Six Pics Speak: Oregon in her own "Words"

"Flood of Fire" Trail, John Day Fossil Beds

Iwetemlaykin Trail, Joseph

Wallowa Lake, Joseph

Mt. Howard Summit: Wallowa's

Walking out Wallowa Road, Joseph

Painted Hills, John Day Fossil Beds

Carroll Rim Trail, John Day Fossil Beds

Rogue Gorge, near Union Creek

Quotes from Narcissus & Goldmund

“I call a man awake who knows in his conscious reason his innermost unreasonable force, drives, and weaknesses and knows how to deal with them.” (44)

“And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all. . . .” (73)

“When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.” (157)

“Any work of art that was truly sublime, not just a good juggler’s trick; that was filled with the eternal secret, like the master’s Madonna; every obviously genuine work of art had this dangerous, smiling double face, was male-female, a merging of instinct and pure spirituality. . . . In art, in being an artist, Goldmund saw the possibility of reconciling his deepest contradictions, or at least of expressing newly and magnificently the split in his nature.” (171)

“One thing, however, did become clear to him—why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art. . . .They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing—mystery. That was what dreams and truly great art had in common: mystery.” (184-185)

“All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a wanderer or a sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person—no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as desirable as the other.” (249)

“God is perfect being. Everything else that exists is only half, only a part, is becoming, is mixed. He is one, he has no potentialities but is the total, the complete reality. Whereas we are transitory, we are becoming, we are potentials; there is no perfection for us, no complete being. But wherever we go, from potential to deed, from possibility to realization, we participate in true being, become by a degree more similar to the perfect and divine.” (280)

“Goldmund had showed [Narcissus] that a man destined for high things can dip into the lowest depths of the bloody, drunken chaos of life, and soil himself with much dust and blood, without becoming small and common, without killing the divine spark within himself, that he can err through the thickest darkness without extinguishing the divine light and the creative force inside the shrine of his soul.” (301)

Hesse, Herman. Narcissus And Goldmund. Trans. Ursule Molinaro. New York: Picador, 1968. Print.

The Honeylicker Angel

Announcing the release of my new novel!
Available on amazon.com in print and as eBook.

I could say the story started with a photograph I saw: a beekeeper smiling, head absolutely covered in bees. I remember reading the caption and learning that bees can sense fear. The man was unafraid.

Or the story started while spending the winter of 2003 studying fear and love in a theological commune high in the Swiss Alps.

Or maybe while ghostwriting later that summer on the Costa Brava in Spain, hearing a friend tell me, in her French accent, about the last beekeeping barge on the Canal du Midi in France.

I began to think of a story—a story about overcoming fear.  The main character would be deathly afraid of bees . . . and would end up face to face with far more than potential anaphylaxis.  And so, when a photo, a study, and a story came together, The Honeylicker Angel was born.

I began this novel in my mid-twenties, at the “quarter-life crisis” of establishing my identity. I worked on the novel off and on over the last decade. It has travelled through various geographical continents and continents of the heart. Seven years ago, it plumped up to 80,000 words after another Swiss winter, and then it slimmed to 50,000 after a couple of years on a tropical island.

And really, stories about fear and love have been around since time began. This particular one just happens to take place in the douce France—gentle France. It is a douce story of sweetess and light—an “Everywoman’s” story, as told by the protagonist, Melissa.

I wrote The Honeylicker Angel especially for women who are navigating their destiny. May there be lovely surprises along the journey.

O taste and see. . . .

In Defense of the Disciplined Artist

A forthright friend recently commented, “How strange that you are an artist, and yet you are so rigid with your time. So structured. Where’s the passion?”

To which I wish I had replied: “Talent and passion don’t just transform themselves into books and paintings. That takes discipline. And one person’s passion can look a whole lot different than someone else’s.”

After my undelivered comeback, I continued to think about the misconception of artists as excitable partiers who throw together masterpieces in between ongoing bouts of binge drinking and orgies.

True, some of the most prolific artists in history were at least a little bit zany, but they were productive; they showed up, they worked, they finished their work. The evidence of their discipline is found on library shelves, theater stages, and museum walls.

Discipline is the artist’s friend. It is the ability to tell your time and talents where to go . . . and to follow your own instructions.

To those of you who build a structure to house your passions, your creativity applauds you. It has a safe and reliable place to come home to daily.

Sure, the best ideas often happen while outside of that structure—walking in the woods, staring at a bowl of oranges, standing in line at the post office. But my idea for a poem or a painting will only become a poem or painting if I steward that idea with discipline.

And as for passion, it looks different for everyone. It’s not necessarily loud. It won’t always set off the smoke alarm or leave stains on the furniture. It doesn’t have to get kicked out of movie theaters or small countries to exist. Passion can be blooming in the quietest person in the room, the one with a revelation she’s trying to find a way to share with the world.

I took the picture of my alarm clock when it rang this morning . . . very early. I don’t always like that thing. I don’t always listen to it. But that little face is a foundational part of my creativity structure. I wish my productivity peaked late in the evening like it does for fellow artists I know. Mine doesn’t.  So I honor my version; I wake up my talents and passions, sleepy as they are, and we all sip our coffee and get on with the business of creating.

That creation time is never rigid. It is deep and wild. Mystical and mysterious. Full of a richness that I’d only know if I committed to entering it.

Yes, passion can look like puffy eyes lit by a laptop screen at 5:30 in the morning. Really. 

Well Suited

Suits at a shop in Dublin, 2012

The other day, I interviewed for a position as an adjunct professor. Something about twenty years of academic calendars and CV-centric activities had elevated Being a Professor to the holy grail of vocations (never mind that this position would be teaching introductory composition courses). I had always assumed that teaching as a professor would be a benchmark of success.

Last year, I taught at university level for the first time since grad school. It was just a comp course—not my dream of teaching creative writing—but I was doing it!

I felt absolutely unpinnacled.

The whole hallowed-halls-of-learning-in-a-classroom seemed a bit overrated. I realized that I’d learned more in my ten years out of a structured educational system than my twenty years within it.

The evening before my recent interview, I had dinner with a sage friend. I was telling him (well, maybe whining) about my quandary. He looked at me and said, “You can get whatever you want. But do you want it?”

Did I?

I thought about what I wanted as I chose my outfit to wear for the interview: a skirt suit of mix-matched vintage pieces I loved.

Ah, the owning of a suit: that was another thing I had thought marked grownup-edness. Well, a matching suit, that is. As I looked at myself in the mirror on the way out the door, I laughed. Why on earth did I think I was a matching-suit kind of girl?

Don’t get me wrong, if a Neiman Marcus box showed up on my doorstep with an Akris or Lanvin suit inside, you’d see me wearing it. But looking at the reflection of my A-line tweed skirt and creamy Japanese wool jacket—both courtesy of my local Goodwill—I let the idea out of my ideal.

The invention in my head (my idea of success) finally bowed to the more worthy principle (my ideal success). Success for me is creating. That usually looks like writing and painting. Sometimes I get paid for those things, sometimes not. The beauty is that I love the act of creation regardless of any external value that might get assigned to it. That is my new ideal for success. And my ideas about it are finally starting to align.

I was offered the teaching position and graciously declined it. If anything, I needed to live my ideal first. Some day, I might accept such an offer. But until then, I’m happy with my nomadic, bohemian, off-CV life. Such a life brings me life. You could say I’m well suited for it. 

My Favorite Landlord

I’m a great tenant. When I moved out of my historic apartment in graduate school, my landlords offered to write me a letter of recommendation. All kinds of parties—the millennium included—had happened inside my walls, but I kept even the ceiling molding clean. I took great care of that apartment because I was honoring the agreement I’d signed to rent it. After my two years on Walker Avenue, I not only got my deposit back, but I left the place better than when I’d found it.

My best renting situations were those where I signed an agreement: everything spelled out, everybody’s expectations traceable to a page. I did make the twenty-something-mistakes of renting a few hairy sublets that A) I shouldn’t have rented in the first place and B) had no spelled-out rental conditions. Here, a redux of those experiences blended into the voice of one, conglomerate landlady:

“Hey, want to rent my room while I’m in Milan for four months?”

Two months later: “Hey, I’m coming back to town. With my boyfriend. Can you sleep on the couch?”

One day after they returned: “Can you move out? And where is my pairing knife?”

Yes, I love the rental agreement: I promise to pay you X per month. I can stay here for X months. I will get my deposit back in full if X, Y and Z haven’t broken, fallen off the balcony, or gone missing.

The pairing knife’s location has remained a mystery, but my understanding of the landlord-tenant relationship has clarified. In fact, as I was reading the Book of John recently, I noticed something. In the spiritual version of the landlord-tenant relationship, I have been thinking that God resides in me kind of like a tenant does in an apartment. Even the “Christ in me, hope of glory” can seem to work when I hold role of landlord. Unexamined, that mindset is kind of crazy: God renting a room in Annaland?

What’s really happened is that I entered into an agreement with Him; I signed over all of me for all of Him. With my full permission, He’s got full ownership. Lordship. Landlordship, if you will. I agree to keep my place in working order. I take out the trash, I keep the windows clean, I notify Him of backed-up plumbing. It isn’t always easy to keep to the contract, and I admit that I’ve done more than a few things that should dent my deposit of faith.

As is the norm, my Landlord is holding onto that deposit for me. Beyond the norm, He’s invested it not for Himself, but for me. Its interest is growing in ways I can’t yet see. I don’t want to jeopardize its growth by punching holes in my walls of hope or dragging heavy anger across my polished wood floors. When my rental agreement in this life is up, I want the most gracious Landlord to write me a letter of recommendation. I want it to be filled with words like well done and good and faithful. That will be better than any party I could ever throw—on either side of a rental agreement.