Thoughts Happen

For Every Blog There Is a Season: The Evolution of Thoughts Happen

When I started Thoughts Happen in September of 2008, I had no idea where it would take me, but I knew I needed to write, and write often — for an audience. Magazine articles, my first love, are wonderful, and it’s great to see those bylines, but I had too many things I wanted to get into words and not enough places to publish them. 

 And writing in what I lovingly refer to as my Notebooks Full of Crap wasn’t quite fulfilling enough. Because I am no Emily Dickinson, squirreling my best work away to be discovered after I’m dead — I need an audience to keep me honest.

 Lucky for me I live in the Blog Age. Under the wide umbrella of Kindness, Curiosity and Humor, I claimed my domain and started writing. Everything from Star Trek to colonoscopies were fair game for my posts, with a smattering of Shambhala Meditation, Girl Scouts and tennis thrown in for good measure (not to mention my turtle Littlefoot, who's a muse of sorts). 

 But along the way I found that the lack of a clear focus, instead of being freeing, was becoming a burden. More often than not I woke up on Wednesday mornings — my designated posting day — thinking, “Oh God, what am I going to write about today?” 

 Wasn’t I doing this for fun? 

 Ironically, something from my latest post, about Lionel Poilane, the baker who created a bread sculpture of a bird in a cage, came back to me. "The bird is inside the cage. He is trapped and he can feed himself with his own barrier. ... After you are nourished with your own limits, you can fly to freedom." 

I needed a boundary to push against to feed my creativity again, to get me excited about blogging. But the whole reason I started Thoughts Happen as a generalist was because there wasn’t any one topic I felt I could sustain with the necessary enthusiasm or authority. There are plenty of good creativity blogs and Buddhist meditation blogs, the most likely candidates.

 But I came to realize that I’ve had a life-long curiosity about our relationship to Stuff. Recycling, garbage, finding novel ways to use things that are commonly discarded — these things fascinate me. How do we interact with the objects of daily life, particularly with things that are normally thrown away? And how are the ways we interact with our Stuff informed by our spiritual and community values?

 The spark of an idea for a new blog was born, and immediately a flood of new post topics rushed to my mind. 

 So Thoughts Happen will go into semi-retirement, and a new blog with a refined focus will take its place as soon as its design and functionality are fleshed out enough for public consumption. 

 When I started Thoughts Happen three years ago, writing was something I did, but I did not yet identify myself as a writer. Three years later, I’ve got 144 posts under my belt (wow), and my commercial writing business has grown alongside it as well. I’ve developed a small but loyal readership and met some interesting, thoughtful people through the blog’s Facebook page and my Twitter followers. 

 Thoughts Happen has served me well. I hope as readers of mine you will join me in the next leg of the creative journey ahead. Watch this space for what’s go come. 

Photo of Path In Winter courtesy Jennifer R. Graevell Photography, Some rights reserved  

When the Sh*t Hits the Page

I adore notebooks. Writing longhand bypasses my inner critic in a way that really gets me going, so I not only collect them, but fill them with what I lovingly call Crap. Notebooks full of crap might be the key to my (moderate) success so far as a writer — maybe I should trademark that and call it the Notebooks Full of Crap Method to Semi-Successful Life as a Writer. But I digress. 

As part of my longhand obsession, I've been faithfully doing my Morning Pages, one of the main pillars of Julia Cameron's The Artist’s Way, filling custom-decorated composition books I receive as gifts from Daughter or comission from my uber-talented friend Carla. But when I saw notebooks made from Elephant poo at the gift store in the San Diego Zoo on a recent trip, I had to get one.

Yes, it's true; notebooks made out of poo. The product information sheet that came with it states, "Elephants eat 300-600 lbs of food per day — 60% of that food leaves the elephant's body undigested."

Apparently the manufacturers of PoopooPaper collect naturally dried elephant dung from conservation parks (not from our own San Diego Zoo, unfortunately), rinse it, boil it, and dry it, adding some pineapple fiber and banana tree fiber to the mix to make it thicker and stronger. 

The utter appropriateness of writing my Crap in a notebook made of poo warms my heart. After all, Anne Lamott has advised millions of aspiring writers to write Shitty First Drafts in her book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, so why shouldn't I take it the extra step and write in a notebook made out of shit? 

I can't wait to see what comes out of it.

How is Meditation Like Marketing?

Meditation — Marketing. It doesn’t seem that there should be any connection between the two. Think of a meditator and you probably picture a person sitting serenely cross-legged on a cushion with his or her eyes closed, hands resting gently or holding a pose with thumb and middle finger lightly touching to make a circle. Perhaps the setting is a quiet meditation hall or under a spreading tree in a magazine-worthy nature shot.  

Think of a marketer and the picture might not be so serene. Perhaps an underpaid desk jockey in India with a headset microphone, or a slick, aggressive Mad Men-type shyster trying to get people to buy things they don’t need. 

But in reality we are all meditators and marketers, whether we realize it or not.  

I ran across a discussion in a LinkedIn writers group recently that touched on this exact topic. One of the posters posited that even if we protest that we don't like marketing and don't want to have anything to do with it, all our public statements, including those on message boards and in person, are in fact part of our marketing and branding.

Writers who are too lazy to do the digging around to figure out what type of articles a market typically publishes, and simply email editors asking them to look at their website to ask what type of work they could get, are also marketing — in a negative way — to their intended audience. In essence, we can't escape marketing, so we might as well approach it consciously and productively. 

Hmm ... you mean I’m always marketing myself, consciously or unconsciously? Yikes. Better watch what I put out there!  

But what about meditating? Surely I am not meditating all the time.  

Well, it depends on how you see the word “meditation.” Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the spiritual leader of Shambhala Buddhism, in his video clip, "Learning to Meditate," (also shown below) says the word in Tibet has roots in the word “familiarity,” and so it really means getting used to something. 

“I always think that in a sense we are always meditating, meaning we are always getting familiar. Our mind is getting used to something. We may be getting used to the thought of anxiety, worrying, anger. Our mind is getting used to something. So in a sense we are meditating.”

It makes sense: whatever you place your mind on during the course of the day, you are getting familiar with. We can meditate on thoughts of being wronged, feeling impoverished or on our own fantasies and desires by constantly coming back to them during the day. Or, we can familiarize ourselves with kindness, curiosity and humor, and meditate on those.

Which kind of meditation and marketing would you choose?

 

 

Changing the Channel, or: How to Draw a Horse, with Artist Rick Stitch

Rick Stitch, of Santa Barbara, is a real, live working artist. He's also approachable, creative and practical, as I recently discovered when my daughter and I dropped in at the Lux Art Institute where he is the current resident artist.

We were taking in his water-inspired paintings on exhibit and enjoying the mini pier that he created right in the gallery (complete with water), when in he walked and said hello. 

He asked my daughter if she liked art, and when she said yes, he imparted some of the most practical advice for creatives I've heard. 

"I found this piece of advice in a book I read," he said, "and I tell it to all my students." 

"First of all, I'm always reading things about drawing and painting. Anytime I see something I pick it up, because you never know where you'll find something good."

He then proceeded to tell us that he'd picked up a book for a buck at a garage sale called something like, "How to Draw a Horse," (I don't know if Stitch is a Buddhist or not, but being open to advice from a book called, "How to Draw a Horse," sounds very Beginner Mind to me), and in it was this piece of advice:

"When you're starting out on making something, it's very important to listen to your inner dialogue as you're making it," he said. "And if your inner dialogue is telling you, 'This isn't coming out right, this is so frustrating, I'm never going to be able to draw this horse,' the thing you've got to do is to change the channel.

Change the channel on your inner dialogue to something that says, 'I'm really excited about drawing this horse,' because the only thing you can have any control over is what you put into it. You don't really have any control over the outcome, but you can control the input."

This reminded me of Anne Lamott's chapter on Radio Station KFKD in her classic book on writing, "Bird by Bird." She says, "KFKD is on every single morning when I sit down at my desk. So I sit for a moment and say a small prayer — please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written."

Even though I know I have other channels to listen to, station KFKD is sometimes the strongest, so I was glad to hear Stitch's advice, because it bears repeating.

So tune into that other channel, no matter how faint, set a pushbutton, and go create. The outcome will have to work itself out from there.   

View more photos and a video of Stitch at  www.voiceofsandiego.org

The God I Would Like to Believe In

“This week, in your morning pages, write about the god you do believe in and the god you would like to believe in.” I had to think about that a bit.  

The prompt comes from The Artist’s Way, the 12-week, self-described Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity written by Julia Cameron. I started it right after Christmas, but am taking a little longer since I took a hiatus when I was stressing myself out about it a month ago — I figured that was not the desired outcome.   

When I came back to it, I found this week’s focus is on Abundance, and recovering a sense that god, or God, (or as Cameron puts it, Good Orderly Direction) is not going to punish us for wanting to be artists by condemning us to a life of poverty, that being a creative person does not necessitate lack. There is an infinite number of pies with an infinite number of slices, and if the notion we carry of God is still as a stern authority figure that puts creative ideas in our heads but doesn’t want us to pursue them, maybe we should take another look at that. 

So what about this god I would like to believe in?  

The God I would like to believe in does not have a plan for our lives, but rejoices when we find a path that reduces suffering, our own and others. The god I would like to believe in looks like a very wise and very happy old Indian woman who loves to see us discover new things. 

The god I would like to believe in doesn’t interfere in our lives but can open our eyes to things that were already in front of us the whole time — magic and opportunity and love and fulfillment. 

The God I would like to believe in understands that we need to figure things out for ourselves, and that sometimes this is hard, but when we do it is so much more rewarding than when we are just given the answer. 

The god I would like to believe in doesn’t want to get any credit. 

The god I would like to believe in did not invent money, but rejoices and amplifies well-being when we use the money that we acquire to help others.  

The god I would like to believe in does not protect us.   

The god I would like to believe in knows that what we need is not protection, but bravery and confidence that we will find the path that is right in front of us.

Photo of Indian Woman courtesy of Braden Gunem via Creative Commons license

Why Train Wrecks Make the Best Childhoods

Reading Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors is like watching the proverbial train wreck in slow motion. Except instead of one train, two trains are hurtling towards each other at top speed. And the second train is full of puppies.  

I can’t help but watch in horror, flipping page after page to see what young Burroughs will encounter next from his thoroughly disturbed families (it’s not a misprint —when his first family falls apart his unbalanced mother turns him over to a clan that would make the Mansons look normal).  

Another writer might have turned maudlin, but Burroughs uses deadpan wit and a black comic delivery to turn it into a tragicomic memoir of emotional survival of the fittest (and the one with the most well-conditioned hair).

 No wonder it was a best-seller. No wonder I hate him.  

Maybe hate is a bit strong. But I can’t help but be envious of such great starting material. 

It reminds me of a story Neil White told at his workshop at the Oxford Creative Nonfiction Writer’s Conference last October. It went something like this:  

White, who wrote a memoir In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, is in New York attending a writers’ function. There is a cocktail party in the evening and he’s not sure how dressy it’s supposed to be, so he falls back on the Southern boy’s semi-dress uniform of button-down shirt over khaki pants, topped with a navy blazer. 

At the party, two very New York-looking women writers corner him. One says, “You look like you were in a fraternity.”  

“Why yes,” White replies, “I was. In fact, I was president of my fraternity.” 

“So what do you have to write a book about?” one of them says, rather accusatorially.  

“Well,” White replies, “When I was 33 I spent a year of my life in a federal penitentiary in Louisiana which was also the last leprosarium in the United States.” 

Immediately envious, they reply in unison, “You’re so lucky!”  

That’s writers for you; the worse it gets, the better it is. Provided, of course, that you survive.  

But you’ve got to have good starting material. So can I help it if, unlike Burroughs and Angela’s Ashes’ Frank McCourt, my parents raised me in a loving middle-class family with food on the table, a room of my own and violin lessons once a week? Where’s a person supposed to get a memoir out of that?  

Then I read Susan Johnston (aka The Urban Muse) interview Natalie Goldberg, famed writing instructor and author of Writing Down the Bones, on her blog, where she asked this exact question. “ ... Is there hope for people who didn’t deal with these horrible demons but still want to write books or essays that move readers on an emotional level?”   

Goldberg’s reply, in the blog and associated video clip, is, “There is absolutely hope. ... What really matters is getting to work. ... You can take any subject and make it wonderful if you love it and are interested. So you just follow what you love, and go into it.” 

What do I love? I love catching glimpses of people’s living rooms through their uncurtained windows as I drive by at night and wondering what kinds of people live there.  

I love remembering the house at the bottom of the hill in my neighborhood where I grew up that never took their Christmas decorations down and wondering why they did that.

I love watching people lined up at the recycling center, wondering what brings the guy who is talking to himself and rode up with two full plastic bags of cans and bottles dangling from the handlebars of his well-worn mountain bike to the same place as the lady in black capris and brand-new Asics running shoes who drove up in a shiny black Ford F-150. 

I love turtles and wondering why I have recurring dreams about them. I love finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.  

I guess I’d better get going. 

Photo of train wreck courtesy woodleywonderworks via Creative Commons license

 

What Motivates You To Do Great Work? :The 99 Percent

What motivates us to do great work? It’s an age-old question. But the age-old answers – rewards, recognition, money, stability – no longer seem to suffice. As we’ve shifted to a knowledge-based economy, it turns out that what drives us has shifted, too.

via the99percent.com

On the eve of a three-day-weekend (a four-day-weekend for some of us), I'll direct you this week to an article I found on The 99%, which bills itself as the think tank for The Behance Network, about what motivates us to do our best work.

Behance is one of my new favorite sites — basically it's a platform and social network for creatives, from graphic design to art direction to film editing to writing to you name it, and there are a lot of folks doing their best work and showing it off on their Behance porfolios. (Yours truly has a fledgling portfolio for my writing business going here.)

When I think about what motivates me to do my best work, it can be as simple as a comment on a blog post (hint, hint), a thank you email, or a response such as the one I got from a first-time client that I am writing a web bio for: "It's good, very good. Not what I expected and that's ok. You have a gift." 

And when I'm not doing client work, I get a lot of satisfaction writing articles that I hope will enlighten someone in a way they weren't expecting. Oftentimes with writing the work is its own reward. Of course, a check is always nice, too :-)

So what motivates you to do your best work? I'd be interested to hear from you.