If I were in charge of medals

Posted on May 12, 2008
Filed Under A Writer Afoot, Travel, Writing life | Leave a Comment

A study in texturesThe ranch I visited last week was purchased a chunk at a time by a single minded man who wanted to make sure the land doesn’t all end up as houses (or other such land-devouring things). It’s now a substantial spread, 5000 acres, and you get the feeling as he drives you around (gleefully elliciting tiny screams as he bumps over a steep incline, or roars across a waterway) that he knows every single inch of it. He points out the ferns growing under a ledge and pauses so you can peer through the shadows to a stand of palmettos, “the only ones on the ranch,” and you half expect him to tell you the names of the elks who barely move off the trail. “That’n is Dover,” but of course he doesn’t.

Inch by inch, a man is taking out the cedars that have spread like a fungus over the landscape, choking out native wildflowers and grasses. He points to an open meadow where there were bluebonnets in bloom a few weeks ago, and a wide, pale green pasture. “This is all finally getting back to its natural state,” he says. We climb to the top of a hill and look out over the river and canyons, and he tells us what he’s done to protect it into the future, how the taxes will be paid, how he’s thought ahead so it won’t just be protected for now, but into perpetuity. I standGuadalupe River on the hill and see nothing but unspoiled land–river and hills and trees, wildflowers and no doubt nests of evil things I wouldn’t like but deserve a home in natural balance. Osprey’s fly overhead.

I believe in the land. I love humans who use their wealth to leave a better world behind them, and this is powerful stuff.

One more note: there were live oaks around the bunkhouse and they must be the most graceful, sheltering, mystical trees I’ve ever seen. In one place, their arms reached almost to the ground, long, long, long limbs, strong and sturdy and dripping with atmospheric Spanish moss. They gave the air beneath a greenish cool and as we sat there eating lunch one afternoon, I looked up and spied a prickly pear cactus thriving in the joint of one branch. A big prickly pear, too–it had obviously been there a long time. Charming symbiosis–live oak and cactus. Sort of like Texas itself.

A tree I could live in

Texas and other amazements

Posted on May 8, 2008
Filed Under A Writer Afoot, Writing life | 8 Comments

I went to Texas this week for a cozy little retreat at a “bunkhouse” (a two-story 30’s beauty) on a ranch near San Antonio.    I made new friends, in a way I haven’t done for a long time.  I fell in love with a house, and an old man who already has a great wife and way too much to do.  Photos to come.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it justice, but you must come back to hear the stories.

Texas is beautiful and dangerous.  I have ant bites on my toes (maybe fire ants) but it was still worth it.

A scramble of tidbits….or something like that

Posted on May 3, 2008
Filed Under A Writer Afoot, Avon Walk_, Random Beauties | 2 Comments

I will admit it: I am drinking beer.  Not even fancy beer.  Ordinary, American lite beer from a bottle, which is definitely in my top twenty favorite things.  Not American, necessarily, just beer in general.

Walked 19.5 miles today, on my training quest.  Highest mileage so far, and I weirdly enjoyed it.   (I am, however, paying for it right this minute.  Little ows, here and there.  It was a little cold today and I was underdressed.)   This trail goes right through the middle of my childhood-looping beside the place where we rode our bikes, where I walked to elementary school, down through the park where I had clandestine meetings with the boy I was not allowed to see, and then by the apartment block where my parents lived when I was a baby.

So, the brain is gone and I have only random things to offer.

Best movie this week: Away From Her, which I expected to be wretchedly depressing and is the exact opposite.  Beautiful love story.

Best book I’ve read this month:  Belong to Me, by Marisa de los Santos.   Charming and rich and wonderful.  Don’t miss it.

Best news I’ve heard in awhile: my friend Jo Beverley made the New York Times top ten for the first time this month.  And then she stayed on the list for FOUR weeks, thus far.

Detail work

Posted on April 29, 2008
Filed Under Random Beauties, Writing life | 10 Comments

Long ago, when my boys were small, I loved to cook and listen to music while I cooked or did the dishes.  It was a gilded room with many plants, not terribly large, but very cheerful.  One of my favorite CDs to listen to was Paul Simon’s Greatest Hits, because there were so many sing-alongable, danceable songs on it (I still love it.  Still play it and dance when no one is looking.)   My youngest told me once that his vision of me from his childhood is that: mom dancing around the kitchen when no one was looking, smoking cigarettes, rubber gloves in the air.  He loved to sneak up on me and scare me half to death.  

He’d been telling me lately that he had a surprise for me.  Now this child is a bit of a rebel.  He plays bass guitar and has dredlocks down to the middle of his back.  He also has a tattoo or so, which he keeps in the proper spots to be hidden in unlikely event he will take a job someday that requires him to look respectable.   He arrived on Sunday and said, “Okay, you want to see your surprise?”

This was it:

tattoo.jpg

How’s that for paying attention?  And yes, he got the reaction he wanted.  It totally choked me up.

Busy, busy

Posted on April 29, 2008
Filed Under My books, Writing life | 1 Comment

marigold.jpgWorking on the copy edit of Elena’s book this week.   I am rarely so happy with a book at this stage (actually, I usually hate them with a great and terrible ferocity during CEs), and I can’t wait for you to meet these people.   Next spring: The Lost Recipe for Happiness is the title.

Also, I keep forgetting to tell you that I am blogging at Writer Unboxed on the 4th Wednesday of every month.

Training hard, working hard, sleeping quite a bit in between.  With all those miles, you think I’d be miraculously thinner, but I am sorry to report I am my same sturdy (healthy, thank you heavens!) self.

Creative Commons photo by venkane.

Forget yourself…write

Posted on April 27, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Quote of the day for writers:

“Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music–the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls, interesting people.  Forget yourself.”     –Henry James

What intriguing thing or person or music have you fallen in love with lately?

In pursuit of the daily business of living

Posted on April 25, 2008
Filed Under Random Beauties | 3 Comments

red pepper

Both HB and Gail have talked about photos of the day. Last night, scouring the cupboards for something to prepare for supper, I came up with a few eggs, some cheese and these beautiful peppers. The insides and the color gave me a rush of purely sensual, cave-woman pleasure after a long day inside my own head.

A few days ago, I told CR about my friend who liked getting flowers from her boyfriend, but didn’t much like the flowers he chose every time. CR must have decided I should have flowers, too, since he brought home a beautiful pot of tulips that very afternoon. (He is a fine flower-chooser. When I was struggling with the book that will be published next spring (previously COOKING FOR THE DEAD) it was an orchid, blooming deep luscious pink, and the name of it was Julian, the same name as one of the main protaganists. Another time it was a braided money tree, that is now scraping the 10 foot ceiling in the dining room.)

This morning, watering the tulips he brought the other day, I noticed how beautiful they looked in a band of sunshine:

pink tulips in sunlight

And wondrously amazing up close, all vivid seduction, silky and powdered:

heart of a tulip

Happy Friday!

Circles of Quiet, workshop for working writers

Posted on April 24, 2008
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The description and details for the new workshop is up at The Girls in the Basement. Meant to be a nourishing environment for published writers who need a place to rest and recharge, it begins June 16.

The next Voice I class will begin in June, too. There are only a couple of spots left. Check it out here.

Filling hungry hearts

Posted on April 24, 2008
Filed Under Random Beauties, Writing life | 4 Comments

thong savasana

In my family, the humans are divided into those who are very, very private and protect every thought and emotion carefully, and those who are driven to share emotions and experiences. My mother, who is one of the private ones, has often told me it is a gift that I can pin emotions and experiences into words, stories that eventually makes sense, for those who cannot do it.

The flip side is, of course, that my drive to put words to experience, and then share those words, make the private ones feel slightly seasick. I’m currently engaged in a voice class, and writers nearly all have wounds–large or small–that come from a private (or “proper”) person attempting to stifle the writer who wants to EXPRESS EVERYTHING. Blue! Sex! Apples! Decaying body! Dawn! Incest! (And a big fat fly just landed on my coffee, trying to drink it all up–ick.) Working through some of those wounds can be enormously freeing, but it’s hard to get the idea across that the drive to do this is not an indulgence, but a calling.

Listening this morning to Krishna Das (while Leo the cat took his seat beside me, purring accompaniment) I was settling into a prayerful period and getting quiet so the day’s work might emerge a little more easily. This sometimes feels like a waste of time, really, that I should just get on with it, start writing already, but experience has taught me that even a ten minute meditative period at the start of a work day is a good thing. Like walking, it brings far more into my life than such a simple thing seems it should deliver.

As Leo and I contemplated the flickering candle flame, the words of Sri Hanuman Chaleesa penetrated my morning brain:

“Calling out to hungry hearts
Everywhere through endless time
You who wander you who thirst
I offer you this heart of mine.
Calling all you hungry spirits
Everywhere through endless time.
Calling all you hungry hearts
All the lost and left behind
Gather round and share this meal
Your joy and your sorrow
I make it mine”

I imagined a beautiful table, laid with a rich cloth and beautiful dishes of colorful food, and music in the corner, and hungry people coming in to eat and drink, their gray souls coming back to life. And I thought of my mother thanking me for a story she needed to read. I thought of the slim, well-tended woman who came up to me at a booksigning in Santa Fe and wanted to confess her sin of pouring milk over her husband’s car. I thought of the students in my current voice class, writing their way into accepting the call to do their own work, and how brave they are to wade in, to prepare the feast, to open themselves up to life and experience in such bold ways, letting everything in. See everything, even the ugly and painful. Be open to all experiences, all of them, uncomfortable and beautiful, painful and transporting. It’s part of the bargain we make before we show up on this plane, I think.

How lovely! Writing is like cooking, then, isn’t it? Feeding hearts and souls instead of bellies!

All work is holy. I’m thankful for accountants to put my finances in order, and my own teachers, and my sister the nurse, and CR, the computer wizard, who makes this communication possible. But each one must believe in the holiness of their own call, and then we are all enriched.

What satisfies you most about your own work?

Sari Dreams

Posted on April 22, 2008
Filed Under A Writer Afoot, Random Beauties, Travel | 4 Comments

Colourful Rajasthan — Rainbow Colours #1

Originally uploaded by d.kumar


Last night, I dreamed I was wearing a sari. It was pink silk, embroidered with gold and green, and I was so happy to realize that having it on must mean I had finally made it to India.

No surprise. Anthony Bourdain when to Mumbai and Calcutta on NO RESERVATIONS last night, and a few days before, I watched The Darjeeling Limited on pay per view. (Which I didn’t expect to like, honestly, but it was quirky and fun, and what I loved was the train, so beautifully decorated).

Anyway, looking for a photo to illustrated a dream of a sari, I found this photographer’s work on Flickr. His photos are saturated with color, and a sense of composition and beauty that led me to wander around his collections for more than an hour. Perhaps you will enjoy them, too.

When I look at these photos, I wonder how anyone could not yearn to visit India.

keep looking »