yourpassions.tk

In a recent blog post, Ole Blue the Heretic wrote, “People who have sorrowful looking eyes may be very happy, yet people who have happy eyes may be filled with sadness. We are all actors on the stage called life and each act according to their own life script.” You can read the rest of the post here . Ole Blue’s words brought three things to mind. First, that writing lifestories gives us the opportunity to allow people to peak behind the mask of the role we’ve created for living our life script. Most commonly we write about events that conform to our own life script. It doesn’t have to always be that way. You can write the Truth behind the eyes. Some of those stories will be intensely private, written for your eyes only. Others may be intensely touching when others read them. The obvious next thought was that the choices we make about which stories to share are generally consistent with the life script we’ve chosen to live, or at least the script as we understand it, view ourselves and...

One of my favorite pieces of jewelry is my cartouche, an Egyptian nametag of sorts. Modern cartouches, patterned after the Pharaoh’s name plates, are made of gold, with hieroglyphic symbols for each letter in a person’s name soldered onto a bordered gold oval with an elaborate hanging loop above and the traditional bar across the bottom. I bought mine in the gift shop at the Pyramids Hotel in Geza, where we stayed, right across the highway from the Pyramids. Its valuable to me went far beyond being a customized and unique piece of gold jewelry. Whenever I wore it, I remembered that special trip to Israel and Egypt, and it also reminded me of the tiny gold nametag my father bought for me on my first birthday. I wore my toddler nametag constantly for years, and my cartouche almost as much. I was devastated one day over two years to discover that the tiny gold bar at the bottom of the cartouche was missing. We were sitting at dinner in San Antonio at the time, and I assumed it had fallen ...

The May 2006 issue of National Geographic Magazine features an article on a tattooed mummy found sealed in a tomb in Peru. The 1500 year old mummy is a woman from the Moche society, which predated the Incas by several centuries. Archeologists found artifacts including golden jewelry, golden sewing needles and golden weaving tools, and many types of weapons. This article brought to mind the fact that we know many early societies were able to refine metals, recognize the value of gold, and develop other relatively sophisticated technologies, but they didn’t have the ability to write down instructions in a durable form, and today we have no clue how they did these things. This discovery led me to realize that today, if our own Western Civilization children were transported to the mountains of Peru, or some equivalent, only a tiny percent would have any inkling how to even grow food, let alone discover, mine and process metals. Would they be able even to shape stone hatchets for felling...

Books on lifestory writing uniformly suggest including personal reactions to events in your stories. (Please understand that that I make this blanket statement based on my own memory, without rechecking the dozen plus volumes on my shelf.) I was recently involved in a lively and enlightening discussion of this matter with a group of students. One student encouraged another to include at least a brief explanation of personal feelings and responses in stories covering content that would normally evoke an intense emotional reaction. “When you don’t tell us your reaction, you seem sort of detached or dispassionate. I can’t believe these situations didn’t affect you somehow. I’m looking for that information.” Another student took a different view, pointing out that many people don’t typically express these views when they talk of the experience, so it would be out of character to include them in written accounts. “People will come to their own conclusions about how they feel about these sit...

To my own amazement, I just did a search and discovered that I have not yet written here about the topic of gratitude. Personally, I wouldn’t consider any account of my own life complete without covering this topic and the role it has come to play in my life. I want succeeding generations to know of the power of gratitude to maintain a cheerful spirit, emotional balance, and healthy relationships. Although we learn about the concept of giving thanks for our food, writing thank you notes, and saying please and thank you by the time we reach kindergarten, relatively few people discover the full meaning of this powerful word. I hadn’t given it serious thought myself until two things coincided a few months ago. First I had the opportunity to attend a local program by Dr. Mawaru Emoto, author of The Hidden Messages in Water. I can’t begin to do justice her to Dr. Emoto’s work, but you can learn more about it by going to his website, Hado.net . Shortly after that program, I received an e-m...

Today’s blog is about readers and perception. It was inspired by two e-mails I received yesterday (two on one subject is a serious sign), and is intended as counterpoint to the piece on perfection, to help you remain balanced. The first e-mail consisted of the following gobbledygook. You may have seen it yourself, but it bears repeating: i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng! is tah t the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it. If I’m not mistaken, you had no trouble reading it. Now take a look at a second item an...

I’ve been thinking about perfection and how life is about growing and changing and learning. We can’t learn without experimenting and making mistakes, and in any event, perfection to one person may be an absolute disaster to another. Today I was reminded that mistakes are okay, that accumulated wisdom and compassion are more important to me than perfection. That ties in with writing. The need to be perfect may be the number one champion cause of writer’s block. As I ponder this reality, my mind drifts back sixty years. My mother was a seamstress par excellence, as was hers before her, and presumably sew on up the maternal line. That I would follow the same path was assumed. No early seam went uninspected, and no flaw was too small to ignore. I spent a major chunk of my girlhood using a double-edged razor blade to rip out flawed seams with slight puckers and uneven stitching. Before too many years, Inspector Mom had taken up residence in my head. A decade or so later, while ripping out...

Several of the comic strips in today’s paper popped out as story ideas. Cathy features Mother’s recipe for Beef Stroganoff, consisting of a list of her beefs (pet peeves), with clippings, quotes, and other similar trivia thrown in for flavoring. Hmmm , I thought, I could make a list of my pet peeves . That sounds like great sport! Especially if I want to get depressed. Maybe I’ll make that a list of things I’m grateful for. In Doonesbury , Alex is considering which track to take after graduation. Now, there’s a story. The summer after high school graduation. That was a storybook summer, for sure, and not one I’ve written about. Frank and Ernest have a house for sale — by non-owners. We’ve sold our home two times, and both times were adventures, yet to be written. In Family Circus , Dolly is shocked by a photo of herself as a baby, and Dennis the Menace is disgusted that Mr. Wilson didn’t get in trouble for saying a bad word. Other strips featured thoughts about fireworks, decluttering,...

Today it’s time for a little blog-keeping. Those of you who signed up for notices of new posts via Bloglet will see a new form in your e-mail tonight. Bloglet quit working for the second time in four months. Bloglet is toast. I beg your forbearance for having arbitrarily transferred all subscriptions to Blogarithm. I think once you try it, you’ll like it. In fact, you can use Blogarithm to track new content on any website, not just blogs. Also, you’ll get a few teaser lines from the blog, not just the title. By the way, if you never signed up for notices via Bloglet, this is a great time to do so now. Just click that little button over there in the sidebar and you’ll always be notified when something new appears. Your privacy is guaranteed, and, as always, each notice includes the option to unsubscribe. Another piece of blog-keeping is to announce that I’ve discovered a growing site, Stories in Common , where you can post your own stories, for free. This is a relatively new site, with ...

A young woman I know recently introduced me to the work of Sarah Hutt. Sarah is an artist who developed a unique concept for memorializing her mother, thirty years after her death. The project takes the form of a thousand-line poem, burned onto the bottoms of one thousand wooden bowls. You can read some of the inscriptions on her website, My Mother's Legacy . I found this concept quite inspiring, and I’ve begun writing lines about one of my grandfathers, using the name I knew him by. Here are a few of them: Pop smoked a pipe Pop was a photographer Pop took Robin and me to baseball games Pop made the best sourdough pancakes in the world Pop taught me how to catch catfish Pop taught me to make purple-toned photo proofs with press frames and sunlight Pop thought everything I did was perfect Pop let Robin and me push his VW Bug up and down the driveway Pop laughed at every joke I ever told him Pop always had a smile on his face I have pictures to go with some of the memories. Others m...

Happy May Day! Do you have any May Day memories? The custom of May Day festivities seems to have died in the USA, so I offer these memories of my own as a tribute: May Day was a quiet event in the early 1950s when I was a grade schooler. We often made decorated cone shaped paper baskets with hand colored flowers and designs, sometimes in school, others at home. We carefully created and attached handles long enough to slip over a doorknob. We'd pick a few flowers, whatever we could find (even clover and dandelions if that was all there was available). After we stuffed grass around to hold the flowers in place, we'd hang the basket on a neighbor's door, ring the bell and run. One year one of my classes, maybe in third grade, had a May Pole dance. I looked forward to that for days, imagining something like faeries playing flutes while we pirouetted about in perfect order, finishing with an elegantly wrapped pole and True Love from then on. Just like in the story books. (Maybe,...