yourpassions.tk

Don't you just hate when everything blurs together? When your stories run together, and memories fuzz up? The other day I read that something has changed in the basic vibrational level of Earth. It's vibrating much faster than it did even twenty years ago, and the fact that time seems to pass faster than ever is not a figment of our imagination. Time actually is passing faster. The source that I was reading was not one I'm inclined to rely on, so who knows, but most people report feeling this is so. Blurring definitely happens with stories. Earlier last week I sent an e-mail to my daughter with a story about something that happened sixteen years ago. The story involved a person I was working with at the time. We started discussing the story and the circumstances around it, and the people in that group. Although she was in college at the time and we spent little time together, her memory of my thoughts on matters back then was surprisingly sharp and a bit different from my o...

The tale of sibling rivalry, especially among boys, is as old as Cain and Abel. It may be mild and quickly pass, especially in siblings with a wide age difference, or it may be intense and, as in the case of Cain and Abel, even deadly. It can be the source of humor, lasting scars, or even both. It's almost the norm that siblings argue, tattle on each other, plot revenge, and set each other up. They may even slug things out on occasion. This is all frequent fodder for comic strips like Foxtrot , Jump Start , or Baby Blues . It’s also fodder for blogs. Pete, the author of the blog Your Neighborhood Reverend , posted a piece titled “ Memphis - the New City of Brotherly Love ” in which he describes torments he suffered at the hands of his older brother. It’s illuminating. Don’t let your children read it! I learned some things about spit from that story that I never would have guessed, and that swinging body — how graphic! Besides telling of tortures, he also assures us that not only di...

“Find the story” or “Where’s the story?” References to finding the story have been staring me in the eye in blogs, books and articles on a regular basis for weeks. There has to be a message here, something I need to learn. I know about story. A story narrates action and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has a element of suspense, and it is told from someone’s point of view. Those are the basics. That element of action is what differentiates story from mere description. It’s simple enough to write a short piece that qualifies as a story. You can see the development of the action in a short story. You can put your finger on the drama and conflict, whether it is between people, a person against outside forces, or a person battling her own inclinations. When you write a book-length memoir, the challenge increases exponentially. To keep readers interested, a memoir needs to have an ongoing thread of conflict and development, similar to the plot line in a novel. This story line laces...

Dingle Peninsula I’m proud to have Irish ancestry myself on my mother’s side of the family. One branch left as recently as the Potato Famine, the other left sooner. I know quite a lot about the more recent immigrants. They were coal miners, arriving first in Braidwood, Illinois then moving down to New Mexico where the family dug in. Maybe it’s that Irish blood in my veins, or maybe not, but Celtic music is among my very favorite, and I feel best in the summer when I’m surrounded by green. Perhaps those roots explain the dreamer part of me. Two years ago my husband and I spent ten glorious days rambling around the Wild Irish Roads in the southwest corner of the Emerald Isle, and what an experience that was. We soon discovered the wisom of reserving a subcompact car, with a trunk so small that it wouldn’t hold both our suitcases and carry-on luggage. Many of those roads had lanes only inches wider than that car, with stone walls along each side. Hubby is a veteran at driving on the left,...

Thoughts of spring instantly activate a mental image of a specific scene in my mind: a late April day near the end of my sophomore year in high school. I see the scene as an out-of-body experience. I’m standing near the gray, limed-oak table in the dining room where the rest of the family is still sitting at breakfast. I’m ready to leave for school. The sun is shining brightly outside the picture window as I gaze out on the ponderosa pines lining the rim of the canyon beyond the fence, and the fragrance of lilac mixed with apricot blossoms wafts through the open window. The focal point of the scene is the dress I’m wearing. It is my personal archetype of spring. I made this dress of the butter-yellow calico, sprigged with blocks of tiny spring green leaf motifs, that my grandmother sent me as a birthday gift a couple of weeks earlier. It’s a simple dress, with a scoop neckline, simple elbow length sleeves, and gathered skirt, and I added a sewn-in cummerbund and sash of solid green, ma...

Once upon a time I had what I still refer to as The Job From Hell. I meticulously documented the details of the pervasive insanity I dealt with on a daily basis from my own management and the internal clients we served. As time went on, I observed that the whole organization exhibited aberrations identical to those of dysfunctional families. All of this is recorded in notes, ranting journal entries, and e-mail exposés that I squirreled away, with the thought of eventually writing a memoir of the experience. Within less than a year, I quit. Over the intervening years I have periodically looked at some of those notes, and thought of the situations I faced. Eventually a strange thing happened as I replayed those memories. They began to shift. I began to toy with them, looking at them with additional insight. I began thinking in “What if” mode. What if I’d taken more time to consider my manager’s whole situation? What if I’d handled this other difficult person a bit differently? What if I’...

In my last post I mentioned that it’s hard to write about changing and evolving topics, like beliefs. What I failed to point out is that writing may be as much part of the solution to the fuzziness as a victim of it. Writing for deeper self-understanding and personal clarity is one of the huge and less-often-mentioned benefits of life writing, whether that be memoir, journal, or random free writing rants. Jerry Waxler picked up on this topic in a recent post on Memory Writer’s Network . He discusses a memory he’s had since he was in high school, way back when. Not until he began crafting a story about the memory did he realize that there may be other ways to look at the situation and interpret it. He discovered a side to himself he hadn’t been aware of. He points to the value of writing in helping him reevaluate this belief, reporting that “All of these lessons about myself come from the simple act of trying to tell a proper story.” Jerry's post reminds me that if I begin to jour...

Have you ever heard the term “Blogicide”? Doesn’t the very idea raise the hair on the back of your neck? I found it on Don Lafferty’s blog . The idea of having my whole blog go poof! is seriously chilling. Don confesses to killing his own blog by experimenting with Wordpress, but there are other ways a blog could vanish from cyberspace, like massive server meltdown or sabotage. If Don’s story had to happen, I wish I’d known about it a month ago today when I was sitting on a panel about blogging at Story Circle Network ’s Stories From the Heart conference in Austin. Using blogs as online journals and places to save your writing with related issue of privacy, public blogs versus closed ones, and similar matters were under discussion when a light went on in my head. “Always keep your blog backed up. Over the long run, you can’t assume online storage in a single location is any safer than storing things on your own hard drive,” I cautioned them. I was thinking of online server disasters. ...

After posting my introduction to Gretchen, my newly emerged Inner Censor, I read it to a writing group. The first response was, “Is this fiction or what?” “No. It is not fiction. Strange as it may sound, I did meet Gretchen, and she is quite real — at least to me.” That explanation sparked a lively discussion of reality, truth, writing about arcane events and beliefs and all sorts of good things. Somebody mentioned that it’s normal for children to have imaginary playmates. “Sarabelle and Gretchen are not imaginary.” I assured them. A few eyeballs briefly rolled at that. If they didn’t know me so well by now, I have no doubt that some would suggest medication or exorcism! After several minutes, we collectively agreed that I had accessed some deeper well of creativity in my right brain, and all considered it a fun story and intriguing concept, whatever the source. That seems to represent comfortable common ground for all belief systems, from secular to sacred, and it’s a tidy and f...