Some (really old) thoughts...

...from the Tao Te Ching by Lao-tzu which struck me as rather appropriate for our time:

When a country obtains great power,
it becomes like the sea:
all streams run downward into it.
The more powerful it grows,
the greater the need for humility.
Humility means trusting the way,
thus never needing to be defensive.

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow the he himself casts.

If a nation is centered in the way,
if it nourishes its own people
and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others,
it will be a light to all nations in the world.

The great way is easy,
yet people prefer the side paths.
Be aware when things are out of balance.
Stay centered within the way.

When rich speculators prosper
while farmers lose their land;
when government officials spend money
on weapons instead of cures;
when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible
while the poor have nowhere to turn--
all this is robbery and chaos.
It is not in keeping with the way.

I've been tagged!

I've never been tagged before! (And it's not because I'm a fast runner.)

Serenity tagged me; my mission is as follows:

• Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
• Open the book to page 123
• Find the fifth sentence
• Post the next three sentences.
• Tag five people.

OK, here goes. The nearest books to my computer are in the kid's school library basket (as opposed to the county library basket--sometimes we even manage to keep them separate!). This doesn't bother me at all because I still secretly (OK, openly) read middle grade/YA fiction. This also happens to be where a lot of my own fiction ideas would probably fall if sorted by the publishing world's magic marketing eight ball.

The top book is Ella Enchanted, a Newbery Honor Book by Gail Carson Levine, a funny and worthy selection that I happen to have read.

The fourth and fifth sentences (for context, as Serenity says) are:

This had to be Lucinda. There was every sign of it.

The next three sentences:

She had probably bestowed a gift on the newlyweds that was as gladly received as mine had been.

"Lady..." I called, my heart pounding.

She didn't hear me.

I'm hoping that these lines do not hold secret meaning for me as Serenity's sentences did for her. If so, I sense doom, sarcasm, and failure. Oh well.

In any case, I tag Amy, Dennis, Andrea, Trish, and Tom.

For my wife on Valentine's Day

Three poems of love from the Sufi poet Rumi:

The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere,
they're in each other all along.

__________________________

When I am with you, we stay up all night,
When you're not here, I can't get to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

__________________________

Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.

Free Rice

Sometimes I just need a one minute break from what I am doing, to step away, unhook my brain, do something else, and relax. Being a word lover who cares a bit about what happens in the world, my current favorite one minute break is to go to freerice.com. The idea is that you try to match vocabulary words to the word that has the closest meaning in a list they give you. For each one you get correct, they donate twenty grains of rice to the UN World Food Program. The money comes from the advertising revenue generated by refreshing the site each time you win. Of course, twenty grains of rice isn't much. But then, yesterday, with everyone who participated, Freerice.com was able to donate 150,137,840 grains of rice. This is, by my calculation, in the neighborhood of 150,000 large servings. So play. Learn. Give.

Speaking of the magic of writing...

Some writers are really good planners. They research, plan, plot, make character reference sheets, and compose detailed outlines of their story. I, on the other hand, am more the I'll-know-what-it's-about-when-I'm-done kind of writer. Well, yesterday on my lunch hour I was thinking I would write a sort of diary entry by the main character of a story I've been thinking about for a couple years. When I picked up my pencil, I had an urge to write instead from a secondary character's perspective. When I was done, I suddenly realized that this character should actually be the viewpoint character, with their story as the main plot. How cool is that? I love it when totally unplanned things happen and change everything for the better!

Morning Pages

One of the ways I've found to deal with depression, confusion, frustration, anger, and a variety of other potentially harmful emotional states is through writing. For some reason when I put pen or pencil to paper and start writing whatever comes to mind, the waters of my mind grow calm, the mud settles, and things get a little clearer. I've even found that writing is, for me, a way of praying in ink.

Unfortunately, life sometimes has a way of short-circuiting the very things that make life livable, the things that keep us more or less sane. Jobs, children, weather, sickness, depression itself--there are all kinds of factors that make it hard for me to keep writing. I've been trying to use my lunch hours to work on a story that's been ping-ponging around my head for a couple years, but I find I still need the unstructured dialog between myself and a blank page for the sake of my mental health. Enter morning pages.

Morning pages are an idea promoted by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, and her idea has been picked up and propagated by all manner of writing and art teachers, bloggers, and other creative types. You can read a pretty good description here, but the basics are pretty simple:

• Sit down every morning and write three pages longhand.
• Keep writing, letting your thoughts (or lack thereof) tumble out stream-of-consciousness style.
• Don't worry about style, punctuation, or even making sense. Don't stop, edit, or correct.
• The goal is to unload the clutter, confusion, and baggage from our minds so that we can enter the rest of the day with clarity and unobstructed creativity.

Of course, most of us have encountered this idea somewhere in school as "free-writing," a technique I have made use of off and on throughout my life for the purpose of brainstorming, journaling, or working through something. The idea of morning pages is to use free-writing as a daily practice. If free-writing is going to the mechanic when your car overheats, writing morning pages is performing regular oil changes and checking the coolant. Being, to use a complimentary term, a "free spirit," I am not much good at anything that requires a daily practice. Even so, I am going to attempt to establish this daily practice of morning pages, for the sake of myself and my family.

I see this intimate time with my thoughts as my own version of meditation, letting me breathe onto the page, focusing on the breath, observing what comes, nurturing it, letting it be transformed. It is my medication, written Prozac, free therapy. It is my connection to the creativity within, clearing the passages that allow that creativity to flow into the visible world, to birth something bright and alive. I may or may not ever make a living by writing; but it is enough if, by writing, I can live.