Rain. Essays. Journal Writing and Mountain Roads

Days of rain and the sea is wild. The rhythm of water falling on land or water changes tempo and quickens with the wind. I love the ocean in December. This morning there was a pause in the rain and my long walk took me out to the wharf. We have a large herd of sea lion who take shelter under the wharf. At high tide the waves were knocking sea lion off the wooden planks and only the most fierce, dominant, aggressive hung on, biting, fighting, barking, wounding each other. Dear heart… 

 

Then at the end of the wharf in the open sea I discovered a raft of about 50 sea lion huddled, pups in the center, surrounded by adult sea lion, floating, bobbing together, peacefully. 

 

While walking home the rain started up again. The water felt good on my face and my thoughts were washed clean. I made a big pot of split pea soup yesterday, and it will taste even better today. Soup already made also means I will have extra time to finish up a writing project and write a December journal post. Thinking about writing a post in my online journal here at Earth and the Great Sea, that’s when my thoughts begin to scatter. 

 

Weather forecast calls for rain again tomorrow and the day after. My dog has an appointment tomorrow with her vet for vaccinations. A trip to the vet’s office, seventeen miles away, requires driving the mountain road, in the rain. Yet to go anywhere away from the coastline where I live requires driving through the mountains. It’s fast going in good weather and without traffic, and a journey that can take any amount of time with traffic, when there is a car crash, or in the rain with downed branches on the highway. 

 

Lately, writing journal posts to publish here feels a lot like driving our mountain roads in the rain. I know where I want to go, windshield wipers and the yellow line guide me, but it requires faith, and the act of driving requires getting it right. 

 

Hitting a creative bull’s eye sentence that precisely expresses what I feel flickering in my mind also requires faith, and yet I don’t need to get it right when I write pages in my journal. I don’t have to chase the sentence. The purpose of journaling is to create a net to catch thoughts, feelings, rememberings, ponderings, before they disappear, or take flight. When I write in my journal it always takes me on a path I didn’t expect or plan to travel and always leads to something good, better, and like driving the mountain road in the rain, it requires faith. 

 

But for the past few weeks I have not been able find anything in my hard copy journal; meaning the spiral notebook where I scribble my thoughts to later chew on, the place that is always a rich unorganized mine and often a source for pulling writing topics that I can later spend hours and hours fully developing into essays worthy of publishing. My hard copy journal is also the source I pull ragged thoughts from that can be cleaned up, edited and made coherent for publishing here, in my online journal. 

 

This is when my mind begins turning over the difference between writing an essay and writing a journal post. They are not the same thing. Essay and journal writing are wholly different genres of writing. 

 

The fog in my mind lifts and I discover I’ve wandered off and lost my way. The goal when writing in a journal is not to produce a complete essay, with a fully developed beginning introducing the situation, the middle, where the story is developed, and the end, which brings the events to some kind of satisfying conclusion, and do all of this with perfect sentence structure and punctuation. 

 

Now I understand why I’ve been hesitant to post here. I fell into a dark hole, thinking I needed to offer up beautifully written and carefully edited monthly essays, of the sort I find worthy of publishing and spend many hours writing. I do write those essays. But I never, ever, planned to publish them here first. What I do is occasionally reprint them here, later, after they have been published in books, anthologies, in literary journals, other venues, some online or hardcopy. 

Here, within this journal my goal is to offer fresh, underdone, unprocessed, unfinished journal posts. 

Now my thoughts float light, free. I am a feather, drifting in the air. And I’m a writer, scribbling thoughts in her journal. 

 

Dear readers, thank you for dropping by and for holding space for me. I'm an essayist, the author of two memoirs, a contributor to fifteen books, and a devotee of soup-making, sunrise, sunset and moonlight. And this is my journal (my online journal) my open field to explore, tell stories, think out loud, chew on thoughts, find inspiration, write willy-nilly, and offer up incomplete drafts of essays that might, or might not, later be fully developed and published elsewhere. I live with my family in California, based between the ocean and redwoods. Morning walks and journal writing are my practice, mediation and prayer, along with open spaces of stillness and solitude. 

Thank you for wandering along with me. May beauty surround you.

What is Important to Me?

Friends. Family. The Natural World. Spirituality. Books. Reading. Writing. Music. Race. Culture. Ethnicity. Love. Discoveries. Understanding new things. Hearing Stories. Being in the moment. Letting go of expectations, the outcome. Dreaming. Tender Memories. Water. Rivers. The Sky. Trust. Faith. Vulnerability. Prayer. Ceremony. Seeing the Spark and the Pain in each person I meet. Listening. Deep Listening. All things ethnic and working class. The margins. Borderlands. Raw, unedited versions of music and writing. The ordinary. The Monk's Journey. The Rez. Feeling connected to my Sharecropper, Indigenous, Indian, Mixedblood, German, Jewish, under educated, hard, hard, hard life ancestors. Meeting people of great privilege and hearing their stories. Learning. Becoming real. 

What Brings Me Joy? 
Sunrise. Twilight. Sunset. Owl sounds pressing against the night. The moon. Rivers. Mountains. Trees. Laughter. Sleep. Black coffee. Dark chocolate. Fiddle music. Banjo music. Live music, all music. Reading. Writing. Walking. Rough draft journal writing. Organizing. Day dreaming. Puttering. Lizards. Garden spiders. Dogs and cats, all animals, and wild life. Friends and family. Home comfort. Making soup. Clean sheets. My online group of women friends, all 65 of us, from all over the world, gathered together in one conversation. Our annual community powwow with 40 years of memories in my soul. Clouds. The night sky. Memories of my son, memories of Luke. Good wine. A great pair of jeans and sandals on my bare feet. Solitude. Ceremony. The serious, silly and just having fun. Astrology. Learning about Tarot Cards, a new found joy. This moment. This day. Yesterday, and thoughts of maybe tomorrow. 

My Big Secret
I'm shedding things from my life. Old habits, old thought patterns, old wished for positive behaviors that I no longer want to reach for. Goodbye Balance, you no longer serve me. Now I'm blending. Blending this with that in my life, because if we take care of the moments the years will balance themselves. And I'm tossing out the fear of it being discovered that I'm afraid. All that I'm afraid of, is getting smaller, shrinking as I walk into the unknown. I'm tossing out old emotional patterns I wanted to grow past. I pointed all guilt out the door. Go! Leave! You are no longer welcome here. The wide open field of me, is marked with boundaries. 

Thinking Out Loud on Wednesday

Things I need to get done 

Write the rest of the essays 
Write the rest of the books 
Edit the essays 
Edit the books 
Send the essays to publishers 
Send the books to publishers 
Endure the rejections 
Enjoy the acceptances 
Work on more rough drafts 
Repeat

Late June

My backyard is bursting with life. Even with this terrible drought we manage to save enough water to grow a few vegetables. After each trip to the garden I come into the house bearing armloads of zucchini, cucumbers, basil, cilantro. The gophers, rabbits and squirrels get their share, but we still have plenty for us each night. 

For the past few weeks I have been living a quiet, behind the scenes lifestyle. Like in the old days before the Internet, before blogs, back when writers wrote and you only heard from them when a book or magazine piece was published. The way Annie Dillard lives, even now. It is a lovely serene place. Doesn't do a whole lot for my popularity. But it does wonders for my soul. 

Last week I left my quiet world, and for six days moved into all things writing at the 46th Annual Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Volunteering, paying the rent for the space I take up on planet earth. Giving back to a conference that gave me my writing and publishing start more than 30 years ago. 

I’m older than dirt and I’m feeling old in a wonderful way. Hint. I remember the first Santa Barbara Writers Conference forty-six years ago—sort of. I remember sitting on the floor with other writers. It was in 1988, I think. We were in a tiny beach cottage at the old Miramar, the original conference home, a few feet away from the ocean, waves crashing, the scent of saltwater and sea air all around us, and my friend Bill Downey, who was one of the early SBWC workshop leaders, told us stories about the first conference. 

You will have an opportunity to meet Bill in my forthcoming memoir. I hadn’t planned to write about him. Yet one day he climbed onto the page and insisted on having a role. 

Today I had lunch with a best friend from my growing up years. We’ve been close since we were thirteen and in the 7th grade. Fifty-two years of friendship. 

Tomorrow I’m taking a reading vacation. Every couple of weeks I take a reading vacation day. I pick up the book of my choice and read all day long. 

Sending out love to all my friends, and may beauty surround you.

My foot carries days of the old into new

The room is unheated and on chilly days I wrap the wool blanket around me. I write the first draft to find the meaning. In the second draft I put in everything I left out. And then I take out everything that doesn't fit, in order to make it sound like I just thought it up. 

All those wonderful hours writing, with my dogs sleeping at my feet, while a pot of pinto beans simmered on the back of the stove, and afternoon sun poured through the window, with tiny dust particles floating in the sunlight. Years of indigo hours of early morning rewriting and revising, while my three sweet teenagers slept and the cat walked across my keyboard. 

I always begin with three pages of raw, rough draft writing. But I don’t always save it. The process is the product. Although my friend Luke tells me there is no product, it’s all process. 

Today I write with my grandchildren about, while the world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts, reverberate in all of us. What guarantees do we have that the future will be any better if we neglect the present. 

Time slips softy. One morning I will drink my last cup of coffee after a night of dreaming my last dream. Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. I feel the tides as they answer the moon.

Thinking Out Loud on Wednesday

The early morning sun is bright in the cloudless blue sky. It is warmer than usual for March. I prop the screen door open. It feels good to have currents of air move through the house. Out of the corner of my eye I see a lizard on the kitchen floor, breathing deeply without any other movement. I listen for a long time, feel her presence and watch, and then I helped her outside to be free.

.   .   .

For as long as I can remember Auntie has reminded me to remember my dreams, so that I would be able to find my path within the great circle in relation to how Indigenous people viewed the world, which according to Auntie meant that when it came to spiritual things, our dreams told our spirits desire. She said it was important to pay attention and follow the path our dreams illuminated, and that it was equally important to be kind, to help and let other people follow their path.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the stories she always told me spoke of The Seven Ways. The female cycles of life in the medicine world: The Way of the Daughter, The Way of the Householder, The Way of the Mother, The Way of the Gatherer, The Way of the Ritualists, The Way of the Teacher, The Way of the Wise Woman.

But she never used those exact words. Instead she told me stories, the ones that guided Native children to understand there was a natural world, and a spirit world, and places that connected the two, where some could, if they were suppose to, move from one to the other. But when I was young I thought her stories were like fairy tales, and that she told me the Grandmother Spider story to keep my mind off all the teasing I got at school, being called spider, because I had long skinny legs. 

-- a rough draft page from "We Who Walk The Seven Ways" a memoir in progress.