Moved...ComeVisit

I started a new chapter and a new blog to go with it...

Stop by and say hi.

http://nyhousejunkie.blogspot.com/

Best always,

Susan

I want to be a writer, she said....

It feels like a gray morning by the sea lately...I can't see very far ahead and instead of seeing what's around me, I'm preoccupied by the fact that I'm uncomfortable.

Changes are ahead, that I know for certain. Our home base will be changing. We have unanswered questions about how we'll accommodate our unique and particular work needs to the new space. My life in the 9 to 5 world continues to change and I cannot see where it's going.

All the lifestyle coaches tell us we can't get where we want to go if we don't name the destination. I want to write. Full time.

I've got a book out in the electronic world, a book I haven't got time or energy to promote, which is akin to leaving a birthday cake out in the street. Chances are it's not going to be appreciated if it isn't delivered to the right people.

I've become "the writer" at my place of work, which means I'm often editing other people's work. And I don't mind - it feels like at least an imitation of what I'd like to be doing. I write articles and columns for a couple of websites and publications. That's not bad, either.

But I'm losing energy for things I usually enjoy - some work that's usually a joy has become a chore. I circle around writing that is fun like a suspicious dog...sniffing but keeping my distance.

It's a spell, I know. It will pass, as these moods do, and a new feeling will take its place. But I read too many fairy tales as a child. I'm waiting for my own personal fairy to appear, tap me on the shoulder with her twinkling silver wand, and poof! I'm living happily ever after. Somehow after all these years, part of me still thinks that should happen.

Dancing Naked on the Porch

This is obviously my year for dreams fulfilled. Shortly after posting about my big fun as a backup singer for the talented musician I live with, something else huge happened. I got published.

I didn't have time to think about it much. One day, I was writing emails back and forth with a new publisher called Hen House Press...the next day a collection of my short stories was available on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble.

The View From Outside

My initial reaction was elation that reminded me of the incredulous, happy shock that followed the arrival of both of my children. There's no gorgeous, warm little person to snuggle, but there is a sense of having helped bring something new into the world.

Things have gotten a little weird since then.

In my initial excitement, I told a lot of people. I told people at work, including my bosses. They were thrilled for me. They're nice folks. I told my FB "friends" and sent out a "Hey! Guess what I did!" email to fifty of my closest friends." I didn't expect anyone to buy one but the sales started.

I went to NYC on a business trip and one of my bosses announced to the high-powered business owners at an evening meeting that I'd written a book that was now published. Three people came up to ask me to repeat the name.

And the weirdness grew.

Cousins I don't know anymore passed the word around the family that "Suzie" had written a book.

And it got totally weird. Because what I realized is every single damned thing I've written has some relationship to my view of reality, and I have just laid that bare for the world to see. Nothing's fact, some is complete fiction, but some characters certainly resemble people who could be recognized by relatives and that's a bit awkward.

It's weird that strangers are reading it, too, as I tend to guard my deepest feelings but in a book they flood the pages. It's painfully revealing.

So now I find myself with the strange feeling of dancing on the front porch, totally naked and feeling completely free, while hoping no one passing by on the street notices what I'm doing.

Who knew that this would be my honest answer when someone says, "You're published! How does it feel!"..........Conflicted.

Things Open Up When You Let Go

I've spent the past couple of years worrying. I used to be a recovering worrier, but I've fallen back into old patterns. Money, the future, my kids, health, our world's future, am I doing what I'm here to do (whatever that is)?

And the vise tightened a little bit every day. I could almost feel it.

But something happened around the New Year; I not only resolved to relax and let go, but I realized that if nothing changed at all, it just wasn't all that bad in my world.

Maybe we have to move to a smaller house. So what? It's a house. Maybe I'll never get paid what I think I'm worth. So what? My job treats me well, appreciates my work, lets me work on issues I think are important. Maybe my Lyme really is chronic, that I'm never going to feel quite as well as I used to. So what? I'm still so much more functional than many people with other chronic conditions. Maybe I'll learn to nap, at long last. My kids? They prove every day that they've got good heads on their shoulders and my nudging doesn't really help them. They're finding their way, bumping into walls and learning what works and what doesn't.

The world. Ah. That's all a question of perspective. If I look for a massive, techtonic shift in consciousness, I'm likely to be waiting a long time. That isn't how change happens. But there are changes, there is movement. I speak to the leaders of many of those progressive efforts. I should know better than most that change is possible and it is happening. It's a glacier, not a tsunami.

What about fulfilling whatever my purpose might be here? First you have to accept that there is one. I do. I believe the overarching purpose is learning. We're little cells of a greater organism, in the philosophy of Susan, and each of us contributes to the improvement of the whole by the lessons we learn and the evolving we do in our lifetime experiences.

So what if I'm doing it already? What if I had some massive lessons to learn, and I've already tackled them? I've learned that no matter how hard we try to conform, there comes a time when the inner self throws off its chains and demands to live. It may be a small revolution; a decision to change careers, to find a job that isn't a daily psychic death. Or it can be a huge revolution; a dead stop, full turn in a new direction. Whatever it may be, I think that there are two choices; let that inner self live, or live with a growing resentment and anger that distorts every part of your life.

The inner self, I've come to believe, is the expression of that greater self, the one who came here with a mission. It has to be fulfilled. That's why it exists.

But, as Arlo Guthrie said after fifteen minutes of "Alice's Restaurant", that isn't what I came to talk to you about today.

I came to talk about why the doors and windows suddenly are opening, the skies clearing for miles, the road beginning to uncurl ahead of me like a lazy ribbon.

Something happened after that New Year's exhalation. Opportunities began to present themselves. I made a couple of small steps to straighten out the messes in my world and suddenly amazing things are afoot.

The phone rang and an old friend mentioned a job that might be a great fit for me. Within days, three more good jobs, similarly good, appeared, all of them ones with whom I already have contacts.

Our house hasn't sold, but showings are beginning to pick up. We found another house, not far away, that would work beautifully for us and that we like. I stumbled across a story about an elderly doctor who treats children with Lyme Disease; he offered me a new perspective on my options.

My life's work? I still believe that, right now, it's writing. And I'm still fighting my own resistance to do it. But I've set that April 1st deadline and I'll meet it. Organization is important right now; I've got such limited time during the week that my work is slopping over into my "me" time, and I'm too conscientious to put aside the "them" work and risk missing a deadline.

But I've got three days this weekend, time to get "their" work done, finish my taxes and spend some quality time with my book.

The sky is wide open. And with all my reading of quantum mechanics, the metaphysical reading that relates to it (Seth books are remarkable if you've never explored - my mother adored them and so does KB), all my viewings of Mindwalk, What the Bleep Do We Know?, it's still counter-intuitive. When things are scary, we shut down.

But if the universe is, indeed, an interconnected web of energy and our thoughts can, indeed, create reality, the trick is to relax, to let go, to put out a clear, firm intention of what we want and need and then forget it. By all the laws of quantum mechanics, it will manifest.

This time in my life is apparently another reminder that it's true. All my worrying created nothing but obstacles. When I let go, things started to flow.

I don't know how it will all come out, but I know what I'm looking for. Serenity, a level of comfort and space to pursue this writing life I want. I have to do my part. I have to write. All of these strange, happy coincidences indicate that the universe is willing to do its part, too.

What if we really DO make our own reality? What will you make?

Look at What I Did!

There are many reasons why I love my guy. One of them is that he doesn't take himself too seriously. This morning he'd barely stumbled out of bed but he couldn't wait for me to hear something he'd written in the wee hours of the morning.

Then he started laughing.

"It's a lot like when you're potty training a kid, isn't it? 'Look at what I made!' It's the basis of all of this, isn't it?"

And he's got a point. I think about all the creative people I know who are just dying to have you read their latest poem, hear their latest song, read their new novel. They're the kids who are just so damned proud of what they created all by themselves.

Then there are the ones like me - the ones who make stuff but aren't sure they really want anyone to know about it. We do things like this - blog in obscurity. God forbid we should stand on a stage and read what we've done. We could do it, but I don't think we'd be looking for that invitation.

Oh my, Sigmund, what would you make of this?

The Attic As A Metaphor

I'd like to think I'm a writer. I write every day. I've written news stories, shows, short stories. I've happily pounded out magazine articles. I've struggled with three novels and felt the incredible rush of emotion as I wrote those short, huge words, "The End", and meant it. But I never write as well as I'd like to. There's a touch of poetry necessary to truly write the way I'd like to and I fear I lack it.

Jenna Hammerich has it in abundance. I found her work through my work. Scrolling through a public radio website that allows freelancers to post their work, I stumbled on a piece she'd written about growing up as the child of flower children. It was perfect; hilarious, poignant and thought provoking. I not only used it in my show, I wrote her a fan letter.

She was very sweet, happy for the encouragement and immersed in her writing. She hasn't had time to put together any other shorter stories that I could use, despite my pleas. But she asked me to listen to a half hour piece she put together on the women who painted the poisonous radium dials on clocks in a small Illinois town. I did. I was floored.

Jenna has a talent for not only revealing herself, but revealing the story she's telling in a way that unfolds naturally, fully and inevitably. There is no artifice, no sign where she's placed the wires, where she's pulling the strings.

I was so in love with her work that I went looking for more. And I found it. She's written a moving tribute to Michael Jackson for Salon.

But this may be the one I like best of all so far - she wanders off to the attic of her childhood and takes us with her. She made me remember the attic in the house where my children grew up. It had a narrow, low-ceilinged stairway but opened into a high, dark space with a sunny, finished room in the front of the house. That room, with it's ancient sheet of 1930s linoleum, a small table with child-sized chairs and two shelves with doors where a child and several friends could climb in and hide, was the most magical place in a well-loved house, not only for my children but for me. I remember a few times when they were off somewhere else and I would climb those stairs and sit alone in the sunlight high above our tree-lined street, observing the world from a new and far more objective perspective.

I didn't grow up in a house with an attic. But I wandered many times into the cavernous, bat and squirrel-infested attic above my grandmother's bedrooms. There she kept boxes she never opened, the obscenely grinning teeth of piano keys without their case, steamer trunks pushed off into darkened corners that I never dared open.

That attic held a thrillingly spooky fascination for me, a feeling that our own home's unfinished attic area probably inspired in my children. It was an opportunity to test our courage with little real danger.

Ready to explore? Here's Jenna's essay about attics. Prepare to be delighted.

http://dailypalette.uiowa.edu/index.php?artwork=1734

What I'm Reading: Second Chances

I don't ordinarily plug books. I read a lot, mostly non-fiction these days thanks to my job. But I had the good fortune of stumbling across this book and sat down with a cup of coffee and a good pair of reading glasses this morning. And I must spread the word. This is one terrific read.

I have not run across a book with characters I loved so much since "To Kill A Mockingbird". No, this has absolutely nothing to do with that book in any way. But it is full of fully formed, lovable, flawed and quirky characters, all on their own path to healing and second chances.

I love Elizabeth Berg. I love, with more reservations, Anne Tyler and Alice Hoffman. I have no reservations about this book and it's going up there with my favorites.

In it are little gems of insights about marriage, relationships, philosophy and women. Men who are puzzled by women should read it. Women who are frustrated with men should read it. I haven't been moved to tears by a book in a very long time. I choked up as I read a passage where a man with a troubled marriage reflects on what led him to put achievement before feelings.

When did you last read a book where the tango, tap dancing, dogs, treehouses and bagpipes were all paths to enlightenment?

I now have to read the author's other work to see if I love her writing unreservedly. I have absolutely no reservations about this book.

Read it.


http://www.amazon.com/Divinity-Second-Chances-Novel/dp/0143115189/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246125803&sr=1-14