Creative Process Newsletter
A Writer's Journal

    The journal itself, long before I ever imagined writing a book, was a way of staying in touch with myself, trying to sort through the day and greet it with some sanity. Admittedly, I was a little crazy in my early twenties, and writing down my thoughts, worst fears, hopes, the feelings I never said, made sense.  In time, and thanks to a few good mentors, I settled down.  My journal became a way of listening, of seeing, putting things together.  Books often start that way; scribbling thoughts, feelings, insights on random sheets of paper, or in a journal--gives us a voice, and in a sense, a sounding board for not only our madness but the creative force underneath it. Along with our random thoughts, and bouts of “lucid confusion”, poems, bits of prose can begin to fall out of us, ideas get birthed; the unconscious arranges it, and for all we know, the soul.

    A writer’s journal, as I see it, isn’t about how to write, there are books about that.  It’s simply a sharing of the sort of inner work one might do that pushes up the milt of images, painful or beautiful, real or imagined--from inside.  I offer it as a way learning to get to know your self more intimately, as a way of going deeper into what the moment brings.

Colorado Springs                                                                                      Fall, 1994

    I sit in a chair at the airport, sprawled over two plum colored chairs, settling in for the long wait. I want to go home but the plane is delayed.  I want to go home and sit in front of a warm fire with my fishing partner, a hot drink steaming up my nose, black tea filled with the scent of nutmeg.  I try not to feel let down after the weekend, but I am let down.  I wouldn't have noticed so keenly had my plane been on time, but it is not.  I shuffle through the corridors trying to take my delay in stride.
     I sit once more and try to relax without imagining anything other than being here in this moment.  I imagine Thich Nhat Hanh sitting next to me, his feet up in the plum chair, waiting patiently, unruffled.  In between deep breaths, my thoughts go back to the steaming cup of tea.  I close my eyes and picture the smiling monk next to me.  
     Gradually my mood shifts, I start to shake off the doom of being stranded without wings. In spite of the angst, I can feel my contemplative side rising.  Underpaid that it is. I look around to see what’s become of Brother Hanh, he’s no where in sight.
     A small boy of about three dressed in red squirms free of his father's hand and rushes past me, running to the big black window that spills strange shapes out over the runway; that casts me and my control issues and the neon lights, and the aluminum bird mobile on the ceiling--out into the black night.  The boy looks Middle Eastern, with coal black hair and thick glasses and an accent I don't recognize. "Papee, papee, he comes plane."  But I don't' see anything.  His thick glasses may see something I don't.  His little body, the way he walks has a voice.  It says he's been through something terrible.  He could be Kurd.  I think of the families of mountain people in Kurdistan, victims of poisonous gas when Iran and Iraq were at war. I recalled a startling picture of a woman and her baby lying dead on the stone steps in front of their home--lying there where they fell. A tiny knitted bonnet was still neatly tied to the baby's chin, it's mother's arms still around it. A colored shawl hung loose over the woman's shoulders, her scarf still knotted in place. 
     The boy runs excitedly back and forth clapping his small hands, making airplane engine sounds, his huge horn-rimmed glasses slipping endlessly down over a nose too tiny for such contrivances.  He cheers me with his innocence. With wide-eyed wonderment he scans the runway and at last, the approaching aircraft.  "Papee, a comin!" he shouts again, leaping up and down.  I suddenly feel grateful for the delay, for the simple joy of the child.   I hope he has not seen too much.
     We cross the snowy Sierras in the dark.  We fly over wild habitat; coyote, bear, muskrat, beaver, and foxes lair, a dim shadow under the moon in a solitary trail over the dark snow, going home.

Nestucca Sanctuary, Oregon                                                                    Spring, 1995

     I read Edward Abbey this week on retreat, relishing his passion and love of the natural world.  "What most humans really desire is something quite different: liberty, community, spontaneity, nakedness, mystery, wildness, and wilderness."
     I read this over and over, a philosophy, pungent and simple.  I walk down by the river, a storm brewing at sea.  I imagine walking with Ed, he chews on a good Havana cigar that won’t stay lit.
     Science and technology, he says, seem bent on wrecking the planet. People don’t like it, because it’s inhuman; they’re flocking half-cocked to Eastern spirituality and the occult, and to a whole lot of thin air. But these fancy sounding formulas are too damn abstract. They’re airy and obscure, he goes on, like small bits of magic that don’t add up to anything. Might as well head for the hills.  I mean it, it just makes no sense. 
     We plod along the trail now slick with mud.  Still pondering the dead-ends of technology and what it’s driving us toward, he suddenly clenches his fist, and staring straight ahead as though toward some imaginary enemy, shouts,
     "Don't talk to me about other worlds, separate realities, lost continents, invisible realms--I know where I belong.  Heaven is home.  Utopia is here. Nirvana is now."  I laugh at his irreverence, and the truth in his words.
     He stops and sits down on an old fir, a nurse log, and tries to light up his smoldering cigar.  He looks out over the river on its way out to sea, and heaves a sigh. Yeah, all that technology, it’s going to get us nowhere.  You can’t just rely on reason, you know.  Too much logic, too much thinking, it’s not healthy.
     I ask him what he means by reason.  "By 'reason' he says, I mean intelligence informed by sympathy, knowledge in the arms of love." I like the sound of this.  We sit in silence for a while.  I lean on his images, let them sink and cool someplace.  He stirs the imagination, that’s for sure. 
     After a while, he tells me about a mountain he has just come back from, and a certain encounter with the night sky.  "Walking up the trail to my lookout tower last night, I saw the new moon emerge from a shoal of clouds and hang for a time beyond the black silhouette of a shaggy, giant Douglas fir.  I stopped to look.  And what I saw was the moon--the moon itself, nothing else: and the tree, alive and conscious of its own spiral or time; and my hands, palms upward, raised toward the sky."
     I walk back to my small room in the lodge and curl up on my bed.  I wonder who else runs into Edward Abbey on the trail, if anyone. Knowledge in the arms of love, I say it slowly as the light falls, and the rain.
     Knowledge…in the arms…of love.
     You could cry our eyes out over something like that.

Travel Poems

September in New Mexico                                                                           Fall, 2004

Orange light spills over blue
hills, the horizon on fire again.
Something sighs, sings down
the day,
a promise I can’t name springs up
from the longs strands of indigo shadow,
my arms fly up like
bird wings.

In the soft light
under the breastbone of earth and sky,
a wind stirs, things burrow
deep as night falls, and
the land sweeps itself under its dark cloak.
Dreams begin here,
What ever you pray for
a way opens.

Kingman                                                                                                     Fall 2004

Morning in the desert, a light breeze. Shades of
brown earth, light and shadow, angular and soft, an early litany,
a great bowl holds us, sunrise in all directions. Free of his bed
in the truck
 
the dog chases up the red hills, sniffs
rocks, boulders, jagged edges of stone, piles of debris,
stands of tree bush, and colla cactus, delights at every bushy
visitation. What’s been here, passed this way, peed before me...
We amble down the shale, a thought

crosses my mind: Leaving one’s mark,
when you’re not a dog, takes up
so much time, what sacrifice, if you think of it ,
the better part of a life.
Dogs pee and mark un-self consciously, unattached
to outcomes.
We bank everything on it.

What great bowl, when you think to ask, holds you?

Morning Prayer (For Mariam)                                                         October, 2004      

In the half light of the motel room
I pray the I AM
prayer.
The stretch of arms, legs, neck, and stomach,
the breathing deep and conscious
unravels the tattered ego,
it’s ragged edges
rest,
my fear rests.

I don’t remember praying
yesterday.  I was packing
up for the road, and talking to  Mariam about her
job at the shelter, the gutsy work of
compassion and savvy, the way she trusts You
in the face of constant threat,
the love that wells up
under the fear.
Take care

God,
break through to these kids.
Break through their rage and despair,
bring them home.
Didn’t you say there
is a spark of fire and grace
in every one of
us?  Unveil us then,
get down on these
dark streets. Come
down, Lord of the
alley ways, gang fights,
and broken homes.
Come God of
the dark
places,
come.

The Shop Keeper                                                                             January 17, 2007

Imagine if you can,
the pain some people live with.

There are two kinds of pain, the kind one
must endure because there is no other
way out; and the kind one endures
even when there is.

Sorrow is inevitable, the rag and bone shop
of the heart is always open for business. 
But some of us linger there too long, buying over
and over the oldest sorrows.

Yet what can you do?  Tell somebody clinging
to an old pain that she might be wasting her time
and she becomes angry. Mention to someone fond of
grudges, that it might be best to let go,
and he holds on even tighter. Maybe it’s our nature
to cling, but then again, maybe it’s not.

The old man in the bone shop, if you ask, might say,
Don’t just carry your pain around, put it to work. 
Get to know your anger and sadness, throw a party
for fear and resentment, set a table for your moods,
talk to the whole lot. 

Don’t judge what any one of them says, just
serve good food and listen. After a while,
ask who really needs to be there.
Ask what they bring, and if you really need it.
You don’t have to serve dessert to everyone.