Where thou goest....I may not follow????

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and

It slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

Maya Angelou

                Writing is my passion it has been since I was young.  For a great long while though, I lost my voice.  The rest of the world or at least my immediate part of it squelched my enthusiasm for creating with practicality.  My destiny was swamped with raising children and their needs.   I lost the ability to dream for myself.   I became about hoping and trying to help them succeed.  When they accomplished their goals, there was a sense of accomplishment within myself.  I used chat rooms and role-playing games online to satisfy the emptiness that I did not even really understand. I occasionally wrote small articles on online safety and discerning the truth from dating men you meet online.  Something clicked inside my head.  So about five years ago, my dear friend, Larry, having bugged me for years to take the NANO challenge in November, finally convinced me.  My passion was reignited and my dreams became my own again.  I have since written a few short stories and two novels.  So I added up a total of words written in the past five years (not including my blog or my journals) 397, 853 words.  That is roughly 79,570 words a year and 219 words a day.  I was not sure whether to be impressed with myself or upset until I realized that is hours and hours of imagination, hours and hours of struggling to find a way to write a story that can make a reader feel and live the character as I dreamed them not mention I am still on mommy duty.

                Writing is not like a job you go to everyday.  You go to work then you come home and for most, they leave that responsibility behind when they get into their cars. Writing happens whenever something plays out in your imagination.  I can be sound asleep and my mind will be dreaming up the next chapter or changing a previous one.  In the shower, I am worry if the name I have chosen for a character really fits with his or her personality.  To you as a reader you see it as finished product and some of you avid readers will whip through reading it in a fraction of the time it took to get it on to paper and in edited to become the finished product that you hold in your hands. Its hours of outlining and research to find a perfect match that  will conjure up the perfect location or era that will make the experience for you as a reader come to life.  It staying up until dawn because the words are flowing like a river and praying you make it through the day with little or no sleep.

                Even here in my blog, I often strive to use real situation and the people I know and love to make my point. I firmly believe it is easier for us to tell the truth in away a reader can identify with if we can say look this happened to me too.  The truth about change and lessons is that they are not learned usually through wonderful circumstances.  They are brought about by need. The sorrow of life, the pain of a broken heart, and the frustration of daily life are the educational system that helps us to grow and learn.  I feel in order to have you identify with my current issue I need to share the trip that got me there just as in my story.  I want you to share the passion I feel.  Very few people really like self-help books but we all like the help.  The ones I cherished reading and learned the most from were not just analytical but also personal. 

                Passions are often very volatile.  They drive us to anger and tears or fits of laughter and joy. If you use them well and without reservation then you will probably get a bundle of both extremes and everything in between.  You will be loved and hated and often your motives misunderstood.  Nevertheless, it is that passion that will allow people to see the whole you.  

My daughter is an Art student at the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco.  She loves painting and sketching as much as I love words.   This semester in one of her classes, she was asked to write a paper on a very controversial piece of work.  It was a sculpture done by the artist Eric Fischl, “Tumbling woman”.  He so heartbroken by the graphic pictures of the people falling from the windows of the World Trade Center on September 11^th.  He created the statue as a tribute the raw courage and vulnerability of the human condition.  He wanted to memorialize the raw emotion  that struck him as he watched in torment. It was displayed on the lower concourse of the Rockefeller Center for a week. It was curtain off never to be seen or displayed again because people objected to his vision.  The piece is graphic and sad to me but it has a certain haunting beauty in the fact that as a sculpture he took a horror that stirred it with passion and created a piece of art.  He did not want to anger the masses but for all of us to remember that day with passion and fierceness so that we are not destined to feel complacent about our lives. He was driven by an inner emotion that most misunderstood or even attempted to contemplate.  All they saw was the ugliness. The world rejected his passion.  The sculpture was exiled. It is destined never to be displayed again. 

The point is simple though. No one person can completely understand the mind of a creator, be it a sculpture, a book, or even this blog.  All of you will take away what applies directly to you or what settles in your mind.  For some, you will say oh gosh, how embarrassing that she writes about her children and how hurt they will be about what she said. Others will read it and say it was a powerful lesson that they can apply to their lives. My passion was to touch that one person who needed to hear my message that day. 

I do not feel the need to constantly reassure the masses that I love my children, that I am a good mother or any other malarkey. My passion is to write. My passion is to create a message with meaning to share here.  My life is far from perfect. It has been ugly and hard.  I can dwell in that darkness and be bitter. I can let that ugliness consume my dreams and dwindle them into a more acceptable package. I can become a little sheep waiting to herd into “right “box.  ON THE OTHER HAND, I CAN MAKE A CONSCIOUS CHOICE TO BE ME!!!!!  I CAN STAND UP AND SAY, WHAT IF YOU LOOK AT THIS DIFFERENTLY!!

We all have passions that guide us in life.  Some for medicine like my friend Barb.  I would tell you she is the most amazingly smart and strong woman I have ever known.  Some will be jack-of-all-trades like my friend Darrel who to this day has failed to give me a wrong answer.  He might not always know the answer up front but you can bet he will help you find it.  Some will master the peace of the world and teach us all about Zen and inner peace like my friend Stephen. Even his most frustrated and stressful times, he has this awesome way of creating a peaceful space filled with truth. Some will become artist and entertain with a vision in paint and photography like my daughter Kyrie and my adopted daughter Lindsay.  Some will serve our country and become honorable men from little boys.  Some will take their passions for gay rights and turn them to a passion for serving others dying from AIDS.  Some will stay home and raise children that will bless the world with a new generation of teachers and scientists.

We are all different. We will all have different outcomes and see different messages.  If you desire to find the bad in any given subject then in truth you will. Good people do bad things everyday led by an uncontrollable and indefinable passion.  The outcome may cause pain and grief. It does not necessarily mean they are terrible people or that the good they did in our lives was all a lie.  Sometimes we will look at the horrendous act and rally to make goodness never before dreamed.  So if my messages here and passions are lost on you. Then perhaps I am guilty of not using the correct words to touch you but in the end, it was my dream, my passion.  You were along for the ride on my train.  It was not my responsibility to make you like the destination, only to try to get you there.