Last night, I stumbled onto this video of Marvin Gaye singing the vocal track for “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”. I’ve been madly in love with this song since it first hit the radio in the autumn of my freshman year in high school. Now that I’ve heard it this particular way, I’m not sure if I want to hear it orchestrated, harmonized and produced ever again. It is perfect, exactly like this.
Hearing a song this way is like reading a short poem that rips away the protective rib cage of logical thinking and puts its burning hand right onto your exposed and fragile heart. Single singer A cappella is to perfectly written Haiku poetry, as a symphony is to a great novel.
We hear the original pain and the hard truth of the writer’s drunken 3:00 A.M. confession in each carefully chosen word and musical note. If the singer has embraced the zeitgeist of the creation of the piece, they can breathe life into the song. They can take us with them on our own Ghost of Christmas Past journey to the moments in our lives when the words hit home with a vengeance.
This should be my goal in every poem and every story that I write; that whatever comes out of my pen will be better than the silence of the blank page.
Stumbling over to the soft landing place, phone silenced and blessed quiet descends on this small island made of pillows and for thirty precious minutes, the nothingness is mine. I am a connoisseur of napping. I wasn’t always as appreciative of this life renewal process, but a few years back I learned how to do this with reckless abandon. Now it is a feast of bliss for me.
Sure, I’ve napped on planes over the Pacific and stretched out in the sun with my body cozied into the indentation it made in hot sand beneath my towel. I’ve crashed on couches, hammock’s swinging in an afternoon breeze and countless other settings, but I only started consciously using naps as power tools a few years back.
Like a cell phone, Kindle, laptop or any piece of equipment that moves data through its core to make it useful, the human body must recharge in order to function at maximum efficiency. Proper sleep at night addresses deeper REM issues, but who hasn’t woken up after eight hours of shut eye and still felt tired? Like my cell phone, my body’s battery life seems to change willy-nilly leaving me dragging my rear end at a time when I could really use a full charge.
My own mastering of the nap happened just over five years ago when undergoing radiation treatments for my breast cancer. The tech told me when we started that in a week or so, I would start to feel the effects and I might feel more tired. He downplayed it. I was driving myself to treatments and facing this like a to-do task on my list. Ten days in, arriving home from a session, I face planted in the sofa and slept like Princess Buttercup’s, Wesley after his encounter with the machine; not all dead, just mostly dead. When I got up, pushed my hair back into place and wiped the drool away, I felt like a million bucks. OK, half a million. The point is that my body said “SLEEP. NOW.” And I listened. Where we go wrong is not listening to our body when it’s talking to us.
Twenty to thirty minutes of surrender to what your body needs can snap you out of a creative rut, it can clear the mental debris clouding the solution to a big problem and it can make you a person other people want to be around instead of that whiny, bitchy person you are when you’re tired.
Famous serial nappers included John Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and Salvatore Dali, who slept with a metal key in his hand and a tin plate on the floor so when he fell deeply asleep the key would fall into the plate and wake him, perfectly refreshed. There are studies galore on the Internet to support this theory. Here’s a quote from just one. “Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap.” Dr. Matthew P. Walker, of the UCB Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory. BBC News (2-21-10)
I have a hypnotherapy background so I make my nap times productive. When I surrender to my nap space, I go there with one issue in mind and I hold the thought as I put my body in the most comfortable position it can find. Already familiar with my own self induction ritual, now I simply have to think, “Deeper and deeper, down into complete relaxation.” It takes about two minutes for me to fall into a restful slumber. Short of my Great Dane deciding this is an excellent moment to press her nose into my eye, I will awaken twenty minutes later feeling like I’ve had hours of good sleep.
New parents would trade a pile of gold for enough rest to face their day. My favorite quote when I was a new mother was this: “My parenting skills are in direct proportion with the amount of rest that I have had.” Whoever said it was a freaking genius.
Instructions for the beginning of a new life of creativity, productive work and sane parenting:
Find your nap nest.
Have the things you’ll need close at hand; a great pillow, a blanket of the perfect material to balance your body temperature, an alarm on a phone or an old fashioned alarm.
Shut off ringers, put signs on doors for quiet.
Remove pets from the space unless they are your nap buddy and let you sleep uninterrupted.
Make an agreement with others in your space that they will allow and assist you to be uninterrupted during this nap time. Agree to do the same for them.
The last and most important thing is to actually take the nap. The laundry will wait. The telemarketers and political pollsters will call you back. The world will be just fine for twenty to thirty minutes and you will return from NapLand a supercharged working, writing, creating dynamo and an infinitely better companion.
I heard that song again this morning. The one that burned into me years ago at a time when my life was in flux and I was looking for any guidepost signs from the Universe. You have one too. Everybody does.
Smell and sound are two of the markers that burn memory onto our brain like a tattoo we can see only when it’s reactivated by the right trigger. This morning, I was searching for a song that one of my characters could sing in a bar scene I was writing. Not really sure how I ended up at that particular YouTube video, I found myself staring at a link for a Jim Croce song.
Unless you’re as old as I am, he might not be a household name to you. Maybe your parents were fans and dragged their 8 tracks out, forcing you to listen to his Greatest Hits and though you are loath to admit it, you do know every word to his cheesiest radio hit, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown. Your memory trigger, hearing that particular tune again, might be a bucket of soapy water and washing the family car with your dad on a summer afternoon with the radio blaring from the open garage.
My memory, breaching the depths of my subconscious like a killer whale in Hawaiian waters, was from the night he died. I was on a cross-country drive when I heard that news. I remember exactly where I was.
Jim Croce wasn’t even on my A list of musicians that I would fork over my small cash stash to see live. I liked his “B” side music and his masterful guitar playing. He was subtle and sure. Unlike other artists of the era who looked good in limousines and custom-made stage clothing, Croce always looked like he just punched out from a 3 to 11 shift down at the factory and someone dragged his ass on stage after he’d had a couple of beers and loosened up. He wasn’t a particularly beautiful man. In fact, I’d guess he had his fair share of fist fights judging from his nose bridge; and his ethnic look didn’t evoke dreamy explicit encounter fantasies the way contemporaries, like Cat Stevens, did from young, impressionable fans. OK. Maybe that was just me.
My point is, he was a regular guy and his songs were spare, his guitar work, lush and gorgeous, and his lyrics were so true that they would enter your ear and lodge in the center of your gut. If all you’ve heard of his music is the Leroy Brown radio schmaltz, I urge you to spend a little time on YouTube or a music site and just listen to some of his other songs.
It was September 20, 1973. I had been eighteen years old for exactly four weeks and one day. My life was moving in a slow motion bubble with a crappy job. I had a few friends I’d made in the new state where I’d moved to the year prior; no love interest on the horizon and an undefined sense of self-worth that I seemed to take out and weigh on a daily basis. Was my life going anywhere? Was my life even in Arizona? Should I head back to Illinois where I had grown up and see if I still fit in there?
Something happens to you after you leave high school. No longer a part of an easily defined pack of friends or teammates you are flung out into the world to sink or swim on your talents and your dreams. Some take the college route, where they can extend the catapult launch date a few more precious years.
Not choosing the college route at that tender age means you’re still flung out into the world, just earlier than your college bound friends. Each day for the first few years is an existential enema that leaves you feeling less than at the very same time it makes you feel like more. There’s a heroes journey there, if you dare to take it, for those who define their own paths; and it’s not an easy ride.
Along that ride, I dated a guy briefly. Very briefly, in fact, because he decided, after four dates that I should be doing his laundry and cooking his meals. I decided he should leave and not come back; and suggested he hire a maid. What I kept from him, were a few of his bizarrely profound insights on life. He had arrived at these, I assume, after inhaling mass quantities of fragrant smoke, followed by three bags of Fritos and a box of Hostess Ding Dongs. He said that real power was standing on a corner, naked, waiting for no one.
That bears repeating. Real power, is standing on a corner, naked, waiting for no one.
When I was sure he wasn’t going to test that theory out right at that particular moment, I let it sink in. It was kind of brilliant. It became more so as my life went on and I met people with lots of money, advanced degrees and impressive titles on business cards. I found myself wondering who they would be if they were stripped of their credentials and had to face the world in only their birthday suits. Would they still be “powerful” if they had to leave those titles behind and just show up as themselves?
Back to Jim Croce… In late September, 1973, I was driving back from Chicago to Phoenix. In a first time show of amazing trust in my maturity and responsible character, (she says with a wry chuckle), my father handed me a wad of cash and a plane ticket a few days earlier, to send me back to Chicago. My task: retrieve a relative who had over stayed her welcome by free-loading, going house to house from relatives to friends parent’s homes and they hit saturation point and wanted her out. I was sent, like the Transporter, to get her and drive her back. I had road maps, enough cash to stop at motels and I’d promised to call in as we made our way across country.
The ride was partly a good dream; like when my passenger fell asleep and I could exercise my lead foot on the empty highways west of Amarillo. It was also part nightmare; like when everything that was different about us was rising up like two krakens in the confines of the small, but very cool, Camaro. My mission made me more of a junior bounty hunter, bringing her in to save the victims of her house-guest from hell visits. Her disdain that it was me, an entire year younger, (gasp!) who had been assigned this job made the atmosphere in the car predictably sub-arctic. The fact was, we were both just drifting through life and though I’d been sent to bring her back home, I was just as lost and unfocused as she was.
During a “good dream” portion of the drive she’d fallen soundly asleep just outside of Winslow. She didn’t wake when I saw the turn off to 17 South was blocked due to an accident. Traffic was diverted on to 89A, locally known as the Switchbacks. The road winds its way down through a heavy stand of Ponderosa pine trees starting at Flagstaff, Arizona, in a spectacularly curvy fashion. If you open your windows as you drive, it smells like butterscotch for miles. 89A continues down through Sedona and eventually re-connects to 17, south of Oak Creek Canyon. I love that bit of road and still relish the chance to drive it again.
It was 2:00 AM, and it was raining; which is probably how the accident happened on 17 south. I’m not sure. Not wanting to spend another day on the road with this particular kraken, and being the night owl I was born to be, I decided to push on the last three hours to Phoenix and be done with this adventure.
Listening to the Flagstaff radio announcer, I heard his emotional voice. “Folks, we’ve just gotten word that we lost a great musician today. Jim Croce has died in a small plane crash in Louisiana. Let’s spend a little more time with Jim, tonight.” He then played all of Croce’s catalog while I drove the switch back’s. The shock of another musicians death, and there were far too many in the 70’s, slapped whatever road weariness I had right out of me. He started his Croce marathon with the song, I’ve Got A Name. “Like the pine trees lining the winding road, I’ve got a name…” The back of my hand was working just as hard to wipe tears from my face as the windshield wipers clearing the 2 am rain.
Like I said, Croce wasn’t even my favorite musician, so the sudden emotion surprised even me. I’m guessing that the revelation that there would be no more music from him made me listen closer, and then, I really heard the heart of the music. He ended the marathon with Operator, a stark and beautiful piece that I wish someone would re-record, even if the “…you can keep the dime”, line is now irrelevant.
His lyrics combined with the smoke and honey tone of his voice had depicted, so perfectly, the places in our lives when the only thing we are sure of is the hope that life gets better and the very real presence of any stored kindness we can carry in our own hearts from place to place and relationship to relationship. If we get tattoos on our insides at moments that impact us, I think I have a Croce tattoo somewhere inside me. I probably have another one for the icy green-eyed guy who defined “real power”.
Figuratively, standing on a corner, naked, waiting for no one, became in that moment, a good place to start what would become my life. The heady ingredients, of Croce’s song lyrics, naked-on-the- corner-guy’s words and my flotsam and jetsam of a life that hadn’t yet settled into a recognizable pattern all combined to make the perfect recipe for Epiphany Soup.
It hit home, right then, on that road, with a kraken sleeping in the bucket seat beside me, that we can begin…anywhere. That middle of the night revelation has served me well all these years in everything I do.
Begin Anywhere.
Thanks Jim, for riding along that night and for setting down the poetry of your music in such simple perfection. Thanks, naked street corner guy for the brief but memorable dance and thanks kraken, for showing me how not to live your life. There are teachers everywhere you look.
I do have a name, and that name is, me. “If it gets me nowhere, I’ll get there proud. Moving me down the highway. Moving fast so life won’t pass me by…”
I was up at Mt. Shasta last October. If you haven’t been there yet, then get on it. There’s something very special and sacred and connected on that land and you just have to be there to feel it. Anyway, on a high trail, I stopped at a picnic bench area to have some water from my pack and when I set my stuff on the table, I saw this note.
It was tucked under a rock and waiting for some unknown soul to happen upon. The writer of the note thought the ring had been lost. I was thinking it had been set free. You’d have to be standing there looking up the mountain and looking back and out over the land below to know that no one leaves a ring on a table right there accidently.
It reminded me of a friend who married in her mid thirties. Her first marriage, his second. She was over the moon that she had finally found “the one” and when he was offered a chef’s position at a hotel restaurant soon to open at a very high profile casino in Las Vegas, she happily packed her life in Chicago and headed to the desert with her man. A thousand things came into play in her life, not the least of which was a rekindled dream that there was still enough time to have a child with her new husband.
On a corporate path for so long, she had almost let that dream blow by her like tumbleweed; until he came into her life that was. They settled in and she brought her formidable talent and humor, her artistic nature and her beautiful self 100% into this new life. Not even two years later, she found herself alone, standing on the roadway over the Hoover Dam with her wedding ring in her hand. When she drew back her arm and let it fly out and down into the nothing below, she let him go. He and the cocktail waitress he had been sleeping with those nights he was “working late.”
I wasn’t there when she did it, but I could clearly see her black hair flying in the breeze and her startling green eyes flash and shimmer with the last tear that she would shed for this bastard. She didn’t even cry the next year when he married the cocktail waitress who was pregnant with his child, the irony not lost on her as he had told her about his second thoughts of starting a second family in his forties.
Not all who wander are lost…not all things left behind are a mistake.
I wrote a response to that note on the picnic table in poetry form. I tucked it under the rock and after I had my water and got ready to put my feet back to the trail, I gave a salute to Jennifer. To her new life without him; to the ring that now rests among the rocks at the bottom of the dam, perhaps with a million others, and to moving her feet back onto her own trail, wherever it may lead her.
I’m supposed to be writing this week. I thought I would pound out at least four more chapters in seven days. So, that didn’t happen. Life happened. It happened all around me. Cat sitting, dog managing, spouse home for several weeks recovering from a surgical adventure. Oh, yes. I said weeks. Even when those around you take care of themselves and stay out of your field of vision, for the most part, we are always keenly aware of their presence. We’re also aware of the laundry mountain awaiting our attention, and the dust bunnies multiplying like, well, rabbits, beneath the sofa and pulling food from the freezer for dinner 8 hours from now. And hey! Wouldn’t this be a great time to call Nancy and have a chat over coffee?
DISTRACTIONS…
In 2011, the University College in London did a study and concluded, and I quote, so you won’t think I just made this up to justify my possible ADD-Sugar-enhanced-Dory-the-fish Olympic avoidance festivals, “… those who are easily distracted from tasks at hand have ‘too much brain’.” Researchers at the university found that there were larger than average volumes of grey matter in certain brain regions in people whose attention was easily diverted.
YES! This is the problem! I have too much brain! I am vindicated! Free now to claim superior deductive powers, not a lack of control over my attention span. No, sir. It is the sole fault of my giant fraking brain.
Some distractions we really can not do anything about and so we must live with them. Others, we can have some control over; like our writing environment. I have a table that I used as a desk last year that sat in the corner of my living room. It worked pretty well for me until staring out the window at the neighbors house began to feel far less inspirational than it once did. It was time for a change of scenery. I commandeered the dining room. A long, white table sits next to the front window giving me a street view of winter snow, spring blossoms and now, a lush green, leafed out Michigan summer. Being a dining room table it is a magnet for every bit of junk mail, keys, hats, empty coffee cups and whatever family has in their hands as they pass. I made this place a little writing altar. I have a candle and a Kwan Yin and some little tchotchke things that I use as writing juju. I do not care if that Sprint headset box that was left on the table looks just as important as my turquoise suede pouch with the wolf stone my daughter gave me, it is not MY juju and I find it distracting.
The other day on Pinterest, (the MECCA of distraction), I saw a sketch of a guy sitting on a heap of books with more piles covering the landscape. It said some clever thing about wisdom. Nice enough picture, but I found myself thinking that any real lover of books would be freaking out at the horrible disorganization of what they supposedly, love. That is not wise. That is not even love. That is feeding a short term addiction to interesting stuff. When we truly love what we read and love what we write and love the ideas our muses give us, we want to be able to easily and quickly lay our hands on them again so we can quote them or nurture them into a storyline.
Scanning my dining table/workspace I find that my own stacks of reference books, research material, spiral notebooks and sticky notes with “great ideas” may have been moved to accommodate the nearly finished mocha latte to-go cup that he-who-will-not-be-named really, really needed to leave right there. It … distracts me.
Shades of Joan Crawford screaming about wire hangers move through my mind when I look up from the keyboard and see that paper cup exactly where my Celtic Wheel of Life and The Path of Druidry books were earlier this morning.
Logic says that this is all yet another avoidance tactic to getting down to the writing. Giant Brain Squirrel Girl says, “Honey, does this rag smell like chloroform?” It will be interesting to see which choice my giant brain makes…right after I have some lunch because I see the spouse making a sandwich and that looks really good right this very minute…
The other day, I stumbled onto an old post on a writing website. The author had asked readers what they thought it took to be a successful writer.
Good soldiers said it took discipline. Several said it required patience. One guy even said it took, “patients.” Perhaps he was a medical writer. A few pointed to skill and there were a few votes for a love of words.
I’d have to go along with the word love fest myself, but I’d add that we must be in touch with our wild selves as well. Real writing worth reading always takes us somewhere that could get messy. We must love to roll around in words like my dog does on the lawn just after I’ve mowed.
Writer’s must be part cat. We need to revel in rubbing up against words with embarrassing sensuality. We also need the cat’s ability to survive being thrown off a roof and still land on our feet when rejection letters and bad reviews arrive in our lives.
The tenacity of a Gila Monster comes in handily in word wrangling; biting into a storyline and hanging in there until our teeth touch and there is nothing left to say on the subject.
We need the vision of an eagle; flying high above all the sameness on the plain of published words and seeing something meaty and delicious, be willing to fold our wings into a death dive, down to where it is and bring it home.
Most of all, a writer must become a word lion; embracing our predator nature, staring down what we want and following it wherever it goes. Without shame or apology, we must set our sites on that feast of words and take it down; bloody truth and all; laying it out on paper to be devoured by our dinner guests, the readers.
Word Ninja Girl 