Spring and the Zen of Gardening

It took moving to Oregon to finally understand the meaning of spring.

In the area of California where I used to live, the days start getting warm in February. By March the days are gorgeous. Sometimes the first 80-degree day hits early, feeling like it's 100. By the time April 21 rolls around, the official start of spring seems like someone’s idea of a joke.

In Oregon, the spring equinox finally makes sense. On target, the earth explodes in the third week of April, its arrival celebrated with grand sales at the home improvement stores. Bags of soil amendment, seeds and flats of perennials go on sale along with everything one would possibly need to grow a garden. Stores hold drawings and giveaways, complete with hot dogs and balloons. Makes a person proud to own a hoe. I’ll be there this weekend, stocking up along with my neighbors. It’ll be like a 4^th of July picnic, a harbinger of the season. A celebration of life. A small thing, but really, not. It’s a reminder that the dark months are over. We crawled out from the long sleep renewed and refreshed. We made it.

Spring reminds me that I’m capable of rebirth. I can still wield a hoe and rake and, and by all that's holy, I intend to use them. I have a long list of projects, completed in front of the fireplace last winter, and now I’m hitting the dirt with everything I've got. Being physically fit is the result of good habits and luck. I don’t take for granted that I can handle a hoe and rake for five hours, that I can unload a thirty-pound sack of amendment from the pickup. Many people can’t. For a lifetime gardener the loss of strength and agility is a terribly loss. It will come one day, but I want to hold that time at bay by working up a sweat while I still can.

The sunshine, the crisp spring air, the drizzle of rain that salutes my flowerbed after a morning’s work are miracles. My efforts are a form of prayer, a way of saying “Thanks” to the ultimate Gardener. It’s also a reminder that I need patience to love my enemies, dandelions among them. I tell myself we should be able to co-exist in harmony. Maybe use some of them in tea. I've read that every part of the dandelion is usable and I intend to try.  I don’t want to rage against my nemesis, just share the earth for a time. After all, they'll be around a lot longer than I will.

Yesterday my husband and I cleaned out the ravine previous farmers used as a household dump. With leather gloves we pulled bottles, car parts and pots and pans from their resting place and piled them into the trailer. We hauled them to the recycling and separated them. It feels really good, making one tiny area of the earth cleaner, safer, better.

The least we can do to honor spring.   

 What about you? Any plans?

  

  

Some Quick Thoughts on Writing Before I Forget Them

I’m reading Thomas Moore’s little book, Meditations. One of those gems that delivers a bolt of enlightenment on every page. Like Anne Lamott if she were a monk.  

Small, intense books pave my path to sagehood. They would be my path to sainthood if I paid attention to all the lessons they teach. Instead, I’m cursed with a weakness that lets the world tear away my best intentions.  

That’s it, in a nutshell.

My obstacle to perfection is that I’m two women. (I explore this in my memoir, Ordinary Aphrodite.)  The brainy me tends to over-think issues.  I read deep books and feel the author’s ideas fill my head. But that’s where everything stays. The other me is flighty. I ponder the book for a day or two and then it’s back to watching Nashville or Game of Thrones on TV with a bowl of popcorn in my lap. I’m a wannabe intellectual with an average IQ.

In a nutshell.

My writing group is discussing finding our Writer’s Voice, that illusive combination of phrasing and structure, personality and thinking that makes each writer’s work unique. Some writing gurus claim it comes after we’ve written 1,000,000 words. (I put this in numerals so it will look like a big number. Actually, I think I wrote that many words reworking my first novel.)

I envy writers who find their writer’s voice, their genre and their place in the commercial market. They write a mystery, sell it to New York and start another before the royalty check clears. I suspect they were born knowing who they are and are satisfied with that person. All the while I wander the earth searching for the true me.

This is what I know about my writer’s voice. My writing involves the heart. That’s why I love memoir. When I write about “Me,” the name I give the universal woman who occupies my brain, I let my heart tackle the hard stuff. My ego gets to sit on the fence and watch me share my thoughts with the world in a self-effacing manner that allows women to laugh at themselves as well. Afterwards I feel useful. I feel like I’ve taken a few steps along my path of enlightenment and brought along a few sisters to share the trek.

There is a downside to being both giddy and wise. It’s hard to define what I do. I write women’s fiction. Inspirational fiction that women will read and share with their husbands and boyfriends. Contemporary stories that resonate with modern readers. But, wait. I also write historical fiction set in the American West. And Mexico. I write short stories of the heart. I write for religious magazines. I wrote a dark story about mental illness. What each of them has in common is my writer’s voice, the way I define my path.  

Writing is a way of exploring the big questions. I pick up knowledge along the way, but I still have more questions than answers. I’m finding my spiritual path in a messy world. What’s to be done? I guess I’ll just keep writing. Reading and listening. Take quiet walks in the woods. Find inspiration in faces of strangers and friends. Work on being a better friend. Pray and ask for prayer from others.

Maybe that’s enough.

Any thoughts you’d like to share on your own journey? 

Stylist Wars

I know better than to be late for a hair appointment. After all, those ladies have to make a living, too. So if I had followed my own advice I wouldn’t be writing this sad story. I had a hair appointment today. New place, new town. I’d won a gift certificate to the shop in a charity auction event. I had no idea where I was going, but I had the name of the shopping center. How hard could it be?

I drove around the shopping center twice, three times, looking for the salon. Finally I found the certificate at the bottom of my purse and called for directions. Turned out it was at the back of the center, at the truck entrance.

I arrived six minutes late, panting to the stylist closest to the door, “I made every wrong turn I could make finding you.” She was busy blowing someone’s hair, but she smiled and said she did the same thing when she was new to the area. Just then my gal came around the corner and announced in a voice that would have carried in a wind storm. “You had a 12:00 o’clock appointment.  I thought you weren’t coming. You can wait until 12:30 or you can reschedule.”

Several women looked up, their curiosity branding me with shame. My face must have shown my humiliation because my gal added, "Sweetie” in that saccharine tone usually reserved for old ladies in wheelchairs—and they don’t like it either. My face was obviously set in a grim mask of shock because she complimented me on my cute top and called me “sweetie” again in an effort to rescue the appointment.

I murmured something about taking the 12:30 and slunk out. I was parked in front of the store, so I got into my car and drove off. Fury, aggrieved injustice and humiliation spun around in my head while I tried to decide how I felt. I wanted to call my lifeline number and ask for advice like they do on those reality shows, but this was too personal—a road-not-taken fork.  I’d be carrying the memory of this day to my grave

My blood pressure cooled and a semblance of reason returned. The honorable thing to do was to honor the 12:30 appointment. After all, she was right. I had been late. But it was easy to get hung up on the technical point that it had been only six minutes. And it was her fault for setting up shop in the parking lot.   

Part of me wanted to drive home and never think of this day again. My gal's attitude spoke of a long career working with women. An ugly adjective that rhymed with "itch" kept coming to mind. I don’t usually have that thought. I considered my options. I could go back and get my free hair cut without saying anything. Claim the moral high-ground and reduce her to tears. I could leave a tip that would humble her. She would start to apologize, but I would cut her off.

I walked in and the stylist near the door offered me a cup of coffee in a soft, apologetic tone that made returning a whole lot easier. Then my gal called across the room, “They said you phoned that you were lost.  I’m sorry.” Yeah, I had. That was nice to hear.  

An hour later I had a great haircut. I left with something else, too, self-knowledge. I’m a better person than I was yesterday. I'll be a gentler, softer-spoken person in the future, a metaphoric server-of-coffee-to-stricken-strangers. My character got an up-do by the most unlikely of stylists. I'm grateful.

But if I go back to that shop again, it’ll be to the stylist near the door.  

15 Lessons about Playing Solitaire

Every writer I know plays Solitaire while they’re waiting for inspiration or coming down from the natural high of being “in the zone.” It occurred to me this morning that most of life’s lessons apply to Solitaire.

1. Sit up straight, don’t slump.
2. Don’t assume anything.
3. Luck is passive. Winning because of our skill feels better.
4. Don’t be greedy. Nobody wins every hand.  
5. Be careful what you ask for. The hand that lets you use every single card in the initial lay-out will leave you out of options.
6. Trust your instincts, but heighten them by living in the moment
7. Don’t get pompous. More great hands are lost for lack of a low face card than a king.
8. The round may start out easy, but every game has its rough patches.
9. Forgive yourself for being an idiot.
10. Sometimes you get a second chance.
11. God doesn’t answer every prayer.
12. The game isn’t over until it’s over.
13. When you don’t feel elation over winning, it’s not a game anymore.
14. It’s addiction if you have to hide it from others.  
15. Try other games in the list  

I'm sure this list could go on forever. How about you? Do you have one to add? 

Writing with George

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite

all the time. - George Orwell

I found this quote somewhere last week and it cracked me up. By coincidence, I’m working on a novel with this theme.

In my novel I channel a middle-age Mexican man with self-doubts. Preliminary readers say it works, and I’ll bask in the glow until my editor gets her copy. By implied consent she gets to say it doesn’t unless I can convince us both that my way works. One thing we never disagree about are the details I tuck into the story.   

My favorite part of writing is developing a character. It’s the same for actors, in that we become our characters. For me, the best part is asking myself the nuanced questions that go beyond the “who, what, where, why and how” that some writing books suggest. Fleshing out a character always happens after the first draft, like when I used to sit across a cafe table with Robert, a friend who reads my early iterations. He’d ask me things like, “What is the lighting like in Esquival’s cantina?”

I’d answer without taking time to think about it, “It’s an ancient wagon wheel from the wood hauler’s oxcart. After the ox died at the age of twenty-six, the owner had no further use for the cart. A week before he died, he bartered the wheel for a few day’s worth of pulque and drank himself into a place where old men could still find purpose.

     

My friend would blink, expressionless, and continue. “What does the front door look like?”

 “A heavy wooden door in the brilliant blue of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s robes, painted by the owner’s wife so everyone will know she is a righteous woman and a Catholic. Above the arch she added six gold stars that have kept their color even as the door has faded. Although it can no longer compete with the shouting lavender of the Jehovah’s Witness Hall at the edge of town, it is of no matter. The color satisfies her.”

Now Robert has moved away and the café sessions are no more. Now I ask myself these questions as I write.  I’ve learned that the best details define the characters that own them. Every accessory serves the purpose of moving the story forward. Nothing gets in without carrying its own weight.

And, surprisingly, they all seem to have something to say about the struggle of man (or woman) to be good—but not too good and not all the time.

Our Grandmothers, Ourselves

   This is an excerpt from Branches on the Conejo: Leaving the Soil After Five Generations, my memoir celebrating life in (then) the rural Southern California community of Thousand Oaks.                             

We daughters of the soil bear a long and affectionate link to the past. When most of us left home for the glamour and the financial opportunity of the city, we didn’t understand that we were abandoning our rural heritage. We thought we could escape the drudgery of chores and save up a nest egg for retirement. We never meant to sever the link. Now we baby boomers have become grandmothers, viewing the past through lens of wisdom. And we are torn.  

We think of ourselves as the last generation to be reared under the expectation that hard work will be rewarded. We work at town jobs but drive a tractor on Saturday mornings. We daydream of silk lingerie, but opt for a new pair of Wranglers. We help castrate sheep, but wear gloves to protect our nail polish. Some of us marry city boys and spend our lives trying to figure out why some things make us so cantankerous.

Still too close to the old ways, we see little reason to trade our values for others that seem artificially slick and calculated. We accept progress with a sigh, pick and choose what we will embrace.

We help raise sheep and cattle on our five-acre suburban plots while we work full time jobs in town. We grow peaches and apples and spend our weekends canning them into Mason jars before returning to our town jobs. We can’t understand why our children won’t help in the family garden, why our children and grandchildren have rejected our belief in hard work and have replaced it with confidence in a New World Economy. Our advice, our spirituality, our way of life seems archaic. We see our community becoming a service economy where no one wants to be the servant.

Our children think we are dinosaurs, fools for our work ethic and our slavish devotion to the old ways, and maybe we are. We seem to be caught in a schizophrenic blur between the old and the new.

We distrust bio-engineered food and altered milk. We remember when things tasted real. Many of us can still milk a cow. We recall our grandmother’s roses and geraniums before the nursery industry hybridized their scent away. We recall when trees were planted in both male and female varieties, the females making a mess in the yards with their pods and debris. But they attracted the pollen that now floats uselessly in the air. Now we sneeze and take our allergy medicine, and medicate our children’s asthma. We recall that the old days were healthier.

We study the photographs of our ancestors and we notice that hardly anyone was fat. We remember the Fifties, when sodas, flavored drink mixes, white bread and potato chips came into our diets, when sugar became synonymous with a mother’s love. We remember school prayer, spankings, being sent outside to play, and having to change into play clothes. We remember twice a week baths, and saying ‘thank you’, and calling our parent’s friends Mister and Missus instead of by their first names.

Now we are hounded by the guilt of our abandonment. Things are out of kilter and we suspect that we are to blame. Our grandparents’ photographs remind us that we forgot their lessons along the way. They were disciplined in a way that we are not, focused in a way that we have lost.

True, theirs was a world of fewer choices. I doubt, given the diversity of our temptations, they would have done any better than we have. But the fact is, we failed to heed their maxim: Waste not, want not. Maybe we are bracing ourselves for the consequences.

What about you? Anything resonate with you? 

35 Rules for Living a Happy, Spiritual Life

Here’s something to reflect on as we move into a new season.  

1. Do you have a generous countenance or do you hoard?
2. Do you let go or must you always control?
3. Are you courageous or too scared to go forward?
4. Do you hope or do you despair?
5. Do you recognize the abundance in life or do you see only the scarcity?
6. Do you put your trust in Jesus or in politicians?
7. Do you love or live in fear?
8. Do you take time to notice things or are you always in too big of a hurry to care?
9. Do you love people or are things your treasure?
10. Do you look people in the eye or stare at the ground as you pass?
11. Do you celebrate life or its total misery?
12. So you see life as a great adventure or is it all about fate?
13. Do you know God or just know about God?
14. Do you go the extra mile or skip corners when nobody is looking?
15. Do you say “yes” to people and then “no” later?
16. Do you give whenever you can or withdraw on false excuses?
17. Do you trust or are you suspicious of others motives?
18. Are you humble when you make a mistake or do you get defensive?
19. Do you stand for the truth even when it’s unpopular or do you cower to peer pressure?
20. Do you seek forgiveness when you are guilty of serious wrong or do you shrug it off?
21. Can you laugh at yourself or are you always serious?
22. Do you bless the stranger you encounter or avoid them in fear?
23. Do you listen to God or just yourself?
24. Do you give with no expectations or with strings attached?
25. Do you speak well of others or spread gossip that destroys?
26. Do you praise God in all things or always complain to him?
27. So you strive to do heroic things or do you frequently play the victim?
28. Do you use you power in order to give it away or use it to subdue others?
29. Do you seek solutions or must you be right and others be wrong?
30. Do you treat others with the dignity they deserve or do you mistreat them?
31. Are you living your life to the fullest or are you afraid inside?
32. Do your actions demonstrate that you value and respect the dignity of life or do you put your personal desires ahead of the most vulnerable?
33. Do you know that God has won the war or are you overcome by battles?
34. Do you know God’s forgiveness or feel that your sin could never be forgiven?
35. Do you know how gifted you are or are you always self-critical?

Borrowed from my priest’s sermon this morning. Thank you Fr. Bill Holtzinger, St. Anne Parish, Grants Pass, OR.