The Written Picture

Seeing the Holy

"When your life is filled with the desire to see the holiness in everyday life, something magical happens: Ordinary life becomes extraordinary, and the very process of life begins to nourish your soul."

    --Rabbi Harold Kushner

A Novel Idea

While I was in Colorado, I started working on a new idea for a story. Well, it's not new exactly. A year ago, I had the image of a hallway with glass on one side and 500 years of old portraits on the other. A girl stood at one end and didn't want to walk down it. I wrote a little bit on it at the beginning of the year, but then in Colorado with the clouds dipping down low over the mountains, I kept going.

I love books like Wuthering Heights, The Shadow of the Wind, The Thirteenth Tale, The House at Riverton, Jane Eyre and especially Rebecca - my all time favorite creepy/gothic/mystery story. I love dark and stormy nights. I guess after this long, I just wanted to write my own.

In Writing Past Dark, Bonnie Friedman likens writing a novel to building a little fort when you're a kid:

Again I closed the curtain around me, regaining the secret place so much like the chamber that registers the images of a photograph, and which must be kept dark for the picture to be captured.

I'm building a fort. I'm climbing into a dark cozy space with blankets for walls. I've got my pen and paper, and I'm scribbling secrets in the dark.

52 in 52 - almost there

Only 6 more books to go in my quest to read 52 books in 52 weeks. As of right now, I'm 8 books ahead of schedule. You might think I cheated when I read this book. Or this one. Or even this one. They're short. VERY short. But I wanted to keep track of them (I'm using Goodreads to track my progress and wanted those books on my "read" shelf). Plus I figure reading a 944 page book makes up for the shorter ones. I read quite a bit while we were on vacation in Colorado - 11 books. But then hit a slump when I got back to laundry and unpacking, school starting, and picture taking.

In October, I like to read spooky books. This year, I have slated: The Woman in White and a couple of paperbacks I've had for a while but never read, The Poe Shadow and The Dante Club. And I've just read a sample of Maureen Johnson's newest The Name of the Star about a boarding school and a modern day Jack-the-Ripper. I love a good creepy boarding school mystery. Maybe I'll finally finish The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. I read The Girl Who Played with Fire in Colorado in two days. I just couldn't put it down. And it seems more than appropriate to read The October Country by Ray Bradbury - a book I've dipped into from time to time but never officially finished. Maybe I'll keep dipping.

My favorite October reads ever are: Wuthering Heights, The Thirteenth Tale, The Shadow of the Wind, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Rebecca. What are yours?

The Peace of Wild Things

"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake 
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

 waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world,

and am free."

  --The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

(all pictures taken with the Vignette app for android)

10 years ago

Kenny and I were getting ready to go down to the Walnut Valley Festival - a bluegrass festival in Winfield, Kansas near the southern border. I took my 5 year old daughter to Target where every TV showed those same horrific images over and over again. We waited in line at the gas pump, not knowing if we should even venture 3 hours away when airplanes were falling out of the sky.

Turns out Winfield was the best place we could've gone.

Some performers couldn't make it. Others drove all night from all over the country to get to a place where there was only the music and the stars.

I had my notebook with me and 2 days later I took it out into the night and wrote while I listened. This is what I said:

I am sitting shielded from the stars under a yellow and white canvas tent with a mandolin singing next to me. I am 1000 miles from New York City, from hijackers smuggling knives onto an airplane, from a "state of war." I don't know if there will be a war when the music stops. I don't know if we'll ever be here again. I don't know what kind of world my daughter will know tomorrow.

But tonight I know the quivering voices singing in harmony and the wailing mandolin. I know the music that reaches out and touches my chest like a mother soothing a sick child. "I'm hungry I'm tired I'm thirsty I'm sick." That's what they're singing as a cool breeze breezes through and the crickets and cicadas try to keep up behind them.

I'm hungry I'm tired I'm thirsty I'm sick. That's how I came to Winfield. That's how I walked out of the camper away from the TV, away from Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Special Report, Breaking News, Nightline. I walked away from billowing smoke clouds, crumpled steel - enough to build 6 Eiffel Towers. I walked in the night past cicadas and crickets, through the breeze across the grass in bare feet under the stars to a shelter. I walked like a sick child called home.

I came to the music.

I'm not with a Boeing 767 slamming into the country's largest tower. Twice. I'm with the train in the night and the sighing dobro. I'm with the blonde haired girl singing, "Are you also alone with a memory now that I am gone? Are you missing me?" My soul is soothed as she sings over the train that roars past.

And I don't know what to do with these two worlds.

In one, we are all together, sitting close even though they sing, "Someone has taken you from me." And the music is a thread running through us all, stitching us together tightly.

And in the other, there is no music.

Tomorrow, I'll be back in that world. But tonight (I'm hungry I'm tired I'm thirsty I'm sick) we are together in the breeze, in the music, the train, the crickets, and the stars.