One Step at a Time…

Don’t find fault. Find a remedy. –Henry Ford

This is especially profound for me today.  I started doing some research on how to go about publishing a book.  Even if one self-publishes, which I would rather not do at this point, the process is daunting.

First, the market is saturated.  I recently read the title (and subsequently bought the book) of a memoire that sounds VERY familiar to my own themes.  I have read 30-40 books in my particular genre (the spiritual memoire), and though they all takes the same idea from a different angle, I wonder if mine will have enough of an edge to cut through the niche.  I think that it does, but will someone else, looking at it cursorily at the starting point think so?

Second, many publishers do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.  And those that do are still looking for authors who have 1) already published a book or books, 2) already have an established reputation in their field, and 3) already have some kind of networking in with the publisher.  I have not published a book before, though I have published a several poems in journals and chap books, and an article in a ‘zine.  I don’t think that is enticing enough to a memoire publisher.  I do not have an established reputation in my field, nor is my field (art history) related to my manuscript.  And I am not a skilled networker with my fingers on the pulse of publishing (though that can change as I commit myself to this process).  As Ford advises against, I see many faults.

Third, I would need an agent.  I briefly looked up some blogs written by agents and the list of do’s and do not’s is terrifying.  So many people want books published, and there is only so much interest and so much paper in the world.  Again, I wonder if my writing style and personal experiences are interesting enough, different enough to catch some attention.

But I like the encouragement to find remedies.  I can only take this process one step at a time.

1. I need to finish my book.  I recently went on a self-imposed trip to an out of town B&B to do just that.  I am in the process of sending the manuscript to my own legion of editors.  I am prioritizing finishing my book even over writing this blog.  My goal is to have the book finished in 2012.
2. I have also started working on my query—the letter written to agents telling them about my book.  It helps me focus my pitch; it helps me identify what my book is about and where I might be wandering too much; it helps me feel like I am not giving up on the process even in the face of impossible odds.

That is all I can do right now.  Those are the remedies to my outstanding fears.

The Altar of Yes

Every person is the creation of himself, the image of his own thinking and believing.  As individuals think and believe, so they are. –Claude M. Bristol

I am a believer in synchronicity. It is the idea that life will present you with what you need when you need it.  Some would say it is divine providence or destiny.  Some would say it is “your life attracting your life.”  What the BL%@p do I know?!  I don’t know how to explain coincidence.  I detested the plot and style of The Celestine Prophecy, which talks about coincidence as a life force, but being a twisted hair, I related to the idea of synchronicity.

So today I had a moment of synchronicity.  Phil and I had a civil discussion (some would say argument, some would say fight) about…blah, blah, blah.   You fill in the blanks because you have had the same conversation.

After a day of teaching and some time to sit with myself and my own contribution to this row with Phil, I found my way to Mary Stan’s Facebook page.  Facebook, with so many friends, is sometimes like a reunion.  You don’t talk with people daily, you don’t look at their pages daily, but you love having the chance to meet up again someday.  Facebook is about potential.  And I found, once again, Mary’s page (which I do not substitute for Mary herself).  So back to Mary.  As I said at her “funeral,” and she is still very much alive, Mary is the woman who makes you feel like you belong.  And she makes a very diverse group of people feel special.  The only common denominator in this group of people is Mary.  So today I meandered to Mary’s page and found that she has listed as her place of study, “Studied at Yes.”

Studied at yes.  Yesterday that may not have meant much for me, or it would have likely meant “yes, take a bunch of 12 year old boys skating at the Roller Drome without a costume.”  You  have no idea how hard the sans costume was for me.  But today “Studied at Yes” is my Sermon on the Mount.  And not coincidentally, today is a day of Sabbath for many people in the world, so why not for me?!

Saying “yes.”  For many women, as you will read in everything from Reader’s Digest to    Cosmo, saying “no” is usually the problem.  It is a problem I do not relate to.  I do very little that I do not want to do, and some will say that sounds selfish.  It isn’t; I am just not a woman who has a problem saying no.  I do not attend committees I do not think I can help, I do not take on more that my schedule will allow, and I do not feel pressured to be “involved.”  I have made decisions that protect my independence, free time, and mobility in the world, as much as that is possible.

But I do have a problem saying “yes”—to vulnerability, to loss, to a broken heart (once again), to admitting that I am wrong even with someone who loves me unconditionally, to saying “I need.”  I have a problem living comfortably in the mundane, because I am always looking to sustain the liminal.  I have a problem saying “yes, this moment is all it is” to an argument with Phil because I feel drawn to associating with the past or projecting into the future.

I think of Mary and her husband Chuck.  They are tender with each other, and I think that tenderness comes out of their willingness to say “yes” to each other.  Yes to different interests, different philosophies, different experiences (Burning Man and archeological digs, both in searing temperatures with bottles of tepid water).

Even after five years of loving Phil, I still have a hard time letting down my “no” wall.  He has the same wall.  That is the beauty and bane of loving your mirror.  But I want to be a yes person even when my first inclination is to say “no.”  And I am grateful for the life that gives me the continued opportunity to find “yes.”

I can smile at the old days…I must think of a new life

Never let your memories be greater than your dreams. –Doug Ivester

When I think of greater, I think of number, and because of my age, I have a lot of memories, though with age, I expect to have fewer and fewer.  But of course, the word greater likely signifies “more significant,” or “of a more severe hold.”  This quotation is probably not to be read so literally

So what is a dreamy memoire writer to do when her dream, one of many, is to write a book about memories?  I really like my memories.  My memories are signposts for directing me to who I want to become more and more of, reminders of what I may want to avoid in the future.  Even those sad breakups and lost opportunities, I love them.  I moved to Los Angeles with a boy instead of going to art school in Savannah, Georgia, with a GREAT scholarship…yeah, that one still smarts a little.  And my decisions to have experiences that bring about memories are mired in memories, some very unconscious.  Memory is very much a part of my writing, my internal process, my poetry.  So how do I reconcile myself with Mr. Coca Cola’s aphorism?  I think it is this.

Sometimes I grieve the loss of faith, and that grief leads me to anger—a sarcastic, bombastic anger.  And I find that my writing suffers.  I lose my voice for some shrill, hurtfully avoidant voice, and it is this voice that, I think, will ultimately hurt people, people I love, people I trust, when they read what I have written.  I spend more time finding ways to dislodge another person’s reason rather than writing about my own experiences.  Writing so that I arm myself against what I remember rather than writing to become vulnerable and safe in my memories turns my dream of a book into a hellish, and frankly unentertaining, read.

The quotation probably means never let your memories hold you back from achieving your dreams.  But I like a new spin on it.  Perhaps as one grows older and more wise, dreams may stem less and less from controlling a memory and more and more from present desire and future anticipations.  Maybe with this I can avoid singing under a midnight lamplight dreaming of yesteryear, though that is very romantic, and continue to think of what I want more of.

Mother May I

The Virgin of Itzamal, Photograph by Fonda Portales

There’s nothing capricious in nature, and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feels it. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

So lately I have been feeling a rite of passage coming on.  I have not been sure how it will take shape or what will precipitate it (if it has not already begun), but I feel it looming.  Perhaps it is this “implanting of a desire” that Emerson speaks of.  I am seeking change, and I am sure that it will come about.  But how?

I was in the bookstore the other day looking for something to escape with, and I had picked up We need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver.  It’s about a woman who struggles with feeling maternal to her own child, and when he commits a heinous crime against others, she wonders if it is her lack of maternal love that caused the tendency in her child to harm.  Pretty sure I was going to buy the book, I turned to the poetry/women’s studies section on a whim.  I ran into the new book by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., Untie the Strong Woman: Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul.

Now I love Estés.  Her book Women Who Run with the Wolves was very instrumental in my early thirties as I was then in a transitional phase of becoming more Woman.  She is a keeper of the stories, a cantadora, a role to which I feel akin as both a reader and a scholar.  Much of my graduate thesis was studying the stories of Ix Chel and her relationship to the Virgin of Itzamal.  Clearly, I had to buy Estés’ new book.  And I thought, looking at the cover, “perhaps my great change is to find the Mother in myself so as to mother myself.”  And I knew it to be Truth.

Serendipity—the idea that coincidences are not in fact random and unconnected, but rather a sign that your life is going in the right direction.  And it is only intuition, that freedom to listen to yourself and KNOW something to be right, that allows the seemingly capriciousness of life to blossom into something heartfelt, real, and perhaps a bit magical.  Buying a book about a mother, finding another book about the Immaculate Mother, having a thought about being my own mother, these are all those “coincidences” indicating that my desire for more change will be gratified by my constitution.  When I thought “my great change is to find the Mother in myself so as to mother myself,” I felt my body relax, my mind flee from anxiety to settle, and the void that resides in the back of my stomach fill up a bit, and I knew that this was my immediate Truth.  But these coincidences lie within a history of my relationship to Mother.

I have been feeling a maternal tug of late.  The innate (for women as well as men), though developmental, need to protect, to defend those who cannot defend themselves, to comfort, to salve hurts and heal wounds, to love BECAUSE of personality flaws has been present for me for my niece.  And I have justified that because she is far away, because she is not my own, I cannot really “mother” her.  I do not think that is true any longer, though I am still unclear about what my role in her life will look like.  It, too, will come.

For many, that maternal tug indicates a desire for children, and I am decidedly sure that is not true for me.  I am not ready to have children, and I do not know that I ever will be.  So how can I be a Mother?!  Reading Estés’ book reminds me that through the power of symbols, the power of myths (also a title of a brilliant Joseph Campbell book), I can develop my own Mother—in me, for myself.  She will protect me, defend me, comfort me.  Or rather, it is me, through my imagining of Mary, who will comfort myself.

I do not feel this urge because my mother is in any way deficient.  She consistently goes out of her way to tell me that I am beautiful, that she is glad I am her daughter, that she is proud of who I am (even when she disagrees with my choices and beliefs).  She is brave and she is strong, though I am not sure she would say these things of herself.  I am lucky to have the mother I do.  Rather I feel this urge because I need to develop my own Mother inside of me.  It’s a coping skill made more profound through image and story.

When I was growing more weary of being a Protestant, I wanted to convert to Catholicism for many reasons that I will likely discuss later.  In part, this decision was based on the Catholic emphasis on Mary.  Protestants recognize Mary as the Mother of God and they praise her for her submission to God’s will, but she is largely ignored for fear that Virgin Worship takes precedence over Christ Worship.  But Mary’s privilege in the Catholic tradition culled my feminist energy, though that was certainly not the intention of Christian forefathers.  About 15 years ago, I was discussing this around a table of women in Whitstable, England, and they argued that the figure of Mary was unconsciously contrived as an anti-feminist image—that her virginity rather than her womanhood was privileged.  I was intrigued by the contrary idea, and weeks later, staying at the Taize Monastery in Macon, France, I brought up the questions to ecumenical monks living there and leading daily Bible studies.  Why did Mary have to be a virgin?  Was not her availability deserving enough?  They did not have answers, though they were patient with my earnest and devout questioning.  Looking back now, I think it was perhaps because they believed Mary and her life to be tenets of faith, articles of the Church, rather than examples of a woman in process, a story of femaleness becoming.  I walked away from those traveling experiences with a sense of loss.

But my loss came not from unanswered questions or absolutism in Christianity.  Rather my loss was predicated on believing that others had better ideas and more answers than I did.  I marginalized my own love of Mary’s mythology, and so I lost her and part of myself.

There’s nothing capricious in nature, and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feels it. For 15 years, I have loved the story of Mary, but she has traveled with me even as I forgot her, and by her, I mean me.

I’ll have the Attitude Adjustment, please.

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.  –William James, author of Varieties of Religious Experiences

Today I was thinking, I am not disciplined enough to be a ____, fill in the word, because I thought it all (scholar, painter, guitar player, tap dancer).  I choose to procrastinate; I choose to be distracted by a plethora of other projects or activities, most of which I like as well.  And in one sentence, my language has defeated me.  It is hard to get out of that sentence.  It is final, determined.

And that makes me really sad.  One sentence closes so many doors on a life that otherwise could be more rich, more creative, less sedentary.

I can do all that I can to be more organized.  I can make a weekly calendar like we were taught in Freshman College seminars on Managing Your Time, marking out half hour blocks for eating and bathing.  I can set up a little corner of my small house reserved just for creative energy, where my brushes, my books, my guitar, my tap shoes are arranged like shining beacons calling for my attention.  I can reserve an office at the school library where I can peacefully write, study, order from the interlibrary loan catalog.  And all of these would be wonderful tasks to complete, IF I were not already living under the damning declaration.

I tend to think of myself as a pessimist, though Phil would argue that at heart I am a closet-optimist.  It is so easy for me to think from a place of lack.  So I can momentarily ignore that it is discipline that allowed me to save money to travel Europe for 2.5 months.  I ignore that it is discipline that earned me a graduate education so that I can enjoy a job teaching.  I can act with discipline, and I can continue to do so.  I just have to change my language to change my attitude.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/

http://www.wjsociety.org/

Preach, Dr. Reverend Thurman!

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs.  Ask yourself what makes you come alive.  And then go and do that.  Because what the world needs is people who are alive.  Howard Thurman http://www.bu.edu/today/2011/who-was-howard-thurman/

For me, this quotation requires an attitude of Self-centeredness, a space in my soul where the Self is privileged.  Sometimes, that is very scary for me.  I grew up in a tradition where asking what the world needs is vital to a life of Christian development and spiritual formation.  Being Self-centered translates to being selfish, proud, inconsiderate, lacking a spirit of service. Being Self-centered is sinful.  Especially for women.

The quotation also reminds me to live first from a place of intrinsic motivation rather than from an extrinsic expectation, to continue to make a paradigm shift in my thinking.  (The irony of writing a blog based on other people’s quotations on intrinsic living is NOT lost on me.)  Thurman wrote this from a tradition of civil rights, where sometimes what the world “needs” is the oppression of others, that which is not in accordance with another person’s sense of dignity, worth, and self-respect.

So I am thankful for a world of intrinsically motivated women.  Some anonymous woman who wanted to feel alive, for her own sake.  She was a wife, a mother, and that was all that was expected of her.  And she said to herself, quite quietly, “I think I can do more.  Because I have reason and intellect, I deserve to choose more.”  She said this in a world that did not need thinking women, actually in a world where women were not considered thinking people; she said this in a world that did not need active women, but sheltered women, chaste women.  Maybe she looked out her window (of stucco, of stone, of mud brick, of concrete) and wanted to wander farther than the radius allowed her. Maybe she thought, “I am not satisfied with only this.”  Maybe she saw her brothers working and thought, “I can do that.” And in that moment, she came alive.

She wondered what exactly it was preventing her.  She questioned and she doubted and she got into trouble, but she was alive; her stature towered (allusion to Joseph Campbell), her stride lengthened, her shoulders unfurled.  And maybe she told a few friends, and they thought, “hmmmm, I think I deserve more as well.”  And little by little, more and more women came to think that they deserved to be more than mothers and wives.  They deserved to be citizens and so the right to vote; they deserved to be active and to work outside the home, to be financially independent, to own their own property.  The world backlashed and said, “In times of conflict it has to be left to the man to make the final decisions.”

I do not know who this woman was, but her spirit is behind the attitudes of Etruscan woman of ancient Italy, the Italian Renaissance author Christine de Pizan, the American Revolutionary Mary Wollstonecraft, the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai who founded the Green Belt Movement, and the anonymous or marginally known poets and artists and local political leaders who will refuse to define themselves by what the “world needed” and instead by what made them come alive.  That original, unknown woman, the source of boundless creativity and power, she inspires me, too.

Ardent Desire

Whatever you vividly imagine, ardently desire, sincerely believe, and enthusiastically act upon must inevitably come to pass.  –Paul J. Meyer

I thought that this would be an easy aphorism to get behind.  Wanting seems easy; we are prone to want.  But when I set out to list what I desire, what I want, I got a little stumped.

First, I continued to think that “wanting” came from a place of lack, from that which is NOT experienced.  And I have so much the life that I want.

I have a fulfilling job, one which has allowed me to escape financial irrelevancy and save for traveling, retirement, a frequent dinner with friends.  I get to teach history through works of art, and often I get to rearrange students’ thinking to adopt a new point of view.  I have a wonderful relationship with Philander Rodman, who consistently astounds me with his genuineness, kindness, patience, and acceptance.  He and I are so much alike that he is very much my mirror, and in his love I find freedom to love myself.  And he is sooooo fun to love in return.  I have traveled to unexpected places; I have a tribe of friends and family who love and support me, and lovingly call me to task for what is unaccounted for.  I have a beautiful shelter that I love spending time in and which holds many reminders of my journeys; I have a car that runs after 14 years.  So much of it seems to have come to me through luck and really good timing, things that I have no control over.

So the quotation reminds me that my life is my life because I have chosen it.  Serendipity can only work so far if I do not allow a place for the surprising, for the opportune.  I have become so comfortable with living by the seat of my pants (and it working out for me) that it will be interesting to live with more intention, desire, and acting.

Second, vividly imagining wants and sincerely believing in their possibilities is NOT so easily done.  For instance, I can vividly imagine that my book (oh yeah, I am writing a book) will be read by millions of people, that it will hit a bestseller list, that it will encourage others to share their own stories, that it will soothe some pains of some readers or entice the interest of others.  But then the little voice in my head says, “Fonda, that is hubris, that is naming a power for yourself that you should not want.”  And I hear the voices in my head others (some inanimate) have put there. “You are not the center of attention. It’s all about you, isn’t it, Fonda? ‘Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.’ You have such bad timing.”  I can momentarily intellectualize these voices away; for instance, Proverbs 16:18 and its haught refers not to a vision of more in one’s life but rather self-aggrandizing.  Still, ultimately I feel the desire dissolve into shame.

Assuming I can get past the shame and just put my desire into frank, vivid terms—I want to write a book that will allow me to meet others with the same or different experiences, and that will inspire others to share their own stories, that will earn me an additional source of income—then my belief in the possibility is countered by statistics.  Aren’t there millions of people who have written books and have not had them published? Am I just one in a million participating in the writing trend of a digital world where everyone thinks they should be published?!  My own confidence in my writing skills and material gets in the way, too.  Who wants to read my memories of growing up in an evangelical church if I do not write like Christopher Hitchens?!

There is also the fear of the unknown.  Wanting, as my best friend and I discussed, requires a certain acceptance of risk.  What might have to change to make this desire of mine possible?  What might I have to give up to bring it to fruition?  And what if my wants change in a year, ten years?  That risk can be terrifying and paralyzing.

Finally intellectually accepting that fear for what it is, then there are questions of what to do to bring something about.  If I want to publish a little memoire about growing up Nazarene, where do I start?  Who do I talk to besides people I like and that I trust like me?  I honestly don’t know. My uncle Tim reminded me that rarely do things happen because one person acts, but rather because a community pushes it forward.  A village is going to publish my book, but I have to finish it first.  Ill-informed dreams are still dreams that can come true, I suppose.

But inevitably?  The word syntactically unsettles me.  It seems hyperbolic. Now, I am a hyperbolic person.  But being a woman of paradox, I question other people who use dramatic language, probably because I am so full of it so often.  So when Mr. Meyer links the words “whatever” and “inevitably come to pass,” I get suspicious of just who is making this statement.  I looked him up.  He was a motivational speaker, and one who was paid a LOT of money to speak in hyperbole.  It works in his arena.  But I also believe in the sentiment behind enshallah.  Please, a tangent.  Enshallah means “If Allah wills it.”  In Syria, I worked with a man, a poet, who would always make plans proceeded by enshallah.  Yes, he planned to make the dinner; yes, he planned to be at work the next day…enshallah.  Enshallah does not excuse irresponsibility or lack of accountability, but rather accepts that things, even making it to work the next day, are simply out of our control.  Floods happen, wild dogs run loose, political insurrections detain our immediate intentions, wives die, and children get hospitalized.  Life happens.  Enshallah inherently requires a belief in an interventionist deity, a belief I no longer hold.  Still, I respect the mystery of unforetold occurrences.

But, I digress.  This quotation gives me the encouragement to NOT be paralyzed.  It does not take away my anxieties nor settle the abusive chattering in my head; these are issues I will need to work with ongoingly.  It does not entirely convince me of INEVITABLITY.  However, I like the sentence’s intention which seems to me to be “think it and put it out there free from limitation.” So I have and will (or try to) continue to do so.

Welcome.

Hello Everyone and thank you for joining me here.

Addendum on January 8, 2012

This year, our family decided to make handmade gifts for the annual gift exchange, for which we draw names and try to personalize a gift for the individual drawn.  My grandmother, over 90 years old, drew my name, and commissioned a decorated, glass Christmas tree, I would say vagazzled, filled with 365 quotations, one to be read each day of TwentyTwelve.  They are quotations from various sources–Greco-Roman poets, contemporary motivational speakers, international leaders and provocateurs–but they are meant, I think, to stimulate edifying thought.  In short, that crystalline Christmas tree is a year’s worth of free therapy.  I have often sought my grandmother’s her insight–I can only hope to be as graceful and as young at heart as she is now–and this vibrant tree of sage advice is what has (in part) come to culmination.

I could have read one each day, thought “Hmmm…How true,” and thrown away the small strips of paper each quotation rests upon.  But I am a collector; some would say hoarder, quietly, in a high whisper, and under his/her breath.  So I wanted to preserve in some way the thoughts collected from that Christmas tree.

I could have also written these quotations and my thoughts about them in my journal.  But I am a writer and need to stop pretending that I write only for myself; truth is, being heard is very much part of the writing process for me.  Being heard is very much part of the human experience for all of us.  Sharing my particular insights to this mad, mad world is becoming more and more important to me.  This year I am going to quit hiding behind my journal and write regularly in a public forum.  So, I need you.  So many of these quotations are discussion worthy.  I hope we can collaborate and find meaning for ourselves…together.

I don’t pretend that everyday I will be able to write here, but I hope that once a week, perhaps more, I can share my grandmother’s collection of quotations with you.

Love you,

Fonda Lynne Portales