Tag Archives: Writing

Dreamsicles

02 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Prayer, Soul Care, Writing

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“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.   — Langston Hughes

I wake to a morning sky parfait, though I am unaware of it.

Instead, wrapped in my own private world, I’m focused on my unloaded dreams — where is that new dream journal?  Before I can find the missing journal, I look out the back door to instead find a red-orange horizon resting under dark blue canvas resting under a striped double ribbon of true orange against true blue.  The ribbon fades and swirls until it’s topped with Dreamsicle Orange.  I devour this rare and lovely morning treat.  Soon, the rising sun will melt its beauty.

Dreams melt away just as quickly.  If I don’t record my dreams on paper in those first waking-up minutes, they slip back to wherever dreams live, buried deep under the more comfining thoughts of everyday life.  So most days, even before I get out of bed, I grab my journal to record my freshly minted dreams.  Weighting the strange disjointed images with words keeps dreams alive, so that I can ponder the images and messages under daylight.

What do our dreams tell us?  Why am I investing part of Lenten morning devotion towards dream work?  Oh, I have my reasons — three good ones, in fact.

The first is that my spiritual director invited me to take a look at my dreams for answers I’ve been seeking.

Then there’s this quote I ran across in a book I’m reading   — Clyde H. Reid’s Dreams — Discovering Your Inner Teacher — that’s part of my spiritual direction coursework:

“Our dreams can show us who we are.  In fact, they can sometimes show us ourselves unmercifully.  If we really want to know ourselves in the deepest ways, we need to record and study our dreams carefully.”

Reading Reid’s words reminded me of a final reason, an invitation I heard from Pulitzer prize-winning author, Marilynne Robinson, a couple of years back, when she was here in Oklahoma to speak at one of our local universities.  “Descend into self to write– discover your primary self — the beautiful, the true; it’s preparation for writing words worth saying.”

Though Reid’s book assures that dreams are not terribly hard to interpret — as long as we remember and record them in a sufficient level of detail — the hard part is remembering them.  Every night I go to sleep asking God to help me remember.   About half of the time I do .  And oh, as I spill out dreams on paper, have I noticed some familiar faces  —  Ms. Perfect and Ms. Workaholic and Ms. Low Self-esteem — while comically wrestling with concerns that consume my waking hours.

My dreams are like an old Hollywood movie that jerks along with missing frames and little plot.   Sitting in a darkened theater, I watch my  dreams play out.  I do not direct the scenes in which I am both actor and audience.  Instead, my dream spins off the reel unfiltered, a poor sort of improvisational comedy.  One scene leads to another — personal worlds collide — past, present and future merge and swirl  as the dead and alive keep each other company.

Dreams are a brave new world of unedited truth.  But under the dreams and under the truth, I believe, is a God that lies at the horizon between humus earth and the heavens, a God whose red hot love waits to burn up all the lies, known and unknown, that have become part of who I believe I am — but am not.  Somewhere in my dreams, waits a God with the keys of true blue to set me free… … so that I can soar with childish abandon and joy that comes from keeping company with Dreamsicles.

Humble Quiche

26 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by in Good Reads, In the Kitchen, Life at Home, Soul Care

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“Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.”  Les Brown — quote from The Artist’s Way

My friends in the workforce are beginning to daydream about their post-retirement lives.  One hopes to volunteer as an overseas English teacher while another plans to serve the elderly in some capacity.

Unlike my friends, I held no lofty goals when I retired eight years ago.  Instead I left a twenty-three year accounting career behind with two humble goals in mind — to read more for the pure pleasure of reading and to learn how to make pie crust.

Coming to know myself as I have during the last three years, it’s no surprise that the goal that required work was the one I accomplished while the one that required play is still blowing in the wind.  I am, after all, a recovering workaholic with perfectionist tendencies, which is to say, I tend to engage in never-ending work when I’m at my worst.  Meanwhile, my stack of unread books continues to grow and gather dust.

I uncovered the seeds of my problem during an Ignatius retreat last year.  But it was three years ago that I came to name perfectionism as the root to my problem.  I was reading a self-help book when I ran across these words in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:

“To the perfectionist, there is always room for improvement.  The perfectionist calls this humility.  In reality, it is egotism.   It is pride that makes us want to write a perfect script, paint a perfect painting, perform a perfect audition monologue.

Perfectionism is not a quest for the best.  It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough — that we should try again…..

….We deny that in order to do something well we must first be willing to do it badly.  Instead, we opt for setting our limits at the point where we feel assured of success.  Living within these bounds, we may feel stifled, smothered, despairing, bored.  But, yes, we do feel safe.  And safety is a very expensive illusion.  ….Once we are willing to accept that anything worth doing might even be worth doing badly our options widen.  “If I didn’t have to do it perfectly, I would try….””

How would you complete the rest of that sentence?  My three-year old list included modern dance, learning a foreign language, writing short stories and taking a watercolor class.   But writing was my biggest pie-in-the-sky desire.  In the case of writing, it was better to live with a dream than with the possibility of failure — in other words, it was better to be safe than sorry.

As silly as it now sounds, I once held similar fears about making pie crust.  Now I just get in there and do my best.  And this morning, the pie crust I rolled out was far from perfect.  Yet.  Once it was stuffed with a nice quiche filling, it ended up fulfilling its purpose perfectly with no one noticing its imperfections.

Could this truth apply to the human experience as well?  Could it be… that as imperfect as this human is, that I can fulfill my purpose as long as I remember to remain empty —  that is to remain humble —  so that I can be filled with something good — like God?

To be humble is easier said than done.  To be humble is to realize I can never be perfect.  To be humble is to realize that I am not my work and that my work is not me.  To be a humble is to realize that I must learn to let go — for the entire human experience is an exercise in letting go, as we let go of our stuff and our loved ones until all that we have left at end of our days is to let go of our own lives.

To be human may not be as easy as pie — though I for one, have never found making pie or pie crust easy — but its worth the effort, the time and the risk of failure with a trash can full of rejected pie crust.  To be human means “it’s no better to be safe than sorry.”  Life is full of a-ha moments… and perhaps more than a few servings of humble pie.

Simple Quiche

1 9 inch pie crust, baked to light brown

3 large eggs, slightly beaten
1 1/4 cups light sour cream
Dash of salt, white pepper, garlic powder and Tabasco sauce
1 1/2 cups grated Swiss cheese
1 cup grated Cheddar cheese
2 cups of pre-cooked chopped meat and vegetables  e.g.s (broccoli and ham) (spinach and bacon) (sausage and mushroom)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

In a large bowl, combine eggs, sour cream and seasoning with a wire whip.  Stir in remaining ingredients and pour into pastry shell.  Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until set and lightly browned on top.  Cool on wire rack for ten minutes before slicing.

Serve with a cup of soup or your favorite green or fruit salad.

Fighting for Reality

22 Monday Feb 2010

Posted by in Life at Home, Soul Care, Writing

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“So needless to say I’m odds and ends
But that’s me, stumbling away
Slowly learning that life is O.K.
Say after me
It’s no better to be safe than sorry.” A-ha — “Take On Me”

I keep up with a few blogs in addition to my own.

Each one on my short list is a unique expression of its keeper, but our shared passion is a love of the written word.  At one time or another, each of the blogs I follow have inspired my own words, as I believe mine, at times, has inspired theirs.

My friend Linda’s latest post at The Task At Hand inspired me today to select a Lenten anthem to listen to daily for the sheer joy it will bring me.  I chose an eighties pop song released by the Norwegian band A-ha, a song that holds special meaning in my life.

My favorite line in the song  — “Say after me… It’s no better to be safe than sorry” —  are words I must take to heart.  And in fact, a few times in my life, I’ve given up safe to avoid being sorry.  One time occurred just as this song was flying high on the music charts in late 1985, when I was slowly teetering off the edge of my own safe world to the riskier world of what has become the loving home of my second marriage.

I hear the song’s opening beats and I feel better instantly.  It wipes away clouds and shines me with hope.  And my hope during Lent is that by keeping daily company with this song, I will be empowered to become who I wish to be and what I wish my writing to become.   Like an apple a day that keeps the doctor away, I pray that my Lenten Anthem will become good spiritual medicine in supplanting negative voices of doubt with positive messages of ‘can-do”.

The original music video, featured above, won six awards at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards.  The story it tells holds a powerful Lenten message, as it depicts a cartoon fighting to become real.  And becoming real, becoming our true selves before God, is what Lent is all about.   We give up something say —  or we take on some practice.  But all the giving up and taking on is done in order to know who we are and who we are not  — and importantly, to know whose we are and are not  — and to discover our current weight on the scale of  Reality.  As one of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, writes,

“During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.”

Lent invites us to put down all of our props and take off  — or in some cases, pry off —  all of our masks so that we once again become  true to our own reality, so that we can breathe free again, so that without constraints, nothing gets in the way between us and a God called Reality, to borrow that God-word used so often by Evelyn Underhill.

Rather than give up something this Lenten season I choose to Take On Me.