What Painting Buddha Taught Me About Writing

From the time I was old enough to color, I wanted to paint. I kept saying “When I get older, I’ll paint.”

I guess I’m older now. It’s been poking at me with more persistence than normal. When I sunk into the mental process of deciding what I wanted to paint, I found myself drawn to the East.

I’m not religious, but I am very spiritual. There’s a clear difference to me. I see religion so often as a vehicle that carries people farther from the Divine instead of closer to it. They seem to get so wrapped up in coffee and cake meetings that love, compassion, and appreciation of the diversity of creation elude them. I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work, but if you study world religions that’s so often what happens. Each group thinks the rules they follow are the right ones and everyone else is simply misguided. Some religions are more tolerant of different thinking than others, but arguably any structure by its nature secretly (or not so secretly) feels right.

For me, Truth strings through them all. I have always been keenly aware that there is an amazing Source greater than me and yet somehow connected to me. My goal is to strengthen my alignment with that Source (or God or Creator–all names seem insufficient and okay at the same time) daily and by doing that, to evolve the world in a loving way rather than one filled with hate, discrimination, and fear. Simple, really.

Recently, I watched a documentary called “Inner and Outer Worlds.” It showed how to keep our inner worlds balanced in an outer world that’s constantly whirling about Tasmanian-Devil style. While watching, I found myself (as I have at various times in my life) drawn to the images of Buddha. The stillness and space of the images. During this same time frame, my husband had been looking for a Buddha picture that had been given to us from his dad years ago.

The signs seemed clear. I knew the Buddha would be my first painting and it would be for my husband. For a flash I was reticent about launching my introduction to my new paint class as the “Buddha Girl.” I live in more of a “crosses” kind of town right now. I’d be way better received if I were to paint an angel or Jesus on the cross. I suspected my Zen bend would make the other people suspicious of me. Not one to live according to what people think about me, I let it go as quickly as it came. After all, if I can’t be who I am at 50, I am certainly not connecting my inner and outer worlds well at all.

So I brought my many Buddha shots to my paint class. I flipped through them with my instructor and settled on the one above. I was excited that my new paint teacher, Sandi, said I could paint this in my first class with acrylics. That meant I’d have it in time for our anniversary. I felt the reactions from other painters. Some were intrigued, others suspicious as I’d suspected. Sandi was enthusiastic and highly creative. I knew I’d found a teacher who would let me play and develop my own creative channels.

As I brushed red on the white canvas, I thought about how similar painting is to writing. You start with a blank page. Tabula Rasa. From that, you create something wholly different than white. Ideally, anyway. You pour out part of your soul. You add color and contrast in characters and places you create. Your inner world has found a visual path to the outside.

While the first layer dried, I thought about the role time plays in the creative process. If you try to rush things, it can get goopy.But my real epiphany came while watching Sandi at work. One of the other painters had asked her to help paint an “eye” on a child painting she was making of her grandson. As Sandi dabbed her fine brush around the pupil, she talked about how every painter should paint portraits because it makes a person so observant. I loved the metaphor, eyes being windows to the soul and all.

So goes writing. I especially love watching comedians who write their own material. I’m an avid follower of “Last Comic Standing” for just this reason. The way the current comics are able to create humor from their fine-tuned powers of observing the mundane causes Roseanne to say nearly every week, “I love your ability to find a new slant on the mundane.”

That’s the sweet spot of creating anything. We all have it inside us. If only we quietly observe, we have all the material we need to create a masterpiece.

Exposing the Shadow

Last Thursday I was scheduled for jury duty. I called after 5:00 and found out I didn’t have to go, free for another year from the summons’ police. This gave me all day Friday to work on my WIP novel. Sweet.

I woke up Thursday to my daily morning chef ritual, peanut butter pancakes and fresh squeezed orange juice for my boys. After I messed up the kitchen, then cleaned it again, I rounded up the three teen boys that I cart to school each morning and off we went. As we were driving, I started planning my writing time.

I should really do my exercise first. It’s important and it’ll get the juices flowing.

When I got back, I went out to our combo shop/music/exercise room and hopped on the elliptical for 45 minuntes. As I wrapped up my time there (and respective special on Jane Goodall I was watching) I planned my writing time.

It’s raining and I love sitting in the hot tub in the rain. Talk about creative flow. This will do it. A logical next step.

While sitting in the hot tub under the rain, I composed a Facebook status that was entirely too long. Here it is in case you missed it…

I’m not a huge fan of “read more” posts–subscribe more to the Twitter style of posting. But I feel it coming on so maybe just this once. Can I just tell you that one of my most absolute pleasures on this earth, one that makes my cheeks hurt because I smile so much when I’m doing it, is to sit out in the hot tub in the rain. Right now, the clouds are shapeshifting, white and gray faces and animals dancing together across the sky. The windchimes tingle one moment then ring out in a full orchestra in the next, moving with the wind. Towering pines sway amongst oaks as birds dive in and out of branches, chirping back-up to the chimes. The rain changes in intensity with the shifting of the clouds and when the drops get fast and fat, they look like the Bellagio fountains on the surface of the hot tub water. No, better. Because this is Nature and it is just pretty perfect as far as I see it. #Bliss

By the time I finished my hot tub time–and novella of a post–it was time to make lunch. And shower. And blow dry my hair…and my toes.Oh, and I needed to get the laundry started, unload the dishwasher, and check my email.

I looked at the clock: 2:00. In 30 minutes, it was time to go get the boys. Kind of hard to start now. Interrupt the flow and all.

I know. I’ll wait until they get settled, eat, and then I’ll knock out ten pages.

So back to school. On the way back to school, I remember my de-clutter program. I am organizing one thing per day in the house (a drawer, a cupboard, a closet) because items in the drawers have become unrecognizable.

I’ll do my pages AFTER I de-clutter the spice drawer. All that de-cluttering will be good Feng Shui and show up in my writing.

I pick up the boys, get home, fix food, de-clutter the drawer and then take my computer up to my desk for some peace and quiet. My husband’s on the other side of the Japanese screen that divides our desks asking me something. My son’s downstairs making noise about how we don’t have any food and need to go to Walmart.

How am I supposed to write with all this noise going on?

Off to Walmart we go to buy lots of things we don’t really need. And to Goodwill to drop off some of those de-clutter bags. And to Sonic because it’s Happy Hour and strawberry shakes are on sale.

Back home at 8:00 pm, I sit down at my laptop. I rework my first sentence three times. Add a word, take it out, add it, take it out, read both versions to my husband.

I’m exhausted. And, I reason, to start this flow now would really be activating.

Really, I should have some TV time with my hubby. He did, after all, help me on my sentence.

And that, my friends, is the dark side of writing for me. The only caveat is that the next day I wrote ten pages because I was so disgusted with myself. (Good pages, too.)

The Writer’s Ego

Talk true to me. If you knew Baby Goose was just waiting for your stuff, wouldn’t you be piping it out like a rapid-fire machine gun?

It’s hard to be a writer and not be infected by the Writer’s Ego. After all, writing is a form of communication and if nobody’s reading, how are you communicating? Most writers I know write to be read, not just to pile up long strings of paragraphs in their bottom desk drawers to be discovered when they kick it.

When I think about the reasons I kept writing after college when I no longer had to, I come to this conclusion. All along the way people (teachers, professors, peers) stroked my ego by telling me I’m a good writer. I didn’t know that, but I recognized the pattern of that feedback.  I had friends along the way who I thought wrote well, but when the professor would say, “This is just crap,” they never wanted to write again. They were embarrassed. Ego and the dark side of Humility, crawling into the fetal position, and pulling the blankie over their collective head.

And yet so many writers claim to not write for anyone but themselves. Unfortunately, it’s not themselves that works as agent, editor, publishing house, reader, library, bookstore, readers. In the end, we write to be read and we want others to love it…all others–the gatekeepers, the readers, the librarians, the award committees. There’s always somebody to please.

Yet the message you hear over and over again is, “This business is so subjective.” What one person loves, the next reader can outline a list of bullet points about what’s wrong with it. You just can’t please them all, and you want to posture as if you don’t care, but there’s a place inside that wants to please the reader. As I was growing up. I never had anybody tell me anything except, “You’re a great writer.” I’m pretty sure if I had, I would have stopped. I may even resist posting Facebook statuses.

When Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson came to speak with American writers, he told them to find their own voice, that part that is uniquely them. We hear that over and over today from agents and editors at conferences who speak to both new and veteran writers about the elusive “how to get published” conundrum. But to be uniquely you requires not only a knowledge about who you are and how that differs from the rest of the Earth people, but also how that connects with the rest of the world. What I see much more regularly is people getting caught up in meeting the criteria of publishing, which often has little to do with being uniquely who they are.

What’s the Ego’s block then? When too much chatter lords over the creative process, it deadens it. It’s harder to access. When too many rules dictate the flow, the writing feels stale. On the other hand, at least for me, when I sit down to pour out on the fertile landscape of my journals, I see ideas blossom in a way that’s very hard to copy when I work on manuscripts. My current goal is to dismiss my Ego at the bottom ot the stairs, before I go to my office, and write like nobody’s watching.

Sorry, Baby Goose. Right now, it’s not about you.

The Torch Carriers

Writing blog? What writing blog?

I marvel at writers who are disciplined 12 months out of the year. They have routines where they spend two hours each day most days (or even 7 hours each day) on their works in progress or other creative projects. They make time for journal entries, stream of consciousness writing, snail mail letters, blogs. You, my friends, are the Torch Carriers.

I’ve touched this discipline at times. And if nobody gets sick, or runs out of toilet paper, or has one of those out-of-the ordinary demands that are ordinary in my world, I can keep it going for maybe a few weeks.

Then it’s like anything. My writing time–which I’ve so nicely slotted out on my Google calendar–has been mulled over by life and the priorities I’ve chosen instead.

And this is a choice. It’s not like a bulldozer from my subconscious emerges and I have no control over it. It’s that I’ve looked at what’s most important to me right now in the present. I have two teen boys, one here only until June when he goes back to Germany, and one here for the next three years. Those moments are measured out and of highest priority as I know from having a 26 year-old that these moments fly by so quickly. My husband and I love date nights and daily walks with our 11-year-old lab. Those moments are measured. I exercise every day and coach others into a healthy lifestyle. I meditate each day, and spend time learning something new (right now in the form of weekly classes) and this is what keeps me balanced and inspired. I’m not willing to give any of that up.

When the day is over, I ask myself where I might have fit my writing in and I may or may not see a place. I ask myself where I might find a place the next day and I balance my priorities accordingly.

Whether or not it fits, there is this driving force in me that yearns to create, to explore the ideas that flow through me like Niagra Falls and never leave my lips or my keyboard, to tap into that utterly divine collective unconscious that so often arrives at similar tracks despite the allusion of individual creators.

And I know I will. Meanwhile, I am so grateful for the writers out there who write daily and keep the torch burning. Thank you, Torch Carriers.

Creativity Blossoms

I’m mentally back on the creative process and you know what that means.

The creative process is not a thing reserved for a select few who convert their first names to initials and write about wizards. It’s a thing that we all have access to and use in many different ways.

How it blooms depends on each of our unique seeds. Where we plant it, how we water it, how we sun it, how we fertilize it also matter. We can amp it up or turn it down, but it’s there for all of us to play with.

This past weekend I was doing one of those things I love most–talking with people and getting to know some friends of friends. It had been a full weekend in Austin with wedding festivities and touristy things. This was Day 3, Sunday brunch out on a patio overlooking the beautiful Austin hill country with a lake in the distance. We got on the subject of creativity which came after that question you know I always get. Wait for it.

“What books have you written that we can read?” There it is, followed by “I hate writing.”

But then the man talked about a class he and his wife had taken. He was surprised he liked it, but found it a great creative outlet where he didn’t usually get a chance to dabble in his more technical job. The class was called “Painting and Merlot” or something like that and the concept was each person got a canvas, a prompt, and a glass of wine. The man said as they all began to paint their “trees” each very unique painting became more and more beautiful as they drank.

First of all, I want to take this class. Next, I wondered, “What is it about the alcohol (substitute chocolate, food, etc.) that helps the creator become more creative?”

There is obviously a trend here if we look at all our creative types lost to addictions of various types. I remember hearing a guy say the best thing you can do for your art is to drink. I remember another one saying that was a horrible thing to say. I guess my curiosity lies more in the question of the “why.” Why does it take shifting the chemicals in our brain in some way to let the creative process open up?

I think it’s because of the Gremlin. That inner voice that mocks whatever it is that is being created. The one that shouts out, “Really? You just published that blog with all those freakin’ ass mistakes? You used “are” instead of “our?” Pretty ballsy, aren’t you?” or “That’s a tree?”

But here’s the thing. We don’t create to be perfect and put out perfect product. We create because it nurtures our soul. We create because it’s part of our natural process that yearns to be activated. We create because there is something that is so uniquely us that it is meant to be shared with the world.

It’s really just part of our job here to go forth and create.Through this process, we blossom. On that note, if anybody finds that “Paint and Merlot” class, sign me up! I’m in the mood to paint a tree.