Big Black Wet

This morning glowered with heavy clouds that looked more beast than atmosphere.  It had rained all night, and I kept the window cracked to hear the dripping and pattering wet out there, a pretty sound that belied the rumbling, shifting masses overhead. Sometimes clouds like those seem to be more like movie set props that need to be shoved around and into position by harried stage hands than like they do actual clouds.  All that the whole sky needed was a director with a megaphone, "Let's pull that monster over Monterey and darken everything.  Heavy on the rain now.  Action!"  

In Pacific Grove, I was right underneath them and didn't really get the full measure of their heft until I drove north around the bay to its far eastern edge near Sand City.  Once I got out of the car and looked south, the dramatic layered aspect of the clouds arrayed all along the southern horizon was impossible to ignore.

The cumulus crowded around the hills and stood up on their hind legs pawing at the air, spoiling for a fight.  Some had white edges and a puffy quality for a few moments that was positively pretty.  Not for long though.  Constantly changing and tumbling, the cloud density increased and then lowered, impenetrably opaque, and soon rain was falling in the distance.

When clouds are heavy and stern, commanding attention from stage center as they were today, they act like an iron lid that has clanged down and darkened the water.  The color palette is a study in steel gray, silver, and iron black.  Rain hangs down like curtains, billowing and slanting across the hills and tree tops.

With that much dark water booming at the shore, it's simple to imagine a tsunami looming on the horizon and having to run for your life.  Or to imagine large sea monsters rising up and making awful noises while they lick their chops.  Winter cold and uncompromising forces of water and wind were taking no prisoners, from the look of it all.

There was no broad daylight as I looked around even then, at high noon.  Big surly rounds of churning moisture could have just sat down on the ground and squashed everything.

More rain to come in this sodden winter, and certainly a few days of storm surf and billowing clouds too beautiful to ignore.

Keeping It Simple

Because the year is on the rise and possibility exists, I am making plans.  Even as I say that I realize that plans are made in sand.  My goal, however, is set in stone:  

Find the truth in the matter and see if love is there or not.  

That's my resolution, and I believe it applies in pretty much every situation I'll find myself in.  It's open ended in a nicely subjective way.  It implies that if love is not somewhere in the matter at hand, then something else is.  By my way of thinking, if love is not present, fear is; sometimes both are present at the same time.  One way or another, truth and love are worth searching for.  

Remember that famous quote of Goethe's:  Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.  

Salute Per Tutti

Writing for New Year's Eve late at night after the day and year has left for good, I see images in my mind's eye like a kaleidoscope of shifting colors and sounds, and all involve family and food preparation.

This was Cioppino Day, the big family reunion we have every year.  Four sisters and their loved ones converge on one point from four directions, near and far.  We hate to miss it; we try at all costs to be together "for cioppino."  There is an interesting thing about long-term traditions:  The framework is so strong and well estabilished that only small changes are made, but they are noted by everyone, even if very quietly.

This day is the biggest marker of change, tradition, progress or decline that our family has.  There is some reminiscing, lots of joking, and mental notes about what we look like and act like in comparison to our predecessors, even if we don't admit it out loud.  A grandmother and grandfather, now long gone, were the first generation to establish new lives in America, and we do not forget them; they live large in our memories.  We do what we do on Cioppino Day because they did it first.

One year, one person may bring a tray full of antipasti and the next not at all.  One year, someone will bring a very good wine and the next not even think of it.  The cioppino sauce is recalled and mentally compared to this year's result and judgement passed.  "The sauce was better than last year," or "There's more spice than last year," or "The cookies came out dry this year." The huge pot and deep red sauce filled with crab and prawns is the symbol, the icon of the meal and the gathering.

The numbers of chairs at tables varies according to who can travel and who cannot.  We toast with upraised glasses all who are present and those who will never be with us again.  It is the final flourish on the year, good or bad as it might have been.

We tie on our bibs, fill our bowls with steaming sauce-covered seafood, pasta, bread and another plate of salad.  Grated romano cheese is sprinkled liberally.  Sleeves are rolled up and nutcrackers begin to crush the crab and open up pockets of tender sweet meat.  Prawns are hot and tender, savory with sugu the Sicilian-style hearty sauce that bears up well with rich red wine.  Simple, memorable, traditional now because of our family and Sicilian-American community's interest in keeping it so.

So for Lou and Sarah Bottaro and all others, we say "salute per tutti," (cheers for everyone).  Happy New Year.

What Is It About Dying

I attended a funeral this morning for a woman who died on Christmas day.  She was 80 and had lived a very full life.  There were tears and a quiet solemnity that was facilitated warmly by a uniquely gifted priest. He found a graceful balance between warm loving kindness, respect for the grief and loss among close relatives and friends.  The ritual of the Mass and the design of the service had meaning and power for we who attended, providing us with guidance and then room for our own thoughts and memories.

If there is ever a time for considering The Return, as defined in Joseph Campbell's mono myth called The Hero's Journey, a funeral is it.  Life is a journey, we agree.  Our myths and legends represent that journey in heroic proportions, and we are inspired and informed by them.  But journeys end, and we must take time to learn something from them, or we are lost and become fearful and depressed.

There before our eyes was Death and its unknowable dimensions, the unavoidable disappearance of self that ends Life.  The priest pointed out that symbolically death was a return to our origin, to heaven, where we are eternal and unblemished by difficulties.  It soothed our hearts and minds to be turned in a hopeful direction, but we still do not trust death to be a very simple or easy thing.  How can we when preservation of life is what we strive for all our lives? Suddenly, you just aren't a someone anymore.  You stop being.  

I thought about Gabriel, my grand nephew, so new to the world.  He came from somewhere else, an unknown dimension.  Did he just assemble himself from bits of substance and become a living being?  I do not understand it any more than I understand where Mary went when she died.  Did her energy and life just dissipate?

Becoming alive is far preferable to becoming dead.  In day-to-day life, I would rather hear, "Welcome! Come on in and join us!" than "Time to leave.  We'll miss you.  Good-bye."  We welcome new life to us and become anxious when life leaves.  Or rather, that which we can see we understand and become familiar with.  That which is undetectable is fearsome and suspicious.  For those with full-fledged faith in the hereafter, in a place called Heaven, the concept of dying may be less uncertain, even a welcome thing.

I don't know how I feel about death.  I don't feel ready to die, I miss people who have died (I can't talk to them and know them anymore), and I know I can't sit down afterward with living people and say, "You know, when I died, it was pretty amazing."

This journey called living is a very peculiar thing, being bookended as it is by such vast unknown spaces.  I think the only option is to love and live well.  I hope the rest will take care of itself, all in due time.

Writing Resolution

I read about different writers who are considered a success, significant in some way, creative and ingenious.  I was told I might be able to write and make some sense now and again, but the trouble was a lack of belief and resolve to jump into the fray and begin.  I have a bookshelf next to my bed piled up with books that I see when I open my eyes every morning first thing.  There are a lot of books.  The stack is high.

I think to myself, "A writer sat at a table for a lot of hours, a very large number of hours, to make that book and that book and that one.  What are you going to do?"

I got the brilliant idea to start a blog nearly two years ago and kind of liked the idea.  Then, I was A Blogger.  I only impressed myself, believe me.  If you look, you'll see I didn't write every day in 2009.  I kind of toyed with the idea.  I noticed that writers were saying that they write every day. I felt dismayed because I wasn't doing that, but I liked the idea of calling myself a writer.  But, when I said it, I knew I was lying.  I felt intense admiration for writers who had successfully published good books, but it was obvious that what they were doing and what I was doing were two very different things.  They practiced writing.  It was their discipline, just like any other physical or mental discipline.

A year ago, come New Year's Eve two days from now, I finally decided it was high time to walk my talk and get down to business.  Time to take on the practice of writing.  So I made a resolution.  The promise was:  Write every day of the year, no excuses.

So I did.

Oh, my poor husband.  He supported and encouraged my journey, but I don't think he knew he was helping create a monster.

The more I wrote, the more I realized I had no idea what was required to know.  Big gaping holes in my knowledge of writing - the craft - yawned before me.  Terms I'd never heard of were bandied about by writers, left and right.  I think I fell in and nearly drowned with embarrassment. What was a trope, a precis, a koan?  Would it be possible to write anonymously?  With a bag figuratively placed over my head to maintain my invisibility? I barely grasped point of view or plot structure. What the heck is passive and active voice?  Writers had agents, editors, publishers, and web pages.  They went on book tours, spoke to groups, and they wrote.  A lot.

In late winter or early spring, I noticed that Belle Yang mentioned Red Room on Facebook, so I checked it out and asked to join.  Bless their hearts, they let me, and I felt both like a poseur and a very thrilled neophyte.  On Red Room, writers generously discussed their ideas, writing practice and successes; they shared wisdom and misgivings.  One author, Jessica Barksdale Inclan, posted the name of a writing workshop in Northern California's Lost Coast area. It was a big step, and I hesitated to go, but I finally signed on and spent the best week of the summer in the company of other writers.  It was another huge  step for me.

Frustration accompanied my excitement and amazement.  I work full time in nursing and find myself being jealous of my time, unwilling to squander it on other hobbies and work when I could be writing.  Of course, if I write all the time, I have nothing to write about, so I have to not write, too.  I have to live in order to write.  But, I find I am writing in order to feel enlivened.

I took a short-story writing class this past Fall and learned some more.  Gradually, I'm weeding through my ideas, just like a gardener thrashing through a weed patch, preparing it for spring planting.

Something will come of all this writing, something more than daily postings on my blog.  Possibility is the one thing I have come to believe in.  That and balance.

My husband has taught me a lot about surrender, giving up the resistance to change, understanding that I am not in charge here.  I have just set the ball rolling with writing, but I am very certain that I do not really call the shots; I am just holding the stick while something else guides it to hit the cue ball, (to extend a metaphor).

My resolution of writing daily, making it a habit, is one of the few promises I have ever kept through the course of a year.  In my whole meandering life, this blog is the result of a successful New Year resolution.  It is humbling and exciting and mysterious, but that's pretty much what creativity always is.  Just like a garden, I am sowing seeds.  I just don't know yet what the harvest will be.

Thank you very much for reading.