On Getting Rid Of Writer’s Block

November 20, 2013 By

DSCF0860I’ve been going through a few weeks of being unable to write. I spent the first week after my trip recovering from a nasty cold. The second week  I finished up laundry and caught up on missed appointments.  I don’t know what took up the third week but it wasn’t writing and that is what I wanted to get back into. During the fifth week, disgusted and scared that I might be suffering from a blockage, I decided to simply sit down at my computer and see what might come forth.  I had no problem writing blog posts. But working on my book was another story.

It probably had a lot to do with the fact that I had finished Part II of my book while I was sick in England. I couldn’t go out much and needed something to keep my mind occupied rather than allow myself to turn bitchy and unpleasant to be around.  But back at home and coaxing those first words out for Part III seemed well nigh impossible. I needed to change my style from a time line narrative to something more free and open, where I  allow myself to become the person I am now …  not the person I was back during the days before I took control of my life and began the process of healing from the trauma I’d been through.

But it was hard for me to change costumes.  Since I started this project, I’d drag out the old screwed-up me every day, dressed in her victimhood and write in her voice. I’ve been doing that for almost a year now and had gotten pretty good at.  Through the writing process the pain of that time has now been dealt with and I no longer feel the hurt, the dread or the fear I made myself return to in order to begin my travels back in time. Who says writing isn’t healing?

In my first attempts to move forward in time, my natural instinct was to return to that old time driven story which I wanted to be done with. I wanted Part III to be more open, philosophical, and forgiving of those who had done me wrong. Whenever I began to write about my process of healing I was drawn into the conflict of who to be … Joan, past or present.  The result?  Nothing! So I gave myself some time to relax and clean out a few closets, which seemed to be a natural remedy for the undertaking of making the shift I wanted. I read through journals of my healing time and otherwise occupied my time with seeing friends and having some fun.

Knowing that I was going to see my writing coach, Kevin, this week, I sat down on the weekend in front of the screen to see what would happen.  I typed a few beginning words.  I didn’t like them. I deleted them, took a deep breath, and started again.  It took a while but before too long I was on my way to writing the transition chapter into Part III.  Monday night having finished that chapter, I started another.  Same thing.  I couldn’t stand the opening words I chose, deleted them and tried again. Words started to pour out in bucket loads.   The next morning I sat down again to continue work on that chapter and wrote another five hundred words before my appointment with Kevin. I didn’t want to stop. All I want to do now is keep going. I have no difficulty getting back to where I was after taking breaks and I seem to have entered the third phase of my book without further difficulty.

As in the past when I’ve had difficulty writing, I’ve taken some time off and allowed the project to simmer on a back burner.  Sure, I pissed and moaned about my lack of words, but eventually when I stopped fighting it, I was able to relax and try again.  It has always worked.

How do you end periods of being unable to write?  I’d love to hear about your ways of getting back to work.

Filed Under: Memoir, Navigating Through Life, The Journey, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,

A Sure-To-Cure Remedy

November 12, 2013 By
Herbs for Medicine

Herbs for Medicine

Here we are in the middle of November. Thanksgiving is just a few short weeks away and the big December gift day will follow on it’s heels.  Not being one who enjoys shopping for things that I imagine other people will like and then find them  never used once given, I’ve turned to other ways of giving.  I’m one of those health nuts who believe that food is medicine and that what is on most dinner plates and in many medicine cabinets these days is the cause of our dis-ease. This is the time of year I head to the kitchen to prepare a few gifts that a number of family members especially ask for and that actually work.

One of my favorite thing to make is what I call Sure-To-Cure Elderberry Elixir, originally known as Kiva’s Ultimate Elder Mother Elixir. I found the recipe on-line a number of years ago when I was studying and learning to use medicinal herbs. This one is a cure-all for colds and flu and I regretted not having some with me on my trip to London.  When I have plenty on hand I find myself taking a swig every day or so even when I’m feeling good, just to keep the bugs away. And it’s yummy on vanilla icecream as well.

I’m getting ready to order a few of the ingredients I’m out of  for this year’s gift giving.  I order most of my dried herbs from Mountain Rose Herbs, out in Oregon.  They have good prices and just about any herb you can imagine. They also carry premixed teas, and bottles for your herbal concoctions.

This tasty remedy is simple to make and oh, so appreciated when received as a gift.  Here is the recipe if you’d like to make some for yourself:

1 cup dried Elderberries
1/2 cup dried Elderflowers
1/4 cup fresh Rosehips or 2 Tbsp. dried
3 Tbsp. fresh ginger chopped or grated
1 Tbsp. Fresh orange zest or dried chunks
pinch of Osha (optional, dried or fresh)
A small handful of wild licorice
Raw honey
Brandy, dark rum or good whiskey

Mix all of the herbs together and place in a one quart jar.  Cover herbs with honey until all are fully coated.  Then fill the jar with the booze.  Let it sit for four to six weeks. I turn it occasionally to keep it mixed well.  Strain through several layers of cheesecloth and bottle it up.

For best results, 1/2 to 1 dropperful every couple of hours until cold/flu symptoms disappear.

Please note that the photo in the header of this blog and my website is of a small elderberry shrub that grew in my garden at the last place we lived before moving here.  I have started growing one here but it hasn’t yet produced berries.

The weatherman predicted snow showers for today.  So far only gray skies and a biting wind out of the north.  Brrrr!

Filed Under: Healing, Health and Wellnes, Healthy Living, Herbal Remedies, Recipes, The Garden Tagged With:

On Burning My Journals

November 7, 2013 By

IMG_0605Have you ever considered burning your journals?

I’m over at the Writer House blog with a new post. Check it out at http://www.writerhouse.org/blogs/mainblog/2013/11/05/on-burning-my-journals/

Filed Under: Journaling, Memoir, Mental Health, Navigating Through Life, The Journey, Writing

Around The World In Fifteen Days With Only One Stop

November 5, 2013 By

IMG_0787I’ve been home for just over two weeks since we returned from London.  The first week was great.  The second week I had a nasty cold. I’m over it and the jet lag, though last Saturday’s time change is setting me back a bit. I’m very happy to be home. It’s no fun being sick when you’re away from your own space and without the usual comforts I keep stashed away for just such an occasion. Like my  “Sure-to-Cure” Elderberry syrup and sweat inducing chicken soup, filled with big chunks of carrots, parsnips, shredded chicken, and brown rice. I frequently clicked the heels of my ruby red slippers together while sniffling away, and repeated “There is no place like home.”  But I didn’t wake up like Dorothy did, to find myself in my own bed with Auntie Em and Toto welcoming me home.

But really, it wasn’t all that bad. The Organic Planet grocery shop right around the corner from the flat we rented was a huge help. They had dynamic smoothies and carrot/apple/ginger juice which I enjoyed several times a day at the peek of feeling aweful.  And I wasn’t alone.  Bill got it too. But it wasn’t like the time we both got the flu with severe body aches and fevers while visiting New York City.  We were staying in a not so great hotel in Chinatown, that didn’t have room service. It was in the middle of winter with snow on the ground and freezing cold winds whipping through the canyons between skyscrapers.

We arrived in England to temps in the 70’s with clear skies and sun, though it turned into typical London weather a few days later with on and off rain and a bit of a chill.  Our second day out, we walked four miles through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, enjoying the glorious day, the swans adrift on the pond, and lots of dogs running free, playing frisbee or ball with their people.  We ate a lovely lunch right in Hyde Park and in the evening went to St. Martin in the Fields to hear the music of Beethoven and a host of other composers. How sweet it was. The following night we met a friend and went to see the play, “The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time.”  It was a “WOW” show. Bill has written up a brief review of it and the other shows we saw, on his blog if you’re interested.

The first week ended perfectly with an overnight to Canterbury where we caught up with friends we haven’t seen in years, their gorgeous daughter, and amazing grandchildren. Back in the city we returned from dinner and a movie to find a terrorist arrest happening just around the block from our flat. There were dozens of police, guns, roads roped off, and gawkers standing about.

Then the “Cold” hit the fan. During “Much Ado About Nothing,” with Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones, my throat was sore and my nose started running a marathon. I had no tissues with me. Despite the big names, we were both unimpressed with the show. At intermission we hightailed it out of there and went home to bed. I pushed myself to go out a few nights later for dinner and another show, (Ibsen’s, “Ghosts,”) with friends. The meal, the show, and seeing our friends were great, but I was feeling worse and by then Bill was sick as well.

We spent the next few days, like two caged birds, lying about and shlepping out to the Organic Planet for juice, lozenges, and vitamin C, while mountains of yucky tissues were building around us.  Happily I read a lot and finished up Part II of my memoir.

Bored and pretending he felt better, Bill took in two more plays while I languished at home. Stubborn as mules, we took to walking again, saw a few movies and made a visit to the fabulous, Chelsea Physic Gardens, where I was in seventh heaven.  It is a small (3 1/2 acre) garden with plants that are used for food, medicine, and cosmetics.  Before we went, I envisioned shelves of the gift shop filled with plant tinctures and bottles of elderberry syrup to help me get through our upcoming return journey across the Atlantic.  No such luck, but I did enjoy a delicious salad made from plants grown right there.  Then there was the arduous seven and three-quarter hour flight back to Washington which made things even worse. I was weak, impatient to get home and very grouchy.

IMG_0885Would I do it again? You betcha!

Getting out of town and our own country to see what is happening in the rest of world is one of the most valuable things you can do for yourself and your kids. It is a learning experience that brings new perspectives on how we view ourselves and the world around us. I haven’t been out the country for a long time and while I was busy here at home, I found out that we are becoming one big global village. In some ways it’s frightening, but it’s also very exciting.  If the creek don’t rise and I continue to have the stamina to spend all those miserable hours just getting there and back, I’ll go again and hopefully to other places on my bucket list as well.

The last time I was in London was well over ten years ago. Things have changed. This time, walking down the streets, I heard languages from every corner of the planet. I heard much less English.  While the U.S.A. is mostly attracting people from South and Central America, England and the rest of Europe are attracting people from the Middle-East, the Balkans, Asia, and North Africa. Food from all over the world is served in an amazing variety of restaurants. In some areas of the city, women with head covering or full face coverings are a common sight, as well men sitting at outside cafe’s smoking hooka pipes.  When I left on this journey I didn’t realize I was going to have a mind-bending cultural tour around the world.

I came to realize that we as human beings are doing what we have always done: migrating from our homelands to find a place where we imagine work is easier to find and we’ll feel safer. But we’re doing it on a much grander scale than ever. Many of us are uncomfortable and threatened by the many problems it brings. I see us needing to begin adapting to an era of change, in which the entire world becomes the melting pot. Hopefully we will tolerate and celebrate each other’s cultures with love, not war.

If anybody out there wants to know what is really happening beyond your back yard, buy a plane ticket. Go visiting instead of relying on American media to show and tell. In a country that is as close culturally as we can get to our own, I found the whole world just waiting for me to step into it.

IMG_0848Yes, at heart I’m a homebody. Yes, it was hard. Yes, I was sick. Yes, I came home exhausted and I was at times unnerved by the numbers of people I had to navigate through. But I had a look into what the future is perhaps going to look like. I came home a much more tolerant person and hopefully wiser. All in all, it was simply a lovely time.

Filed Under: Healthy Living, Navigating Through Life, Retreats, The Garden, Theatre, Travels Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Book Review: Blush, A Mennonite Girl Meets A Glittering World

October 29, 2013 By

IMG_0804While away in London, I read and reviewed Aimee Wise’s, Of Human Clay. Having set the tone with her “spiritual” memoir, I was eager to continue my reading adventure with another: Blush, A Mennonite Girl Meets A Glittering World, by friend, Shirley Hershey Showalter. Having two women I know publish memoirs simultaneously is thrilling. And both authors have helped me to understand my own need for spiritual comfort and have left me wanting to know more about how spirituality and religion becomes part of our lives and how it effects those around us.

Though each of these women has a different story, a different religion, and culture to deal with, the frustrations and tensions apparent in both stories, are similar. Regardless of what church, synagogue, or temple one worships in, our struggle to be faithful to our God, while being human beings with wants and needs that may fall beyond what we are permitted, are universal.

While Aimee’s book brought back twinges of my early anger with the Catholic Church, I was charmed and delighted with Shirley’s memories of growing up in a conservative, Mennonite farm community in Pennsylvania. Her wish “to be big,” not in the sense of being tall, “but big as in important, successful, influential,” went against all that her church and family represented.  To be Mennonite was to be plain and simple: in dress, speech and in all behaviors.  To be female and wear a prayer covering on one’s head was to stick out like a sore thumb … part of a religious subculture that a good part of the rest of the world doesn’t notice or choose to explore. In large societies like our own, we’re all too quick to point fingers at and make sometimes cruel jokes about those who are different from the rest of us. Whether it’s our skin color, religion, political affiliation, or sexual orientation, there is always something to gossip and make nasty judgements about.

Reading through Shirley’s memories of her first eighteen years of life, I was struck by how “BIG” she was even when she was small. She seems to have had an intuitive side that brought her through difficult moments in a family and church that she went along with and believed in, despite having her own dreams and aspirations for something more. And though following most of the rules, she never became the expected Mennonite wife, wearing a prayer covering, raising a handful of kids, and helping her husband by doing whatever is necessary to run a sometimes not so profitable farm.  Shirley seemed to know, if only on an unconscious level, that she would be more, while still respecting and hanging on to the structural ideals of her church and family. She has done more than succeed as a past president of Goshen College and her work with the Fetzer Institute.

From the beginning, Shirley, named by her mother after the famous child star, Shirley Temple, loved to be with her dad, riding along with him on the tractor and helping out in the other innumerable daily farm chores. Later when her brother and sisters came along, she loved being their teacher, showing them the ways of the natural world, the church, their family and even perhaps the glittering world beyond her parent’s farm. She “blushed” her way through awkward moments when she could barely contain her urges to go beyond what was expected of her. Her parents seemed to understand her concerns and differences with the Bishops of the Mennonite community, allowing her to think for herself while guiding her with gentle kindness.

Of the many heart-warming stories in this memoir, one of my my favorites is when her brother, Henry, gets a “new” second-hand bicycle. Envious of her brother’s good fortune and frustrated by her own old and worn out  bike, Shirley, tries to paint hers in an effort to make it look better using odd cans of paint stashed in the barn. She never asked permission to do so and makes a huge mess that most parents would have a huge fit about. When Shirley tells her dad, about her misadventure, adding that “I think you must love Henry more than me,” he  purchases the proper paints, takes her bike apart, and repaints it to make it look almost like new. Though her mother reminds her about “envy,” her father doesn’t lecture her on what she has done wrong. This special love and Mennonite kindness, prevails throughout the book, making me wish at times that I had grown up as a member of her family.

Filled with interesting tidbits about the history of the Mennonite church, family stories, along with recipes, footnotes and a glossary of terms I had little to no clue about, Shirley’s book took me on a journey through her early life and who and what has influenced her to become the woman she is today. She says it all best in the final pages of her book in, “Why I Am (Still!) a Mennonite.”

In the complicated world we live in, reading Blush, was for me a calming and refreshing visit to a simpler, less thorny way of living.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Compassion, family, Growing Up, Kindness, love, Matters of the Spirit, Memoir, The Journey Tagged With:
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