Failure

 

Opened my daily planner to find this quote:

"Try again. Fail again. Fail better." -Samuel Beckett

I've learned gut-wrenching lessons from every failure.

Steve Jobs said: "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

Better to be a happy failing fool than to have never had the courage to crack open the hollow shell of longing.

Never stop. Seriously. Just do not let yourself.  Dream.  BIG.

Why do we tell stories?

 

We've had a week of sun and each morning when I'm finished work, I head out to the deck with a pot of Chiai tea and a copy of "Writing asa Sacred Path" by Jill Jepson.While the sparrows eat the aphids on the golden hops vine and cardinals dart through the willows, I turn the pages and wonder over the gift of being able to tell stories.I don't why I'm a writer, but I'm pretty sure the obsession to put words on the page was tattooed in my DNA from day one. Here are a few abridged quotes:

Storytelling may seem too commonplace--even trivial--to be the key to a writer's spiritual path. But this is because , like all seemingly simple work...we fail to see how remarkable it is. When you try to analyze the feat of telling a story, it becomes an act of immense complexity and depth.

When you tell a story, you become what F. Scott Fitzgerald called, "part of the consciousness of our human race." Stories sculpt meaning; they shape how we think about the world; they provide framework for understanding our place in the Universe. Stories determine what we cherish, despise or ignore. Stories express the inexpressible.

Stories remind us that we are not separate, isolated individuals afloat in the cosmos, but part of the universal stream of life. Stories are gifts.

E. B. White: "As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be personally held responsible if even a small one were to be lost."

Lofty thoughts, right? It's true that writing is excruciatingly hard work, exasperating, nerve wracking, ulcer producing and much much worse. But when the vision inside finally begins to come into focus on the page, the feeling of satisfaction warms to the core like a golden benediction and, like birthing a child, I instantly forget all that came before. I always go back for more.

May your pages be dusted with 'enchantment' today. 

Happy Writing! Kathy-Diane

 

Fling yourself!

"If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work, as Curtis flung himself into the yawning gulf, as the soldier flings himself into the enemy's trenches...

 

...and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner on whom the walls of his gallery have fallen in; if he contemplates difficulties instead of overcoming them one by one...he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent."

 

- Honore de Balzac

Inspiration from RUMI

If your writing is calling you to a wounded place you don't have the courage to probe because it's too raw, honest and painful, contemplate these words from RUMI:

With this pain,

You are

digging a path

for yourself. 

 

Trust the process.  I find writing, like a GPS for the soul, often leads me to higher ground.  Be brave!

 

 

Kathy-Diane

No more excuses?

 

As writers, we'll often find any old excuse to delay putting pen to page. When you work at a desk job, one excuse that seems full proof is that you just can't squeeze in the time.

Not so. In "The NightTime Novelist" Joseph Bates lists authors who held day jobs and wrote at night: Franz Kafka worked at Workers Accident Insurance in Prague...Stephen King taught high school English...John Grisham worked as an attorney...William Faulkner did a stint as a postmaster.  

There's more: Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorn. 

In fact, according to Bates, there are "only a handful of writers working who make their living solely by their fiction."

Guess it's time to cross that excuse off the list. Take that procrastination!

Happy writing! Kathy-Diane

"Roads Unravelling sends the reader off the beaten path and down an honest dirt-road trek...a great piece of Canadian literature." -Lesley Choyce author of Clear Cold Morning

 

For Writing and Life

 

From Sylvia Fraser's "The Green Labyrinth:

"Perform in humility, just as birds accept that air is their vehicle."

Reading this quote from an Amazonian shaman, got me pondering: As a writer, what is my vehicle?

There is a mystery, something larger, more expansive and powerful than myself that sustains my imagination, sparks my creativity, transforms words into wonder when they bloom on the page...

I don't need to dissect this unknown, quantify it or squash it into a neatly labelled box.

I only need to put my pen to the page.....marvel with rising joy and rumbling fear...and be always, bone-deep, astonished and grateful.  

The Tao

On of my favorite verses from Wayne Dyer's "Living the Wisdom of the Tao:"

6th Verse

 

The spirit that never dies

is called the mysterious feminine.

Although she becomes the whole universe,

her immaculate purity is never lost.

Although she assumes countless forms,

her true identity remains intact.

The gateway to the mysterious female

is called the root of creation.

Listen to her voice,

hear it echo through creation.

Without fail, she reveals her presence.

Without fail, she brings us to our own perfection.

Although it is invisible, it endures;

it will never end.

"I pay attention to my inner callings and apply my uniqueness to everything I undertake."