It is time to plan for the coming month. I rarely accomplish all I plan to do, and that is just fine.
The first rule of planning is: Plans change.
Rule two is that there are no rules, only guidelines.
Guideline 3: Treasure each moment by living in the moment.
Today I am in a beautiful city I first visited forty years ago. I could focus on what I cannot do today because I have my large dog with me and my husband is in meetings all day. But that would decrease my joy of living today as fully or at least as best I can.
My husband is doing what he loves. He is making theworld a better place by serving on an NIH panel. I am so proud of the organic chemistry he has producd that makes the living world a better understood and healthier place, and that he can also contribute at the higher level of advancing the research of other scientists, as he is doing today, by being activity in the national research community.
Buddy, my neapolitan mastiff companion, and I went out for an hour and a half walk around Union Square. He was happy to relieve himself and I was happy to have a cup of coffee and people watch.
The best moment was when I had the pleasure of choosing a pastry. There in front of me was a simple bit of dough folded over and crimped around a bit of cream with sugar. My mother would make these for me when I was little and she had a bit of dough left over after making pies. The taste brought back one of the nice memories of Mom who left this world 10 years ago yesterday.
Having coffee and pastry with my best pup and my mother, even if only in memory or across timeless mysterious dimensional divides, this morning was a beautiful gift.
So today I plan, and if I do not accomplish all I plan, that is okay, because something akin to pastry with my mother in San Francisco might unexpectedly present itself to me.
Narration
Narration
If you want to share your story, your family’s story, your church group’s story, your ancestor’s story, or the story of someone you admire, you will eventually realize you are a narrator of someone else’s story, even if you are telling your own story. No, no need for schizophrenia.
Narrating your self as though you are talking about someone else is not weird. Trust me. Your story will be more readable and seem far less boastful if you can use different perspectives and what writers call voices to shift perspective from “then I did this” or first person to what is called omnipotent or all seeing.
Viewpoint Example
Omnipotent: “Narrating your self as though you are talking about someone else is not weird.”
First person: “Trust me.”
This is just shifting perspective.
Why would you want to do this viewpoint, narration thing?
- Think of your readers. Are you writing for friends or your great grandchildren? Figure this out and then tell those people a story. Sit down at a keyboard or in front of a microphone or video camera and tell them about your subject.
- Passion shows through. Let your voice sing through… even if you are using the the keyboard to sing.
- Because something has to come between the pictures.
- Because your future readers may not know what the thing you are talking about even is…
Mules. No not the animals but the slipper.
Taffeta. No not a candy. That is taffy. And taffeta is not the same as crinoline – just an FYI. Oops there is another one: FYI means For Your Information.
- Every human is programmed to listen to stories. Remember the “Tell me a story, Mom” phase of childhood.
Ask people to read or view your first few efforts and give you feedback.
Legacy Tools
April 2016 A to Z Challenge
Letter M Legacy of Marking and Metadata Tools for Legacy projects
The F of Legacy Tools – Filter
is for Filter in the A to Z of Tools for Legacy
Filter, screen, censor, or frame, no matter what you call it, we all do it, and we humans have always done it. Sexuality has been written out of most personal family histories and stories for a long, long time. All the way back to the epoch of “begats.” Disagreements, strife, and less than stellar personality traits are excised from the official record. Many of these things were not done to tell lies. But cultures at various times create expectations that do not match up with reality.
Lying is Nothing New
You can consciously choose honesty, navigation around certain subjects, or downright righteous rewriting of history. You have the same choices people have always had.
In an undergraduate anthropology course on kinship and social organization, I learned that unless genetic testing is done on an entire community, true paternity will not be known. “Paternity is always problematic,” was how one professor put it. Another simply stated that “women lie.” But it really is not even that simple. Families lie, communities lie, and genealogical history is often the cover story. Memory, too, can be unreliable.
We all will omit parts of a story that are unpleasant, less than flattering, or would hurst someone we love. It doesn’t have to be about paternity. It can be about your mother’s cooking. Stories can be made more humorous.
Ultimately stories about ourselves and our families convey information. Awareness allows you to see if you are saying what you intend to say and nothing more.
Making Decisions
What we then have to decide is whether we want to be:
- totally fact-based
- tell a fact-laced story
- present the stories of others, without editing or embellishment
- present only the stories of others that serve a purpose
- present stories as a group that itself conveys a story
- consciously omit stories, characters, or scenes that do not advance your story or purpose
These decisions will be made, the real question is how conscious these decisions will be.
An example from my own family shows how different stories can just be embedded without comment rather than omitted or emphasized.
Genealogy vs. Narrative
My great grandmother died when she was 39. The widower who was a minister, of roughly the same age, had many young children who ranged in age from infants to teenagers, remarried a year later. He married a girl the same age as his oldest son. That marriage produced a daughter, a half sibling, to all the other children from the first marriage.
The family story, when talked about in hushed tones, is that the girl was a girlfriend of the oldest son before his father wooed her away to be his second wife. As such, my grandfather’s step-mother was also his former girl friend. The second marriage ended only upon the death of my great grandfather after several decades of marriage.
My grandfather married my grandmother, when he was a very young man of 19. My grandmother, up until that time, was not in the story, and they had 8 children, and many grandchildren before my grandmother passed away in her mid-fifties.
Then things get really weird. My great grandfather died in the late 1940s. My grandmother died about six year later in the mid-1950s. Within a year of my grandmother’s death, my grandfather remarried. He married a high school sweet heart, his step-mother.
Literally, the s**t hit the fan. The family fractured. No more multi-generational Thanksgiving dinners at the mansion in Chicago. No visits to Grandma’s house. Huge family gathering photographs ceased. Eventually truces were called and polite, on the surface, gatherings happened twice a year.
I was born after the family fractured. It took me until my early teens to figure out what had happened and that nothing biologically incestuous actually happened anywhere as this story played out. Sociologically, that is another matter. My father would not speak of any of this, and it was clear he had problems with his father and genuinely disliked his father’s second wife. Cultural mores were violated. I am sure this novel situation helped shape my path to become an anthropologist.
Genealogical charts cannot give as rich of a tale as an actual story.
What do you suppose might have been filtered from your family stories?
Legacy Tools
April 2016 A to Z Challenge
Letter F Filtering Legacy Tools for Legacy projects
My Father's 100th Birthday
My father, Donald, was only 71 when he passed away. Today he would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Donald Eugene Hill was born at home near the tiny burg of Colburn, Indiana, on October 14, 1915. I saw the house once, abandoned and in the middle of a field; it has since been torn down.
Almost two generations older than me, and deceased since the late 1980s, my dad still connects me to times, lives, and customs taught to him by his parents and grandparents who knew the 19th Century.
There was an abandoned yoke for a draft horse that pulled a plow in back of the barn when I was a kid. I missed the days of my dad using horses to plow and till by only a decade or so. My brothers learned to farm using draft animals.
I may have missed the experiences, but the connections were palpable to me.
These were times when my family, and the culture from which they, came were agrarian. The larger society was in the midst of an industrial revolution but the old ways from many previous centuries still brought food to tables. Territories opened, land rushes drew adventurers and drifters.
Dad saw the coming of the end of the life he knew. Not his own mortality, though he knew that well, but rather the incorporation of the basic production of essential goods necessary to sustaining life into mechanized, impersonal processes removed from nurturance and knowledge.
How did he convey such nuanced information to me? He lived life honestly and he told stories. Boy, oh, boy, did he tell stories. Many people thought him to be an odd duck. And he was. So am I.
He did not give a hoot about what most people thought.
He once roared out during discussion with a local priest for whom he was doing some carpentry, “There is no God but Allah,” while in the middle of the sidewalk in our small, Indiana town. My brother, Roger, witnessed this, and was mortified. We were Christians. I can only imagine that he was demonstrating the belief that one should proclaim one’s beliefs publicly, as in the Islamic call to prayer, in some sort of intense religious discussion with the good Friar. He loved to expound on religious philosophy.
As an agnostic who could, “recite all the begats,” my father was an enigma. His memory had to be photographic, as he could recall anything he ever read and/or learned at the knee of his grandfather, Silas Hill, a Brethren Minister. But at heart my dad was a historian and a logician, not a church-goer. My interests in anthropology and semiotics did not fall very far from the proverbial tree.
He loved to tell stories about finding buried treasure. Some thought his stories were tall tales. But it was easier to find buried loot back when he was a boy, as people did actually bury their precious metal and gold and silver coins to hide them from ne’er do wells in the days before bank deposits were insured. Dad found serious money a couple of times according to my brothers. He literally stumbled over a can of gold coins, on the property just off the road our farm was on, and that financed his first tractor in the 1940s. You see Dad may have told tall tales, but he also listened deeply and analytically to the old men who gathered in the center of the town. Their stories revealed much about who did what where, some of which included who took the whereabouts of where they buried their money to the grave with them.
I cannot document these stories as facts, but I know the stories did not change over time, but they were plausible, and had verifiable elements. And he valued truth and community. He was active as a citizen, He was a volunteer fireman, a founding member of the group in our township. He was an active member of The Farmers Union and the local Democratic Party. Service and truth were important to him. But he also understood the power of telling a story or two.
So, if you would, do me a favor and give a gift in honor of my Dad’s 100th birthday: tell someone a story that you were told as a child. Such is the stuff of legacy.
Happy 100th Daddy.
Boomer Blogging Bog-down
Women have chronicled family history, recorded life events, written diaries, and journaled for all the centuries since writing became feasible through technological advancements. We still do, but for some of us this is just what we do, we write no matter what the limitations of our access to technology, there are lots of options when the muse is cooperative.
My muse has not been cooperative as of late. I am getting back on my feet after being sick for a few weeks. When I am not feeling well I am overly critical of everything I do. I make unfair comparisons of my self with others. I knew I was seeing things askew when I decided I could not read my friends and fellow mid-life bloggers because they made me feel jealous of their achievements. Now that I am getting back my balance and perspective I am wondering why I reacted in such an exclusionary fashion.
Speculation on motivational undercurrents in women’s blogging
The group of women I consider to be my peers in the blogging world are mainly women I have met through the BlogHer blogging network. That is where the similarity ends. We are incredibly diverse in our backgrounds. We all bring distinct elements of what it is to be a successful 21st Century writer to the table. There are many kinds of success.
- Being published on a high circulation site, paid or not, is considered success by some.
- Making money from advertising is considered success by others.
- High number of readers is considered the goal by some.
- Writing sponsored posts for a recognizable national corporation the goal for some.
- Being able to blow your own horn about success can be viewed as being a successful marketer.
- Reaching readers with a message is the pinnacle of achievement for others.
- Being considered a good writer by peer writers is an honor for many.
- Being an expert and blogging may increase the perception of a writer as a subject expert.
- Some blog as a necessity for their business site.
Women’s life situations differ dramatically too
One of my main problems, in addition to battling depression, is that my support network of one, the Hubby, is not all that supportive of anything I do that does not either involve working outside the home for at least 30 hours a week, or making more money than him. He recently told me, “I don’t know why you think you have to be a successful entrepreneur. Can’t you just go get a job?” Scientists are at times distant and diminish the importance of everything other than work similar to their own. I’ve heard this from spouses of both sexes with partners who are scientists.
Other bloggers have supportive and successful partners and spouses who underwrite their efforts with action and moral support, while others have partners who underwrite the costs of professional start-up, networking expenses, and travel.
That said, there are some folks who have come to blogging with perks that are unrelated to writing, per se, after having worked in an industry for years, and they bring their networks or expertise with them.
Still others just have the seemingly innate ability to sell, sell, sell themselves. Marketing is a skill that comes naturally to some.
Why write this?
At times I have to remind myself of all these things, so I thought that someone else might want to see them too.
Our lives and paths are very different. But each of our life situations bring blessings and curses.
I was born a writer. I was also born an anthropologist. Neither are practical occupations though they provide for an interesting life.
I was born poor, my family was not supportive emotionally, and my only mentor in life is a brilliant but eccentric academician.
By the time I was 30 I had learned to trust no one. By the time I was 40 I was so broken that I had to do a complete restart to re-evaluate and rebuild my self. Other than for my daughter, I felt I had nothing but a fair intellect that was positive in life. I wrote about subjects that were important to me, but I did not really write myself into the story.
Then on my 49th birthday I found myself again. Over the course of the 50th year I learned a great deal about who I was coming together as in this rebuilding. I decided to build a network of connections through the Blogging Conference I adopted as my professional conference. It was a good choice.
I think I am talking to all the women writers who face challenges that at times seem insurmountable. Allow yourself time and space, and if necessary even envy when you need to step back and regroup for whatever reason. If you have a talent that can share and a passion to do so, it will come back to you. You may not have money, the perfect support system, or luck, but you have the fire inside you and that burns as long as you live. I am convinced of it. If I can lose my way, get knocked down, become demoralized by comparing myself to others, and then get back up and start all over again, then you can too.
This year I will turn 57, and having been born in 1957, I have decided to consider this a magical point in my life. In the next month, or so, until my birthday, I will write a few personal pieces on what I know about — how to keep going. I am nothing if not tenacious and resilient.
Getting bogged down for a bit isn’t so bad. The bog or swamp goddess told me so. That is one of the reasons she, Nerthus, is my twitter handle. @nerthus.
Stumbling Over Ant Hills
I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels as I do, but given my “I’d live in a cave if I could” personality, I don’t stumble across many people period, let alone people who are much like me. So maybe this is more common than I think, but I suspect most people are not quite so susceptible to ant hill stumbling as I am.
I have decided that when I stumble over the littlest of ant or mole hills that there must be something I am supposed to see from ground level.
I can’t imagine any other reason I would have been given the ability to be instantly befuddled, stopped in my tracks and stymied from moving on by the smallest of impediments unless there was some “reason” for it. I’m not a person who believes in predestination or cosmic micro-management. I have however learned that I am far more aware or and in charge of what I do than I once thought. I firmly believe that we shape our lives beyond the conscious, top-level layers of our actions.
But I also know that over-thinking can result in less than optimal results.
I know that visualization works, but I do not know how it works. Practice? Yes, probably. Self-guidance? Definitely. Shaping possibilities? Maybe even more so than simply giving ourselves permission to see obscure, less than likely opportunities and paths can explain.
So rather than beating up myself for “tripping over ant-hills” I have come to realize that these situations actually give me a chance to see a part of the past that shaped me but which I have no conscious memory. Deconstructing the stumble allows me to discern the shapes of the missing pieces.
Having to put my beloved dog down seems to have kicked my butt to get out of a long-standing stumble. Big decisions, like life and death decisions make smaller decisions, like what to toss and what to keep, where to set up a craft center, and similar level decisions much, much easier.
I don’t want to make an awareness of death a motivating factor in my life. I grieve and then let it go away so I can enjoy life again as fully as possible. But I am going to try to stumble over fewer ant hills after this period of grieving for my Daisy Doodle the bestest doggie in the whole world, although, as I said, sometimes a stumble allows for a completely different perspective to be gained from the new vantage point.