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Notes from a Crusty Seeker

Waking Up Late in Life

I recently asked members of the cyber world about dealing with regrets—specifically rectifying mistakes in the past. I sent out my query on all the social media I participate in. Here was the question: Read More 
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Quiet, Cain, Cohen—a Restorative Niche—Hallelujah!

I just know there are connections here. If I write about this week’s activity—or Quiet—perhaps they’ll come.

You see, I can’t stop being quiet. Maybe it’s the fact that I am contemplating Susan Cain’s magnificent exploration of my private experience in her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. After a thorough analysis of the introvert’s talents and essential nature, which includes the ability to act like an extrovert sometimes, she explains the necessity for “restorative niches” following events of vibrant social behavior. I think I’m in such a niche now. Usually I consider my niches of doing nothing while lying on the couch in complete silence a private matter. But Cain says it’s not only normal, it’s healthy! It’s a physiological need of people who happen to process stimulation via big-time amygdala (brain) activity, which apparently is different from the way extroverts process the same stimulation. So don’t call me! I’m in a restorative niche. In fact I might stay in this niche indefinitely because I’ve been talking so extrovertly about QuietRead More 

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I Wish You Merry Moments

I wish you:

A Merry Xmas,
Good tidings and cheering,
But in end-year time of
Assessment and clearing—

In case you are one
Stuck on goals and achievement,
I wish you no fretting,
No tallies, but easement—

Of accomplishment worries,
Or legacy concerns.
I wish you this moment,
Where only life burns,

I wish you this moment,
To let go your grip,
And to feel the joy of
Of our shared time blip.

MERRY MOMENTS!

This morning, boomercafe.com published an excerpt on the subject of worrying about legacy from my book, Conversations with Mom: An Aging Baby Boomer, in Need of an Elder, Writes to her Dead Mother. It’s what I still need to learn, and I share it with you, in case you too worry about achieving and accomplishment. Enjoy the excerpt

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About My Left Breast

There are no accidents. I first met Pamela Wible, M.D., more than four years ago at a publicity conference. I was there as managing editor of a magazine and she was on a long line of people speed-pitching stories to the tick-tock of a stopwatch. The main things I remember were that we greeted each other like old friends, her face felt like full sun on a perfect summer’s day, and I begged the woman with the stopwatch to give her more time because I knew what I was hearing was important. I wanted to know more about how she’d started a compassionate, patient-centered medical practice in Eugene, Oregon, and how other doctors could do the same thing, and how patients could feel cared for at a fair price. Although I can't remember exactly what Pamela told me, I do remember being absolutely certain that she was a revolutionary and I wanted to support her revolution in any way I could.

Jump cut to the present. I am no longer employed. I work as a freelance book editor. I have lousy catastrophic insurance, and I have just completed an odyssey that began with a month-long nightmare at a radiology center that treated me like a member of a herd and, with no information or face-to-face contact or returned phone call from a doctor, tried to steer me down a chute where some person—I know not who—would stick a needle into my left breast for unexplained reasons. I've never been a herd person, so I refused, dug in my heels, and in my best former legal secretary voice, wrote a letter protesting, among other things, their refusal to send me my medical report . . . resulting in the instant return of my records right before Hurricane Sandy hit. Read More 

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Deep Calm in the Midst of Chaos

I have been deeply calm the last few days. That might seem weird considering the violence in Aurora, Colorado, and the subsequent explosion of chatter chaos about gun control, along with the “thriller” media coverage of the “Movie Theater Massacre,” and the “why, why, why,” and the anger and the inexpressible pain over loss of love and life.

On November 22, 1963, I learned that I react to this level of drama and chaos and violence by going into an almost altered state of deep calm and clarity. I learned this on the bus home from school when we were dismissed early because the President had been shot. I learned this as the sustained screams of the other children on the bus reached a deafeningly high pitch—almost like celebration, but really a reaction to grief that was beyond their bodies’ capability to contain. My best friend, Roxy, told me about the assassination. We were in the seventh grade; someone had just come to tell our teacher, who released us out into the halls, which is where the screaming began. When Roxy told me—yelled it actually, to be heard above the shrieks—I felt a sadness as deep as the calm I went into. “One big tear rolled down your face,” she told me a few days later, trying to understand. I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t talk. But I felt a deep, clear calm and I knew life as we’d all known it had changed forever.

I’m feeling something similar now, and as an adult I would like to at least try to articulate it. I read a New York Times editorial yesterday called Don’t Jump to Conclusions about the Killer by Dave Cullen. The piece suggested that if his research into the Columbine massacre killers’ backgrounds had anything to teach, it’s that the killer’s actions probably had little to do with revenge or a response to bullying. Instead, it probably has to do with that moment when a clinically depressed person who relentlessly hates himself finally disconnects from himself. He can no longer contain the pain and he becomes unreal to himself. And therefore everyone and everything else becomes equally unreal. His self-directed anger ceases to have an effect on his unreal self, so it turns outward, and craving a release, it acts. Read More 
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What Inspires Writers?

Listen to the radio interview mentioned in this article at Cecilia Skidmore’s Open Mind.

Some writers grapple with being blocked; they spend hours paralyzed, gnashing their teeth, and downing large quantities of coffee, hoping to catalyze words with caffeine. Other writers can’t focus, can’t find the topic that maintains their interest, and they do everything possible to procrastinate putting fingers to keyboard. I don’t have either of those problems. I’ve made my living as a writer and editor for more than a decade. I love to write! And although I have periods of paralysis, I prefer to call them “pauses.” I trust that something is germinating and I believe it is my job to wait for it. My problem is much more pragmatic: selling my writing. Selling often involves talking, and talking about my work scares the bejesus out of me. Read More 

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Why I Prefer an $8 Paperback to a First Edition of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

After watching the wonderful PBS American Masters documentary Harper Lee: Hey Boo, I pulled down my old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird with the intention of rereading it. I believed I’d read it in high school. I knew the story, and I thought the book had just faded from memory.

Perhaps I was certain I’d read it because it’s been sitting on my shelf for so many decades since I rescued it from my mother’s damp garage. She’d loved it and had written her name and declaration of possession in careful script on the front endpaper. Wondering what the value of such a book might be, I searched the Internet and was floored to see less battered versions of my “true first edition” selling for anywhere from twelve to twenty-five thousand dollars. Torn between my desire to read and preserve, I decided to buy the cheapest paperback I could find. And as I sank into it and under Ms. Lee’s spell, I instantly realized I was reading this book for the first time and had created a memory of reading it due to the book’s physical presence on my shelf as well as its place in our collective consciousness. Read More 

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Animal Teachings Treasure

Animal Teachings: Enhancing Our Lives Through the Wisdom of Animals by Dawn Brunke with illustrations by the amazing Ola Liola is one of the most versatile works of art I’ve ever laid my hands on, paged through, or smelled. Does that sound odd? If so, I’m glad. It emphasizes why this elegant 160-page paperback needs to exist as just that—a real book, not a digital something.

In marketing circles, it’s common knowledge that the most important thing about any book is its reader benefits. The benefits of Animal Teachings scream.

First and foremost it is a work of art—a reminder of what is possible when a writer, an artist, a designer, and a publisher decide it is important to do the very finest work they are capable of. Read More 

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Beyond the Leaving … and What I Learned from Gil Hedley

hard cover & paperback

1. Did you know that your heart has arms and legs? It does. The heart that we see in medical shows when a surgeon is saving somebody’s life is only part of the organ. The entire heart has long tendrils like tree branches that go down each arm and each leg. Imagine how amazing it would be if you could walk down the street looking at everybody through special X-ray–vision glasses that singled out the heart!

2. Super models are freaks of nature because, according to poet/anatomist/teacher/author/ethicist/renaissance man Gil Hedley, “our bodies are not symmetrical. Not even close.” They’re full of surprises and anomalies—like the most perfectly formed little ovary that looked like a miniature brain … in an 83-year-old woman who had donated her body so that people like us could learn something and maybe wake up a little.

3. It’s a well-known fact that New York pigeons smoke—you see them poking around sidewalks filled with butts, so who else could have dropped them? And lest you judge them harshly for stinking up the environment, just take another look—really look: See that pigeon taking off for the sky, tail feathers down, beak up, effortlessly defying our human body limitations and looking like a grey angel. I know this to be true because Gil Hedley showed slides of pigeons, both pre-smoking and frozen in flight, in his recent New York City intensive (which seemed to be over in about five minutes—blink, it’s eight hours later—really) at the Cantor Film Center, where about 120 of us packed into a tiny theater and were riveted, laughing, and grateful for what was really an indescribable experience of learning who we are through a mosaic of lecture, stories, slides, little movies, art, poetry, and Gil, Gil, Gil—who, in the course of a day, managed to gently and reverentially shatter all inhibitions, shame, judgments, and biases we humans walked in with. Read More 

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Gil Hedley: Reconceiving Our Bodies

Not long ago, I blogged about anatomist/theologian Gil Hedley’s deeply moving new book of free verse,
Coming Into Form
. Well, there's more:

Reconceiving My Body: Take Two, from the Heart is Gil's earlier book, a 147-page paperback — part memoir and religious philosophy debate and a lot of the most out-of-the-box brilliant thinking you’ve ever read about who and what and how we are what we are. There are so many reasons to read this book that it’s hard to know where to begin. But my personal most important reason is fun. It is very fun! Funny, engaging, interesting.

Now the more serious reason: This book may cause you to install a new inner teacher that starts out as Gil’s voice, but quickly becomes your own. I find myself hearing that voice in my head many times during the day —

• When I suddenly start stewing about political matters, I hear Gil/Me talking about the “perpetrator-victim” cycle: When you get into an anger riff, you are casting yourself as a superior victim. You are superior in your rightness, and somebody more powerful (otherwise why would you be angry?) is wrong. Just realizing what I’m doing seems to diffuse my completely counterproductive mind spasms.

• When I start berating my body for being what it is, or loathing some of the sensations of aging, or despairing about my genetic history, I hear Gil: “How you conceive of something has everything to do with how you behave with respect to that something.” If I’m conceiving of my body or my ancestral flaws as a burden, I’m probably not going to respect and be kind to my sometimes sticky joints or be grateful that modern medicine offers solutions that I cannot find by the natural means everybody assures me I should pursue.

• When I start feeling like I’m not enough, when I’m not doing “it” right, I think of Gil’s tumultuous experiences and mistakes, and if he is so clearly wonderful, then maybe I’m okay too. Read More 

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Dark Energy, a Holographic Reality: a Case for Meditation

In a fascinating new PBS series called The Fabric of the Cosmos, renowned physicist and author Brian Greene says we've all been deceived. "Our perceptions of time and space have led us astray. Much of what we thought we knew about our universe—that the past has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that exists—just might be wrong."

According to the latest science, up 70 percent of the cosmos is made of "dark energy." We know what dark energy does—it drives the expansion of the universe—but that's about it. (I have some thoughts about that in the little video on the right.)

But, for me, there was an even more compelling piece of new information—revealed like a live nude in the middle of a room full of clothed people: the nature of black holes of dark energy has led scientists to propose that "like the hologram on your credit card, space may just be a projection of a deeper two-dimensional reality taking place on a distant surface that surrounds us." Read More 
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Learning to be a good Intervieweeeeeee!



For more information, go to Conversations with Mom.











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Aging, Sustainability & Selling Books

I’ve been criticized for being too far afield in this blog. Writing about the conglomeration of things I love leads to a kind of eclecticism that does not sell books. And since I am a writer, and since I want to sell books, I should get my act together!

I’m also an editor, and I recently worked on a book about sustainability that seems to have awakened some latent Republican DNA running through my veins, because all of a sudden I long to be a small-business-person-cowgirl type who makes a living by her own rules … selling books!

But back to my over-broad eclecticism. (I hope this is not too eclectic for you.) This concern started when I read publishing consultant Alan Rinzler's very fine blog on The New Author Platform.

To sell books, Alan says, you need "personality, authenticity, expertise, and subtlety." In other words you have to be who you are on your blog (but entertaining, even if the real you is slightly dull), you have to know what you're talking about, and you should never ever ask people to buy your books. You just charm them so much with your non-dull authentic personality and expertise that they can't wait to click that PayPal button. Alan also suggests you comment a lot on other people's blogs, so I commented on his:  Read More 

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SERVING LIFE

Click to see Serving Life trailer and learn more.

When filmmaker Molly Fowler was at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola working on her documentary about inmate hospice workers, one of the inmates wondered how she could see him as a “normal person.” How could she accept him without even knowing the details of the bad things he had done? Didn’t she want to hear his full story?

“No,” said Molly. “I’m only interested in one story—the story of how you go from where you are right now to becoming a hospice worker.”

The result of this this single focus is the remarkable documentary, brilliantly titled Serving Life—a double, or maybe even multiple, entendre that not only describes the life sentences being served by the film’s subjects (murders, rapists, robbers, and kidnappers) who minister, change diapers, and sit vigil as their fellow inmates pass away; but it describes their personality change as they feel the enormity of their responsibility, their love, and their loss; it describes what they offer their fellow human beings; and it becomes a two-word mantra for everyone lucky enough to witness this movie and then resume a life of freedom. Read More 

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COMING INTO FORM by Gil Hedley: A Gem of a Book

I first encountered Gil Hedley many years ago in what felt to me at the time like a murky soup of people. When he spoke, the murk gave way to clarity and the sun seemed to shine, even though we were indoors with no windows.

Gil Hedley is a poet anatomist. He teaches all kinds of people about the body through his Integral Anatomy human dissection workshops, his DVDs, and now through his gorgeous new book of free verse, Coming Into Form. From the cover art (“Self-Knitter,” sculpted by Lauren Rose Buchness) of a little person knitting her own skin, to the words that feel sometimes like Rumi–2011 and sometimes like ocean waves and sometimes like nothing you have ever heard quite this way before, the book is a gem.

This is the kind of book you never shelve because you want to have constant access. No matter what kind of mood you’re in, there is something in it that can catalyze growth, nudging you to inhabit your own form just a little more, just a little more joyfully.  Read More 

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