Day: March 22, 2014

I am out chasing the spring light, it is fighting its way through the stubborn winter.

Spring is fighting its way into the world, I saw the collision between Spring and winter in the sky on Route 313.

I’ve been trying for months to take a photo inside of George Forss’s darkroom, I love the idea of seeing genius at work, it is, in so many ways, the mad den of a wizard, George is sorcerer, he is so at home in his darkroom. My new camera made this possible, I set the ISO to 25,000 (I didn’t have a tripod, which I needed) and caught George at work, what I could see was almost pitch black, my camera saw more.

George liked the photo. This, he said, is what a darkroom looks like.

My Hubbard Hall short story class went into its second week this morning, and I thought it took off. The class was limited to eight people, and the students are diverse – two high school students, a nurse practitioner, a retired minister, a yoga teacher and massage therapist who travels with famous rock starts, several writers. There are some wonderful stories bubbling up – a charismatic child struggling out of poverty in the Mississippi Delta, a middle-aged man who decides to go to Times Square to see the ball drop, a young volunteer in a school library who encounters a dying mime (and writes about mostly in text), a mother who warns her son against playing the lottery and then wins.

In each class, the students bring their work and show them to the other students and then we talk about them. It is powerful to see how much the students support one another, help each other. Feedback is so essential for writing, how else can we improve and grow? For me, the biggest challenge is to overcome the hideous way in which writing is generally taught in America and to get the writers to see that their stories are important and good, if they are authentic and brave. The idea is for them to feel good about their work, not bad, to encourage them, not fill their heads with rules and do’s and dont’s. I want them to have fun, to have confidence in themselves, to let their inner spirits, their inner writers come out and be free. This class is special, I bet we go past the four scheduled meetings

I had a curious and, in some ways, a difficult week. Some old fears about money, growing older, some panic about having traded in security for love and purpose resurfaced, about leaving Maria and  her future if I died. Yes, I am aware Maria can take care of herself, but these are the demons visiting me in the night and another disturbance or visitation, I keep getting messages from the Carriage Horses Of New York, hearing things, I have been trying for several days to write about them, I am close, perhaps Sunday or Monday.

Maria woke up when I had some piercing nightmares and she asked me what was going on in my mind, I said sometimes, my mind has a mind of my own. In the middle of the night, this brought laughter to both of us. This weekend, I’m working to center and ground myself, to feel stronger, I’ve been down this road so many times but not for awhile. A spiritual life is like that you are never really there, you just keep working to get there. I hope to write about the horses and their messages tomorrow – Monday if I’m still struggling with it. It wants to come out.

The horses don’t really speak to me in words, but in messages, and when I start to write about the messages, they sometimes sound stiff and unreal, like the Indian “Chiefs” in B Westerns. I don’t believe horses – or Native-Americans – talk like that. I have to find a real voice, my voice.