Imbalance

Perhaps, if you’ve read the two recent postings on this blog, you’ve wondered why I seem to be examining my life so minutely. The answer I think lies in the major back surgery I underwent in mid-March. During my time in the hospital rehab unit, I had an Easter experience.

For four days I was unable to eat anything. The nurses encouraged me to at least eat applesauce, but I simply couldn’t swallow. The fifth day—a Monday—went awry. My blood pressure fluctuated disturbingly. I fainted and was out for some time. I could answer only “Anna Dolores Ready” to all the questions the nurses asked while trying to revive me. Repeatedly I vomited. My spirits plummeted, imprisoned in a gray cloud. I dwelt in a miasma of nothingness.

In late afternoon, my eldest niece visited after work. Seeing me pitch forward and nearly fall, then faint, then throw up, she stayed several hours. She asked the nurse to monitor me closely during the night; the nurse assured her I would be well taken care of.

Needing to feed her cat and dogs, my niece kissed my left cheek and reluctantly left. As she passed through the doorway, I thought, “I’ll never see her again.”

The nurse turned off the light. I lay on my right side and began to talk inwardly to all those who had already entered Life beyond the reality I knew—all those who had raised me, taught me, befriended me. They and I dwelt in Oneness.

Trusting their infinite love for me, I said something like “I’m scared that I’m going to die. If living is for my good and the good of the Universe, then I trust you will wake me in the morning. If not, then I embrace death. Not my will, but the will of Oneness be done.”

I began reciting names: Mom, Dad, Jan, John, Jim . . . name after name after name of those who have touched my life with goodness.

Several times during the night I woke, still feeling lost within myself, still praying to Oneness to keep me in this life or to welcome me to the path of Light. More names: Florence, Al, Mary, Annette, Nicole, Mary Alice.

I slept again. When next I woke, I thought of all the cats who'd blessed my life: Dulcy, Bartleby, Tybalt, Noah, Jeremiah, Eliza Doolittle, Laz, Raissa. I called on each to be with me.

Once more I slept, then woke again and invoked name after name after name of those for whom I felt deep and abiding gratitude. The names passed like ticker-tape through my heart: Miriam, Robert, Andrew, Lon, Scholastica, Dunstan.

The next morning, I awoke to sunlight. I was alive.

Two days later I came home.

Now what does this have to do with the introspection evident in this posting and the last two?

Since that March morning, I’ve found myself feeling not only physically, but emotionally, imbalanced. The doctor tells me that this is a common response of patients who have serious spinal surgery or whose chest has been cracked open for open-heart surgery. I, myself, think that the possibility of saying good-bye to life as we know it can accompany any major surgery. 

I am alive, yet I find myself reevaluating my whole life.

Perhaps the anesthesia has something to do with this. Perhaps my age. Perhaps the weariness resulting from the months of pain before the operation. Perhaps all of that.

And perhaps what I’m experiencing is the opportunity to truly let go of the past and embrace something new in my life. Time will tell.

Peace.

Detaching from Outcomes

During the past twenty-five years, I’ve experienced a range of ailments from minor to major. Probably all of you have too. For myself, my life went merrily on during the first fourteen years of that span. Then Meniere’s Disease demanded entry in May 2006.

Meniere’s, one moment I would be standing upright. The next nanosecond, with no warning, I’d be sprawled on the kitchen floor, with the walls and ceiling spinning round me. I never knew when I’d fall or when the room would start to spin. For nearly a year, I seldom left the house. Mostly I crawled from room to room.

        After an operation on the sac behind the mastoid bone of my left ear, the episodes subsided. I recuperated, but neglected to consider what my body was trying so desperately to teach me. I didn’t explore what I could learn from Meniere’s.

       After recuperating from the operation, I once again began producing hour-by-hour schedules, demanding that I write so much each day, exercise so much, complete a certain number of odd jobs around the house each day.

     The result? Ten more years of ill-health that culminated in a seriously major operation on my back in March of this year.

The time has come for me to examine what my body and the Universe are trying to teach me. To do that I must wander back to what’s been said to me and what’s happened in these last twenty-five years.

     I remember telling a friend that I just couldn’t figure out how to get an agent to represent my writing. Judy said, “Go with the flow. You try to control too much.”

     Quite frankly, I wasn’t sure what going “with the flow” meant. Surely I had to plan. No agent in New York would be muttering, “I need a new client. I’ll stick a straight pin in this map of the United States and that’s where I’ll start searching!” And there I’d be, pinned smack dab in Stillwater, Minnesota!

      I didn’t listen to Judy, but continued to plan and to envision the outcomes of all my planning. In fact, I became totally attached to those outcomes: an agent would be delighted with my writing; I’d be published to rave reviews; the first book would sell 50,000 copies, make $100,000, and enable me to build a four-season porch on the house; an editor would ask for another and then another manuscript to publish; I’d become both rich and famous. (Yes, I admit to that dream, wanting to be famous enough that readers would eagerly await my next book.)

      Several years after Judy’s remark—the one I ignored—I read an article in which the author encouraged readers to dream big, but to resist becoming attached to outcomes. She said that the Universe had much more to give us than our paltry desires.

      She, too, spoke of going with the flow; of entering my dream river and floating downstream to wherever it took me. I liked this image; it spoke to me.

      Here’s the summing up: I’m hoping that while I rest and nap and sleep during these months of recuperation, I will also let go of outcomes and simply embrace what my life is right now. I’m blogging, and that, as a number of you reminded me in your comments last week, is a way of being published.

      I’m also hoping that from all this musing, I’ll learn something truly new. I have no idea what. I only know that I can feel the cracks opening within me—the cracks through which the light will shine through as Leonard Cohen wrote.

      Peace.

A Need to Control

The past few years of my life can be summed up with an old Yiddish expression: “Man plans. God laughs.” For the past thirty-five years, I think God has been guffawing at my detailed plans for writing and getting published.

I’d like to explore that with you in this post and several that will follow. This is a big issue in my life—one that I’m grappling with since I had serious major back surgery in March. Health issues have accompanied me for many years, and I’m wondering if they are an indicator of what’s amiss with my life.

Let’s begin with a confession: I’ve always been a planner. That is to say, I’ve always tried to control the events of my life. I make schedules, routines, regimes—all those things that indicate doing this before that and getting this done today and that tomorrow.

All my long life, I have been a person who gave herself deadlines. By such and such a time, a day, a month, a year I will have accomplished this or that—mostly with regard to writing. That was necessary when I worked as an editor and had projects with deadlines that had to be met for publication purposes. But those deadlines are no more.

Now there are self-imposed deadlines that encompass my whole day: Walking. (How far? How often? Which route?) Doing core exercises. (Three or five times a week? All or just a few of the twelve the doctor gave me? Morning or afternoon?) Polishing a convent memoir I want to self-publish. (A chapter a day? Add more incidents? Explain more? Learn to use social media? Read books about marketing? And by when do I need to know everything? What kind of research regime do I need to establish?)

When I took the Myers-Briggs Inventory way back in the 1980s, my chart showed I was strongly intuitive, that details flummoxed me. But as the years have passed, I seem to rely much more on details. Details piled on details. I’ve lost—or misplaced—my trusty intuition.

No one, except myself, is standing over me wearing a hardhat, wielding a clipboard, and checking off the detailed items I accomplish each day. I have become my own taskmaster. And my thoughts don’t leap—intuitive-wise—to the next step: I need to have it writing done, planned.

With regard to writing I am struggling with throwing in the proverbial towel. I’ve been boxing my own shadows for the last thirty-five years.

I have planned and planned for how to get published and yet little has happened. My trying to control the outcome of my writing—and there has been only one acceptable outcome—being published—has resulted only in frustration.

Something is amiss. If I am meant to be published, then why—if I do the work—doesn’t that happen?

All my plans have led to disappointment. And it’s really sad that I’m unable to appreciate just being able to write.

So what is the answer?

I think it’s letting go. Going with the flow. Surrendering.

Next week I’ll share with you where I am with that.

Note that I’m “planning” to post again next Sunday. You see, I just can’t stop planning and scheduling. I’m steeped in a lifetime of control.

I wish you peace, pressed down and overflowing. I wish the same for myself.

The Process for Producing My Memoir

Three weeks have passed since I posted the announcement that I’d asked nine readers to assess my recently completed convent memoir. I’ve heard from four of them. By the end of the month I hope to know what the others think about the story. Today I’ll detail how I got to the fourth draft that I sent them.

      In my last posting, I explained that I began the memoir back in July 2014. By October, I had a first draft of 65,000 words. Everything was there, I thought, except for the ending. It didn’t share itself with me.

      I decided to take a month off. In that way, I might come back to the manuscript as if the words didn’t belong to me. Then I could see more easily how to edit it into a second draft.

       In fact, three months passed before I returned to writing. During that time, I experienced a severe allergic reaction to medication, deepening concern about my rising glaucoma pressure, and two bouts of pneumonia. None of this was conducive to assessing that first draft.

     By mid-February 2015, I felt healthy enough to begin work on a second draft. As I mused about those long-ago convent days, I added newly remembered anecdotes. However, my work was sporadic because within six weeks, I was in Emergency with a back problem that left me unable to sit at the computer for more than ten minutes at a time.

      In May, I completed that second draft. It was now 92,000 words. Once again I planned on taking a month off and then beginning a third, and possibly, final draft. However, new health problems waylaid that plan.

      By mid-August I began to feel equal to writing again. To begin, I read the second draft. It was ponderous and repetitious. I realized then that I could spend many more months, maybe years, fooling around with the memoir. It might never get done. So I decided to impose a deadline on myself. To do so, I contacted readers to ask if they’d have time during the month of November to read the memoir.            

      With that self-imposed deadline, I began the proposed third draft in which I hoped to rid the manuscript of repetition. By mid-October, I had cut 10,000 words and was down to 82,000. That still seemed long to me. I wanted to get in the 70-75,000 range.

      Now I had only a week to clear my mind before I began a final pass-through. I spent the final two weeks of October working on the fourth draft. That eye-opening experience revealed haphazard writing. I found countless extraneous words. Rambling sentences. Poor transition and organization.

      Also, because many sentences gravitated between who I was in 1958 and who I am now, readers would be torn between two time periods. I wanted to draw them into the world of 1958-1966 and keep them there for the duration of the memoir.

      With these problems in mind, I ruthlessly cut the third draft to create a fourth one. By October 31, 2015, I had a 74,000-word manuscript that represented what Dee Ready/Sister Innocence thought and felt nearly fifty years ago. It was as authentic as I could make it.

       Now I need to trust my readers to tell me if I’ve succeeded in my attempt to capture that young woman’s joy and angst. In my next posting, I’ll let you know how those readers have responded to the memoir.  

Waiting Is—I Tell You—Hard

Over a month ago, I posted for the first time in ten months. My plan was to begin posting and reading blogs again on a regular basis. What I’ve learned in a rather long life is that plans “oft go awry”! What I hadn’t planned for is the time necessary for completing a memoir.

I began this memoir—one centered on my years in the convent—back in July 2014. I’ve now written four drafts of it. And as Wordsworth would say, “My heart leaps up when I behold” a completed manuscript!

Sister Innocence. Age twenty-three. 

This particular 74,000-word memoir originated with a request from an agent way back in June 2014. I’d sent her a query about my cat fantasy manuscript—The Gift of Nine Lives. While exploring my blog, she discovered I’d been in the convent.

The same day I e-mailed the query, she responded, asking me if I’d ever considered writing a convent memoir. If so, she said, she’d be interested in looking at it.

My friends in Minnesota call me “no-grass-grows-under-her-feet Ready!” That was never truer than with this memoir. I sat down at the computer and for two weeks didn’t even brew my daily shots of tea. By the end of that time, I had twenty polished pages to show her.

I pasted them into an e-mail and sent it to the agent. I never heard from her again.

Recently, I looked at those twenty pages and could see why she’d expressed no interest in pursuing the idea. The writing was amateurish. Wordy. Dull. A lot of telling and not much showing; a lot of explaining; a lot of philosophizing. A lot of boring detail. You got it—Lousy!  

Despite the agent’s lack of interest, a friend who knew quite a bit about publishing encouraged me to continue. “Dee,” she said, “you want to get published. A convent memoir just might get an agent’s attention. More so I think than your first-century Palestine novel. Or the one about Bronze-Age Greece.”

“But those two grabbed me. Doing something about the convent sounds boring.”

“It won’t once you get into it.”

“It’s ancient history. Who’d be interested?”

“Your blog readers liked your convent stories. I bet there’s lots more readers out there who’d read it.”

“But what about the novels?”

“Get the memoir done and published. Then readers will want more from you. That’s when you’ll get the novels published.”

“You think?”

“It’s worth a try.”

She was right. It was worth a try. And I did have some basic questions niggling my inquisitive brain. I’d been twenty-two when I entered the convent; nearly thirty-one when I left. Who was I then? Why had I entered? And more importantly, why had I left when so many stayed?

I opened myself to memories. Welcoming my summons, they came. With some came tears. With others, a great lassitude. With still others I felt the wonder of being young and in love with the idea of monasticism.

Next Sunday, I’ll write more about the months that followed. Today I’ll close by saying that nine readers—of various ages and background—are now reading/assessing the manuscript. I hope that before the end of November, I’ll know their thoughts. The big questions are, of course, does the story have an audience? Is the writing strong enough to interest that audience? Does it grab the reader?

In writing for all those months, I got lost in a thicket of words. I no longer have an objective view of what’s in that manuscript. I hope by the end of this month I will.

Waiting, my friends, is hard!!!!!

Peace.