The Gift

What makes a book one of “The Greatest Books of Our Times?”  I’ve been asked to a Middle School to read from such a book of my choice.  How to decide?

For me, it’s a story:

Early in my marriage, a step-son arrived on my doorstep every other weekend as a troubled 8 year old.  A learning disability imprisoned him as poor reader and student to the point that all his tests had to be read aloud to him.  He didn’t fit in.  He knew it and acted out.  Naturally, he hated reading and books, and all my efforts to read to him were spurned.

One day, a misbehavior earned him time-out, and I offered him his choice—either an hour in his room or sit with me while I read him one chapter of a book.  (I know, I know—it’s contrary to all behavioral advice to make reading a punishment, but I was at wits’ end.)

He considered it and asked how long it would take to read a chapter.  “Probably about 15 minutes,” I said.

Fifteen minutes versus an hour.  He wasn’t bad at math and chose the chapter.  I went to my collection of childhood books, my heart pounding. It thumped away in my chest, warning me that this could be my only chance with him.

The books, stiff and dusty in their rows, whispered of cherished hours. Which to choose?  I stopped at one, remembering pulling it from my mother’s bookshelf, hopeful from the title, though the company it kept was grownup stuff.  By the first chapter, I knew I had found treasure.

Once again I pulled it out and took it back with me, clutched to my still thumping chest and sat with my stepson on the hard cement of the porch (part of the “punishment”).  “Here are the rules,” I said sternly.  “You have to sit still and listen.  I will read one chapter.  After that it is up to you if you want to hear more or go.”

He agreed, and I opened the book.  I read my best, in honor of all the hours my Granny read to me, her voice cracking with the effort to bring the characters to life.  I hoped to reach a young mind with the gift she had given me.  I read and did not look at the boy beside me, afraid to see on his face the boredom of a prisoner doing his time.

When I finished the last word of Chapter One, I snapped the book closed, deliberately keeping my voice matter-of-fact.  “That’s it,” I said.  “What do you want to do?”

There was a long hesitation—maybe it wasn’t so long, but I remember it that way—a silence so deep, you could fall into it, and then one intense word from him—“Read.”

In the years ahead of us, he would repeat that word many times.  We finished the book, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and moved on to many others.  He began to sit next to me, at first to see the pictures, but when there were no pictures, he stayed to move his eyes over the words as I read.  Eventually, I feigned a sore throat and asked him to read a sentence or two, and then a paragraph, and then a chapter, never criticizing as he stumbled and only offering help when he needed it.

One day, I poked my head in his room and asked if he was ready to read Part III of “our” current book.  “Already read it,” he said.  And once again my heart pounded, this time with mixed joy.  He was reading on his own, voraciously, and we were never again to have those special moments together.  But I am not complaining.

He read a lot about ordinary young boys becoming heroes, and I think it helped give him the courage to sign up for the Marines.  Though not a physical boy—he played in the band and was ho-hum about sports—he thrived, and today is a successful career Marine with a wife and a son I hope he will read to.

***

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The Stay Alive Rule or What’s a Writer to Do?

We are hard-wired to want it simple.  Long ago (400 million years) there was only one basic premise under which we operated –Stay Alive!  The conscious part of our brains was evolutionarily geared for simplicity, so we could decide things like where to go hunt and not worry about how to make our bodies get there.

Even today, we don’t ponder how to, say, drink a cup of coffee.  We are happily oblivious of all the electrical, chemical, and muscular complexities required to accomplish the tasks of locating, reaching for, grasping, ferrying cup-to-mouth and swallowing.  We just say, I want it and it happens.  If we suddenly had to consciously oversee all that activity, we would go catatonic with the overload.  The “computer” would freeze up.  Nature designed our consciousness to be left free so we can focus on the Stay Alive rule.

But how “free” are we?  Daily choices bombard us—what to eat, what to wear, what to get for holiday gifts, how to balance our checkbook, our jobs, family, health and social lives.  On top of that, the issues we must decide are tangled in complexity—When does “life” begin?  Is it okay to make animals suffer to find treatments for humans? Where is the line between democracy and stability?  Between freedom and security?

What’s a brain to do?

Naturally, the mind gravitates towards the simple.  We are emotionally attracted to politicians who speak in one-liners that make sense to us even in isolation from context.  Given a choice between choosing between black-and-white or multiple shades of grey, we go with the B&W.  When an issue gets too nuanced or confusing, we feel uncomfortable.   We want to have a right and a wrong; to know who is the good guy and who is the bad; who wins and who loses.  It’s much easier and, perhaps an evolutionary directive to fit people and situations into categories, even if we have to ignore that it’s a round shape going into a square slot.

What’s a writer to do?

Writers wear the modern-day mantle of the story teller, symbolically gathering people together around the fire.  A story can bear the complexities that we reject in other venues.  If well-told, the reader can understand the good in the bad guy, or the bad in the good; see the “other side” of an issue or position or social situation; experience the kaleidoscope of humanity.  This is part of the magic of story, that we can weave the reader into a non-reality that is a truer reality than the one held in the mind.   That is an awesome power and an awesome responsibility.

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I invite you to continue the “Sleigh Bells and Ink Wells” blog hop by visiting Ann K. Albert at http://Anne-K-Albert.blogspot.com.  Have fun!

I also invite you to check out my award-winning debut novel, Noah’s Wife.

Na’amah is Noah’s wife, a brilliant young girl with a form of autism we (now) know as Asperger’s.  Na’amah’s desires only to be a shepherdess on her beloved hills in ancient Turkey, a desire shattered by the hatred of her powerful brother, the love of two men, and a disaster only she knows is coming.

Other participants in the blog hop:

http://Anne-K-Albert.blogspot.com

http://elizabethclarkstern.com/wordpress/

http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/

http://www.sharonheath.com/

http://AuthorMelindaClayton.xanga.com

http://SweetMusicOnMoonlightRidge.blogspot.com/

http://www.leahshelleda.com/

http://SmokyZeidel.wordpress.com

http://www.patriciadamery.com/

http://debrabrenegan.blogspot.com/

http://KnightOfSwords.wordpress.com

You Never Know….

There’s a lot to worry about.

We are worried our investment dollars may not poof back into existence when they poof out. We worry about inflation and that gas prices are too high, or about deflation and that they will go too low.  Writers worry that our stuff will not be good enough, or read enough, or we will have “writer’s block” and not write enough, or will write too much and have to cut … and (yikes!) what if we cut the wrong stuff? We worry that agents or editors won’t love us or, if we are fortunate enough to have a success, we panic that the next project won’t be as good.  Pick a subject; we can worry about it. Everyone, except possibly the enlightened Dalai Lama, worries about something, more likely a lot of things.

Worrying must have had some evolutionary value.  If we never worried about having stuff in lean times, we wouldn’t have invented grocery stores…or shopping.  We plan in response to worry.  If junior is smart, how are we going to pay for college?  Better start saving early.  If junior isn’t smart, we may have to feed him well into his adult life.  Better start saving early.

Some worrying (that leads to planning) is therefore good.  Excess worrying, however, causes stress, and stress is linked to everything from headaches to premature death.  Early man worried about placating emotionally unstable gods and spirits that rocked the world with floods, drought, earthquakes and fire from heaven.  They must have worried incessantly about what they could do about it until they invented shamans to tell them exactly when, where and how much stuff to offer up.  Of course, we are way beyond that now.  I think it’s been days since I knocked on wood to keep from irritating the gods about something I said.

My 4’ 10” grandmother was a Professional Worrier.  She was pretty much undiscriminating about the subject matter, but as I entered my teens, she worried in particular that my hair was not stylish, my cheeks were too pale, and my skirts were too long to catch a boy’s eye.  She worried I would not marry a doctor and that some illness or accident was bound to befall me, probably at the worst time, (i.e., before I got married).  Most of all, she believed I was oblivious about the importance of these things and so, she carried the burden of worrying about them on her own tiny shoulders.

On one family outing, we watched my grandfather puttering around the lake in a small boat. Grandma’s palms were plastered to her cheeks for the entire thirty minutes he’d been having fun.  She sighed, “I’m so worried about him.”

She and I were standing on the bank; Grandpa was several hundred feet away.  Grandma’s concern was always an expression of her love, not something to question, but that day I turned to her and asked, “Why, Grandma?  Why are you worried?  What good does that do?”

“Because,” she responded with a look of disbelieve at my ignorance—“You never know!”

You never know.

True.  Something could happen.  Anything could happen.  And then with a flash of understanding, I got it: Worrying is magic.  If you’ve worried about something, you’ve tipped the scales of fate, you’ve appeased the gods; you’ve knocked on wood.  That’s why when you say, such and such could happen, you add a “God forbid” to the end of it.  Grandma’s strategy was that you should do preventive worrying to keep something bad from happening.  And if you weren’t diligent and hadn’t covered all the bases, something you hadn’t even thought about was sure to sneak up on you … and (God forbid) happen.

The Dahlia Llama sees all this in a very different light.  He says that if there is a solution to a problem, there is no need to worry. And if there is no solution … there is no need to worry.

I, being my grandmother’s descendant, have developed my own, somewhat less enlightened, but workable, strategy:

Refocus your worries.  I like to worry about exactly how I am going to spend all that money should I win a lottery.  You have no idea all the problems such a responsibility raises.  And speaking of responsibility, we could worry about starving people in Africa a little more often than when we are admonishing children to eat what’s on their plate.  We could worry about the polar bear’s diminishing habitat and our chances for surviving on a planet whose thermostat has gone whacko.   But even responsible worrying can become stressful. When the You-Never-Knows of everyday life start to tangle my mind, I refocus on the scientific proclamation that our Universe is possibly a random bubble among many, and it could pop at any moment and annihilate the whole thing.

Now, there is something to worry about!

The Jerusalem Wall

My first glimpse of the Western Wall in Jerusalem was a hurried one, but my eyes immediately filled with unexpected tears.  I am not a “religious” person, but I had no time to figure out what was affecting me about the sight of a stone wall, because we had an appointment underground.

The Cotel Tunnel is an amazing area that runs parallel to the western wall.  Here, history reached out, as it so often did on this trip, and grabbed me.  I knew that King Herod had rebuilt the Jewish Temple, but I hadn’t realized that he had done it “his” way.  The original Temple—imagined by King David and built by King Solomon—sat atop a hill in Jerusalem.  It was destroyed in the 6th Century B.C.E. by a Babylonian king.  Centuries later, King Herod decided to rebuild it, at least in part to appease the people for his close ties with the unpopular Romans.  Herod had studied architecture in Rome and he was not one to do anything on a wimpy scale.

Hated by many, he was nonetheless a gifted architect and a man with vision.  He wanted, not just a temple, but a complex—difficult to do on a sloping hillside, particularly when he did not wish to disturb the stone where Abraham almost sacrificed his son, the foundation stone beneath the original Jewish Temple’s holiest inner sanctum.  So, he built four retaining walls and filled in to the level of the top of the hill, making a level rectangular area while leaving the slab of rock exposed.  Then he built his complex.  And if he were around, I think he’d have the right to say, “Can I build or what?”  According to ancient records, if you hadn’t seen Herod’s temple mount, you hadn’t seen beautiful!  Unfortunately, when the Jews rebelled against the Romans, the Romans tore this treasure down, leaving only the wall standing.

Although more of the wall exists, the western section is the closest to the holiest place of the Jewish Temple, the inner sanctum where the ark was kept (above Abraham’s altar stone).  During the Moslem rule of Jerusalem, a mosque, the Dome of the Rock, was placed in this exact spot, which is also holy to the Moslems, who believe it to be the place where Mohamed was taken up to heaven. When Israel regained control of all Jerusalem (1967), the mosque was not disturbed out of respect for all the diverse religious interests in Jerusalem.

After the tour in the tunnel where we walked along the original level of Solomon’s day, we emerged and I took a few minutes to go sit in the women’s section near the wall.  Again, I was moved, not by the wall itself, but by something I could not at first identify.   Other than the light murmur of prayer, there was silence.  Some of the women sat in plastic chairs and read from prayer books; others held their hands against the wall or worked pieces of folded paper with their own prayers into ancient crevices.  One woman pressed her forehead against the wall as if to bleed all her sorrows into the stone.  I sat a little distance away, completely alone, and yet, on another level, I was part of every Jewish person in the world.

As a child, during Passover services, we always recited a phrase–“Next year in Jerusalem.”  I found it puzzling.  It seemed perfectly fine to celebrate at my home; why would we want to have Passover in another city?  But that was before I knew much about ancient history, or the Holocaust, or the Inquisition, the pogroms, or the miracle that was the state of Israel.

And now, here it was, a land of Jews, besieged by enemies all around, but here…still here.  And I understood why people chose to come and live in constant danger to have and keep this place.  And I understood this piece of wall stood not just to hold back dirt, but as the place of refuge, the heart of a people.  And I understood why I wept.

[More pictures]

How To Know If You are a “Real” Writer

HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOU ARE  A “REAL” WRITER?  This question has plagued me for a long time, and I saw it recently on a writing web site, so I am not the only one who has asked it. For a long time, I was unpublished and wrote in the “closet.” I was afraid if I admitted to doing it (writing, folks) I would have to face that dreaded question: “Oh, what have you published?” To which, I’d have to say, “Well, nothing… but my mother loves my stuff.” And then go crawl under a rock.

I’m sure there are people out there for whom this would not be a problem, people who have lots of self-confidence and don’t care what anyone thinks of them. I tip my hat to you. For the rest of us, what to do? Should we go to the writer’s conference and expose ourselves as wanna-be’s or should we just stay home?

Now that I have a novel published, I have the perspective to return to this perplexing question. How do you know when you are a “real” writer? What is one? Does anyone who picks up a pen or taps on the computer qualify? Do you have to be published? How many times? Does self-publishing count? Does payment in art journal copies qualify or do you have to be paid for it? If you win an award or get an honorable mention, does that jump you to the “writer status?” According to the IRS, a professional is anyone who is paid for their work. My first publication to a magazine netted me $8.48. It was a great feeling to finally reach that milestone, but somehow it didn’t make the question go away.

Is the aspired distinction merely to be found in the eye of the beholder? If I like what you write, does that make you a “writer” in my eyes, but if I don’t care for it, you aren’t? Saying someone is a “good writer” or a “bad writer,” at least slaps the tag on them, but is he/she a “real” writer? If you keep a journal under the bed and scribe in it daily, are you one or not?

Okay, I’ve asked the question, now I’ll share my epiphany. By college, I was quietly writing fiction, but I took a class in poetry because my roommate talked me into it. It turned out to be the best move I could have made. Everyone brought their hearts and souls to class with their poems. And it was brutal. I learned that there was only one rule—Does it work?

Not, does it express what you really want to say? Not, does it use alliteration and rhyme correctly? Only, does it work? You can break rules; you can follow rules; you can cry big crocodile tears onto your paper, but the only question is that one.

So, it doesn’t matter if you are published or not, have won awards or not. It doesn’t matter what you write or how often you write. It doesn’t matter. A writer wants it to work! If it doesn’t work, a writer is willing to produce it for critique, to listen to criticism, to cut, to add, to change, to ask questions, to learn, to rewrite, to stand his/her ground, to start over, to rewrite again—whatever it takes to make it work.

Of course, you can write without being “a writer.” And there is nothing wrong with writing for your own pleasure or self discovery or for your mother. Kudos to you and keep writing! But if you have a passion to tell a story, to paint in words, to reach people, to move people, then you understand the question—Am I a “real writer?” And if you have that passion and are willing to work to make it “work,” then, in my book, you is one!

T.K. Thorne

author of Noah’s Wife

ForeWord Review’s Historical Fiction Book of the Year

www.tkthorne.com

Ballooning Over Cappadocia

(For Çimen Filliz PAŞA)

From the womb of the predawn dark, fire spouts a blue finger tipped with gold into a wrinkled spread of fabric– a sleeping balloon lying lifeless on the ground. Only slowly does she stir awake, nursing on the warm gusts of air. Like a chick that knows nothing except primal hunger, she opens her mouth wide.

In the distance, great ovals–fellow balloons suffused with the light of their own fires–flash bold colors in encouragement.

Now, our newborn rises above the flame, tethered to the earth and her need for more air…more…and more. While she feeds, we climb into her basket, watching her sides expand above us into a massive cylindrical sail. When she is satiated, hands reach to untether her and, ever so gently, she lifts. Cradled in a mother’s woven arms, we rise above the land of mothers.

Up, into a holy quiet punctuated with the roar of flame throwers–

–we are moved to silence.

In the morning light we join the others, a troupe of ascending jellyfish or whales gliding the ocean depths. Our balloon feels the wind and gives to it, but keeps us close to her so we feel nothing as we slide through the silk of sky.

Below us opens a panorama shaped by ancient violence into alien towers and creases, into cliffs streaked with colors from cream to rust, and fairy castle cones that spear the air, their pocked sides a refuge to fox and man.

We tease the cliff face, skimming close enough to snatch a breath or tuft of grass. With a laugh at us, our balloon catches the updraft and lifts to greet her brother sun, seeming to pull him up like a bauble over a ridge crest.

Too soon, we descend. Too soon, we stand, creatures of the earth again and watch our balloon settle and collapse. She dies with quiet dignity, the dignity of one who but falls into slumber, only waiting to awake again and kiss the sky.

The Whirling Dervishes of Cappadocia

Tell me how wonderful I am or I will strike you with lightening, cause your fields to lie fallow and your women to be barren!

      Why would an omnipotent God, or even powerful gods, need to be praised? It seems an egomaniacal, neurotic demand. “Praise” has never a comfortable concept for me. But twice in my life, experiences have shifted my understanding. The first was in a room of believers who raised their voices in spontaneous musical “praise,” each individual contributing whatever he/she felt moved to create. Somehow, all that miscellaneous individualism coalesced into a glorious harmony. To compare it to even the best choral performance would be like trying to pass a piece of glass as a diamond.
     The second came unexpectedly in Cappadocia, Turkey, where I was privileged to sit on the front row and see the famous Sufi Whirling Dervishes. Contrary to the spontaneous singing, this was a scripted, formal service and yet… Well, let me start by saying I was expecting men in white robes and funky hats to spin around in circles like children, but without the dizziness. And, after a solemn introduction of chanting and music—wooden flute, a stringed instrument, and drums–that is exactly what I saw, and yet…not at all what I saw.
    They entered the dimly lit square area beneath a domed ceiling, stately figures covered in black, their tall, cylindrical hats representing tombstones, a reminder that life is a whisper on eternity’s wind. Each knelt and bowed, sitting quietly for a while. Then one by one, they stood, shed the black cloaks and began to turn, hands crossed on their chest to represent the oneness of God, the weighted hems of their snowy robes lifting. After a moment, their arms rose as though gravity no longer claimed them, caught in the vortex of the whirl like filaments of spider silk in a gentle waft. One hand cupped upward, filling with the vibrancy from above, the other down to the earth, symbolizing the dervish’s position as conduit between both. There was a moving simplicity in their spinning, a reflection of the elemental nature that lies in the indescribable smallness of the sub-atomic and the unimaginable vastness of space. The whirl of energy’s essence; the spiral arms of a galaxy.
     In some mysterious way, the audience became participants in the dervishes’ peaceful, joyful state. This was worship…but the word is flawed. It doesn’t convey the fact that praise is not the Holy’s need, but ours–our need to connect to that which is both beyond ourselves and the essence of our true selves, to recognize that our skin is only the most temporary container.
     To maintain that awareness for an extended period of time, as whirling dervishes, yogis, or monks do, takes a great deal of practice, but such intensity is not a requirement the Universe imposes. Nor is the phenomenon of a spontaneous melding chorus. All that is needed, I think, is that we lift our focus from busyness and recognize any of the countless moments that wait for us everywhere–moments of the holy, moments of praise.