Looee finishes her Nano Novel - almost

Looee finished her word count for the day: 2,037. She could have written more, but figured she could chunk out the remaining 1521 words in no time at all tomorrow, and tomorrow she would have the time if she didn’t waste it like she did today. It amazed her how easy it was to spend time like it has no value. Just run here, run there, check this out, check that out. She didn’t even remember her day very well. She did remember that she got next to nothing done even though she supposedly had lots of time. She did take a nice walk with Emma who was a good listener and would walk, arm in arm with her, along the beach as Looee picked up unusual shells, took pictures of beautiful moments, and discussed the things Emma might consider doing now that she was alone. Actually, they were both alone and could do things together. They did discuss needing to go back to Vegas to have chocolate martinis and hot fudge sundaes. None of the friends wanted to start making the martinis at home as they’d all become alcoholics before you could say social security.

She knew it wouldn’t be hard to complete her word count tomorrow, November 30^th, the last day of National Novel Writing Month. This was her fourth attempt, and her fourth win she thought proudly. To win, one must complete 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. She started to think “I guess I shouldn’t count it as a win quite yet. I could get hit by the proverbial bus, but probably I won’t.”

However, she’d already been hit by her bus. Her husband of 40 years had left her. She didn’t know if it would be permanent, but he was tired of her woo woo ways and wanted more realism in his life. Realism. She didn’t care for it at all. Whose realism is it anyway? Everyone’s realism was different and she liked hers. She didn’t like being alone, and she felt guilty, as if she had kicked him out, but she had hidden her gifts and talents long enough. She wanted to come out of the closet so to speak and share her truths with the world.

She was ready to get up and start doing something else. She decided to go downstairs to get something to eat. She blew out the candle that she always lit when she wrote, or did anything at the desk in order to burn up any untoward energies. She never left it lit when she went away from the desk since the incident of the burning desk several years previous. She’d lost a lot of paper and her cell phone melted a little too. As she headed for the kitchen her inner voice piped up and shouted at her:

“Hey, where are you going? You’re not hungry, just get back here! That’s right. Go on, sit down, light that candle.”

“Oh you’re right,” she said to herself. “I’m not hungry, just wanting something to make me feel better. She decided to do something that she felt would help to answer the gnawing she was feeling inside. She decided to do some bibliomancy – the art of opening a book and expecting an answer – and maybe even finish the novel early.

Her original novel this year, her 4^th year writing a novel with hundreds of thousands of others across the world through NANOWRIMO, had been a story about a pod of souls who had come to the plant to do something or other that was important and good. The issue was that they all needed to be together and there was one soul missing; she’d been seduced by some bad guys who were keeping her well ensconced into the physical world where she would not be very interested in the spiritual part of her life, and so would not be tempted to find this group of souls who were waiting to do something fabulously important.

She liked the story, but was having trouble making it work and was also obsessed with Charlie leaving her. She decided that what she really wanted was to heal the relationship inside herself so she could really let him go and in turn let herself go free. So she called her novel Heart Break because she decided that she’d put the breaks on her heart and was wanting to release and let them go. Today’s writing had been quite fruitful. She had started to write about the relationship and the things she wanted to blame him for and the things she didn’t want to take responsibility for.

She realized that her biggest issue, though her friends might not agree, was that she didn’t feel very worthy because she didn’t feel that she was doing anything of value with her life. She was feeling like a lump of coal waiting for a fire to be lit under it. But until Charlie left she was happy being a lump of coal and had no problems staying that lump, but she knew that she was being hard on herself. She did have a life. She did do things.

“What I am aware of,” she had declared in her novel, “is that this crazy lack of confidence in myself and my unwillingness to release and let go of my past is holding me back from being the incredible being that I was born to be. I really do want to appreciate myself and know myself as worthy.”

“My worth is intrinsic,” she called up to the moon. “It is not based on who I know, the house I live in, the car I have, the food I eat or don’t eat, the weight of my body, what I do for a living or anything else.”

“I believe that God made me and the guy (or girl or it) doesn’t make junk. I don’t know how I know that is true, but I’d bet my soul on it!” She started to laugh and said “I guess I am betting my soul on it. In my heart I know that we are all worthy, we are all good, even the worst of us.”

If Kate were here right now listening to me, or reading over my shoulder, she thought, she would be having a coronary. It’s what I believe and I’m out of the closet now baby! She said mimicking Kate’s voice.

She sighed, opened her document and continued writing “My true, insane, airy fairy nature is on the page for all to see. I know this sounds crazy, but I have a swelling of joy and peace inside, and my heart is smiling. Heck it’s laughing. And that tells me I’m right. So I will open A Course in Miracles and know that it will confirm this.”

She opened to page 270 and the first words on the page were “Yes, you are blessed indeed. Yet in this world you do not know it. But you have the means for learning it and seeing it quite clearly.”

“So HAH!” she said, “I am worthy. A Course in Miracles says so.” She looked at the shelf and decided to continue. She pulled down the book Frequency, by Penny Pearce.

She opened the book, but got confused. The first quote was by Donald Hatch Andres and said “The universe is more like music than like matter.” (page 24)

She began reading and it was all about vibrations and beings sensitive to and picking up the vibrations around us. Then she decided to turn to the previous page and saw START BY BEING PRESENT. In caps, just like that.

She sat with her eyes closed, becoming quite and present. She breathed deeply and evenly and when she opened her eyelids, bringing her consciousness back into the room, her eyes were shiny and she had a broad smile on her lips. She wrote “What I am discerning from this is that when I feel like I am unworthy, when I feel like I am confused and frustrated I may be picking up something I don’t want and don’t need to hold on to. I just need to let it pass. It’s just music, it will flow and float and I don’t need to hang on to it. I just need to START BY BEING PRESENT. The truth is that God is present in each moment, and THAT is the vibration I want to tune into. Next…”

She decided that she couldn’t just use her spiritual books so pulled her copy of the 10^th anniversary edition of “Tin House” from the shelf. Again she heard Kate’s voice in her head saying: “Girl, everything you’ve opened so far is fiction. Jeez!”

She smiled and laughed a little. She loved Kate’s down-to-earth attitude about life even though it wasn’t her own. “I know this one is going to be good. The call out on the page she opened to said “What Brantford had expected from life and what it had actually given him must have been so distinct and so dissonant that he probably felt his dignity dropping away little by little until he simply wasn’t himself anymore.”

“OH MY GOD. OMG,” she said out loud. She laughed at herself. OMG was initial speak that the kids used today. She was getting pretty good at it as she loved to be up on the latest in cultural literacy. She continued to write: “The part that resonates with me is that the wear and tear of Brantford’s life caused him to not be himself any more. I am not myself any more, and it is time for me to get myself back. This will be my task from here on in. My task is, like Michelangelo’s was, to take the marble and remove the bits that are not the beautiful statue.”

She concluded the day’s writing with “It is time to take the breaks off my heart. It is time to step on the gas of my loving and go. It is time to explore and express and become the me I have always wanted to be. I’m not far from 69 and it’s time. I’m a poet and I don’t even know it. Life is good, like it should – be. Well, that wasn’t such a great rhyme, but I will call it a close rhyme. At least I feel like I’m back on track, the close call I had to finishing my life as a lump of coal on the floor is over. I am up and running again and only 1,000 words, exactly, from being done!”

Procrastingation

Yahoo! I read in a recent e-mail that procrastination does not equal laziness. It only means that I am not aligned with my desires. Could this be true and how DO I align?

Here is what I read:

“What is the definition of procrastination? It means: I can feel within my Energy sensor that this action is not in perfect alignment at this time.” Abraham (Abraham-Hicks.com)

Okay, so this is the biggest woo woo statement I’ve heard in ages (and I LOVE and agree with much woo woo), but it seems to give all the lazy butts in the world an out: we can’t do it, we’re just not aligned! I guess we just need to hang out here in front of the TV until our alignment ship comes in!

This sounds like my students and one of the reasons I don’t really want to go back to teaching: “Sorry Ms. Grossman, I just wasn’t aligned enough to do my homework.” Truthfully, that IS what they were saying, and they were right, maybe my job should have been to help them get more aligned. When I don’t want to do something, when it feels forced and chore-like, if I do it anyway, it’s often a painful experience and the result is often shoddy or half-assed; therefore, I might as well not have done it at all.

‘But HOW????!!!’ I asked myself, after thinking that I can’t just play games, watch movies, hang with friends, and read books all day …am I supposed to do that? If I wait until I’m in alignment to do something, I’ll never do anything – what then? Dirty toilets, bills unpaid, work incomplete, letters not answered, meals not cooked, cats not fed, taxes not paid, clothes unwashed and un-ironed.

SO HOW??? “Ah, there…,” as Hamlet reminded us as he was trying to decide whether or not to be – “…is the rub.” How do align myself? This once joyful news turned to instant depression as just thinking about HAVING to align myself felt like hard work. I started to wonder if I was just going to succumb to loser status and never line up with anything, or if there was a magic button that I could push to get me into alignment.

I decided that I was NOT a loser, and that this magic button was my holy grail! How will I enthusiastically align myself to the tasks that I must do? This process is still in its infancy, but I have made progress. I first looked at ways that others have used – rewards and punishment. If I do this, then I get that. If I don’t do this, I CAN’T get or do that. Been there, done that – doesn’t work.

What about ideal scenes and visualizations? These are tools I’ve learned and not used to their fullest extent. I started to fantasize an outcome that would enhance my life and make me feel good. It took some creativity and brain power as I thought about my house which has been neglected for some time. I was having trouble finding a compelling enough vision for cleaning the house. I couldn’t seem to visualize with any level of believability that Brad Pitt would show up at my doorstep. But as I began to visualize my home nice and clean, I realized that that is how I really do like it (I miss my housekeeper who is not working because she is seriously ill).

I didn’t want to overwhelm myself because I wanted this to work, and procreation, at this point, has become more or less a life style, and cleaning the house is not a 15 minute job. So, I remembered an old phrase… “three-foot-tosses.” I didn’t have to do everything now. Sitting comfortably in my meditation chair I clearly visualized my sinks clean, the counters clear save for a few toiletries and my bamboo plant, the floor free of cat littler, the mirrors glistening, the carpets sweet and cat-hair free, and low and behold – I actually wanted to clean my bathroom! I got up and immediately started on the task. The joy I felt when I actually finished was quite amazing, and the volume of cat hair collected in my vacuum was quite exciting! I loved looking around. My reflection was smudge free, the counter tops and sinks were hair-free, gunk-free, and shiny. I was immediately motivated to go to bathroom number two, but by the time I had completed bathroom number three, I was ready to bestow sainthood on my housekeeper! How on earth does she do bathrooms and floors and everything else and so quickly?!? I guess I know what career I will never pursue. I can housekeep, but I need my visions and three-foot tosses. Having accomplished this mundane task, I started to look at another task that would need aligned motivation.

I’ve been saying I want to write for years, and November 1^st was the 11^th inauguration of NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth (NANOWRIMO). I have done it successfully twice before, so I know that I can. But last year was a race to the finish. I got it done at the 11^th hour. The goal is 50,000 words in 30 days and on the 1^st I took my first step toward my latest novel, or more accurately, the first step of stringing together 50,000 words that will all, more or less, have something to do with each other.

NANOWRIMO motivation is actually quite un-writer-like, but it works. I love the process of competition and I love being around people, and there are NANOWRIMO groups in every town in America. So far, there are 172,000 aspiring novelists signed up. Many of us apparently like to write together. Isn’t writing supposed to be a solitary endeavor? Not in this venue apparently. I love being with people, I love writing, and I love competition.

Day one of NANOWRIMO: I, from my California home, wrote with a group in Cape Cod. Actually, it was me and one person in Cape Cod. She was with others at the Hyannis Borders, but she and I were in textland together.

“NOW!” She would text, and I would start my intensive writing until I heard the text tone on my cell phone 30 minutes later. I looked down, and the text said “STOP.” I then texted over my word count and when our two “word wars” were done, I was happily on my way – Day 1: 3631 words. Someone else in Cape Cod beat me by about 200 words per round (rats – when I was with them two years ago, I won many of our word wars). My total after day two is 7,279 words! No “word wars” in Mission Viejo, but there were a bunch of people, and the breaks were fun. The required number of words per day to “win” at NANOWRIMO (50K/30Days) is a measly 1667. Of course, now that I have sung the praises of my wondrous daily average (3640), I have a built-in motivation! If I continue at this rate, I’ll hit a grand total of 109,200 words!!! That’s more than the 76,944 words of a favorite: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (I am not saying that what I am committing to paper will rival that book, but AHHHH, I can dream). My goal – okay it’s not really a goal, 50,000 is still the goal, but IF I do manage to keep my current average, I will have written even more words than another great favorite: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban which clocks in at a proud 107,253 words.

Okay, so I get it – to align with my desires I need a deadline, a vivid mental picture, people (even if they’re just on the phone), enthusiasm, and passion (even if they are just manufactured). I’m glad I finally know this about myself at 58 years old! I wonder what my students would have needed to get aligned with writing their essays.

So… can I build up passion for cleaning out my guest bedroom closet? No problem, if I can build enthusiasm for clean toilets, I can build it for a closet. If I build it – it can be done.