Beginnings and endings

02. January 2013 · 6 comments · Categories: Creativity, Mindful living, Nature, Spirituality, Teaching, Travel, Writing

The courtyard between the lodge and the hot springs at Joyful Journey as winter sunset colors the Sangre de Cristo Range in the background.

“Begin as you intend to continue,” my Scots grandmother used to say. Which to me means,

Be thoughtful about how you enter into something, whether a project or a new year. Don’t rush into it; take care with your intentions and dreams, what you hope to achieve and how you imagine getting there.

I heard Grandmother Chris’ lilting voice in my head last Friday during a trip with girlfriends to soak in the hot springs at Joyful Journey Spa. A chance encounter with the conference coordinator  led to my learning that the lodge and events center had an opening for a group the first weekend of spring.

Begin as you intend to continue. 

I’ve been considering beginning a series of writing workshops that nurture both spirit and creativity, based in comfortable surroundings in places that inspire awe and deep thinking. Joyful Journey fits that bill: the small lodge and spa encompass a rural hot springs with a panoramic view of snow-capped peaks, star-studded skies at night, and the peace and quiet of Colorado’s “forgotten” San Luis Valley. Especially in spring when the entire Rocky Mountain Flyway population of sandhill cranes, 20,000 or so statuesque, long-legged and long-necked birds, arrive to dance their spring courting rituals and call in their percussive voices.

So I’m taking a leap and beginning a “Write & Retreat” workshop series offering time out for creative renewal and writing practice, time to let the community of nature work its magic on heart, spirit and inspiration. The first workshop, “Write & Retreat: Cranes & Hot Springs” will take place–appropriately for the renewal theme–on the first weekend of spring, March 21-24, 2013, at Joyful Journey Hot Springs Spa, about 3.5 hours southwest of Denver and an equal distance north of Albuquerque.

Sandhill cranes in the San Luis Valley in spring.

The agenda for this four-day retreatful writing workshop is simple: soak, write, read and talk writing in a small-group workshop setting, retreat into contemplative time, take a drive to watch and listen to the spectacle of the cranes’ dawn flight and dancing, write, read, soak, contemplative time….

Imagine these four days as time to nourish your inner self, to take your writing to new, richer places with an intuitive and experienced teacher, and to practice retreatful habits to bring home to your daily life.

Begin as you intend to continue.

If you’re interested, let me know. I’m still working out the details. Spaces are limited by my preferred workshop size (10-15 writers; there’s also room for companions who come along to soak and see cranes, but won’t attend the workshop).

*****

Trimming the window over the kitchen sink. One down, 36 more to go….

The endings of the title? My new sideline as a trim and finish carpenter is something of a gentle transition (gentle emotionally, if not physically!) to a rather huge ending. Once I’ve finished trimming all 37 openings, put up what seems like miles of baseboard, and invent a shower and tub surround plus a counter for the master bath, this whole half-block property will go up for sale: the house with its custom sculptural sinks, cabinets and sandstone shelves, the cozy guest cottage, and the historic shop (plus the pentanque court, organic kitchen garden and wildflower “lawn”).

I’ll move around the corner to a tiny house built just for me, plus a studio over the garage to house guests and Terraphilia residents.

Endings and beginnings

None of this will happen overnight, which is what I mean by a “gentle” transition. Regardless, I’m ending my time in the house my love helped design and build for us, the place we imagined living out our lives together. We did that, only the end of “together” came sooner than either of us could ever have imagined.

I’m beginning this new year as I intend to continue, walking a mindful and loving path as writer, teacher, and–this I would never have guessed a year ago–finish carpenter. Building a new life with care, and a great appreciation for the community of lives with whom we share this green and blue planet, sparkling with life.

Road Report: Miami and home again

13. November 2012 · 15 comments · Categories: Art, Creativity, Travel, Writing

Biscayne Bay and the Venetian Causeway from my hotel room balcony (that’s Miami Beach in the distance).

Last week I was in Miami, staying in a hotel on the shore of Biscayne Bay. All I saw of South Florida was the view of the bay from my 28th-floor balcony, and the choppy water itself on the five-minute walk between the hotel and the Young Arts campus.

That twice-daily walk was a welcome break before and after the hours in a conference room reading and evaluating 140+ writing submissions in four days with my fellow writing panel members, poet David Lee and novelist Dianne Oberhansley and our coordinator, Mary Lee Adler. Each panelist read every submission, an average of 35 manuscripts read, digested, and scored each day. No wonder my brain still feels numb!

Former Utah poet laureate David Lee engrossed in reading a digital manuscript for Young Arts

Our task was made much easier by the preliminary panel, which met the week before to read and score nearly 1,200 submissions from talented young writers across the country, whittling that enormous virtual pile down. (“Virtual pile” because this year for the first time we read digital manuscripts on individual iPads instead of literal piles of paper stored in files in stacks of banker’s boxes. Even the Luddite among us declared the iPad “pretty useful” by the end of the week. And many trees were saved.)

Our task was also made much easier by the work of the Young Arts staff, especially Letty Bassart, Joe NeSmith, Ty Taylor, and Neidra Ward in Programs, and the IT folks.

Young Arts’ new home in the Bacardi Tower, an iconic example of Cuban Modernist architecture..

These creative and resourceful people managed the transition to Young Arts’ new digital submissions system at the same time as they moved the organization into its new campus, the iconic Bacardi Complex, just days before the panelists in nine artistic disciplines arrived from as far away as Los Angeles to begin screening submissions.

While the Young Arts staff was doing the moving and adjusting to the new computer systems, they also planned a gala Open House for the new complex, including bringing in Young Arts alums to read and perform their work on a balmy Miami evening, plus fabulous food and drink (including, yes, Bacardi rum, donated by the corporation whose buildings Young Arts now owns), films of the program projected onto the tower, cinema folks filming the performances, and a glittering crowd enjoying all of the above. Y’all have my admiration!

This new-to Young Arts campus, built for the Bacardi Company as their US headquarters in the 1960s, is located between two of Miami’s arts districts, and includes enough land for the organization to build a performing arts center, which will be designed by architect Frank Gehry, and a park landscaped to provide outdoor spaces for young artists to work.

The Jewel Box building, lit up for the Young Arts Open House last week.

A smaller building behind the iconic tower, The Jewel Box, named for the stained glass walls that are positively luminous from the inside during the day and at night with the lights on, will be renovated into indoor studio and workshop spaces. The complex offers incredible opportunities for Young Arts to grow its year-round programming, and I’m honored to be part of that.

And of course, there are the young writers, whose work was the focus of our week. As we sat around the conference table reading from our iPads, the quiet was punctuated with “uh huhs!,” chuckles, and the occasional phrase or sentence read aloud, just for the delight of hearing the right words in the right order. We read “blind,” which means we didn’t know anything about each young writer–except their words. And sometimes those words really sing.

The Jewel Box and the famous Bacardi bat from the top floor of the Bacardi Tower, with the blue and white tiles that define the tower in the foreground.

Discovering young writers whose words sing is what carried me though a week of very long days, and then the 12 hours of cab, airport, plane, and driving over the mountains in a snowy night on my journey from sub-tropical Miami home to Colorado.

Yesterday, Veteran’s Day, I woke groggy in the pre-dawn darkness to the sight of the thinnest possible sliver of the waning moon rising next to Saturn over the night-black Arkansas Hills.

“That’s the moon we share,” I murmured out loud, thinking of my love. This time last year he was still with me, entering into that ending that is also a beginning, as Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:

Our lives are an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn. That there is no end in nature but every end is a beginning.

That’s why I do this work. The right words not only sing, they shine, illuminating the truth at the heart of our lives.

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