Stepping Sideways into Inspiration

I did it! I got the photos to work! You can see my photo at right (taken by Lucie LeBlanc, an amazing portrait, landscape, and action photographer).

I woke up this morning with the intention to put full attention to the Overview of the book proposal, the "last mile" of my last post. An inspiration came to me: to begin the Overview with an excerpt from one of the chapters. The book proposal expert wrote that you can open with a narrative, as well as a quote, anecdote, startling statistic, etc. Since statistics are my (recently) acquired ability, and narratives my natural bent, I found myself leaping out of bed (as best I could with this lingering cold) and going to the chapter that had come to mind, and copying a portion of it into the beginning of the Overview. My own words, written some years ago, looked back at me: a memory from age 12 having to do with money and shame. At the time I wrote it, it seemed so awkward and raw a self-transparency; but today, amidst all the sales tools of the book proposal, it was like a friend: poignant, real, evocative.

I inserted it into the file on the Overview. But then what? The expert said to create a cultural context for your book, before introducing it proper. I did my best. I, as they say in Yiddish, fumferred around seeking the all-powerful thought, phrase, trying this and that. But there was a sense of trying.

Then, suddenly, what had been cooking in my unconscious overnight bubbled up to the surface. It didn't have to do with the Overview, though; it had to do with the possibility of using my desktop publishing program, with all its visual artistry potential, to get illustrations and photos onto my website. Eagerly, I let go of the Overview for the moment, telling myself--wisely, I think--that a break would be valuable. And I figured out a most ingenious, and complex, route for translating my photos and illustrations that I have scanned into my MS Word files into a "webpage" on the graphics program, and from there onto my website. Finally, I can do this! I have my photo on my website, at last, so I am a face to go with the words (www.essentialwriting.com), as well as some illustrations. I was so tickled with my ability to figure this out--because it was really complicated!--that I kept on going and going and going...an Energizer Bunny of sorts.

Was I procrastinating the Overview writing? Or was I stepping sideways into creation?

To find a way through something that has seemed to be closed in and of itself releases energy, inspiration, hope. The focus of this was getting photos up onscreen. But the illumination that opened the door to my initial thought, "What if I did this...?" was also given to me. This kind of gift is always a breakthrough-joy, and it's well-known in the history of creating that at some point you do have to let go, let things cook, let the side-door of consciousness work for you, stop trying to batter down the front door. We all know this, at least unconsciously; but the desire for something--control? completion?--keeps us at it.

"Good for me!" I thought, linking photos from one context to another to another, back and forth, in and out. But would there have been any linkage to do had something larger than "me" not put the idea in my mind?

So the Overview, and my fears about not knowing how to put this seemingly make-or-break section together, could be well served by relaxing the "me" of it. For now that I look at it, that "me" is the obstacle. "What if I can't do it right?" "What if I can't make it amazing?" This pressure to dazzle constricts the self, and brings forth the false "me"--the facade of the quiet child happier to look at the trees than stand in front of the class and deliver a book report to all onlooking eyes. How can it be that, having written God knows how many pages from as deep and true and intimate a place as I could--for my own sake, for my own heart, and to meet the deep Self rising up to love me--suddenly presenting the cover, the wrapping, of this transparency causes more fear and flight than moving into the real thing? (Though fears were there, until the release of truth sighed through.)

What I love about blogging, to my amazement, is the ability to process. To not have it together before it is together, but to look at this and that, to say what's true in and for the moment; and it's that telling--and more, that self-listening--that opens the door. "Ah," I can now realize, "I'm afraid that the me I will show is not dazzling enough." Ah, a release in the solar plexus at that one. Because my mother, bless her soul and memory, was a dazzler, or at least a person who felt she should be a dazzler (as my book makes clear); and, growing up, my secret shame was that I was not dazzling at all.

In my first marriage, to a wonderful classical musician, when we were both young enough to lie awake dissecting our backgrounds and lives, he said to me one day, "Not everyone had a mother for whom image was everything." That was a revelation to me. Now, so many years later, I know this to be true; and I know how many decades I have put into finding the truth of the felt sense, the truth of the inner knowing; and how an image that doesn't match that inner experience is only empty image, and not of interest to me.

But still--when I find myself in a position of meeting the standards and conventions of someone else, like the honeycomb of the book proposal sections, something old arises that says, "Don't even bother going inside to find out what's there. It's not a matter of what's inside. Just figure out what they want and make it look good." Ah--sigh, sigh. This was most of my life as an undergraduate, sorry to say. I became an A student this way, an honors student. And then, the leaving of that safe, tormenting trail over the years....

None of what I write comes from that place any more. None of what I counsel my clients comes from that place. I have such trust in the wisdom and authenticity of the deeper Self. And yet I find myself a scared child, trying to do it right, sure I'm not dazzling enough to take the stage....

It's good to say these things. They make perspective. I can feel more breath coming in--a sure sign of "in"spiration. In fact, I have been onstage many times--as a singer, and reading my work here and there. And what makes a powerful performance--a "dazzling" performance--is not a good package, but good presence, total engagement at the same time that there is a witness whose existence goes deeper than the "me" in the moment.

What will come out of this? I can't say, exactly. But at least my feet are on the ground, and this Overview--which I might call a sighting from the top of the mountain of the landscape below--begins to belong to the deeper "me."

This is the excerpt from my book that will begin the Overview (perhaps with a sentence of introduction before it):

My mother and I had been downtown walking, walking for hours, it seemed. I was twelve and longing to be more like my friends than like her—a longing that our sudden, inexplicable poverty had only increased. When we found ourselves in a part of town way beyond home, with the sun starting to go down, I said, "I’m tired. Let’s take a bus home."

My mother looked down at the pavement and growled, "We don’t have the money for it."

The sky was streaked with pink. It was the about the only thing with color. There were no trees at all, here; everything was paved, and the brick smokestack buildings of the projects down the street were grimed into grayness. Suddenly, something about these projects looked familiar.

"I think that’s where Carole Schreiber lives," I said, pointing, just because it was an anchoring point, and just because it was true. Carole had been my counselor in daycamp, sixteen years old to my twelve, vivacious and pretty, with thick curly black hair. She was worlds apart from me: she wore makeup and smoked cigarettes, and joked familiarly with boys. Yet she was kind to me, she smiled at me often, I grew inches when with her, from the look in her eyes.

My mother straightened up, hearing this, and her eyes brightened. "We’ll borrow a dollar for the bus from her," she declared, pleased with this inspiration, and tugged me forward with finality.

My mother strode before me on the way to Carole’s building, plowing the air on her four-inch high heels as if she were squaring back her shoulders to approach a bank for a loan. I dragged my heels behind hers reluctantly. "Do we have to?" I muttered. "I don’t mind walking home." This reversal suddenly seemed preferable to showing up at Carole’s door and having to endure my mother’s asking her for a dollar. I would have walked home in the dark, exhausted, in a flash rather than present our abjectness as a family to Carole’s sophisticated eye.

"Don’t be ridiculous," my mother retorted, gathering speed. "We’re almost there."

I saw "Schreiber" listed by the doorbell when we reached the project’s front door. Now there was no excuse. We rode up in the elevator not talking, my stomach clenched into a fist. "Here it is," my mother whispered, tracking the apartment number. And then we were standing together in the hall right in front of Carole’s apartment, my heart pounding wildly as my mother reached her finger out to ring the bell.

I wanted so much not to be there that I could scarcely breathe. At least if my mother did all the talking. Maybe I could acquit myself silently, could convey with my eyes or a tilt of my head that I was sorry, I’d been dragged here, this was not my idea….

And then, at the crucial moment, when the door opened up a crack and there was Carole looking out at me with an expression of surprise but welcome, with pink curlers in her wound-up dark hair, my mother ducked behind the corridor wall so that I was left alone.

"Yes?" Carole asked quite sweetly, because it was obvious that I would not have rung the doorbell if I had not wanted something.

I stood open-mouthed and mute, suddenly betrayed in front of my idol. Yet I could not fail to ask for money, since my mother was in earshot behind the wall.

"We, I, walked all the way here," I fumbled lamely. "I didn’t mean to…. It got late…. I didn’t expect to get so tired. Could I borrow…?" The "I" tasted sour in my mouth.

Carole smiled with kindness and ease, and went back inside to get her wallet. She gave me a dollar from it when she returned. "No rush in paying it back," she said, looking beautiful. "Good luck. I hope the bus comes soon."

And only when the door had audibly closed with a click did my mother stick her head out, as if scouting whether the coast was clear. And when her whole body came into view, I saw that her shoulders were more erect than before, as if during her time behind the wall she had been addressing her own embarrassment with some internal military drill.

The bus came quickly, along with the night. I paid for our fare with the dollar "we" had borrowed. We were silent the whole ride home.

Copyright © 2006 by Naomi Rose, from The Blessings Ledger: A Journey to Find the Union of Money and Compassion. All rights reserved.