Sweep

Take me in your hands
hold me tight,
I will dance across
this kitchen floor, brush
away the crumbs, the cares
of day, help you face
the night.


Gladiator broom photo (again! :) by L.L. Barkat.

POETRY FRIDAY:
High Calling Blogs RAP: Sonnet Makes Grown Man Cry
A Simple Country Girl’s Raspberries
Monica’s Dinner Table
Joelle’s The Beginning of the Path to There
Claire’s Wind-Tossed Paper
Laura’s Tumor [for a friend]
Yvette’s A Daily Prayer
Sara's Night

Why Do You Write? (tweet, blog...)

The path meanders upward, embraced in shadow. A red-winged blackbird lights on the underbrush where pearl-orange berries hang. Further on, red berries dangle too, like liquid glass. Poplars and firs give way to bamboo, and through a gap I see fields of roses, pink and wild. The air carries their scent, even as it moves cattails now full with ivory cotton swelling.

A single cardinal punctuates grass, turns his head to the side, just after the pond. Oh, the pond! Brown fish like blunted chopsticks sit motionless, while powder-blue dragonflies whir and dip. A naked branch, dead to the year, becomes a landing dock. Dragonflies, dragonflies, like blue-powdered leaves, clutter the skeleton branch. And here is a cluster of golden brown mushrooms. Or there. Look! Yellow flowers like banana bunches, and lavender too. Banana flowers. That's what we called them as children.

My girls go before me, biking through time, past creeks and swamps. They like the tunnels, shady and cool. I hear them up ahead, whistling in the dark.

-----

Why do I write this for you? Tell of my Sabbath biking? I write because I suffer.

Suffer? you say. What have cardinals and red berries got to do with suffering?

Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift has an interesting observation about gratitude. It is, he says, what we 'suffer' between the time we receive a gift and the time we pass it along.

So, yes, I write of girls on a path, of wild roses and dark tunnels... because I have suffered gratitude. For these Sabbath gifts. And now I find relief, in passing the gifts to you.


Fairy Forest Painting, by Sara B. Used with permission.

RELATED POSTS:
High Calling Blogs The Gift: Generous Elves

The Gift: Sometimes You See

Sometimes you give a gift and that's the end of things. Well, the end for you. The gift leaves your hands and you don't know where it travels, what the increase is. But sometimes word gets back... just a small picture of a tiny part of the "increase," and you are heartened. Thank you, Reluctant Homefront, for giving me a glimpse of your experience...

The other day I received a gift in the mail. I had stumbled on a giveaway held on Billy Coffey's blog, and as it turned out, mine was the name picked out of his hat by his children. I was excited to find L.L. Barkat's Stone Crossings in my mailbox only days later, and immediately settled in to read. I'm not sure what I expected when I first cracked the pages, but what I received was certainly beyond my expectations...

read the rest here...

On another note, here's my offering for this week's poetry celebration:

"Gift"

Boxed taped paper
flapped folded fitted
sealed kissed sent felt
burst open
let me
be

RELATED POST:
High Calling Blogs The Gift: Hike With Me

POETRY FRIDAY:
High Calling Blogs RAP: Make Me Human
Lorrie’s Tambourine
Monica’s Wedding Gown
Liz’s Gone
Simple Country Girl’s Wild Daisy
Jim’s Take Jonah, many do
Mom2Six’s Cavern
Laura’s Paint
Joelle's Animals Know Better

Stone Crossings photo by The Reluctant Homefront.

Speaking of Silence

Of late, I've been feeling silent. Life has been full— among other things... writing, writing, writing, to finish my second book... and now cleaning up messes before I send it off.

One of the ways I try to achieve synergy in such moments is to use one platform to explore or sustain another. So when I began working on my book's 'Silence' chapter, and I had a speaking engagement on the book of Esther, why naturally I chose to delve into the silence of God.

[if you think you'd enjoy the irony of a talk on Silence, why, have a listen here]

Similarly, in the past few months, I've often used my prayer and devotion blog as a way to pre-write about the various spiritual practices that will show up in God in the Yard.

Sometimes people ask me how I get it all done. Blogging, writing books, home educating, public speaking. It is this kind of synergistic approach that makes things work. Well, and the willingness to sometimes descend into silence.

Old Chest photo, by L.L. Barkat

RELATED:
Bradley's approach to summer blog silence

Fourth of July (what else?)

Last night we went to see fireworks— stunning art that traces the sky, then is gone. Ashes to ashes! But the lights played in my dreams. How to capture the loveliness of such ephemeral beauty? Poems seemed just the thing, but they did not come easily. No matter, I offer them to you anyway, as a response to our prompt and as a gift from my little life.

"Fourth of July"

Would that the night
could preserve this
sight of stars
and stripes, red green
fuschia blue and spirals
too like Goldilock's
curls all strung with fire,
explosions that launch,
piercing our hearts,
bang! Shots in the dark
expire in less than
a beat of forever.


"Storm During Fireworks"

Up go rockets, burst!
Sizzle, sizzle, consummation
in the clouds. Rain has come.


"After Fireworks"

I gather my girls under black
umbrella. Two sparklers at my
side, I slip into the night.


POETRY FRIDAY:
High Calling Blogs RAP: Andrew Kippley is God's Poem
Carole’s poetry: the poor
Carl’s Torching all my Idols
Cindy’s Living Waters
Jennifer’s Ring of Hope
Jennifer’s ode to Andrew Kippley
Andrew Kippley's Through Dying Eyes
A Simple Country Girl’s Wanting Out, To Run Free
Monica’s The New Me
Joye’s Star Outside My Window
Mom2Six’s Poetry
Marcus' Garden in Drought
Yvette’s In Memory of Freedom
Joelle’s Mowing the Labyrinth
Laura’s Rain
Megan's Stubborn Bluebonnet
Emily’s Walk in the Woods
Ann’s Old Love
Milton’s handmade life
Claire's a pair of crutches
Tony York's When Poetry Goes Bad
Suzy's Rain Drops and Finger Prints Upon My Window

Alhambra Ceiling picture, by L.L. Barkat.

NEXT WEEK's PROMPT: Post your offering by Thursday, July 9, for links and possible feature at High Calling Blogs. This idea is from Susan Wooldridge's Poem Crazy. 1. Find an object and name it 2. describe what it looks like 3. ask it to bring you a quality it possesses. For example, I might choose the fireworks from last night and write...

Fireworks,
red and blue rain,
bring me your laughter,
tossed again to the wind.

Let Go, Write Strong, Build Readership

You've seen it before. The burdened poem. A heavy-laden sentence. Blog posts that go on and on. Chapters that would have done well if they ended three pages ago.

We all create overstuffed writing sometimes, much to the chagrin (or boredom, frustration, and unhappy surprise) of our readers and editors. We want to hold on to all of our words, each of our sparkling thoughts or stories. But the poems, sentences, chapters, readers and editors of the world wish we'd simply let go.

I understand. I'm not immune. What to do? Here are 5 things I try to remember, to help me let go and write strong:

1. Aim for arresting details, then trim those that don't add extra force to the text. Refrain from being too sad about this (see number 3 below); remember, this practice wins points with readers and editors.

2. Trust the reader. If details are strong, readers can catch the import without a lot of explanation and application talk. I dare say that religious writers are particularly remiss in this area, as they spend too much time overlaying the God-aspect in their stories, poems and posts. We don't need to say, "He redeemed the situation by His powerful hand," if we've made it crystal clear through redemptive details.

3. Save it for later. This is especially hard for the new author/blogger, eager to fill a book/blog post with everything she knows on a subject. Remember, there'll be other chances. For instance, this weekend I was tempted to add a section to my Hospitality chapter, on the sometimes inhospitable ways we practice communion in our churches. But the chapter was already pleased with itself. So I started a file called "God in the Yard Blog Posts" and sketched my idea for a future blog post (once the book comes out and I want to extend ideas through conversation).

4. Give ideas away. Sometimes it's nice to pass things along to other writers, who have a built-in audience for your idea. (This point is also my tiny plug for Lewis Hyde's The Gift. In Chapter 2, he asserts that we keep a gift by giving part of it away. As Hyde says, "...where true, organic increase is at issue, gift exchange preserves that increase" )

5. Print it out, let it sit. I don't print my blog posts (maybe I should!), but I do print my articles and chapters. Then I let them sit for a day or a month. Creating distance between ourselves and a text, as well as seeing it in a different form (paper versus screen) goes a long way towards helping us appreciate the power of deletion.

So that's it. If we let go, we write strong. (Now let me see, where's that delete button...)


Empty Swing photo, by L.L. Barkat.

OTHER SEEDLINGS POSTS ON 'THE GIFT':
The Gift: Take, Eat, This is My Tweet
When Did You Labor, or will Sabbath help your gift go viral?
Womb, Harlequin, and License Plates: The Gift, 1

OTHER BOOK CLUB POSTS:
Laura's Blowing in the Wind

Dear Editor Cindy, You Can Stop Crossing Your Fingers

Dear Editor Cindy,

You probably heard a rumor that I might not finish my book God in the Yard. Struggling through the final chapters of a manuscript can be tough work. But I assure you the rumor is patently false. As of yesterday I typed the final words of the epilogue.

If I hadn't been through this process before, I'd be celebrating with wine and chocolate (well, that is if I drank wine on U.S. soil; for some reason I only imbibe when I'm traveling abroad). Anyway, this time I know better. These final keystrokes are not an end but a beginning. You'll send the manuscript out to two readers (but if it's okay with you, please don't pick Reader 2 again. She didn't seem to appreciate my genius. Just hire Reader 1 and Reader 3 and we'll be fine.)

You're probably on vacation and won't get this note until my manuscript has been sitting on your desk for a month. In the meantime, I promise not to email you every day and clog up your inbox. I'll be good and keep it to a bi-weekly inquiry. And instead I'll send letters to people like Mr. Billy Coffey. He just did a marvelous giveaway of our first book, Stone Crossings. You should check him out. I'm not kidding; he's an up-and-comer. Why, I wrote to him already and here's what I said...

Dear Billy,

I'm so flattered that you want to be writer-me when you grow up. That's pretty cool. Really.

I just have this... well... this concern... I'm kinda wondering (quietly, see) if you could stand the pressure to sometimes wear a dress and heels (personally, I don't mind dresses, but I can't stand high shoes; they hurt my knees and make me feel like a wanna-be giraffe). The way I see it, you're more the cowboy-hat type— spinning tales by the fire. Tales that could make a man weep into his coffee or lose his chewing tobacco in a moment of pure hilarity. [you can read the rest of the letter here.]

When I'm not busy writing letters to talented people like Billy, I'm going to write lots of poems. Like this one for last week's 'not' prompt at High Calling Blog's Random Acts of Poetry...

'Muse'

You are not the blond
beauty I'd been taught to
believe in, Renaissance-buxom,
fawning over my every word

and feeding me grapes while
I sop up inspiration from the
sweat of your pores. I wish you'd
stop yawning, picking your teeth

and flicking stray peach skins
over my notes. Who can work
in the presence of such disdain,
who can stay sane, pen the next

masterpiece while your eyes
look so vexed. You are not
the helpmeet I ordered, not the
glass of red wine nor the rich, fine

chocolate they promised in sonnets.
I bet money you like it this way, wielding
a tray of miniature mincemeat pies, not
lifting a finger to help me swat flies.

Warmly,
Your Favorite Writer for InterVarsity Press, L.L.

'God in the Yard' notes photo, by L.L. Barkat.

POETRY FRIDAY:
Monica's Pilgrim Longing
Sally’s Skinny Dipping
Jim’s 76th and Tidbits
Ann's The Din Undoes Us
Milton's To a Friend, on the Death of Her Father
Marcus's As the Deer
nAncY's not
Mom2Six's Quest
Claire's Untangling and Twisted Tale
Tony's Country Rain
Cindy's Lucid Thoughts
Sara's Woods
Deb's Prodigal Mothers
Simple Country Girl's I Do Not Have

The Gift: Take, Eat, this is My Tweet-- hospitality on Twitter

'Honey, come and try some viral-marketing broccoli rabe,' says a woman to her boyfriend.

The context? Bill Wasik, author of And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture has just removed the plastic-bag-cooked-veggie from the microwave; he's promoting the bag as part of a word-of-mouth effort he signed up for on-line. This is the world of viral dreams, where businesses capitalize on 'media-consuming individuals' in hopes of creating 'community' that will sell their products.

But corporations are only tapping into a reality that exists for many who move and shake on-line. These are the 'sub-culture [who have] the mind-set of the marketer, drunk on numbers, single-mindedly obsessed with gathering attention, engineering sudden spikes.' They are the 'individual consumers...learning and refining the tricks of manipulation for themselves— where they serve as secret agents inside their own crowds, totaling up mentions and page views, sifting through their troves of data in a scurrilous search for gold.'

In other words, we are a tweeting, blogging, story-churning narcissistic cyberbunch, asserts Wasik, and who knows what effect this will ultimately have on culture?

Wasik's conclusions are only slightly less narcissistic than the cybertrends he observes.* In a kind of secular-spiritual-practice approach, he recommends quiet times, techno-Sabbath, self-reflection, and delaying gratification (by waiting for a topic to die down before reading about it). He asks us to be judicious controllers of what we take in, mostly to preserve our sanity and productivity and possibly to grant reason to our politics and greatness in our art. Any mention of true community and grace-engagement seems absent, as he urges us towards a corrective of partial 'disengagement.'

Enter The Gift, by Lewis Hyde. In speaking of gifts, he considers three levels at which they can function: the ego-of-one (which is self-gratification), the ego-of-two (which is reciprocal and best exemplified by lovers) or a full circle scenario that is unlike many married couples who 'get just so far in the expansion of the self and then close down for a lifetime, opening up for neither children, nor the group, nor the gods.'

In a sense, Wasik's Internet antidotes speak to dealing with the ego-of-one. But can *disengagement* alone move us towards higher levels of gift-giving? Towards reciprocity or full-circle giving? Maybe for that, we need to consider grace-engagement, a kind of cyber-hospitality modeled on tried and true off-line social behaviors.

For simplicity's sake, I thought we might focus on the increasingly popular Twitter world. However, if you tend to move more actively in the blogging or Facebook world, I invite your observations in those arenas. I don't think I've reached an adequate hospitality model quite yet, but here are some questions I've begun to ask myself about the act of tweeting...

1. How often do I tweet? If I spoke that much at an actual party, would I be monopolizing the conversation? Would I be viewed as a self-focused self-promoter?

2. Do my tweets tend to focus on *me*? As a journaling tool, focusing on myself can be positive, but how would such inward-focus be viewed in the average off-line conversation?

3. Do I tweet about the good stuff? Comparing this to off-line, am I just the gossipy tidbit type (sometimes fun and can serve a purpose) or can I also be counted on to move the conversation to refreshingly humorous or profound places?

4. Are my tweets usually monolog? Or do I engage in dialog? At 140 characters per entry, dialog is no simple matter. Still, am I talking AT or WITH other people?

5. Do I celebrate others' successes in my tweets? (And here I must thank Bradley Moore for retweeting my self-focused tweet on how I received an unexpected advance because Stone Crossings is being translated into Korean! Oops, pardon that temporary descent into narcissism :)

6. Do I think twice before tweeting on a bandwagon? As Wasik notes, he has seen the 'day-to-day destructiveness of the Internet churn, of the manufacture of nanostories with little regard for their ultimate truth.'

7. Do I tweet-dialog mostly with one other person? As in off-line life, it's good to focus on one or two friends sometimes, but in a social context that can border on the ego-of-two which never widens the circle.

8. Are my tweets always directive, statement oriented? Or do I sometimes ask questions, thus encouraging others to think and respond and add their wisdom or humor to the conversation.

All righty. Take, eat, these are my thoughts on tweeting. Now I'll sit back and wait for the bread and wine you'll bring to the table. And together maybe we can feed a wider world.


And Then There's This, photo by L.L. Barkat. *Overall, I enjoyed Wasik's book; I attribute the nature of his conclusions partly to the stage we're at with this whole 'social media conversation'; others like him, including those in the Christian community, have offered similar antidotes that rely on disengagement. As the conversation continues, I expect we'll eventually see a call for other kinds of solutions that favor what I've termed grace-engagement. For an article that begins the call in this direction, check out Loving Your On-Line Neighbor as Yourself, at Catapult.

OTHER BOOK CLUB POSTS:
High Calling's Laish and the Silo Effect
Thanks to International Arts Movement, for linking to our discussion of The Gift.

OTHER SEEDLINGS POSTS ON 'THE GIFT':
When Did You Labor, or will Sabbath help your gift go viral?
Womb, Harlequin, and License Plates: The Gift, 1

RELATED:
Trust Word of Mouth, at eMarketer
Loving Your On-Line Neighbor as Yourself, at Catapult
The Rise of the Nanostory, at Freedom to Tinker
Nanostory, at Tangzine

TOTALLY OFF TOPIC:
My First Giveaway, at Billy Coffey's.

Make Your Writing Happen

I'm pushing myself through writing the last three chapters of God in the Yard. (Um, Editor Cindy, if you are reading this, please pretend I don't have an August 1st deadline, okay? :)

Concerning this challenge, I was foolish enough to say to a writer friend, 'Well, you know, I can't force this thing.' To which my writer friend said in an annoyingly writerly way, 'Uh... yes you can.' (Advice here to the would-be writer. Don't make friends with people who know anything about writing if you want the freedom to sit on your writing butt and dip violets in sugar, or some other such thing, rather than finishing a project of consequence).

Truth is, you really can't force writing. It takes time to research, to process thoughts, to craft something as lovely as a sugared violet. And, truth is, you really *can* force writing. You've got so much in that head of yours already; you don't have to read one more ancient monk on the 'art of submission' (I'm talking to myself here now, which is a healthy writer behavior). Sometimes it's about altering expectations. Or trusting what you already have to offer. It's about putting away the violets and pulling out the keyboard.

Like right now. I am not inspired to write a poem. I don't want to do it. Truly, I'd prefer to translate French poetry (a new passion), but I am going to prove to myself that a person can *make* writing happen. It may not end up being my best shot, but here goes, based on last week's prompt...

'Holy Writ'

I spied God
meddling with
my keyboard,
skipping from
a to z like He
was some kind
of Alpha and
Omega who
could ply a
whole world,
ex nihilo, presto,
from the chaos.

1600's Books photo, by L.L. Barkat.

POETRY FRIDAY:
High Calling Blogs' Apophasis, or the Power of 'Not'
Monica’s His Delight, His Applause
Mom2Six’s Connecting
Sara's Before it Was Gone
Laura's Red and yellow...
Deb's The Verse
Joelle's Sacred Heart Abbey
Erica's Silver Coin
Simple Country Girl's I Spied God...

You Can Get Away With Anything, So Long as You Sing It

I couldn't resist posting this, smack in the middle of a serious discussion of The Gift. Even if you know nothing about opera, this lady'll make you laugh. Laughter is a special kind of gift, don't you think?







Anna Russell, on Ring of the Nibelungs.

When Did You Labor? (or, will Sabbath help your gift go viral?)

Sam got stuck in the Intro, and I decided to wait for him in Chapter One— just a little corner of it... just the last sentence... okay, just the intro to the last sentence (see, Sam, I'm working with you)...

The Lord says, 'All that opens the womb is mine...' And this reflects back on the Introduction, which uses the image of laboring... When we are moved by art we are grateful...that [the artist] labored in the service of his gifts.

This supposes that we know what our gifts are, and that we take the time to refine and share them. For those who love the cyberlife, this can become a thorny issue. It's easy to get carried away on the wires for hours on end, while our gifts sit idle. As Vincent Rossmeier notes,

I would say that if there's one thing that's causing the novels of the world from getting written right now, it's surfing the Internet. I do think that a lot of creative people want to be working on their craft, they want to be thinking big about what they should be doing and my belief is that the culture is encouraging them to think small. To me, the challenge is to try to find ways to partially unplug ourselves. To carve out spaces in our lives away from information.

That's one reason I take a weekly technology Sabbath. It helps me carve out thinking and dreaming space. It relieves my heart from all the hype and bad news (I'm talking about the news links that pop up when I open Yahoo). I'm even working on a daily schedule of unplugging and prioritizing, based on some cool suggestions I found in Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential...in Business and in Life. (This book oversimplifies sometimes, but it's worth a definite checkout at the library.)

So now, if you'll pardon me, I'm off to do a little labor in the service of my gifts.


Gladiator-Flower Broom photo, by L.L. Barkat.

MORE BOOK CLUB POSTS:
High Calling Blogs' Mozart, Tiger Woods and Me: Gift 1 1/2
Liz's Increase and Sacrifice
Laura's The Gift, Forcibly Taken

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