I have one golden rule when it comes to friendships: My friends are allowed to have other friends. Shared or exclusive, there is a life beyond “Kat,” and those I cherish are welcomed to pursue as many relationships of support and love, business and success, passion, fame and excitement as their hearts can hold.
What I can't tolerate is “trading up.”
If a friendship also results in lucrative creativity, that's wonderful. It's a blessing if several such relationships can do the same. Go forth! Create! Be successful! But how sad when ambition overcomes the heart, and the more successful pairing “wins” while the other friendships are abandoned.
Well, my butt has been left in the dust, on the side of the road, before. I had dared to hope, however, that wisdom would replace “smarts” in the minds of my friends and students as they matured. It ain't necessarily so. Pity.
Therefore, I am picking myself up, dusting off my ample arse, and wandering off to a solo writing career. But it's not easy.
As a writer, I have always loved an interesting turn of phrase, or a new and different way to convey a human emotion or characteristic. Once I compared someone's “frozen visage” to Lot's wife after she turned toward Gomorrah.
And then I thought...”Turning Towards Gomorrah” - not a bad title for a book. Trouble is – no text. I'm sure I'm not the first writer to put the cart before the horse, but how do you go about developing the back story for the title? How do you retro fit a book?
Some friends suggested meditation. Think of nothing, and the ideas will come. Zen and “mindlessness” will open the portals to a world of inspiration. There are countless tomes on the subject, torrents of words describing the process.
Not to sound a negative note, but if the main thrust of the exercise is to hunker down on a zafu and think of nothing, why does it take 500 pages of text to get there? None-the-less, I gave it a try. I sat – and got nothing. Either my creative self was dumb as a box of rocks that day, or I was already an “Ascended Master.”
I found the process more distracting than liberating. The idea is to think of nothing – ABSOLUTELY nothing. I sat, and said to myself ,“Think of nothing...think of nothing... I am thinking of nothing. Hey..wait..I'm thinking of thinking of nothing. Is that the same thing?...Now I'm debating myself about thinking about thinking about nothing! Stop it!. OK...ok..I'm back to thinking nothing... nothing... nothing...Crap! Now I'm thinking nothing in short hand!..”
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| LOOK INTO MY EYES.....THINK OF NOTHING |
Ultimately, there must have been some little success on a subconscious level. I came up with the idea of using “Turning Towards Gomorrah” as the title for my next blank book. (Blank book – get it? OK, I heard that groan. Stop it!)
Meanwhile, I did have one productive thought. Sage Woman magazine has a future theme of “Weaving the Web.” For a year, four of us have been involved in attempting that very thing, working with the elements and each other. The project ends in October, and I've kept every email, and detail. It would make a dandy article.
For anyone else, involved in the project, who may also have a passion to publish, I call dibs!
You've hitched your wagon to other stars.
Go write an article with them.
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