Worldviews and the status quo

My life has changed dramatically since I last posted on this blog.  I moved from my beloved Albuquerque, NM  to Louisville, KY.  If you have been following this saga at all, you may remember that I lived in Kentucky for 30 years, with a 2 year hiatus in Dallas, Texas, my original home town.  I think there has to be some gypsy in my ancestry because I love to move, well not the physical act of packing, loading, moving unloading, unpacking and not being able to find everything you need for 5 months, but the being in a different location.

Changing perspectives is never easy, but when you move into a new residence, your perspective has to shift.  Rooms aren’t in the same place, not enough cabinets, either you now have a walk-in closet, or like me, your closet space has shrunk 200%.  Some good things, being closer to family, reacquainting self with old friends, or making new ones, finding things to do in the new city/town/neighborhood, all these things require an adjustment in habits, which can result in a new perception of things, and if you are lucky, a complete paradigm shift. 

Once you change your perspective a few times, it becomes easier to open yourself up to the possibility that you don’t know everything or that your worldview isn’t the only one and could possibly be causing you harm. And once you look at  the world with a different view, you will never be the same again. 

Fantasies, dreams and European princesses

Let me start at the very beginning, it’s the very best place to start.  I’ve always wanted to write a book, and I wrote a novella when I was twelve.  That should be a sign that many more are to follow, but alas, the characters in Elise and Alycia are long since dead.  And even if they were still alive, it’s unlikely that two published writers, with their two Pekingese sailing across the Atlantic to Europe would want to be the star characters in another one of my melodramas.  Oh, I’ve loads of characters, it’s just that none of them want to do anything but sit on the page.  There was that one woman, what was her name?  I don’t even remember, but that’s not the issue.  She was a very likely candidate for a best seller, but then she went and offed herself in an expensive hotel with champagne and lobster at the side of her bed.  She was passionate, inventive and posh to the end.  But the end did come and her sap of a husband doesn’t interest me enough to write about him.

I moved to New Mexico, romantically, I might add.  (I know you are expecting a torrid love affair, but you are going to have to wait a long time for that to happen.)  No, my romance was with the landscape, the desert, the mountains, the beautiful Turquoise Trail, it all captured my imagination and I had visions of writing Pulitzer Prize winning novels, or at least a Pushcart Prize.  I have the talent, I know I do…so many people have told me so, let’s see, my first grade teacher, even at age 6, I had a powerful imagination.   I told story after story about the European princess who was whisked away by gypsies and sold to an unsuspecting couple, (who happened to have the same last name as my parents!)  I remember when I first read the Princess and the Pea, I knew I was royalty, because my body is sensitive to the least little uncomfortableness.  Even then, fantasizing a different life.  Then there was my 2nd grade teacher, and my 3rd and well, you get the idea.  The most “acclaim” I got was when I was a junior in high school and Mrs. Scott urged me to join the writer’s club at school and I published my first poems in the little publication that we put out and sold for a quarter.  She was a beautiful woman, in more ways than one, gentle and very committed to her students.  For a while, I considered being in love with her, in fact, I used to walk along the street where she lived in the hopes that she would walk out and say, “Linda, darling!  I’ve been waiting for you to come by.  I’ve decided I’m in love with you and I am going to leave my husband and children.  We are going to move to New York and write novels together.”  But that fantasy quickly died when I fell in love with my science teacher, Mr. Tate.  Now that was REAL love.  He was amazing.  Oh, yes, he was nearly bald, but that only endeared him to me.  He was tall, thin, balding, and old, ever so old  (probably 36!)  I didn’t do as well in that fantasy, we did have a little fling, but he ended up falling in love with the music teacher, Ms. Brown, who happened to be in love with the gym teacher, Ms. Ford.   Now this was the 60s so none of this was on the outside, but if you lived in the school 8 hrs a day, you pick up on things.

I all but quit writing after school because I was too busy having babies.  It seems that all my creative energy was put into making them, then birthing them, then taking care of them.  Them and the house, the house demanded lots of attention, too.  Sweeping and mopping and vacuuming, washing clothes, and oh, the cooking. Day after day, another meal, another opportunity to use the French Chef’s cookbook and make daring main dishes and posh desserts, which the hubby then said tasted terrible and why couldn’t I stick to steak and potatoes?  None of the chauteaubriand, or the baked Alaska.  He wanted chocolate cake with the worst possible icing you can imagine, but it was what his mama made and that is what he wanted.  

If you build it...

September 23, 2012

I seem to have developed a habit of updating this blog in September every year.  That is the time of fresh ink on paper, spiral notebooks, and visions of new possibilities.  Alas, I seldom follow through on that dreaming UNLESS I go back to school   And I would LOVE to do that, but not this September. Maybe next.September.

For 2012, I am doing something different.  Actually committing to a program of living the dream.  How to do that?  Well, the first step is to enlist a coach to ensure that I stick to that commitment.  I have done that.  Next step is to dream a little bigger.  Not to settle for small dreams, because small dreams create small realities.

I am stepping out into another vibration.  One that is a match to what I have always wanted to achieve in my life.  I'm on my way to collecting the bits, pieces and fragments that have gathered over the past 30 years, a poem here, a fragment of a short story there, an unfinished novel.  Weeding out the chaff, gathering the wheat into a collection that I can be proud of...and PUBLISH it.

A bold statement, I understand, but I am really and truly sick and tired of my own excuses.  My own justifications for not following the 52 year old dream and doing what I truly love.  I am committing to you, reader, to my family, who have cheered me on for years, but I always stopped short of the finish, to my Higher Power who gave me a truly amazing gift that I have hidden under a bushel, and finally, and perhaps more importantly, to myself.  The person who has sacrificed talent for mediocrity, the person who has settled for less and thought it was my "lot" in life.  To her, to the little child who dreamed a bigger dream than anyone else in her family had been able to accomplish, I dedicate the pages to come.

Which I also promise, will be updated more often than before, if only with a few words to honor my commitment to myself, to writing, to my children, and to the Universe.  Thus I speak my imaginings into reality and share my true story for all to see  (if they so choose.)