Three more mutual lessons from entrepreneurship and spiritual/personal growth empowerment, and their story:
- Surround yourself with people of similar interests, intentions, and consciousness. It's said we are the cross section of the five people closest to us. I have a hard time taking this on board because I'm such a loner, but I do also believe it. If you want to get better at writing, hang out with writers--on which, more in a moment.
- Work around a "no." I'm not good at taking no for an answer. And--if the thing that's being turned down has merit and goodness in it, often the no can be turned into a yes.
- Create your flow. "Go with the flow" is great in concept, but I've had to acknowledge that often I've gone with someone else's flow rather than use my own idea muscle or act of will. When I'm conscious and intentional of what I'm working toward, and when my actions are reflecting my intentions, the focus creates a genuine flow all of its own, and everything I do has an ease and rightness and rhythm to it.
Storytime!
Starting from number 2: our wonderful local author Miranda Weiss was scheduled to teach a nonfiction course through the college this semester. Not enough people had registered, so the class was cancelled. Some of us were quite disappointed by this, and I (and probably some others) wrote her to ask if there was any way we could make the class a go on an informal basis, maybe at her home. It turned out that the dynamic and imaginative campus director was quite open to having a short version of the course hosted by the college, as a noncredit offering. There were eight spaces. And so, yesterday, nine of us showed up for the first meeting of Miranda's class at the college!
Which illustrates numbers 1 and 2. All of us were there to write. All of us were there to learn from Miranda and also from one another; to listen, offer feedback, write both in the class and in between meetings. We all happen to be women, and we all live in Homer; but aside from that we're such a diverse bunch--all of us choosing to surround ourselves with others who want to write, to write better, to explore more, to write deeper.
As a sweet synchronicity for me, I received two lots of feedback from my mentor yesterday too, both of them excitingly encouraging. The most beautiful thing about the past two days has been number 3: I've been having an experience of creating flow. Whereas there are times when days go by without my writing anything except a bare bones journal entry, and I question myself, "What am I so afraid of? Do I really even like writing? If I loved it like I say I do, wouldn't I write all the time?" -- the past two days, on the other hand, have been characterized by involuntary flashes of "Hey! I like writing!" and, when I write in my journal first thing in the morning and ask what I could do to make it a really good day, the answer has been something like "Write x" or "Work on y."
Underlying all this positive energy and buy-in, there's still this niggling piece about my physical health. The "go away to treatment" chorus has gotten a little louder, and I've become a little more adamant that I'm not going. I'm the one in this body, most of the time I feel okay, I know pretty much what I'd be going to and it would really suck; and there's way too much going on right here right now, plus my next moves to figure out. I just wish there wasn't this one little apple of discord.
