Sandra Tayler's Blog, page 87

Guests and Organizing

My sister and her family are staying in my office, which has been transformed into a guest space. This is not preventing me from getting my work done. They’re quite understanding that sometimes I need to sit at my desk. They’re also self-employed with an internet-based business, so they understand. We all cooperate and everything gets done.

What I am not doing is puttering around and relaxing by being on the internet. I’m fine with intruding on them to work, but it feels selfish to intrude so I can read random internet things. I still do some puttering using my laptop, Calcifer, but my usual patterns are disrupted. I’m discovering that a desire to clean and organize is flowing in to fill the time vacancy. Since de-cluttering and cleaning are good things, I’m just rolling with it. By this time next week I’ll have hauled piles of things off to thrift stores and my house will feel more spacious. It’ll be a good way to enter the home stretch between now and the beginning of the school year.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Picnic and cleaning

Today began with half the neighborhood showing up in my back garden expecting breakfast. Fortunately our bishopric was handy to sling pancakes and supply paper plates. Thus we had our ward pioneer day breakfast. My sole responsibility to the event was to supply a location, which I was happy to do. It gave me impetus to complete a bunch of gardening projects which make me happier every time I step outside my back door. It is lovely out there. Of course the required moment of panic was supplied by the fact that the sprinklers ran and drenched the lawn just before the event was due to begin. However things went well anyway. I got to sit and visit with friends whom I see at church every Sunday, but somehow never get to really talk with. Picnic conversations are different than church hallway conversations. I wonder why that is.

The remainder of my day was mostly spent on house things. For some reason my brain decided that cleaning house and organizing was a necessity. I did quite a lot of that. I have even more that I still want to do. I keep finding clutter that I want to discard. A trip to the thrift store is pending. But first I must have a sabbath. I like those.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Fatigue

I’m experimenting with the concept of siesta. Today I needed to be up early to get some gardening work done before the day got too hot. I also tend to stay up late because the evening hours are so lovely out of doors. Rather than be chronically short on sleep, I’ve been trying to find a quiet mid-afternoon hour when I can nap. It doesn’t work every day. This afternoon it did. I lounged in my hammock swing and dozed. It almost made me long for a full hammock so that I could lay down instead of recline. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll just grab a pillow and a blanket to lay on the lawn. It is lovely in the shade of our trees.

Not everything today was nice. The internet was full of not-nice and news of tragedy. I hugged Howard tight this morning and told him he had to stay home today, which is not an entirely rational reaction to a shooting at a theater, but then rationality is hard to come by when so many emotional strands get a good hard yank. So I hugged Howard, who’d gone to a midnight showing, and then I worked in the garden all day. And I napped. Because sometimes the best thing I can do is just get on with the stuff that needs doing.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Peace in Nature

In one of my recent posts I talked about how a forest is a stress sink. In a space so large as a forest, human noises vanish. I can breathe deeply.

I could fall into a sky like that and float forever. Unfortunately I can not keep a forest in my back garden. There simply is not enough space. However I’ve discovered that small things in nature can also gift me with peace. I find it very encouraging the adverse circumstances in which greenery manages to grow.

Those rocks are formed of ages old lava, yet the plants find ways to thrive.

Some of the forms that growth takes are strange or even alien. I’m guessing it is some form of lichen.

The most charming bit of miniature nature were the white flowers growing out of lake weeds. Mats of green mossy growth floated on the surface of the water and were dotted with these tiny flowers.

I loved these little flowers popping up in a seemingly unlikely place.

Small portions of peace are all around me if I only seek them out. And then there is always sky if I remember to look up at it.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Fear and Flight

Fear is not logical, and yet I keep trying to wrestle it into behaving as if it were. I take each fearful thing and examine it from all angles, trying to explain to myself why this particular event, stress, or interaction seems to accumulate associated fears while other things don’t. I track backwards along the paths of fears to see where they come from, in the hope that I can find all the sources and empty them out. Sometimes I succeed. I am not always afraid. Fear absents itself for quite long periods of time. Then I come to a day like today when fear is pervasive, seeping into the most mundane tasks. It is ridiculous to leap from rotten apricots on the ground under our tree to a belief that I will obviously fail at everything I try since I can’t even manage to take care of ripe fruit. I know the leap is ridiculous, but if it is accompanied by a little spike of adrenaline, that fight or flight response, it takes effort to find calmness again.

Then there are the things in my life which are frightening and I can not immediately dismiss as ridiculous, even if I would like to. I booked a plane ticket today. This is my fourth trip for the year, which is more trips in a single year than I have ever had before. I feel a little guilty about that, even more so because I could choose not to take this next trip. I could choose to stay home in my comfortable house with my kids. I could choose calmness and routine. Part of my brain tells me that I should choose those things. Instead I’ll be heading off to a writer’s retreat for an entire week. This is me spending time, resources, and stress in the hope that I will write something saleable. For at least that one week I’ll pull my writing from the edges of my life and put it into the middle. And I’m afraid. I’m afraid that the retreat will show me that I do not have a building career, but instead a nice hobby.

Now that I pull the fear out into the open, it does begin to seem a little silly. After all, there is nothing wrong with hobbies. They are an important source of joy and life satisfaction. It would not be a disaster to have writing as a hobby. So if writing as a hobby is not disastrous, why then am I afraid? What if I made the wrong choice in going to the retreat? What if something terrible happens while I am gone? What if I’ve wasted all my time? A hundred other what ifs file through my brain and I begin to see that a large portion of the fear is simply ambient to the day rather than created by the decision. Then I sigh and put away all my thoughts. I’ll look at them again some other day to see if they look different.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Quick thoughts on scrubbing and opportunity

“Wow. This Bathroom is freakishly clean” said Patch. It is possible that we should scrub things around here more often, even when we aren’t expecting lots of company. I’m scrubbing today.

In other news, this is also the day when I first had my writing career conflict with my writing career. I’m quite accustomed to Howard having conflicts, family vs business conflicts, community and school conflicts. The last week of September offered me two mutually exclusive possibilities and I had to choose. It was sad because there are empty schedule spaces on either side of the conflict. However I have come to realize that the adage “Opportunity only knocks once” is a lie. Life can be arranged so that opportunity comes around regularly. Yes I had to choose this time, but another time I’ll get to pick the thing I had to turn down.

And now, back to scrubbing.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Recovery, The Legue of Utah Writers, and an Interview

Today I am recovering. All day. I got to 5 pm and really could not account for where the hours went except for knowing that quite a lot of them were spent unconscious or semi-conscious and staring vacantly while my brain processed thoughts. Five days of family activities with very little down time is apparently just as exhausting as a convention weekend. The family reunion was everything it needed to be. We have photographs to prove it. I loved reconnecting with siblings and their offspring. But now I am tired and my brain is not supplying much in the way of new thoughts. So I will instead direct you to two cool things.

The League of Utah Writers Round Up.

This is an event taking place in Park City Utah on September 14-15. Howard is presenting and I’ll be participating in a panel discussion along with Howard, Emily Sanderson, and Brandon Sanderson. They also have many other excellent guests and presenters. If you’re nearby, or even if you’re not, this event is probably worth your time. Rates for LUW members and non-members are listed on the Round Up web page. Take a look.

Amber Sistla is a writer who interviews other writers for her blog. I found her questions to be thought provoking and had lots of fun answering them. It helped me think about my writing process in new ways. You can see my interview over at Finding My Words See how I answered and then think about what answers you might give to similar questions.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Pretty things at a Family Reunion

This post was originally written on Saturday July 14, but internet at the cabin was too sporadic and slow to support uploading pictures. I am now home and can post the entry.

For me the biggest advantage of this family reunion location is that the cabin is surrounded by trees and the trees are home to wildlife. When the cabin is too packed with voices, I can step outside. The trees are a huge reservoir of peace. I am refreshed and then ready for people again. Sometimes I take my camera with me when I go walking.

This is an extremely settled forest. Every place I walk has signs of human habitation, usually a cabin and associated landscaping, but if I face just right I can pretend I am far away from all people.

The animals have adapted to all the cabins and humans. This marmot makes his home under a shed.

The wildlife are encouraged. Here is the squirrel who politely posed for my photography efforts.

The squirrel also held still for child photographers.

On the third day of reunion my introvert kids are beginning to exhibit strain from all the togetherness. I’m spending more time helping make sure that they find quiet spaces. I try to get them outdoors too. Sometimes we find truly lovely places, like Duck Creek Pond. We brought bread to feed the ducks, but these are not city ducks and did not come flocking at the sight of thrown bread. Gleek was patient and managed to convince a duck to eat some.

This trip showed to me once again that the natural world is a huge stress sink for me in much the same way that some machinery has a heat sink. In the forest there is so much space that my stress can not stretch far enough to cover it. It thins out and I am restored. I don’t have a forest back home, but I do have a garden. I should remember to spend more time in it.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Unpacking My Brain

I am so very tired tonight. Five days of family activities, most of those nights short on sleep, a morning of making breakfast followed by scouring the cabin to remove all signs of human habitation. Oh, and then a four hour road trip to get home. About an hour after I got here my brain went out of gear and instead of unpacking and organizing, I just stopped. Fortunately I am familiar enough with exhaustion to not believe much of what my brain tells me. The various fears, anxieties, and despairs are mirages that will vanish in the morning. If there is any piece of it that does not vanish, there is plenty of time to handle it later.

The drive home was mostly quiet. We did get to drive through an impressive deluge, which managed to slough away the coating of mud that our van acquired by driving through a muddy deluge on the day we arrived. The entire weekend had intermittent rain. It was lovely though hard to appreciate on Saturday morning when the activity plans had to be adjusted because of the rain. One of the things that I noticed on the drive home was how interconnected all the highways and freeways are. It makes sense. They’re supposed to connect, but the third time I passed a sign indicating that I could turn there to reach Capitol Reef National Park, I really had a sense that the highways are a giant grid laid across the land and there are a dozen ways to get anywhere. Driving on the smaller highways was fun. It made me want to take more trips.

Tomorrow I will sleep until I am done sleeping. Then I will try to find enough focus to get work done. I have mailing to do and a back yard breakfast I’m helping host on Saturday.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.

Adventures on the Way to Church

It turns out that going to church near a national forest can be more adventuresome than one might expect. We knew we were going to have to drive forty minutes to get there. We also knew that the congregation itself is a seasonal one, run by locals and attended by people like us who were vacationing in the area. The kids were quite enamored of the fact that many folks attend in blue jeans and camp clothes rather than the usual Sunday clothing. So we set off with some verbal instructions, half expecting to get a little lost on the way.

We did not expect the stowaway Chipmunk.

Kiki saw him first and gasped. The rest of us tried to figure out what was wrong with her and all she could do was point out the windshield. Then we all saw him. He popped out of the crack between the hood and the windshield. He ran across the top of the hood. He dove back into the crack, obviously trying to find a way off of this crazy fast-moving contraption. My brother-in-law, who was driving, did a marvelous job of not crashing the car while distracted by chipmunk.

The little guy must have climbed into the engine while the car was parked outside the cabin. Then when the engine heated up, he emerged where we could see him. We found a safe place to stop on the little mountain road. There was some debate over whether it was possible to return him home, but trying to catch a chipmunk in a car engine seemed likely doomed to failure. He hid the moment we opened the hood.

Then he scampered down into the engine. Moments later we saw him dashing for the trees at the side of the road. Hopefully he likes his new home.

But that was not all. There were also sheep.

We sat for a good five minutes while a huge flock was herded around us and off down the road. It was fascinating. When we opened the windows for a better look, several of the sheep stopped and stared at us as if they expected food to materialize from the open windows. The kids were delighted to discover that sheep would baa back if they made the sound first.

We did eventually get to church and the meeting was lovely. For the rest of the weekend we were on the watch for stowaway chipmunks, but he was the only one. Which is probably best as we didn’t really sign up to be a chipmunk relocation service.

Comments are open on the original post at onecobble.com.