Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 34

Cluttered mind journals in cluttered room

(Stares at the blank page, then at the bitter cold view out the window — sunny, but treacherous — then up at the clock and at the Julia Cameron book left next to the other armchair instead of back up on the shelf where it belongs.)

What is the problem with having “a place for everything and everything in its place”? Why do I just leave everything where I left it, lost and disheveled in a place not its own? How will I ever find it there? Rolling my eyes at myself asking, “Now where did I p...

The value of being real

“People want their wisdom in short bursts.”

“People want their stories long and complicated.”

People — people — people — what do YOU want? How do the wisdom generators and storytellers reach YOU?

That’s the puzzle, and that’s the solution: You are not “people.” You are person. You have a name. You might enjoy the cookie made with a cookie cutter, created to fit “the market,” and you might not.

How do I reach you? By giving the universe what I would want to see — providing the most au...

Righting

Is something bothering you? Start writing.

Something’s wrong. You’re not sure what it is, but you’re uneasy — or you know exactly what’s wrong and you’re seething or brokenhearted or just upset. Start writing.

Don’t worry about what to write. Write about what’s wrong — that’s easy, it’s the main thing on your mind. Write why it’s upsetting you and what in the world you’re going to do about it — fix it, walk away, whatever — go through the options if you’re not sure. Start writing.

After...

You got to know when

Somewhere out there, someone laughed at what he was writing. Someone else rolled their eyes. As for him, he was just sleepy.

And poverty came over him like a bandit, right on time.

Some Time Later, he came back to the place, picked up the book, and read What Had Been Written.

“Danged if I can make any sense of this s#!+!” he heard someone say, and maybe it was his voice. In any case, he moved on.

Where do I begin?

Where do I begin?

“What’s wrong with starting at the beginning?”

It’s hard to say. Because what IS the beginning anyway? At what point was the story in a place where it all started?

I suppose it depends on what “it all” is.

It all is what it all is. It all means what it all means, whatever it is and whatever that means.

Why does it all have to mean anything anyway? What and who gives it this thing you call meaning.”

“Yeesh. Just begin wherever you want to begin.”

Thanks. I t...

What art says

“See me,” say the books on the shelves. “Feel me. Touch me.”

The purpose of a work of art, wrapped up in three two-word sentences.

The creative person says, “I made this. See me. Feel me. Touch me.”

(Recalling one brilliant bit of writing by Pete Townshend.)

Morning pages are invented all over again

The other day I discovered my morning exercise has a name.

Seth Godin made a passing reference to “morning pages” and I remembered him mentioning them before, and so I looked it up. It turns out morning pages is a phrase coined by a writing guru named Julia Cameron who suggested writing three pages of stream of consciousness — longhand, not on a computer, because writing with pen and paper is a different experience — first thing in the morning, not concerning oneself with craft but simply wri...

The good common sense of the Sabbath

“Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.”

Six days of work, and then rest.

I encountered the article that Anne Helen Petersen used as the basis of her book Can’t Even: How Millennials became the Burnout Generation, and something about her descriptions of burnout sounded, well, a little like me.

I am not a millennial.

But I recognized the symptoms and attitudes from my own experience and those of my (here comes a popular new bit of jargon) cohort. Petersen has discovered a malady t...

All things lead to hope

There it is again. Here it? A spark of life, and where life is, there is hope.

The ruins of yesterday can be rebuilt. The harsh edges may be smoothed over. The debris and the wreckage can be cleared away and replaced by new, glistening structures built on a foundation of love and peace.

The pessimist will say nothing good lasts forever, but neither does anything evil. All things must pass, which makes the good things more precious and the bad things more bearable.

At the start, toda...

Waiting to be found again

The books wait on the shelves. They came to the shelves, some on impulse, some on purpose, all because they called to me, looking interesting.

Some I bought after a great ebook experience, to preserve the memory to sample again someday. Some are collections of memories (the comic-book compilations and other anthologies). Like the records and the CDs and the DVDs and the iTunes app, they wait for an opportunity to be heard again … to be found again.

My little (by comparison) library has...