Keep on Swimming, Keep on Swimming...

I loved the movie "Finding Nemo." One of the reason's I loved it was the character Dory played by Ellen Degeneris and her unforgettable line when things got tough, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming."
Truth be told, that line alone has helped me through a lot of things in my life. It's a constant reminder to not give up.

Lately I've haven't been doing a lot of writing, mostly editing, working and doing physio. I fell and hurt my knee last fall and it hasn't healed properly so now I'm getting help to strenthen it and facing an MRI and possible surgery. My advice: Next time you fall and feel a twinge in your knee, get it looked at asap!

As much as I love hiking and yardwork, slowing down has made me less reluctant to sit at the computer and get my work done. It's also given me time to join in on Wynterblue Publishing's monthly 24 contest, a 24-hour short story contest. I love it. What a great way to spread the creative wings! I was also thrilled to find that I'd been chosen as a runner up in August! More motivation to try it again in September! Check them out at http://www.wynter.ca/

Off to work again. You can bet I'll be humming my mantra for the entire day.
"Just keep swimming, just keep swimming..."
Have a great day!

Sept 11, 2011

Today marks an infamous day in history. The tenth anniversary of 9/11.
After watching hours of footage all morning, I had to get away from the media that had made it all real again.
I spent the afternoon with the HWG discussing writing and getting away from the "real world" for a while.
It was my turn to lead today and one of the prompts I had given the others was "We have an aversion to loss of control, as much as we love it." Below is what I wrote, raw and untouched:

We have an aversion to loss of control, as much as we love it. In writing, our goal is to form images with the written word and allow the flow of those words to stream from our pens like water from a tap. But taps still control.

We edit, we doubt, we scratch out our thoughts mercilessly and do rewrite after rewrite.
We seek perfection.
We seek control.
We are afraid of writing, even those of us who love it.
Live it.
Yet we seek to let go and let the words, the universe, the stream of unconscious mind say its piece. And when we do finally give up, we find great things appear. Thoughts we never would have thought.
Associations that had never occured to us.
Intuitions that have sought out an eager fountain to flow from.
Thoughts that have travelled the universe seeking to be released and not controlled.
And we become better for giving them voice.
While the words we write may never become famous or find their way to the rest of the world, they have been given voice and were heard by us.
Even if only by us alone.

Keep on writing!

Unsettling Morning

I'm a little bit rattled today. Just found out a friend of my husband's had a major seizure yesterday while hiking with a friend. He nearly fell down a cliff into a river. Thankfully, an off-duty firefighter heard his friend's calls for help and he was taken - nearly two hours later - to hospital where he's been heavily sedated since.

For me, this brings up lots of memories of dealing with my dad's epilepsy and some of the seizures he had. Once he dumped a drink on our cat. Another time, he ate a feather. Yet another time, he tried to skin our dog alive. Then there were the times he tried to jump out of a moving car and when he nearly shot my brother. Not things a kid wants to remember so vividly.

I've tried to get him to write his memoirs about these incidents and how he finally came to have brain surgery. Trust me, what he ended up writing would have caused more law suits than they would have helped anyone with epilepsy. I think this will end up being a team endeavor in the end.

For now, however, I am sending prayers and hugs to our friend suffering in hospital and feeling just a little bit hollow today.