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The Artist's Way, Write it

The Artist’s Way Week 1: Monster’s Hall of Fame

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My Creative Stifling Monster Hall of Fame

  • Me

Of all the monsters in my life, I am by far the worst. I have been my own worst enemy for as long as I can remember. I have wonderful friends and family who have pretty much always been supportive of my dreams. In fact I can’t remember a single time someone telling me that what I want to do or be was a bad idea or that I might fail. I was the one who decided (as a realist) that writing ‘wouldn’t pay the bills’ and maybe I was listening to main stream society, but I made that decision. I knew I couldn’t—or that I didn’t want to try to live off it and I was good at teaching so Poof! Teaching career. And don’t get me wrong, I love teaching, and I’m a wonderful teacher, most days, but my first love has always been writing. I can’t even remember a time when I wasn’t writing or telling stories. I convinced myself though that it wasn’t viable.

But, what if it could be?

  • A guy who in middle school ranked my “prettiness” on a scale and let’s just say I didn’t measure up to his standards

I know I’m not a super model, but when I was in elementary school I was a confident kid. I was out to conquer the world. I had loads of friends, and I was pretty extroverted. I was the first to make friends with new kids, and never allowed anyone to sit by themselves in the cafeteria. And then Middle school came and I was still that same girl…

Until…

I asked a boy to a dance.

And the boy said, “Well, on a scale of ugly to pretty Ashley falls right about here.” It was pretty close to the ugly side.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am aware that this is one child’s opinion, but I do realize that this is the moment when my personality began to change. I became less extroverted, I was no longer the center of attention (nor was I trying to be the center of attention), and quite frankly I preferred the shadows from there on out. I was ashamed. Not only of my physical appearance, but of what I created and did as well.

As a friend of mine once wisely said, middle school is quite a bitch and it’s a miracle any of us survive. If we could press a fast-forward button and skip ahead we’d all be happier people probably, but none of us would be the same. And quite frankly these experiences are what make us who we are. We can’t divorce ourselves from our pasts, or our past monsters (and quite frankly compared to other people and their monsters, I got off quite easy), but we can learn from them and move forward—fighting to become men and women, artists, we want to be.

  • Q from middle school who either didn’t like more or I perceived that she didn’t like me—either way I felt stifled as an individual and persecuted as a result.

I have always been a teacher’s pet. And maybe that’s why Mrs. Q didn’t like me. Some people don’t like kids who are constantly trying to please adults. But again, it was middle school and by this point, I think I was feeling persecuted by pretty much everyone. Sometimes I wonder if Mrs. Q actually disliked me as much as I felt like she did. I’ll never know though. She passed away not long ago, and I never asked her. Regardless, in her class I didn’t feel free to be creative, or open, which was ironic because many people who had her would say the opposite. They loved her style and how she helped them to open up and become more creative people.

  • My school system

My school system was small and had few resources for creative outlets. We had music and some art, but that was about it. I would have really thrived had I had the opportunity to take a creative writing class or even drama in high school, but I didn’t have that option, and that feels like a shame to me.

  • The NC Voter

For not fighting for the educational system more. For not making it a priority and for taking the wind out of creative outlets in schools and in teachers and in individuals who are trying to fight for these things for students and for the future.

So who are the monsters of your past? Who stifle your creativity? How do you plan to overcome them?

Character, Learn it

A Second Chance

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I’m not very good at giving people a second chance. I have a tendency to pass judgment quickly, rely on first impressions, and hold grudges.

I don’t like this about myself, but I admit that it is a weakness and probably a large part of why I’m not a particularly fun loving, devil may care, gregarious, everyone-wants-to-be-her-friend individual.

On the one hand, I can accept that about myself, on the other hand I don’t really want to accept it. Because we should give one another a second chance. It’s our responsibility, and a lesson we should learn sooner rather than later.

In church the other week we were reading about Jonah, and I was reminded of Jonah’s poor attitude and the chapter after he returns to Nineveh. For some reason, I always forget about this chapter. In my mind the story always ends with Jonah becoming Whale spit up, fulfilling God’s will and then learning his lesson…but even after spending time inside a fish, he doesn’t really learn anything. Not a blessed thing and that is terrifying. I’m not going to lie, it worries me that one could experience so much and still have such a hard heart. In fact, he gets mad because his sermon to the Ninevites is effective. His ticked off that they turn from their evil ways and repent. He gets so mad that he goes out to the desert to pout.

God sends a vine to cover his head and provide him shade.

Then Jonah gets mad when the vine, which he did nothing to cultivate, dies.

And God speaks up. He asks Jonah an important question: Do you have a right to be angry about this vine?

Great question. Jonah didn’t do anything to deserve the vine, to nurture the vine; he didn’t plant the vine—he didn’t even say thank you when it grew. Then, when it dies he does nothing to change his circumstances. He just sits and lets his head burn. Stubborn, isn’t he? Of course, this is coming from the runner—the one who tried to escape God and when that didn’t work had sailors throw him into the sea, I guess he thought that would be a way to seal his fate—but you can’t run from God no matter how far you go and if God wants to teach you a lesson no matter how stubborn you are he’ll teach on.

It is up to you to decide to learn.

How many of us are the same way? We are blessed with health, family and sometimes even wealth that we did not earn and rarely deserve. We are living in a world of entitlement, but as Romans is so quick to remind us—all have sinned and fall short so we really don’t deserve anything but death, destruction and punishment. Some people, no matter what, some people are determined not to be happy. No matter what they are determined to be miserable. In fact I’m not even sure they would know what to do with happiness if it grew from a vine and slapped them in the face.

You see, it’s so easy to forget about Jonah 4 because no one wants to see Jonah as a whiner—no one wants to remember the man who survived a whale’s belly as a complaining, stubborn, unhappy man. Because it doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t someone whose been given that SECOND CHANCE be able to empathize more with people who are seeking a second chance? Shouldn’t he rejoice with them, be joyful and grateful?

And yet, he’s angry! Angry that God would save them. He FORGOT too. He forgot his own transgressions and somehow I doubt he was as pure and sinless as he pouty face would suggest.

And then the bitter sting of hypocrisy sinks deep into my skin. Don’t we struggle with the same problem? We’ve all been given the same second chance, and we all think we deserve so much more than we actually do.

We think we deserve happiness.

We think we deserve contentment.

We think we deserve a life of leisure where we get what we want when we want it.

But we don’t.

We are all sinners.

We deserve misery.

We deserve sickness.

We deserve death.

Just as a murderer deserves to pay for his or her heinous crimes, each and every one of us deserves to pay for our sins. But OH how quick we are to forget our own sins when we look around and see someone else sinning. “Well,” we say to ourselves with our noses stuck up in the air, “at least I haven’t cheated on my wife like Bill. Bill deserves punishment. How could he show his face in church? He is such a sinner!”

What if Jonah had accepted their conversion? What if he’d stopped feeling that it was unfair, that they deserved less than he, that they were his equals? Now I don’t presume to rewrite the Bible, but I do want to look at another perspective, because after all, that’s what this blog is about. So Jonah 4 might have read a little like this:

1)And Jonah was pleased and joy filled his heart. 2) He prayed to the Lord, “Oh Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? How could I be so blind and flee to Tarshish? I know you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in Love. A God who relents from sending calamity. 3) Now, O Lord I see how it is better to live than to die. Praise your holy name.” 4) And the Lord blessed Jonah and the Ninevites…

Because the thing is we’re all sinners. Some of us don’t want to admit that we sin, and that’s worse in a lot of ways. We go to church, sing in the choir, attend Bible study, join every committee, but forget that we are more than just an organization. We are, and should be, designed to love everyone, not gossip about their shortcomings, or worse ignore and run away from their suffering.

We’re designed to be God’s image.

But we’re not in God’s image when we are unforgiving and self-righteous, sulking in the desert of our own iniquities and sin.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about what happiness is and why we pursue it. It’s not in our declaration of independence by accident. And we often take it for granted. I’ve come to the radical conclusion that happiness is not as illusive as we try to make it. Happiness doesn’t run from us, we run from it. Pursuing happiness may be a right, may be what God had in mind in fact, I don’t know. But what I do know is that Proverbs 25:26 says: “Like a muddied spring or a polluted well are the righteous who give way to the wicked,” but John 4:14 says: “ but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” All you have to do to quench the thirst is drink. But we resist the water just like we resist happiness. Why?

Because it can’t be that simple, can it?

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A World of Abundance

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 SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES   I walked 2 miles…uphill to class today. It was beautiful. And when I got there, what I learned was even more wonderful. 

We live in a world of abundance. Everywhere you turn there is excess to the point of grotesqueness. But this is not a new thing. Lack of resources has rarely been a true problem in our society or world. It is the distribution of resources and the generosity (or lack thereof) found within a society that has caused most of our problems.

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 Now, I know what you’re thinking. This is some kind of call for government reform. Some kind of socialist advocacy. But it’s not. Let me tell you why.

 Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has deep roots, having been influenced heavily by Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present and a previous work by Dickens in the Pickwick Papers entitled “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton”. What we learn from these two works is that A Christmas Carol is not just a fairy tale, it is a text that mimics the abundance of our world showing the best of the best and the worst of the worst. It is this world of superabundance that shows us that you can afford to be charitable. NOT the government, but YOU.

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 If we look at ”Captains of Industry” a rhetorical selection from Past and Present we see the influences of Carlyle’s ideas on Dickens more fantastical story. In the Victorian era there is a constant fear of rebellion, particularly as a response to the French Revolution having occurred at the end of the 1700s. According to Carlyle, the problems in our society results from isolation, idleness and mammonism, the unholy trinity.

 

 Isolation is a type of wretchedness that keeps us from interacting with our society turning us into savages.

 Idleness leaves people soulless. When you rob people of work, you are taking away their humanity.

 Mammonism is a worship of money based on Carlyle’s idea of the Cash Nexus; the concept that the only thing binding us together is money—but as a society we need more than money. Otherwise our soullessness becomes permanent and contagious.

 

 Carlyle explicitly says that the problems in our society particularly with the oppressed and the poor—those in want—cannot be fixed by the government. Instead it is a call to personal responsibility for the captains of industry to break the trance and become more aware of the problem. As he says,

“ Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. To order, to just subordination; noble in loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven neigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner. Not as a bewildered bewildering mob; but as a firm regimented mass, with real captains over them, will these men march any more. All human interests, combined with human endeavors, and social growths in this world, have, at a certain stage of their development, required organizing: and Work, the grandest of human interests, does now require it” (272).

He tells them to be nice! To treat their employees better and as a result a new kind of wholes can be achieved. It seems like common sense, but if it was so common—then why are there so many adaptations of A Christmas Carol teaching the same basic premise over and over again?

Which brings us back to Dickens. Most people are familiar with A Christmas Carol for a reason; because the text is recognizable and acceptable to most of our societal values. The lessons it teaches us are fast—thus bringing us once again to the abundance concept. Today in our NEH seminar I learned many things about the text from many shifting perspectives, but as a writer the most important lesson is what I leaned about how Scrooge teaches us how to show students the value of reading and what it can do for them. Like Scrooge we see things in novels and literature but we can’t interact with them. Novelists and writers are responsible for pointing us to certain things in our past, present and future and helping us to see how we approach and thus change the world. If we learn to read in the right way, we will be a better people because novelists are like the ghosts showing us how to change our futures before it is too late. This is why words, writing and reading is so powerful in our society.

So A Christmas Carol isn’t just about Scrooge or Christmas, but a lesson I how and why we read because it is a lesson in how and why we see things and what it does for us. If we learn this lesson properly we will learn how to change the world. Because the real lesson from Dickens and Carlyle is that we should be helping each other, not relying on the government (or other people) to fix problems that we should all be personally responsible for.

And that’s why I write. I want to help change the world. 

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