The first of everything

December 21st, 2009 - 6 Comments

“If you don’t see the Way you don’t see it even as you walk on it.” – The Identity of Relative and Absolute

In this week of returns and revelations, I’m leaving sand on your doorstep with a few repeat posts. Enjoy your time!

The sandwiches are packed; the watermelon sliced. Today I take the kids to the beach. It is the one day every summer every year that we do this: at season’s end, the four of us, giddy to go, spit-roasted on return. With me: the two teenagers who were once my babysitter’s babies, plus the baby who was once my own.

I believe in cycles like this, in anniversaries and observed traditions. But then, what’s to believe? They come on their own, the returns and repetitions, as reliable as seasons because they are seasons. All of life is a season. We dance in a circle the whole way! The rhythm insistent and true – our part is but to hear the music and move.

Next week we end these short summer months with a true family vacation. Venturing up north, where the ocean is darker, the air misty, the forests thick. Yesterday I remembered that Big Sur was the last vacation destination my husband and I took before Georgia was born. Hardly a vacation, it was the place that the full catastrophe of my sickness was felt, and the shock of its sudden conclusion would bear down. We spent three days roaming and moaning the northern coast, and on return, I was hospitalized. Georgia was born too soon after. This Sunday is the anniversary of her coming home.

So I’m riding the waves and wind these days, again, and next week I’ll find myself back at the first of everything. All over again. Completely new.

Subscribe to my newsletter • Come to my retreat • Fan me • Follow me.

How to unwrap your life

December 8th, 2009 - 22 Comments

I speed-read a short story collection last week, Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, which I cannot recommend. Despite that, one story in the book stuck. It was about the relationship between a cellist and his musical mentor, a woman who described herself as a virtuoso. The woman gives her protégé weeks of technical and inspirational corrections before revealing that she cannot play a cello herself. “We are both virtuosos,” she explained in pitch-perfect logic, “but my virtuosity has not been unwrapped.”

A wrapped-shut virtuoso. Does that resonate?

We dare not yet pick up our own instrument for fear of, well, everything. We are cautious, guarded, unprepared. Getting closer, we tell ourselves. Getting ready. Awaiting the moment of fulfillment, when our mastery will be revealed. In the meantime, our virtuosity is unchallenged, shielded beneath layers of tissue, inert, immobile, a precious empty ideal. Held in reserve for one day.

How to Unwrap Your Life

1. Do something you’ve been avoiding, without thinking twice.
2. This might mean that you need to mail the letter or send the proposal. It will put things in motion.
3. This might mean you need to make the call or send the resume. Go for broke.
4. This might mean that you need to tackle the hand wash cold.
5. This might mean you need to make a meal from whatever you have on hand in the kitchen, without restraint or apology.
6. This might mean a dog walk or a litter box cleaning.
7. This might mean forgetting what he said, she said, you said and everything that has been said before now.
8. No one can tell you a thing. There is no “how to do.”
9. There is only do.
10. Play as if your life depends on it. Without you, there’s no music.

Subscribe to my newsletter • Come to my retreat • Fan me • Follow me.

Unbearable likeness of being

July 17th, 2009 - 9 Comments

I feel brave when I’m performing
It is the color of confidence
And it feels like magic

This is a page in Georgia’s art journal she made as part of the Mini-Mermaid art e-camp this summer. She made it right before she auditioned for a part in a play last week when she was beaming pure gold and glitter like the color of confidence.

She didn’t get the part she tried for. She didn’t get any part she tried for. They gave her the part of a boy. This seems to be a recurring tragedy in her life drama. She cried for a day, and for two nights she wore sponge curlers to bed so she could convince the director, too late, that she is a girl like the girls they cast.

But she feels brave when she’s performing. She’s decided she likes her part. She’s having fun, surrounded by friends, intoxicated by the 190-proof enthusiasm that is the stage life. Watching her dive, and dip and swim to the surface again, I’ve decided that I like her part too. It’s called Georgia, and like magic, she can be anything.

Note to self: nevermind

July 16th, 2009 - 2 Comments

There must be something in the connotation of the word “being” that makes it seem like the opposite of “doing.” I say that because I’m sometimes asked how, as an avowed meditator, I ever get things done. Perhaps they picture me curled up in a corner.

A regular meditation practice is the last thing that prevents me from totally engaging in activity. It helps me do more even as I think about it less. Hidden in the question is how preoccupied we are with to-doing rather than doing. To-doing or should-be-doing takes up quite a bit of time. It could well be the principal occupation of our lives: imagining scenarios, planning strategies, fretting outcomes, second-guessing choices and then sticking the whole rigamarole back into the familiar rut that’s so hard to get out of.

Emptying the mind of that kind of doing opens it up to a spontaneous and creative undoing that is quite marvelous and, I dare say, breathtaking.

Read the rest and leave a comment on “The Laundry Line”
my blog at Shambhala SunSpace

Subscribe to my newsletter • Come to my retreat

Actual testimonial and giveaway by a mini-mermaid

June 11th, 2009 - 17 Comments

I think this camp looks fun because I love art and drawing. In this camp a video is given once a week to give you the theme of an artbook page. We then make a whole artbook by ourselves. Flickr photos of your drawings will be posted for those who want to share. I want to do it because I love art and because I want to have other friends all over the world I can share it with. During the summer my mom usually says “Get off the computer right now!” or “Don’t even think about turning on the TV!” but this way I can do my art and connect with my new art friends. I’m gonna do it this summer. How about you?

Yours,
Georgia G. Miller

little girls changing the world from mccabe russell on Vimeo.

Georgia is signed up as a mini-mermaid art e-camper this summer with the one and only dancing mermaid and we have an even bigger mess in store with one full camp tuition to give away to another girl age 8-13 (or younger, or older!) The camp runs all summer so you can start anytime and count Georgia G. Miller among your best art friends in the whole world. I’m tellin’ ya, she’s devoted to her worldwide web of friends. Leave a comment here, with a way to reach you, and give your girl a chance to show her stuff this summer. Winner to be drawn and announced sincerely by Georgia G. Miller next Wednesday, June 17 on her last day of school. Look out world!

Winner: Georgia picked Shanna. Congratulations!

From a tipi to a tribe

May 27th, 2009 - 2 Comments

Perhaps if this woman had ever been here, she would have had the fearless forethought to stay there. Maybe if more girls could find their own expression, they wouldn’t be lost in translation. It’s not farfetched to imagine the day we’ll have one of our own braves as chief. That would indeed be tribal justice.

My friend Wendy Cook has taken an impossible dream out of her laptop and into her lap with the launch of the Mighty Girl Art empowerment camp starting this summer. It’s for our tweens riding the raging waters between slippery rocks and hard places. (And those aren’t just the frontiers where calls get dropped.) I have a tween, and I hope in the months and years ahead she will learn to trust the voice of her native intelligence above the mindless cacophony of the crowd. But she needs wise mentors and guides beyond her mother’s fleet fingertips. All of our girls do.

What I really want is for Wendy to bring her tipi to my front lawn for a West Coast outpost. Saving that, I want you to look around the camp see how you can add your muscle to the magic. How can we grow this? Spiral it outward? I liken it to my own recent kids’ writing project, which has ricocheted to 70 places all over the world in just the last week. There’s no underestimating the power of getting ink all over your hands, and no one has to make a case for it.

It’s about time, girls, to put our faith in the tipi instead of the WiFi, connect to the sacred circle and not just a cell network, and flex something other than our thumbs.

We have a whole world to rescue and seven generations to serve, starting now.

Whoop!

Subscribe to my newsletter • Come to my retreat.

After the ecstasy, the ecstasy

May 20th, 2009 - 10 Comments

For the before, click here.

Dear Karen,
Thank you for helping us doing our book. You are a very good author. Yesterday at the book tour I was kind of shy to read it but then I was very excited to do it. The kids asked us how many months did it take to do the book. We said it took us about 2 months. We kind of got like every kid’s question. They loved us and they loved our books a lot. One of the kids said I want to be an author too!

You are the best author ever in the whole wide world!

Love,
Wendy

The last 19 books I didn’t write

May 17th, 2009 - 76 Comments

About mid-way through this school year, my daughter started griping, I’m bored. I thought, whatever. She nagged me to volunteer in her class. I thought, no way.

When a four- or five-year-old uses the word, bored, it’s a safe bet they are playing with the word. But when they are eight or nine, it might be time to pay attention. When I did, it changed my life.

I like Georgia’s historic, charming, well-staffed, well-intentioned public school. She does too. This post is not about the shortcomings of her school. It is about the shortcomings of my attention.

My daughter and her classmates are being taught superlatively well how to write to rules and rubrics. But to write freely, for fun and without judgment? That’s a different story.

Stuck in my own nowhere of creative momentum, I plunged instead into a new adventure. I proposed to Georgia’s teacher that I lead a classroom project in something I’d never done, but that amounted to the only thing I could contribute. The magnificent teacher did her part: she said yes. Then, over a four-month period, she and I worked together with 19 third-graders to write their own creative nonfiction (and a bit of fiction) stories.

We tell our children stories. We read books aloud, and prod our kids to read for themselves. So they read about famous people, folk tales and legends, biographies, historical fiction and fantasies. But do they realize that their own lives are stories? That they have the experience and imagination to create and share stories that come entirely from themselves? Based on their own remarkable lives and the future they envision?

Well, of course, they can. Give them tools and attention and you will be amazed. I was amazed. I was encouraged. I was uplifted and transported. I was repaid a million times over, with the only payment that counts or lasts.

I want you to know that wherever your child goes to school, or doesn’t, whatever their age or grade level, they are brilliant. They are geniuses. They are authors. I am convinced already. I am their first fan.

I word-processed and printed out each three-chapter-long book on my computer. They drew illustrations and a cover design that we laminated. They wrote author bios and I snapped their photos and we put that together on the last page. We spiral bound everything together and then they went on book tour reading their stories aloud in classrooms of younger ages. We’re having a book festival next week where the kids will read their stories to their fellow authors and everyone gets a literary prize. An eraser. Oh how I prize my own, because the most important thing about writing is not that you finish. It’s that you start, and then start all over again.

What did they write? To keep it short, I assembled 19 lines from their work into this abridged life story. It gives you an idea of the treasure they handed to me.

My story is unlike any other.
I was born early because I wanted to go places.
My first smile wasn’t a real smile, it was my “about to cry” smile.
It was like being sad and happy at the same time.
When I was little I liked excitement. I put Cheetos in the microwave.
When people asked how many friends I had, I said, “It would take a long time to count them.”
It seems like I have friends all over the world.
Friends are magic, movies are magic and spelling is magic because people can read your writing.
Making people feel happy and safe is the most important thing there is.
Everywhere we went, we went fast.
I thought a lot about growing up, but my parents thought about when I was little.
That’s what parents do.
Sometimes you have to lose something to find something better.
What you love never really goes away.
I used to want to work in an ice cream store, but something tells me life will be more interesting than that.
The day you read this I may be 9 or 90.
Now my energy goes up in the daytime and down in the nighttime.
The funeral lasted three hours.
Somewhere I’ll be watching, and I’ll be happy if you are good citizens.

I could go on forever, but my heart is bursting, and I find I have some writing to do.

***

If you are a parent or teacher and you would like a copy of the lesson plan I created for this project, “My Life Story: A Creative Nonfiction Project for 3rd Graders,” just leave a comment with a way to contact you, or email me and I’ll gladly share.

Subscribe to my newsletter • Come to my retreat.

What to make of it

May 10th, 2009 - 11 Comments

Last night at a neighborhood party, my daughter and her nine-year-old friends put on a show that was shocking and lewd.

I was embarrassed and alarmed.

Frank Rich’s column in the Times includes this fact “more than 60 percent of Twitter users abandon it after a single month.”

I’m still afraid the future will sail without me.

On speakerphone so we could wish her a happy mother’s day, my mother-in-law asks, “What will your mommy do today?” My daughter says, “Exercise and write by herself.” My mother-in-law replies, “Doesn’t she do that everyday?”

I never know where she’s coming from.

Wish Studio posted this essay describing my creative process, which seems like a misnomer. My output is painstaking and small but I get a big kick out of looking the part.

Break the bottle, make a space and let it be.

The list of forgetting

April 30th, 2009 - 23 Comments

I’d forgotten all about this. And then something told me it was a good time to remember.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. –Dogen

Forget the story you tell yourself about your parents, the story you tell yourself about your childhood, the story you tell of your first love, the story of your first marriage, the story of pain and partings. Forget the birth story, the death story, the whole story, the story you keep repeating, the story you’ll never forget. Forget that story, and do not replace it with another.

Forget what might have been and what could still be. The past is gone and the future will arrive on schedule.

Forget the time you ran away, the time you cheated, the time you got caught, the time you found out, the time you broke down, the time you picked yourself up, the time you were left high and dry, the time the milk spilled and the glass broke, the time you’ll never forget. Forget time.

Forget your second thoughts, your second guesses, your second glances and second chances. Forget the count. No one knows the count and there is no way to count it.

Forget your worst fears and highest hopes. Forget all fears and hopes. Forget all worst and highest. Forget altogether the habit of make believe when reality is magic already.

Forget your leaps of logic and foregone conclusions. Nothing is ever foregone or concluded. Cover the ground where you stand. It’s enough.

Forget what you thought.

Forget what you felt.

Forget what she said, what he said, and especially what she said. Do not mistake the word for the thing.

Now, open your eyes and do what needs to be done. Having forgotten all obstacles and limitations, all distractions and negations, there is nothing you do not know how to do. Surprise yourself.

You are a buddha.

Any questions?

The next bubble to burst

January 5th, 2009 - 12 Comments

“Although we can expect small-business failure rates to increase over the coming months, the entrepreneurial spirit is still alive and well.”

– Dr. Jeff Cornwall
The Entrepreneurial Mind

Pup Sudz

The ULTAMATE doggie
grooming center!
Make the dog look good!
small dogz: $5
medium dogz: $10
large dogz: $15
*
Jan 4 (only)

We don’t take credit cards!!!
_______

Opening/Closing day customer count: One, her own dog, who doesn’t count.

“Mommy, no one ever comes to these things, no one ever wants to come to these things, and they don’t even care how hard we try!”

–Georgia Miller, age 9, The Entrepreneurial Mine

By any other name

October 22nd, 2008 - 6 Comments

Children’s books that forever changed my life.

Of course, you say, of course she’d like that book. She chose the name.

My daughter is named Georgia, but not for the artist O’Keeffe. My daughter is named for two great-grandfathers on both sides of her family. One an architect; one a farmer.

So this book, once again, is rather for me. Georgia O’Keeffe is my namesake, my mentor, as an artist and an independent being. As a heart and an eye and a hand that saw the big truth in small things.

My Name is Georgia
A Portrait by Jeanette Winter

Her entire life story is told in these 48 pages of spare text and evocative illustrations. Her own girl, with her own way and her own way of seeing. Drawn by the urge to meet the faraway up close, to render mysteries plain and true so people would see.

I went to the New Mexico desert.
So far away that no one ever comes.
I was satisfied to be all by myself.
I did things other people don’t do.
I painted my sky BIG, so people would see the sky the way I did.

Find the fearless footprint, hear the song of truth and echo it back over the mountains. Paint your life BIG so people will see.

My earlier favorites are shelved here, here and here.

On little cat feet

October 21st, 2008 - 12 Comments

Children’s books that forever changed my life.

It turns out I have an affinity for things French (besides fools and fries). Today I send you in the direction of a cat that travels, in the inscrutably self-actualized nature of a cat, across the entire country of France to find his original home.

This is the sweetest, shortest evocation of a spiritual sojourn that I have ever read.

The Cat Who Walked Across France
By Kate Banks
Pictures by Georg Hallensleben

Kitty lives in a stone house by the sea until the day he is shipped north, with all the other lifelong belongings of the old woman who once scratched his ears and stroked his back. Soon he is forgotten among the unclaimed and disused. Until one day he leaves.

Children playing ball would chase after him. And the cat would scurry up a tree. But when he nestled in its branches, he would remember the tangy smell of lemons ripening on a branch under a window at the stone house by the edge of the sea. And he would move on.

May we all move on through a life as lush as the French landscape until we reach a wide open front door, settle into a warm, familiar spot and come to rest, knowing we are home.

Earlier recommendations here and here.

Pages: 1 2 Next

karen maezen miller

making peace with the laundry, the kitchen, and the yard

the laundry

the kitchen

the yard

Posts Tagged ‘Creativity’