Karleen Koen — writing life

let it spill

Karleen Koen — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:34:40 +0000

Thoughts from the week…………………………

First, a poem leaps out at me as I resume the habit of reading poetry daily:

They tell me I am going to die.

Why don’t I seem to care?

My cup is full. Let it spill.

Brave, bold words which strike hard at the me who has no idea how to navigate these older decades, which seem to suck so many into bitterness and despair. What was it Odysseus had to navigate? The whirlpool Charybdis….some days I row too close to the whirlpool, too far away from the sun.

I am also feeling as if I have nothing new left to say in this blog, so I look back to old blogs to recycle and come across this (slightly reworked this version) from July of 2009. It seems a hint toward finding the blessing implied in Robert Friend’s poem, and so I share it…..

“Neil Young sings:

I want to live

I want to give

I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold……

and I’m getting old.

I thought about my searches for a heart of gold. What that meant to me was finding someone who would love me without ever hurting me. It was about me being loved, not so much about my loving.

And then I was reading Byron Katie, and very stark sentences leaped off the page: ultimately there is only you; you are your own suffering; you are your own happiness. And I thought about what had flitted through my mind as I hummed along with Neil Young: I’m the heart of gold.

It is the quality of my loving, which includes loving myself. And I’m growing old.”

paper

Karleen Koen — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 01:17:59 +0000

The other day, when my writing group had to settle on its next meeting date, I, too, whipped out my calendar. Everyone else was tapping on a phone, but I still use a paper calendar; some kind of day planner thing; in fact selecting it each fall is one of my more important decisions. This year I’ve gone to 8 by 10 size, when I had been at 5 by 7, because this year I decided to stop trying to hide my paper state of mind. I feel a little awkward, true, and I always feel out of fashion, as folks in another group I’m a part of pull out phones instantly for any future planning. But today the newspaper included a story about using paper planners, and I gave a sign of relief. It isn’t only me.

There are others who like being able to spread out a page, who like penning something in, who get monumentally impatient with the tiny keyboards of a phone for noting anything complicated (that reason may belong only to me). I can still remember when having a handsome daytimer was as big a fashion statement as carrying the latest hot purse. I remember being in New York, and every women I saw had a filofax. Remember those? I thought they were so glamorous. Anyway, the nerd among my groups (being me) is still using paper for her calendaring needs. I just like it. I like being able to look at a month at a glance and see what’s ahead with detail in all those little daily squares. And I like going to day entries and entering in my activities. As a writer, as someone who works at home and alone, entering what I’ve accomplished, even if that is only answering emails, make me feel less frail. Yes, I, too, have a work life, my psyche can announce in triumphful tones to my inner critic. Just look here what I did on Wednesday.

So the story in the newspaper made me smile. I’m not alone, not quite yet………How do you keep up with yourself? Paper or phone? Why? Do you feel like you’ve given up anything to go digital? Or am I just a dinosaur braying in the paper tar pits?

fresh

Karleen Koen — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:06:08 +0000

The new year can be a time of fresh starts, and one way is journaling. Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way recommends writing three pages long-hand before you’re fully awake in the morning.

Why? Because you dump irritation, bad feelings, complaints onto the pages usually, and then you begin your day, and a lot of what would have muddied the hours is on those pages, rather than carried outward with you. It’s as if you’ve been heard. And writing three pages every morning creates discipline. (And more, but you’ll have to find out about that by going to her website.)

A lot of people are doing gratitude journals. A blog I read recently spoke to this topic with words from Nicoletta Baumeister: ”Gratefulness thoughts in the morning light are about the setting of the daily lens. What will we take in, what will we seek and what is today’s sense of self? Feeling grateful puts my feet on solid ground, able to work out the next step; whereas, asking what I don’t have sets my day on a frantic course.” She ends her day in an interesting way, too: ”A poem, haiku or a small drawing at night has the effect of driving all other thoughts away. The narrowed focus and purity of intent creates a sense of calm after a day of supersaturated activity. It also affords feelings of satisfaction, job well done, if only in the tiniest work, so that I slip seamlessly into excellent sleep. Too many people out there have insomnia!”

Another way to journal is from wonderful Dr. Rachel Naomi Ramen, who counseled a successful but burned-out doctor in one of my favorite books, Kitchen Table Wisdom, to find again these three things in his days: what inspired him, what surprised him, what touched him. I’ve done this one for a long time, and it has transformed journal entries from junior high whining to memory rushes with sweetness.

And that, my dears, is what I want to take forward into this long day’s journey into night, into this particular new year in the journey, into aging, the only way forward in the journey: sweetness. What do you want?

new year

Karleen Koen — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 03:47:54 +0000

Keep walking though there’s no place to get to….

Don’t try to see through

the distances….

That’s not for

human beings….

Move

within….

But don’t

move the way

fear makes

you move……

Poetry from the 13th century mystic poet Rumi….advice for a new year. I like it that there is some place in our calendar where we may stop, take note, take a deep breath, and try again. At living, I mean. The older I am, the less whirlwind there is in day to day life, the more I am left with myself. With the internal of myself. When I was a young woman, I fled that internal because the words it spoke, words I wasn’t conscious of, cut so deeply. I carried knives whose blades I never saw but from which I was always running.

What does your internal say? If it hurts, is it true? If it isn’t true, how wonderful. If it is, then begin the change so the words are false. Be the beauty you really are…. a goal for 2012………….

singing bird

Karleen Koen — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:29:50 +0000

Keep a green tree in your heart and a singing bird will come….Chinese proverb.

I’ve been nursing myself through Christmas for years, missing the breakup of my family, dealing with a fractured holiday where kids have to split in two to see all the parents, missing the young family I had, the young me so busy and so organized. This year, I realized my work…..on defining what I and no one else but I….want for Christmas has paid off. The heartbreak seems to have been sealed off, like a leak in an old boat. The vessel may be creaky, but she can sail. I’m enjoying myself. Small things delight me:

Buying the three living green wreaths that unleash my decorating and never decorating them the same but just letting creativity flow…..

Noticing the beauty of the Christmas cactus blooms when they finally open; the closed blooms themselves are so satiny beautiful and then when they open….wow…

Letting myself be fully present at whatever small or large Christmas do I’m at, and it doesn’t matter if the only pair of wool slacks I have are too tight at the waist; I’ll diet in the New Year….

Punting around the kids’ schedules but having something Christmas Eve day with them….

Singing my heart out at the Unity Christmas Eve service, all by myself if need be…..

Going with Youngest Grandson (2) on admiring Christmas lights walks. “Light,” he says as he carefully navigates himself near the lighted object. “One finger,” he says, as he’s been taught, as he carefully touches a single light of each object. His masked, furtive delight that he’s talked me into allowing him to walk down the sidewalk with me rather than placing him in the stroller could not be more obvious or more joyful to me. I get one more grandchild to do this with….

Buying reindeer antlers and a red nose for the car, laughing at how silly I must look because the cars I see with them on look silly….but happy, too….what if we all put such on our cars for this time of year…..wouldn’t that be a hoot?

So….a green tree did grow in my heart again around this season, and ten years ago I would never have believed it. I can’t be the younger woman with the world I once had, but I can enjoy the season again. Merry Christmas, ya’ll………

folders

Karleen Koen — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:16:44 +0000

Two small things have made me happy recently. WordPress is adding snow flakes to the blog posts for the season again. It’s likely the only snow I will see, and the sight of them on the screen and across my words makes me smile. And I found file folders for the new book. I don’t know if you were a school supply freak like I was, but office supply stores are the way I’ve taken that delight into my adult life. For several years now, one can purchase file folders with really beautiful patterns or designs on them. And I do. And each book has its own set of folders. And I had a simple and lovely blue for this next book, but then I saw a more dramatic navy and teal background with new-grass-with-yellow-still-in-it green slight design of a flower and feather and bird, and that was it. It’s the next book’s folder.

I think I’m calling the next book: Our Bed is Green, from the Song of Solomon…..an Alice and Richard story. I need small things that please me as I grow older. I have this memory of reading about Sir Alec Guinness saying, we must gradually, gracefully grow into a less grand position. He was speaking of aging. When we’re young we’re the center of our drama, but drama doesn’t travel well in the forward motion that is life.

What do you think?

Before Versailles

Karleen Koen — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 23:07:37 +0000

I found out that week that Before Versailles was picked by both the Library Journal and RT Book Reviews to be included in best historical fiction of 2011…….

ralph

Karleen Koen — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 23:04:26 +0000

–To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded–

I saw this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson on a friend’s Facebook share and took it here. I’m looking for small things to get me through the season. I made a fire today (first cold day in Houston); I put red in my front door wreath. Today is the first day of a secret Advent adventure I’m doing with my grandchildren. From where I sit as I type this, I can see a long red ribbon twisting in the wind. It reminds me of that scene in American Beauty when the young hero videos plastic sacks caught by wind; he sees them as dancing. That’s how it feels to view this ribbon that was wound in the tree to attract hummingbirds, but keeps positioning its long arms toward the ground. There are several white blossoms on the paperwhites that are scattered here and there in the yard. Good things. Small things.

What’s small and wonderful in your life? What is success?

splendor

Karleen Koen — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:21:04 +0000

Flipping around, looking for something to wile away time, I came across Splendor in the Grass, about young love. I cried at the end, as I always do. Why? Because Deanie, the heroine, tries so hard to be a good girl. And when being a good girl loses her the boy she loves so deeply, then she tries to be sensual. But her being a good girl is important to him, too, because he loves her. She breaks into pieces and when she is back together again, he has moved on. And so has she, driving away from the ranch where she has just met his wife and seen the child that might have been hers. She isn’t pathetic. She is lovely inside and out and moving forward with her own life. But what might have been is there in the car with her and with the viewer.

It made me think again of becoming a woman and of sex and how a girl-woman goes forth to meet that part of her destiny. Before birth control, the complications were huge. But after birth control, I think it’s all still complicated. I know a girl-woman who is so in love with her someone, who loves her back. Will her being able to explore sexuality more safely guarantee happiness? It’s so complex, this journey into a sensual self. Society doesn’t make it simple; religion often makes it sinful; conventionality tries to make it invisible and nondisturbing.

Maybe it shouldn’t be simple. I don’t know. I just know from my own experience that the journey can be so difficult. That journey is often what I explore in my novels. These are the lines from Wordsword at the center of the story:

What through the radiance

which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Through nothing can bring back the hour

of splendour in the grass,

of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind……

What do you think?

return to

Karleen Koen — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 00:20:27 +0000

I have old faithfuls, books I return to, books I read the way a baby sucks a pacifier. One of my pacifiers is almost any regency by Georgette Heyer. I have paperbacks of hers so old that the pages have to be rubber-banded in a heap. I love her plucky heroines, the sometimes truly witty banter between characters, the very sweet romances. There is a lot of subtle humor in character interactions, which amuses me even more each time I read it. I also reread John le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl about once a year. I love the heroine he’s created in this book, the way he describes and builds character, and the truly gripping plot. He is a master of plotting and character. I reread To Kill a Mockingbird pretty often; the underlying tenderness of the story takes me, though I find the African American characters a bit stereotyped, but what do I know. Maybe for 1930s Southern America, they are not stereotyped at all. It’s just that they’re shaded all one tone, and the others aren’t. I love Winston Graham’s Poldark Saga, the first six books. He’s a fine, fine historical novelist, and Ross Poldark has my heart, as does Demelza. I adore Dr. Naomi Ramen‘s Kitchen Table Wisdom. Again, the scope of heart in her collections of stories about people gravely ill and those who serve them is huge. It’s a wise book, too, nuggets about leading a deeper life scattered like bread crumbs. I love Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek, though having read it so many times, I now see plot flaws, but I just never mind them because I like the character of Dona and her story so much, and the marvelous dreamy quality of du Maurier’s prose. Anything I like ( I’m almost always reading), I now put up on my shelf in Goodreads. But the ones listed here are my tried and true go-back- tos for a needed mental rest. My husband doesn’t understand it, and I can’t explain it, except that they never fail to comfort me, I never fail to not like them, I never fail to be amused again or touched again…..and that’s special…….

It occurs to me that I learn a little more about writing each time I read these favorites; I learn on a level I’m not aware of…..

Do you reread? What? And why? Or why not?