Blue Skies and Clouds

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things in nature have a message you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive. ~ Eleanora Duse

 

"Not a cloud in the sky." You've heard people say that, I'm sure. Yesterday was that kind of day here in Kentucky. The weatherman on the 6 o'clock news suggested sending your kids out to look for a cloud in the sky if you wanted to keep them busy. They wouldn't have found one. Nothing but blue skies ahead. That means no storms on the horizon. 

 

But sometimes we don't see those storms coming. That's how it was eleven years ago on 9/11. The terrorists were in the skies using airplanes as weapons and thousands of people died. Many on the airplanes. Many more in the Twin Towers. And a brave number of firemen and police officers who rushed into danger to try to save people. It's not something anyone old enough to witness the scenes on television will ever forget. The live picture of that second plane flying into the building will forever be seared on our memories and then the awful sight of those buildings collapsing. I saw a space type movie once where a whole world in space exploded in one of the scenes. That scene bothered me even though I knew it was make believe. My imagination was making it real. But the scenes that day eleven years ago were not make believe. They were tragically real.

 

We were at the Quartet Convention that day too. Not when it happened, but later in the day and then the rest of the week. The Convention is held at the fairgrounds in Louisville which is right next door to the airport. That airport has a UPS hub and planes go in and out every few minutes. But for the rest of that week in 2001, no planes flew. The sky was empty. And we prayed. For our country. For those families who had lost loved ones. For each other as we waited for what might happen next. 

 

There are things like that we can never forget if we've witnessed them happening. Pearl Harbor was one of those days. I wasn't born then, but I can imagine how people felt as they heard the radio reports of the attack and faced the sure knowledge that our country would now be joining the Allies in the war overseas. Husbands, sons and fathers would be taking up arms to defend our country. Many would leave and never return home. Others would return home, scarred by the horrors of war. Life would never again be the same. 

Here in Kentucky this week, the blue skies are peaceful and spirit renewing even though hard things are happening in other parts of the world. Wherever you are, may your blue skies ahead be something that brings sunshine to your life.

 

"By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet." ~Thomas Merton

 

Fire and music under our feet. Love the sound of that. Thanks for reading.

 

A Week of Songs

That's a big gift when people say to you that a song helped them or brought them to some place in their life where they needed to be.  ~ Lenny Kavitz

 

 

The National Quartet Convention is in Louisville this week. The Patriot Quartet, the group my husband sings bass with, will be singing on a showcase Monday afternoon, so I have worked it out to go listen. At least I hope I’ve worked it out. My mother is not doing very well right now. We had a really odd night, but then oddness is part of dementia. Oddness and sadness and all the patience one can gather. So perhaps tomorrow if I get to go hear some of the songs the gospel groups will be sharing, I’ll get that gift of a song that will bring me to a place I need to be. A place of continuing patience and a little touch of wisdom. When you’re dealing with someone with confused thinking, you feel like if you could just find the right answer, then maybe things would be easier. But I’m not sure there is a right answer.
 

The Patriots are going to be singing their new radio release “On the Right Road Now” and a patriotic song “One Nation Under God.” At least I think that’s the plan. Then they will be meeting and greeting people in the Exhibition Hall. I enjoy meeting people at their booth and will have my books for anybody who might want to get an autographed copy. Last year I met a couple from Scotland and they went home with a heavier suitcase because they packed some of my books into it. It was fun talking to them. It’s fun talking to everyone who comes by, and especially fun when they are like me and love books. Of course they wouldn’t be at the Quartet Convention if they didn’t love Gospel music.
 

We’ve been going to the Quartet Convention for years now. For years, we went as fans. Well, Darrell was the big fan. I went along for the ride and usually ended up liking some of the songs. The songs that speak to me are generally ones with words that I relate to. If they also have a great melody, that’s a plus, but it’s the words that mean the most to me. Sometimes just a phrase in a song will touch my heart. The Patriots sing one “I Can Feel the Touch of His Hand” that borrows a lot of the beautiful ideas of the 23^rd Psalm and I love the line “surely goodness and mercy will follow me.” It’s a line that other people respond to also, because sometimes they will come to the product table and ask for that “goodness and mercy” song. That’s one song I never get tired of hearing.

 

It’s interesting how people are touched by different songs. Songs that I don’t like all that much are often favorites of other people. I suppose that's true with books too. Actually, there’s no supposing to it. You can tell that's so by reading the reviews on Amazon or other sites where readers leave their thoughts on books. One person might love a story and give it many stars and great words while another person will totally pan the same story and think it’s awful. That’s what makes the world go around and opens the publishing door for many different types of writers. Thank goodness. Who would want to have only one kind of book or one type of song? That’s why we say “different strokes for different folks” or “to each his own.” 

 

I’m just glad some of you like the words I come up with. So thanks for reading, and if you happen to be at the Quartet Convention this week, come by the Patriots booth in the Exhibition Hall this week and say hello to me or Darrell. One of us will probably be there. 

The Honks Keep Coming In

A double dose of hope

What expresses hope for the future better than a rainbow? And two rainbows are even better. Hope can be amazing, and perhaps it was that message of hope about my little great-niece on my Facebook page that has so touched people. 

The honks are still coming in. If you didn't see my earlier post on this, the picture I posted was of my little niece smiling and standing behind her car with the message "Honk for No More Chemo." The fact that she's a cute little girl with an appealing smile didn't hurt either. But I'm not sure anything explains how the photo went viral and is still collecting comments at the rate of 100 every hour. 

A little bit ago the post had been viewed 17,841,285 times. The picture had been shared 24,252 times. 1,470,011 people had clicked the like button and 50,317 people had taken the time to leave a comment. I read through the last 221 comments and here is a sampling from those. 

"Honk Honk!!!!!!" (from Hawaii) (The honks are such fun.)

"I don't know her personally, but I will remember that face. What a gift!"

"I have not read a better post then this on. Congratulations."

"Good for you kid. Live a long and happy life. Don't know you but that doesn't matter. As for the parents, congratulations."
 
"St. Jude's is my charity of choice. Hurray Hurray." (In the comments I've read since I posted this on August 15, I seen a lot of support for St. Jude. Some of those who gave to St. Jude on a regular basis like the next commenter were extra pleased to see the picture of my niece and to know a child their money had helped to cure.)

"AAWW how great. God is good. We always give to St.Jude. I am going outside to blow her a kiss, the wind will carry it to her..GOD BLESS YOU ALL...♥" (Indiana)

"Chili's raising money for St. Jude's for the month if September. Please go in and donate." (Others mentioned fundraising opportunities.)

"more than like, LOVE!!!" (Saw this kind of comment often)

"Praise God & YOU ROCK KAELYN!!!" 

"Let's have a Praise Party for Kaelyn!! Thank you Lord and congratulations young lady!" (There are so many praise God messages every time I read through some of the comments that I think we're having that praise party already!)

"double, triple, quad-triple LIKE this!"

"honk honk honk great news happy for all of you" (Texas)

"This is awesome!! All the kids at St Jude are warriors and there is no better cause to donate to. Trust me I know." (Usually when I dip into the comments, I see at least one from a cancer survivor or a family member telling about a child who also was cured and now has children of his or her own. The saddest message I read was from the mother of a survivor who in his teen years died of a drug overdose.)

"Father God please Bless her with a lifetime of Remission. Thank you Jesus Amen." (So many wonderful prayers were offered up for my niece and her family and many more promises of prayers.)


"Honk honk !!!!! Praise God" (Georgia) (I have to admit I loved it every time I read a honk, honk comment. Great the way people got into the spirit of celebration.)

"Finally something worth reading!! GREAT NEWS!! Congrats!!"

"I don't know her but that is wonderful news." (I found it very touching that so many people were so ready to celebrate with this little girl they didn't even know.)
 
"HONKKKKK! nothing more then AMAZING!!" (And that is my feeling exactly - about my niece's great news of no more cancer and also the outpouring of support by strangers from all over the world.)

"And the people said.......... AMEN!" (I think they did. Over and over and the amens [honks] keep coming in.)

Thanks for reading and I hope you have many reasons to celebrate life and hope as we move toward fall. We won't talk about winter yet. Enjoy the days and the seasons one at a time.

              

  

Celebrating Work

 Work is no disgrace; the disgrace is idleness. ~ Greek proverb

Labor Day weekend - the last hurrah of summer. In some places it's when school starts although here in our community, school has been starting earlier and earlier, and now the kids have usually been in school several weeks by the time Labor Day comes around. Labor Day was originally conceived as a day to celebrate the laborers in our country and although it wasn't officially established as a national holiday until Grover Cleveland signed it into law in 1894, the idea of celebrating work and workers would surely have been one the Shakers would have found fitting. 

The Shakers believed a person should work, but then so did their neighbors in the "world." Most of us still believe a person needs useful work to do. Perhaps that's because few of us have the opportunity for a life a leisure. So we hunt jobs and celebrate when we find that perfect job or in this hard economic time, when we find any job we can do to help keep our families going.

The Shaker village near where I live is now a living history museum and it gives a number of people jobs as they demonstrate how the Shakers used to live. The picture above is of one of those workers demonstrating the way the Shakers made the wooden boxes they used for storage.

We visited the village yesterday. One of my granddaughters has been reading some of my Shaker books and she was anxious to see the place I use as the physical setting of my books. I expected my younger granddaughters, three and six, to maybe be bored with the visit, but they enjoyed watching the demonstrations and learning about the Shakers as much as the older grandkids. And of course, they enjoyed seeing the goats and meeting the turkey named Henry. It was a good trip to take on Labor Day weekend since it's a good place to celebrate work.

No great achievement is possible without persistent work. ~ Bertrand Russell

There is no substitute for hard work. ~ Thomas Edison

A man is not paid for having a head and hands, but for using them.
~ Elbert Hubbard

Hope you have a great holiday. And a better one than I used to have when we were doing more farming. Then it seemed as if Labor Day weekend was always when work needed to be done to get in the crops. Now I'll simply need to "labor" to get some more of my new story written. Might be a good day for that since rain is in the forecast. Hope if you're planning picnics or cookouts or even some harvesting, that the weather will cooperate with you.

What does Labor Day mean to you? Do you celebrate work? Do you stop wearing white shoes and pants until spring? Labor Day used to be a fashion deadline on those. Most of us don't worry so much about that any more.

Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoy your day off work.

Shaker Sayings & The Gifted

My book in fine company at WalMart

Every week on my Facebook author's page, I do what I call "Shaker Wednesday." On those days I hunt up some bit of Shaker history or maybe a picture of something the Shakers made or a building in one of their villages. Some days I just post one of the Shaker sayings. They had a lot - many of them credited to their founder, Mother Ann. Many more were added as the years went by. Most of the sayings are based on commonsense. The Shakers were a practical, hard-working group of people who just happened to believe they weren't meant to marry and they were meant to dance as they worshiped. 

I use some of these sayings in all my Shaker books. One that I use most and is probably the most familiar to anyone who knows anything about the Shakers is "Hands to work. Hearts to God." That is so much a part of the Shakers' beliefs that it has to go in all my stories. Other sayings I drop in as needed. Another I've used a lot is "Do your work as if you had a thousand years to live, and as if you were to die tomorrow." To me, that one reveals how they thought their work was to be perfect but also as productive as possible with diligent attention to the details of their tasks. 

I've often allowed an established sister or elder to speak the following one to my character who is generally a novitiate trying to learn about this strange group of people and their odd ideas that go so against the ways of the world. "Our testimony is for peace, now and always. No Christian can use carnal weapons or fight. He never did so. We oppose wars of households, and wars of nations. All wars are the result of lusts for lands and for women. Those who marry will fight." I suppose the Shakers didn't think about the fun of making up. 

 This is one I like too. "None preaches better than the ant, and it says nothing." I don't know what Shakerisms I'll find for my Christmas Shaker book. Perhaps this one. "Man is a harp with a thousand strings.  Touch the spiritual cord of his heart, and lo, with what inspiration he sings!”

I also came across a few bits I'd pulled out of my book The Gifted for some kind of promotion. I don't know that those ever got used, but the quotes weren't half bad. So I'm going to share them with you.


Security generally trumped love in the game of life. Love was a poor man's card of choice. (Tristan thinking about how he was expected to marry to enhance his family fortunes.)

"A waste of time chasing the past. It won't do anything but bite you if you catch it." (Laura Cleveland's father warning Sheldon Brady not to look backward.)

And last, Laura telling Tristan why they can marry but perhaps never have love. "Love can’t be ordered up. It is a serendipitous thing with wings that swoops here and there and sometimes lands on you when you least expect it. Or when you can ill afford to follow your heart.”

 It's interesting trying to pull a quote or two out of a 100,000 plus word novel. Do you ever notice particular passages in a fiction book? It is probably common to underline this or that part in non-fiction books, and now with the e-readers, favorite places can be easily marked and highlighted. At least that's what I've been told. If you have an e-reader, have you ever done that?

Thanks so much for reading. I do appreciate each of you.

The Struggle of the Blank Page

 

"If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word."  (Margaret Atwood)

I’m struggling to write a story now. I love to write. I have always wanted to write. I have always been writing something since I was ten years old and maybe before. I like the feel of a pen in my hand, a notebook open in front of me. I like my fingers perched over a keyboard ready to record whatever words pop into my head. I like filling the blank page. And yet, I often struggle to write. I put it off. I delay the hard work of getting the words of a story out of my head and onto this blank screen.

I don’t struggle to write here in my on-line journal. These words come easy. I grab a picture off my phone or out of my photo files and write something that matches. Or not, as it turns out tonight. This picture is just one I really like and that I took last spring when the tree was blooming. That doesn’t have much to do with the struggle to write a book. But then, maybe it does. Maybe that’s what a writer needs – the seed of an idea that buds out into words that bloom into scenes on branches that lead back to the entire story or trunk of the tree and down into the roots of what the story is really about. Now that was reaching, wasn’t it?

Ah, but pulling those words out of my head is what I’ve always done. I do my best to make my characters get up off the black and white page of my imagination and explode out into the colorful pages, alive and ready to live their stories. Then comes the worry that the story is not going to be right. That’s a worry I have had to overcome with nearly every book I’ve ever written. Somewhere between the excitement of typing Chapter 1 and finally finding the end, I nearly always hit a slippery spot where the doubts bombard me and make me lose my confidence in the story. Then it’s good to remember what James Thurber said. "Don't get it right, just get it written."

I can’t make anything better until I have it written. And after writing dozens of books, I know I’ve done it before and that perhaps, just perhaps, I’ll be able to do it again. I’ll be able to tell the story I set out to tell. Or if not that one, the one my characters reveal to me along the story road.

Here's more great writing advice from Barbara Kingsolver. "Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer."

I tell myself now that my problem is time. My problem has always been time. Every writer struggles for the time to block away their everyday world of chores and duties to go off into their fictional world. And then to use that time wisely. It’s easier to read. Every writer needs to read. It’s easier to write in a journal. Every writer needs to organize his thoughts and keep in touch with her inner self. It’s easier to check messages or post on Facebook and all writers want to connect with their readers.

But here is the advice I’m going to have to keep in mind in the next few weeks as I look at a deadline headed my way with life pulling at me on every side.

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining--researching--talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing." (E. L. Doctorow)

And writing is what I’m going to do. As soon as I get this blog post finished - and check my messages - and...

Thanks for reading. I so appreciate each and every one of you who read this and those of you who take the time to leave a comment. For those of you curious about my post on Facebook that went viral, it has gotten over a million likes and nearly 12 million views. I have been moved by the many people who have wanted to celebrate with this one child who has defeated cancer. Many have shared their own fights against cancer or those of others in their families. I’ve scanned hundreds of the comments and have been impressed with the joyfulness of the comments. I’ve only seen two or three that were in any way negative. People are ready to hear good news.

No Batteries, Just Fun

Did you ever play with a June bug? That's the bug in the photo. On a walk several weeks ago, the June bugs were swarming along the path I took. Just in one area. I'm on first name basis with this bug and have never really been afraid of it even though it has a hard outer shell and can make a loud buzz sound when it flies. June bugs love berries, so if you've ever picked blackberries out in the field, I'm sure you've encountered a few of these iridescent green bugs. Japanese beetles resemble them, but they're not as large and not nearly as nice a bug since those beetles love eating my roses and June bugs just like over-ripe berries.

Plus you can play with June bugs. Now some of you will probably think this is cruel, but when I was a kid, we'd sometimes tie a string around the June bug and have a bug on a leash. Why we wanted to, I can't say. Well, maybe I can say. We didn't have all those electronic toys to keep us out of trouble. The only thing my dad would buy batteries for were flashlights (not counting vehicle batteries) and you had to have a real need to dispel the darkness to be allowed to use the flashlight. LOL. Then I don't think batteries lasted so good back when I was a kid. Else why would the flashlight go dim every time I got down into the cellar to fetch my mothers a canned jar of tomatoes or beans. Every time!! As you may be guessing, I was terrified that a snake or mouse or perhaps a Twilight Zone monster would be waiting to jump out at me down in that dark and dank cellar. I used my memory of that fear in my Hollyhill books and let Jocie feel the same heebie-jeebies going down into her cellar.

So with no iPhones to ask Siri the meaning of life, only a couple of hours of lame kids' programs every day, and no games on computers of any type - well, no computers of any type - we had to come up with our own entertainment. Guess that's why we tied strings to June bugs and let them buzz. We also used string to make crows' feet and Jacob's ladder by wrapping the string around our hands and put this bit of the string over this finger and that bit over that finger. Sometimes this involved the teeth to slip the string in the right place. Eventually you gave your hands a twist or a flip and there was whatever string marvel you were making. Then there was the trick of making a spinner out of a big button and string. We must have had a lot of string. 

We did have actual games too. We played solitaire with real cards. We drew circles in the dirt and knocked marbles around. Jacks were more my game. I could sit and play Jacks for hours. Now it's almost impossible to find the metal jacks necessary to properly play Jacks. Too big a chance somebody might step on them or something.

Of course, there was always fun waiting outside. Mud pies to make. Grapevines to swing on. Trees to climb. Puddles to stir up with a stick. Lightning bugs and frogs to catch. Creeks to wade in. Woods to explore. Deserted houses with the idea of ghosts lingering to send shivers up our backs. 

And always books and more books.

I don't think I'd exchange any of that for battery powered fun. How about you? Do you remember any of those things? What was fun for you when you were a kid?

Thanks for reading. And if you're in the Frankfort area, you can come see me at the Gathering of Authors this Saturday, August 25 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Paul Sawyier Library. Lots of authors there to talk to about reading and books.