Thomas Sullivan

Having spent most my life outside the box, I love being lost.  All right, go ahead, nod your head and smile sadly.  But I mean physically lost.  Like in a snowstorm in the woods.  To be lost is to shed all shackles, to erase the façades of society for a time and – if there is even a little danger – to come fully alive with the effort of surviving by your wits and your will.  Now you might think that’s a classic description of escapism, but somehow the exhilaration of an adventure doesn’t supplant thoughts about the rest of my life, even while it’s happening.  On the contrary, it clarifies and enhances my whole world, putting things in order and perspective the way dreaming does.  I find myself remembering, analyzing, fantasizing, rehearsing.  The two tracks complement and inspire each other as if by metaphor.

Did I say tracks?  Extend that metaphor, if you will (by the time I let go of a double meaning, you’ll have stretch marks on your brain).  The physical tracks in nature and the psychological tracks that people leave in society are each profound with information about motive, purpose, will, i.e. fears and needs and wants.  And that’s where writing comes in.  Because all my writing is about people (how can it be otherwise).  So when I’m reading tracks while lost in the physical world, they often lead through people who inhabit my psychological world.

Most writers get that about themselves – that all stories are really people stories – but I think very few writers learn to find the connections to their writing in the physical surroundings of their days.  Every day, any day.  Instead, they try to isolate their minds from the perceived drudgery of their lives and spin truths wholly out of imagination.  Getting lost is a better way.  Getting lost lets you set up an outpost where you can gain perspective.  You can do it as simply as writing by candlelight in the basement, or in the closet in the middle of the night, or in the bathtub, or on the roof.  Or you can go to a real forest and get lost among the trees, which works for me.  The minimum thing you want to achieve is to erase the four walls you are looking at but no longer seeing.  The maximum thing you are reaching for is an environment that actually inspires you, jangles your senses, awakens awareness, and connects all your circuits with metaphors and imagery.  Time for another Cannibal Essay, by way of example.  Call it the Walter Mitty Shuffle:

…you are on skinny skis, charting your own map through a new woods.  Deer tracks show you the path of least resistance and soon intertwine with known trails where some time in the last two days snowshoes have punched through the crust, creating a Swiss cheese of human tracks to follow.  You are warm with exertion, but beyond the woods is a brutal day of minus double-digit temps which high winds have dropped to a number you don’t even want to know.  Here in the woods it is very much like the routines of your daily relationships where you mindlessly follow the paths of others, sheltered from risk by immovable old growth towering paternally all around you.  Light splinters through the trees, beckoning you to a blinding freedom where life is unscripted and conventions must prove themselves by truth or be discarded as useless to survival.  There is beauty there, and pureness, and most of all insight.  But you stick to the path, which for all its trampled disfigurement suggests that others have survived if not actually thrived by following it. 

Civilization and communication are on this path.  God has been defined here.  By man.  But then, who made the light out there beyond the trees where there is no path if not God?  God not defined by man, then – God unscripted, unencumbered by a history written from the POV of one man-made religion or another.  It would be a generic God sans intermediaries, totally accessible even to those who walked the Earth before there was such a thing as writing.  This is God as First Cause, Prime Mover – a will, a motive for why there should be something as overt as a universe in the first place instead of just nothingness.  Would such a God be a polyglot, writing conflicting letters to his constituents with funny marks on parchment?  Wouldn’t that miss eons of humans who couldn’t read?  Better to communicate a consistent message through nature right from the beginning, don’t you think?  The way it’s happening to you now.  Written with light for ink (talk about illuminated manuscripts) – a picture book painted with light on the pages of time!  A single source in a universal language has its advantages.  Out there in the open, free of the shadows and silhouettes that hem the narrow path you are on, you wouldn’t have to pick a path to follow, wouldn’t have to sift through competing theologies, honest errors, lies, good intentions, manipulations and mythologies.  No translations necessary.  No revised editions of holy Scriptures or changing interpretations.  You can be 100% illiterate, and totally isolated, and still learn all the universal truths you need to live by a priori in nature.  Because there are no politically correct shades of gray out there where the man-made path stops.  White light diffuses evenly into all the colors of the rainbow.  So, what will happen if you dare to leave the path and let the spark within you merge with the natural brilliance beyond?

And now the woods thin and you come to the edge of a precipice sweeping white and veiled as far as you can see in the swirling snow.  The path vanishes.  Where did it lead before the storm hit?  To the left along the edge of the woods?  To the right through dunes and scrub?  Your instincts tell you that the shortest distance back is straight down the sweeping precipice and into the open maw of the storm.  Only, what if you’re wrong?  Better to play it safe, turn around and retrace your steps.  But the light is so compelling, and sparks are flickering inside you as if something strong and resolute is awakening.  The wind gusts impatiently, and you almost hear your name.  What is there behind you that is worth spending your life on?  Are you going to follow the same path forever?  And suddenly you are rocketing down the glazed crust while skeins of wind-driven powder lasso your feet and arctic cold slashes across your face.

10 seconds of soaring, 15, and it is too late to struggle back up the scarp.  You are into it now, and it is into you.  Recklessly you go to your poles, getting all you can out of momentum until gravity reasserts itself.  The disheartening drag of inertia brings you to a halt.  There is no calling of your name from the nearly complete white-out now, no sanctioning for what you’ve done, no precedents to guide you.  Stubbornly you begin to skate – hard thrusts with your skis, stabbing drives of your poles.  You do it endlessly to the point of exhaustion, then you do it some more, and when you glance back your tracks are almost invisible mere yards behind you.  Despite the snow pelting into your mouth, you are starting to dehydrate and your muscles are cramping.  Each time a pole bends, or a ski breaks through the surface, you risk a sprain or a muscle tear as you lift against the icy crust.  Only the angle of the wind gives you a sense of direction, but that is so cutting right through your clothes that you have to tack like a sailboat to lessen the risk of frostbite.  And if the wind shifts, will you even know it, or will you just veer in a circle?  Suddenly you doubt everything.  In a moment of panic, the all-forgiving grace of near-death and certain doom comes over you.  Physics isn’t working.  The geometry of who you are, where you are and where you should be is all scrambled.

But then the rushing surf of snow around your skis parts and you see faint tracks – animal tracks.  A dog, a wolf, coyote?  No matter.  Something less dominant than you is out here, surviving, adapting by using all its cunning and capacity.  It is living to the max.  And so are you.  This is who you are.  Not who you were forty minutes ago, following the narrow path of the herd.  And this is where you should be at this moment in time.  You almost laugh at the irony of your situation.  Because whatever the peril (and realistically it is minute), you are as good as dead for far too much of your life already, for the most part merely existing in sheltered conformity, living far below your capacities, following prescribed paths day and night that sacrifice your individuality.

The lee of a rise and the fickleness of the wind have allowed these tracks to remain, but you see now that the storm is also thinning.  To your right, there are trees and a break that might provide a shortcut.  And then you recognize dried husks sticking out of the snow that in summer would grow on the edge of a pond, and so you turn away.  No year-round access would lead through water.  Instead you skate up the rise, and – presto – there are the tracks again.  Inspired by your correct decision, a rush of bravado drives you over the crest.  For a few minutes you ski pell-mell into oblivion, and then the white room descends around you once more and hopelessness returns.  Take a lesson.  Arrogance can be fatal.  Is that your Achilles’ heel in the world of human interactions too?

You skate on blindly, steering by the wind and a vague sense of where the sun might be in the dense overhang of mist and snow.  How you would welcome your traditional antagonists out here now!  Like the yahoos who fire guns willy-nilly in the woods.  Shoot at me, please, so I can follow the sound.  Or the snowtoilets.  That’s what you call snowmobiles that roar up and down trails marked NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES, sometimes missing you by only inches.  I.e., what makes gaseous noises, spreads noxious fumes, and all you do is sit on it?  Um…a toilet?  No – wait, a snowmobile!  Snowtoilets.  Only, you wish one would come rescue you now.  What a hypocrite you are!  Take another lesson in survival: different strokes for different folks.

As if the god of humility is rewarding your epiphany, the windblown snow suddenly swirls into a pair of snow devils that sashay out of your way.  Exit stage left.  And in its place there are the animal tracks!  Out here a dog would be accompanied by a human, you decide, neither are the tracks far enough apart to be a wolf’s, or anywhere near the size of a cougar’s.  A coyote’s, then.  A male marking his territory, it becomes evident, by the configuration of tracks around periodic archipelagoes of yellow snow.  A well-ranged, keen-sensed, wonderful creature left these, and in so doing taught you the difference between making tracks in pursuit of individual fulfillment and following a one-size-fits-all path.  But it was not an either/or choice – it did not exclude the path – because now you see that this instinctual creature found the safety of the woods just before the storm closed in.  That woods.  The one rising in the distance, split by a clear trail.  And thus you are indebted to your inner light as you must be every day that you wish to grow, to learn, to mirror back wisdom and beauty.  If you can manage to get lost for a bit, inspiration will find you.  Disguised, to be sure, but if you have the courage to leave the beaten path and trust your purest instincts, you will be able to read it, even if it’s written in white light and coyote pee. 

It was too cold to take photos during the adventure described above, but I’ve included pictures from similar days in my latest newsletter.  I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  A sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan   Recent Tweets:

If something has to be kept secret, it must be true. Secrets are self-proving.  Lies are loud and wear red hats.

Dear Muse, may I write today words that are worth 1000 pictures.

“Don’t expect too much” is a self-fulfilling prophecy for accepting too little.

Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways, has kicked off another January.  True, he is two-faced, looking forward and backward at the same time (you can’t sneak up on him!), but I like that.  It sort of shows the circularity of things.

By extension, he gets called the god of beginnings and endings, but I think that’s either sloppy semantics or sloppy thinking.  Just as space can’t begin or end (because you would need a “where” in some other space to mark the beginning and ending), and time can’t begin or end (because you would need a “when” in some other time to mark that beginning and ending), Janus can’t be said to start or finish anything.  That’s the whole point.  His gift is to see the past and future at the same time.  He is a continuum, a bridge, a filter, a redirect, alpha and Omega in a circle, the Yin and Yang, a snake eating its tail. 

Writers – creative people – too often see themselves as on hold, caught in a matrix of beginnings and endings – fresh resolves and familiar rejections – when what they need is to see that they are a continuum in full flight, already underway, leaving indelible footprints whether the world chooses to follow them or not.  Life doesn’t hang around the starting line, and babies don’t wait to be delivered.  If you expect to be announced or sanctioned or heralded or loved before you take yourself and your dreams seriously, you will lose a lot of living.

This is especially true if you let feelings of worthlessness or rejection rule over you.  Who said you have to start at the finish line?  You only have to set out from the starting line and then not quit.  You have to act on your dreams.  Whatever you are at any given moment is quite good enough – but only if you have all your skin in the game!  Not trying, risking nothing, sitting on the bench or in the stands – that’s what you should fear.  That’s the killer, the waste of life, the no-show.  You don’t have to manage failure.  Failure doesn’t need your help.  It will be there by default if you don’t manage success.  And you can always manage success.  On your worst day you can make progress.  Even if success is just getting out of bed or refusing to wallow in self-pity or not succumbing to self-annihilating guilt or not fearing the next rejection or what others think of you.  Do not feel worthless over what you cannot control.  Write the damn book.  Send the manuscript to an editor.  Take your shots!  You are a good and righteous person when you put your honest heart on the line, and to hell with the consequences!  The world, for all its trumped up piety, isn’t your judge.  You are.

And you will succeed!  When you follow through and finish that book, then you will have succeeded.  Not because the book is finished, but because you will have given it your all and in the process become the best YOU you can be.  And that’s not just faint praise, because the thing of it is, THERE’S NO UPPER LIMIT ON THE BEST YOU, and quite likely (and magically) you will be astonished at what comes out of you when you stop giving up on your dreams and instead let the effort to fulfill them build relentlessly day by day.  The only limit on your potential is the amount of time or opportunity you lose by NOT reaching for your dreams.

To be sure, you need to be receptive to true opportunities that come from outside yourself.  It is simply tragic to miss the wild cards life gives us, the cues, and especially the rare connections.  They can form and fulfill you.  But they seldom fit a safe and convenient life, and they are easy to reject for all kinds of seemingly practical, responsible or even “noble” reasons.  Because what if we take a chance and still fail?  So there is always the danger that we may reject taking a chance out of misplaced fear or guilt.  Our dreams don’t fail or reject us…we reject our dreams.  And that’s real failure.  I think the answer is to strive for total honesty with yourself.  If you act on that, there is no reason for guilt, even if the chance doesn’t pan out.  But act you must.  Else you live by fear, and that can never be worthy of a dream.

If you are unique, then BE unique.  Rejection can’t keep you from living.  Well, it can, but you shouldn’t let it.  Trust me.  I learned the hard way.  Forever waiting.  Forever faithful to a cause or a person or a hope, as if they/it would then reward me.  I’m still that way… sort of terminal in my romantic view of life and still faithful to those same entities.  But the reality is I have no control over externals.  I have control over me.  And that’s what’s ultimately important: not robbing yourself.  I have not robbed myself.  I am living, loving, learning, evolving, giving…CREATING!  Not as a series of false starts, dead ends, rewinds and rejections, but as a continuum.  It is all a growth medium.  Nothing really dies as long as I keep what I control alive.  What decays outside me simply nourishes more knowledge and resolve.  If I give up, the real me ceases to exist.  How many people have that backwards?  Their inner selves never get to exist in the real world, because they give up – they let the external world define them and smother their uniqueness.  They usually do this passively by degrees, simply defaulting out of resignation into the circumstances life metes out to them.  Which, I suppose, is why there are relatively few writers, and maybe why there seems to be so much disillusionment and so little fulfillment generally.  Every month I am dismayed by the e-mails I get from writers, published and otherwise, who feel absolutely dead-ended.  Hey, it’s always about the journey.  Don’t end it prematurely.  Do you expect to die, or strike a permanent pose like a statue, after you achieve something?  Keep reaching and take your joy in that.  Believe me, that’s all there ultimately is.

There is only one person with whom you always have to live, and you know who that is.  You can be alone in a crowd, a career, a family, a marriage, a relationship, but you cannot escape yourself.  Might as well have good company then.  The indomitable, inspired, energized, fearless you wants free rein/reign.  Let yourself have it.  Surround yourself with what you need in order to survive and thrive.  Or if you cannot surround yourself, create an inner sanctum, a sanctuary.  Fill it with the right people, places and things.  It’s 2011!  Listen!  Hear that?  It’s your song.  Come out of the audience and up on the stage…

I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram (a kind of newsletter with stories and photos) once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net  .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic  .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326      

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan    Recent Tweets:

 

There are people who are batteries and people who are drains.  Make sure you are compatible when you connect.

Old years are memories, new ones are dreams.

Picture a carrara marble room whose fire pit blazes silver in its reflection on a curved glass wall which overlooks the Grand Canyon by day and tilts upward to magnify the universe at night.  The jaws of the black granite Sphinx in the center of the room open in a kind of Savonarola throne made of solid gold.  Against another wall there are nine cages, each containing a Muse.  This is where I write…

Or maybe not.  (Actually I’m in one of the cages.)

I’ve never been particularly curious about where creative people work, but maybe that’s because I don’t associate the act of inventing or being inspired with a single setting.  Imagination is homeless and inspiration goes comatose whenever it’s confined.  So, when anyone asks where I work, they generally get an elusive answer.  Not sure I can do better here.  I’ve decided to try, though, as much to see if I can find some meaningful pattern for myself as to answer what others ask. 

When I was married I wrote in restaurants, parked cars and bathrooms.  When I taught school I wrote furiously for 2 min. in the library loft each day before first bell – having thought out scenes or narration on the drive in.  I’ve written at weddings and funerals, in a cemetery, in trees, in a phone booth, left key phrases in the snow and with a paint brush while painting flats for a play, left a memory tag in my own blood on a cash receipt, left episodic notes through serial phone calls to an answering machine, and when the plot for my first novel attacked my brain like a case of mental indigestion while jogging I borrowed a pencil and paper from a lady hanging clothes.  You get the idea.  The point is that it’s difficult to pin down the externals that accompany a free-flowing process within.  Sort of like trying to predict the next eruption of a volcano.  But like the scene of the crime certain settings beckon my return.  For what it’s worth, here are some of the current locales w/photos where I corner a Muse.

[NOTE:  I am so toast if these pictures don't post!]

Trees turn me on.  Especially when they’re naked and you can see which way their legs and arms (so many limbs) contort.  It’s like a blueprint or an x-ray of their lives, each turn showing where they made a free choice to grow in another direction.  And yet, ultimately there is structure and form and balance and symmetry and total logic in where they went.  They do it their way and weather the storms.  No clichés in a forest.  Highly unique individuals.   Trees know the nuances of freedom.  I think that’s why I want to look at them when I write.  I wrote a book about a tree once (BORN BURNING), I have a tree in my living room, and I even talk to a certain tree out at Elm Creek.  Am I out of my tree?  In this picture you are looking at my Creatorium (no “m” in the middle, please) where I put down roots in a computer.  The print you see is one of four on the walls.  The other three are stoic oaks in b/w against the Mexicali rose of my inner sanctum.

And the flick Avatar may have a cliché of a plot, but its magic forests (remember the mega tree) and romantically ideal culture make it my fav film (yeah…Jake Sully – irony).  Thing of it is, I go to Pandora every day/night to gather inspiration.  I’ve stood steaming on skis in a violet forest clearing many a magic midnight, listening to the silence of the universe and daring dreams as real as the surreal elements my senses are actually taking in.  You cannot write less than “romantic reality” after that.

Rarely someone will deliberately inspire me to write.  Shared dreams are hard to come by – which makes them all the more potent – but I count visions sent by a soulmate as inspiration.  Here are a couple of triggers that worked on me – photos of Tintern Abbey and of interacting galaxies.  The first photo followed a gift book of the Tintern Abbey poem containing a bookmark that reads “Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air,” and the galaxies photo followed a CD of Howie Day’s “Collide.”  Such communication puts poetry in my head, as in “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”  Wordsworth’s poem was all about how he lost the inspiration nature provided him and recovered it again and searched for a way to keep it in his life.

And then there are my nightly drives to points of light and darkness, like stations of the cross.  Writing fairly roars out of passion and perspective.  I do not want to forget anything meaningful that has happened to me, to lose high points or low, to revise history or heal hope with scar tissue that would forever dull the potential to feel and soar.  Night focuses memory, perception and anticipation.  I would rather bleed fresh than turn my heart into stone, rather gasp in anguish than breathe the sterile air of amnesia.  A writer cannot afford to go numb.  Motion and proximity are essential to keep track of who I was, am and will be.  Driving at night does that for me, particularly if I am right there in the presence of a memory.

No, I don’t hibernate in the summertime.  Contrare, contrare!  And this gazebo at a place called Noerenberg Gardens always seems to inspire possibilities for me.

 

 

 

Okay, whether it’s got a tub or just purposeful plumbing, I still write in the bathroom.  I’ve just finished putting down black granite tile with matching fixtures and a chair rail in one of my four baths.  AND…there are three prints of TREES on the walls.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus…well, at least there’s a Christmas Eve.  You might not believe it, but on most Christmas Eves there is absolutely no one out late at Elm Creek.  So that’s where I go, and it never fails to inform my writing for a while thereafter.  It is a most summary hour or two, bittersweet yet somehow affirming.  And this year I will ski to the highest point and shout out to the crystal universe my warmest regards and gratitude for all the kindnesses that have been given me.  So, if you are suddenly wondering whether or not you heard a faint call in the distance…

Hmmm.  Guess the only pattern this reveals is that I might write anywhere anytime.  In fact, the only place I can think of where I don’t sometimes write is my bedroom.  Now why is that?  Sanctuary?  Timelessness?  Nothing has changed in my bedroom in four years.  Same bed, same furniture, same snowscapes on the walls, cinnamon and vanilla candles, red and white feathers – there had to be something around which the carousel revolves.  Whatever anchors YOUR life, may it never drag you down or keep you from reaching your horizons in 2011.

I’ll be happy to send you a Sullygram once a month if you e-mail me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  I’m also on Twitter and YouTube.  The YouTube is kind of a joke, as I was dared to come out of the closet with the sax (sax, not sex).  Here’s a sample:  http://www.youtube.com/user/Sullysax1#p/a/u/1/d49rY3FQ5ic .  Please feel free to hit the Subscribe button at that link to be notified of new videos. 

Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1219261326     

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan   Recent Tweets:

 

Cell phone died after 1 call. Figures. You get 1 call when they put you in a cell.

 

Guess I’m a miser with my emotions, but when I spend them, they are non-refundable.

 

 

Used to be that my muse had to put a bullet in my brain to get my attention.  Now I can hear the gun cock.  Hell, sometimes I hear the barrel clearing leather.  All by way of saying that recognizing where stories come from is an acquired skill.

Yes, you can take the shortcut just by living on the edge, thus making your life full of ready-made dynamic tales.  Climb Mount Everest.  Smuggle exotic pets across borders in your underwear.  Absolutely.  But if you open your eyes, mind, heart and soul to the every-day poetry and the magic all around you, you’ll find fragments of stories by the long ton that need only imagination to come together with sweeping wisdom and consummate beauty.  That’s only the circumstantial part of it, of course.  You still have to see the meanings, the patterns, the connections to larger life before a story will emerge.  By any name this is insight.  We all know people who have insight and people who don’t — those who can travel all around the world but go nowhere, and those who travel nowhere but still seem to grasp the world as seen through a microscope and the universe as seen through a telescope, plus the hidden stuff as it might be exposed by an MRI and a digital x-ray.  Making yourself into the latter is the ultimate enhancement to a writer and the ultimate enrichment to life.

It starts with getting outside of yourself.  That’s because the world wants ever so much to put on appearances for you.  And because when we take everything as a reflection on ourselves, we become blind to most of what is out there.  It isn’t about you.  It’s about what is really there.  So if you want to see the world in all its vignettes and sagas, you have to step beyond your own limitations.  That’s trickier than what you might think.  But there are three things you can will yourself to bring to the table that will help in your quest.  COURAGE will get you off the dime and out the door.  If you’re afraid of losing your comfort zone or are paralyzed by doubt, you need this.  BELIEF has the power to motivate as well as to deliver a positive outcome from the sheer force of its charisma.  If you don’t believe there is magic all around you, you’ll never see it.  And ENERGY is simply your guarantee against giving up before you do see it.  Energy never accepts failure and never stops connecting the dots. 

This is mind control.  Yours.  You can condition yourself to almost anything — believing something, feeling something (or not believing and not feeling something) — so will your self through the early stages until habit makes it easier.  Yeah, that’s dishonesty, but it’s dishonesty of method not of reality, like stowing away in an empty freight car to get to a very real destination.  If what you discover doesn’t make you a true “believer,” you can always ride the cattle car back.  When you become that relatively free and objective person you want to be, you will have the insight and empathy to be the writer you want to be as well.

Okay, insert example.  Cannibal Essay time.  For newer readers, cannibal essays are peeks at the conversion of facts into fiction, that process or method by which one learns to put frames around every-day reality, i.e. recognizing stories as stated above.  Here’s how it worked for me last week:

Tuesday evening and I’m shrinking.  What’s my motivation, what’s my motivation?  I am pissed.  Trying to train for 13 days of sea kayaking in Tonga, but it’s been so windy all week that all I see are little dogs named Toto flying out of Kansas on the way to Duluth.  And now a genuine storm is threatening.  The weather has me under siege, trapped in my own little world of narrow perceptions and expectations.  Then I remember, open your eyes, mind, heart and soul, Sully – courage…belief…energy.  Overcome the obstacles.  Seize the minus and make it a plus.  The best roads are always detours. 

The impulse becomes a resolve, and I’m out the door, carrying my canoe to the lake shore.  My neighbor, who is battening down a patio umbrella, hollers a warning, to which I reply that I’m going after Somali pirates.  He has his own little world of preparation — his own story worthy of note.  And so does every other living thing I encounter.  The sky is dead calm — like the eye of a hurricane — but even the least reasoning creature around me knows what is coming.  White herons settle like snowflakes in the distant lees of larger trees, turtles slip into the water, a lone swallow arrows for the sanctuary of a bridge, a fish, oblivious to it all, takes a last foolish insect that has not headed for the underside of a leaf or tall grass on the banks.  What is my strategy for survival?  Why am I not following some predictable pattern?  I am odd man out.  A little adrenaline rush comes out of that, some minor risk, but also perspective.  An irresistible force, deeper than instinct, is driving all populations in a single direction, countermanding all routines, usurping evening rituals, unifying unlike things to an overriding purpose — survival! 

Excitement spikes my heart, and I can taste the iron in my blood.  Yes, I could have hunkered down in my sterile bunker , but I am out here, moving with the herds and flocks and swarms, taking my chances, believing in mortal things again and in imminent adventure.  More importantly, I am privy to life and death dramas large and small.  The stench of rotting fish belly-up in virulent blue-green algae seems to decree a warning and the first lightning glares at me — an impossibly long flash — as I paddle hard for the end of the lake where the creek begins. 

The next 20 minutes are a pointless race in the wrong direction through the curves of a creek that widens to 80 yards or shrinks to 10, ending at a small waterfall whose edge I tease with the bow of the canoe as I turn back.  And now, as if it has been waiting to stare me in the face, the wind rushes at me beneath a blackened sky, like the rank breath of a bruised boxer on the assault.  As a writer, I have all I need of seeing stories and feeling them.  Time to make shore, haul the canoe out, take shelter.  Feel free to jump out on the bank and make for the gazebo at the foot the bridge, if you like.  But — and this is optional — I want the adventure. 

This is it.  The main event.  The limit to be tested.  So now the lightning goes crazy, winking like flash bulbs capturing the “you want it, you got it” moment.  I dig the paddle into the chop with long J strokes side to side, trying to knife the heart of the wind and still negotiate the bends of the creek.  The excitement, the uncertainty, the burn as muscles fill with lead — this is what I work out for.  It is impossible not to laugh with exhilaration, just as it is impossible not to be afraid.

What is probably hundreds of strokes seems like thousands, but then I am under the last bridge and around the final curve onto the lake where the wind catches me and spins me completely around.  BIG chop.  Lightning is spidering all over the place now.  I am obliged to sweep back into the creek to try again.  This time I round the turn, but I can barely make progress along the banks.  The canoe is driven under every leaning trunk held above the lake surface by dead branches.  And here comes this tent caterpillar-webbed thing that threatens to engulf my head, and the wind is pushing me into it, so I swing the paddle to snap off the branches, only I swing too hard and the branches snap easily and the canoe is going over.  I grab onto what is left of the trunk sticking out of the lake shore bank.  Hardly matters, as a slashing rain erupts now, and the wind and lightning take charge, and I am hanging onto twisted branches to keep from being blasted back to the creek. 

A gamut of boat docks separates me from my house half a mile away, and I’ll never be able to paddle around them.  Something similar happened to me a few years back, only it was just wind then, and I was in a sailboat (the SS Plastic), so now — thoroughly soaked — I do what I did then: I jump out and drag the hull home through the shallows African Queen style.  

Yeah, totally unnecessary mini-odyssey.  But a hoot.  And the best part is stripping down in the garage, throwing my clothes in the dryer, and sitting in a hot bath to savor the impressions.  The ready-made adventure is obvious, but the elements of story are more subtle than that.  From my neighbor’s warning, which could be an element of foretelling in any tale, to the indelible sensory imprint of a rising storm, and the contagion of wing, fin and claw scurrying in primal panic for survival, I have been in touch with what life is all about.  It didn’t have to be that dramatic.  But it did have to engage me – my body, my mind, my spirit.  I had to interact. 

If you got out of the canoe back at the gazebo on the creek, you got all you needed in the way of insights.  Light and air infused your body, you touched palpable reality, and life paraded its truisms past your eyes.  Fragments of dramas, romances and comedies entered your experience, paralleling, confirming and inspiring what you already know.  They joined thousands of other fragments available to you which collectively may stir the poetry and wisdom that is in your soul.  They are the fuel of your creative process, the Cliff Notes, the cheat sheet, the Rolodex, the cribbed prompts written on the palm of your imagination.  Search for just that much every day and you will never lack for a metaphor, simile, thing & event, or insight to express your deepest passions. 

Now all you need is an audience – be it a soulmate or the world.

Finally, a very special notice: editor Denise Wydra – daughter of our beloved and illustrious colleague Frank Wydra who passed away in 2008 – has collected his Gonquin Table essays and other material in a professional book available here at http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?fListingClass=0&fSearch=Frank+Wydra   True to his wishes, at his final services Flamingo Frank was propped up in his casket with a silver dollar and a glass of Jack in his hands.  Do you get a sense of legacy from that?  The man can never die, and I am honored that my funeral oration for him and a column are also included in the book. 

May I also invite you to receive my Sullygrams free?  Email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net and I’ll add you to the list.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Yoo hoo!  Attention everyone who has been broomed out of a job by Donald Trump.  And you uncounted millions over and above the counted millions who all are out of work — gotta minute?  Also to the rejected, the downtrodden, day dreamers, spurned lovers, adventurers, searchers, fantasizers, philosophers, natural-born psychologists, sob sister, questers, trapped housewives, romantics, gigolos, Delilahs, or otherwise unfulfilled souls with holes in their lives, I’ve got a job for you.  You’re hired!  If you want to be. 

Here’s the standard contract:

On call 24/7.  Report to shift muse.  Irregular hours, no days off.  Weekly pay = 0.  Monthly pay = 0.  Guaranteed annual income = 0.  Retirement = 0.  Health insurance = 0 (think of the “0” as the first letter of Obamacare, as in your first free brain surgery is a frontal Obama-ty).  Paid vacation  = 0.  Additional employee benefits = 0.  In case of actual sale and publisher eventually coming across with the green scratch, subtract Federal tax, State tax, Local tax, both ends of FICA, 15% agent fee, additional agent fee if sub-agenting, business expenses, and all fees, penalties and taxes yet to be invented hereafter in the known and unknown Universe.    

Agreeable?  Good.  Congratulations, you are now a fully functioning writer.  Take a pen with you the next time you go into the bathroom (hopefully you’ll find paper already there).  Here’s your first project:

See, I’ve got some questions and the research is murder.  No, no, not murder as in research for a mystery (though there’s some spooky stuff I’d like help with too); actually, my questions go more toward character relationships, emotional stuff –you know, whathcamacallits…gender relationships, sexual romance and whatever.

Like I said, the research is a killer, on account of my approach to romance is a little out of the mainstream.  Actually, I’ve only met one woman whose instincts/thinking about “luv” were the same as mine, so what do I know about normalcy?  I have two requirements for falling in love with a woman.  One, she must be totally insane and two, she must be utterly intransigent.  The insanity is necessary so that she will fall in love with me in the first place, and stone solid stubbornness ensures that communication will be blocked at some point, effectively annihilating all that I am and leaving me free and independent once again.  Yeah, it’s partly theory, but that’s because of my extremely limited experience, having kept myself off the market 99% of the time (why are you applauding?).  Hello?  Ah…still there and semi-conscious?  Good.  So I figure I can shortcut the research by getting the benefit of your experience and insight.  Here are six questions, five of which you’ll see could underwrite relationships:

If a woman HAD to choose, would she rather have a man be emotionally faithful to her or physically faithful?  And if a man HAD to choose, would he rather have a woman be physically faithful to him or emotionally faithful?

Fear, guilt, love.  Which one drives the bus?  Which one motivates the strongest?  Which one trumps?  And especially I’d like to hear views on which one(s) win if they go head to head against each other.

Which of the following two nightmares would be the scariest: just as you are about to awaken you 1) feel cool air all around you and know that when you open your eyes you will find yourself on a two-foot wide rock ledge jutting out from the side of a cliff, staring into a steaming abyss 9,000 feet below, or 2) you sense that a person who has been dead for a long time and that you miss the most in your life is lying conscious in the bed beside you, though they don’t seem to be breathing.

React to this statement: men are great dumb beasts when it comes to communication and love, but women train in those skills from early ages and are far more practical about emotions over time.

React to this statement: a man is less likely to fall romantically in love with a woman than a woman is with a man, but if he does, he falls hopelessly and idealistically in love whereas most women are more realistic.

React to this statement: living fully and loving fully (romantically) are mutually exclusive.

Feel free to e-mail me your responses at mn333mn@earthlink.net or just chunk something in below where it asks for Comments.  I rather suspect that writing a novel this way is going to be the ol’ making-sausage method.  Not pretty, but if it fries up nice in the pan, well, the proof is in the . . . uh, pudding (no), putting (no), sausage (no), blood pudding (no), eating (no) – you see why I’m hiring this out?  Hiring being euphemistic.  I mean, I hope the phrase “you get what you pay for” doesn’t apply here, ‘cause this ship sails empty.  Think of it as a balloon payment on your future as a writer.  And you know what balloons are filled with.  Floating off now…

Please use your newly hired imagination to pretend the photo above is relevant (floating…empty ship = empty canoe floating on ice pack).  It’s from my monthly newsletter which you can get free just by emailing mn333mn@earthlink.net .  The newsletter is mostly inspirational stories and a rave about nature w/photos that has a large and growing global readership.  Past newsletters are at this author’s website under Sullygrams & Columns (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/sullygrams.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out. 

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  The only thing that changes after you create an account by making up a username and password is that when you click on your account page you’ll see the tweets of anyone you wish to follow, though they won’t see you.  Or simply click this link anytime: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan.  Sample of a recent Tweet:  The Easter Bunny just saw his shadow. Which means we’ll have 6 more weeks of basketball…    Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

It’s happening again.  I am suffering from postpartum depression in the wake of an Olympics.  Call this one Vancouver games detox or 50K skinny ski hangover.  It is very similar to what I feel after penning the last word to a novel (been there, done that, as they like to say on Death Row).  In both cases you are caught up in something sublime if not surreal.  You’ve stumbled onto a yellow brick road, fallen down a rabbit hole, passed through a mirror.  Magic has kidnapped you, and life ceases to be a series of pedestrian events — washing clothes, cooking meals, getting the kids off to school — that are an end in themselves.  Suddenly there is adventurous content in your life and unknowns and the potential for…

PERFECTION.            

That’s what the Olympics and writing have in common.  That redeeming pursuit of excellence.  Doesn’t matter that the athletes run out of condoms, piss their names in the snow, or play air guitar from the podium during their national anthem.  Doesn’t matter that the author falls into a bottle for breakfast, or lives a life of quiet desperation whenever he/she is cut off from their secret passion.  The cracks and the flaws do not contaminate the liquid gold of the dream.  What matters is the pursuit of excellence.  What matters is the courage to put yourself in gear for that far horizon, even if you travel only a few steps during stolen moments every day.  The waste and the shame come not with failing to get there but only in failing to set out.  To allow fear of failure or the vanity of guilt to direct your one and only life is the same as hunkering down in the middle of the herd as if you never lived at all.  That is the crime of a cowardly soul and an affront to whatever created you. 

So I love people who dare reach for perfection.  Dreamers.  Risk-takers.  Love them all the more when they fail.  Love them still more when they fail and it doesn’t defeat them.  A writer who keeps faith with his/her pure dream despite unrelenting rejection is still in-process to succeed.  Failing is never failing until you give up, and a journey doesn’t end until you stop moving.  Most of all, I love those who never give up and never stop moving.

You know what I’m talking about.  You’ve been there.  Been made to feel foolish or childish for dreaming.  There is always pressure to conform to the majority who do give up and do stop moving.  Being different is dangerous.  After all, “who do you think you are?”  So, when we get hammered enough by disappointment, most of us resign ourselves, compromise, “mature.”  Thus, the athlete who seeks only medals and hears only applause quits staying fit when the medals and the applause are out of reach; the wannabe author tucks away their mss and demotes themselves to lesser expectations; the life of quiet desperation anesthetizes itself with spectatorship and stupor.  They have reached their destination.  RIP.  But the dreamer, the romantic idealist, the Peter Pan immature oddball keeps trying, and that makes it a lifestyle (at least a closet lifestyle).  Which is how they win at last: by remaining a participant in the Olympics of the Heart, Mind and Soul…

BECAUSE NOW THE EXCITEMENT, HOPE AND VITALITY OF THE ONGOING JOURNEY WILL LAST FOREVER! 

Impractical?  Don’t tell that to the part of yourself that secretly dreams, that wants to stay hopeful.  Idealism is realism of the soul.  In the territory of the heart, surrender and resignation should never be called being realistic.  That is an inversion of the latter term.  The needs of the inner soul (not to be confused with innersole) should not play second fiddle 24/7 to appearances demanded by society.  If fulfilling practical obligations means canceling out who you are, you have morphed into a zombie.  There should be nothing unrealistic about self-honesty trumping conformity especially if you don’t fit your circumstances.  That may be inconvenient, but so is personal extinction.  As Gerard Houarner, psychiatrist and one of our esteemed writers here at Storytellersunplugged, mentioned in his last column, being realistic is often considered anti-social. 

But not for Olympians.  At least not during those precious few days every four years when it’s all about performance and society focuses in vicariously.  Those of us audacious enough to try and capture the world’s attention with our writing know the excitement and stress well.  Stories are like single events and novels are like decathlons.  You may be judged by pace and style or beauty and daring.  The rules and execution tricks of language carry their own rewards and penalties for success or failure.  You can lose or win appreciation points from the reader or be totally disqualified if you wander off course.  And as you race ever faster through the baffles and turns of your plot, each chapter becomes another gate in a grand slalom that must be negotiated before the next chapter can be aligned.  A cast of characters is inevitably the source of conflict, competing head-to-head for something or staggered in their interplay or as conspiratorial as a relay, and as these vie and collide they will produce heroes and villains in skeins of interwoven dramas.  Those conflicts may be pulse-pounding with raw physical action or as lyrical as a ballet on ice, but always there will be a countdown to the resolution.  A clock may actually be ticking.  Certain things go hand-in-hand in the tableaux that the writer presents, as in the focused events of an Olympics: risk and reward, heart and mind, body and soul, substance and style.  You are, for all the preparation and execution of your endeavor, presenting the world made simple.  Life through a reduction valve.  Whether that comes out in a series of fictional scenes or the symbolic goals and performance of an Olympic event, it is editing.  But don’t wait for society to give you a gold medal after the fact.  If your dreams are threatening to others, find a secret venue to perform them every day and write on with liquid gold…    

The doctored photo of the Flying Tomato at the head of this article is from folk singer Mark Manrique (Doc Foto), whose novelty pix are a regular feature with which readers of my monthly newsletter are familiar.  The newsletter is mostly inspirational stories and a rave about nature w/photos that has hundreds of subscribers globally.  I’ll be happy to put you on the mailing list for free if you email me at mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are at this author’s website under News & Articles (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/News.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out. 

May I also invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  The only thing that changes after you create an account by making up a username and password is that when you click on your account page you’ll see the tweets of anyone you wish to follow.  Or you can simply click this link anytime: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  Samples of my recent Tweets: Skis ran slow in the soft snow today.  Like the woman in the bikini, I should have waxed.  And … I have a 1-word solution for the killer whale: SUSHI   And … Valentine’s Day: I shall visit a place where a woman once married me in her heart, mind & soul, and loved me with her body.   Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

I don’t know if I can do this.  I want to, but I don’t know if I can.  I want to tell you about characters, about heroes & villains and the necessity of empathizing with them, but I think it’s a lot like telling you to go through psychoanalysis. 

That’s because you have to be bigger than your characters.  You have to contain them.  All of them.  The ones of the opposite sex, the sinners and saints, the cowards and fools, the twisted and the pure, the children, the obese octogenarian of another culture or another race, the thieves, the liars, the cheats, the Einstein, the Forrest Gump, the suicidal, the politically opposite of what you believe, the warrior and the pacifist.  Fight or flight must be in you in every possible equation.  Fear and desire in all proportions.  You must be in a wheelchair and you must train with Olympians.  So, if you want to be a writer — or even a complete, empathic, insightful, creative human being — you need some serious psychoanalysis.

Whatever makes you snuggle comfortably into your demographic works against this, of course.  Whether you are Joe Sixpack camped in front of the TV or the bored woman who was promised it all when she hauled her advanced degree to the altar, you won’t outrun your own borders without a mental overhaul.  It’s relatively easy to sympathize/empathize with yourself.  Even if you are filled with self-hate, confusion or depression, you can probably recall specific things and events that changed you from positive to negative and therefore you remember a time when whatever you were seemed justified and worthy.  But as an exercise, think of your worst enemy or someone you hate and try to empathize with them.  That’s the acid test if you’re going to assume the God power of creating people, or even the insight to understand the human blueprints for every person.  Creativity doesn’t fit a mold or follow a stereotype.

But how do you achieve such broad-mindedness without sometimes compromising or even contradicting your beliefs and values?  And doesn’t the inherent contradiction in trying to represent everyone’s POV convincingly where they differ from your own threaten who you are?  Ya, you betcha it does.  Small writers — small people — who reach mindlessly in that direction are almost doomed.  They are at risk of losing their souls, of becoming intellectual and emotional whores, or of simply drowning in more life than they can sort out.  But I’m not making a pitch for you to become some giddy, singsong, bleeding heart, all-inclusive, ex-patriot hippie who is so open-minded that their brains are lying in the road behind them.  What I’m saying is that you can let go of your demographic without abandoning it.  You can reach across the aisle into truth about the human condition in all its stripes; you can walk the walk, share the passion, talk the talk.  All you need do is drop prior expectations, judgments (and maybe even a few biases) as you meet/create characters with unique histories and independent motives.  And at the end of the day you can still flee back to familiar things you have chosen to define yourself. 

Of course, that’s where the psychoanalysis comes in.  Because you may not want to go back.  Not completely.  You may change, learn, grow, if you open up in this way.  It’s really quite emancipating — and sometimes even a relief — to go outside the appearances of your life.  And it’s exhilarating to work in the same industry as God, Nicholas Sparks and Dr. Frankenstein.  You never know what you’ll come up with, plus — oh, boy, here’s the door prize — know that above all you will learn to live more honestly within yourself.  The genuine, authentic, uncompromised, absolutely core Version 1.0 of YOU may re-emerge and trump the accumulated Version 99 with all its patches, fixes and updates.  But I hasten to repeat that it doesn’t have to shine a new light over your entire outward life.  It may be enough if it just shines a new light in your head, heart and soul during those times when they are up on deck.  True, you will then be schizophrenic.  Sort of.  But hey, you aren’t all that real when you’re living mostly appearances, if you want to know the truth.  Now at least you can be honest about it half the time.  And for all you know, that might be the best half of your life.

S’pose I should finish off here with a little show ‘n’ tell by way of example.  I’ve never been in therapy, but I’ve been in way deep self-analysis all my life.  Can’t tell you exactly why.  Maybe I was the class clown who got attention by being different; maybe I couldn’t win anything so I took my bat and ball and went home, refusing to play the game; or maybe I really was just different.  Doesn’t matter.  When you don’t belong anywhere, in a sense you belong everywhere.  I had circumstantial help.  A certain rootlessness anchored me to the broader universe — I had lived in a dozen countries by the time I was six, and maybe the different languages were part of the reason I seemed to be tuned to shadows and echoes rather than taking everything at face value.  But whether or not you have circumstances conducive to force you to look over walls, you DO get to choose where to put your borders.  Probably at critical or even life-defining moments.  As Jake Sully (no relation) says in Avatar, “Sometimes your whole life comes down to one insane move.”

The movie Avatar says quite perfectly some of the things I’m trying to say here.  It’s one of those films in which you can find what you want, and its premise is an ancient Hollywood cliché, but the real magic is in its fantasy culture (the Na’vi) and how the characters relate.  The Na’vi are driven by tradition, but their individualism trumps mere appearances of tradition.  Though the chief’s daughter is socially ordained to marry the heir apparent to the chief, the reality of her love for Jake Sully wins unhesitatingly.  They simply mate after vowing their mutual love in a natural setting one afternoon and that bonds them for life.  When a clash of cultures annihilates their home, the Na’vi begin again without looking back.  There is a kind of freedom implicit in their openness to all of nature.  And because they are open to all of it, it is open to them, from messaging through tree roots to riding dragons.  They embrace reality without losing their souls.  They will survive any change because their minds and their spirits are not narrowed into a subset, a demographic.  They live by the truth within themselves, as we all secretly yearn to do.

That’s the kind of childlike honesty that flows through the veins of creativity.  Purest reality and yet, because of its searching honesty, it becomes the hyper-reality of romantic idealism, of perfect empathy.  It is not a short-term perception that fits mere circumstances.  It is an unfettered perception that links beyond one’s circumstances and thus opens the door to understanding and creating truly believable characters.  Any and all characters.

When your writing drags on, try riding dragons.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  Samples of recent Tweets: Valentine’s Day: I shall visit a place where a woman once married me in her heart, mind & soul, and loved me with her body.  And…  I keep seeing what I think is the same deer in the same place. The buck stops here…   And…  Just driving around all night, dodging recalled Toyotas. Missed Toyotas but witnessed a disaster while listening to Howie Day’s “Collide.”  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters w/photos are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles (http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/News.htm ) and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Who you were at your best moment is always who you can be again.  Kind of like summiting a mountain, it becomes a benchmark.  You’ve proven you can reach that far, be that person, do that thing – a minimum standard of excellence that cannot be taken away from you.  That applies pretty much to everything from labor to love, laughter to loss, but especially – I firmly believe – to moments of creativity.

Creativity, after all, is pointedly about excellence, isn’t it?  You reach for perfection, and if your fingers get burned, you gather your courage and reach again.  Artists as a community may be deeply flawed and anything but perfect, but in a world of frauds and disappointments that’s what makes our quests/dreams/passions so necessary.  In the infant innocence of our souls we cannot give up the romantic notion of achieving something godlike.  Is there an addiction or a high as pure as perfection?  I can’t speak for normal people, but for the lost and the damned who think that the sky is too low a limit, it is only in pursuit of excellence that all our senses and sensibilities come fully alive and we breathe rarefied air once again.  Just to be in the game, to make a little progress toward unblemished goals, quickens the blood and restores an urgency that is too easily lost in routine lives.  That said, it is exhausting to soar at that level, and so the real problem – once you find the courage to try – becomes to find the inspiration to act…

Which is what I wrote about last month  —   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/12/16/thomas-sullivan-sea-lions-in-coffins-getting-lost-writing-without-words/ .  A number of e-mails came in from people who related to the little trick of getting lost in order to find themselves or doing eccentric things to shake the dust of monotony from their souls, so here I go, diving recklessly deeper into the subject.

Most of the feedback came from people who don’t regularly seek CPR from their muses, but I got the sense that whether it was just to escape, say, writer’s block, or something more systemic like stopping suffocation in a routine life, a necessary part of the solution was to gain perspective.  To me gaining perspective is almost the same as defining the problem, which most suffocatees have already done (they can’t breathe!…duh).  The necessary adjunct to gaining perspective, however, seems to be to do something very instinctive, like…walk, run, fly, but get out of Dodge.  In other words, do not let inertia chain you to your prison.

BACKFIELD IN MOTION.  Amazing how many writers regularly use the same strategy in order to re-fill the well.  DNW drives or walks past houses, WAS is drawn like a moth to the cathode tube glow of a night-time Chicago, RB bikes around Los Angeles… Brian Hodge defines the need to break out of routine as hardwired.  My own personal matrix is at least 3-D, so I have mixed motives, but I can’t remember when I did not make daily transits, usually into nature, and for the past three years inevitably a nightly drive.  Last month I suggested getting lost as a way of finding one’s self.  The goal of that was to eliminate the tedium of daily life — those limitations that make us forget our potential.  It’s very hard to see the painting, after all, when you’re standing on the canvas.  So you move outside the frame to a place with no context in your life.  Streets are good – and best at night – because they are margins.  You want to be totally offstage, pure audience.

Okay, let’s assume you achieve this true detachment which is fundamental to escaping whatever is smothering your creative side.  Like the physician who wants to heal, you must “first do no harm,” and remaining in your routine was harming you.  So you’ve stopped the hemorrhaging by taking sanctuary elsewhere, and now you’re ready for a transfusion.  Where do you find a donor for that?  The suffocation was of your mind and spirit, after all.  Where do the stem cells for imagination come from?  How do you kickstart inspiration?  

When was the last time you didn’t have to kickstart inspiration?  Pregnant pause.  Ever see a bored baby? 

THE GANG OF 5…or empowering your five senses.  This is another trick that works for me.  It worked for all of us when we were babies totally indulged in sensory information.  Everything was new and we were keen to examine it all with the full battery of our senses.  But we grew up and started to skip the savoring of the senses — been there, done that — and went straight to the abstractions, and so every time the phone rang with a new message from Taste or Touch or See, we didn’t always answer attentively.  Why should we, if we already knew what it tasted, felt or looked like and had turned it into an abstraction?  But we missed some new info that way, and maybe got disconnected from the inspiration — the total sense of being alive — that only The Gang of 5 can supply.  So going back to your senses and putting your brain on high alert for all incoming calls is good stimulation, even if all it does is repave old roads.  

Chances are, though, that your senses will give you better conversations if you give them some variety to chew on.  And that brings me to the third element of this column, another thing that works for me on a daily basis…

WHO’S THE STIFF?  Yeah, that thing you’re carrying around, the cadaver hanging from your brain, the corpse embalming your heart.  That stiff.  You.  The body.  Maybe you trace your pedigree back to Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago, or maybe you add millions more on the Charles Darwin freeway by believing in evolution, which gives you one helluva lot of basic training no matter how you slice it.  Sure, sure, we live in an intellectual age now, but whether we got here from standing naked talking to snakes and eating apples in the Garden of Eden or through eons of adaptation, most of what came between then and now was a pretty physical world.  You think because modernity has arrived, and the can opener has been invented, you can just ignore all that physical potential?  That’s a lot of dead weight to carry around.  A real drag on those sensory outposts I mentioned a paragraph back, know what I mean?  You sure you want to become a vestigial vagrant — hauling that carcass along through your emotional/psychological/intellectual state of being like it wasn’t a blue elephant standing in the room with you?  What if there’s more of a connection between your mind and your bod than you think?  Ever hear of, “Anima Sana in Corpore Sano”?  Okay, the only Latin I speak has the word “pig” in front of it — but just about everyone from Plato to John Locke is credited with saying, “Sound mind, sound body,” and even if I’m not that smart, I recognize a truism when I see it…feel it.

So do you.

And that’s my third trick this column.  Physicality.  Big part of my life.  True, I’ve been a nut job about it since romper room days, and ego & competition played large for most my life, but it was never JUST ego & competition and now being physical is purely about escape.  Escaping the tyranny of my mind, ditching smallness and paranoia, and about waking up my imagination each day.  It doesn’t have to be rabid physicality.  It can even be dynamic physical surroundings, if it wakes up your body.  This column is pushing my limit for length, so I’ll have to come back to the subject another time.  Right now I have a hunch that taking my Adam & Eve sleeping bag out into the brilliant winter woods for the afternoon will be a hoot.  Seriously.  Think contrast: robust nature vs. down sleeping bag.  Think crystal air and white light.  Imagine yourself all snug and warm while drinking in the pure distillation of winter in bracing sips.  Could be I’ll find my day’s supply of perspective, sensory stimulation, and physicality all in one shot.  You never know what you’ll find when you search for perfection.  And never knowing is part of the magic of inspiration. 

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s just something fun you can peep at without having to interact.  2 samples of recent Tweets:  Someone clue me, is the point of Vietnamese music to sing totally off key or did I just get a really bad trio twanging “Seoul” music?  And…  If I was a bat, I’d want to live in Al Gore’s humongous nostrils.  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters w/photos are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles and usually go up within 1 day of being sent out.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  Happy 2K10! 

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com    

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Pssst…me again.  Thought I’d check in on you.  See what kind of problems you got today.  No problems?  That’s a problem.  You’re an adventurer, a thinker, a romantic, a thrillseeker — something in a Walter Mitty fantasy that needs an adrenaline feed.  You need a problem.  Well…to be precise, you need a problem and a solution all in one shot.  If you’re a writer, you especially need something going on in the — whatchamacallit — inspiration department.

I never run out of inspiration.  Okay…okay, sometimes I run out of inspiration.  Okay, a lot of times I run out of inspiration.  Whenever I’m suffocating, actually.  Apathy suffocates me.  And I tend to get blue around the gills in a room full of oxygen if it’s being breathed by dull people in formal situations.  My least favorite vegetables are cooked carrots, rutabaga and dull people.  People who don’t respond and mistake prattle for conversation are duller than mosquitoes droning a Gregorian chant.  People who veg out like sea lions in coffins make me catatonic.  That’s when my eyes glaze over and my internal rockets launch for the far side of the universe. 

True, I am easily motivated.  But I am just as easily unmotivated.  People I can’t light up unmotivate me.  If you want to call that a lack of inspiration, okay, but really I just go underground.  Inside my head the burners are still blazing as I entertain myself.  I call that: WRITING WITHOUT WORDS.  Sometimes I just crack me up — such a funny guy, ha, ha, sob, sob.  You’d think someone would want to push my best stuff out there in front of people, cultivate an audience.  Oh, the world owes me a living!  But it doesn’t.  It do not.  Uh-uh.  Nope.  So, eventually I have to forgive the world for not loving me, make peace with it, and approach it on its own terms.  Eat your veggies, Sully.

Okay, now comes the part where I throw you some of my favorite tricks for inspiration.  I might as well tell you right now that they sound silly.  But that’s the whole idea.  If they don’t sound frigging ridiculous, they won’t shake anything up, and you need to be shaken up when you are uninspired.  That is what they do for severely depressed patients, you know — shake them up.  For instance, they might wake them in the middle of the night.  That puts the depressed person in a different world.  It’s a change from their expectations, their routine, and the overwhelming hopelessness that has them locked down.  It might seem pointless, but regarding everything as pointless is exactly the rationale we use to procrastinate until we become so inert that doing anything, however unorthodox, is a better option.  We need to stop smoking the brakes.  We need to grind some gears and DO something. 

Example, Sully.  Right.  Example: Go somewhere you have no reason to be.  (Yo, I’ve done this, you betcha – hell, I do it every day without trying.)  Try walking three miles to a corner totally unrelated to your neighborhood or anywhere you normally go.  Then think how disconnected you are at that moment. 

Feel the rain.

Feel the snow.

Feel the sun.

Feel the wind.

Take whatever is there.  Shape it.  Now invent the future you want.  The present is ever sashaying into the past before you can pin it down.  And the past is dead.  Life goes in one direction.  If you missed the life you should have led, at least live the life you have left.  Make it what you want.  There are always flashes of light in the broken glass of your dreams.

As you gaze at the traffic light – red, green, red, green — ask yourself, What if I never go back? 

So now you reinvent yourself right there.  Don’t skimp on the dimensions.  Roles have hammered your shape into what it was before you walked here, but now at this new intersection you can be whatever you want to be.  You can’t be born again, but you can grow, edit, morph.  Once you drop the embalming expectations and the fear-and-guilt driven inhibitions, you may surprise yourself with what emerges from your repressed soul.  The unfettered passion, the unhampered reach, the uncompromised dreams — like seeds trying to grow in the dark. 

This is the beginning of magic.  In you.  Still.  And if it’s still there, you have to ask yourself how/why you let it slip away in the first place.  How did you get to this time and place in your life?  Where were you born?  What or who were your companions for the first 20 years of life?  Are your dreams still alive?  What is crushing you?  What is floating your boat?  Are you who you thought you would be?  Watch the traffic going by and realize you are a stranger.  You have no history, no failures, no disappointments.  Just a stranger standing on a corner.  The intersection of Nowhere and One Way.  You can wait out the red light, or you can follow the green.  Go in any direction you want.  Be anyone you want.  At least for a while.

Now, for whatever reason, you may be saying that you can’t go somewhere you have no reason to be.  Your shackles are a 24/7 job or a family or physical limitations or you’re sitting in a jail cell in DeHoCo (Detroit House of Corrections).  Well…yeah, it’s cool if you can take a trip to Nova Scotia or drive 300 miles on a whim some night, but even if you have to sit backwards in a bath tub (warning: sitting backward on a toilet is not recommended) or go stand in a closet, you can put yourself in a position that makes you see the world differently for a while and stops the clock and causes you to THINK new stuff.  

Vitality is stimulated — or smothered — by context.  But the thing is you get to pick the context, and if you fail to take advantage of that, then what’s left except to fold your hand and take what you get? 

More on this in future columns.  Right now I’ve got to get lost so that magic can find me.  Got to go visit a beaver dam deep in a local woods.  Really.  It’s the wrong time, the wrong season and the wrong place (see photo at start of column) – what could be more lost than that?

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and won’t intrude on your computer.  2 samples of recent Tweets:  I’ve been practicing stupidity all day. Then I realized something very profound. I don’t need to practice…  And…  Considering the number of vitamin pills that have rolled under the ‘fridge, I have the healthiest spiders in the Universe.  Here’s the link: http://twitter.com/thomassullivan .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net.  Past newsletters are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/  

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan

Love that George Jones song.  If you have an ounce of passion in you for anything, a single unblemished ideal, or if you feel a poignant stab in the heart for any kind of perfection, then you understand what’s behind that song.  

Writers get it.  Real writers.  Lovers of the Muse.  When you want something so badly that it makes your teeth ache and you swallow sand and you know that whatever the obstacles, it’s just right for you – not for someone else maybe, but absolutely for you — and life just won’t move forward unless you are in pursuit of that holy grail, well…that’s when you come alive.  And only then.  Passion sweats blood. 

Only sometimes you bleed out.  Bleed white.  Your veins constrict, your heart turns into a dried husk, and your mind goes cold.  That’s when you THINK you stop loving the Muse.  Because passion that intense is draining, and rejection takes its toll.  Your commitment may be true, but even a faithful dog backs off when it’s kicked in the teeth enough times.  So your fingers slip off the keys; you quit caring.  Hope becomes a dull ache, and you walk around in a novocaine stupor.  You listen to loud music, you laugh at things that aren’t funny, you get hyper interested in feng shui or the kids next baseball game.  The people around you who have patiently endured your impossible dream seem almost relieved.  You are back.  You are acting the way they act.  Life is suddenly clear and simple and balanced. 

And predictable.                    

But then you get a glimpse of color flitting past the window one day or hear a whisper in the leaves alongside an autumn path, and it’s like remembering where you placed your car keys.  You vividly recall where you were going!  It hits you full passion with a touch of dismay.  Because you realize that you are wasting your life, wasting precious time.  Like the white rabbit, you are so late!  You can’t believe you let yourself become a zombie, that you lost faith with what you started out to be.  The stars and the galaxies are still there; you just quit reaching for them. 

But giving up on your dream is like letting the best part of you commit suicide.  Because that’s where the real you lives.  Your dream is where you are honest with yourself.  If it dies, what’s left except to live a lie?  And, yes, you can live a lie where appearances demand it, but you can’t do it 24/7.  You need somewhere, sometime to live your dream, to know that it could really happen, to feel that you are worthy of it.  Living a lie might meet the world’s expectations for you on the surface — it might even be noble, depending on your situation — but by definition it cannot be honest. 

So you re-visit your dream.  Secretly at first.  Maybe life interferes with that a little bit.  But you find a way, even if at the start it’s only in your mind, your heart.  You imagine, plan, fantasize.  And then you dare to reach out on a computer screen or a piece of paper.  And the words come back.  Because that’s who you are.  Words and thoughts.  That’s all anyone is, only with some people — writers – communication is infinitely more acute.  You need words both coming and going.  Like breaths.  Inhale, exhale.  Words are oxygen.  You are a willing slave to the Muse.  Forever in love. 

But you only recognize that when you think you’ve stopped loving your dream.  Because your passion is so great that it just exhausts your spirit and you have to take a timeout to let the ground springs refill the reservoir.  To let the hurt of rejection subside.  And you’ll probably repeat the whole thing again.  Until you succeed.  Or don’t succeed.  It really doesn’t matter which, as far as what you have to do.  Life is not a dress rehearsal.  One take…action!  Or else you go sit with the audience.

“He stopped loving her today… they hung a wreath upon his door.” 

Yeah.  That’s the only way to murder a Muse, if you’re for real.  The only way to kill a true writer.  And it says everything I’ve ever tried to say about the journey itself being the destination.

Thanks for reading along with these columns.  I get a lot of e-mail from people who gave up on their dreams but think their dreams gave up on them.  And speaking of e-mail, I’ve heard from a number of Glenn & Deacon Frey fans that my link to the September column is broken on some of the newsletter mirror sites.  I think that column is being confused with earlier mentions of Glenn and Deacon from 14 months or so ago.  Here’s the correct link to the most recent column:   http://storytellersunplugged.com/thomassullivan/2009/09/16/thomas-sullivan-are-you-ready-for-fame-fortune-%e2%80%94-crosslake-redux-with-glenn-deacon-frey/   

Oh, and another thing.  If it says Comments closed at the end of this column, IGNORE that.  WordPress has a glitch or two and that’s one of them.  Your comments are MOST welcome, and the way to leave them is just to click the title of this column, which will take you to a new page of the column so fast you may not realize it changed.  At the bottom of that column is the posting box for your comments.  If you got here from my newsletter link, you may already see that.

May I invite you to follow me on Twitter?  It’s fun and won’t intrude on your computer.  2 examples of recent Tweets:  Nothing is easier to take for granted or quickly forgotten than constant magic…until you suddenly realize it isn’t there.   And…  Why is everyone telling me I should write a romance novel? Am I wearing chick-socks or something?  Hey, I can explain. That was Halloween.  Here’s the link:  http://twitter.com/thomassullivan  .  I’ll also be happy to put you on the mailing list for free newsletters packed with stories and adventures, including photos, if you email me at: mn333mn@earthlink.net .  Past newsletters are archived at the author’s website below under News & Articles.  Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued.  

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan

http://www.thomassullivanauthor.com/   

http://twitter.com/thomassullivan