Breaking Down to Build Back Up

The first thing I learned on my spiritual journey is that all my preconceptions, prejudices, and comfort zones were going to be challenged.  I grew up in an independent, fundamentalist Baptist church where I sang gospel music and hymns and was taught the Roman’s Road to lead others on the “true” path to heaven.  Even when I was 110% working in the church and following all their precepts and dogmas, I didn’t feel completely whole.  I felt like I was missing something.

Then, I started that fateful journey in March of 1998 and I realized a lot about myself.  I had days and nights of tears as I realized just how much I depended on my family and how I missed them.  I learned that I couldn’t put my trust in people I met online who I had thought were my faithful friends.  I realized the man I had an affair with wasn’t the love of my life, but I got stuck with him having no place else to go and feeling like I should always be with the first man I shared myself body and soul with.  For five and a half years, I gave him my loyalty, to realize we really weren’t meant for each other.  I had given up too much of myself to stay in that relationship and it was causing me physical, emotional, and spiritual distress.

It was a painful part of my journey where I had to be broken to be fixed.  Ever have a deviated septum?  Often the process to fix this is to break the cartilage again in order to reset the septum so it will heal in the correct place.  That was what had to happen to me.  I had to be broken in all the places that I deviated from my destined path in order to get me back on track.  Nothing could be more humbling than to be shown you don’t know everything about trust, love, and family, especially when you are 2,000 miles away from everyone and everything you grew up with and were familiar with. 

During this time of being broken, one of my favorite books to read was “The Tao of Pooh”.  Taoism helped me to categorize and filter everything going on inside of me.  This breaking down process was trying to get me back to Pu, or the “uncarved block”.  In “The Tao of Pooh”, Winnie the Pooh was portrayed as Pu as he was simple and untouched by society’s cutting tools.  This is the perfect state in Taoism.  The rest of Pooh’s friends were shown as various icons in society who are living in disillusionment.  Owl was the scholar who imagined himself the most intelligent of everyone around him even when he was completely wrong on a subject.  Rabbit was the control freak who got distressed whenever someone strayed from what he felt they should be doing.  And so on….

I like how Wikipedia puts it:  “Taoism posits that people may gain knowledge of the universe by understanding themselves.”  I started to see what I was, what I became, and how some things were just not right about me.  Once the process started, I began to see how I wasn’t what I was meant to be.  Then I actively started to seek out what was right for me, dabbling in other things and seeing how they effected my life and either moved me forward or backward.

Next post will be around the first of February and I will discuss discovering co-dependency and how paganism affected my life.

Happy Reading!

ROW 80 Updated for 10/23/11

I actually accomplished a goal that I didn't put on my list.  I took the girls outside - it was a beautiful day of sixty odd degrees and sunny - and had them help me dump some pots that were on the front deck.  I had one little girl go gun-ho and tried to rake a little, although the wind helped a great deal with that last week.  I even moved my raised bed box to the back of the house.  I feel so accomplished today.

Now for the ROW 80 Update.  Below are a list of accomplishments:




Reading:  Finished Sookie Stackhouse book #6; Finished Heart of Darkness anthology;
WIP:  Made some necessary cuts during editing and added 1,828 words;

On a side note, the book is really coming along now.  I have my villain's plot planned out.  I was making it way too complicated at first, hence the need to edit and hack out unnecessary parts to make the motive more simple.  Now I am developing minor characters and their roles in the villain's plan.  There is another villain - a minor one - that will be necessary for a change of location for another set of characters, but right now, I'm working with the villain who first challenges the heroine.  This first villain is less complicated as he tends to work in political and religious circles.  The minor villain will be a bigger challenge for me as he will be more barbaric.  It's a big strange even to me how I just classified them and their difficulty rating.  I would have suspected the one manipulating things behind the scenes would be harder to write, but he isn't.  It's the one where I need to create battle scenes for that will be more difficult.  

Happy Reading!

First Official ROW 80 Round 4 of 2011 Post

Ok, I'm going to do it.  Here is my first set of goals:


Put the following three projects in my yWriter5 program to assist in outlining and editing:


Project 1:  Paranormal Investigator novel (Liz Lochran, main character)
Project 2:  From Night Into Dawn (working title of historical, Christian romance)
Project 3:  Before Atlantis (working title of Atlantean series, Book 1)


I'm giving myself two weeks to have this done.  Then I will focus on my next set of goals:


Project 1:  Add 1000 new words a week
Project 2:  Add 1000 new words a week
Project 3:  Add 500 new words a week


When I feel like I have finally finished a project, then I will change the goals to reflect edits and rewrites.  Since Project 3 is mainly a rewrite, that is why I decided on a smaller amount of words and this will be harder to track since I will be using previously written text along with new phrasing and scenes - or throwing out entire scenes to be replaced with others.


Maybe the goal seems unrealistic, but considering my need to work on multiple projects at once to keep my brain from getting bored, I thought this would be a good start.  I could always change these goals if I suddenly feel like it is too much.


We shall see.


On top of that, I always am setting some reading goals, just nothing too specific.  I want to finish at least one book a week, but I may have to make it one book every two weeks or more to have the time to blog, read, write, and take care of the multiple projects waiting for me at home (e.g. laundry, dishes, taking the kids to school to name a few).


If anyone has any suggestions for me, I am very willing to listen and eager to learn what has worked for him/her.  


Happy Reading!

Musings about Muses - Polyhymnia

I sat in church today, mulling over an article about music during writing as a topic, mostly reviewing my research about the muses. In Greek mythology, Polyhymnia was (or is) the muse of hymns. I sing hymns every Sunday morning when I attend church. I wondered about the Christian church and how it would view a Greek demigoddess as the source of their music. Then, I realized, she would be the source of all religious music regardless of religion because that was what a hymn was - the musical embodiment of faith.

Imagine. A Greek demigoddess just embodied a concept that crosses ancient belief structures that have been in contention for nearly as long as they existed. Well, mainly among a few, anyway. Every church, synagogue, temple, mosque, etc. that has any music of any form would have the spirit of Polyhymnia within their walls. I know Muslims don't necessarily have singing in their mosques, but I have heard the Call to Prayer before. The way it is intoned it vibrates similarly to song. Hindu, Native American, Pagan, and other religious faiths have some form of music involved in their worship. "Hymn" does not strictly apply to a book of songs one finds in a church. It is wherever musical vibrations are used to gain closeness, acceptance, even the attention of one's own chosen deity.