Let’s keep in mind that this year’s writing camp is only about a month off. Camp runs from June 20 to 24 and all the details are found here — Summer Camp homepage.
Today’s Mondays with Martin essay is one that focuses on the need to write, journaling, and the discovery of self. Although this short piece dates back to 1992, the message in timeless.
* * *
By David Martin
Someone once said they read books to discover the souls of others. I write to discover my own. I want to discover who I am. Few things in life teach me who I am more than writing in my journal does. This desire for self-knowledge inspires me to write almost every day.
I seldom lack inspiration to write, but I often lose my focus. I spend too much time doing many things other than writing. Earning money, pursuing life’s pleasures, and trying to please others causes me to get lost in the fog of daily existence. I get tired making a living in a stressful environment. I feel waves of people, emotions, and work wash over me and knock me off my feet.
I search for my footing in my journal. I look for meaningful reflections in my sentences and metaphors, and my journal becomes a symbol revealing my true self.
I want to be good at a few things in life. Conveying accurate images through my choice of words is one of them. I want to use my gifts well.
Simple things in life inspire me to write. My heart lifts when I see a male cardinal in a bare tree above the mounds of white snow. My soul warms when I see a strong, male hand hold a tiny child’s little fingers. Fathers teaching sons and daughters the sacrifices needed to reach maturity turn my pages. Lovers look into each other’s eyes and inspire me to paint the scene with words. Close friends sitting together, silently drinking coffee, as they watch moisture form on a window while the cold, Nebraska wind howls outside makes me warm to the possibilities.
I am urged to write when I feel friendly eyes locate me in a crowded room; when loved ones bare their souls to me; when a student comes to class with the attitude, “I am ready to learn today, and you can teach me.”
I write eating gumbo, listening to Cajun music. I look for pen and paper when I hear the carol, “Silent Night,” pierce the air on Christmas Eve. I sit down under a tree to record my emotions when my daughter chooses on her own to take the training wheels off and ride her bicycle solo for the first time. Ray Charles’ “Georgia,”Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” and the children’s story, “The Little Engine That Could” all speak to me in the same way. I can not pass up these opportunities.
When my work captivates me, when I hear, “Daddy, I love you!” when I see outstretched hands reaching for a baby’s face, when I feel soft fingers on my shoulder, when I hear the words, “Everything will be all right, now. I am here with you!” I feel fortunate if I can put half of what I feel onto paper.
When I remember my writing passions, I stay on the path meant for me. These times inspire me to write. I am content in my bliss.
Below is the beginning of an essay about sign language and the deaf community by Abby Giambattista. It appears in the current issue of Fine Lines, which can be found by following this link.
Editor’s note: This David Martin essay dates back to 1993. The points made here are still as important ever. Take a look and think about your own writing. And there are dragons out there waiting to be slayed.
* * *
By David Martin
It is now 3 a.m. Lightning and thunder pound my head. I am tired and can not sleep.
An awful dragon chased me for 5 ½ hours tonight. Our battle sounded like the thunder and looked like the lightning of my dreams. I heard my sword crash against the fire breathing monster’s neck, and I awoke to hear real monsters clash with Zeus’ bolts of fire in the sky.
The monster of my dreams aroused the emotional “donder and blitzen” that took place yesterday at our monthly Dragon Slayer’s meeting. Those flashes of insight and the sound of truth now stir in me to write once again.
Outside, Mother Nature’s rain falls softly. The natural thunder and lightning keep calling my attention to life’s rebirth, baptismal cleansing, and regeneration. It’s never too late to start over.
Our discussion went from patience to parking lots, nuclear holocaust to Nikki Giovanni, a search for passion to paternalism, native desires to Nietzsche, individual courage to Camus, a creative swim to Schopenhauer, and a quest for real education to erudition. My mind became tired and excited as a result of our four-hour sharing. I feel there is much electricity in this group of writers. It is no wonder that Donder and Blitzen are now more to me than just two of Santa’s reindeer.
If Giovanni said there are no conversations, just intersecting monologues, what would she say about Sunday afternoon? Our sharing and discussion prove that good exposition and feedback occur when writers commit to their tasks.
No one really knows the mind and soul of another. Friend, husband, wife, child, do we really know who other people are? Probably not, but yesterday’s attempt was a huge beginning. Let the flow of written words never stop, as we follow our quest to write ourselves into our destiny.
“I can feel again . . . there but for the grace . . . it is the moments I like . . . memories last longer than experiences . . . suffer in order to create . . . passion and pride. . . courage to be . . . over the edge . . . eye of the tiger . . . it is a question of vision . . . a search for truth . . . be the rebel . . . personal battlegrounds . . . celebrate our 26 letters . . . a struggle to be authentic . . . .”
These glimpses of everyone’s participation are sparks for much contemplation and great composition. Don’t be satisfied to talk about them. Write them down. Develop them before they vanish. We must challenge our dragons before they disappear.
I try not to worry about the past. What is done is done. Just let me learn from my mistakes and move on. I pray I don’t repeat the same errors. I hope to move to a higher ground. Then, if I make more mistakes, at least, they will be new ones.
I use to spend so much time worrying about the “boo-boos” I made, people I hurt, and opportunities I lost, that I only made myself depressed. When I learned that my unhappiness was only sublimated anger at myself, I decided I was not progressing by hurting myself, so I stopped it. I am only human. Yes, I made mistakes. I will make more, I am sure, but I don’t want to dwell on them. I choose to think of the future, to emphasize that aspect of my life, to accentuate the positive things I can influence. The little things I know will be affected by my attention.
Living is endless “being,” a continuous growth. There is no finish line; just life in a marathon and small victories tacked onto each other. An ending is a new beginning. I try to keep my eyes on the road and relax behind the wheel. Instead of going around and around in circles repeating the same mistakes of the past, if I can slowly, continuously, move to a higher level, my circles will become spirals. That is enough for me.
The only responsibility a river has is to flow to the sea. I don’t have to be anything else but the river I was created to be. My mission is to simply live what I am. If I am the Missouri, I don’t have to be the Amazon. If I don’t do what the Missouri is supposed to do, that is my only mistake.
Rivers don’t go upstream. I don’t have to push the current. The current will flow by itself. The river’s job is simply to be patient, take the curves and bends as they come, and ride, ride, ride to the sea.
The Greeks said happiness was attaining perfect balance and moderation in all things. When I am not happy, I find that parts of my life are more emphasized than others. Often, I notice my unhappiness comes about when I am thinking only of myself. When I want something so badly that I crave nothing else, when I am obsessed by possessing something, when I am greedy, then my displeasure with life is at its highest point.
When I quit worrying about the getting, when I begin thinking about the giving, my happiness returns. When I am aware of serving others or something larger than myself, when I volunteer my time, when I let good things pass through me to someone else, my happiness returns. It is not the taking that is important; it is the touching. It is not the getting that counts; it is the giving.
If someone asked me, “What are the Dragon Slayers all about?” I would say they are about all of the above and more. Individuals have their own personal dragons to overcome, and according to Joseph Campbell, we may have more than one. The dragons can be many things: possessions, fears, ideas, jobs, school, teachers, wives, husbands, children, and egos. The monsters are concerns in life that prevent us from being ourselves and pursuing those things that let us become happy.
Campbell used the idea of following one’s bliss to find rapture and defeat one’s dragons. The barriers in our lives block our pathways and prevent us from going down the yellow-brick-road to Oz where we will surely be able to find ourselves a brain, a heart, and the courage we need to be successful.
Dragon Slayers travel the road of life searching for its truth through writing. Once the truth, as we see it, is found, the next step requires action. Knowledge is the knowing, but wisdom is knowledge in motion. We want to do more than just find the dragons. Going past those monsters to a better emotional and physical world creates the thunder and lightning that I hear. Let’s confront those dragons. Let’s keep our faith! Let’s write on!
Stu Burns is a fixture at the once-a-month Fine Lines reading/editing meetings. The following essay he penned is all about the importance of solid, smart punctuation. With that in mind read (and write) on.
* * *
By Stu Burns, prose editor for Fine Lines
Punctuation, especially using commas, isn’t the exciting, sexy part of writing. It doesn’t usually inspire carpe diem moments with rebellious, creative souls rushing to build barricades or give eulogies to technicians of the nonrestrictive clause. Comma use is more like personal hygiene. People notice, even if they are too polite to mention it. Some people really don’t care, especially if their own hygiene or comma use isn’t that great. As a rule, though, it is probably a good idea to get this sort of thing right. That is why this blog entry came to be. I am going to share some rules out of the MLA Handbook and boldface some examples as I go.
Commas divide sentences, making them easier to read. When a writer leaves out a comma that rightfully belongs, the words mush together and become hard to understand. When a writer puts commas in the wrong places, they create divisions where there should be a flow of language. For example, commas go between adjectives that modify the same noun, like when you are describing a big, fat, fearsome, hairy raccoon. You would not use a comma describing an intelligent history teacher, though. In this case, the words “history teacher” make a noun, and putting a comma in there would break up the language when it should flow.
Commas also guide a reader by adding structure. If your sentence begins with an introductory phrase, use a comma to set it apart. This is especially important when you begin a sentence with a conjunction (like I just did) or a preposition. Joining two independent clauses with a conjunction also calls for structure, so use a comma when you do this. You do need the conjunction when you do this, though. If you try to use a comma by itself to join two short sentences, you get a run-on sentence. These are bad; structure is good. (And, yes, you can use a semicolon to join independent clauses. Some people do not like that, though.)
As anyone with a bottle of sriracha in the cupboard knows, it is important to know when not to do something. This applies to commas. Structure is good, but not when it breaks up words that should go together. The subject of a sentence and the verb that shows what the subject is doing should never be separated by a comma. Take this sentence:
“A transport ship full of brave soldiers, charged onto Omaha Beach.”
The comma in that sentence throws up a wall between the soldiers and what they are doing. Get rid of it.
Along the same lines, commas should not separate a verb and its object. This is a little harder to recognize. Take this example:
“The grizzled author sat and wrote, a long dissertation about an obscure topic that concerned no one but himself.”
The comma above breaks up the writing (the verb) from what is being written (the object). This is confusing. That comma needs to go.
Difficult as it may be for some people to believe, there has been a nasty war of words in the past few years about one way to use commas. Like the example with the adjectives above, commas separate a series of nouns, phrases, or clauses. See that comma I just used before the conjunction “or”? The comma before the conjunction that ends a list is called the “Oxford comma,” and there are some people who feel that it is unnecessary. Author James Thurber once had a fight with his editor over the phrase “red, white, and blue.” In Thurber’s own words, “All those commas make the flag seem rained on.” While less cluttered writing is usually a good thing, leaving the Oxford comma out can cause problems. Take this example:
“The sheriff spoke with two prisoners, his wife, and his mother.”
Without the Oxford comma and the structure it gives to the sentence, we get this:
“The sheriff spoke with two prisoners, his wife and his mother.”
Now it sounds like the beleaguered constable has his beloved spouse and parent in the pokey. There are a number of memes floating around the internet that demonstrate the Oxford comma in less polite ways, but kids read this blog, so you will have to find them yourself. I am sure there are fine, honest, hardworking people who don’t use the Oxford comma, but the problems you face leaving it out probably outweigh the gains. My advice is that you use it.
Good punctuation is essential for good writing, but hammering home rules is never fun, and spending valuable writing time consulting grammar references may not be the best idea. In that spirit, I will leave you with a piece of advice that did not come out of any style sheet. If it is difficult to figure out how you should use commas in a sentence, do yourself a favor and rephrase what you are saying. If you have a rough time writing, your audience will have a hard time reading, and no one wants to struggle when they read. It might be a challenge for you to let go of some beautiful phrase that blossomed from your mind like a lotus from the navel of a primordial creator, but the simpler language that you find to replace it may prove to be even more charming. In other words, if you find yourself fighting with anyone about how to use commas, stop what you are doing and rewrite. Some things are worth fighting over; comma usage isn’t one of them.
“We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us” (Thomas Merton).
Vanishing Point by Oliver Hellowell
I am responsible for my actions and my thoughts, and I want to learn much more than I now know. I sense the knowledge inside of me is much more important than the external knowledge I could acquire. No one else can teach me what I need to know. My insight comes from life experiences. I must each myself how to see.
Every year, I teach The Scarlet Letter to my eleventh grade high school students and renew my interest in the Puritans who settled New England. My mother traces her family name (Steele) to Abigail Adams in the United States and to Charles II in England. The Puritan religion plays havoc with her family tree. On my father’s side, Charles Martin was, in fact, the treasurer on board the Mayflower when it docked at Plymouth Rock. We can’t say for certain if he was one of our family, but it is possible.
The Puritan custom of labeling people into two groups was one of their interesting habits. If these people believed in the need to reform the Church of England and tell citizens the “pure” interpretation of the Bible, they were “saints.” If some expressed any doubt in the strict Puritan philosophy, obviously, those people were “sinners.” Life was so black and white, so simple. “Saints” and “Sinners,” that is all there were.
King James I threatened the Puritans when they asked him to change ceremonies, carried into the Anglican Church from the Roman Catholic Church. He said, “I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land.” He demanded a simple life, too. Subjects had to follow his way, or else they had to go to jail or leave the country.
These Puritan farmers, merchants, professionals, and scholars, especially from the University of Cambridge, came to be regarded as gloomy fanatics. For example, “They objected to bear baiting, not because of the pain to the bear, but because of the pleasure to the spectators.”
Some teachers try to “harry . . . out of the land” students who feel a need for new ways of thinking about old problems. These teachers feel they are on the front line of ethical values, and to alter their nineteenth century views is the same as succumbing to modernism. Many of their students feel no sense of unity and no sense of inner awareness. These conservative teachers take so much pride in being orthodox, like King James, that they retard many learning processes.
Rush Limbaugh sends his newsletter to interested subscribers for $20/year, but he “charges $10 more to liberals.” Doctrinal instructors put that “$10 more tax” on creative and non-traditional students in the way of stress, pressure, and a “saints or sinners” approach to education.
Opportunities to learn arise when different points of view appear on the scene. The greatest single educational lesson I learned in education revolved around the definition of the word “synthesis.” The main point of view in any discussion is called a thesis. The opposite point of view is the antithesis. Many hard life experiences taught me that seldom is the truth ever in one of these two opposing points of view. Almost always, the truth is somewhere in between the thesis and the antithesis. The truth is in a blending of the two, the synthesis. Once I accepted this lesson of life, I learned what tolerance really meant.
When I learned that my ego determined my thesis or my antithesis and that what I thought I saw was based on my pride in knowing the truth, I understood what Joseph Campbell meant when he talked about the dragons in our world.
Campbell’s discussion of the mythology surrounding the European dragon in literature and religion points out to me how important my ego becomes in determining what I think I see in any situation. European dragons are negative barriers our egos place in front of us to prevent us from achieving our desires and goals. Writer’s block is one dragon I must deal with on a regular basis, and my ego creates it, not anyone else. I learned how to over come my dragon.
This specialist in comparative mythology changed my life forever. He taught me the importance of following my bliss and why I should expect synchronicity in my life. He taught me to look inside myself, to find the life force to which I am connected and trust that my reason for living will become unknown. He showed me why when I do what I am supposed to do with my life, synchronicity will “open 1,000 doors.”
Campbell’s thirty books and forty years of studying cross cultural mythology reinforced what I sensed in y childhood years: most major religions have more in common than they do differences. If we study them far enough and rise spiritually high enough, somewhere beyond this mortal plane, they come together as one. That intersecting point is not located outside ourselves. It is only reached through an inward journey.
When my father was a young man, he was dressed in full combat gear, ready to board a troop ship to cross the English Channel and do his part in Normandy in June 1944. I remember seeing newsreels of General Eisenhower talking to young men, just like my dad, the day before they left for their meeting with “Hell on Earth.”
“Ike” asked one soldier if he had a religion. The smiling paratrooper said, “Yes, sir!” The general said, “Good. Where you are going, you will need one. It does not make any difference what it is. It just matters that you have one.” I wonder if this awareness is not just as true now, as we face our personal “Normandy Invasions” today.
A recent retiree became interested in construction of an addition to a shopping mall. Observing the activity regularly, he was especially impressed by the conscientious operator of a large piece of equipment. The construction worker went beyond what would have normally been required and reached for excellence in all he did. The day finally came when the retiree had a chance to tell the man how much he enjoyed watching his scrupulous work. With an astonished look on his face, the operator replied, “You are not the supervisor?”
Most people need supervisors looking over their shoulders to ensure excellence. Many look at the way we live our lives and draw conclusions about our self-reliance. True students have few supervisors looking over their shoulders. I see good students remaining disciplined because they are courageous enough to become their own supervisors. They don’t need someone else telling them how to study or when to study. Sincere students, teachers, and managers spread their visions of simplicity, synthesis, ands synchronicity to students, peers, and employees.
Today’s Monday with Martin was previously published in Fine Lines Journal.
(c) David Martin
What do you need to ensure personal excellence? Who is your personal supervisor? Why?
