Technology is freedom. The electric toaster changed the universe. The boat opened worlds. Clumping kitty litter saved continents. Paper handkerchiefs saved lives.
Every picture tells a story, a picture worth 1,000 words, they say. But words expand the picture.
Every person who encounters the words hears a different story. How many novels did Harper Lee write? One — and several million.
A closet is full of universes, a shelf is packed with lifetimes, collections of rare gifts waiting to be unwrapped. We each pass this way just once, and forever. What miracles will we unwrap today?
The joy of discovery is endless when we open ourselves to joy; the pain is endless when we focus on the pain. Choose the joy, overcome the pain — open the closet and discover yet another universe.
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is our purpose in life. What’s the meaning of “all this”?
You work your way through something day by day and sometimes try to conjure what all the somethings mean: To find a purpose, to find a story, to find a point behind it all — because we all go through life wondering what’s the point? and perhaps not knowing exactly why until the story ends — At the end you tally up whether you served your purpose, or you tally up what the meaning of your life was, based on where life took you.
Who says your purpose has to be singular? An old friend of mine once said, “We each live many lifetimes within the one we live.” Rather than think of it as a frustrating search for our One Big Purpose in Life, maybe we should think of it as a series of adventures trying different purposes out for size.
And maybe someday will say “Yes, this is it, this is The Thing I Was Meant To Do.” When that happens, there’s no point in saying, “Oh, I’m 25 or 43 or 62 or 87 and wasted so much time getting to the point.” The point is you got to the point and you’re here now.
And while trying all that other stuff, surely you made an impact, and certainly that time was not wasted.
So this weekend is the anniversary of the day I woke up in the morning not intending to publish my next book yet, and it was posted to various bookstores by nightfall.
How To Play a Blue Guitar was a work in progress, and I sat down to proofread what I’d done so far and decided it was a completed book.
I have not made a similar decision about Full, but I have a) a cover and b) an announcement: My next collection is called Full and it ought to appear soon, this spring. Either I’ll give you a date later or it’ll just appear, soft opening style, and then I’ll mention it’s arrived.
How to Play a Blue Guitar
Full is along the lines of A Bridge at Crossroads, Blue Guitar, and Gladness is Infectious, that is to say, a collection of rockets, bells and poetry, most of it drawn from this blog. I am organizing it into three “books” within the book, tentatively titled Creative, Live Free or Die, and Encourage, but now that I have a subtitle (”Rockets, Bells & Poetry”), it’s entirely possible that I will throw that out and retitle the sections Rockets, Bells, and Poetry. What do you think?
A year later, I think How to Play a Blue Guitar holds up pretty well, as a little collection of stories, poems and reflections that somehow gelled into a finished book I didn’t see coming, at least not that quickly.
What’s that? “I thought you were working on a novel called Jeep Thompson and something or other.” Glad you asked. I have covers for the first three books in the series, but I only have words for one-third of a book. On the other hand, from what I’ve got so far, it’s going to be a doozy. Do people still say “doozy”?
