This morning I began something new. Morning Pages. They came at the behest of Julie Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, a book that’s been referred to multiple times now in the work I’m doing in the SMU Writer’s Path program.
Morning Pages are simple. You wake up. You grab a pen and you’re then to write out three pages in long-hand about whatever it is that pops into your head. There is no right. There is no wrong. There is no editing. No review. No one, not even yourself, are supposed to read what’s written. The exercise is done purely to free one’s mind of the gunk that’s collected there that’s blocking the way to creative thinking. Pure. Simple. So far, mid-day, it feels like it’s working. At least once I got up from the desk this morning, I felt like I’d left a lot of baggage on the page and emptied it from my mind.
Then came a walk with Maycee. Actually, my Morning Pages contain multiple references to her whining and begging to go out. She’d already been out. So I was compelled to let her on to the porch. Nope. More whining. More writing. More whining. Back inside. Then she went to the front door and rang the Christmas bells that are hanging from the knob. Maycee is now six months old and those bells only were put there last Wednesday. Thursday, the twins, Reagan and Haley, I’m told because I didn’t witness it, trained her to ring the bell with her nose. That she’s learned to do that, I can testify. When she needs to go out and poop, it’s ring, ring, ring.
After a second trip out this morning, I completed my Morning Pages. I didn’t go back and read them. I went on with my day, which now led to another trip to the potty area for dogs, and then Maycee and I left out on our usual morning stroll of at least one-mile’s length before 8 a.m.
Done with that, shaved and showered, I got in the car and headed to meet with my mentor, Ron Rose. You see, I’m at a stuck point in the development of The Privacy Patriots, the novel I’ve been trying to develop over the course of 2014. I gathered up a couple of notebooks I keep working through, grabbed a laptop and iPad and out the door I went, promising to be there by 9.
Traffic on 635 was a mess, so I wound up running parallel to I-30 west until Dolphin Street. Made it through the Canyon and on the other side, began to realize I was actually going to make it to our rendezvous point early. And then the car stalled. It apparently went into “Limp Mode.” A design feature to keep serious damage from happening to the engine.
By 9:20 my car was attached to a tow truck and headed from whence I’d just come, back to Mesquite. By 9:44 a.m., the time OnStar’s people said the truck would be at the spot of origin to get me, we were pulling into the repair shop.
The shop, one I told the tow truck driver I use because it’s so quick, is backed up. They have about three or four jobs in front of mine. So Bruce, the owner of the shop, dropped me here back at home.
And instead of going and talking to my mentor, discussing, hashing and rehashing, God revealed to me another plan.
Sitting Still
You see it was yesterday that another now very significant mentor in my life, Author Suzanne Frank, told me to go do something besides trying to work on my book. She said to go trim the tree. (I didn’t write her back and let her know there are already three up.) She said to bake something. But to get away from my book and let my mind wander a bit.
When I did all but about three of the first week’s exercises, I turned my chair from the desk, leaned my head back and closed my eyes and said a prayer.
I Am A Brilliant And Prolific Writer
I wrote in a notebook the following sentence:
I, Donald J. Claxton, am a brilliant and prolific writer.
And then I wrote it out again. Eight more times I repeated this function for a total of 10.
And as I wrote, I began to hear little voices saying, “No you’re not.” “You fool.” “If you’re so good, why haven’t you published anything significant yet? Your 49th birthday is Saturday. What the hell have you been waiting for? Lunch?”
I wrote those things down, too.
And then I identified people, “Monsters” the book refers to them, in the past, who might have called me things like that or said things about my writing that was negative. And then I identified positive people and positive things that have been said about my writing.
There are a couple of more exercises I need to do for the first week. And I will do them another day. Tomorrow, I will get up, scribble some thoughts about hopes and prayers the car gets repaired and isn’t going to cost a lot of money, money I don’t have, to get on the road again.
Tomorrow I have a writing class at SMU that I missed in November because of a family tragedy back in Alabama. Now, at the moment, even being there tomorrow night feels like it’s in jeopardy.
But I have to firmly believe as I sit here at this writing and believe that the same God who made sure I took some time today to be still, to think, to not think, to just meditate and breathe in the good and the bad of life, is going to make sure tomorrow works itself out, too. Perhaps if the day had gone some other way, I’d be upset about all this.
Something tells me already today’s first week lesson has already taken hold on my heart.
On Oct. 11, 2007, I made the second most important conversion of my life–I bought my first Mac.
Today, I own an iMac, my second MacBook Pro in that time, and a MacBook Air. I also have the iPad Air and an iPhone Six Plus. During my time of evangelism, I’ve also brought more than a dozen others to the fold–family, friends, maybe an enemy or two.
There are many blessings that come from being a Mac. I don’t have to run Norton and slow my processes down. I’ve not ever had a Blue Screen of Death from Windoze. I’ve NEVER had an issue with a virus. And with Apple Care, if anything has ever happened to go wrong, Apple has fixed it in less than three days time.
One-on-One Training
In 2007 I also bought a year’s worth of One-on-One training that Apple provides. You get to basically go to the Apple Store of your choice every week for a year and sit with an Apple expert and they teach you how to use your new machine. Adolpho Cantu taught me Aperture, Final Cut Express, and then we dabbled in ways to move things out of Photoshop into my video projects, which seven years ago, were sophisticatedly primitive given the level of video equipment I had at the time.
But that $99 a year and the curiosity to learn has made a tremendous difference from where I was then and where I am now. Eric is another of the trainers at the Apple Store at Northpark Mall in Dallas. I visited with him recently and he’s still teaching. Many thanks were tendered during our conversation. I then showed him what we’ve been doing with books for the iPad and it made his day. Neither of us could have imagined anything like that would have even become possible in October 2007.
The Price Threshold
I often hear people talk about how expensive Apple products are and how they can get a cheaper: computer/tablet/phone with another company that runs Windoze or Droid. Yeah, you can. But with them come headaches you don’t get with Apple products. That’s not to say Apple is perfect, because there are issues in the Mac World as well, but nothing near as problematic as I was experiencing when I had a PC. My point is, you pay a little more for peace of mind and it’s worth every penny.
My Apple World in 2014
I’m running the beta version 5 of Yosemite on two of my work machines now. For the big machine, it’s still running Mavericks. There still are a couple of crucial things for my work that aren’t jiving so well in Yosemite so I can’t make the complete change over. But it is cool to see the things that are coming soon from Apple–ways to make the iPhone, iPad and Macs all share the same information seamlessly without even having to do anything to make that happen.
And this part may surprise some of you, but I have the iPhone Six Plus and I have to say, I wish more and more that I had gone with the smaller iPhone Six. No, I’ve not bent it like six other people apparently have done out of millions of them sold already, but I just find the whole experience with it to be a little wonky–a little like a return to the Droid/Microsuck World, if you will. There have been times when the screen on my iPhone Six Plus has gotten stuck upside down. A time or two when I couldn’t start the video in horizontal position, and had to turn it sideways and then back to horizontal to shoot wide and not shallow. And then when I’m out walking the dog and I want to start MapMy Walk or take a picture while I’m walking and holding the leash in the other hand with a 45-pound dog yanking in the other, it just feels like I’m a flicker away from dropping the massive thing. In other words, it’s just a little too big, even for someone with big hands.
The other thing I wish Apple had done was better timed the coordinated release of iOS 8 for the iPhones and iPads with the commercial release of Yosemite. We have all this functionality sitting there on the iOS devices that really doesn’t work to its full potential right now and I’m certain most people are going to miss out on some of that when Yosemite finally does go live.
Happy Appleversary!
Regardless of those quirks, I have no regrets for being a Mac. Having Apple products in my life has changed my world and work dramatically in seven year’s time. I’m now a much better photographer, graphic artist, video producer, video editor, sound editor, music producer, book for iPad producer, movie-maker, 3D graphics designer, photo editor, web designer, and even educator because of what I’ve been able to learn in the Mac World since.
Thinking of making the conversion? I encourage it whole-heartedly. It will change your world in ways that only you can imagine. Thanks Apple, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. Oh, and War Eagle. We need to beat Mississippi State today….
For much of my life I have been in love with writing. If you jump over to TraverseAdventures.com, you’ll see a reference to the window at 208 Fortress Street on what was KI Sawyer AFB, in Gwinn, Michigan. From that window of opportunity, I would sit at my kidney bean desk and a children’s typewriter and construct stories.
Admittedly, I long have had a problem in my writing. I like people and dislike controversy so much, I found it hard to create characters who I began to care for and then needed to throw every sort of imaginable adversity in their way to make a compelling tale. As I told the class I was in at SMU over the summer, “I hated to skewer my characters.” Essentially, however, that’s what makes a good story; one worth reading, one that has something to say.
My life has changed drastically over the past four years. I have had a lot of bad things happen to me emotionally, physically and any other kind of -ly you can come up with to where I’ve been able to punch through what I didn’t have in me before. I’ve experienced how bad things happen to people that shouldn’t, how nutty and dishonest people can wreck one’s life. I’ve witnessed how mean and disingenuous people really can be. Disillusioned now, I have seen how the truth has so little to do with what goes on in court rooms, and how jealous, greedy and evil some people really can be. I’ve seen what demise the use of meth can bring about to a person and their family. Ultimately, I’ve learned to put new value in the simpler things in life.
There are two upcoming classes at SMU I look forward to beginning the next two weeks. One is called Story, a five-week class that features the book The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler. The second is a class called, “Stakes,” which is a two-session class designed to help writers “raise the stakes” their characters will endure in a work.
I’ve begun reading Vogler’s work, which also led me to Barnes and Noble yesterday to purchase Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Vogler wraps a lot of what he has to stay around the works of Campbell, which are largely based on premises of Freud and Jung–and as much as modern psychology has undone the concepts they put forward years and years ago, I have to wonder about some of what Campbell says–but I’m enjoying the aspects of what Vogler has put forward. But Campbell also dissects the essential elements of what stories have been about for thousands of years of recorded human history, largely through myths. Volger and Campbell’s contention is that stories, even today, are still deeply rooted in the tales of yesteryear and will be until the end of time.
At this writing, I’ve only ingested the first part of the book but it has been exceedingly insightful into the essential elements of the characters a successful work theoretically should contain.
Of course, a story needs a hero. But then there are certain other foke that a hero must get help from, or be opposed by, to make a good story work. I highly recommend this book already. Yes, I’m still a fan of Bob McKee’s STORY, but Vogler is able to say things in some ways that are simpler to comprehend than McKee.
The Privacy Patriots Progress Update
For the Stakes class, yesterday, each of us in class were to have sent in two chapters of our work, and a 12-point plan for our “hero’s journey.” That’s a dynamic spelled out in the Vogler book where the progress of a story is broken down into 12 logical steps from setting the stage of the hero’s ordinary world, getting called to go on an adventure, refusing to go, meeting with a mentor, crossing the first threshold or point of no return, going through tests, meeting allies and fending off enemies, to approaching the lair of the biggest enemy, the ordeal, getting the reward or seizing the sword, the road back, the resurrection or climax, and then the return with the elixir.
Essentially, any good tale is going to have all of those elements, not necessarily in that order, but they will be contained in the work to make it compelling to read or watch.
In some ways, it almost ruins the reading or watching of books or movies, because instead of concentrating on the content of the story, I’m now more mindful of which element is in play and where. The trick of all writers though is to make the tale so compelling, that while one might be aware of those elements, the reader is still captivated.
So I’ve begun the process of writing the book. The two chapters I sent in were a prologue–which many books argue is out of fashion today, but if you go to the book store and pick up a book, it’s still likely to have one–and then blocks of what’s theoretically going to happen in establishing the “ordinary world” of my primary characters.
This past summer, along with massive client projects, I’ve managed to build some in-depth character profiles for each person in my book. And now, almost as if I were a character in a story about writing a book, I’ve been given my call to adventure (START WRITING IT WILL YA?!) and in part, answered it metaphorically with, “I’m not ready.”
My two instructors over the next six weeks are going to be the “meetings with the mentors” to get me further down the road with this tale I so desire to tell. It’s time to skewer some characters and make them hurt before helping them emerge on the other side, stronger, better and more human because of it. Much like the last four years has done to me.
Time most certainly is running out. For all of us.
That message couldn’t have come home more true to me than any other over the past week or so with the passing of my last grandparent.
I’m going to be 49 in a few months and it’s amazing to think that nearly a half century has passed with me in it. For those of you younger reading this, trust me, it will go by fast for you, too.
We just don’t realize when we’re younger how fast time is whizzing past us. It’s like having a big pot of money and not understanding that at some point, it’s going to run out if we don’t put more in it. The only thing is, we can’t add more life to our frail bodies.
My grandma was a Christian. I am, too, so I firmly believe that now she is in Heaven with our Lord. There is comfort in that thought.
Funerals have a funny way of making everyone who attends one start thinking about their coming end.
Below I’ve added Neil Diamond’s song, Done Too Soon, from Taproot Manuscript. He lists off dozens of names of people who lived life to it’s fullest only to realize at the end, that it’d come to an end way before they were ready. Done too soon…. Think about that.
Bucket Lists and Such
I’ve never gotten into the idea of creating a bucket list. My Uncle Jon, who died about three months ago now, apparently had rented the movie the Saturday before they found him deceased on a Monday.
It appears he got to that film a little too late to make it happen in real life for him, so maybe he decided he’d live vicariously through the film as he knew he was passing from us.
We’ll never know.
What To Learn From Grandma’s Passing?
My grandma had been fading down the path the Alzheimers for several years now. My dad and aunts moved her out of her house and into an aunt’s house a couple years back. They sold grandma’s house and she’d faded enough to where it never occurred to her. She went into a nursing home shortly there after.
Maybe that’s a good way to go, part of God’s kindness. Grandma’s BP the night before she died had dropped to 90/40. She weighed about 85 lbs. And if I’d been there even a week before, I’m told she wouldn’t even have known who I was.
I had a line I wanted to use in my eulogy–don’t ever let a dentist pull all of your teeth. Apparently they’d prematurely allowed a dentist to pull some of my grandpa’s teeth and put him in dentures. Grandma said that had been a huge mistake.
At breakfast Wednesday a.m. while I was testing some of the things I was going to say on my toughest life-long critic, my mom, she said a dentist once told her that “when you start having teeth pulled, that’s when you start dying.”
Yikes.
I don’t know how true that is, but it makes one think.
Growing up, I have made flossing every morning a habit. I hate leaving the bed room without having flossed and it’s made a difference. But jeez.
Eulogy
I wasn’t sure I could keep it together to talk during grandma’s eulogy, but I found comfort in looking at her body there the night before and telling myself the body they had there really didn’t look like the person who had made me homemade play dough once upon a time. It wasn’t the person who had given me such a love for music. I told one of my aunts today that it felt like I was talking about my grandma at someone else’s funeral.
Maybe that was God’s way of being as kind to me as he had to grandma in her fading slowly away from us. When I finished, two of my cousins came up to me and genuinely said that I’d represented well what they wished they could have said about her, too. You don’t know how much that meant to me. One of them got extra years with our grandma because he’s never really left Northern Indiana. The other had traveled the globe like a gypsy, her father/my uncle in the Army. I’d not seen her since we were in the third grade before they went to Germany, but I heard about her from time-to-time in talking to grandma regularly through the years. To have both of them say I’d said what needed to be said and to genuinely have meant it was satisfying.
Rough Week
It’s been a rough week. Life didn’t stop just because grandma’s heart did. Clients have needed things throughout the whole family gathering. My range of emotions have been clouded because of the demands of work. I need to shut down and be still for awhile but can’t seem to find such peace. I know the need for to do so is there. But so is the responsibility to keep going.
My dad said when my brothers and I were young he saw a strength in each of us that made him proud; that he knew we were Claxton boys. You see, we all ran like the wind. Like our dad.
One of the extra joys of this week was getting to hear him and others talk about the younger days.
In talks with Dad, he apparently still holds the Indiana state record for the mile among eighth graders. He set it more than 50 years ago.
Now I did not have my dad’s speed at that age/any age, but I had a love for running when I was younger. With that came a determination to not give up when things got tough.
That fire is still there even though this aged body could barely run to the car if I needed to at this point.
I’m praying that tomorrow is going to be a better day. I have lots of work to get done and maybe after a good night’s sleep my brain will be ready to keep going.
Some day I’m going to find the rest that both my grandmas and grandpas have found. I hope my daughters and their kids will be able to find a similar peace.
The following are portions of my eulogy for my grandma, Retha Jackson Claxton, delivered at Rees Funeral Home in Hobart, IN, Aug. 20, 2014. The passing of grandma marked the last of my living grandparents.
Eulogy For Grandma Claxton
This morning I will attempt to deliver a eulogy the last time as the eldest grandchild in my maternal and paternal families. And do it without losing my composure.
It’s not done out of expectation or obligation but out of what my Grandma Claxton would see as an appreciation. My hope is to add honor to her memory.
I’ve been by the old Claxton house our family inhabited for decades and I’ve seen the body that used to be that of my grandma’s. She’s no longer at home in either.
This room last night was filled with laughs, jokes, love and fond memories. Only periodically were there tear-dimmed eyes and that’s just how she would have wanted it to be. A celebration of sorts. And relief that one of God’s servants finally has gone home.
What she taught me to enjoy in life: The tastes of good foods and the practice of having something good to feed others when they come to your house. Not necessarily healthy food, but gosh-dog it tasted good. For her that was:
When my brothers and sister and I all lived in the same town, our house became the family dinner spot. My answer to “what should we bring?” became “only your smiles.”
Grandma loved to laugh. Maybe that’s one of the things that kept her young for so long.
The eve of Grandpa Claxton’s funeral, piled around her dinner table for snacks, I’d brought Mrs. Renfroe’s Habanero salsa. When people started dipping in I said Habanero means “Damned Hot” in Spanish. Grandma stood in her kitchen laughing. She thought it was hot, too, but that’s how Claxton’s roll.
She talked constantly about how she loved the trip to Germany to see my Aunt Patsy and Uncle Mike when they were stationed there in the Army. She loved the colors of the trees in Northern Michigan in mid-September. Yosemite in California. She and grandpa rode the Alabama Reunion Train with Gov. Hunt from Auburn to Montgomery in 1990. And they both went to a Cubs game with me and my friend Tim Cobbs in 1993.
When traveling home after wedding in December 1995, Tim was checking her bags in BHM and greeted her with, “Hey, I know you, I’ve been to your house.” It made her feel good to be so far away from home and have someone tell her they knew who she was and had been excited about being at her home.
Words of Advice:
She loved the quilts she made. If you have one, take great pride in your possession of it. There’s a story in the fabric. Her heart and soul still lives on in every stitch.
Even as you age, don’t ever let a dentist take out all of your teeth.
Work the tense situations in life like you were working a puzzle. Put the straight-edged pieces together first then go about filling in the middle part. In time, you’ll start to see the bigger picture.
True love doesn’t have age restrictions. This is the girl who eloped all the way from Athens, down to Decatur, AL—about 10 miles or so—with a man six or seven years older than her when she was 16, and she stayed married to him to the day he died 61 years later. These days we’d put a guy in jail for doing that. Where would you be right now if they hadn’t run off and gotten married at such young ages?
If you’ve been struggling over a puzzle too long, take a break. Go to the bathroom. Go for a walk. Come back in 10 minutes and the answer/puzzle piece probably will be the first one you find.
Read. Every night. Keep the phone by your bed and stop reading when your grandkids call you. They may be keeping you from your reading, but you’re giving them a lifetime of joy in every conversation. And if you can answer it before it rings, well, then you’re faster in their minds than the gunslingers you’re reading about.
Why go to the store and buy Playdough when you can make your own. Even if it was white and didn’t last, the story that you made it with your grandkids will endure for the next 40 years or more. The point is, time with little ones count. It’s not the big things, like trips to Disney World, that count the most. But making Playdough in your kitchen does. Trips to the store to buy things they really don’t need is pretty cool, too, though.
When your family is coming and going to and fro and the Air Force makes them feel like they don’t really have a home, let them know that no matter where they travel, your home is their’s, no matter how big or small it is.
Life can be difficult and families can be hard on each other. Love harder. No matter how mad you are or frustrated you are with someone else in the family, never close your door to them. Life’s too short.
Love music.
Love God. But not being at church every Sunday doesn’t mean you don’t love the Lord.
If you’re sitting there sad about her passing I ask you to stop. She wouldn’t want that. She wouldn’t want tears. Just like in the old hymn Where the Soul of Man Never Dies … she would want no tear dimmed eyes today. She’d want us all to be happy, to tell a joke or two, to find Mike Feltman and get him to say something about “Mama” that would make her laugh. She’d want us all to find a way to get along … life’s too short to be mad at each other over differences of opinion or doctrinal interpretation. I heard so many times from her over the years the heartache she had over the fissures that were there between brothers and sisters. Life’s too short, she would say.
And it is. Forty-three years after I really came to understand who this woman was, it seems like it only was yesterday. Life has raced by with all it’s pains, sufferings, temptations, high points, celebrations, births, successes, and tragedies.
Grandma believed she was going to Heaven. When Grandpa died, her last words to him were “Grab hold of Charlotte and I’ll see you soon.” She lost a child who was age five and until these recent shadowy years, never forgot Charlotte had left so early to be in God’s arms.
Now she, Grandpa and Charlotte are reunited again and in the words of Grandma, we’ll all be seeing them soon. In Heaven.
Do not pain the loss of this great, loving woman. She’s dancing with angels now, and out of pain.
In 1973 she brought me a 45 of Paul Simon’s Loves Me Like A Rock. For all her four children, the 10 grandchildren and 22 grandchildren, really, anyone she knew, that was how she loved us one and all.
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