Author: lauren

I wish I was one of those people who handle things well. I wish when I got bad news, my first reaction was one of trust and serenity. I wish when I’m ill, I would have confidence that things are going to be better, that I had a positive outlook even when the facts look bad. I am not one of those people. I will get to a good place eventually, but I go dark first. First I get sad, angry, and frightened.

It is helpful to be reminded of who I am, so I don’t worry so much for who I am not. The other day, my father was kind of enough to remind me that I am brave. I do feel the fear, and even dare to say that I feel it, but the fear does not hold me back. I act courageously. Dad reminded me that on our first trip to the beach, I walked straight into the ocean. I went to Europe by myself when I was thirteen, to hike the Alps. He reminded me that I used to sing for special events at church, and the congregation was so proud of a little girl who would march onstage and take the microphone in hand. I am not a positive thinker, but I am brave. I do not wink at demons. I seize demons by the horns and wrestle them to the ground.

There are a few special days in the course of a year when everything is half priced at the thrift store named Savers. I buy almost all my clothes second-hand, in large part because fair trade (non child or slave labor produced) clothing is so hard to come by. Half off everything sales at Savers are where most of my wardrobe comes from. The sale days are busy and crowded, but I can elbow in with the best of them to get a good deal on a dress or shirt or pair of shoes that are super cute, inexpensive, and don’t benefit any slave traders. Memorial day is one of those magic days, but this time instead of going to my local Savers, off Lake Street in the heart of Minneapolis, I visited a suburban location in Maplewood.

The major hang up at Savers is the dressing rooms. Since thrift shopping is mostly a numbers game, I’m not the only shopper who arrives at the dressing rooms with a shopping cart heaped over with potential fashion gems. To prevent impossibly long waits, and I assume a lot of shoplifting, Savers has a three-item limit on the dressing rooms. If one obeys the rules, one waits in line many, many times. It’s fairly common practice to take four or even five items into the dressing rooms, but the spirit of the rule is obeyed for the convenience of others. No one wants to stand around for an hour while four people try on eighty different outfits, even if you only have to stand in line once. The rule creates a flow, a movement of people going in and out, and helps out those rare shoppers just looking for one red, button-up blouse. It creates a kind of community, because you stand in line with the same people over and over, and get to see them in some goofy outfits as they model them for their friends. As in any community system, there are free-riders. People who pull their heaping cart up to the dressing room door and just grab four more items without bothering to wait in line again. People who think they can short-circuit the system by having a spouse or friend hand them all their clothes, three items at a time.

At the Lake Street store, there is a loud black woman who prevents this kind of behavior. She scares the crap out of me, but I respect and appreciate her. There’s a little adrenaline rush in sneaking five items into a dressing room under her careful eye, and no one gets away with any of those free-riding shenanigans on her watch. At the Maplewood Savers, there is no scary black lady. People are really kind, and will even tell you it’s your turn instead of sneaking into the empty dressing room that just opened up, which is nice. But in Maplewood, a total blind eye is turned to the free-riders. So despite the presence of a teenage girl blatantly taking up a dressing room for over an hour, nothing was said. Her parents asked her periodically if she was done, and she would shrug and say “not really. I’ve still got lots of stuff.”

I imagine that scary black lady transported to the Maplewood Savers, and I can see that she would be interpreted by the shoppers there as hostile, a bad employee because she’s not treating the customers with respect. But I missed her. I missed the order she brings to the operation, the clear-cut justice she enforces, the sense of fairness that was missing from the more peaceful scene in the suburbs.

I’ve had a few conversations lately about artists and elitism. Mostly because in a few weeks I’m going to be hosting a small group (a mid-week Bible study from my church) that’s specifically targeted for artists. There was some debate about how to phrase the description so we’d attract the right kind of people. This is a problem. On the one hand, we don’t want the group to feel exclusive to our fellow church-goers. On the other hand, a small group about being an artist is going to kind of suck if it’s populated by non-artists. Furthermore, if the description doesn’t make it clear that it’s focused on artists, the actual artists at the church won’t be interested in it. What serious painter wants to sit around and discuss some really pretty knitting?

Um, well…me. I’m not a serious painter, but I am a serious writer, and I would be very interested in hearing about the knitting. Here’s what I’ve learned from my creativity events. Almost everyone does something creative, it’s like we can’t help it. My friend Rena makes knitted objects inspired by geometric shapes. She puts them into coasters and coffee cup sleeves and they are amazing. I arranged a bunch of them on a pedestal at my birthday art festival. My friend Angel, who has never described herself as an artist in my presence, has a secret darkroom in her house where she hand-develops black-and-white photographs she takes of nature scenes, and they are fantastic. Maybe it’s a matter of perspective, but I have so very rarely run into people who call themselves artists who don’t make things. But almost everyone I know makes things, even if they don’t call themselves artists.

I do tend to judge people in my own field a little more harshly than someone who does great knitting, and maybe that’s the rub.

I have fellow writers categorized in my mind. There are people who write things, all the time, and those are people I identify with. I’m a writer because I write things, all the time. Publication and success aside, I will call you a colleague if you write things. Then there are people who write one thing. The people who’ve been working on their novel for the last twelve years, and are either constantly on the cusp of finishing or see no end in sight. The effect is roughly the same. They are people who say “everyone has a book inside them.” Maybe everyone does have one book inside them. I have several books in me, and that makes me different. Finally, there are people who don’t write anything. Seriously. People who answer the question, “what do you write?” with “not much” or “nothing yet.” These are the people who irk me. You have no business calling yourself a writer if you don’t actually write things.

In that last paragraph, you won’t find any mention of quality. Certainly, I have been trained in the fine art of literary analysis, and I even have a shiny piece of paper to prove it. If pressed, I might be able to give a cursory opinion of the relative quality of one piece of writing compared to another. I have thoughts on these kind of things. However, you can write one really gorgeous and elegant novel, and I will have less in common with you than someone who’s hammering away at their keyboard day after day, trying to make their mediocre prose more meaningful.

My amazing friend Alice told me last summer that she’d gone through The Artist’s Way, a twelve-week DIY course by Julia Cameron, and it was really helpful to her. Alice is a musician, and I’ve known her for many years, but that visit was the first time she was willing to play some of her original music for me. The cute husband gave me The Artist’s Way book for my birthday, and I started going through it with two of my very best friends this April. Among the various exercises and tasks assigned during the course, one piece of advice stuck out to me in last week’s reading. It said, “every day look to the Great Creator and say, “You take care of the quality, I will take care of the quantity.”

This is amazingly profound to me. I’ve said such things before – I will do the work and God will take care of the results. But there was something about that idea being put into such specific terms that clicked in my brain.

Normally, at the end of a first draft, I have a totally readable, coherent approximation of what I’d like to end up with. That makes the first draft really difficult to write, because I’m acting as if I know the characters and the main thrust of the book before I’ve started writing it. That isn’t how I work; I figure out what I want to write as I’m writing it. So, with my shiny new book project, I’m just writing everything that I might want to use in the actual book, creating a kind of pool of ideas and phrases that, in the second draft, I will mix and match and connect into a cohesive whole. But for now, I’m just writing with wild abandon anything that occurs to me that relates to the project. It is the most freeing exercise I’ve ever attempted. It makes so much more sense for the way I process and create.

I don’t know if The Artist’s Way is for everyone, but I will say this. The joy of being an artist, for me, is sitting down and making things. When I decide that I’m going to stop being concerned about whether the work is “important” or “profound” or “good,” I am free to just sit down and make things. Lots of things. So many things that I can’t help making a few beautiful things.

A while ago a good friend of mine heard about something horrible person A had done to person B and my friend was so outraged, he declared that person A did not love person B. When I made some uncertain noises, my friend said that person A might have warm feelings for person B, but they did not love them because “love is what you do.”

This is an idea I’ve heard a bunch, including the classic DC Talk rap-music song “Love is Verb.” It’s kind of a thing. Yet that declaration of my dear friend made me feel uncertain and uncomfortable. After much thought, I concluded that it made me feel uncomfortable because, in my experience, people do all kinds of super creepy horrible stuff to each other, thinking that they’re doing it out of love. Sometimes even really truly meaning to do it out of love. That made me sad to realize, but it does kind of complicate the issue.

To complicate it even further, I don’t know how I feel about people doing nice actions for me without feeling nice things about me. I would appreciate the nice actions a lot, but it would make me really, really sad if I found out that the people doing the nice actions didn’t have any warm feelings for me. And when people who do have warm feelings for me are unable to do nice actions for me, I still really appreciate the feelings.

What do you think? Can love be defined in terms of action only, or does it require something else? Do warm feelings constitute love, or is that something else?

I was reading a book the other day, and this book made an off-hand comment about how silly it is for couples to expect that they’ll always feel in love. It struck me as odd. First, because the comment was made so casually, one clause in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. As if the author was so sure that all readers would think, “Oh yeah, that’s so silly.” Second, because it reminded me that before I coupled up with my husband, I’d heard that thought quite often. The message was that the wonderful feelings of love fade once a couple has been together for a certain amount of time, and good, strong people stay with the relationship anyway. Flighty, silly, inconsistent people expect to feel in love all the time, and they end up very unhappy because none of their relationships last.

Back when my husband and I were first dating and I was glorying in the wonderful wash of euphoria, I remember thinking that I should not expect this feeling to last. At that moment, I decided that it was okay to enjoy the feelings, even if they weren’t permanent. I think I might have even written in my journal something like, “just because summer is coming doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t enjoy spring.” And that was the last time I thought about that until I read this book the other day.

Certainly my relationship with my husband has changed since we were first married. It would be rather odd if it hadn’t since we’ve been married for nearly seven years. We are kinder and wiser people than we used to be. We’re nicer to each other. We work more effectively together, we’ve got our housework peaceably divided, and we have better sex. I would not say that our love has “faded.” To fade is to become dull, less colorful. That does not describe us at all.

My friend Kim, who is wise in many ways, told me that she thinks the strong emotional bond between a couple, even between friends, is the time they’ve spent together. In relationship with people, you learn to communicate with them more effectively, you develop a rich library of memories together, you have more and more common experiences. It gets better. I wonder if that initial hormonal surge of euphoria is meant to be a bridge between the beginning of the relationship and a time when you have developed a true and rich love for each other.

One of my larger non-fiction tasks is to write up some children’s curriculum about social justice for the Midwest Mercy and Justice Team. I’ve only had this task on my list for about 14 months, so it’d be great to get it finished. I have already outlined a four week program with Bible verses from each of the four gospels wherein we learn that Jesus sees people who are different from him, listens to people who are different than him, touches people who are different than him, and loves people who are different than him. I would like there to be a craft and game for each story. So I’ve been doing some research online, looking for games and crafts for bible stories.

Of course, I wouldn’t have volunteered to write the kids curriculum in the first place if I hadn’t worked in Sunday schools for many years and been unsatisfied with the curriculum we used there. Kids curriculum, in my limited experience, tends to be very rules focused, black-and-white, or completely inane. There’s lots to be said about kids needing structure and boundaries. But I’m more interested in what a compass has to do with Zacchaeus.

Because that is what I have found. The craft to go with Zacchaeus in his sycamore tree is anything from a coloring sheet of a tree, to a word scramble with words like “tree” “taxes” and “money”, to a 40 piece puzzle of a compass. I don’t know a lot, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have glass compasses back in Zacchaeus’s time. But honestly, I’m no more annoyed or offended by that than I am by the word scramble. I don’t understand the point of a kids activity like that. What are we reinforcing? Basic knowledge of the facts of the bible story? That’s the most positive aspect of the practice I can think of. On the not-so-positive side, I see “keeping kids busy while the grown-ups are in church.”

I have written about that before, so I won’t go into it again. But I am really disappointed at how much of what I find are cute little games that are vaguely related to some idea or object in a bible story, and aren’t at all about the meaning of the story, much less the character of the God involved.