Winter announced! First ladylike snow because I can still wear my loafers and jeans.
I say this as politely as possible: Government stay away from my Genie. The annoyance of conflicting orders robs me of my Aladdin (magic moments). Mental sedation is needed while I edit my next book. I’ve been advised to delete 40,000 words from the 141,780 manuscript. Over three days I deleted 2300 words. My new friend Rose, says, ‘Chop chop, you can do it!”
I feel like time is stained with interior stoplights, obstructions, and restrictions, within and without. What happens is subtle, but when so much time is spent on soulless activities, life loses its Aladdin. Even if you’re sitting on the beach at Turk and Caicos, dining al fresco with perfectly agreeable friends, and swirling in jets of aromatic succulents, I think our souls ache for simple genuine, honesty.
I’ve ended my book. Now, the editing takes you to a critical, objective perspective. It’s like looking in the mirror of truth, wrinkled, obtuse sentences. If I had not had this manuscript to write, I would have stared out the window and thought about it. A wise man told me,’ Write every day,’ and so I have. A photo from the Santa Fe fine days is placed in my heart like a vessel. One of those days is the Wine and Chili Festival.
Edit
2William Winant and Nancy LeRoyilliam Winant and Nancy LeRoy
East Palace Avenue Santa Fe (Photo credit: paigeh)
SMILEY’S DICE-ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS
By:Luellen Smiley
SANTA FE,NM.
I’m sitting outside in a flowerless garden because no matter how many flowers I plant, they only last one season, if that long. The garden is erupting out of its winter coat, and lime green leaves, plants, and stalks will have to do for now. The sky that seals me in is licked with revisionary hope. The kind that comes back laundered and fresh after a chosen recess from believing in the possibility of a preferred life correction.
Behind the garden, a neighbor is drumming a soft tribal beat, and on Palace Avenue the choir is singing inside the Episcopal Church on Palace Avenue. Between these distinctive tastes, there are sparrows fluttering from fan to nest to fountain. The chattering sounds like; ‘here she comes, don’t come over here, get out of my nest, watch out for that fat crow.’
It’s a mind drift, to be caught in such UN-structured beauty, away from the manuscripts, remotes, doors, and phones. It’s like being on an island out here. Everything we bring into our experience can be revised; a work of art, a way of speaking, thinking, portraying yourself, your way of loving, or lusting, and we all know about appearance, because our society shoves it down our throat.
Look at the possibilities in revising our patterns of behavior. What we accepted twenty years ago doesn’t mean it’s carved in our organs. We can transmute. The interior life needs lifting and tightening, just as our mind and muscles do. You won’t find any immediate remedy, or advertisements, or books on the subject because we’re consumers of products that change and revise only the visible tangibles. I wonder if I traded in my eleven year old Land Rover for a new one if I’d be really happy, and for how long? Or if I flew to Los Angeles and bought cartons of antiques, hats, and perfume if I would be grinning from ear to ear.
I begin with revising the way I experience Santa Fe. I’ve lived on the outskirts, like a storm that blew in and is waiting to blow out. It seems my storm is here for now, and so I let go of the criticism and intolerances. Beginning with my favorite activity, dancing, I returned to El Farol, my chosen dance hall hullabaloo, then to La Posada across the street and mingled with an assorted group of locals, guests, and actors, (who were real as pippin apples)spent a day cruzing the ghostly town of Madrid to experience the cinematic sparseness, and walked up and down Canyon Road one morning before the shops opened, and was greeted half a dozen times by strangers out walking, uniquely different in attire, disposition and stride. I love that about Santa Fe. You don’t conform, it’s a religion here!
My homework for the next few weeks is revising the interior doors of emotion, and the exterior doors of expression. I’ve set aside the memoir, (did I mention I started that again) after a publisher suggested major rewrites and editing. I mean you have to know when to give up because you’re not going to make the team. I’m a six page essayist. If you get me into one hundred and fifty pages, I march all over the globe and lose the reader.
You guys are smart. You know all of this; I’m just learning. I am a case of insufferable arrested development. If I felt my age, which most of you know, I’d be looking at retirement brochures. Instead I’m planning on breaking into new territory. Its a joke between my dreamer self and my inner critic, but I’m not listening to the critic.
Today I swiveled in my desk chair trying to write the column I thought I was going to write. In between gazing out the window at sky scenery, I made oatmeal cookies, watched the birds, took care of business, had a hair cut, plucked at paragraphs from Anais Nin, and danced on the treadmill. The column didn’t come out of a conscious thought wave; it just rose up, after I typed the words, the throw of the dice. The odds were I’d find my way from there.
My dad the gambler, who laid a bet on everything from sports, horses, gaming, to the Academy Awards and elections, taught me many valuable lessons. He actually told me once, ‘Take a chance for heavens sake! Go out and get arrested.’ He knew the odds of that, which is why he dared me. Life corrections begin with edits, then revisions, and then you have a new story!
ADVENTURERS IN SINGLE LIVINGNESS 