An Extraordinary Man

I don’t get much time to read when our business hits its busy season, but I continue to snatch a few moments here and there to read what I am realizing is an amazing story about someone I would never have known existed had it not been for Robert Kanigel and his compelling biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan. 

The book is entitled The Man Who Knew Infinity and relates the life of an Indian mathematician who is deemed the greatest mathematician since Newton. With next to no formal education, let alone in pure mathematics, he explored the nature of numbers and their relation to each other and the world with a depth that keeps mathematicians 95 years after his death still working to understand all that he bequeathed them. And yet, Kanigel has presented this story with the intimate grip and wonder of a riveting historical novel.

Ramanujan’s early years were marked by poverty often to the point of his going hungry and suffering a surfeit of failure as he repeatedly flunked out of school, unwilling to finish any courses not related to math. His was the loneliness and misunderstanding that many a prodigy endures, and the depth of understanding shown toward this period of his life by author Kanigel is masterful. As he remarked about Ramanujan’s movement toward recognized genius:

“His success did not come entirely through flashes of inspiration. It was hard work. It was full of false starts. It took time.”

I have not gotten far into what is a substantial book, but I am finding the character of Ramanujan portrayed with discerning sensitivity toward the man, his culture and the unfamiliar domain of genius. As well, for the first time in my life, after struggling through calculus and differential equations years back, I am beginning to understand what math is actually about. Kanigel is an outstanding science writer as well as biographer.

The inspired part of Ramanujan’s story begins when he realizes he must find a situation that takes care of his basic needs but allows him to focus entirely on his work. He begins the search to find employment with only his notebooks tucked under his arm, filled with his equations as a reference. Acquaintance by acquaintance, step by step, after much rejection, a letter sent to Professor G. H. Hardy of Trinity College Cambridge introduced him to someone brilliant enough in his own stead to recognize who Ramanujan was. Ramanujan wrote in his letter to Hardy:

          “I have had no university education but I have undergone the ordinary school course. After leaving school I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at mathematics. I have not trodden through the conventional regular course which is followed in a university course, but I am striking out a new path for myself. I have made a special investigation of divergent series in general and the results I get are termed by the local mathematicians as 'startling'.”

Quoting K. Srinivasa Rao, "As for his [Ramanujan's] place in the world of Mathematics, we quote ... Hardy's personal ratings of mathematicians ... on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100, Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J.E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100."

It was fortunate for Ramanujan, mathematics and the world at large that G.H. Hardy took the Indian genius in and gave him a chance at productive years of work, for the young wonder lived only 32 years. 

Modern applications of his work are affecting areas of science and medicine that did not even exist when Ramanujan was alive. He died in 1920 leaving a legacy of math so advanced that some of it is still not comprehensible to modern mathematicians, though it is still avidly studied.

For a captivating read by an insightful and talented writer, charge

your kindle up (or buy the book) and be ready for many days of insights into the aspirations and struggles of this brilliant man, genius being no assurance of an easy life.

My Religion is Kindness

So said the Dalai Lama when asked what his religion was. To be honest, I have to admit that when I first heard his answer to that question, I didn't get it. I really had no idea about the nature of kindness. To me, it was someone being nice or considerate or civil and that seemed hardly the basis for spiritual accomplishment in my book. But the other day something happened to change all that.

I was putting individual packages of photographs together for our next sale, looking at these dear children we’d photographed and thinking about what I see at childcare facilities these days when Bert and I sit there for long hours selling photos. These are young children, babies to five-year-olds. In the photos, our very talented photographer has captured them in a safe moment of connection with her, so we see them bright-eyed, innocent, and often smiling or laughing. But increasingly, she has had to bring them out of seeming endless moments of acting out in ways that past generations rarely saw among those so very young. 

There is growing defiance in young children today. They exhibit anger, dis-trustfulness, resistant and defensiveness, attitudes that are not at all endearing. A reasonable question is, what is happening within families and our society that children appear so reactive and disrespectful? It hit me, as I sat there looking at them - kindness is disappearing from our personal interactions, replaced by a growing sense of self-absorption that is now filtering down to our children.

All of a sudden while looking at them, I felt my frustration and sadness of seeing them afraid, not listened to, their innate curiosity and innocence locked away and increasingly difficult for them to find, lift away as something in me stopped judging and instead felt only kindness toward them. It is difficult to put into words how extraordinary the sensation was, but I felt how their compensatory reactions would melt away in the face of true kindness. I think more than anything, children need to feel safe and accepted. Such safety soothes their fears, the ones now initiating their harsh reactions. I could feel how cooperative children would be from the get-go, if kindness was what redirected their misguided behavior, if kindness eased their embarrassment, if kindness was their teacher, if it received them in its arms to set them free later calm, renewed and appropriately redirected.  

That was a big step for me as I had never known kindness growing up, and I don’t think I’m alone in that respect. I knew discipline, orders and rules taught through manipulation and shame, but I never felt kindness. There was no real safe harbor there, no unconditional status. There was market place mentality – you do this and you’ll get that. As I grew older, I actually didn't believe in kindness, it seemed too soft to effect appropriate change. But in that moment of inspiration, I realized only kindness has the power to provide a true learning environment, only kindness turns our hearts, only kindness breeds trust. If instead, we order our children around, demand certain behaviors and force their responses, all that can ultimately result is fear and frustration that then spawns endless emotional reactions such as anger, hurt, resistance and retaliation. Kindness, on the other hand, is love in action. It engenders an environment where we can let down our resistance and defenses and truly learn. I believe our trust issues stem from lack of kindness in our lives and without trust, every request calls for reconsideration before we can offer ourselves to that moment. Living without trust is life in isolation. The degree to which today’s children are shut down is the degree to which they find so little terrain they sense as trustworthy.

Kindness creates a different sort of interface than any other human behavior. It expects nothing. It is a state of being where there is no need to rant, boss, diminish or judge to get children to turn away from their hurt-based actions and acknowledge new choices. There is no greater joy than living among kind people, and, concomitantly, there is no greater sorrow than people so completely untouched by kindness that it can no longer tempt them to drop their defensive choices and join in its peace and safety.

I now understand why His Holiness referred to his religion as kindness for it is by its very nature infinite in source and endless in its capacity to heal.

For the Love of a Letter

I am not a woman of letters, at least not in the formal sense of that phrase, but I am a woman who writes letters, and this past February I signed in with InCoWriMo (International Correspondence Writing Month) to have my own experience of what my husband found so enjoyable the year before.

I am a part of that generation where letter writing was the only means of distance correspondence. Yes, there were phones. I’m not that ancient. But if you had a father that limited the household to 5 minute long distance phone calls, you were and remained basically a letter writer. In truth, the most exciting time of my day at university was mail call, when you went to your mail box to see if anyone had written to you. And nothing felt so treasured at the letter or letters you carried to your dorm to read in delicious solitude.

In fact, Bert and I started our relationship via letter, preceded by

only two short conversations over a weekend when he spoke once in Vancouver. We wrote for 3 ½ years, filling seven journals, particularly exploring the Vietnam War due to its impact on both of us. They were marvelous, honest conversations, for when you are writing in a journal, there is no taking it back or hitting delete. That correspondence blossomed into friendship, then love and ultimately marriage. How’s that for the power of the pen.

In InCoWriMo, I am meeting many interesting people from all over the world. A soul-sister in Massachusetts, a young Israeli lad living on a Moshav, a Rabbi scholar from my birth city, Philadelphia, PA, and a Welshman with a great sense of humor, to mention a few. Yes there are days Bert and I both grimace when the mailman comes. Our stack of unanswered letters waxes and wanes, but when it gets depth to it, we each hope for a day without mail.

Nothing in this digital world, for me, can take the place of letter writing which came back graphically when one woman I write to, a gal of extensive writing talent which generates captivating letters, sprained her thumb and had to type her letters for a while. There was no interesting handwriting, no doodles while thinking, no lovely colors or the artistry of various fountain pen nibs, no afterthoughts running vertically in the margins, no sense of the moment that writer was in, their struggles, their passion, their frustrations. Just black type on white paper. Even if she had chosen to use colored, fancy fonts, it still wouldn't be her spilling out on the page, lining out words that got ahead of her thinking, caret-ing in words that got lost in a flurry of thoughts, adding art to the page in caricatures or pen and ink drawings. Nor is there any way to explain the sense of connection hand written letters engender that typing cannot even touch.

Recently, I found this marvelous book which I bought as a gift for Bert. In all honesty, the gift did have the flavor of buying your father a wagon for his birthday, but… The book is entitled Letters of Note compiled by Shaun Usher. Shared letters such as the ones found in it are like treasured secrets whispered in your ear. Elvis Presley to U.S. President Richard Nixon; Louise Armstrong to Lance Corporal Villec; Ray Bradbury to Brian Sibley; The Connell Family to the Ciulla Family; Kurt Vonnegut to Charles McCarthy. Three hundred and forty of them in all. Here are bits of three of them that gave me pause.

Francis Crick to Michael Crick, his twelve-year-old son at boarding school – March 19, 1953

The letter relates his jubilant news of his co-discovery of the “beautiful” structure of DNA, the most important scientific discovery of modern times accompanied by drawings he made to help his son visualize it. He ends this letter with:

Read this carefully so that you understand it. When you come home, we will show you the model.

Lots of love,

Daddy

Flannery O’Connor to a Professor of English who wrote and asked her to explain her short story A Good Man is Hard to Find, for which his class was struggling to find an acceptable interpretation – March 28, 1961

O’Connor’s last two paragraphs conclude in this manner:

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.

Flannery O’Connor

Richard Feynman, world class physicist and Nobel Prize winner to his wife who is dead – October 17, 1946

The last paragraph and the P.S.:

…I’ll bet you are surprised that I don’t even have a girlfriend (except you, sweetheart) after two years. But you can’t help it, darling, nor can I—I don’t understand it, for I have met many girls and very nice ones and I don’t want to remain alone—but in two or three meetings they all seem ashes. You only are left to me. You are real.

My darling wife, I adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead.

Rich

P.S. Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.

......

Have someone out there you love, you miss, you've left along the way and regret it? Go clean out that dried up old fountain pen, get some paper that can handle ink, and do yourself a great and loving favor. Write a letter.

First Things First

It was 1994, I think. I was sitting in an audience laughing myself simple as author, Julia Cameron, shared both her life and how she’d come to write The Artist’s Way. The book was a blazing success, and she was most entertaining with the sense of humor only a recovered alcoholic has, having stripped themselves clean of the puffery most people employ to fill out the dents in their persona that denial and non-accountability whacked in there.

I worked through The Artist’s Way back  then as I was just starting to write and my life was in chaos, both of which the book addressed. The activity that Julia stressed in order to tap into our source of creativity and wisdom was what she called Morning Pages – 3 pages (8 ½ x 10) of longhand writing about anything or everything that crosses your mind done the first thing when you get up each morning.  As Julia says,

“They [Morning Pages] appear to have nothing to do with creativity, yet they are the bedrock on which my creative life is built. They are the terra firma of my book The Artist’s Way and the central, life-changing tool that guides and safeguards creative emergence.”

Trust me if you will, Ms. Cameron is not being overly effusive in that statement. The book she recently published is specifically on the topic and is entitled, The Miracle of the Morning Pages , which I heartily suggest you read if anything in this blog strikes a chord. You see this recent book was written 25 years after Ms. Cameron's original experience with Morning Pages, and the power of this practice is now time-tested. Whether you are in the arts or just living a life that has far too many issues unresolved, this simple, doable activity could change your life.

I started the Morning Pages all those years ago, but I didn't realize their power, and somewhere along the way stopped writing them. So this past February, after Bert found Julia’s new book mentioned above, Bert, friend Adrienne and I began this practice anew, and we were all amazed at the results and continue to be.

How do the Morning Pages accomplish what they do? I’m not sure I see it all, but of this I am clear. There is an elemental activity that goes on continuously in all human beings, call it an energy or force that is constantly active. I refer to it, thanks to Don Juan Matus, as our attention. We don't have a choice about whether it is active or not. Where our choice lies is in directing its focus. If we don’t take an active role in directing it, attention generally focuses along the lines of habit – paying heed to old stories, opinions, expectations—our usual habituated look at things. Or worse, it trundles through life like an early morning dog on the run, nosing into all kinds of garbage. 

If we take an active say in where we place our attention, many possibilities open up to us, not the least of which is being present. Another is awareness of our intuitive core, the home of creative instinct. That instinct can serve our artistic endeavors or direct us toward solving issues that are diminishing our lives. By the simple act of putting pen to paper and writing continuously for 3 - 8 ½ X 10 pages whatever comes up or whatever you indicate you want to understand, your attention resides in the present and accesses your creative inner core. Rumi, the Sufi mystic, referred to this aspect of ourselves as The Friend, and you will soon find out why.

Get yourself past the New Agey frame of reference that Julia comes from, if that bothers you, so you can find out for yourself what this amazing practice has to offer. Each day, Morning Pages become the first thing you do because that makes the pages easier to write. Your attention is still close by and hasn't yet gotten caught up in that infernal inner chatter or shot off to La-La Land. Get up, grab your coffee then sit back down and write.

ONE WARNING – The Morning Pages are absolutely private. Do not let anyone read then. It will inhibit you if you think someone might see what you are writing. If you have someone in your space that you fear might not honor your right to privacy, put the journal where it will be safe. You must feel you can write whatever comes to you. That is critical to the success of these pages. You can discuss ideas and insights as you wish, but don’t give anyone access to the journal itself.

I would suggest you read The Miracle of the Morning Pages before you start. Then buy yourself a journal that you like of the proper size and get started. If you hit a morning where nothing is coming, just keep writing something, repeating a question or soliciting the flow to begin, until it does.

For those of you who take me up on this, I would love to hear your comments about your experience. Friend Adrienne, who’s new to all of this, reports her results have astounded her. Help those still fence-sitting by sharing your experience of a week with Morning Pages. We’re all waiting…

Accidents of Birth

Yesterday, someone reading my recently released novel, Accidents of Birth – A Novel in Two Parts asked me a question readers don’t often ask an author. “How did you write this book? You aren’t Black. You aren’t Southern. So how did you write it? All I could reply to her was, I’m not entirely sure myself. It felt almost like this was a story that wanted to be written, and it had to use whoever was available

How it came to be is a conundrum, but the outcome is a vivid tale told through a quirky, gritty, illiterate yet discerning Black housekeeper who talks to her cart horse, Polly, and God with equal aplomb. Born in 1928 in what remained of a freed-slave enclave called Small Town, Imogene Ware is confronted with a racially charged, politically divisive world. She becomes increasingly embroiled in the consequences of such an environment as she attempts to protect not only her own children, but also one of the children she looks after in the Sutton household.

What adds a twist to this story is what happens the night Miss Imogene’s mother is dying. Mama Curtis alluded at times to a tradition among her people that she felt was what kept them alive through centuries of suffering and injustice—a deathbed behest from mother to daughter. The selected daughter was asked to give her word that she would live loving the world. Miss Imogene was the one who took that vow, and the reader watches this choice frighten her, bewilder her and finally mature her as she fights for the lives of many she loves.

If ever there was a love story, this is it. If ever there was a character you wished lived next door to you or was your best friend, Miss Imogene is it. If ever you wanted an honest, peaceful way to live revealed to you, this book is it. See for yourself.

Available in Kindle Format and Paperback

A Writer’s Voice

I have always been fascinated by that which is elusive, there, but filmy and oh so hard to describe. A writer’s voice is precisely that sort of notion, and yet it is real and unique. I have read many people’s attempts to describe voice or define it, but it’s a slippery slope and most end up at the bottom of the hill none the wiser.

What it definitely is NOT is style – the mix of syntax, grammar, characters, plot, dialogue, etc., for all writers offer that, but not all writers have a voice. I've heard it described as a personal tone or flavor unmistakably that of the writer alone. That description scratches the surface of what we’re sensing, but it doesn't get to the heart of it. So why bother struggling with something so abstract? If it’s there, it’s there; if not, it’s not. Not so?

Literary agent, Rachelle Gardner offered an excellent explanation for what is meant by voice, plus it points to why voice cannot be ignored. She said, “To me, your writer’s voice is the expression of you. It’s that simple—and that complicated. Your voice is all about honesty. It’s the unfettered, non-derivative, unique conglomeration of your thoughts, feelings, passions, dreams, beliefs, fears, and attitudes, coming through in every word you write.

“Voice is all about your originality and having the courage to express it.”

I would add that your voice is you as an authentic being. We are each unique, original with us. When we are authentic, that uniqueness, that originality is being expressed. Thus authentic expression is your true voice.

Children aren't born with made-up stories in their minds nor do they feel the need to mask whatever they sense. We all start out authentically us, until the thumb of life begins pressing down on us, and we struggle to squirm out from under it with one overriding question: What’s wrong with me? From there, we relentlessly reshape ourselves into what others seem to want. We are still original, but we are no longer authentic.

The reason finding one’s voice is so important is not just because agents and publisher are always looking for a new voice to promote. What matters more is that we live an authentic life, for that is our highest fulfillment. It is the only way we can live present and begin to conceive of the even greater dimensions that comprise our authentic expression.

Recently, I read a compelling book by Mary Oliver entitled, Winter Hours. It’s a mix of essays and poems, both media being  ones in which she is expert. In the essay, “The Swan,” she begins to tell the reader what rules she established for her poetry. As I read them, I thought, oh my god, that’s where her voice—so unique, so exquisite—came from, because I realized that she was describing what I had recognized in all her poems. The elements were always there, and because they were, each poem, each essay was her authentic expression—her voice. In “The Swan” she explores the three rules she started out with:

Every poem I write…must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy and it must have a spiritual purpose.

These phrases have profound meaning for her. They represent what she experiences deep within herself—what it feels like to be her.  Later she added to that list. She said:

I want every poem to ‘rest’ in intensity. I want it to be rich with pictures of the world. I want it to carry threads from the perceptually felt world to the intellectual world. I want each poem to indicate a life lived with intelligence, patience, passion and whimsy (not my life—not necessarily— but the life of my formal self, the writer. 

What she has done in determining these rules is to express who she is at her core. If we are to be authentic, we too must invite our expression to remain integral with our core.

So how do we find our voice—the question always asked at this point? Mary Oliver has provided that answer too.  We draw up our own set of “rules,” meaning identify those things which are so real in us that we will not deny them in our art or our life. If we do that, our voice will echo through every level of our novel as an authentic expression of the truths that live as us.

Inspired by Mary Oliver, I've created my own list:

1.     Every work of my fiction must ride on the back of a worthy story—one worth the telling.

2.     The story must engage the reader at a level of connectedness possible only when characters (especially the protagonist) are authentic, thus compelling.

3.     The story must imply or actualize a higher order of reality—what might be termed spiritual— to which human beings aspire and at times touch.

4.     The words must associate rhythmically with one another, as best they can, and at times lyrically so they are capable of mirroring the evocative, intense nature of authenticity.

If you are a writer, this is a powerful exercise.

We all know when a writer has an authentic voice for we are magnetically drawn to their work. If you are committed to excellence in your art, then voice is not an option. You must find it. Not only will voice provide a firm base of readership with which you can share your stories, but it will also fulfill its promise of artistic work at its creative best. It may even spill over into the rest of your life, keeping you always in touch with what is original and real. 

Finding your voice means you have found the reality within you and that is a life of merit.

February’s Charm

It’s February, what I've always thought of as the turning point of winter. It’s the month where you suddenly notice that the days are getting longer. Somewhere in that month you look up from your work and hear yourself murmur, “It’s five-thirty and it’s still light.”  Then you smile. It’s the month where when I lived in northern Alberta, we agreed that if you made it through February, you could make it through the winter. March could be a bear, but having committed to that view, you took March in your stride.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln had their beginnings in February, great men through whose integrity and insight our nation was twice saved. Something about that time of the year perhaps, the arrangement of the cosmos, which gives rise to Piscean aptitudes: the mystical, the intuitive, the visionary that we so needed at those two periods in our history.

Nor is it surprising to have the celebration of love in this month for as the sap starts to rise in the natural world around us, within us is the call to renewed attention to that which wells up in us, sensitivity, passion and yearning.

My first winter in Alberta was an experience I've never forgotten. I was aided by the fact that everything was novel to me, and I was in love with my new home. But that winter set a record mark for cold when December started a six week cold snap, 42 days, give or take, below zero. I remember walking to a friend’s home for Christmas Eve supper with the temperature at 55 below zero and a wind chill factor that dropped it to 72 below. But it was a first for me, and I was young and I thrived on adventure. Come February, however, I began to develop a desire to have the scent of life about me, plants, flowers, and fresh, damp dirt. I’d never before stood on frozen ground that long. I lucked upon a tiny greenhouse associated with the university that was open once a week for two hours on Sunday. No one seemed to visit it but me, and I spent each Sunday of the month sitting in its damp air, smelling moist earth and feasting on the flowering cyclamen that filled that tiny glassed-in room. One time another person happened into the greenhouse and saw me there, sitting on a low stone retaining wall my arms wrapped around my knees. Quizzical, he glanced at me, and I said simply, “Smelling dirt.” He smiled knowingly, nodded his head and soon left.

But perhaps my strongest affiliation with this month results from being born in it, and for 69 years having called it home.

Happy February to You