August 17th, 2008
Yesterday I took a nineteen-mile bike ride through a lovely wooded park. The weather was unusually cool and overcast for the middle of August, and at times, I felt a chill in the breeze. The trail was sparsely populated, again a surprise for mid-August. I saw two armadillos and one small snake. Biking through the lush, green woodlands felt like cycling through Tolkien’s Shire. I expected a hobbit to pop out from behind a tree at any moment.
The peace and solitude of this magical ride was an unexpected gift, and it gave me time to meditate on the state of my life. The chill breeze and the threat of storms, though a cooling relief after a week of hundred-plus temperatures, gave me a brief flash of the future. The persistent cry of a hawk, a harbinger to the change of season. Sometimes these unexpected moments when our present collides with a vision of the future can be unsettling, even scary.
Change is scary. But change is inevitable. Knowing how to embrace our present joy and wait for our future happiness is a skill that requires much patience, will, and perseverance. Life’s moments unfold in an order and at the time in which they must. Things are what they are, and the beauty in life comes from refusing to limit our experience by putting people and circumstances in boxes, but to allowing them to simply be.
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August 8th, 2008
I’m reading a book by a Native American medicine man who explains life as a “House of Shattering Light, a place where reality, which is timeless and eternal, is cut into slices perceptible to our senses.” He goes on to say that “in each moment that we live there is an opportunity to change ourselves in some way. We shatter what we were in the past, so that in the new moment we can remake ourselves.”
Life, in many ways, is metaphor. There is meaning in everything. There is purpose and design in every circumstance and every person who comes into our lives. And it is comforting to know that every new day is exactly that–a new day. We can only live our best in our present moment, in order to bring our future moments to us. “A confused state,” the medicine man says, “is that state in which the idea has not begun to sing its song of identity.”
I think confusion is good. It brings us back to the core of who we are, to our place of being real. Confusion goes hand in hand with brokenness, which becomes the gateway for grace.
Check out this tune by talented songwriter Ross King. It captures what God’s amazing grace means to me.
http://www.rosskingmusic.com/freemusic-non-religious.html
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July 31st, 2008
I discovered the beauty of Robert Bly’s poetry earlier this spring when I visited San Diego and was wandering through the campus bookstore at San Diego State University. As I lingered over the lines in his poem, “Loafing with Friends at Ojo Caliente,” this particular stanza stuck with me:
“Sometimes ohs and ahs bring us joy. When/ You place your life inside the vowels, the music/Opens the doors to a hundred closed nights.”
There is something magical about the power of a name. Some cultures believe the power in the spoken name accumulates solely within the vowels, the place of musical resonance, a place beyond words where the yearning of the soul resides.
Whose name do you call when your heart is heavy and life seems bleak? Call their name. Hide yourself in the beauty and the power of the open spaces inside your mouth, the places of pure harmony and bliss. And let this music open your eyes and heart to possibility…
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July 29th, 2008
Hi all,
Just a note to let you know the book signing in Lockhart has been confirmed. I thought I’d updated the Events page on my website, but forgot to upload it. D’oh! Anyway, you can hop on over to the website page at www.melodygraves.com/pages/events and view all the details and a flyer.
Cheers,
M
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July 24th, 2008
Last week was a stretching, enriching experience for me. I attended a writing conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was once again amazed at the wealth of talented individuals there. I met several people, made some new friends, and re-connected with old friends that even after many years are still like family to me. Sometimes, home can be anywhere you let your heart reside.
One stranger (now a friend) shared some personal difficulties with me, and he said the thing that impressed him was my willingness to emotionally invest in him, even though we didn’t know each other at all. He said he appreciated that, and was convinced that had we known each other while he was grieving over the recent death of his son, he knows I would have “made the effort.”
Something a high school classmate of mine said at our reunion over the weekend really stuck with me. “It’s impossible to have a relationship with someone who won’t be real with you.” And it’s so true. But what does “being real” mean? It means letting people see who you are, even in your weakness.
For me, I know that being real means letting people see who I really am, what drives me, the things I’m passionate about, and the way I love others. For me, God’s strength is indeed made perfect in my utter weakness and destitution. It is in these moments of brokenness, of resignation to my higher purpose, that I find the fullness of a life lived inside God’s will.
One of my colleagues asked me why I attended the workshop. “The people,” I said. This week was not about the writing or the craft. It’s always about the people. Because the only thing that matters in this world is personal relationship. I write because I want my words to touch people’s lives, to inspire change from the inside out. But if I can’t touch people’s lives when I’m with them in person, anything else I write will seem hollow because I’m not being real with the people who are most important.
Don’t be afraid to be real. God honors the heart broken in service of Him. Let your heart be fragile—God will mend it, and those who draw near to you will see the beauty of Him instead.
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July 3rd, 2008
For those of you who thought I was kidding about Dallas drivers with handguns, check out this news story and video about a recent random shooting spree on the North Texas roadways:
http://www.star-telegram.com/dallas_news/story/736869.html
http://www.wfaa.com/video/index.html?nvid=260025
See what I mean?
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July 1st, 2008
Yesterday, I found out one of my friends’ father passed away last week. Today I found out one of my friends in her mid-twenties has cancer. As I sit here in the coffeehouse, trying to not weep for both of them, it makes me realize what a delicate hold we have on life. Circumstances of life can change in a heartbeat. One moment, we think we know where we’re going. The next, and the road ahead of us changes, and we find ourselves in a dark, unfamiliar place.
We are measured by the way we respond to such changes in life. Will we shine as lights in these new and sinister landscapes and blaze a trail of courage even through the valley of the shadow of death? Perhaps the most powerful demonstration of who we are and what we believe arises from our ability to show people what love is, what faith is, what hope is. We can tell them all we want about how wonderful God is, and how much He loves them. But this—deep in the trenches, shoulder-to-shoulder with our friends, demonstrating our love for each other and God through the act of our will—this is the way we show people what we are made of, and Who lives inside us.
There’s an old adage in writing: “Show, don’t tell.” It’s the secret to fresh, immediate, and emotionally engaging storytelling.
It’s also the secret to living an extraordinary life. Don’t tell people what you believe. Show them. Show them, and the world will pay attention.
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June 28th, 2008
I got another rejection letter today after seven months of waiting. Invariably, the day before or the day after I send a follow-up letter, the rejection slip discreetly arrives in my mailbox. I know it’s a rejection the instant I look at the envelope. Too thin. Not even a full sheet of paper inside. When the rejection has no hand-written message on it, it’s even worse. No evidence of human contact whatsoever. But I know at least a human hand put it in the envelope and sealed it.
In a sense, these literary “dear John” letters embody the harsh reality of the writing profession. Competition is fierce; people don’t have time to craft personal responses, nor are they expected to explain themselves when they stick a cliché-ridden, thrice-copied slip of paper the size of a fortune cookie message into an envelope and send it on its way to hammer another dent in a writer’s fragile ego.
Combined with the angst of being misunderstood by people who read too much of themselves into our work, and the writer’s life seems emotionally perilous at times. This occupation to which we bind ourselves is not for the faint of heart. It requires immense dedication, indomitable drive, and the courage to create a story that illustrates a higher truth. Those caught in the crossfire are casualties of the honest effort of a noble profession. However, the purity of heart with which we stand grounded in the soul of our story doesn’t count for much when we find ourselves having to choose between preserving relationships and perfecting our art.
Why must writing be so complicated? Because all good writing is essentially about life, and life is about people. And the people who populate our lives are micro-representations of a larger collective humanity, and as such, amalgams of them will necessarily appear in our stories, as amalgams of ourselves must also appear if we are to be true to the story.
The decision to sacrifice a friendship in defense of a story seems like a ridiculously selfish one. However, many writers choose this path because of their commitment to the art. Is this perhaps why it is easier to write wooden characters who don’t remind us of anyone in our lives? So we can minimize the risk of wounding someone we care about because they think we’re writing about them? This all-too-common phenomenon seems to reinforce the idea that fiction represents more universal truth than memoir, and perhaps the conviction readers feel when they look into the mirror of story and see themselves is further evidence of the sheer power of fiction to reveal the human condition.
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June 23rd, 2008
Well, I just got back from a writing conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This being the first time I’ve spent any length of time OK, I learned a few things about my neighbors to the north:
- The tap water in Tulsa tastes like dirt, but it doesn’t give me gas, which is a very good thing to know.
- People in Tulsa drive rather strangely. Meaning, some people drive slow, and some people drive fast. This, however, is not necessarily an insult, since the people in Dallas drive like demon-possessed individuals with handguns. I prefer “strange” over “demon-possessed” any day of the week.
- In general, the service is slower in Tulsa than say, New York, L.A., or Chicago. However, you get a lot more smiles and warm fuzzies for your time.
- There are an amazing number of creative, talented, and genuinely exceptional individuals who come from Oklahoma. And I feel lucky to have met several of them at the conference.
My take-away from all of this? I need to get to know my northern neighbors a little better. It’s something we all do from time to time in our lives: we underestimate the boy (or girl) next door.
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June 9th, 2008
The more I think about it, the more I realize God operates on a need-to-know basis. American society and our ideas of rugged individualism, self-actualization, and empowerment have taught us to believe that we should be able to control every aspect of our lives and our destinies. It teaches us to be self-reliant, as if this is the highest form of power we can achieve.
You don’t have to go far to see that we don’t control very much about our lives at all. We can’t tell the sky to stop raining. We can’t stop the earth from rumbling. We can’t keep the sun from setting.
The point is that we know only what we need to know to live in this moment, and perhaps to look ahead to the next few moments. We will never really know all that we want to know. We can’t see into the future, but still we want to plan, to control it somehow. If we can just learn to be okay with living on a need-to-know basis, a lot of stress, anger and worry could be circumvented.
So many of us spend too much time and energy wanting to know what we can’t know. God only gives us what we need to know to live in the moment He’s given us. We can rest in that. Do you want to know how everything your life is going to turn out? Get over it. You don’t need to know that. All you need to know is what God has given you this day to do, and do it.
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