Winter Solstice and Marcus Aurelius

"Where is Nature leading you?" Marcus Aurelius asks himself in his meditations....for me Nature is leading to hopefully new and better beginnings. M.A. mentions a lot about the ruling part within us, which I feel relates to the foundational core of our Being and that place is awfully close to the infinite.
To feel at home in myself was something I have felt before but it has not always been a constant. Lately I can really feel it. That I have this core, my true underlying self that persists no matter what life may throw at me. This type of feeling is one of those won by hard work and uncomfortable circumstances - description of life?
Art definitely helps; Zen has been useful, Marcus - illuminating, but dependable loving friends and family are indispensable to knowing the home of myself where I feel comfortable and free to be me.
Again from Marcus "...defend your freedom every hour of every day with kindness, simplicity and self-respect."

The view of Gloucester Harbor from inside the Paint Manufactory...boat included. Pretty neat to be inside the place that has not been in use for most of my life.

blahblah

Just over a month since the last post...busy woman...but now I've got the winter to attend to more creative endeavors. And I already have a "to do" list for tomorrow, including an art show inside the famed Paint Manufactory in Gloucester. It's been empty for years and now Ocean Alliance has bought it as a research base of operations. These folks help save the humpback whale. It was definitely a hangout for teenagers, but I wouldn't know anything about that...














The gallery at the NSAA has closed for the season, it was sad saying "have a good winter" to all the artists today. Six months til we reopen - weird to say goodbye to the dark empty galleries. But I am inspired and awed with the time I will have to get some writing done. I've been feeling my imagination waken, dreams become more vivid...neato.

Ok blogger we'll see

So apparently I'm supposed to have "Embedded Comments" on my posts but I don't think it will show up on the blog page as it first opens....it should make it easier to read and post comments hopefully.

That being said I'm trying to go tech with the writing movement and drying my clothes on a line on the porch. All hail the sun!!!

Being...states of being, I can be in so many different minds in the course of a week...though generally speaking I tend to inhabit one or two for several days at a time. Paid labor mind, partner mind, writing mind, imagination mind....all this stuff we carry and yet it is amazing too to see a character in fiction as diverse as a live person, we hail it if it is done wisely with craft to create tension in a story...reflecting our own stories..."a day in the life" I quoted to my mother earlier today. The Beatles song comes to mind and so do the short stories by John Kessel. Especially the Lunar Quartet....seek these out if gender satire and a fresh perspective are on your menu.
I have to admit I have been surprised by his ability to handle this sub-genre so adroitly when I've largely only studied women writers in this avenue...(minored in this type of lit in college).
So he gets a huge bravo from me for tackling it...the gender utopia/dystopia field is richer for it.

And there comes a point in every young feminist's life where she comes to understand that no matter how much we raise our consciousness if the rest of society does not come along for the ride we are still fighting that battle everyday, until we get too tired and we begin to narrow our battlefields for lack of resources.
That sounds incredibly pessimistic I know, but it is a reality of all human interactions that all we can change is our own responses, even if we don't want to admit that.

Old Friends

Even though there are some people I have known for an incredibly long time, since I truly began to be me, we have to remember that we each evolve and react and change to our lives, our circumstances. I know some of us are mature enough to give me the space I have needed to journey through important transitions that affected me deeply. I hope I have been as good to them.
I am blessed with some remarkable people I have grown up with, and apart from, only to reconnect later and just be adult women together, trying to make meaning in our lives.
Tonight was a good night out with an old but renewed friend. Happy Birthday to you!

Elliot's at the Blackburn Tavern

the band What Time is It, Mr. Fox? is fantastic and I'm sad I missed their second set because I was arguing about the nature of human being's definition of truth...bottom line (I think, feel free to disagree)- there is no way there is one answer, one truth.

Humans are too complex and too alarmingly simple for it to be that tidy.
Science, religion, philosophy, ideology they all work together and separately to create this world we move through. The thoroughly constructed world. Even alone in nature we are colored by our insides. Empirical and gospel may mean the same thing to entirely different people.

Reading Howard Zinn...

It forever surprises me, or rather never seems quite real, that so much of history is the story of men with lusts for wealth or power behaving like school yard bullies or drunken idiots.

grokking the website

Uh...I'm not thrilled with the suzanne website yet, not my best writing there because I need to save that to submit to zines, and I haven't had the time truly to research other things to put up yet....I am cursed with being an editor/writer too, the perfectionist in me leaps forward and I forever rewrite instead of laying to rest something perfectly...fine... and moving on to the next thing...

And I've got zero comments on the ole blog here, basically not enough time to devout to an online presence but I will have the winter to do so. I'm on facebook now too, but mostly have been reconnecting to old friends from high school and theology school.

Sometime I feel like the work theologians do as pastoral ministry is some of the most real work there is...take for example a priest giving last rites or performing some other life changing ritual. A person touching the life of another person by helping them get through a tough time...like Sr. Kathleen who was my spiritual direction counselor for over a year. Not that this work is only done by theologians or from a faith based background, like social workers, but it's that personal connections that I think make the world of difference in reality - on an individual basis.

That is what I'd like to acheive with my craft, is to speak in a way that is meaningful to even just one reader - to conjure a response that is direct and personal.

I may have no idea that it ever happened if no one ever told me.
And not to toot my own horn here but the most amazing moments of my writing career were when someone gave me the gift of response.

So my heartfelt thanks to the man who came up to me at the Farragut House poetry slam and told me he thought I should have won...it's just that I was competeing against the co-founder of the Boston Poetry Slam, Michael Brown. (I didn't have a chance really, but it was very nice of him to say so!)

suzannegilbert.net

The website skeleton is now up...check it out and feel free to give suggestions...except about more fiction to read....it's coming...I can only spend so much time at once on the website building stuff...more definitely on the way...

over a month and here's a carpal tunnel poem

Allergy dreams of monied hours taxed precious
on the field of paper reams,
ink sweetened with my soul's molasses
ode to shaken glasses, speared olives, smooth vodka
and kisses on the porch of summer's afternoons.
Muscles aching with life,
disuse and the tough tension of creation.
Words await a home,
blank pages caressed into feeling alive.
With tunneled pain words become
less reliable as the writing comes out quicker
and discomfort blots thought out.

The photo

What I love about the photo is that it's in a space where visual art is created. The outlines in paint on the wall behind me seem like numerous attempts to try and box or define an image on its surface. What's left is undefinable, blank space and vaguely descriptive paint.

Self and art is an intersection where we can learn, grow and be changed. What I like best about this opportunity in all art, writing, visual, etc...is how it can grant us the gift of seeing what we couldn't before. Lifting a veil, or Milan Kundera's curtain...

"...so a novelistic invention is an act of knowing...a quick and sagacious penetration into the true essence of all objects of our contemplation..." -The Curtain by Milan Kundera

A brief glimpse of phenomenolgy - roughly, the study of the Self

Max Scheler (a phenomenologist) used a term "unity of fate" to (partially- I'm amazingly paraphrasing here) describe a juxoposition of free will and fate as not completely seperate ideas. He used this phrase to explain how human beings are as creatures of habit, continually falling back on past decision making processes whenever presented with a new choice.
What are most likely to do? He proposed that we usually opt for the familiar.

So think about that....you can look back at parts of your life and see how you made the same types of decisions over and over, until suddenly - something changed, you decided differently than you had in the past and it changed your life in a small, or big way.
My close friends know I'm crazy about this idea because it places two seemingly at odds philosophies : Free Will and Fate right next to each other....in the free choices we are faced with in life we can be fated to respond in the familiar way...or we can change our fate and head in new directions....I just dig it.
My gratitude to Edward Vacek, S.J., for writng the article that introduced this idea to me and all the other things I learned in his class at WJST.

What's up with the name?

Sidhe is the Gaelic word for faerie (Old French spelling) and cafe is self explanatory. The original Sidhe Cafe appears in a story called The Cafe, which I am continually submitting for publication.

It's the story of a woman who wakes up to find herself with amnesia in a Limbo world working as a hostess/waitress in a magical cafe. She's trapped there and consequently struggles with herself and most of the characters with whom she interacts. As I am submitting it for publication I will not be putting it on my website. However, I do have a few other things in mind.

Technology mania

It seems to be catching, or at least following me around....I spent a good hour trying to get my website up and running and of course the hosting site froze and I lost all the work I did tonight. So the website is still a work in progress. And I think a whole day looking at a computer screen is no good for me anyway.

I'll make a big announcement once it's half way decent...has at least some lounge clothes on.

Thanks to Corey Tevan

Corey is responsible for the effective photos on my page here. Corey Tevan is a SUPER imaginative artist and if you are interested in art that comes from the heart of an artist who keeps a light but unbreakable grasp on his sense of hope and wonder - check out his work at www.coreytevan.com.

What do I mean by the self in fiction anyway?

Short hand, I'm interested in how characters evolve their sense of self; regardless if they are lost in (or on) another world, searching for a twin sibling, happier in the void of space or manipulated by parental figures.

Change in direction for this Blog

It's high time I started to push this blog in another direction beyond random theological musings that this was an old and short lived dumping ground for....
So stay tuned as I post notes on the writing life, why I write the fiction I do and updates on a coming website that will be home to samples of my work.