Celebrating Stories

In my last post, I said that the TV show My Fair Wedding has had a major impact on my life.  Let me explain.

The premise of this reality show is that couples with a small budget and a distinct theme in mind for their weddings get help from world-class event planner, David Tutera.  He comes in three weeks before the wedding and takes over, usually changing everything from the dress to the venue.  What he doesn't do, however, is change the theme, no matter how wacky or tacky it is.

After watching the show for a few episodes, I began to realize why it was so appealing to me.  (Keep in mind that I rarely watch TV, ESPECIALLY reality shows.)  David Tutera has a true gift for taking the ideas and desires people have and ultimately treating them with respect, even if he begins with a little eye-rolling.  He takes it upon himself to understand where his brides are coming from, what it is they truly want, and then making it happen in a way that always far exceeds their expectations. And underneath it all, I realized, his foundational philosophy is that life is meant to be a celebration that we share with our loved ones and ourselves.

I found this very inspiring, and even began to plan a Valentine's Tea Party for my closest woman friends as a result (which actually turned out to be quite lovely.) 

Valentine's Tea Party, with heart-shaped lemon lavender shortbreads and heart-shaped cake

But even more significantly, I made connections between his gifts and my own.  Watching Tutera at work and really observing what he was doing made me realize that I have a similar gift in how I work with people I write about as well as those I teach writing to or do editing for.  I love to tell people's stories; I love to teach people how to find their writing voice.  I love to honor people's truths in these ways and even help them to recognize their own truths in some cases.  And from the wonderful feedback I often get from people I've written about, from my students, and from my clients, I know that this can have a real impact on them.

Around the same time as I was getting into My Fair Wedding, I was also feeling restless, like my life was in need of some new direction.  For a long time, I'd been feeling like even though I love what I do, I was missing out on time for "my own" writing.  But out of the connections I was making between David Tutera's work and my own, I had an epiphany that stopped me in my tracks:  Writing other people's stories IS "my own" writing.  It satisfies me, and I feel called to it.  Realizing this was like coming out from under a huge weight I didn't even know was there.  It gave me permission to stop pressuring myself to do "my" thing, and fully embrace what I was already doing.  And this led me to make the decision to launch a new service in my writing business:  writing personal histories for people.

And so I have reworked my writing business, Illuminated Manuscripts, to reflect this new direction.  Rather than make this post any longer explaining about what it means to be a personal historian, I will simply direct you to my new website, www.illuminatedwritingandediting.com.

Here Comes the Bride

My 2012 collage

As you know if you've ever been a regular reader of this blog, I choose a color and a word for each year.  This year my color is purple and my word is juice.  Last year, I also started the year by making a collage that represented my color and word, which turned out to be a wonderful thing, so I did it again this year.  I have a ton of stuff I want to share about how this year and its themes have unfolded so far, but I'm going to have to break it into several posts, so I hope you'll bear with me and come along for the ride.

In choosing the images for a collage, I keep my theme(s) in mind, but sometimes I will find myself drawn to an image that doesn't completely fit.  In the 2012 collage, that image was the face in the top right corner.

She is a bride from a small village in Kosovo where they paint women's faces for their weddings.  The colors used on her face, other than the obvious white, are blue, red, silver, and gold - not purple.  But I felt the need to include her with no idea why.  A bride?  What did that have to do with anything?

Lo and behold, a couple of days after I finished the collage I got an email from one of my editors at the Taos News, asking me to write an article for the Taos Wedding Guide supplement that comes out every spring.  I would be interviewing three women in Taos who are all ordained interfaith ministers and wedding officiants.

After interviewing these amazing women and then transcribing the interviews, I had no idea how to jump into writing the article.  Weddings are not something I've experienced much in life.  I did marry the same man twice, but the first time was on Halloween in a cemetery, and the second time was on a Wednesday night (in a church this time at least, but it was extremely casual).  I was a flower girl in my uncle and aunt's wedding as a child, and a bridesmaid for a friend from high school, but that's about the extent of it.

I always like to say there's a fine line between "the pre-writing process" and procrastination.  In this case, I felt I needed some inspiration to get started on the article, so I went onto Netflix to try to find some kind of wedding show to stream.  After comparing the few that came up, I chose a reality show called My Fair Wedding because it was higher rated than the others, and I proceeded to watch two episodes in a row, which did in fact inspire me to write the article.

However, this show had a far more profound impact on me than just helping me write.  I ended up watching all 24 episodes available on Netflix over the period of a few weeks.  Once again, something fluffy has changed my life, and in my next post, I'll tell you how.

How A Fluffy Movie Saved My Life

I'm writing this post in response to a question a friend of mine posted on Facebook; she asked bloggers what their goals are for their blogs.  I started to formulate a response, and quickly realized it would be too long-winded for a Facebook comment, because I have more than one blog, and more than one reason for each of them.  (It's probably even too long-winded for a blog post, but you can decide that for yourself.)

This blog was my first.  And I don't think I've ever confessed this here before, but I started it because of watching that epitome of "feel-good" (i.e., fluff) movies, Julie and Julia.  If you've seen it, then you know that it's based on the true story of a woman who started a blog and eventually became famous for it.

Well, I knew going in that there was little chance of fame in blogging these days, now that EVERYONE has a blog.  No, what convinced me to try it was what the Julie character said in the movie when she made the decision.  She said it would be a "regimen" for her, and she saw it as something that would fulfill her need to do something meaningful and creative.  This inspired me, because at the time, I had been living in Taos and working at Subway for about a year - it was one of the most miserable years of my life.  I was a lifelong writer who wasn't writing, and hadn't really since I'd finished my Master's in creative writing four years earlier.

For my Master's, my concentration was poetry, but I had always wanted to get into writing personal essays.  Blogging seemed like a great way to do that with the benefit of immediate gratification, just getting it out there and dropping the whole burden of "trying to get published," which graduate school had completely turned me off to.

So I started this blog, and proceeded to visit other people's blogs and leave comments.  Within a fairly short time, blogging completely and wonderfully exceeded my expectations.  I found myself part of an eclectic online community including (to name just a few) a young man who had been homeschooled, taught in Korea, then proceeded to get his bartender's license and his pilot's license more or less simultaneously; a male Buddhist kindergarten teacher in the Bay area who is married to the town's female mayor; an Australian storyteller-poet-naturalist; a glitzy woman entrepreneur in Dallas; a Scottish woman with equally passionate interests in cooking, photography, and literary pursuits of all kinds; and several spiritually-oriented women who sort of became my church.  One of those women I actually count now among my very closest friends, even though we've still never met in person. 

That in itself was fulfilling enough, but there was more.  Blogging gave me the confidence to think of myself as a writer again, so I started a writing business called Illuminated Manuscripts and created another blog for it.  I made business cards and brochures and joined the Taos Chamber of Commerce, and out of that, I got offered a job writing a weekly column for the Taos News, which I'm still writing today.  Other writing jobs came my way as well, and I have found myself living my childhood dream of writing for a living.

However, since I now had several clients and was no longer working at Subway, one might say I had a life, and blogging began to take up less and less of my time.  And anyone who blogs knows that if you don't do it on a pretty regular basis, the warm glowy sense of community begins to dissolve.  Less and less people comment on your blog, as you comment less and less on theirs, and after a while you just kind of lose touch altogether.  In the past year or so, I've posted here very infrequently, and hardly anyone comments anymore.  It sort of feels like a ghost town.  I miss those golden days, but that's okay.

The blog I started for Illuminated Manuscripts never really took off at all because I found myself with more than enough work without having to promote it.  I'm now about to expand my business' services and will be building a new website for it elsewhere.

My third blog came about when I decided to buy land off-grid and build an earthbag house on it.  Where my purpose for The Whole Blooming World was simply to be writing and sharing that writing, my purpose for Home Sweet Hive is more to document my project and connect with other people doing similar things.  It fascinates me to see that an entirely different group of bloggers has sprung up around me over there, although there are a couple of loyal readers that followed me over from this blog.

I know a lot of people blog for money, and I also know that if you want your business to grow online you should have a blog, but so far, blogging has had nothing to do with these things for me personally.  However, nowadays, I write the weekly blog for the business of one of my clients, and I've seen how it can be a whole different animal.  And once I get my new site up for Illuminated Manuscripts, I will be blogging regularly there for the sake of promoting my business.

Even though this blog has faded into the background of my life and there is little chance that will change in the foreseeable future, I know from time to time I'll still post here even if no one's reading it, because it's become for me a way to track and tell and change the story of my inner life.

If I hadn't watched Julie and Julia it's hard to imagine that my life would be as rich as it is today.  So there's a lot to be said for fluff.  For instance, milkweed is fluffy but plays several important roles: it remedies poison ivy, insulates, repels pests from plants in its vicinity, removes warts, and serves as the sole food source for monarch butterfly larvae.

But I guess some curmudgeons would consider butterflies "fluff" too.  Too bad for them.