Grace for Sunday

Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, said this to Laura Miller. Co-founder of Salon.com, she just wrote The Magician's Book about loving, disdaining, and reclaiming the Narnia series. I thought the quote was fitting for the day:

You can't regain the grace you've lost.

The only thing to do is go on through that

and eventually acquire the other sort of grace,

the conscious grace.

Reader Response Criticism

That is what was. This is what is. I'm most interested in what could be.

I'd like to be happy someday. I'd like to be unified. I'd like my stories to fit together into one book, bound together without disparity. I'm tired of telling this story and that.

Yoga teacher trainer S and I had a moment in front of the class this weekend. Sometimes I'm quiet and reserved in class even though I disagree. Other times I let that energy be apparent. I gasped in feigned shock when he told us that if we didn't focus our energy while we were painting our assigned Yantra then we would be stupid. I was pointing out that a teacher shouldn't call our work stupid.

But S rounded on me. He said, "Come on, Marie, admit that. If you make your Yantra from a place of mind chatter, it's just stupid. Your mind chatter is stupid. Isn't it? Isn't most of what you say in your mind just negative, self-critical stuff?!"

Man, he wanted to be right. He wanted my instant agreement that my mind chatter is full of negative voices that I'm hardly aware of. But I couldn't agree. Nor did I really want to explain my psyche to the whole class.

I understood what he meant - not to create from a place of superficial worry and self-restriction. A Yantra is a painting that is meant to also be a meditation, an offering, a performed prayer.

I could have said, "I'm not a good example." I could have said, "I've spent the last few years in a deep and extensive examination of my mind chatter. I hear it and interact with it at a level unusual for Westerners. My mind chatter isn't critical of me. My mind chatter is stories about life and reality."

Sometimes I'm quite amusing to listen to.

Ack. Writing. And now this has become a story. I started with one aim, one expression and these words have veered elsewhere.

I'll say it simply - I think it's up to you, reader. I don't think I can change this whole story from where I sit. The dance of narrative is a dance between teller and listener, words and story, signifier and signified. I think you have to bridge this gap that I can't.

Of course it is from my point of view. But that's the only place I can write from. I am reliant, even dependent, on my readers to participate in this construction of meaning along with me. Otherwise, my story does not exist, and my words are void.