Mary Panttaja

I was in the orchard this afternoon checking out the fruit set. It looks good; especially after last year’s debacle. We had one (count it) Santa Rosa plum that fell off the tree before it ripened. This year there will be hundreds. There are dozens and dozens of tiny red fruits on the pear trees. The apple set and the oranges aren’t done yet—though because of the incredible bloom, it should be good.

I heard a shrill scream overhead. And then a second. I look up to see a large white-tailed kite, brilliant against the sky, sail right over my head. Followed by a second. They proceeded to chase and circle around our hill. They swirled and chased up into the sky. And then they seemed to clasp their feet and, in a spinning cartwheel, began to fall out of the sky with a fling and flare of white wings. Down almost to the tree tops they cascaded.

In the last minute, they separated and began their climb back into the sky.

Are they brave? Do they need courage to take such a plunge? Or are they simply surrendered to who and what they are? They are so completely themselves, so completely the embodiment of white-tailed kite-ness; completely free of any ideas of worry or fear. And as they perfectly reflect their kite-ness, it turns out that they really are safe, and that any idea of danger or safety we might have for them isn’t meaningful to their lives.

They were so free and so beautiful.

We flew home from Seattle today. A beautiful day at both ends: starting on the ferry from Bainbridge Island, ending with the drive up the lane through the wine country, the Russian River idling flowing by the side of the road. I napped and worked the first half of the flight, taking down some notes on Illumine feedback, adding things to my task list. But at one point I looked out the window and was startled.

The light was so bright and clear. Every little bit of the earth was illuminated and stark. More snow than I expected dusted the tops of the Siskiyous, ridges winding east to west across the edge of northern California. After a while, we came across a lake which, after study, I resolved to be Clear Lake in Lake County. Mount Konocti standing sentinel on the southern shore. Now I knew I was home. I could follow the highway and then the Russian River south to the Alexander Valley, tracing its radical meanders that carve up the neighborhoods where I live. But I couldn’t deplane here, and so we passed by my town, and continued south over Marin.

The mud of Tomales Bay was greasy in the reflecting sunlight, each drift and swirl in the sandy mud another smear of color. The San Francisco Bay was startling in its multiplicity of hues—mud in swirls, sandy bottoms, drifts of teal water, all lace-edged with the snow white bloom of the waves crashing on the shore. The sharp daylight etched each house and road and trail into a bold image of the earth.

After we cruised over San Francisco, we banked left to head back to the airport and circled the salt flats at the end of the bay. So many colors and patterns I couldn’t track them. Red, oranges, and pinks of the salt ponds, colors of algae and brine shrimp. Native mud flats in ochre and green, intense fractal patterns of water traces and creeping plant growth. Every plot was worth a photograph.

I don’t know why the colors and images where so brilliant today—was it the sunlight or the air? Or was it my willingness to see? Most likely, a little of both.

Yesterday morning I headed out of our hotel in downtown Seattle to hit the street and head down to the harbor. Having been writing for a few hours, I kept noticing things I wanted to note down—will have to get some technology working to help me out in these situations.

Some of what I noticed:

• A young woman was settling herself in front of Barneys New York. She was striking with her very delicate skin, pale red rastafarian-like hair (not unlike my granddaughter’s). She was having a gentle moment with her dog, comforting him, settling him in on his cushion next to her. She spread her blanket and sat carefully. She began to unpack her violin and I saw the glimmer of a silver flute. Everything arranged, she began to put the flute to her lips. I caught her eye as I turned back to look again.
• There was Lush—the soap store. And I had walked blocks out of my way in SF the day before to check it out. We like their hard travel shampoos and travel with them everywhere. I was hoping to find other useful travel accessories—but most of their options are a little bit extravagant for me. I remember this company from about 30 years ago—having long ago used their little round tins of solid shampoo.
• Seattle waking up is cleaner and more pristine than most cities I know. Having shuffled around San Francisco in the lunchtime crowds this week, it felt very shiney and barely used.
• An image caught my eye. A Miro-like picture framed in a window—a floating sphere, a stem, a flower, orange against cream. I notice that there is a series of them. I look again and see spring hats and flowers in a department store window. Someone with a wonderful eye has taken much care.

My most recent post just arrived in my email. (I subscribe to make sure things are going out—not to boost my subscription count.) But I’m still here in the Starbucks, writing. So I guess I know that I am at least talking to myself in a very weird sort of way.

I sitting in in a Starbucks in downtown Seattle trying to get some work done this morning. I spoke with a man in line about how disorienting it was to find yourself in a familiar place when in the back of your mind you know you flew last night. Of all the Starbucks I’ve been in, this is one. (Hong Kong, London, Colfax, SF, Healdsburg, on and on—-I’m sure you’ve hit more.) He suggested that it was much like MacDonalds world-wide—-MacDs for grownups.

I’m trying to find a pace and pattern (maybe it’s really tactics and practices) that enable me to keep working (writing and researching) while I’m traveling. Since that’s what I’d love to be doing I’d better figure it out—how to work through a modicum of distraction. The last month, with illness, remodeling, and family events (all good; except the illness) I really couldn’t find my way. But if I can get the tactics down, I know I can do better.

A couple of my tricks:

• Write anywhere you are comfortable, but write. I used to find myself with a bit of writer’s block (not usual for me, as normally there is always something I can blah, blah on about). I discovered, to my embarassment, that it was not a block to the writing, it was a block to sitting at my desk. Sometimes I just want to be horizontal. And I can write in that position as it turns out. So I just take the computer with me wherever I have the urge to be (and in whatever position). I write on the sofa sitting up straight; I write on the sofa lounged out flat; I write in bed; I write outside in one of my REI lounge chairs; I ocassionally write in front of the tv—but would usually rather be writing than watching. I would write in the bathtub (the subject of the remodel), but my Mac is not really prepared for the possibilities inherent in that location, so I am reduced to reading.
• Keep writing topics queued up all the time—one will always meet your needs when you come to write. If you can, keep a number of threads open. For me they seem disparate some days—but most of them come back around to weaving into the general thread of the the work.
• Move items to the top of the queue as the last thing you do before going to bed. I always try to have a draft of the next blog on my desktop. Work does happen overnight, and a fresh morning and a primed pump makes getting the material out really efficient.
• Stay open to moving ideas—thoughts percolating. Grab them and put them down—this post is just something I was experiencing—and much of everything I experience comes back to be useful—a writer’s work is handy like that—life IS the topc. My character George likes to write in a coffee shop.

More later—there will be many distractions in Seattle this week: friends, biking, kayaking, music. We’ll see what I manage to get done.

I hadn’t seen this yesterday when I posted. But in the latest National Geographic there is an article on the four corners area of the red rock dessert. Keywords to search for more on this area are: Escalante, Canyonlands, Moab, Arches, Natural Bridges.

A couple of years ago we hiked into Horseshoe Canyon to see the Great Gallery of rock art. It was quite isolated and beautiful there. It is difficult to really comprehend how old these paintings are. They are scattered through miles of Horseshoe Canyon, so people lived here for quite some time.

If you are really interested in this area, you should look into a fabulous publication called “Plateau, The Land and People of the Colorado Plateau.” It is one of the most beautiful magazines you will find. It is published by the Museum of Northern Arizona and many of the writers they use are our most gifted commentators on the natural world. They cover history, geography, geology, archeology, and ancient and contemporary art, among other things. And there are always a plenty of beautiful images and maps.

No. Really.

The image that gleams so brightly at the top of the page is from an early morning in the red rock desert. Jim and I rose early to watch the sun rise from the edge of Dead Horse Point State Park in Southern Utah. We felt so blessed to sit in the dark and watch the morning spill over the cliffs and chasms. The surprise is that no red in the image is from the rock—it’s all sunlight. In the daylight the colors invert and it is still red in all directions.

The park is perched on a plateau called the Island in the Sky—a breathtaking place of hard stone and deep canyons, crystal air and stark light. There is a dirt road that circumnavigates the “island”, The White Rim Road, on a hard sandstone edge. You can drive it if you are very brave.

The park’s legend really does end sadly for the horses. The plateau spins itself out to a narrow penninsula about 30 yards wide at one point. The story says that a herd of horses died there from lack of water surrounded 2000 feet below by the Green and Colorado Rivers.

My husband grew up in the desert and we go whenever we can. The desert is so unrelenting, no soft edges. The sculptural shapes of sandstone feel like the bones of the earth, as if the structure of the planet rises to the surface so we can touch it. The sublime spots for me are not the high pinnacles (though I always like to go anywhere high), but where the stone walls come out of the earth. Those are the places that really touch me, where I connect. I figure it’s how I’m wired—to the bones of the planet. Sort of the opposite of being transcendental; how does one transcend stone?

So the picture is a pun of sorts—the dawn arising over the world—the world arising to the dawn—”the arising world” coming into being. A bit of an inside joke.

Coming down from the hermitage…my first blog post.

I have been working in my little hermitage in the woods in Northern California for a few years now, writing mostly, but also engaged in those day-to-day activities that keep you busy when you live in the country. (It’s a little different from city living.)

I just finished the third draft of the novel I have been writing. It is a great relief to turn it over to my diligent readers for their reactions and suggestions. A bit of a breather on that side of the work load, filled with a few nerves and a lot of hope.

I am also coming into some self-consensus about how to experiment with the rest of my work, moving it and myself back out into the world—talk to people, get some feedback.

I have a odd and complex history of work—first in the theatre, then in technology and business, and now writing fiction and personal/business growth and management theory. It all makes sense organically but it sounds like a strange path to most people. Well, it even sounds like a strange path to me, but it feels normal.

So I am going to be writing a cross-linked set of blog threads—mirroring my evolving fictional structures in complexity and woven meaning.

Blogging is a new and mysterious medium to me, though it is still writing after all. But it’s form is so very different from other forms I’ve done. I keep asking myself, “What is the point?”. What am I trying to accomplish? But as a writer, it seems necessary to explore its timeliness, flexibility, ambiguity, and the weaving nature of narrative cross-linked by theme and time. It will not be easy and I must be ready to shift gears from the single focus of the novel, which, as a large and complex structure, has taken considerable time to build. Without strategic focus, it would never have come to be. But blogging as a format allows many threads of thought to be express simultaneously. The ability to capture the threads in a visible structure as they come to be seems like a very promising development for the practice of keeping the creative pipes primed on all fronts. So my work will not be “written” and complete, but instead evolving in the process of meeting an audience.

So what are my threads, the courses of thought that seem to demand my attention?

The Illumine Story Line

The story continues beyond the current novel format. I envision many ways to explore this material in time-based formats. This follows naturally for George’s journal, but also suggests more ways to imagine creating ambiguity in time and space.

The Travel Journals

I have written these independently but they are often part and parcel of the evolution of the Illumine story. It is wonderful to have a platform to observe and discuss the world and your experience of it.

Creativity: E-4/Catching the Updraft/The Arising World

These are all incarnations of the philosophical work on the process of creativity, innovation, and making things happen in the world. Different voices for different audiences. The key issue here is where to start the conversation. In fact, for a writer that is always an issue—what is the best entrance into the story. And is it always different for different readers? How can you choose/discover/evolve the perfect set of entrances.

Business and Technology

Having been only peripherally involved in the last couple of years, it is interesting to dive back into what’s going on. There are some stark contrasts appearing between “old world” business practices and work styles, and the new world—differences in habit, actions, belief structures, values—it is interesting to see. In addition, technology has shifted, but is also so much more volatile and dynamic—it’s hard to do more than identify a directional current.

How do these relate? Well, I can weave them together left to right, top to bottom; though it’s not clear how the weft moves back around. My travel writing is a major source for the story. The creativity work and the story are tightly woven together as the philosophy is a major current in the story. The creativity work and my approach to business leadership, management, and technology are tightly woven. So the weft is there, though it’s never obvious why a fiction writer also delves into business and technology so deeply. But there you go; that is what I do.

So now, I have begun.