Hearts

Children and Memory

I never expected to write memoir, but that's a good bit of what I now do. Not only is my memoir Love is the Thread on its way to publication, I also publish the zine Memory Stick. With Issue 7 in the works, I've got memories on the mind today.

Memory Stick includes personal narratives, family narratives and ancestral stories. I started the zine more than a year ago around the time I hit menopause. (Or it hit me.) Friends assure me that the colander-like holes in my memory will mend once my body chemistry stabilizes. In the meantime, I want not only to recall stories from all the layers of my past, personal and familial, I realized how important it is for me to share those tales with others.

Each issue centers on a theme. The upcoming Memory Stick includes stories about the children in my life, from nephews and nieces to some little people I worked with at the kindergarden center where I worked many years ago, and one or two who, despite the decades of difference in our ages, I count as friends.

Many years ago when he was four, my eldest nephew told me, "You're a tall child with car keys." (Tall? Well, to a four year old, I suppose so!) Issue 7 celebrates the child in all of us.

Changing Times

Recently a friend sent me an email about 2012. In essence, the message relayed how several expert astrologers compared the Mayan and Gregorian calendars, with special attention to all the changes that have put the Gregorian calendar out of sync. The result of the astrologers' cogitations? It seems the pivot point of the Mayan predictions may have already happened on the Winter Solstice, 2010.

Remember, calendars are how we measure time, they're not time itself.

As a writer I have often set deadlines for myself, as well as dealt with deadlines set by editors and publishers. For example, I write for two different magazines on a regular basis. And in my forty years of writing, I have made so many goals for myself: to have an agent by thus and such age, or have a book published by the year Whatever. Goals are good. They keep us motivated. If we don't become more involved with the goal or date than we are with our work (or life) they keep us involved and focused.

On the other hand, I've received a lot of guidance lately that sounds something like this: "Leslie, you need to take the long view--and stay present in this moment." That is, keep my eye on the long range unfolding of my time, my personal goals as a writer and a human being, while savoring where I am in this instant. I struggled with how to take that long view and stay present for quite a while, just as many people have struggled with, feared or looked forward to the big moment of dramatic change scheduled to take place in 2012.

When I heard the theory that 2012 had already happened in 2010, the challenge of taking both the long view and staying present snapped into focus for me. Big changes are and have been already happening here on earth--big weather in Australia, in Chicago and the Mid-West and elsewhere. Yet here we are, still living our lives. With one eye on the long range unfolding of events within time--shifts in weather and cultural changes, or a book in the pipeline, for instance--and the other on the task for the present: cuddling a baby; giving a toddler her lunch; writing or reading a blog.