Tag: KM Huber’s Blog

Dimensions of Creativity

Posted on by KM Huber in Beyond Time, Oneness, Writing

“Creativity may be our Last Line of Defense” is the title of Gary Gauthier’s intriguing and well-written post that appeared on Sonia Medeiros’ blog this past Friday. For me, Gauthier’s consideration of creativity as our last defense in an increasingly technological world of  decreasing human tasks was not only sobering but a bit of a surprise. I realized I had only considered creativity from the human perspective. What about other dimensions?

Gizmodo.com image

Like Gauthier, I was quite taken with the performance of Watson, the IBM computer, on Jeopardy!  last Valentine’s Day. While some of Watson’s responses proved that human nuance is still a bit beyond a computer’s creativity, Watson won the knowledge rounds speedily and decisively.

I do not fear human or literary Watsons, I believe in them.

Gauthier also cited technology capable of creating journalism articles once “the facts” are provided. There are software programs for creating screenplays, novels, and probably just about any kind of writing for there is nothing new under the sun, which we’ve known at least since Ecclesiastes, probably before.

Time is relative and maybe so is creativity.

Until the 21stcentury, creativity has been a human component; truthfully, we don’t completely comprehend any dimension–yet. We’re not even completely convinced how our own human parts work but we know the sum of us is quite amazing. So, when it comes to creativity in technology, are we trying to simulate/emulate being human or are we vying for being perfect, which some would argue we already are.

greggbraden.com

What constitutes creativity? Is it the life force that animates a neutrino or a gnat as easily as a human? There is an argument that the life force in any dimension fights for every possible moment of existence, which seems pretty perfect already, creative even.

As for what creativity may mean for the 21st century, I came across this quote from Gregg Braden, a computer geologist who writes about the relationship between science and spirituality:

“For those who can embrace the learning curve of our past without judgment, the future becomes the palate for new industry, new jobs, new forms of expression, and new communities based upon sustainable ways of thinking, living, and being in our world” (Gregg Braden, “Letter to the Community”).

Poe Wikipedia Image
Edgar Allan Poe Wikipedia Image

For me, the source of all being is in matter and anti-matter; is in Einstein’s quantum entanglement of “spooky action at a distance”; is in Edgar Allan Poe’s sentient story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Maybe creativity is less a line of defense and more a bridge between humanity and all that is not.

Rhythm of ROW80 Sunday Scheduling:

The 30-minute writing stretches have improved the quality and number of  “words I keep.” The exercise provides a way to think through material for blog posts as well as novel scenes. In short, it’s creating much needed distance from the initial excitement of writing.

This week, I start writing the concept of my already drafted novel based upon Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering and Kristen Lamb’s concept critique.

Doing the Tao with Dyer away from duality, perhaps

Nepo morning meditation continues

Paradox Practice

Posted on by KM Huber in Beyond Time, Lupus, Oneness
Wayne Dyer (Wikipedia photo)

I didn’t grow up practicing to be a paradox so when Wayne Dyer writes, “practice being a living, breathing paradox every moment of your life”* it seems a tad…paradoxical. Yet, my life of duality brought me only contrasts, opposites, comparisons and yes, judgment—all balancing acts of duality and not of the “paradoxical unity” that is the oneness of the Tao.

This I discover after almost 60 years of living but I do discover it.

More than thirty years of my life have been with lupus, an autoimmune disease that now actively lives with me permanently, unlike its earlier years of extended stays but then it had other names.   Truly, I understand “the name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

Regardless, lupus was made to order for practicing paradoxical unity.

For years, juggling balance, stressing no stress, and unlimiting limitations were my duality, uneven at best. The effort of trying to order my life out of chaos was like touching the wind. Yet, chaos, like every storm, has one, still eye that allows …”apparent duality while seeing the unity that is reality…[an] effortless action without attachment to outcome.”  By no longer focusing on outcome in my life with lupus, I replaced the trying and the effort with what is moment by moment.

Being requires a lot of presence–“duality is a mind game” that is always ready for a match–so I get a lot of paradox practice.

*Attribution: All quotations are excerpted from Wayne Dyer’s book, Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, Hay House, Inc., Carlsbad, CA, 2007.

ROW80 Wednesday Word Marking:

From January 2 until February 4, my goal was to write 250 words per day—as blog posts, fiction, or nonfiction–for an approximate total of 8250 words.

On February 4, I started the “30-minute” stretch in which I write for 30 minutes daily. So far, that has generated just over 3700 words, averaging about 900 words a day. It takes care of  a lot of my mind minutia so my other writing is more focused, and I fuss less.

Where Risk Resides

Posted on by KM Huber in Beyond Time, Oneness
Wikipedia photo

When risk is choosing this one or that, I always think of  Linda Pastan’s poem, “Ethics.”

In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
if there were a fire in a museum
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn’t many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we’d opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter–the browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond saving by children.
Linda Pastan, from the collection Waiting for My Life (1981)

The poem sets up an array of caveats—whether the woman is loved or a stranger, whether or not one is mature in experience or just beginning to experience life, whether or not to choose—each requires risking this or that, one or the other, or not at all.

Mark Nepo writes:

“There is no substitute for genuine risk…the very core issues we avoid return, sometimes with different faces, but still, we are brought full circle to them, again and again” (The Book of Awakening).

Avoiding risk, somewhat akin to eschewing responsibility, seems to be a circular choice every time. Yet, in oneness—here and there, this and that–risk is whole, not one or the other, not old or young but the one truth that resides in us:

“It is we who, in our readiness and experience, keep coming back, because the soul knows only one way to fulfill itself, and that is to take in what is true” (Nepo, The Book of Awakening). 

Maybe that’s why the poem puts the annual question to children, who are no strangers to truth.

Rhythm of ROW80 Sunday Scheduling:

On February 3, added a 30-minute writing stretch—free writing that is timed—it helps clear the minutia of the moment so my daily writing is more focused.

Alternating short fiction, novel, and blog posts as daily writing

Doing the Tao with Dyer, still stuck in duality

Nepo morning meditation continues

“Once More to the Lake”

Posted on by KM Huber in Beyond Time, Writing
E B White (Wikipedia photo)

“Once More to the Lake” is a 1941 essay by E.B. White in which he returns to a Maine lake, revisiting childhood memories that are “precious and worth saving.” The essay is among the finest ever written; here  is my favorite paragraph in any writing anywhere:

“It seemed to me, as I kept remembering all this, that those times and those summers had been infinitely precious and worth saving. There had been jollity and peace and goodness. The arriving (at the beginning of August) had been so big a business in itself, at the railway station the farm wagon drawn up, the first smell of the pine-laden air, the first glimpse of the smiling farmer, and the great importance of the trunks and your father’s enormous authority in such matters, and the feel of the wagon under you for the long ten-mile haul, and at the top of the last long hill catching the first view of the lake after eleven months of not seeing this cherished body of water. The shouts and cries of the other campers when they saw you, and the trunks to be unpacked, to give up their rich burden…. Peace and goodness and jollity.”*

Always, White’s words return me to the lake that is my life, no matter when or where I am.

This time, it is 1985, on the last day of the last year I taught at the University of Wyoming. Alone, I sit in an empty classroom, with its beige, cracked-plaster walls—the rows of laminated desks stretched into an elongated square—I am 33, giddy in my belief that I am leaving teaching to write,  whatever it may mean. By 1989, it means part-time teaching in a college outreach program for a trio of towns in southwestern Wyoming—less than 3,000 total population—whose “jollity, peace, and goodness” still occupy me. With these students, I write in restaurants, in classes, in homes, returning again and again to White’s lake. It is the richest writing of my life with a Parker fountain pen—the cheapest but best my money can buy—scrawling in spiral notebooks of red covers and silver spines in the low light of a scrawny chandelier until 1991.

Some 21 years later, my writing unpacked, I return with White once more to the lake.

*“Once More to the Lake,” E.B. White in Eight Modern Essayists, 5th Edition, St. Martin’s Press, New York: 1990 (page 83).

ROW80 Wednesday Word Marker:

Since January 2, I aimed for writing 250 daily words that I could keep—as blog posts, fiction, or nonfiction–so far, I have approximately 7500 words.

“It Tells You.”

Posted on by KM Huber in Beyond Time, Writing

“You don’t tell it. It tells you.”  I included these two sentences in my reply to a comment on last Wednesday’s post, Goal-Gazing. The discussion was around writing and what it evokes in us, from the slough of despond to joy and every emotion in-between. All agreed writing is worth it.

Joan Didion, nndb.com image

Hours beyond the blog and out of the electronic ether entirely, the sentences return to me, just a tad tenacious. They belong to Joan Didion and are from her 1976 “Why I Write” essay.

“It tells you.”
“You don’t tell it.

I’m used to sorting and shuffling through my mind for “lines I like” but of late, I find my recollection is not always the original order of occurrence. I consult my well-used copy of William Smart’s Eight Modern Essayists, fifth edition, a resident of my writer’s bag until the end of the 20thcentury, now a bookshelf retiree to ease its spine.

Virginia Woolf, Wikipedia image

I open the book to a heavily underlined passage from Virginia Woolf’s “Professions for Women,” her 1931 speech to The Women’s Service League:

“…for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is still a stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories…” (Page 12).

I consider finding the part about the Persian cat but I turn pages instead, remembering I may forget what I started. Didion’s one-line paragraphs return, as if on cue, but with the additional phrase of nota bene (note well), and I remember that the phrase precedes the paragraphs. 

“It tells you.
“You don’t tell it.”

At that point, I reach page 241 and read: “the arrangement of the words matters…[it] tells you what is going on in the picture.” I have believed this all my writing life—still do—moreover, Didion’s two, one-line paragraphs were a mantra for me—still are–nota bene to self.

Rhythm of ROW80 Sunday Scheduling:

  • Alternating short fiction, novel, and blog posts as daily writing
  • Doing the Tao with Dyer
  • Nepo morning meditation continues

Goal-Gazing

Posted on by KM Huber in ROW in 80 Days

As of Monday, Mars is retrograde in Virgo until April; in translation, it means that work, organization or systems will lag a bit. In particular, completing tasks and meeting goals will take longer.

If I know, you have to know but here are the stars for goal-gazing.


Yup, this is a check-in for A Round of Words in 80 Days (ROW 80). ROW80 is an exercise for writers who aspire to write and to live—preferably at the same time—and be happy about it. Of course, that is my interpretation of ROW80, as it happens to be my lifelong goal.

Writer Dorothy Parker—there is a Facebook page that features her—expressed it this way:

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

I am 60 this August, no longer young but still aspiring, although I’ve called myself a writer for over 30 years. Have not been without a copy of The Elements of Style in over 40 years, yet happiness, unlike so many needless words, has been omitted. However, believing  age favors my living on, I continue as a starry-eyed writer.

In my career(s), writing has always played a part: teaching writing at the junior college and university levels; editing two journals and a statewide newspaper; writing grants, proposals, and government reports. I have some fiction and poetry published, one novel written through, awaiting revision.

Some years ago, I chose writing over the love of a lifetime. Still amazes me, from time to time, but it’s not surprising, really. I have always written stories, sometimes in place of truth, but more often as a way to truth. Not sure there’s a difference.

“…loving yourself requires a courage unlike any other. It requires us to believe in and stay loyal to something no one else can see that keeps us in the world—our own self-worth” (Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening).

Rhythm of ROW 80 Wednesday Word Markers:

Since January 2, I have written almost 250 words per day or approximately 5000 words.