Finish the Project at Hand

Life wastes itself while we are preparing to live. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance.

Prompt by Jonathan Mead:

If you had one week left to live, would you still be doing what you’re doing now? In what areas of your life are you preparing to live? Take them off your To Do list and add them to a To Stop list. Resolve to only do what makes you come alive. Bonus: How can your goals improve the present and not keep you in a perpetual “always something better” spiral?

Finds of the Day

This could be John Lennon's answer to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans".

My answer to Jonathan Mead: Since childhood I've been living my life as though each day is my last. 

Old, physically beat and mentally tormented, my father knew he wasn't going to live long enough to see me grow from child into young adult. He  tried to prepare me for his death, telling me he would still be there for me after he was gone. 

At night, after my father and I finished watching a television movie and we had gone to bed (hours after my mother retired), I listened for his every breath, and sometimes would get up to check his breathing. If he had a quiet night without a cough, I was awake, his silence was killing me. Of all the colorful pills that filled an old cigar tin, I only remember the little green one that was for his nerves. Was that the one I handed out most, or was it his heart pill, or the one for asthma, or odema? 

I expected my mother would die soon after him, and while I didn't really express the thought that I would be next after she was gone, I lived up to that expectation by taking life one day at the time.

Programmed to make the most of each day I ask you: Stand By Me. I'll be back soon with more, today I enjoyed a day at the beach.

Some great finds: Fresh sand dollars, starfish, pipe worms, water spewing geoducks [gooey].

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Being at Home Wherever I Am

If we live truly, we shall see truly. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prompt by Chris Guillebeau

Not everyone wants to travel the world, but most people can identify at least one place in the world they’d like to visit before they die. Where is that place for you, and what will you do to make sure you get there?

Traveling is in my blood. "I've been so many places in my life and time." That's not my line, that's Leon Russell's in A Song For You. Is he fantastic or what?

My father was a wandering Jew. The eldest of four children, he was born in Antwerp, because his parents just happened to be there for business at the time, while his two sisters and brother could claim Amsterdam as their place of birth. He went to sea after his father died of the Spanish Flu, and visited many places in the world I didn't even find out he did until decades after his death.

My mother traveled for her job in advertising. The summer after my father died, she signed me up to hike from the southern tip of the Netherlands to Luxembourg. At sixteen I took the train to Skopje, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and hitchhiked the rest of the way to Athens, Greece with a 21-year-old girlfriend.
"No one will ever take away the memories you collect on your travels," she said.

In Palma, de Majorca one Spring, in my early twenties, I promised myself I'd have a profession that would take me places, and working as a designer and artist did just that. I vowed I would not move from my present home before I finish a few books in the making. And then? Then I'll work the Writers' Conferences circuit, giving lectures and readings, teaching workshops. That's how I envision I'll get around.

In my dreams I see all different hues of blue in lagoons, and ache to paint the exotic beaches I haven't taken in, but for their appearance on television or in a movie. I sing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav on that hike to Luxembourg, and whisper "next year in Jeruzalem". I hear the banter at dinner parties with friends in Istanbul, Melbourne, Christchurch, and more places I haven't been to, but I don't really need to go there before I die, I just hope I'll be home before that.

Chris Guillebeau is the author of The Art of Non-Conformity.













This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

We Hide under Stones or in Bright Sunlight

 That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? . . . Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prompt by Jenny Blake

Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I’m passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.

We hide under stones or in bright sunlight

What was my parents' secret?

Why did I grow up in isolation? 
Who was the culprit? 
When and how would I find out? 

By writing, by digging deep and discovering. 

That's what I do.

My biggest challenge is to share my discoveries with the world. I don't share my discoveries with the world.

 

How can I make myself share my discoveries with the world?

 Tell you what, I started sharing on Day 1 by taking on this Trust30 Self-Reliance Challenge. Since today was a busy day and I'm tired after yesterday's purge, I'll take the hint and take it easy, take the night off and wait and see what tomorrow's prompt will be.

 Jenny Blake is the author of














This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

Secrecy Creates Schisms

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Today's prompt by Buster Benson

The world is powered by passionate people, powerful ideas, and fearless action. What’s one strong belief you possess that isn’t shared by your closest friends or family? What inspires this belief, and what have you done to actively live it?

Where I grew up, your conviction had to be stronger than belief. "If" was for children and belief reserved for fairy tales, Sinterklaas and religion. Where I come from, a sentence started with "I believe..." often triggers the response, "You can do that on your own time," or "Believing you can do inside the church." In other words, you've got to know something for sure. It's about semantics, about the meaning of language. In my mother tongue I won't say "I believe" that secrecy creates problems. I will state that it does and I can without holding back do the same in my second language.

Secrecy creates a schism in families and between friends.

While my father did not communicate with his only surviving sister, her husband and two daughters, nor with his only son, the man whom I wouldn't meet until 1993, when I was 37, and he 69, just two years younger than my father when he died in 1969, my mother did not communicate with hers either. 

Dense what? Early manuscript 1980

The wife of my mother's eldest brother ignored the schism. Since they lived up north, as far removed from family and friends as we, there was nothing to lose, only to gain. They visited us once at the farmhouse in the fields near Allardsoog. The crayons and sketchbook they chose to bring for me, my aunt's inspired conversations with my father —about art and the Bible?— were good for a truce.  The next time I saw them, they fetched me at our less isolated farmhouse near the hunebed of Steenbergen for an overnight stay at their home in the peat territory of Groningen. My very first sleep-over at age eleven. Their huge house towered between the peat cutters' sod huts, the wind blew under the eves, the guest room was cold and incredibly clean, there were no other children, no toys, no children's books, no photographs of family members as far as I can remember.

After my father died, my mother's elder sister, a spinster, and the younger one with husband and child, showed up, as did another brother with his wife. The third brother was missing, his boyish figure cut out of the line-up of six children. Why? I did not know. 

At times my father had camp syndrome induced anxiety attacks. He would hold me and share his anguish. During these episodes, my mother was the enemy, and not allowed near the two of us. What happened to my father was more of less clear. He had been terrorized and was tormented by re-living moments of fear, anger and guilt. 

What was my parents' secret? Why did I grow up in isolation? Who was the culprit? When and how would I find out? By writing, by digging deep and discovering. That's what I do.

What remains is sharing his story, her story, my story; resolve the mystery. My hope is that this will close the wounds. My conviction is that it's easier to live with scars than with secrets.

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Changing Tack from Amstelodamum to Outhouse

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. The force of character is cumulative. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today's prompt by Liz Danzico

If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tracks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? 

Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.

Today I wake up thinking about yesterday, and how my parents and I left Amsterdam, and about the things we left behind us in that flat on the Ceintuurbaan, only a block from the Amstel where I learned how to skate on natural ice that winter of 1962 when even the river that gave Amsterdam its name —for it was the dam in the Amstel that helped create Amstelodamum— froze over and my father stood shivering in his Monty Coat, named after a general during WWII, he told me when he buttoned my own miniature version of his, and knotted my scarf under my chin and would have plugged my ears with cotton balls if only my mother would have let him, but she, the Amazon on skates, had no fear of cold, she, nineteen years younger than my Papa who was born in the Century before last, how is that possible you wonder, I have such a youthful countenance, well thank you, I'll take that as a compliment, but to get back to the flat at the Ceintuurbaan ("ceinture" is French for belt, and the Dutch "ceintuurbaan" means circular railway which in our case was a tram that stopped in front of our house,

Ours was way nicer than this rough spot!

and one time my father said there's your aunt Sophie, your mother's eldest sister, she cleans toilets at the French Consulate, and my mother said that's not true, Sophie is the secretary to the Consul General, you know that very well, and my father grumbled something about a toilet bowl and that is one of the things that we left behind when we moved up north where we had not Water Closet, just a loo in the back of the barn, not even a toilet bowl, but a wooden box with a hole in the top that was covered with a wooden lid that you took off before sitting down, and I remember how smooth the seat was as if all the bottoms that had come before mine had sanded the wood and it sometimes made me wonder whether those people's behinds were like the finest sandpaper, but my mother said I did better not to think about the people whose bottoms had touched our numero hundred as she liked to call what my father said was nothing but an outhouse inside the barn.

This #Trust30 Self-Reliance challenge makes me change tac(k)tics, zigzagging through history, coming about!

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Fear of Sharing - Stow it Away

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Self Reliance Project I've embarked on requires me to respond to prompts given once a day for 30 days in a row

Today's prompt by Gwen Bell

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.

2. Write the story that has to be written.

Fifteen minutes to live? 

My first urge is to pack all my folders, all printed materials in a box, to schlep all the files and folders on the three Macs I work on to the shared Drop-box and dump. Dump everything in the file I share with my husband (is there enough space?). And then what? I'll be dead. Will he care enough, will he have the gumption to do what needs to be done to get the story out that needs to be written?

Needs to be written? Get out of here! It's all been written. I've been writing since 1980 when IDTV director Harry de Winter lend me one of the Brother typewriters that was used in his office on the Kloveniersburgwal in Amsterdam. I'd pick up the machine and a cassette at 5 p.m. on Friday and return it on Monday morning.

At the time I was working on an opera by Milhaud and Cocteau. Juri Voogd, the director introduced me to Harry in Café Frascati. Harry was curious, where did I come from, a Jewish girl in Amsterdam he had never met, that seemed impossible. So I told him I had lived in Amsterdam until age seven, when my parents and I moved out of town, back to nature.

In 1963 "up north" to Allardsoog could be likened to emigrating to Australia. Raised in isolation, in the middle of the fields, without relatives or friends, I thought we, my father and I, were the last Jews. Not unlike The Last of the Mohicans. My father's mother, after whom I was named was gassed in Auschwitz, so was my father's sister Beppie, her husband Simon, and their children. Whether these cousins were boys or girls, and how many there were, I never heard from him.

My father's brother Jacques was killed at sea, he was the cook on a Merchant Marine ship. My dad never talked about Jacques' wife and children, I gathered there were none. The times that Papa called his surviving sibling Marie on the phone, making contact just for me, he'd hang up after a few minutes. They didn't get along. My father wasn't on speaking terms with Maupie (short for Maurits) either. Maupie was my half-brother, my father's son from his first marriage to aunt Poldi. One of my dolls was a gift from her. I only knew handsome Maupie from a photograph.

The alarm just went off, I'm dead and I haven't told the story I need to write, no, that I need to share. Even the threat of death can't make me come to the point. How pathetic is that? 

For me, writing or creating something is not the problem. I've got loads of material that's already written, and believe me I did get to the point. 

Come back you hear! I'm not finished yet!

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Garden Design + Blogging Ghostwriters

Five years ago I created the Tuin van Mariënhof garden blog for my friends Jeannette and Meinoud. It all started when I learned that they planned to open the gate to the garden of their monumental estate de Mariënhof to paying visitors. All they had at the time was a simple flier. That they would attract many more interested people if they had an Internet presence was obvious. At the time I had just launched my website DutchessAbroad as well as my blog Hope Filled Jars. I caught the blogging bug and was ready to spread the luv.

An avid gardener myself I derived great joy from finding relevant information to link to the posts I created from their email, intermittently adding my own content. Since I posted all texts —whether derived from my friends' email messages (heavily edited by me) or my own material— in first person plural (we, the landlords of this formidable estate) I basically operated as ghostwriter.

While I loved every minute (or rather the many hours) spent on the content of the garden blog, I often wondered why hardly anyone responded. To be honest, there was only one person (a blogger on the isle of Texel) who engaged in a conversation with me, the writer. Were the readers on to something?

Per definition ghostwriters don't get credit for what they write, it's the client who attracts all attention. In a way the role of a ghostwriter is comparable to that of a landscape architect, or a professional gardener. An important difference however, is that the designer of the lay-out of the grounds will receive credit for his or her work. The same is true of the gardeners who maintain the yard, prune trees & bushes, and keep plants bug free. People are after all always happy to brag about their hired help, unless the help is a ghostwriter.

Comments are feathers on a blogger's hat, the art of blogging is after all dialogue. Visitors of a blog address their comments to the person who "speaks to them", the voice that tells the stories. Usually that's the blogger. If readers feel engaged, if they wish to lead others to their own blog or website, or if they just want to give a thumbs up, they'll respond by leaving a comment on the blog itself.

However, if there's a discrepancy between writer and the storyteller, visitors may send their comments directly to the latter's email address, rather than honoring the writer and the storyteller at the same time by leaving a comment on the blog. A paid-for ghostwriter will live with that knowledge, she after all pockets praise in another form. How well a blogger is paid depends on the value that's put on the writing.

Think it's a goldmine? Consider the fees published by Nicola for blog post subscriptions:
1 post per month $26
4 posts per month, once a week at $24 per post
8 posts per months, two per week at $22 per post

For me blogging about the Mariënhof was not a lucrative enterprise; it was a way to help my friends, and to maintain a virtual garden in my home country. Today their email messages (heavily edited by me) combined with my own contributions add up to 260 posts. Whether browsers are looking for a picture of a blossom of a hazelnut tree, or the architectural feature inspired by Acanthus, Google will take them to the blog of an estate in a hamlet in the countryside north of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

It's time for yours truly to focus on her own blogs and most important her book, about art, nuts and love in a cold climate.

As for readers enticing readers to post comments, I'll be working on the art of blogging/ dialogue here, at Write Day-in Day-Out, at Hope Filled Jars and occasionally at SheWrites or ExpatHAREM, and of course I'll be posting comments on blogs of participants of Dialogue2010 and other writers.