I am not a natural entrepreneur

October 13, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

But my father is. Which may be why I am not one. Or, rather, why I never wanted to be one.

Do you know how long and how hard entrepreneurs work? My dad was still pulling all-nighters well into his fifties.

Do you know how much entrepreneurs carry on their shoulders? For a year after high school, I worked for my dad’s fledgling company, and since I was daughter, as well as employee, I knew those times he was one day away from not making payroll. He always worked it out and found backers, but that’s a lot of stress for one person who’s simultaneously building a product, managing the people making and selling the product, finding new markets, taking care of current customers, pushing innovation, coming up with new ideas so there will be more products in the future, traveling to spread the word, wondering whether they’re making money fast enough to keep the investors happy, making sure that the deals made are solid enough for both the near and the far future, all while doing things like spending time with family and friends (who add their own stresses, as well as joys). Entrepreneurs are superheroes. Seriously.

Their ability to maintain hope and determination in the face of rejection and long odds is amazing.

I like to have a job I can complete. I like to have work I don’t have to worry about after I leave the office. I like clear expectations and reachable goals. I like to have my evenings free. If I can swing it, I like to have my late-afternoons free.

But, alas. I am too much like my father: I have ideas that inspire and delight and confound me, and in pursuing them, I’ve become a writer who is independently publishing her work.

In other words: I’ve become an entrepreneur.

This year, I’ve started two companies and brought two writing projects to ever-nearing fruition. I’ve got this Kickstarter thing happening for As Real As It Gets (a picture book about an adopted or foster child who yells, “You’re not my real mother!”) (less than two weeks to see whether we’ll make it!), which is a constant dance of pitching, rejection, acceptance, and learning. So, so much learning. And the thing about mistakes is that you can only see them after you’ve made a decision and acted on it, not before. I am constantly anxious, yet still a little hopeful. Committed to moving forward, mistakes and all.

Given that there are 11 days to go and we aren’t even a third of the way funded, it feels like there is a good chance we won’t make our goal for the Kickstarter, which means that we don’t get any of that money, which means that we have to find other methods for getting this book published. Because we will get this book published.

If every person who told us they think the book is amazing and asked us to let them know when it’s published (not to mention the organizations that do the same), contributed to the crowd funding campaign, we’d be set. But they don’t. Is it because you have to be a little entrepreneurial to contribute to a Kickstarter campaign? I don’t know, but we’re working as hard as we can to get the word out to anyone who might be just that little bit of entrepreneurial. Or to any adoptive or foster parents who might be just a little bit desperate for books that address their kids’ experiences.

Speaking of which, Amanda and I will be interviewed by Grand Rapids community powerhouse Shelley Irwin on the WGVU Morning Show on Friday (I’ll post a link once it’s on the web).

So check us out, if you haven’t already. Spread the link around if you haven’t already.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1367769515/as-real-as-it-gets-a-picture-book-for-older-adopte?ref=nav_search

And pray for me. I’m not a natural entrepreneur and I hate asking people to do things for me … but I’m learning.

Exorcising High School

August 18, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ 8 Comments

My daughter started high school today — obsessing about her clothes, her hair, her make-up, the friends she’d made the night before, the plan for lunch, whether she’d get lost, whether it was actually true that she wouldn’t need her textbooks on the first day and that teachers are lenient about getting to class on time the first week, and probably a host of other things she wouldn’t admit out loud.

As a wordsmith, I chose my words of encouragement with care:
Set the bar low. Just live to the end of the day!

Because I know she’ll do fine. She is her mother’s daughter, freaking out about stuff ahead of time so she’s ready for it when it comes (whatever “it” is).

But I’m remembering the thirteen-year-old from 1981 who started high school without the benefit of a launch day that would take her to all her classes before that high-pressure first day, without the benefit of seeing all the kids and what they were wearing and carrying. That poor sweet girl, coming from a weird and tiny Christian school with its graduating class of seven, all girls, two cousin pairs, four of from the same church. Whose grade had been the oldest one in the school for three years. Who only knew two other kids in this school of hundreds. Who knew no boys her own age. Who bought her own clothes with her own money from the local consignment shop, with a very experimental fashion sense, except for jeans, which (according to the weird school’s subculture) had to be boys’ jeans. Who still wore pigtails in her hair. Who went to high school that first day with a doubled Loblaw’s bag (plastic grocery store bag) in which to carry her books.

Should I mention that she went to a public school that had a reputation as the snobbiest school in the city, even worse than the private schools?

She certainly considered it a victory to live to the end of the first day of high school.

Of course, this sweet girl was me. My daughter starting grade nine is bringing it all back.

I’m having flashbacks to that first day, standing stock still in the central hall, students streaming around me, jostling me, my nerdy Loblaw’s bags (while everyone else had backpacks or school bags — oh, the horror) cutting into my fingers, on the verge of tears because I had no idea where the science wing was and I was too terrified and mortified to ask anyone.

To that day when my choir teacher made an appointment for me with a guidance counselor because the altos had been making such obvious and loud fun of me in class that he’d heard it. I hadn’t wanted to deal with it at all, so I said it didn’t bother me. It did.

To that day when a boy who smoked a wide variety of things in what we called Cancer Alley turned my entire desk around in history class so I had to face him while he told me a made-up and obscene dream he’d had about me.

To that day when someone complained about me being at a party because it brought the stature of the party down — to my face. And I had neither the confidence nor the social capital to laugh it off. Because in the hideousness of high school, it was true.

To that day when someone yelled to me, “Nice ass. Shame about the face.”

Other people had it worse, I know. I was never physically threatened, and I’m grateful I didn’t grow up in the digital age with cyber bullying. But oh, did I hate high school.

Now, I had friends, and I was on the swim team and in clubs (nerdy clubs), and I laughed, and I skipped school to go for bike rides or to the mall a block away. There was my birthday buddy who took me to her house once for an authentic Chinese dinner. There was the girl whose uncle was in the mob in New York City (he really was). There was the druggie girl who liked to tell me stories of her exploits (probably because I had no competing stories). There were the two boys who would practice with the girls’ swim team, so I got to know them enough to flirt with them. There was the girl who would invite me to her cottage in the summer. High school wasn’t all skin that felt permanently red from blushing, and clenched teeth.

I’ll still occasionally dip into a daydream in which I get famous enough to be invited back to NTCI to be a graduation speaker, and I speak exclusively to those kids who had a bad time. Which, now that I’m an adult and I’ve talked to more people, I realize was most of the kids; even if someone looked like they had it all together, inside they felt just as awkward and terrified and self-absorbed as I did. Ah, perspective.

Thank you for indulging me while I got all that out in the open. I feel better now.

Want to engage in a little high school horror story one-up-manship? The comments are yours.

Decision Fatigue

July 28, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ 4 Comments

Right about now is when I’m thinking longingly of being traditionally published. Going indie and choosing myself and all that is fine and good, but now I’m down to the final 10% of work, the final 10% of decisions to be made. And anyone who’s ever moved knows that the final 10% is the worst.

I am generally so decisive that it’s a discipline for me to curb it so the less decisive don’t feel railroaded. But there’s a limit. And I’ve hit it. I didn’t understand half of what I had to fill in to fully register my ISBN with my title. In fact, I may have abandoned it half-way through, which means I have to go back to it.

And I haven’t even started trying to upload my novel yet. Asking for help doesn’t always solve things; I accidentally started a ridiculous argument between two fellow indie publishers after I asked a technical question in a Facebook group.

I was going to talk about how good traditionally published authors have it, but they have to deal with constant changes in their publishing house and editors leaving and the new editor not liking your work, not the mention feeling like you should be getting help with marketing but you’re not, which is probably akin to my getting an epidural 28 hours into labor with my son and still being able to feel everything. Not cool.

So all authors have it tough, just in different ways.

The lesson there is a good one: it’s a fiction that that person over there who looks like they have it all together, actually has an easy life. Don’t let yourself believe that lie.

That woman with the sweet voice and temperament had to leave her abusive family at seventeen and figure out how to make it on her own. That man with the great career and adorable family was sexually abused as a child. And cancer eventually hits every family and friend group — talk about decision fatigue. At least I’m not having to decide what treatment to pursue against something in my own body that’s trying to kill me. Or my child’s body.

I started out this post, admittedly, whiny. And now I have that glorious thing: perspective. Which means I have energy to go forth and make ever fussier decisions.

But not yet. I’ll be spending most of the morning thinking about someone I love who is getting a mastectomy today. Which, for all the kidding around we’ve done lately about being one-boobed, is too serious for a gif.

This is my punishment

July 22, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ 1 Comment

A skilled and generous writer and teacher, John Vorhaus, sent me his soon-to-be-published book (How to Live Life) for me to read and spread the word about. I’d really been looking forward to this book, because he’s funny, and in his more recent essays for Writer Unboxed, he’s brought some moving truths, not just about writing but about life. Which is my favorite way to receive truth: wrapped up in something that makes me smile. I’m all disarmed from the smiling and then WHAMMO. Truth.

Vorhaus was a workshop leader at the Writer Unboxed UnConference I went to last November. He led the session on Failing Big (my notes for it are 1/3 of the way down the page here) and what he said there finally kicked me out of the disappointment spiral I’d been wallowing in for a couple of years. He also taught me how to play poker (a kind of poker I can’t remember the name of anymore, which is rather par for the course — in our first conversation he teased me for not knowing the make of car I’d just driven halfway across the country). He’s funny in person and he’s funny in writing and I knew that this life advice book would make me smile. And it did.

But even before breaking into Hollywood, I knew that teaching something was a great way to learn it. I’ve used this strategy many times in my life to increase my understanding of songwriting, poker, comedy, creativity, sailing (that was dangerous), archery (that was worse) and more. I have come to believe that an inspired learner makes a good teacher. So that’s the real source of my authority, such as it is: my gape-mouthed wonder at the fact of my existence, and my desire to know it more fully.

This book, then, is an intensely selfish exercise.

But I don’t think it’s all that pretentious, not really. No more than life itself is pretentious. I mean, here we are in the midst of this incredible, unbelievable experience, and something tells us that it should be even more incredible and more unbelievable. We should be… I don’t know… painting pictures, writing poems, staring at the stars, communing with God, digging life’s mysteries, getting down to the isness of it all.

I love that attitude (particularly because this is a non-religiously-affiliated book, but there’s room in here for people, like me, who are communers with God). But then he did something that made me feel crabby and rebellious: he left spaces for me to write my responses to the questions he was asking. Many spaces. Many questions.

Make a list.

You’ll hear me say that a lot, make a list. I’m a huge fan of lists because lists…

Let us create without consequence
Give us hard data we can use right away
Are emotionally neutral; they don’t judge
Yield much information for little effort
Put things where we can see them

This was not going to be a book that was both funny and deep and that I could enjoy reading and adding to the general thoughts in my mind. This book was going to make me actually do the work. I know myself. I know my process. I know that I have to write things down to truly work through them. Which is why I didn’t want to.

So, as punishment, I’m going to do it here, in public.

[Just so you know, I did absolutely everything else possible before doing this: the laundry, the household filing and bill paying, the dinner making, the nagging of children, the ferrying of children, the buying of toner, the returning of the video (yes, we are pleasantly old fashioned enough to still rent DVDs sometimes). I did filing, people.]

1. What wouldn’t I do if I had six months to live:

clean my house
cut down on beer or cookies
play so much online Boggle
go to “mandatory” mass parent meetings at school

2. There was a question about externalizing motivation to help one overcome inertia. I’ve tried some — I like Jerry Seinfeld’s method of X-ing off each day he’s written, and seeing the line of Xs motivates him to keep the line going. That works okay. For awhile. I think I need another person to hold me to a timeline. I’ve been working on a collaborative project and we have meetings, and I need to have things done for our meetings, and I do them. I don’t get stuck in freak-out mode or find other things to do. Like filing.

At this point, Vorhaus brings out some big guns: the centrality of acceptance to this process of growth.

Acceptance is called for here, the sense that whatever emotions we experience are fine, completely allowable, totally cool, no matter what they are. Without acceptance, we are afraid to approach ourselves. With it, we can appraise ourselves openly and honestly, without freaking out. …

I see me, and it’s all okay.

Just to be clear, acceptance doesn’t mean surrender. To accept means to process information with emotional neutrality. Acceptance provides an objective perspective where nothing is made worse by the editorial judgment that this really sucks.

How wonderful to be free from the feeling of this really sucks. You can be. It’s a choice you get to make. Simply seek to acquire the habit of saying, and thinking, “I accept.”

3. Pick something on your list above and dive deeper — if you tell yourself nasty things about yourself because of that thing, try to push past them with acceptance.

I wouldn’t play so much online Boggle because it doesn’t add anything to my life — it doesn’t add connection or knowledge or feed my imagination. I’m hiding and anesthetizing. If I had 6 mos to live, I’d dive in, I wouldn’t space out so much. I like the word games, I really do. There is a real satisfaction to them. But I go for the easy rush and choose it way too often and then don’t do things I actually like better.

4. “Got any questions you’d like to ask yourself? Just ask. Just answer. Explore. Don’t judge.”

Why do I keep falling into mindless activity? I used to be a horrible slob. Impressively messy. Every fall, when one mouse would come into our house, it would come to my teenage bedroom because there were so many piles of things for it to hide into. As I got older, I liked it when I made things clean and neat, but didn’t care to do the daily practices to keep things that way. And then I had children. There was so much chaos and overwhelm in my mind and in my life that I couldn’t stand a chaotic home environment, and presto: I am now very neat. So I know I can go from non-effort to regular-effort. Why won’t I do so for the practices I care so much about (writing, prayer, dance)? It’s like I’m still in teenage-mode: occasional and impressive outbursts followed by accidental ignoring followed by guilty ignoring. That is a question I imagine it’ll take me this entire book to figure out. So I’m not going to try now.

5. Name some things you know you want, but rarely dare to say out loud.

I never, ever, ever say this out loud, but I’d like to drop a little weight to make dancing easier.
I want people to read my books.
I want to be a better mother.

THERE. That’s chapter one. I’m not saying I’m going to blog my way through every chapter of the book. In fact, I won’t. But I will finish the book and I’ll make my lists and I’ll report back to you. I’d thought that declaring my word of the year to be PRACTICE meant that I’d improve my practices. Instead, it’s shaping up to be about exploring why I resist doing just that. Which may be more helpful in the long run.

What if you’re the one in the ditch?

July 14, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

One day an expert in religious law … wanted to justify his actions, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus replied with a story: “A Jewish man was traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and he was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him up, and left him half dead beside the road. [A priest and a Temple assistant crossed the road to avoid the man.] Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him….
“Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by bandits?” Jesus asked.
The man replied, “The one who showed him mercy.” (Luke 10:25-37)

The Good Samaritan. We often read this famous story as a call for religious people not to be so self-important that they refuse to help those in need, even when it’s inconvenient.

But that’s only one way to read it.

* * * *

Our expert in the law understands the use of stories in making a theological point, so as he’s listening, he’s figuring out:

Who is the hero of this story?
Who am I in this story?

Although Jesus’s first two examples (the priest and the temple assistant who pass by the man in the ditch) are the ones most culturally allied to our expert, they are definitely not the heroes. The hero is clearly the Samaritan — the despised one, the one our legal expert crosses to the other side of the road to avoid even being near. This might make our expert uncomfortable enough.

But “Who is my neighbor?” is the question that started the story.

“Who is the neighbor to the man attacked by bandits?”

“The one who showed him mercy.”

Which makes the answer to the original question: “Your neighbor is the Samaritan.”

Our expert is the man in the ditch, broken, bruised, in need of help. He is not the hero, but the one who needs saving. That is probably not who he was expecting to be.

That’s not who many of us expect to be in the story, either. But what if we are?

What if you are the one who is hurt and broken and needy?

A painting of The Good Samaritan by Dinah Roe Kendall — The Good Samaritan by Dinah Roe Kendall

Then your neighbor is the one you think is gross, the one you think you are morally superior to, the one who is the butt of your jokes. That neighbor is the one who will help you, the who will show you mercy and make it possible for you to receive the healing you need.

Which makes the story of The Good Samaritan a whole lot more uncomfortable to live out — but then, Jesus doesn’t tell these stories to help us justify our actions. He tells them to challenge our self-justifications.

Images That Haunt

June 16, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

This is one of the art displays at The Heidelberg Project in Detroit. On the face of it, it’s a pile of shoes topped by a doll riding a plastic horse on springs. It’s a pile of discarded goods. Some might call it garbage. Or silliness.

But after last summer’s trip to Washington, D.C., all I could think about were its parallels to this other pile of shoes.

4,000 pairs of shoes recovered from a single concentration camp in 1944

This is a display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Here is how the museum’s website describes it:

When Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek camps, they discovered huge mounds of shoes, hundreds of thousands of pairs, but very few living prisoners. At the sight of these inanimate witnesses, veteran CBS News correspondent Edward R. Murrow commented, “One shoe, two shoes, a dozen shoes, yes. But how can you describe several thousand shoes?”

The 4,000 shoes displayed in the Permanent Exhibition are on loan from the State Museum of Majdanek in Lublin, Poland, and represent a tiny fraction of those found at Majdanek in 1944.

Each pair of those shoes had an owner. Each owner was murdered. But before they were murdered, the Nazis mined them for every item of monetary value: clothes, eyeglasses, hairbrushes, suitcases, shoes, even their hair. Depending on how long the Nazis had been in charge where the victim lived, the shoes would be worth barely anything, since the Nazis closed Jewish shops and then forbade Jews from shopping in non-Jew establishments, so some of those shoes might have been patched and patched again, or “resoled” with newspaper found on the street (since Jews often weren’t allowed to buy newspapers, either). And who got the task of taking apart the shoes for any usable leather? Concentration camp prisoners who hadn’t yet been killed.

In a building full of sobering images, this was one of the most striking.

And I couldn’t help but see echoes in that more colorful pile of shoes at Detroit’s Heidelberg Project. In forgotten neighborhoods like so many in Detroit, people have been discarded by their elected leaders, used as lightning rods to ramp up racial fears and to perpetuate isolation. As we’ve seen in our newsfeeds in the last couple of years, people in these neighborhoods are more likely to be killed by police officers for offenses that might get a white person in a different neighborhood a stern warning. Violence is everywhere in many forgotten neighborhoods, whether due to drugs and gangs, domestic violence, sex trafficking.

It doesn’t escape my attention that the same word is used for the narrower and narrower neighborhoods European Jews were forced into and narrower and narrower inner-city neighborhoods that poor African-Americans live in (and some have argued, were forced into by government policies): ghetto.

Their lives are as valued as a pile of discarded shoes.

Which haunts me.

What Time Is It?

June 2, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

My husband and I recently went to Detroit, and toured a powerful art installation called The Heidelberg Project.

In 1967, 12-year-old Tyree Guyton watched his city burn. In the aftermath of the Detroit riots, thriving communities rapidly became segregated urban ghettos characterized by poverty, neglect and despair.

In 1986, Guyton took a stand against the decay, crime and apathy in the neighborhood where he was raised. Using discarded objects from everyday life, he created a festival of color and meaning that has been described as a “Ghetto Guggenheim.” Using vacant lots and abandoned houses as his canvas, he transformed an entire block into a world-famous outdoor art environment and a thought-provoking statement on the plight of inner city communities.

As we walked around the couple of blocks, my attention kept being drawn by all the painted clock faces: different shapes and sizes, each with a different time painted on it, some alone, some in groups, nailed up to and painted on and leaning against every kind of surface, right-side-up and sideways and upside-down.

clocks against a wall at The Heidelberg Project

My husband walked up to the artist and asked him about it. Being an artist, Guyton answered in more questions.

What time is it? Where are you in time?

Guyton has been studying Plato and Albert Einstein and their writing about time.

Time is energy. It’s all about energy. What has time done to you?

As we walked, the same phrases played over and over in my mind:

It’s always time.

The time is now.

The time is now to do whatever it is that you so want to do. The time is now to seek change, whether personal or societal. It’s always time to do something that needs to be done.

And on a more personal level, the time is now to put in the work to realize my writing dreams. I need to put in the time.

And this one. This one cuts me to the quick.

O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?
    How long will you look the other way?
How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul,
    with sorrow in my heart every day?
    How long will my enemy have the upper hand?
(Psalm 13:1-2, NLT)

Because this is/was a forgotten neighborhood, and represents all the other neighborhoods abandoned by the powers that be. When will it be their time?

So, for me, the clock faces were rallying cry and lamentation, plea and accusation.

What is it time to do in your life? In your corner of the world?

The good that I should do, yadda, yadda, yadda

May 19, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ Leave a comment

There is a dance step that I love. It’s part of a dance we did for the entire season of Lent at a church I used to go to. We faced forward in a line, linked to each other, one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of you, the other hand on the hand that’s on your shoulder. And we walked together: three steps forward and one step back. It’s a simple yet effective mirror of the Christian life, which is never just unrelenting improvement.

Except that sometimes it feels like three steps back and one step forward is more accurate.

I’m having a three steps back moment, and I’m hoping that writing about it will give me the push I need to actually do the good I know I should do.

I am not what one would call “a good sleeper.” According to my mother, I didn’t sleep through the night until I was at least two and have many middle-of-the-night memories during my childhood and adolescence. I still wake in the middle of the night more nights than I don’t. On a good night, I fall back asleep right away, but if I hear a noise, or have something to worry about, or (apologies if this is TMI) it’s the few days before my period, or a dream left me unsettled, or I start thinking, or I’m on vacation and not in my own bed — any of these will mean at least an hour of wakefulness, if not the loss of sleep for the rest of the night.

Incidentally, this is how I survived my own daughter not sleeping through the night consistently until she was six — we had similar nighttime schedules.

It’s also how I avoided recognizing how much my depression was messing with my sleep: my wakefulness was worse than usual, but not terribly unusual.

All that is to say that the whole topic of sleep can make me anxious enough that it interrupts my ability to fall asleep, so I usually nod off by distracting myself. For years, it was late-night TV. Then we took the TV out of our bedroom, and it became youtube videos on my laptop or on the iPad. And then I went on my beautiful antidepressant, and staying asleep became more common, as did falling back asleep after I awoke in the middle of the night.

But still I kept with the laptop, even though I’d grown to kind of hate it. It doesn’t help me fall back asleep when I wake up in the middle of the night, because by then my husband is next to me, and I don’t want to wake him up with the light or the noise. And I began to wonder whether it was, in fact, a bad sleep habit that made it more likely that I’d wake in the night. So I fired up the Kindle and tried reading (I used the Kindle so I didn’t have to have the light on).

It was an immediate improvement. Immediate.

I fell asleep easily and stayed asleep. My sleep was more restful. I got more reading done. It was glorious. I raved about it, swearing that I’d never go back.

And then, one night, I didn’t have a new book lined up. So I went back to the laptop. I’ve flirted with the Kindle since then, but haven’t continued it as a habit. Even though I know it’s better for me. Even though I actually like it better than the laptop. The lazy laptop monkey on my back is hard to shake.

Paul got it so right:

I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate (Romans 7:15, NLT).

I’ve got no nifty solution, and there has been, as of yet, no overcoming. I’m in the midst of this fight. But I vow that, tonight, I’m going to keep the laptop downstairs, and I’m going to read the book on legal issues for self-publishers. Maybe this time I’ll be able to keep the better habit going.

Do you have any good habits you’re avoiding?
Feel free to confess them here so we can do the self-recriminating together.

When You’re President of Potkettleblackistan

March 17, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

I went with a friend to a writer’s conference — his first, which means it was his first time saying to himself and the world that he is a writer (in other words, a big deal!). Afterwards, we were talking about his two projects (not a man who does things by halves). He was asking a lot of questions about method, as if there were a magic method that would make the writing smooth and the manuscript finishable and require no false starts.

That characterization may sound mean, but the “is there any way to make this less overwhelming” impulse is strong and entirely human.

My answers were very unsatisfying. Because there are a multitude of ways to write and ways to start and to organize, but (unless you are the special-est special sunflower there is) none of them guarantee diddly-squat. Especially since my friend’s process for similar work is quite loose and involves a fair bit of discovery along the way, I suspect that his process for writing these books will be similar.

Can I confess something to you? I was feeling just the wee-est bit smug that, at this stage, having been writing with the goal of publication for 11 years, I’d never get blocked by the question of how to start.

Which is how I became the President of Potkettleblackistan.

Remember with me all the way back to December 31, 2014. My word for the coming year was PRACTICE…

Both in the sense of the things I want to work on: prayer practice, writing practice, dance practice. And in the sense that “we call it practice because we’re not that good at it yet” (something a dear friend who is a spiritual director said once, a couple of years ago, and I can’t get out of my head). So I will both go harder after my various practices, and be accepting of myself when I’m not that good at it. I will practice both patience and impatience, simultaneously (something one of the presenters at my November writing conference said).

So how am I doing on that?

Not very well. You see, I can’t get a handle on a time that will work for me — not because I’ve actually tried a number of different times, but because I can’t wrap my mind around a time. As if there were a magical time that I might choose that would make practicing my practices smooth and easy and consistent. [sigh]

I repent, dear friend, of my slight smugness. There is no way ahead that will solve all the issues in either of our writing or practices ahead of time. There is only the commitment to dive in and not abandon things when they get messy and require adjustment.

Perhaps now, after all this irritating self-awareness, I will actually start practicing my practices. And to give me a push, I’ll be reading my friend Ed Cyzewski’s latest, Pray, Write, Grow: Cultivating Prayer and Writing Together.

How about you? Are you a Cabinet Member in Potkettleblackistan?
Feel free to share in the comments.

From child bride to American doctor

March 3, 2015 ~ Natalie Hart ~ 2 Comments

I have nothing to despise. The whole universe is a lesson to me. — from a letter to Theodosia Carpenter, December 26, 1881

Here are some of the things Indian woman Anandibai Joshi didn’t despise, but clearly could have:

Becoming a child bride at the age of 9 and moving far away from her home.
Living among people who were not of her caste or of her cultural group and being unable to eat food prepared by them, not even when they’d freshly arrived somewhere and hadn’t yet unpacked their belongings, so she often went hungry.
Being openly mocked and spit at for doing such radical things as: taking a walk by herself, dressing according to her customs, conversing with her husband in public, being educated.
Being beaten by her husband/teacher for taking time off of her studies or for cooking instead of studying.
When she was 14, her son dying after only 10 days of life.
Being rejected by everyone because she intended to go to America to get medical training.
Enduring set-back after set-back in her plans to come to America.

All this by the time she was 17.

Another example of her thought:

“I wish to preserve my manner and customs unless they are detrimental to my health. Can I live in your country as if it were my own, and what will it cost me? When I think over the sufferings of women in India in all ages, I am impatient to see the Western light dawn as the harbinger of emancipation. I am not able to say what I think; but no man or woman should depend upon another for maintenance and necessaries. Family discord and social degredation will never end till each depends upon herself.”

And this painful truth, inspired both by her countrymen and by the Christian missionaries she met in India:

“I rely on God, and do not seek to know who are his individual messengers to me. Take any religion you like and you will find that its founder was a holy man. Go to his followers and you will find holy men the exception.”

I am writing at The Mudroom today about this pioneer. Please join me. It’ll give you good background for when I write about her complicated marriage next week 🙂

* Quotes above are from Anandibai Joshi’s letters to American woman, Theodosia Carpenter, as quoted in The Life of Anandabai Joshee, a kinswoman of the Pundita Rambai, by Caroline Wells Healey Dall, published in 1888, by Roberts Brothers.

Natalie Hart

my thoughts about life, the Bible, and the books I'm writing

Humbling