Mount Orégano

You may have heard about “writing in the zone.” It’s a creative state where the writer or artist becomes one with the work, in the flow, totally focused. Athletes can experience this, too.

Having been a writer for a while, I can say that this rarely happens. Most of us work distracted, even if we’re trying not to multitask. The computer advises you about a program update, the dog wants your attention, you’re out of coffee, and what’s that funny smell?

Still, it can happen. I remember one time vividly. Actually, what I remember is when it ended. I’d been working on the novel Interference, which takes place on a distant planet called Pax. I felt like I was there, living in the odd and wonderful sights, the cacophony of sounds, and the scents that carried meaning.

Then I looked up. Where was I? Not on Pax. So what planet was this? A blue sky, an oxygen atmosphere, and lots of clear signs of homo sapiens dominance. Yeah, this was Earth. In fact, pretty soon I recognized the city, the building, and the year, and remembered what I was doing there.

I still had one wisp of a question. Why was I on Earth? Why not somewhere else or some other time? The answer was obvious — but not entirely satisfying. Do I really have to be here?

Here’s a bit of my family lore. When my great-grandmother was a young girl, her family fell on hard times, and she had to get a job. They were living in Milwaukee, and Pabst Brewery had recently won a blue ribbon at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, the Chicago World’s Fair. The brewery was tying blue silk ribbons on every bottle.

That was her new job. (In those days, children could work in factories that made beer.) After her first week, tying countless ribbons, she got her pay envelope. She could tell by feel that it contained only one small coin. A dime! She’d worked so hard and wanted to be so proud of the help she could give her family, but she’d earned only ten cents.

She cried all the way home on the trolley and gave the envelope to her mother, who opened it. The coin was a ten-dollar gold piece.

The disaster of Hurricane Ida in Louisiana and other southern states reminds me of an unexpected heartbreak I witnessed in 2018.

I was traveling, and on September 10, I was in Michigan eating breakfast at a Best Western motel. I was up very early, and everyone else in the breakfast room was obviously a tradesman: construction workers and truck drivers. These were strong, tough men used to going from job to job and working with their hands.

Television screens on the walls played the CNN morning news, and at one point the news ran a segment on Hurricane Florence. The mammoth storm was about to hit the Carolinas coast and cause catastrophic damage.

The room became silent and every man watched somberly. On their next job, these men, or their friends and coworkers, might be called on to haul supplies and to repair and rebuild the storm damage. They looked grim, not joyful, at the prospect of plentiful work. 

Their jobs would bring them face to face with loss and grief, and the future could be hard on their hearts as well as their hands. They’d seen it before, and they were going to see again.

Dinosaurs lived on the far side of the galaxy. That is, the Sun orbits around the galaxy’s center, and it’s a long trip, about 250 million years. Dinosaurs — in particular, the big Jurassic critters like tyrannosaurs — lived about 166 to 66 million years ago, so they lived in a different neighborhood of the galaxy.

Here’s the cool part. Because the stars move around in relationship to each other as well as in their orbits, the neighboring stars are different over time. In that way, space travel is possible to distant stars if the travelers are patient and have generation ships (presuming these creatures have generations like human beings). They can hop from star to star, sometimes pausing to rest, and meanwhile the stars will take them to new parts of the galaxy.

So, it just might be vaguely possible that Earth was visited over on the far side of the galaxy by slow travelers, and they took Earth faunae with them as they continued on, bringing them to new homes. Dinosaurs in space! Land of the Lost without a dimensional portal!

Or perhaps they took a different Jurassic lineage, and there’s a Planet of the Turtles out there somewhere.

True story. Almost 25 years ago, when my now-husband and I were planning our wedding, we thought it would be good if our parents met ahead of time. We invited them to come to our home for dinner.

I knew my parents and my future in-laws well. The men would do whatever their wives told them to do — but the women had very different ideas about punctuality. So I told my mother to come at 6:30 p.m., and I told my future mother-in-law to come at 4:30 p.m.

Everyone arrived, as expected, at 5:30 on the dot.

Creativity tends to be associated with imaginative artistic creation like writing a novel or song, or painting a picture, but I think that’s much too narrow. 

Raising children requires creativity: a parent may be called upon to solve the problems and fulfil the needs of a three-year-old with whatever is on hand (three-year-olds have little patience), using a lot of imagination and improvisation. A business owner faces unpredictable frustrations and opportunities. Cooks, teachers, and engineers, among other workers, have to innovate in tiny and huge ways all the time to create new products and outcomes and re-create old products and outcomes out of changing resources. These roles and many others demand creativity.

We can create beauty, justice, order, value, love, and solutions. Creating anything takes effort and brings joy. The process of creation also changes who you are as a person, maybe a little, maybe a lot. It reveals life.

How will you create today?

Overall, I see pretty well. I use glasses, but even without them I could manage to read or walk down the street if I had to.

However, the vision in my right eye is a little poorer than the left eye due to minor age-related problems with the vitreous humor (the jelly-like substance inside the eyeballs) and a cataract. I can see well, but the difference is noticeable.

Despite that, I see better and more clearly with both eyes than with just the left eye alone. The right eye still has something worthwhile to give — proof again that contributions of smaller size or lesser quality can be valuable. It all adds up.