My Focus Is Lost or In It, I Am Lost? A Meditation, A Boy, and the Ocean.

A post card, my father kept. Mangapwani Beach,
Zanzibar

I was trying to describe my "process" to someone and it hit me that my spells and manic-like writing runs, almost become a sacred kind of possession. I tunnel in, and then a day or two will pass, I leave the writing alone , and then when I choose to go back and edit it, I stumble over some of my own words...shocked (not in arrogance at all) that I wrote the words. 

It reminds me of when I drive to a place and get there, but can't remember anything about the duration of time I drove. It's not pretty and it has pissed my husband off when I don't get enough sleep, or friends worry when I won't call back for hours, because I didn't even take a break to pee! I'm no genius, nor do I think I'm some prolific artist. I do however know, that my "best" --not blog material, but for  my actual novel(s)--work is always what comes out of those "word deliveries." 

The writing below isn't awe-inspiring, or shockingly well written, but it's an example of my literary strength: descriptions. I have plenty of work to do on story-development, multi-layered characters and my God, do I need to learn how to edit my own work better! I'm learning so much in such a short time! (Thank you, "Pablo" for all your editing and amazing patience.)

Below is an email sent to an Editor/literary friend.  It's a perfect example of my 
AD/HD-like loss of focus and simultaneously getting completely lost in focus. That sentence could honestly describe me and my creative side in ten words. What started as a short description about feelings regarding current events turned into a larger run-on-word purge about something I  involuntarily day-dreamed/visualized during a mediation. ***

Originally written on 3.23.2015

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This morning I meditated love and healing to the families of that German flight. My empathic heart takes such tragedies with a deep and sorrowful weight of loss and wasted souls.

But as all things that begin one way, so too my session inwardly morphed into a clear and nearly vicarious experience of a young boy (my father) on the Zanzibar beach of Tanzania.

My father -visibly angry having to leave
  the ocean to take a picture.

I (he) was running...I heard his jaw bouncing in my head, the contents of his lungs, giving and taking as he sped up gaining ground away from his sisters, all six of them. His feet, smacking against the sand warm and granular, then feeling colder, hard and packed-tight as he got nearer to the sea.

A woman, wrinkled and aged, was peeling wood under the shade of a tree near a cluster of palms. The rhythmic slicing sound of knife to tree limb a musical accompaniment to her shockingly high singing voice, chanting a Swahili hymn almost sounding like a cry or whine.

The aqua and white surf got larger as he slowed down to take in the tidal shift of surfaces. The ocean splashed up and around his entire body in short spurts and long sprays before he tucked his chin in union with a deep and held breath. He dove head first, arms swooping parallel up above his head to immerse in the sweet solitude of the sea's crashing silence. 

This was his quiet reprieve from the world's chaotic noises. His head breaking through water, and shaking off the cleansing sting of salt on skin. Even the sun shone in miniscule droplets on his wet and matted African hair, tight coils of black and rainbow reflections. And there he stayed, bobbing in his playground, escaping the tattered, petty world. He was alone and at one with nature's supreme mother.

Woa. Sorry. That wasn't supposed to happen. 

Shit! I'm late!

Thanks! More later, maybe!

You're the best! 
L
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*** I make note of this meditation more for my own posterity and documentation of my audacity or aggressive hope? On a piece of journal paper, I listed all that I was grateful for. (Like every time I meditate.) It's dated, and has the words: "Thank you to The HuffPost and Arianna Huffington for the doors they are about to open for me," This is particularly ridiculous because: 1. I had only sent the query for the contributor job at 10am. It was 11:00am. An editor didn't write me back until three days later. And 2, on this day, I felt an amazing presence or feeling of my father. The first ever. That's right...He's been dead thirteen years, and nada. Even random friends at his funeral "felt him." but not me, until Monday, March 23rd. 2015. Before I began what would be the beginning of a new phase for me: in writing and meditation.