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http:// --> Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Local Issues Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Galleries Video Readers Polls O-Zone Online Games Movie Preview Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad Top Galleries: January 12, 2007 Trust (and love) that blank page By John Darling For the Tidings John Darling Archives Friday December 1st Friday December 15th Friday December 29th Friday January 12th At this New Year's Eve party, after the dancing and champagne, we're sitting and someone says, let's go round the circle and say (I knew right then the party was going into a big shift) what was the best and worst of last year. So much of the "best" was how friends and family showed up and cared during the hard times, they say — and so much of the worst was how one wanted more from the partner, women even suggesting, no offense intended, that men would benefit by going to a "husband college" and learning what women really want. Ah, the gender gap. Women, they said, want to be seen, heard, felt, touched, valued and romanced a lot more and guys are too busy being guys and focusing on work, projects, football, making money and using substances too much. It seems a vast, insoluble issue but men and women are different and, as Dr. Laura says, your man is not your girlfriend! So don't expect him to be. Then, at Bloomsbury Books, here's a book about men called "Not Too Bright and Damn Proud of It." It's humor. Isn't it? I'm lecturing at Ashland High's SAEJ class on essay writing, encouraging the kids to list five or 10 things they saw, thought, did, learned, wondered at, felt feelings about in the last couple weeks, then face the blank page, which so many writers say they fear. I tell them, hey, that fear and that blank page is what you want. It means you have beginner's mind, child-mind and what you write will be an unfolding, learning experience for you — so it will be interesting and a learning experience for readers. The blank page is scary because it's demanding one thing: be honest. And think. I suggest they freely own and draw from self, friends, community and world, seeing them all as part of their world, so that, as we said in the Sixties, the personal is political, that is, there's nothing "out there" beyond me, not personal to me. It's my world, all of it. We talk about their lists, how we're closing our libraries because the feds cut off our historic O&C funding, which they could pay for with what's being spent on the Iraq War any given day between breakfast and lunch — and then we'd just bombed some village in Somalia. They read their essays aloud, Whitney saying, "What do you do when you run out of answers and everything's become a question? When nothing makes sense any more? What do you do? Stand up for what you believe in or fall to the corruption of others? Jump back in the war or be persecuted for not wanting to die in a war that shouldn't have started to begin with?" Cody writes, "close the war and open the libraries." Sacha says, "to have knowledge of doing what's best for yourself would be so nice but we don't have answers for everything "¦We grow up having everyone telling us what is right and what is wrong"¦. but who made these rules and why?" Jeff writes about seeing Star Wars for the first time since he was a child and "now that I'm older and more mature, it's easier to understand all the symbolism of the light sabers and The Force." That's it, Jeff, the door to an essay that must be written. What, indeed, is The Force? It's that voice in you that is connected to the wisdom and energies of planet, all people, all life. That's what the writer is trying to ride. Jeff misses when the old Carnegie library was our only library and the kids would gather round the old gold radiator and read all kinds of books, like The Berenstain Bears, Calvin and Hobbes and Dr. Suess, then the librarian would bring a jar of candy to give to whoever could guess the number of candies in it. Was that The Force moving in that sweet ritual? Are these words reaching to be born in writing? I tell them, hoping it will catch on with maybe just one person, to write every day in a journal, to master words and let their voices be heard, to submit what they write to local newspapers and magazines, who rarely publish writings of teens, these people who must soon inherit and make sense of an adult world that, in a master stroke of form over content, spends millions on grand, new libraries and a grade school here, while laying off teachers and putting books out of reach. I tell them that learning to write is the art and discipline of learning what you really think and what really matters to you and triggers you into awareness — what do I feel? What is this moving in my chest and gut? Why does it matter? What do I value? Who is going to write about it and get it in print, if not me? How do I face that voice that says, forget it, no one's listening anyway? And if just one of them keeps writing and learning to really hear that voice inside, then that may be the voice that one day becomes the hundredth monkey that creates a world where things make sense and we buy books, not buildings — and not bombs. John Darling is an Ashland writer — [email protected] Leave a Comment: Advertisement: Advertisement: Paid Advertising: Debt Help Inkjet Printers Student Loans Water Filter Helzberg Diamonds Mortgage Calculator Security Systems Debt Relief Advertisement: Copyright © 2007 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved. Del.icio.us