Mexican Grace, Agassi’s hate, and a celebration

I’ve had so many emails/messages asking about the new project and why it’s taking me so long in between blog entries.

Well, the most I can tell you is: until the new project is fully secured, I can’t tell you about it.

But I will reveal that it involves an incredible human being, a story-worthy set of circumstances that led to us meeting, and an even more unusual set of circumstances surrounding what we are currently producing to secure the project. Yes, New York is involved. But that’s all you get.

In the meantime, I’ve had the privilege of reviewing a book before it’s New York launch for Dr. Jean Benedict Raffa. This review will be published in the Summer issue of Radical Grace (based out of New Mexico).

For anyone interested in the story of Q. or similar topics, I can not recommend this book enough. It is easily one of the most important books of 2012 and the future.

Here’s an excerpt from the review:

“Dr. Jean Benedict Raffa’s new book, Healing the Sacred Divide: Making Peace with Ourselves, Each Other, and the World looks at the difference between religion and God through the lens of Jungian psychology, and speaks to the deepest spiritual seekings of the human heart.

The power in this book lies not in its ability to reveal a recognizable truth, but in the way it communicates this truth. Through memory, psychology, emotion, and the powerfully secret relevance of our dreams….

Refreshingly, Healing the Sacred Divide tackles topics often left to the university classroom in such a way that makes them generously accessible to the mind as well as the soul. Engaging a powerful conversation about the evolution of our God image (where it comes from and how it came to be what it is today), Raffa reveals the dysfunctions associated with the image, the how and why it often feels incomplete when presented through the orthodox and especially the fundamental religious lens. In this sense, as we learn more about ourselves, we also become powerfully privy to the truth and effect behind the reality that our patriarchal God view is as much constructed as our gender divisions – both resulting in an inability to experience wholeness on the human journey or in a spiritual sense, as children of God…”

(Advance copies of Healing the Sacred Divide are available here)

 

In the rest of this wee lovely little break, I will also answer one quick Naked Author question:

Q.  “Do you find writing easy or hard?”

 

N.  Let me say first that I love writing. Love. It.

Let me say also that it is absolutely one of the most consistently difficult things I have ever done.

There is nothing easy about writing. It challenges you intellectually, psychologically, and even emotionally on a regular basis.

To write successfully, I believe you have to be fully committed to four things:

1)  Trust your instinct completely (which can be terrifying and confidence boosting!)

2)  Be able to be critical of your own work without stifling your creativity from self-criticism.

3)  Lose the ego! Drop it like a bad habit. Immediately. (If you work with your ego, you can not be honest with your self, your intentions, the truth you want to be communicated through your work.)

4)  Become excellent at your craft. Have a relationship with language. Love words. Better yet, marry your thesaurus (figuratively of course), and never be afraid to look up a word you don’t understand, or learn how to use a new one effectively. Eventually, all of those words and their correct usage infuse your thoughts until suddenly you are using them without having to look them up.

So, to answer your question…yes, I find writing difficult (sometimes very difficult), but wonderfully so.

The first time I heard Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent etc.) say that he hated writing. I didn’t understand. Now that I’m a writer, I do. It’s not an ‘Agassi hates tennis’ hate, but a relationship that challenges you so much, you sometimes pray for a reprieve…and then you find a pen and paper because you don’t really want one.

 

read. write. live.

celebrate.

www.thestoryofQ.com