storyfires

Some of you have noticed Storyfires has gone dormant around here this winter. Thought I'd resurrect for Spring. My tulips and forget-me-not are in bloom. Aspen and maple leaves have appeared. Bleeding heart. Cherry blossoms. I keep thinking I should xeriscape my yard since I live in a desert. Cactus. Yucca. Mesquite. So I went to the nursery and came home with thyme and irish moss and delphinium. My psyche thinks I live in England, where things are green because it rains. I am alive. I am writing. Just so you know. Free books will be coming again. More stuff about writing. More about the writer's life. Finding balance. More about barefoot running. Maybe a poem or two. Just to torment you. See you around the fire!

I haven't logged in many barefoot runs lately. One on Thanksgiving that got me all the way around the temple before my feet went numb. One two  days ago, late morning, when the sun was up and the frost had mostly thawed the grass in the drainage basin. Two times around the bowl before I couldn't feel  my feet. Perfect. What those two barefoot days reminded me: how little we feel of the world most of the time. How much we miss, walking around with our shoes on. "The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod." That's Gerard Manley Hopkins. Too bad a barefoot run was out of the question today. I put on wool socks and my "barefoot" shoes and a hat and gloves and took Andrei the Giant up the mountain--next best thing to going barefoot. The dog agrees. The fog made everything look so ethereal: hoar frost sprouting from each blade of long grass, each branch of scrub oak, and the cloud sitting low on the rocks jagging up the ravine.  Tried to take a ...

Sometimes your rhythms are off. Sometimes when your normal rhythms falter, you look around for new ones, and you find something works in a way you weren't expecting. I woke up this morning and was not feeling it. Went to bed late. Woke up late. Drank green smoothie. Drove kids to school. Didn't exercise. Sat on couch with computer instead. Decided to try out Stephen King's writing schedule and ended up writing from eight to ten, ate a snack, wrote some more. Took a nap, wrote some more. I don't think nap was part of Stephen King's schedule. Felt good about the writing. Felt kind of gross about everything else. Stephen King writes until noon, then goes for a walk. So at 12:30 I went for a run with the dog. Dog was sluggish. I was sluggish. Couldn't fall into a rhythm. Dumped the route and went to the park where I took off my shoes and ran barefoot with dog. Andre was tired after one lap. I squished around in the grass and finally found my beat. Kept my...

Today I am writing by making bread. I haven't made bread in a long time. Maybe a year. It's cold and dark outside, so I built a fire in my wood-burning stove, and then I made bread dough. It's rising. Meanwhile, I've figured out all kinds of things for my novel that I will soon write down. You think I'm dodging actual writing? Ha. Doubters. I'm getting ever so much done in my head. Really. And I will have hot bread to eat while I get it all out on electronic paper. Mmm. Come by. We'll have a bread-eating novel-writing party.

Here's a story about going barefoot. Not Going Barefoot, as in my novel. Going barefoot, as in my life. As in, no arc. No actual ending. Just my bare feet. Running. Do people really get this far off the ground when they run barefoot? Some of you have heard (and if you're my family are probably sick of) my rant about how my chronic knee and plantar fasciitis trouble healed when I zeroed out my running shoes and started running barefoot in the grass at the park. I realized I run very differently when barefoot, so I started trying to mimic that upright, butt-kicking, ultra-bent-knee style every time I ran in shoes, too.  My favorite shoes: New Balance Minimus. Second favorite: Vibram Five Fingers. Both of which have zero padding and are only a couple steps beyond barefoot. I mostly run in shoes because I'm scared of that crud always lurking on the side of the road, like to save barefoot running for the grass. Love splashing through that spongy, soggy, just-watered gra...