Thriving While Sad

Artist at Rest, 2020

It is a new year, and I'm terribly sad. Over 350,000 people have died of Covid and the Capitol had been attacked. I am angry, sad and frustrated. A New Year is always a good way to start new things, so I'm going to sit with these feelings of malcontent. As a Buddhist, I know I can feel all of this Moment but not allow it to control me, force me to do something I may regret later. 

It's been months since I'd posted. I, like so many others, got caught up in the business of surviving. This year, I want to do more than merely survive. I want to thrive, which means, I think, leading my best life while all appears to be dismal. 

Let's try this experiment.

WRITE EFFORT Realized!

Last weekend, I completed my first full course of WRITE EFFORT: Creative Writing Through a Buddhist Lens. Yes, it was exciting to work with a wonderful group of writers. I see you Kate, Beth, Lizzy, Fred, Doug and Jonathan! Yes, I loved working with the fine literary organization Beyond Baroque, especially Emmitt Conklin. Yes, I loved integrating Buddhist thought with the craft of storytelling.

But what I really loved were the stories that came about. We are filled with an incredible amount of ideas and themes and characters. Inside each and everyone of us is at least one book. However, I think we need effort, mindfulness and concentration--elements of the Buddhist Eightfold Path.

It will be hard, there will be suffering (The First Noble Truth), but one can persevere.

Greater in battle

than the man who would conquer

a thousand-thousand men, 

is he who would conquer just one--

                                     himself.

                                 Buddha

                                           Dhammapada 

                                  VIII; 103

Gardening in the Time of Covid-19

Gardening, 2020

In my attempt to enjoy what sun may come out in this rainy Los Angeles weather and maintain social distancing, I took to gardening again. That seems to be a huge part of my creativity these days.

Before we went into shelter-in-place, I visited a nursery by my work and picked up several plants. Choosing the flowers and designing the landscape was truly a creative and happy process for me.

I didn't think I had it in me to make flowers grow, but a few YouTube videos later I was doing it.

There's something about having your hands in dirt that's truly magical. Pulling the flowers out of their plastic containers and put them into the ground feels like an act of truly giving.

Within minutes of planting them, bees and butterflies were floating by to inhale them. I was doing this for our family home, a house my parents scrimped and saved to buy back in the 1970s. By adding flowers, I felt like I was giving a bit of my own signature to this family abode. It felt quite satisfying.

Write with Me!

I'm teaching the short story form at UCLA Extension. Please join me.  Classes begin on October 3. I'm working out of the downtown Los Angeles campus. More information HERE.

Vulnerability NOW!

I'd been taking these acting workshops through the SAG-AFTRA conservatory.  I took two workshops that required immediate intimacy.  Right. Now. 

Within 30 minutes in a room of complete strangers, I had to cry, love, yearn and regret. 

I delivered. That's what actors do, but I had to reflect on how each and every time actors are asked to be "authentic."  By being authentic, we lay it down, offer the most intimate moments of our lives through our bodies, speech and minds.  

After each acting experience, I'd felt, in a way, closer to something higher than myself. Was it God? Or Enlightenment? Or an elevated sense of self?

When I was doing AIDS work, some of the most spiritual times of my life were connecting with someone who was dying. There was no wall between us, it was just two human beings connecting at a core level.

That's what those acting workshops resembled--a core level of connecting.  The director and casting people were EXPECTING to connect on a deeper level, so this cold place with strangers because a temple of sorts. For 10 minutes--the time it took to act my scene--I felt something sacred.  

Who knew at an acting workshop, I'd be "taken to church." It was a nice place to be.

Literary Meditation

From my previous post, you may have picked up my lamenting of a wasted life.  Ten years working on a novel and I didn't want to spend time on it anymore.  From some gentle nudging from friends and colleagues, I decided to spend ten--fifteen minutes at most--doing rewrites. After those minutes I was going to live my life.

Those minutes turned into an hour, and what a wonderful hour that was.  I was in the zone of writing and caring about this novel again.  I might hate it again, but at this time, I cared.

That hour was not about wasting my life.  It was a deep, creative meditation.  I didn't waste ten years of my life, I grew creatively and spiritually.  For ten years, I was sitting at my own banyan tree. The sentences I wrote were my mantra.  The resistance I felt was Mara sending arrows toward me.  Writing turned those arrows into flowers that fell at my feet.

I meditate.  Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.  Whatever the "sit," it aims for my overall piece of mind.  Once I finished writing, I went for a run--something I hadn't done in awhile.  I felt jazzed.

Not a single story is wasted.  It may not find publication, but it help pad the meditation cushion where I sit.     

Literary Choices

I was asked to work on my novel Miraculous Boy.  My agent is asking me to do rewrites.  My agent is rare.  He won't give up on this book.  MB has been on the market on two separate occasions and hadn't sold.  Frankly, I'm tired of this book.  I've put in ten years into writing and rewriting this book.  I swear in all the time I'd put into it, I wondered about the job opportunities I didn't take up or the relationships that passed me buy.  I chose art making over everything else. 

Writing a book means that there are other aspects of my life I had to give up or did not pursue.  We are our choices and I chose to write.  This is not a bad choice.  I don't regret the creative process during the last ten years, but I'm nearing fifty.  At what point should I just give up and find other ways to grow my life?     

Literary TBT: AWP and Hamilton Casting

Thanks Alex Espinoza for the screen shot!

A few things things happened in the last week that gave me pause.  There was a big blow-up over how Actor's Equity handled a non-white casting notice for the musical Hamilton.  In an op/ed, Equity apologized and vowed to do more about diversity.  

Last weekend, I attended the annual conference for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).  I sat on a panel called "Intersections: Race, Sexuality and other Collisions in Los Angeles." It was a terrific time organized by Alex Espinoza with Fred Smith, Felicia Luna Lemus and Myriam Gurba.

Early in the panel Fred Smith said that Los Angeles wasn't like Beverly HIlls, 90210.  I said that before I was a writer I was an actor and I actually did an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210.  Back in 1990, I was grateful for the role--and still am.  The character was a guy named Chang, an Asian busboy, who helped Brandon Walsh (played by Jason Priestley) realize that his life as an upper middle class white boy in Beverly Hills wasn't so bad.  Hey, he could be me (or my character), which was third world kitchen help who didn't even make minimum wage.

Doing those kinds of roles is one of the reasons I became a writer.  An actor's life is hard. My creativity was dependent on getting hired at best, staying in acting class at the least.  When I wrote, I could be creative everyday. Yes, I took classes, but it was the act of writing, of creating that drew me in.  At first, I wrote for roles I could play on stage.  Then I decided to attempt the novel, which was one of the hardest things I'd ever tried to do in my life. 

In the 1990s, AIDS was destroying my gay and Asian community.  I worked for the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team where I worked to help men stay HIV negative or HIV positive men stay as healthy as possible.  One of the ways we did this was convincing ourselves that we were worthy individuals who deserved health, wealth and well-being.  And I couldn't properly convey that by playing guys like Chang. 

Sometimes, I wonder what happened to that busboy. In that world of Beverly Hills, 90210, how did Chang turn out? 

Hmmmmm. A short story might be in the works.

On Painting Joshua Tree

My agent has my novel now and I'd been in limbo for several weeks now. I am a creative person and feel the tingle to write, but I'm exhausted.  I'm using my creativity in other ways though. I'm painting. Rather than words, I'm using paint, paper and canvas to speak.  I was in Joshua Tree not too long ago and took some pictures.  Yes, I have exact replicas of Joshua Tree via photos, but it's not capturing the wonder and joy that I felt.  I hope these paintings can help exude that.