This post is part of a series of excerpts from my forthcoming book. You can read them all in the Little Pink Spoons category. You can get advance notice of the book by subscribing to my Creative Adventure Journal over there to your right. Something Out There Calling In my senior year at Wheaton College I discovered Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice in his Letters to a Young Poet. It was as if he was writing to me: You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you,...
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{This post is part of a series of excerpts from my forthcoming book. It is continued from last Monday.} View From The Floor Secretly, privately, the creative voice in me longed for expression. With the same guitar in my arms, on Saturday afternoons when every other girl was outside, I sat on the floor in the dorm and wrote songs of longing and discontent. View from the Floor Always sitting on the floor. Guitar in hand, on the floor, in hand, on the floor. A single...
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View From The Ivory Tower Going away to college in Chicago opened the box for me, but only slightly. I was a smart girl and had been well prepped for a good education. Following in the pastor’s footsteps, I applied to only one school. Time magazine called Wheaton College “The Harvard of the Evangelicals;” we affectionately knew it as Billy Graham University, as he had gone there too. Wheaton was a new piece of the same fabric—religious, strict, conservative, uniform. Even...
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God Is In The Guitar At 14, I picked up the guitar. Three easy chords to that first song—House of the Rising Sun—moved me. Perhaps it was the vibration of the instrument in my arms. Like my Arabian horses, the guitar was another relationship, between a very limited human girl and the mysterious, uncontrollable force I longed for. I started to write songs. They were desperate songs, angry songs; but the voices inside me that could not find expression anywhere else, found...
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Spirit Breaking Free Outside school, my mother ensured that I was exposed to all the traditional art forms. There I dared to dream, to explore, to reach out for something more. My introduction to creativity was learning-how rather than listening-to. There were lessons for everything, starting at age six. There was dance—ballet, tumbling and tap—which I adored but did not continue. There were piano lessons with Mrs. Clark—strict, academic and constricted—and the terrible...
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Conformity Comes Home At six years old, because of my mother’s desperate campaign against the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll in public schools, I was sent to a strict parochial school. There my own conditioning began. I acquired the school’s judgments about what was right and what was wrong, and my fear took root there. Seeing the harsh punishments inflicted there on those who ventured out of bounds—forced to stand outside the classroom facing the wall, sent to the...
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