Insane Writing Challenges: Takes 3 and 4

Rise to the challenge of bringing your dreams to life!

Do not be discouraged by resistance, be nourished by it.

Success is the experience of rising to the level of your true greatness.

~ Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience

In August, I’m participating in BlogHer’s Blogging Challenge.  The theme this month is: Hot.

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nother blogging/writing challenge ends. And because I’m about one IQ point away from insanity, I signed up for not one, but two writing challenges.

I think I just saw my life flash before my eyes.

It’s not as impossible as it sounds.  At least that’s what I keep telling myself.  If my track record in July taught me anything, it’s that I need some external force pushing my hands to the keyboard or my pen to paper.  I’ll slack off otherwise.

Humiliation is a great teacher.

September Sapphire Even Day Blog Challenge

The first challenge I signed up for is Being a Wordsmith’s Even Day Challenge: you just blog on the even days of the month. Easy peasy!  Definitely not as tough as blogging every day for 31 days.  Kimberly gives us the prompts up front and we can follow them or not.  Should be fun!

Two Pages-a-Day Writing Challenge

But of course, as already stated, writing every other day isn’t a good idea for me.  If I skip a day, a big huge boulder lands on my pens, my notebooks, the keyboard, and my hands get tied behind my back.  Oh, and my brain goes “Uhhhh….” 

So of course, instead of just finding another 30 days blogging challenge, I decide to join a second writing challenge.  This one requires that I write two pages a day. Doesn’t say post it somewhere (mwhahahahaha!) but I do commit to writing two full pages a day. This challenge doesn’t last 30 days either.  Oh no! 

It lasts 122 freakin’ days!

Image Credit: Pinterest

Can’t. Wait.

The Blogher challenge has been fun and I’ve enjoyed “meeting” new writers.  Hope to see y’all on the other side!

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

What challenges you?  How do you stay motivated and disciplined in whatever your passion is?

The Haunted Hearth: Farmgirl Meditations on the Love of the Land

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration. 
~ Charles Dickens

In August, I’m participating in BlogHer’s Blogging Challenge.  The theme this month is: Hot.

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his land is haunted.

Over thirty years of memories linger here.  Childhood’s tears soak the earth; ghostly laughter dances with the summer wind; ripening apples, pears, and peaches of years past scent the air, and you shiver as a phantom cat brushes up against your bare leg.

This land is haunted.  And those are just my memories. 

With a house as old as this one, there are decades of memories living in its very bone structure.  Someone died alone in this room, this room had only a dirt floor. Union and Confederate feet alike marched through the trees, and through the cornfields.  Lovers loved, fought, cried, and made up.  Families grew, fought, moved away and left the imprint of their emotions on every inch of board, bone, and speck of dirt that we now call home.

This land is haunted.  And it has claimed me.

Some days I embrace it as the perfect home.  Just enough land to live on, but not enough to kill me with the upkeep.  Not in the city or in town, but not an impossible distance away.  Living here, both my introvert side and my extrovert side are happy.

But on other days, I long for more seclusion, more acreage.  Wish my support system of close friends all lived fifteen to twenty minutes away instead of an hour or more.  On those days, no one is happy: neither the introvert nor the extrovert.  On those days, I read. 

I walk. 

I garden.

I breathe.

And smell the apples and the pears.  Hear the laughter of the trees.  Watch dragonflies play tag among the tomatoes and the zinnias.  Feel the dew and the soft grass beneath my bare feet.  And remember where my soul belongs.

And the claim this haunted patch of earth has on me.

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

One’s childhood home can have an incredible pull on the psyche ~ for good or ill.  What claim does your childhood home have over you?  If you’re a military brat, was there a specific place you lived as a child that holds more nostalgia for you?

 

Death: The Unwelcome Guest

I know she isn’t coming back, but I still think that she will.

Nothing can make that go away.

We figure out what death means when we’re born, practically,

and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.

~ Lauren DeStefano, Sever

In August, I’m participating in BlogHer’s Blogging Challenge.  The theme this month is: Hot.

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eath makes me uncomfortable.

After my aunt P called to say that Aunt G had died, neither she nor my mother carry on the conversation.  My sisters and I call the women on my mother’s side of the family faucets ~ because their eyes drip every time something big or small happens to them.  My father’s side of the family are all stoic Eastern Europeans, so I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen my father cry.  Ergo, my sisters and I fall somewhere in the middle.  I compromise by crying where no one can see me.

Today I am not crying.

Image Credit: Albert Panin 

It’s not that I’m cold or didn’t care about my Aunt G.  She was in fact, my favorite aunt.  The fun, crazy one who would drive us to get ice cream, or plug in her “singin’ machine” and belt out Hank Williams, Sr. songs.  Who would sit outside on the front porch in the dead of winter just to smoke her tenth cigarette of the day.  Who loved Krispy Kreme like a religion, and cooked ham and biscuits better than my mother’s (but never as good as Grandma’s).

But I don’t like to think about death and I hate talking about it.

My default role, in both my family, and among my friends, has been that of the strong defender.  The one who knows the right thing to say, who would drive hundreds of miles to be with someone who needed a shoulder to cry on, or who answers the phone at three a.m. because you couldn’t sleep and needed to talk.

But I turn into an idiot zombie when someone dies.

Any words of wisdom I could say fade faster than the flowers on a tombstone.  And any strong hugs of comfort I could give turn into mutual cry fests.  Or worse, with the bereaved comforting me instead!

When I was younger, I wrote a book report on Kubler-Ross’s book on dying.  I became a teenage expert in grief counseling.  But all these years later, I’m less scientific about it, and closer to the raw reality of death.  Probably because I’ve experienced more losses in last ten to fifteen years than I did when I was a teenager.  When you’re young, you’re immortal, and there is all the time in the world to live your life and accomplish great things.

But by the time you’re thirty, you realize that you don’t have an eternity here, and the time you do have left, well, someone seems to have pushed the fast forward button and the damn thing got stuck!  I can still remember being told back in seventh grade that this would happen.  For some, it happens earlier.  For me, I didn’t wake up until I moved back to my hometown two years ago and realized my parents weren’t young anymore.  Ahhh.  And there it is.  The real reason death makes me uncomfortable.

Now I am crying.

Oremus pro invicem,

~ Mikaela

On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable are you with talking about death?