Great Students

Today I am in Missouri seeing some of my family over spring break. Traveling for 10 hours yesterday and hanging out with my brothers made it so that I wasn't able to blog... but its good to be back and getting back to the writing!

Today is only one writing, it's a bit longer than the others I have shared so far (the limit I gave myself was 20 minutes instead of 10). The chapter is called "Great Students", in it, Natalie Goldberg remarks on how we all remember the great (and bad) teachers in our lives; those that helped shape us, guide us and, well, teach us. But she asks the question, "What about great students that we knew?"
She goes on to say that this writing is looking into negative space, focusing on what you have not noticed, like drawing attention to everything around a tree, except the tree itself.
As she says, "You're focusing not on the teacher but the key element that creates a teacher. No teacher exists without students."

So, here's to all the students that I have encountered in my life and to all the teachers that helped us get there... cheers!

"Great Students"

Great students in my life? That's a bit of a hard one; my mind is racing through a myriad of times spent in a classroom; grade school at a private christian school in Missouri, community college at Moberly and the study partners that I had, especially in history classes.
For me, history was always easy, but for many other people it's a tedious study up there like math is for me.
I remember my first art history class, there was this cute, little, out-going blond girl that mostly didn't have a clue about what was going on in class (nothing against blonds, I am still one if I had my hair ;), but she was fearless enough to ask people around her if they wanted to study together, and I said yes.
Most of the time it was just me and her going over my notes that I had taken in class (I took some seriously detailed notes, including small drawings of the pieces/art that we were studying), she would sit down at her kitchen table, pull out her notebook and we would slowly go over everything that we had covered in class; boiling everything down to a quick outline that can be looked over to help get over those pre-test jitters.
There were several people like that, we would get together at homes or local eateries, like Country Kitchen, and spend hours pouring over pages of notes of names, dates, babies (just kidding), places and pieces.

I remember my biology class and how all my classmates there worked hard to make sure that they got passing grades.
This was most exemplified by these green pieces of paper that we got before we took out biology tests.
Our teacher, handed out these blank "study sheets" that were on green paper, and the deal was, that we could write down as many notes, facts, definitions, etc. we could on those pieces of paper and we could use it for the test as a reference.
You should have seen how small people can write when they are allowed too.
I remember several sheets (my own included) where there wasn't a square inch of that paper that was not taken with some definition, concept, or scientific fact that I felt was need on that test.
I can only imagine the hours that we all spent writing and re-writing our notes so that we could get as much information as possible... fun times!

Other people that I can think of would have to be in art classes.
So many people would come in clueless about what they were to draw, paint, or make with clay.
They would struggle with taking a ball of clay and "centering" it on the wheel (that's when you would take the clay and throw it on a wheel and then apply steady pressure to the clay with your hands to make it so that it wouldn't be wobbling all over the place as you spun the wheel around).
They would start...

Times Up!

Looking forward to see what the topic is for tomorrow! Hope everyone is well and if your on spring break, I especially hope for you that you get some of the much earned rest that you deserve!
Take care everyone

-Eric Alan

PS. Brittany, you can borrow the book when I am done :)

Monkey Mind, Wild at Heart and My Life

This being the second day of the blogrimage, I had the unexpected point of the day when I was getting ready to head to bed and remembered that I hadn't shared my thoughts yet today with my friends across the wide wed and my close family that is updated automatically whenever I write, what my grandmother calls 'journals'.

That being said, I have a correction from the previous day. I had mentioned that this wonderful book that I have rediscovered on my bookshelf was called, "Writing Down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg... it is fact, not.
The book that I am using is still by our beloved Natalie Goldberg, but is called "Old Friend from Far Away" a much more fitting title of walking through the process of writing ones own memoir... but I digress (always wanted to say that!).

Today, I picked up the weather beaten copy of this book that I own and realized that I still have about 250 pages worth of writing challenges, short stories and writing theory to go through before the final punctuation on the last page... this is going to be a looong journey!

The first thing I read was a short chapter titled "Monkey Mind", dealing with that little voice in our heads that keeps telling us that we can't write, shouldn't write and have nothing to say to the world. This voice is simply to try and act in our best interest because how often in the past have we, as the human race, stopped and consider where we have come from and where we are going and how the (excuse my language) hell we ended up in the place we are in and the choices we have made... if we had all stopped and considered all these questions at the same time... how many of us would be able to walk away from them without self-imploding upon ourselves.
All that being said, this voice is a distraction, and one that does not easily go away, but can be overcome with the simple act of writing, of expressing ourselves in the midst of this 'chattering monkey mind'.
So Goldberg's sage advice? Keep writing, don't stop, and through time and a ton of commitment, that voice within you will go from opposing your retrospection, to embracing it and helping you through it...

That leads us to the next chapter that I browsed, "Wild at Heart". In it, Ms. Goldberg introduces us to a poet, Allen Ginsberg and a short excerpt from a biography of the man's life... and how what he grew up in and through, didn't make who he was.
Although most of us have grown up with the arguments of nature vs. nurture in our heads, our childhoods; how we grew up, with whom, for how long... doesn't necessarily have to define us.
It's like you have all the raw materials for making Mac n Cheese (in my case, with hot dogs), just because you have the hard noodles, milk, butter, powered cheese and cold package of hot dogs doesn't mean you have the final product of what this will be... it needs spark, fire, process.

All that to say, there was a small writing challenge in this little chapter, "write your life in 10 minutes".
A daunting task, I only got to my early/mid childhood years before the timer went up. But here is what I have to share with you and I'm looking forward to what we will have for tomorrow.

Sincerely,
Eric Alan

"My Life"

I was born to Linda Ordway and Philip Gregory Ordway, although everyone that knows my father calls him Greg.

I was the first born of a family that eventually would grow into four boys, and now consists of somewhere around 26 boys if you include all the foster children that my parents care for.
I was born into family that went to church every Sunday, every Wednesday and every special service that was within a two hour drive, my parents called those 'revivals'.
Most of my early life was spent with the struggles that all young boys desire/ go through, acceptance by the path of having my schoolmates be my friends; feeling that I was a normal child but always being sent to another classroom when it came time for math, seeing a difference among my classmates plastic milk containers that we used to hold our books and school supplies, and then seeing my little, worn out card-board box on the bottom of that small stack of crates, but one day, feeling the joy of coming to class and seeing that my teacher had taken that card board box that was caving in upon itself and replacing it with an old, brown milk crate that she had had at her house.
To this day, that little act of kindness to a young boy brings a joy to my heart when I remember it. Funny how its the little things that will stay with you.
Normally, we (my brothers and I) were considered, "the Ordway Boys" being called upon and volunteered whenever there was a move our parents heard about...

Times Up!

See you all tomorrow!