Dreaming Outside the Box

In two weeks I will do a new age workshop to examine how I have used my life force in the last year, and brainstorm and focus and channel how I will do it in the year to come. I found the teacher through Meg LeFauve, a friend and inspiration, and the truest seeker I know. But just signing up makes you start thinking...

The thing about me is, I KNOW I am a writer. I also know that I cannot go back to what I did. Newspapers are dying. That era is over. I am like an immigrant whose beloved home country has been destroyed. I can be nostalgic, but I cannot return to what once was.

So here are a few things I know:

After ten years of being a journalist, I am ready to be an activist. I have reported on things I cared about too much for too long. Now I get to be an actor, rather than a perpetual critic and observer. That is a relief. A joy. I love it!

I still believe my words can change the world, but I am ready to write with opinions and passion, not just cower under the supposedly unbiased, purely objective, facts-only facade of American newspaper reporting.

I do not want to work for a big corporation again. Writers need freedom, and ultimately corporations are deeply suspicious of both freedom and creativity. Although I had 10 glorious years at the Los Angeles Times, I do not want to return to a corporate environment. I really do believe it is like a slow poison that infects the soul. You can hold your own against it for awhile, but if you stay too long it flattens you and saps you of your life force.

When I have made more money and less, my happiness does not fluctuate wildly. My happiness comes more from things that do not cost money. I need to remember this.

I would love to start a local paper, like the Los Feliz sentinel. I want to keep working to start charter schools and change education. I would love to start a small, local publishing house that puts out beautiful books for adults and children that are grounded in that place, that locale, that community. They might not be best-sellers, but they would put out books and voices that pull people together, and be sold in local bookstores only.

I want to write well-reported, but more personal stories for magazines. I believe in the power of the personal narrative, and I write to have the reason to experience something. I am my own guinea pig!

I think I have a bit of the healer in me. I am not a doctor. But I may (hold your horses there more conservative readers) but I might like to learn to be a shaman, or learn to do spiritual healing of some sort. As western medicine goes more high-tech, I believe we are becoming separated from our own human nature, distanced from the things that make us happiest in life. I would like to help guide myself, and others, back.

Most importantly, I want to finish my book by June. I will keep seeking agents and publishers, but I want to complete it and get it out. It is my passion project, my baby and my holy grail. I must complete it before I can go onto the next stage!

These are my corny thoughts on a December morning, as I prepare to Dream Outside the Box with Madaline Blau.