In this age of search engine optimization, my husband says my pen name should be Danielle Stephen James Patterson King Steele.  It is tempting to ride the coattails of the already popular as I try to get discovered in the universe of everyone.

Then again, cover bands don’t change the world.

A friend told me she finally started reading this blog. “I can really hear your voice when I read it.”

I sound like me! Hooray!

That has not always been my goal. A lot of the time, mostly in my professional life, I have tried hard to sound like someone else. I wanted to appear and sound like the perfect generic person who had the job I was trying to get or who would get promoted in the job I had.

I knew that I would have to tuck a lot of things in and stand very still. Nobody else looked and acted like me.

Nobody sounded like me.

Tighten up and screw it down. Smooth out the edges. As a matter of fact, just don’t talk.

Try as I might, I kept slipping. People knew I was different.

Of course that whole time I had my notebooks, and the words I would only say in writing.

I could tell I didn’t sound like anyone else. And so I figured I had an audience of one: me. I made myself laugh and I made myself think. It gave me a release from the depersonalization of my job.

A small group of friends started to read it. They kind of already knew me. I trusted them to enjoy my writing too.

As time passed I heard, “How do you find time to write?”

“How do you find time to pee?” I replied. This was not something I an option.  It must find release.

There are phrases for this: Find your voice! Speak your truth!

Once, after a weekly wonder, a reader sent me this email, “Some day you’re going to write something that changes the entire world. I hope I’m here to see it.”

Oh, me too.

Me too.

This is what I do, put sentences together and string ideas in a row like popcorn for a Christmas tree.

I know and I deeply trust that every single one of us has our thing, our voice and truth that we get to express.

Not every voice is booming and imperative. Many of them are still and small.

We are not supposed to be the same. The more we learn to be the most SELF we can be, the more beautifully we will create the world.

That’s how it all began. Remember? Let there be light.

And it is good.

Lynda said to Veronica “I love your name. And I have to tell you I really love the name your mommy calls you.”

huh?

“You mommy calls you bunny. I think that is very cute!”

oh yeah. I do call her bunny a lot.

“…and your mommy also calls you monkey.”

Veronica says, “I really like the name monkey.”

THIS is why old friends come and visit. To help you know your own family better.

In my pursuit of an English literature degree, I studied a lot of Victorian literature. One professor pointed out that the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign was very different than the ending. In fact, so much change was happening during that monarch’s period that, if a person time-travelled from the start of that time and plunked down into the ending, she would not recognize the world.

The same could be said of our time. Things are unrecognizable. Just 50 years ago feels like a fictional world. Watching Mad Men…Women really wore girdles? Men had to wear hats and ties every day?

Yes. And that was the least of it. Hats and underwear are very personal individual choices and experiences. What about the everybody part of life?

I find myself running up against the idea of institutional change again and again.  Things we assumed were solid pillars of society are revealed as non-essential. The load bearing walls must have had their loads redistributed because they are being moved. Let’s hope the loads are redistributed.

I am a naturally conservative person. I like to be certain. I remember making a bohemian friend in San Francisco, and saying to him “You wear your freedom like a denim jacket. I wear mine like a prom dress.” I am not sure who had the right idea. Maybe there is more room for error than I’ve allowed myself. Maybe life is far more wash-n-wear than I’ve supposed.

Things are changing. We are in motion. This is not a theater with a preconstructed set; we are living in real time. Which is terrifying. How will we know whether the change we make will save us or kill us?

My individual choices only affect me, right? Sort of. What about all the individuals that make up the institutions we rely on?

How will the electric company respond to these changes? How will churches and governments? Change is happening, will happen and has already happened.

Will the next 50 years be at volatile as the last? What are the constants in these changing times?

There is so much I don’t know. I have to start with me. That’s what I am surest of.  What I know of right and wrong, of love and truth will have to be what I rely on. I hope the institutions can find the same compass points.

During a time in my life when I felt the depth of my ignorance had no bottom , I interned at NASA. I was paralyzed with intimidation. Someone there told me the definition of expert is to know more about it than anyone else in the room. I cling to that when I am drowning in my inability and it moves me forward

I ate the book like a lit match eats gasoline.-The Russian American School of Tomorrow

I’d been meaning to go have a talk with this local college professor and last week I finally went to his office and did it. His office was lined with books. I went over to read the spines.

“I knew you’d look at the books!” he said.

“You don’t have any novels,” I said.

“Yes I do!” and he found one for me to borrow.

This very thing, this Weekly Wonder, started 4 years ago in July. It has a predecessor, The Wonderblog, which had its 12th anniversary last month. I was pretty excited to hit the ten-year mark, and at that time I went and re-read the whole thing.

I learned that the two biggest inspirations for my Wonderblog posts are conversations and books. I write and I am a reader.

I haven’t talked about books as much in this Weekly Wonder. I know why. This Weekly Wonder goes out into the world. It is me come calling to your space, your inbox. My Wonderblog is my own space. And in my space I can read whatever I want.

I’m shy to tell everyone what I’ve been reading lately. Will I be judged? Can I survive the assumptions people will make?

I wrote before about how I switched from the literary canon to reading fantasy books. At the time I couldn’t take one more beautifully written suicide contemplation. I was going to find a guaranteed hero triumphant, and fantasy has provided that reliably and with more beautiful prose than I anticipated.

And yet, I would feel ashamed to have those books on my shelves. I know a lot of genre fiction readers are pleased to be private as they read in public spaces. 50 Shades of Gray attained its popularity because the female audience could read it on their devices and not be caught.

And I feel alone in my fantasy adventures. I know not everyone understands what a dragon has to tell us.

My professor friend did not give me a dragon book. He gave me a literary novel: An Unfinished Life by Mark Spragg.

I read it. I liked it. In fact, I couldn’t put it down until I finished An Unfinished Life. It made me cry in spots.

I couldn’t be sure what would happen in this one. See, fiction has rules. In my fantasy books, I am promised an epic and a hero. In mystery books they promise that the mystery will be solved. Literary fiction–yes, that’s a genre, too–doesn’t promise anything. I couldn’t be sure that the people were going to behave in a certain way. I didn’t know at the beginning that we were all going to come out okay.

Another friend told me: she will not read a novel if she cannot finish it in one day. She is profoundly uncomfortable not knowing how things will turn out.

I love swimming around living in a different story than my own. Until she shared with me, I hadn’t thought about how much faith that takes. We trust our books to carry us through, and give us some different scenery when we don’t want to look at our own. The best books give us a new perspective on our lives when we are done with them.

It takes faith, readers.

She had us wear blankets drink over our shoulders as ball gowns
“we have to go to the ball so we can find a prince and get a baby. You have to marry a prince to get a baby”

She rated my shoes and found the least comfortable ones for me to wear as ballgown shoes

“Veronica why don’t we go into the forest and look for a baby there? Sometimes people leave babies in the forest .”

“Mommy you have to go to the ball ”

Chris Daley is trying to finish his soup

” daddy you have to be the prince and mArry us so we can have a baby”

” I can only marry one of you”

She does not see this as a problem “ok my turn first ”

“Good idea I’m going to take my slippers off”

Last Friday I got to speak at career day for Bright Elementary. Their principal is a friend, and I got to be part of it for the second year now.

During my elementary school years, the word career was never mentioned. That was a long time ago and my career has been on my mind very much since then.

Right before I became a mom (a career-changing move to be sure) I looked around and decided on a specialty. I sat for a 4-hour test to get certified as a project management professional during my third trimester.

So often I’d seen the corporations I worked at lose their focus.  For years I’d worked on global telecommunications systems that got lost in the moment to stumble and miss the long view. The field of project management had all the answers sorted out in bullet points and flow charts.

At last! A solution to this constant problem. With this new certification and all the evidence behind it, I knew I’d be back from maternity leave to take on the world.

Fast forward to career day at Bright Elementary.

I really wanted to tell these kids about my career, and let them know the things I wished I’d known–the things that would help them as they made their choices for the future. The night before I sat down and prepared what I’d say. How could I describe my career in a way that would make any kind of sense for them? My career was not even making sense to me.

I had just been laid off. A soothing-voiced HR person had met with me the day before to take my badge and go over the paperwork that said my job was done and never to return. Making my notes to give these kids career advice, I decided to focus on the positive.

Careers are like that. It was not age-appropriate to talk about all the ways it doesn’t work out and all the ways you have to swim against the current to get what you need.

I dug out my Project Management Body of Knowledge [the PMBOK] to show what sorts of things I had to learn for my four hour test.

Friday morning I gave my talks. Speaking back to back, for three half-hour presentations I told these children about what I do.

What I tried to do.

What I hoped to do again.

“How many of you have projects here at school?”

They easily told me: “Over there. See? A self-portrait.”

“Yes! Exactly! A project has three criteria:

1. It ends; it has a deadline

2. It is one-of-a-kind unique

3. It is progressively elaborated.

That’s true of building a new hospital and it’s true of doing a self-portrait. Let me explain. Your assignment was due at a certain time, wasn’t it?”

“At the end of class.”

“That’s right!  And you couldn’t just copy the guy next to you. You had to make your own. So it was unique.

Progressively elaborated is my favorite. It means you have to figure out the details over time.”

There were listening.

“Progress means to move forward. See, at the beginning when you sat down to draw your self-portrait you didn’t know what it was going to turn out like.  Would it have arms? Would you color the background?

You didn’t know. You had to decide as you went along until by the time it was due you finished it all and decided what it should have. And then it was done.”

And my career day presentations were done. Not bad, I think.

I carried the PMBOK book back. It is an impressive book. All of us who study it recognize its greatness and how little it resembled action in reality.

Sure, if we followed all the knowledge it contains everything would work out so beautifully. And we never can, quite.

When I started to learn about project management I wanted things to work out beautifully. The books seemed to say that they could, if only.  My frustrations kept hitting the short sightedness of the right now and the emergencies.

It is in my nature to look beyond the moment. There should be a point to it. There should be a target that we are aiming at over time. That is the guiding map of the project plan. And it is hard to achieve.

It’s hard to keep your eyes looking past the horizon. Still, I agree with Browning: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”

The meta-story. Call it heaven. Call it whatever you like. We have to have a concept of a something to reach for.  My principal friend is shining at light past the horizon for her students. The bigger story is that this job I just lost is not my focus. I’m reaching for the big picture.

I can almost touch it.

Intentions…Desires and attraction…Truth

I am flopping around in my lack of tension since being laid off from my job.. I realize that I have been allowing myself to be limited by what I THINK is possible.

I am in this beautiful oasis right now of not-fear, not-worry…possibility is boundless

My imagination is looking for a foothold. I want to stretch. I feel as though I shall need to practice without pressure..practice imagining what i hope for

I suppose I can start there.

Imagine…it’s easy if you try

Getting a LOT of vitamin irony right now. So…I might very much enjoy a frackit bucket of BenNJerry’s to celebrate and assuage my new lay off…

seems an appropriate thing to when one is celebrasorrowing (ooh…i just made a word!)

but here comes the irony

My recent ‘cleanse’ has left me unwilling to eat dairy and very suspicious of sugar

Goddamit. I guess I’ll have to go be PRODUCTIVE or something

all this health is gonna kill me

I heard preachers say it so often growing up: There is a God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart. God needs to come into your heart and fill the hole.

How presumptious and nonsensical. What shape would God be, anyway? and this heart business had me confused. If our heart or soul is without substance, how could it have a hole in it?

One of my family’s favorite movies “It’s a Wonderful Life” describes a different sort of hole. George Bailey gets a chance to see how the world would be different if he were never born. A hole in the world that no one but him could see, since all the people he’d been kind to didn’t know the difference.

I’ve been learning a few things. This year I’ve been concentrating on not stressing out,  and it turns out the best advice on this includes being grounded.

A year ago, I would have stressed out just hearing that phrase. “Being grounded? What does that mean?” I would have felt like throwing that advice against the wall for being useless.

See? I said I needed to learn to not stress out. As I began to try and practice the lessons I was given it turns out that being grounded is extremely practical. One book said to focus on breathing:  lower my shoulders and act as if every breath I took was my best friend.

Hmm. I tried that. I love my friends. I practiced loving this breath with all the abandon and acceptance and pleasure my good friends give me.

Oh. Yeah.  I could do that.

And as I did, my body–which was so frustrating for so many ways!!!–took a different shape. Yes, my shoulders dropped intentionally. And my legs and my hands and my back assumed a different pose as I lay down my worries and focussed on loving my breath.

The hole in the physical world that I filled had changed shape. And not just shape, it had changed–what?

In the absence of George Bailey, Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville because the evil Mr. Potter ran unchecked. That wasn’t a hole, it was a different way of being. The whole world had a different tone because of George Bailey’s existence of lack thereof.

That was a movie, and a resonant one. My life is not the movies.

And still, my body and who I am makes a…the opposite of a hole. It is a substance and a force in the fabric of the universe.

Lately there has been little video lectures on the internet telling us to “look up!” “unplug!”

I know that feeling. My whole body and my whole existence gets narrowed down to my headphones and a three-inch screen.

That’s  not filling my own hole very well. My body takes up space. My body is the one that give kisses and hugs to my family. My body is the one that aches when I stare too long at that screen.

I have to make room for my body as well as my mind. Whether there is a God-shaped hole in it, I have a heart. It’s a heart that loves and yearns.

It’s a heart that beats. A very practical heart. One that carries oxygen around.

Remember my best friend, my next breath?

It’s important. It’s the next thing on my to do list. The first thing.

I want to remember what I am.  I am not merely gray matter. I am all kinds of matter. This stuff that I am matters.

How else would I be missed?