Your Life, Your Story, Let's Get Started

Alicia's Response:

"I've put the memory of that night away like a room with one door in and one door out. So clearly do I remember being the girl who stands outside that room, hand on the doorknob, ready for anything. Funny, when people say that..."ready for anything"...they don't really mean anything. They mean a happily-ever-after, tall, dark, and handsome or short, blonde, and rich kind of anything. They certainly don't mean crushing terror or retching pain. They don't mean death.

That girl who stands there one hand on the door knob and one hand on her hip, tossing a fat glossy braid over her shoulder, she certainly wasn't expecting that truck to come out of nowhere, barreling down a hill with no road, smashing into her car with no warning. In fact, when she opens the door and walks into that experience, that memory I don't think of, she tells herself "I didn't see it coming."

The girl on the other side of that room, through the Out Door, the one missing a hand, she makes sure she sees everything. her fat glossy braid lies heavy down the middle of her back. Her hand presses back against the door, holding it shut, pushing herself forward. She is not ready. But that's okay.

Because she will be. No matter how many more rooms she has to live through, next time, she will be ready.

Excerpt from Assignment #25: Experience as a Room

You’ve been with your character for several adventures and quiet moments alike by now. I’d like for you to pick one or two and imagine them as a room with two doors – one exclusively for entrance and the other exclusively for exiting. Take a while to get a comfortable image going because you are going to walk your character right smack into the middle of the scene....

When you have the scene clearly and lushly imagined, place your character outside the In Door. You may be able to feel their anticipation as their hand rests upon the door knob. This experience, this room, will change them. Your job is to record those changes. Begin by feeling deeply into the character to identify their Before portrait. You have the benefit of knowing the experience that awaits them and even how your character responded to the individual elements of the experience. Quickly, without over-analyzing, check into those memories and awareness of your character Before they entered the room."

Buy Assignment #25 $10.00

I admitted to my homeschooled daughters a particular weakness in my own research skills. For good or bad, I tend to be obsessive in my investigation until I have found atleast one respected source that agrees with me. In my defense, all facts and opinions get fair consideration in the final analysis - I'm just not satisfied until part of the sampling of other opinions includes one that looks like mine.

Very often, this other source has been able to articulate my thoughts and feelings far better than I had, bringing clarity and expansion as well as familiarity. Such is the case with Dmitry Orlov's latest post on Club Orlov. If you've not read much of his work, time spent cruising around his blog will be well worth it. Mr. Orlov brings the task of Journey School Stories right into your lap with this excerpt:

But there is also an alternative: compose your own fiction instead of accepting anyone else's, then go ahead and turn it into reality. A good first step might be to write a short story. It can be very short, and it doesn't even have to be particularly interesting. Something as trivial as this might do for starters: “The next morning she woke up and, instead of having a bagel with cream cheese and a cup of coffee for breakfast, she fasted until sundown.” And then, the next morning, she woke up, and something curious happened: this short story came to life, and so it came to pass. Next came other stories, each a bit longer than the previous one, bridging the present and the future in new ways, and eventually spanning decades. And as these decades rolled by, these stories too came to life.

This, as I see it, is the best way forward in a depressed and increasingly demented and accident-prone country that is heading straight for collapse, where the present (reality, what people think is going on, common notions of the state of things) is degenerating into useless noise—the clamor of clueless but self-important people desperately begging you to continue giving them your attention, so that they can stuff your head with more “B”-rated trash. But if you ignore them long enough, they will go away. Don't hope, don't wish, don't dream, but do write your own fiction and use it to create a present that works for you. Invent places for yourself and for those you care about in your stories about the future, and then go ahead and live in them.

Towards this goal, we will begin posting excerpts from our own Journey School Character Development program. While we'd love to have you as full-fledged participants complete with your own character and seasonal gifts, this task is too important to each of us, to all of us, to make it solely contingent on the exchange of money. Each week, we'll post a bit of the Assignment for free, offer the purchase of a full PDF of the single Assignment for $10, or of course, the entire 26 Assignment program with Character and gifts for $300. Our family has been working through this program for personal healing and character development in our own fiction for quite some time. So, we'll also share our responses here on the blog and hosted on our website www.luckyfarm.us in character specific collections.

See you next week for the beginning of your unique story!

Assignment #1

We've decided to share with you all excerpts from our Journey School Stories character development workshop. Zoe is first up with her response to Assignment #1, Childhood Memories. Best wishes, Lisa.

by Zoe Mathias

My name is Ilona Evenfrese.

When I was but a tiny infant, I remember being warm, and my mother was singing to me. Rocking back and forth, humming a soft lulling lullaby. Whenever I hear her singing it now I cannot understand the smooth guttural growling words, but though I can't quite recall the words I know I understood them then.

Smells waft through the warm air, isolated to the house by bars of icicles.

Nana and Inga are making bread. Sweet ginger bread with just a pinch of grape root ,"Shh Ilona, don't tell anyone. It's an Evenfrese secret.”

Let's see, a touch memory. Ah, that's it. When I was five years old my baby sister Maeve was born. That morning my Nana and Papa gave me a beautiful purple wool dress. I could feel the springy hairs of wool itching gently against my skin. That night Papa took me in to see Mama and baby Maeve. The baby had the softest skin, so soft I could hardly tell she was real.

I was just old enough to pull the string back on my little bow the first time Papa took me out with him and my big brothers. My father hunts at night, like the big cats. I met an owl that first time, as my Papa and brothers crept ahead. He caught me with his yellow gaze, and he whispered his name to me, the small word floated by my ears, carried by a silent wind.

For as long as I can remember that fleeting time that is between winter and spring is my favorite season. It seems like such a magical time, where life is waking up from a cold, death like sleep. The trees are stretching and reaching from skeletons in to lovely flowing creatures. When every gray has a tinge of pink, green, orange, red, purple, and yellow.

The bees buzz, and my tongue tastes again the absent flavor of gold, mellow reassurance that is honey.

I was eleven when they came. It was a clear October day, the kind of day that gets people ready for frost. They wore black coats with the insignia of a powerful, bloody house. A red boar with a long jagged scar carved into its shoulder. They threatened death if we didn't leave, and as good with a knife as my father was, he was a peaceful man. We left with one wagon filled with us, my brothers' dogs, my sister's cat, and a few dear things.

A month after we were exiled, my Nana disappeared. We looked high and low, but we did not find her. A week later I dreamed my Nana was in our ancestral graveyard. She was fighting one, two, three, four guards. As she put her old kitchen knife in one guard's belly, another drove a long bladed hunting knife in her side. Her red blood stained the snow over my grandfather's grave.

The next day a loyal family friend gave us the news that my Nana was dead, killed in our graveyard, but not before she gutted one of her attackers.

From that night on I have asked every god in the other world for a dreamless sleep.

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Welcome Home Honey May

We brought home our newest member of Journey School way back on June 3rd. It's seems paradoxically impossible to believe that it has been an entire month ago and at the same time, that she has not always been with us.








Our own little MaryLou was only a week old when Honey May was born at the small dairy next door. We'd spoken for the calf (if it would turn out to be a heifer calf) as soon as we knew the cow had been bred. We had been expecting a black calf and were quite excited at the idea of white, red, and black calves on our little farm. Our neighbor gave us a call early Saturday, May 29th -- a beautiful honey colored heifer calf was born that morning to her all black mama. After chores and coffee, we hurried over to meet our new baby. So soft, so sweet, so light colored!

Even earlier Sunday morning, we got another call from our neighbor - a call for help. Honey May's mom was down with Milk Fever. You may have never heard of milk fever, indeed we had not until exactly one week before when our sweet Gjynni was hit with the terrifying malady. I didn't blog about that. It shook me to my core for days afterward - honestly, I was nearly incoherent and still have difficulty finding words real enough to describe the experience.

Let me start slowly and I'll try not to lose my breath again. Milk fever especially effects dairy cows - within a day of calving, their bodies receive the signal "Need Milk!!" and they go into overdrive to produce milk for their baby. Sometimes, for complicated causes, their bodies demand more and more and more milk. Calcium is pulled from every source - blood, bone, organs - and the cow becomes rapidly, fatally chemically imbalanced.

We had been planting potatoes in our little inherited garden when I noticed Gjynni looking....... wrong. I mentioned my concern to everyone and asked that we all keep an eye on her. Within half an hour, we were leading her to a smaller pasture with more shade, offering kelp, salt, mineral block and a bucket of fresh water. Another 15 minutes later and I ran to the house to call our vet. He couldn't make it for an hour. We called our neighbors. By the grace of god, they came immediately bringing experience, knowledge, and calcium. At this time, I could have simply pushed over our gorgeous 1800 pound unflappable curious girl. If we didn't hold onto her halter, she just wandered in circles, becoming more and more unsteady and disoriented.

With increasing desperation, we offered everything in our toolbox of natural medicine - minerals, herbs, homeopathics and Reiki. It was actually in giving the Reiki that I began to lose my grounding. Gjynni simply felt less and less there. I have treated injury and disease under intense circumstances but never have I known that death was quietly waiting to step in the very next moment. And there was nothing I could do to stop it. There was no bleeding, no fever, no respiratory distress to be mitigated. She was simply dying and I couldn't stop it.

Our vet, however, could. He arrived within what I sincerely believe was minutes of losing Gjynni and immediately administered intravenous calcium. As quickly as she began walking away with death, she returned to us. Within about 45 minutes, she was standing solid if still not quite all better. It took a full day and a half before we let her go unobserved for more than a couple of hours. And believe me, we learned about Milk Fever and gathered all the tools we had no idea we needed just two days prior.

So when Linda called, we mobilized. Within 15 minutes, we had the cow propped upright, administered two tubes of oral calcium, had the liquid calcium warming in a bucket of water, and were loading the two syringes for subcutaneous injection. Our vet still had to come to the farm to administer calcium intravenously but death itself was never paged. The emotional difference in the two events is inconceivable.

I was reminded during that week of when we dehorned our bull calf Quincy. Honestly, if you believe you want and need to hone your first responder crisis skills, get a family cow. We have learned more, and learned more completely, about disease and injury by living closely with our animals than through any training or workshop. I think because these animals mean so much to us both practically and emotionally and yet are not valued in the same way by the rest of our culture (you can't call 911 for a cow), our level of stewardship simply must reach higher levels. I am proud of all that we have learned, proud of my amazing family, and drop-to-my-knees humbled and grateful for the resilience of our animal partners.

On a side note, Quincy grew up just fine. He's now the expectant father of not one but three calves next Spring and likely three more next Summer. While he probably won't be a long-term resident of Journey School, he has done his job beautifully and we are glad to have known him.