Harley King — Gift of Memory

Without memory, we lose all sense of self. We lose the threads and tangles that tell our stories. We lose our history from where we came. We lose our connection to the past. Memory gives our lives meaning and explains who we are and from where we came.

Yet, memory is fragmented, distorted and unconnected. Distorted memories can create false selves and cause us unhappiness. We must reshape our memories into a cohesive story that allows us to enjoy the person whom we have become. We must dig through the ashes of forgetfulness and find the keys to who we are.

Cradle your memories in your arms.  Give them the love and attention that they need.  Memory restores us to the world in which we live.  Choose to cherish your memories.

And as creative leaders, you are fortunate to have the skills and talents necessary to craft memory into a powerful story that touches the hearts and souls of others. Through the retelling of memory life is restored.

Harley King - Heroes and Stories

Are you the hero of your story? Or are you the victim? We all have faced challenges in our lives and we have struggled to overcome difficulties. We have people who seek to hurt us and cause us harm. Have you found the strength to share your story of triumph and victory over the pain? Or are you still dwelling in a past of unhappiness? Maybe it is time to retell your story with you as the hero. Maybe it is time to celebrate your healing.



Our stories are not new.  Others have tread the same path and faced the same challenges.  The difference is in the details. The difference is in our memories. Share your memories and the details that make your story unique. Share what is special about your story.



The fact that I have been fired five times in my career is a part of my story. Yet, I have risen from the ashes of failure to find new paths. I have used my failures as opportunities to grow and change. I have overcome the pain of loss. I have become the hero, not the victim.  I have been employed by the same company for the last 28 years.



The fact that I was diagnosed with prostate cancer is a part of my story.  Yet, today, ten years later, I am cancer-free.



The fact that editors have rejected my poems is a part of my story.  Yet, I did not let the rejection stop me from writing.  I chose to keep writing and have now written over 5,000 poems.  And I still write and rewrite my story.  I celebrate my story. 



What stories are you telling? Are you the hero?  Or the victim? Is it time to rewrite your story?

This entry marks the 950th post to this inspirational blog filled with positive quotes and comments. I have written every week for six years, beginning with my first entry on August 7, 2010.  The first two years I posted a daily entry. During the last four years I have posted weekly. I am writing and rewriting my story.

First blog post: August 7, 2010

http://harleyinspiration.blogspot.com/2010/08/every-flower-is-soul-blossoming-in.html

Muhammad Ali — Growth

Life is about change and growth as individuals and as writers and artists.  If we think the same thoughts at 50 that we did at 20, we have failed to grow and mature in our thinking. We have wasted our time here on this earth.  If we paint the same paintings or write the same stories at 50 that we did at 20, we have failed to grow and develop our skills. We have wasted the precious gifts we have been given.



I am much more accepting of life today than I was when I was 2o.  I now take the long view and realize the world will go on long after I have left this world behind.  When I was eighteen, I thought the world was about to end.



How have you changed?  What have you learned? What did you learn yesterday?  What do you still need to learn?  Have you stopped growing?  Are you simply existing — waiting for the end to come?



In the summer of 1966, I saw Muhammad Ali standing on a street corner in downtown Chicago.  He was 24 years old and I was seventeen.  He was already a world champion boxer and I was a teenager from a small farming community just beginning to engage with the world. He had already refused to be inducted into the armed forces and was stripped of his title.  My first protest march was two years away.



More than 30 years after I saw Muhammad Ali, I met one of his daughters at the restaurant she owned in a suburb of Chicago.  I was there to give a speech on the privilege of service. Life had come full circle.



Life is about the people who cross our paths, the relationships that we choose to develop and the memories we acquire.  Life is about growth, learning and change.  Thank you, Muhammad Ali, for what you gave the world of yourself and what you taught us. 

Gail Godwin — Writing Habits

Our minds are very powerful and capable of doing more than we imagine.  In a New York Times Book Review essay on the lives of aging writers, Gail Godwin told the reporter that she was able as she grew older to compose paragraphs in her mind and retain them — something she was unable to do in her youth.  She remembers as a young writer hearing Jorge Luis Borges tell his audience at the Iowa Writer's Workshop that blindness taught him to compose his stories in his head.  I know of poets who compose poems in their minds and are able to recite them from memory.

Many young writers and artists feel that if they are not successful by the time they turn forty, they have failed.  Yet, writing and painting is a learning process.  Creative power does not rest only with the young.  Some of us don't get our first wind until we are over sixty.  I remember reading the story many years ago of a writer who published his first novel in his thirties and his second in his eighties.

While Gail Godwin is best known for her fourteen novels, she has also composed music with Robert Starer and keeps colored pencils at her bedside.  On her website Godwin says that she will often draw before she goes to sleep.  She says: "I also draw when I am baffled by some aspect of the character.  Making a visual image of that character in action almost always reveals something new."



(Photo of Gail Godwin by David Hermon.)

Harley King

Telling my personal story has often been difficult for me because my nature is to stick to the facts.  I was raised to believe in factual truth.  I have a bad habit of correcting my wife in front of people when she has the facts wrong.  And she lets me know it.  Old habits are hard to break.



It has taken me years to appreciate the importance of changing our stories in their re-telling — to understand the value of embellishing the facts.  Facts are not as important as meaning.  The truth resides deeper in our memories than facts.


Yet where does one draw the line? Reporters in recent times have been fired or forced to resign because they have played too loose with the facts.  And in some cases, reporters have fabricated the entire story.  Memoirists have been criticized and had their books pulled from the shelves because it was found that they fabricated some of their memories.



Do we violate the reader and writer bond when we embellish our stories?  The reader is expecting the truth and is upset to find the writer has altered the facts.  The trust is broken.  The reader feels betrayed.



Yet the great storytellers embellished their memories to make them entertaining.  Life as we live it has long stretches of boredom.  Life as we imagine it is full of adventure and romance.  Great writers understand this principle.  



Life as we know it is chaotic and without purpose. Imagination allows us to bring order and meaning to events.  Life is lived in the moment and only understood through creative reflection. Life is not as much about names, events and facts as it is about feelings, connections and dreams.  Life is about memory.  Cherish your creative memories.

May your memories grow in proportion 

to the richness of your creative spirit.

Harley King

This is a photo of my maternal grandmother taken in the early part of the 20th century. I remember hearing a story about my grandmother when she was a teenager.  She and a cousin snuck out of the house early one morning and went riding on horses.  My grandmother was thrown from the horse and broke her leg. Rather then tell her parents, she limped back to bed and pretended to be sick.  It took two days for her parents to discover that her leg was broken.



We all have stories from our childhood about our ancestors — the uncle who was a drunk and burnt the house down, the aunt who rode motorcycles and the cousin who died young.  As artists and creative leaders, we need to turn our family history into stories, poems and paintings.



May you be blessed with stories about your ancestors.  For in those stories, we can discover who we are and from where we came.



I wrote a story poem some 35 years ago about a story I had heard as a child.  I showed it to my grandmother when she was 83.  She told me the facts were not correct and she was right.  I changed the details of the story to protect the innocent.  Yet for me, my grandmother lives on in this story.  I discovered my ancestors through the process of writing the story.





Brother AL



He was a little bit of a thing —

knee-high to a grasshopper

as pa used to say.

But his hair was the funnier sight —

white as the coverings

women wear in church.

Been that way since birth.

He didn't seem to mind it, though,

until he met Ruthy Shonkwiler.

She was a big-breasted girl

with farmer's hands.

Seems he fell in love

the moment he set eyes on her.

But as things have a way of happening

in this neck of the woods,

she had her heart set on Stephen,

old Samuel Yoder's youngest,

tall as an oak

with hair the color

of a bull Angus.



Now, Alvin wasn't one

to let obstacles get in his way.

He would stuff pages

out of an old Sears catalog

into his shoes to make him taller

and he was always on the look out

for something to blacken his hair.



It happened one day

that Ma was cooking up

a big batch of prunes

and she set the juice out to cool.

Alvin, in his infinite wisdom,

thought that it was God's answer to his prayers.

He dipped his snow-white cap

into the kettle of juice

hoping to turn it black.

Well, let me tell ya,

it didn't work.

All he got was a lickin' from pa

and a hot bath and shampoo.

Ma, though, thought he should be taught a lesson.

Said if people don't like

what the good Lord gives them,

then the good Lord ought to take it away.

So she shaved his head

clean down to the scalp.

Embarrassed the poor guy to death.

Ruthy, I'm told, laughed and laughed.



Well, he survived somehow

and married, Eli's oldest, Sarah.

Together, they had a parcel of kids,

not a white-haired one among them.

Ruthy went off to college

and married some doctor fellow

from out east.



To this day Alvin refuses

to eat prunes

or order anything out of a Sears catalog.

May your ancestors live in your stories 

and reveal themselves through your memory.

Harley King

Memories are the stories that we tell ourselves and others to remind us of the experiences in our lives.  Rarely are these stories entirely true.  The stories have been altered by time and our ability to forget.  We have the ability to change our stories and yet believe them to be true.  



Cherish your ability to forget what has happened to you because it helps you live a productive and happy life.  If we remembered every detail of our lives, we would suffer from boredom.  Be wary of the negative stories you tell yourself because some portion of each story we tell is false.  You have recreated the experience to fit your beliefs.  Don't live in a past that causes you pain and heartache.  



Celebrate your ability to recreate your experiences into stories that shape who you want to be, not who you are.  Our creative spirits provide us with a rich tapestry of memory.  We change our stories to give us hope.  Memory is a creative gift.  Alter your story to honor your life.



May your memories grow in proportion to the richness of your creative spirit.