I dream and gaze into a Sonoran sky,
where flames no longer lap at my tired tail,
and concrete runs smooth and cool,
and trusting birds fly slow and low,
and spirits rise high above tall trees,
and the constant chase has ended,
and the kitchen door is always open,
and I finally realize I’ve found home.
I try to be careful, but I’m not a superstitious swimmer.
Life flows cooler and bluer when I navigate the deep end.
Back and forth in thirteen feet, more washes over and around me.
I have more room to glide, more room to imagine, more room to dream.
It’s time to come clean. I haven’t been devoting enough time to an important piece of my life and identity. I haven’t been scheduling–and honoring–a critical creative need: uninterrupted time to write.
Like an untuned car with dirty spark plugs, this sputtering connection–between me and my creative self–has been misfiring for about a year.
Though I have produced creative things (like a few librettos for my chorus and a blogpost once each week), I haven’t been protecting my creative time. I haven’t been developing enough ideas that are purely mine.
It’s time to take action. To go back to school. To open the metaphorical hood of this mid-century car. To do something about it.
I know this is a challenge for all writers … and I’m luckier than most. I’m not juggling a full-time job at this stage of my life.
Still, external forces and demands often flood through the door–disrupting my good writing intentions. (Even as I began to write this, a sprinkler head outside our front door just went haywire. I texted one of our condo board members to tell him a fountain of water is spraying everywhere!)
I’m back to the keyboard of my writing universe. Beyond the whack-a-mole geysers that pop up in every life, it’s time I became more selective and vigilant with how I choose to spend my time.
It’s time for me to find a better balance again. To be more attentive to my own creative needs (like I did when I wrote and published four memoirs and one book of poetry from 2016 to 2023) … while still taking some time to help others.
Today I began by scheduling two hours–between 10 a.m. and noon–to write this blog post about the writing process.
Tomorrow, I have another two hours on my calendar. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday will be the same.
Perhaps it is fitting that I’m treating myself like a misaligned student, who needs guidance from the teacher in me. Because this fall I will be leading a three-part “Meaningful Memoirs Matter” writing workshop for up to eight students at the Scottsdale Public Library.
I’m excited about the opportunity to teach again. (In the early 2000s, I taught the fundamentals of public relations as an adjunct instructor for Roosevelt University in Chicago.)
I think this 2024 experience will be more fulfilling on a personal level than the communication courses I led more than twenty years ago.
I genuinely want to help aspiring writers in my community tell their own stories. I want to tell them they don’t have to be celebrities to do it.
Extraordinary things happen to all of us. Important stuff flies under the radar in our everyday lives.
Just as important, I want to share my passion for the memoir art form and set this small group of individuals on a path to discover and unearth their own voices.
Back to scheduling. One of the things I will tell my students is that writing is a discipline. It requires solitude, time, dedication, energy, and–of course–passion.
But if you start small and string enough hours, days, weeks, and months of devoted and affirming writing sessions together–with time–the misfiring or underutilized writing jalopy can become a well-oiled machine.
Simply writing this is helping me get my creative energy back.
It’s time for me to practice what I will preach. To nurture the most important pieces of who I am … the writer, the storyteller, the essayist, the poet, the creative protagonist.
Because I am happiest when I am producing something that is entirely mine. Something that speaks to our human condition. Something that celebrates our connections to animals and nature.
Something that amplifies the importance of raising your voice and sharing your truth … even if the rest of the world has blown a gasket.
In summer’s flurry of joyful singing, record-breaking heat, Covid resurgence, political revelations, and Olympics coverage, June is gone. July is close behind.
Until now, my Covid recovery, birthday revelry, and travels to and from Minneapolis for the 2024 GALA Festival prevented me from posting highlights from Encore, our Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus concert in late June.
Suffice it to say Encore was a musical review of favorite chorus moments and tunes (A Million Dreams, Some Nights, What Was I Made For?, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Proud, I’m Still Standing, For Me and ten more.)
Beyond that, it was also a reflective celebration of Marc Gaston’s twenty-two years as our artistic director–laced with storytelling vignettes (I wrote), LGBTQ anthems, and dazzling dance routines.
As a singer and one of several storytellers, I couldn’t be prouder of the program we created and performed for three exuberant audiences at Tempe Center for the Arts.
I will leave you with a snippet of dialogue … along with four images from the concert … that represents the joy, energy, rainbow colors, and love, which reverberated in the room away from the summer heat.
“When I sing with this chorus–these amazing people–and I absorb all the music and camaraderie, it feels like the sky is the limit. It feels like I could rule the world.” Mark Johnson, Storyteller #1, in Encore.
June is the start of triple-digit season in the Sonoran Desert.
When it reaches 110 degrees–as it has for the past several days–it really feels like you’ve stepped inside an oven alongside that batch of chocolate chip cookies you crave. Or maybe, you imagine, there is a blaze approaching just over the next butte.
Tom and I escaped the oven for a few days to visit friends in the mile-high altitude and pines of Prescott, Arizona.
Watching the acrobatics and listening to the distinctive calls of a wide array of birds–bluebirds, woodpeckers, finches, tanagers, nuthatches, hummingbirds, etc.–while sipping morning coffee with John and Carolyn on their front patio, was as rejuvenating as a day at the spa.
Now we are back home. There is a quiet, reflective component tied to the intense Sonoran heat. Early swims. Late walks. More time to read. Fewer people to navigate.
We’ll be here seven years next month. In the heat and stillness of that realization, we’ve carved out a good, artistic, and whole life among Arizona friends, buttes, and dazzling sunsets.
It’s a warm (hot) life I never imagined at 30, 40 or 50 years old–but still a pleasant surprise beyond the constant push and responsibility of my Midwestern bread-winning years.
I last visited my father’s grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in September 2021.
If there is such a thing as beauty to behold in a final resting place for those who served, it exists there just south of St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi River–fourteen hundred miles east of where I live and write today.
On this Memorial Day, I remember Dad–and the thousands of fallen soldiers gathered around him–with twelve lines I wrote on August 27, 1996 … almost three years after he died.
This poem and forty-one others appear in my book A Path I Might Have Missed.
***
The Soldier on the Hill
I talked with the soldier on the hill today.
We sat, we cried, we laughed, we prayed.
The bells rang true, the trees stood free.
A breeze swept past to welcome me.
Shadows filled the landscape then.
Tempers rose without his pen.
Snowflakes fell, the grass turned green.
All without a change of scene.
Now the soldier rests with them,
Hand-in-hand–all blessed again.
They greet another trailing soul.
Who makes the journey past the knoll.
What will happen, when our last
parade of Palo Verde petals
paint the blue sky yellow?
Beyond the frantic flight
of ever-fluttering pages,
who will pause to remember
what we did, what we saw,
what we knew, what we missed,
who we loved and carried forward,
who we–proud and bold–held,
before the blossoms fell?
May casts a quiet spell of desert sensibility.
Brief morning showers spawn feline revelry.
Lonely pomegranates hang ready to ripen.
Roses, hibiscus, and bougainvillea vie nearby.
Shiny lizards adorn loveseats and walkways.
Still waters wait for summer waves to come.
Late April’s breezy interlude and May’s certain pre-heating oven conspire to scare and sweep them from one escaping path to another. As they scatter and vanish into familiar cumulus clouds, space and silence walk with those who remain and remember.
***
To enjoy more of my poetry, buy A Path I Might Have Missed on Amazon.
9:10 a.m. yoga mantra:
“When in doubt,
exhale it out.”
Without our breath,
and our ability
to let go of the negativity
in the world,
we have nothing.
6:56 p.m. sunset capture:
“Inhale the magic,
exhale the tragic.”
Without our compass,
and our agility
to embrace the possibilities
on the horizon,
we have lost all hope.
To enjoy more of my poetry, buy A Path I Might Have Missed on Amazon.
Mark Johnson Stories 