First, I should define spring “cleaning”. It involves little to no cleaning of anything. What it means is scraping a layer of things and clutter out of my world.

Some decisions are easy. A how-to manual I used when my sons were kids has no current usefulness, so it is gone. Nail polish that is separating or starting to dry out is trash. A sweater that never fit right heads to the giveaway.

But then there are the more difficult items. The books I assembled for a project that I’m not currently working on, for instance. Will I do it someday? I don’t know. What about the green loafers that I really like the look of, but I’ve only worn twice? Or the earrings that were one of my mother’s last gifts to me, but that I don’t really like?

Aargh!

Emotions get tangled up in things, just like they get tangled up in words.

I’m spring cleaning because life feels overwhelming. Whenever it feels like that, I need less stuff around me. I purge, section by section, until the new norm feels comfortable.

I’m not there yet.

I also do it, though, to distract my mind while I’m working out the plot twists on my book. Yes, this is the book that was supposed to be finished in December.

Sometimes, I am my own worst enemy with both the writing and the decluttering. I can spend so much time second guessing a decision that I make no headway. And while I am hemming and hawing, I will do a variety of things to distract myself such as surf Facebook or play games. In other words, since the frustration is building, I seek ways to feel better.

If only I could be confident in my decisions!

Last weekend I wrote three flash stories to submit to Havok in less than 36 hours. And I did sleep. Sometimes, like then, the ideas and the words flow. That is especially true the shorter the item I’m writing or the shorter the deadline or both. (I really thought I would be more disciplined by this point in my life and able to obey my own self-imposed deadlines, but no.)

It is always the middles that mess me up. It can be the beginning of the middle or any place up to the last quarter of the book. In fact, I have the ending written of the book in question. I usually do! But I slog through the middle pages like walking through a bog. I know where I need to go, what the characters have to do to get there, but the actual writing of it gets downright painful sometimes.

Any book or project I have abandoned, has been dropped off during the middle.

Beginnings are exciting. Endings are fulfilling.

But, if you think about it, we live a lot of our life in the middle.

When I spring clean, I am attempting to create both a beginning (clean slate) and an ending (getting rid of what is no longer useful). But the things that are neither clearly things I should keep, nor things I should give or throw away, are stuck in the middle. They make the process arduous and painful.

Again, if only I could be confident in my decisions!

But alas, I am human and finite. I can’t know. There might be a better way to write my story. There might be something I give away that I will wish I kept. I can only make the best choices I can with prayer, hope and trust.

And then, I must forgive myself for any errors along the way.

 So today, another couple of bagfuls made it off my shelves and out of my closets. Along the way, I did get some ideas for one of my forgotten stories, if not the one I’m actually working on. And perhaps, after I cause Hortense a couple of disasters, I can get back to saving the dinosaurs.

For well over a week before a common event, I didn’t sleep well. On the morning of, before an incident that many thousands of people have experienced, I was hyperventilating and dizzy. Why? Because of the myriad of painful and deadly scenarios my imagination had created—especially during the wee hours of the morning.

What happened that morning that had me so panicked? I got my first dose of the vaccine.

In my imagination’s defense, I have had a lot of crazy reactions to medicines. So even though I read everything I could about the process and realized the odds of me having a disastrous result were slim, negative potentialities were all I could focus on. Not only that, my dreams and creativity managed to have the shot slay me or change me in increasingly bizarre ways. You never heard of anyone becoming a spider and then getting stepped on, did you?

As a writer, an overactive imagination (or at least an imagination) is an essential part. It’s hard to create characters and their stories without it. But sometimes (more often than I would like actually) it goes into overdrive. And generally when it does that, it could be labeled as worry. I think of it as Eeyore creativity.

You know what I mean, right? It takes some incredible brain power to find the gloomy cloud on a sunny day.

On the plus side, I have never (thank God) been hard-pressed to come up with an idea for a story. Telling tales comes easily. But finishing them can be a struggle thanks to that same overactive imagination. You’d be amazed at how many disasters have been caused (in my imagination) simply by my finishing a story. Sometimes they’re personal ridicule. I have made some egregious error in plot or fact checking or something that means the end of my career as I know it. Sometimes they’re reality-based. A reader uses my ideas to do some massive harm to society. But whatever my imagined disasters are, they plague me during waking and sleeping hours.

I have written about my nightmares before. For the most part, I’ve come to terms with them because they do provide most of my story plots—especially the crazy ones. But when I’m in a worry loop, they can get increasingly tense and frightening. When they get to the level that I’m trying to escape demons, I know it’s past time for me to turn the imaginings over to God.

Way past the time.

In truth, I should commit my writing to him every time I pick up a pen or tap on my keyboard. But do I? No. Even when I’m writing about him and his role in my life, I often think about it and write about it from my own limited view. In other words, I approach the divine and sacred from the profane and worldly. And that’s backwards.

Many a theologian will tell you that because God created, there really is no profane outside of sin. It is sin and the effects of the fall that give us a worldly view. In a right view, we should look at everything as God sees it.

So when I need to rein in my overactive imagination, I need to look at my life as God sees it. It is a blessing. It is a gift. And it is my chance to glorify him.

Maybe this post will remind me the next time my imaginings go spiraling down negative paths that he has given me a future and a hope.

My post is later than usual by a day. There are a couple of reasons for that. One, Earth Day is today, not yesterday. Two, I got vaccinated yesterday and it pert near wiped me out for the day. Still feeling less than ideal today, but life goes on.

I have always been in favor of the earth. After all, it is the only planet I know that is livable. Given that, I want to preserve it as much as possible. I don’t want to pollute, I advocate recycling (Germany had the best system for that out of anywhere I have lived) and I believe in caring for the creatures that share this globe with us. I believe, quite firmly, that Christians should be the best environmentalists of all mankind. After all, God gives us many instructions about its care. The very first role given to Adam was to “tend and keep the garden” (Genesis 2:15). That role as caretaker of creation did not go away with the fall.

“Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
18 Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
19 In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”

After the flood, God reiterated that Noah’s descendants needed to care for the earth. It was given into their hands—common phrasing for an owner turning over property to a steward.

The earth is not ours. But it is given to us to tend. If we followed all of God’s guidance as to its care, imagine how healthy it and its citizens would be!

Here is a sampling of that guidance:

• Don’t eat or use fruit from a tree for its first three years
• Don’t harvest every single bit of your field. Leave the edges for the poor and the hungry, including the animals.
• Let the land rest every seventh year. Don’t force a harvest from it, but let it grow fallow and recover.
• Know the world you live on. (This would include knowing what was edible and inedible, plus knowing which creatures need a bit of extra attention!)
• Without fallow seasons for the land, it will get harder and harder to achieve the same yields.
• War doesn’t just kill people. It injures the land and its creatures.
• Different lands, different grounds have different purposes. A forest serves one purpose as does grazing land, farmland or places to dwell. Work with the way the land was made, not against it.
• Don’t pollute or defile the land you live on.
• Honoring God prolongs your life, the health of your land and any creatures under your care.
• Conversely, not honoring God leads to famine, suffering, drought or flooding.
• Feed the poor around you.
• Sticking to a cyclical pattern for the land reduces plagues of locusts or other imbalances.

I could have kept going. I figured, though, I would limit the guidance to the Pentateuch or the first five books of the Bible.

God strongly advocates preserving the environments he gave us. That’s what he means by tending.

Years ago, I assembled a chapbook of poetry on the very theme of tending God’s garden, acting as good stewards of the earth he gave us. I thought I would end this post with the opening poem of that book. My prayer is that you don’t see it as depressing, but as a call to act on behalf of the groaning world we live upon.

THE FIRST COMMANDMENTS

When God created, he commanded,

Adam's first obligation was work

And duty to the Earth.

Toil and tend her,

Reap her fruits and protect her.

Cry, for the forgotten duty,

Cry, as God's Earth

Has been raped until our children

Cannot imagine Eden without picture books.