Literary Interview by Suzanne Jenkins with Garnette Arledge

Garnette Arledge –

 Honoring the Divine

May 1, 2016 by Suzanne Jenkins • 2 Comments

Novelist

Suzanne’s Note-I met author Garnette Arledge about ten years ago during a Hands of Light weekend at Vivekananda Ridgely Retreat in Stone Ridge, Upstate NY. She wasn’t participating in the program; instead, she was living at the retreat. That weekend still resonates in my memory bank; my dear friend, Joy flew in from Austin to drive with me upstate from South Jersey. The high point of the weekend; meeting Garnette and her books. The words of the preface to the Wise Secrets of Aloha were life changing for me. Read it and your heart breaks, learning the story of how Garnette found purpose and the strength to write in the midst of profound grief. She was my hero for a very long time. Meet Garnette Arledge.

From Garnette’s Amazon Page Award-winning author Garnette Arledge has traveled the world, been a pilot and poet, Hospice Chaplain and newspaper Editor. She teaches how to write your own stories transformed into published books. She performs poetry and laughter therapy, teaches conversation skills between adults and other generations. Recommends the writing life with a wing and a prayer.

Novels: One Hundred Thousand Lights: love song to India, Summer, 2012, Singing Stars Press. Spiritual South India, journey to romance, ashrams and gurus.

Night of the Mothers: Four Magi Follow the Star, Fall, 2013, Singing Stars Press. Re-imagining the wise women, as midwives bring useful gifts for the babies.

Self-help books: Wise Secrets of Aloha, Weiser’s Books, Spring 2007, healing with Lomilomi, the Aloha Spirit and hands-on touch. Releasing current and past-life trauma.

On Angels Eve, meaningful support you can give family and friends at and during the dying journey. Square One 2004. Practical conversation and caring techniques.

Festival of Writers: My Turn, December 2013, a meditation on solitude and writing at Hobart Book Village, NY, with chapter-excerpts  from each of Garnette's books.

On Angel’s Eve – Hospice chaplain Garnette Arledge has helped hundreds of people say “good-bye” to loved ones who are about to pass away. In this unique book, she explains how to make the most of this period of passing, which she refers to as “Angel’s Eve.” The author begins by exploring your understanding of death. She then offers spiritual support by showing how Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism provide healing perspectives on dying. She also includes suggested activities to help make the most of your time together.

Wise Secrets of Aloha – With Harry Uhane Jim, one of the last Kahuna of Lomilomi, Keeper of the Deep Mysteries of authentic Hawaiian esoterica. He shares the secrets of this ancient oral tradition with readers for the first time in Wise Secrets of Aloha.

Recognizing that the world is in great peril, Kahuna Harry was blessed by the Halau Guardians who instructed him to share the true teachings and tools of Lomilomi for the practice of physical, emotional, and spiritual healing. He writes: “Now is the time to share aloha with humanity. `Aloha’ means the Breath of God is in our Presence. It is time to reveal the profound Lomilomi secrets of the kahunas for personal and planetary peace.”

Wise Secrets of Aloha is as simple as it is profound, as contemporary as it is ancient. It is true to Hawaiian esoteric teachings and available to all who bring the right attitude. Aloha calls. Listen in the splash of waves, in the breeze–the air is filled with aloha. All the abundance, joy, and freedom from old wounds readers have ever yearned for can be found by adopting the aloha spirit.

Review "I have read (in many cases slogged) through all Kahuna-type and Hawaiian Mystical I could find. From Max Freedom Long, to Fundamentals of Hawaiian Mysticism and so on, to the somewhat clearer The Sacred Power of Huna: Spirituality and Shamanism in Hawaii, Hawaiian Magic & Spirituality to the much better The Secrets and Mysteries of Hawaii: A Call to the Soul In all of these works other works you really do have a reconstructive approach to the Hawaiian ways that is done by an outsider to one degree or another. Pila, perhaps because of his Cherokee heritage was able to look into the ways of his Island brothers and unravel much of the mystery there. But this book by lineage holder Harry Uhane Jim is something in another class by itself.

This book conveys a high degree of clear consciousness from beginning to end. And what is important here is that Huna and Lomilomi are not presented as technique but as life-affirming and healing perspectives, ways of looking at the world. The spiritual essence that this book carries is very high and very pure. It reminds me of the best of the mystical works of the Sufi’s and others who see the unity behind the essence of a light and life.

Even if you are not specifically interested in Hawaiian mysticism or healing this book is sure to re-awaken aspects of your being and help you to live more fully. Very highly recommended.

In the same line as this book I would recommend the works of Joseph Rael (Beautiful Painted Arrow) Being and Vibrationand Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan The Heart of Sufism."

One Hundred Thousand Lights-A Love Song to India – Leaving behind a two-timing fiance and job stealing colleague, carrying only her smart phone and a spiritual guidebook, lost Grace Avery lands alone in India to a Mumbai strike, Trivandrum riot, wild Chennai bus ride, the beauty of Pondicherry, the peace of Tiruvannamalai, the brilliance of Puttaparthi and a reconciliation in Bangalore. Guided from one mystical experience to another, surrounded by found compassionate friendships, deep spiritual teachings and love, she finds inside the real meaning of her name, Grace.

 An Interview with Garnette Arledge

1. How long did it take you to start writing in earnest once you knew that was what you wanted to do? All I ever loved, and would say when asked what did I want to do, was read. But my father wouldn’t allow me to major in English or History as I wished (plenty of reading there) so I signed up for journalism. Took more English and History than J’lism. Didn’t know I could write but the professors thought so, fortunately. I’ve been reading ever since. With occasional writing interspersed. Ten books now and piles of news and magazine articles.
2. Did you launch into self-publishing immediately or did you try the traditional route first? Working on newspapers and magazines set the groove for having editors, copy editors, paid colleagues to get my work out. My first two books, Wise Secrets of Aloha and On Angels Eve (the hospice book), were with medium sized publishers I recruited at the American Booksellers Assn. Convention in NYC. I acted on my own behalf but felt frustrated with the confines of their operations. As much as I loved the copy editors. All the others, novels and memoirs, I have self-published which has its own liabilities, mainly distribution and those eagle-eyed copy editors.
3. What was the most difficult part of the journey? Marketing – even though I also worked in PR. It takes good money to promote your own books and a different kind of discipline than writing. That I am easy with. Not self-promotion, not my cup of tea, I’d rather promote others.
4. 4. You have several books, including a series. Do you want to do a stand alone? Or are you compelled to continue your series? Or both?       I do not have a series. Only in my mental attic. Once I’m done with a book, even if it is by another author, I continue thinking of further outcomes. But I’m eager to leap for another project – must be the journalist in me.
5. Do you jump right in to write once you get an idea, or do you plan and outline? Outline extensively, then follow the flow. I love to observe where my mind kicks in and something else than what I was planning consciously contributes itself. Often that is more fruitful than the outline.
6. Where do you write? Do you have any rituals or necessities when you write? Is noise a hindrance? You learn quickly in journalism to pull a cloak of invisibility around your desk area in order to focus on the work. When I started there were fifty other journalists in the room, each focused. Now I sit looking out at Milton Mountain, the huge sky, next to a 45 year-old ficus in my study. Classical music. The dog. The phone. I miss the wisecracks of the newsroom. Well, maybe not. Peace and serenity are good.
7. Do you write more than one piece at a time? I can, have done. Just like I have several books I’m reading going now. What’s in the works now? I’m making a book of my writings: poems, interviews with spiritual greats, maybe an editorial or two. I feel a gathering of my life-time’s work coming on. Making order out of paper chaos appeals to me. Better than in files or boxes.
8. What encourages you to write? Discourages? What do you do to motive yourself through the rough times? I had the world’s best teacher of writing: journalism. “Don’t think: write” the professors said. It helped greatly that the story was based on interviews or facts, a sort of outline. Over the years it became ingrained to rely on gathering the material first, or living it, then writing it. My practice is to put my fingers on the keyboard and let them do the work. There’s an esoteric flow out of those fingers that seems to by-pass the mind. And I do a lot of walking in these mountains by the Hudson River with my dog. Mindlessness becomes Mindfulness, something mysterious happens when I am not consciously thinking about the work. When I get back to the keyboard, although now I am telling bits to Siri even on the walk, material comes. I'm learning to pull over, give Siri a poem title or first line so back at the laptop, the work is jump-started. My blog is called Scripta Divina. Not the ancient church’s meaning of reading divinely inspired  works. But my own meaning: that my writing is inspired by the inner, transcendent Self. I imagine that’s true for writers, although I wonder at the minds of the ones writing on hard-edged topics. Peace.

Lenten Adventurers Book Review: The Sisters of Sinai

The Sisters of Sinai: how two lady adventurers discovered the hidden gospels

by Janet Soskice, 2009

Review (c) by Garnette Arledge    February 26, 2016

Twin sisters born in 1843 in strict Presbyterian Scotland, during Victoria’s reign, travelled by ship, donkey, carriage and on foot against all sage advice by Cambridge male biblical scholars, to discover lost gospels.

They authenticated the earliest known written Christian gospel manuscripts to 90 ce and turned up staid scholarship of their time.

Sounds like fiction and it would be except they were fabulously wealthy, spoke and wrote a dozen pan-Eastern languages and were indomitable. Literally. Blocked from even attending college, much less teaching, they simply (ha!) equipped expeditions with camels, drivers, tea services, full china place settings, linen sheets, grand dresses and went to the Sinai peninsula. Before any other scholars notice, they were welcomed and most importantly, trusted with precious secret and sacred sheepskin documents almost two centuries old. The desert monks, cenobic men living in austerity guarded their hidden treasures with the same zealousy in which the sisters pursued them.

Perhaps that’s why the monks trusted the women. The sisters honored the secret hoardings (manuscripts tossed down into a deep locked room from upper balconies for hundreds of years). In no particular order. And the sisters persisted, had afternoon tea, brought out suddenly willing male scholars to work alongside, deciphering and cataloguing the treasures. Naturally these men tried to claim credit. But monks refused to deal with them. The sisters persisted.

It’s a rollicking good story, as true of any truth is. I see Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. I couldn’t put it down, 300 pages filled with magic, perseverance, derring-do in a Scots Presbyterian manner. Eventually, as they were barred from teaching at Cambridge, they built a Women’s College next door. They wrote books. They were consulted. They married, each in turn briefly but mostly it was just the two of them with paid desert guides who may or may not  have been reliable. Sand, horrible odors from both the old documents and the monks, as well as the pack animals.

Inspiring. Thoroughly researched. Well written. Although I did expect Lord Peter Wimsey and his founder Dorothy L. Sayers accompanied by Agatha Christie to come riding over the dawn-lit sands for breakfast - all five courses naturally. The only flaw is that I finished it too quickly.

Greenwillow review

Greenwillow

review © 2/23/2016

by Garnette Arledge

One gloomy Saturday in January my local library held their Book Sale. I ‘greatly admire’ local libraries sometimes even holding onto a book until it’s overdue just to give the fine. Of course I’m a member and contributor also. For there are treasures to found in village libraries, well worn books written in, perhaps a kinder age to readers’ psyches.

Like it was waiting for me, spring be praised, there was Greenwillow by B.J. Chute, published in 1956 by E.P. Dutton and Company before it was just Dutton. With line drawings of 19th Century English village life. Turns out it was a famous book on its own becoming a Broadway play with Anthony Hopkins. So it is in the genre of Friendly Persuasion by Jessamyn West. Perhaps even a bit of a Jane Austen-like.

Village life, rival clergy who have separate entrances, belief systems and service times into the one Anglican church. Pub. Old Ladies. Young Love, seemingly thwarted by tradition. Descriptive language so the reader can see the seasons, the flowers, the food, the hopes and dreams thanks to the author who was once president of Penwomen. Even a whimsy -- a mysterious call of the East that afflicts one family’s eldest son, a bit like Beau Geste by P.C. Wren. I could smell the tea cakes, root for the animals, love the folk. Reminds me of how Downton Abbey will be missed.

Greenwillow is a nostalgic reading treasure. It’s on Amazon, hold on, one copy for more than a thousand dollars. I’m thankful for bookstores but my heart belongs to the village library.

Dying Well, like Living Well, calls for companionship for the whole journey

Staying Sharp

Review by Garnette Arledge

Staying Sharp was never one of my goals: kindness, compassion, creativity, integrity, saying yes to life are. I can right off the top of my head imagine twenty, at least, attributes I hope to stay with me all my life. What appealed instantly in this book is it’s tag line: 9 Keys for a Youthful brain through modern science and ageless wisdom.

Wisdom. Ah, most definitely yes. So I forgave the writers, Henry Emmons, MD, and David Alter, PhD, for the chilly title. Who wants to be like a knife or an axe, or even a spear? And yes I do recommend this for its seeming goal: to calm fears of Alzheimer’s with a non-toxic mix of science and wisdom. Each chapter highly recommends meditation for example. For calming the mind, emotions and definitely the body. Further I was interested in the varied medical research cited. Like:

“Many scientists have come to believe that while we sleep the space between our neurons expands, allowing a cranial sewage network—the glymphatic system—to flush the brain of waste products that might otherwise not only prevent memory formation but muck up our mental machinery and perhaps eventually lead to Alzheimer’s. Failing to get enough sleep is like throwing a party and then firing the cleanup crew.”

I did learn this in hatha yoga that a good night’s sleep is vital to brain health. May I add, vital to the mind's health as well. Let’s remember the mind is not us but a function that we can heal, caress and support through practice. Yoga is not only physical - but you know that. Qigong and Tai Chi, which the authors also recommend, smoothes out the mind’s brain waves as well of physical energy. Still there comes a time when the physical mind falters perhaps. Then with meditation practices, the Big Mind, the intuitive, soul friend, the observer may step forward. So practicing Qi cultivation, breathing consciously and going beyond the mechanical mind is encouraged. I’m relieved to see this teaching in a pop-medical self-help book. So I recommend it for a quick read.

That’s why as a companion/doula with the aging, I sign up for the whole journey until the last breath. Because I know that even when the mind has faltered, the whole person is still intact and worthy of companionship. As do you.

Wild Plums Salon - part one

Quote of the Day from Joseph Campbell, who was one of my first meta-physical teachers and quite kind to me on several occasions. 

      Sleeping Beauty. Used with permission from:  mydelineatedlife.blogspot.com

Metaphysical meaning reality beyond the five useful daily senses of sight, touch, taste, smell and sound. Meta meaning over, above, beyond those physical, although not infallible  senses. Phor meaning to carry, as in Greek amphora. 

Campbell said: "Apparently in every sphere of human search and experience the mystery of the ultimate nature of being breaks into oxymoronic paradox, and the best that can be said of it has to be taken simply as metaphor—whether as particles and waves or as Apollo and Dionysus, pleasure and pain. Both in science and in poetry, the principal of the anagogical metaphor is thus recognized today; it is only from the pulpit and the press that one hears of truths and virtues definable in fixed terms." - Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology, p. 190

OK, I looked up the complicated words: 

Oxymoronic –when contradictory terms combine.

Paradox – word, or event contradicting itself.

Anagogical - mystical having a secondary spiritual meaning: i.e. the Sabbath also signifies rest in heaven as well as Sunday or Friday night. 

Or ‘dem bums, also means a certain baseball team.

Scripta Divina also calls for loving dictionaries (especially on-line), words and double-entendres known as puns and multi-level wordplay. I read and ask myself: What does a word actually mean – besides what we think it means? What does a text, such as the Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, actually mean? Is the Bhagavad Gita myth or actual? Well, my years in Seminary taught me lots of things I never knew as a churchgoer but one of the most important to a writer is that no text is set in stone. Something I can testify to from my years as a publisher and even as a journalist where the news changes in a daily show.

For that matter, and be very certain I’m not suggesting the Christian Testament is a fairy tale, although some do posit that theory, Fairy Tales have different levels of meaning also. Like the biblical stories, fairy tales are archetypal: wise women, beautiful princes, wicked rulers, magicians, dreams, omens, teaching stories and good versus evil.

For example, take Sleeping Beauty. Despite all those fairies bringing creative gifts (all archetypes: beauty, wit, grace, dance, song and ability with musical instruments.) The uninvited fairy, naturally I suppose, declares a complicated 'gift' also known as a curse. Yet, one last fairy has yet to give her gift and uses it to partially reverse the wicked fairy's curse proclaiming that the princess will die. To mitigate that curse, the last fairy deems that instead she fall into a deep sleep for 100 years to be awoken by a king's son. 

Just one fairy, why were they always women, couldn’t resist, bringing a curse because she wasn’t invited – maybe that’s why she wasn’t invited, because she was so mean-spirited at parties. But it ended well with The Prince of Peace, oops  a Prince coming, endowed with the magic power of love. If Beauty hadn't slept so long would she have aged out, thus missing true love?

On one level it’s a cautionary tale, always be nice to all the fairies, perhaps.

On another it’s a coming of age teaching story. Only when the sleeping beauty was ready could the strong aspect of herself merge.

In Nature, the fairy tale mimics warm weather rising again after winter. Think in Ice Age terms.

Still another take, every gift of every fairy serves Beauty’s purpose in the story line. I mean, in reaching a happy ending, an integrated whole person – which was of course, a beginning of another story. 

How to live in creation as an actualized, contributing member, useful life to society and to Self. Sleeping Beauty evolved into good news about life.

So Joseph Campbell, a Sarah Lawrence professor teaching women; fascinater of Bill Moyers on that well-known PBS series the Power of Myth, 1988, and as deep expert on global myth systems, talks about the power of metaphor. What's your metaphor for today?

Garnette Arledge (c)           More: http://www.garnettearledge.com/

Easiest Path to Enlightenment

Poem a Day Project

July 30, 2013

Garnette Arledge ©

Easiest Path to Enlightenment: hearing the stories of the saints and being in their company, p. 60-62, Sai Chitarita of Shirdi Sai Baba

Why? When the world is spinning the other way to stories of disaster, horror and ugly fantasy? For simply, we are like a glass bottle thrown into the sea of Earthly life. Open it for the message yet automatically inhale the aroma-residue of the liquid it once contained.

So I choose to fill my body bottle and my time with what I love. I am free. Therefore I choose to imagine spinning a gossamer web, each thread shining with Light. That’s what happens inside me when I write. Listening to the muse in my fingers and heart, passing over rocks, Steering the Craft as Ursula LeGuin said. Sailing on the ocean – that fabric of light, wind, spirit blowing the plot along whist it will.

Manifest goodness and glory, dancing on the head of a pin with all the angels. In my case, the pin is a laptop. Knowing I’m in the lap of Creativity in the straight chair, at my mother’s desk, with five coffee table books for ergonomics holding up the world which is the IBM ThinkPad.

Romp! Yes. Effort, of course. Getting the translation exact later with commas, semicolons and spelling steadies the course. And miracles can unfold word by word for readers, partakers, friends who later come on board for the publsihed voyage into the stars within.

Hearing the stories of saints not difficult. Once one remembers every living being is a saint come marching in.

Writing what I hear in the story of saints, mind fills like a billowing sail, swiftly flying across the sea of Samsara. Worldly existence in English. We know it as a boon to the spiritual journey. The body is for writing, living, loving, breathing. Stalwart the body-boat – Avast me beauties! Calls the Admiral, steer forth, skim by the storms. Waves may buffet: just more ballast for the tale. Write on, write on, there’s treasure inside, all sparkly and dancing, plethora to share. Make each word ecstatic like exultation. Inhale glory, exhale joy, color it with pain, and anchor it with fear. Plot your course as you go, or chart it ahead, no matter. Sail on.

Re-hearing, re-reading, writing the stories of the ‘saints’ is keeping their company. Increase non-attachment to later marketing and responses. Be indifferent to pleasure and pain – some of your best writing is awful in the modern sense. Some will be awe-some but don’t critique yet – just write with the flow of the tides.

Writing a bit after meditation in the morning leads onward – always more stories come to the uncluttered mind.

Take refuge in a quiet cove today inside yourself, take refuge whole-heartedly. It will carry you safely across the white sea of paper. And the ocean of time.

No ocean, you live in the mountains? You get to adjust the metaphors, babe. Stories are like baths. They wash away your cares and woes, enmeshed in the story. And you will want to do another the next morning. So it is with meditation. Or a walk in the woods. So it is with writing following meditation, walking or sitting meditation.

Visualize your (wor)ship giving you grace after meditation. Then, now, run, run to your pen or keyboard without censure, just write.

Thank you for listening, hope you didn’t drown in all the metaphors. I’ll tone it down from bliss for the blog. Or maybe not, be true to your self in writing, in life. Love, Garnette

A Spiritual Journey

If GR had ten stars I would put them all in Lavinia’s crown. Because I love to read, I’ve read some fairly inept as well as amazingly ept books. I’m sure, if I thought about it really hard, I could come up with another that equals Lavinia – but right now I just cannot.

And the only other Le Guin book I treasure is Steering the Craft, a handbook for writers.  Early on, when I was too callow, I decided I didn’t like science fiction or fantasy genres. I just couldn’t keep track of the names of places and planets I suppose so I never was one who knew Le Guin’s major epics. I did read a biography or perhaps it was an autobiography and was respectful of her life.

Is this a review? Here’s an interview from 2008 when the book came out that says it: http://inkwellreview.blogspot.com/2008/06/sing-muse-of-woman-unsung.html. Hope you can read Le Guin’s comments there.

I remember Vergil, from Dante, and vaguely from The Aeneid in high school. But this is the great mature work of an incredible master of the craft who decides in her seventies to re-learn Latin, take all her skills of making a story sing, adds magical effects and leaves us flying like a white owl through the woods enlightened.

Not once do cheap emotional writerly tricks torture the reader. We could smell and taste the daily life of pre-Rome/Etruscans. Le Guin calls it ‘making the story thick.” We know those women, although they lived in a poet’s vision of thirteenth century BCE. We feel the texture of their clothes, the married love, sun light on a real hero’s chest as he holds his baby.

LeGuin’s whole novel springs from one slight  mention: Lavinia, second wife of Aeneus who escaped the physical destruction of Troy.

Do you get it that the authoring awes me? By the concept of the book? By the book itself? It has been respectfully designed and published. It’s a thorough treasure. A strong woman touching us comes across the ages. Highly recommend. Now to read it again.