It goes, and it grows....

 June 26, 2024

Mostly, I’m completely okay with the fact that I am a constantly evolving human being. No, that’s not a euphemism for getting older. I don’t need to pretty up the fact that I am indeed getting older. Generally speaking, most people believe that getting older is better than the alternative. And it is—but only in the present moment. But that is a topic for another essay.

No, I am evolving in ways that have brought me to rethink a few things that I had considered to be solid fact. And in a few cases, I am not ashamed to admit that I have had to tweak my understanding to be a bit less rigid, and a bit more accepting. We are all of us different from each other in a lot of small, and perhaps defining ways. But we are more alike and have more in common than we sometimes want to admit.

I used to say, and proudly, “it’s not that I don’t suffer fools gladly. It’s that I don’t suffer them at all.”

I understand now that that thought is too rigid for the person I am evolving into. One needs to accept that fools abound, and most of the time, not only do they not know they are fools, but they also truly can’t help the fact that they are.

The biggest step in my evolution at first made me sad, when I understood it had happened. But now, I recognize that this realization is enormously freeing.

I used to believe that if one’s reasoning was sound enough, and cogent enough, one could successfully get others to see the errors of their ways.

And now I understand that no amount of persuasion, however sound, logical, or right will ever convince some people that the thing they hold as truth really isn’t truth at all.

People will realize that someone they believe in isn’t worth their faith, or they will not. They will come to see that they’ve taken the wrong fork in the road, or they will not.  And I know now that where the change needed to happen was not in other people, no, not at all.

The change that needed to happen was in me. I needed to understand that what others eventually do or don’t do really is none of my business. And it’s not my job. I don’t have to bear any responsibility for the asinine thinking of others.

Wow, what a relief!

It means that I no longer bear the weight of a responsibility that was not mine to begin with when it comes to how those around me behave. And it also means that what other people think of me has no power over me whatsoever.

Love me or hate me, it’s all okay as far as I’m concerned. The important justification is how I feel about myself. It doesn’t matter if you live your life the way I would approve, or vice-versa. It only matters that I live my life in accordance with my own moral compass.

It probably took me longer than it should have to come to this point, this epiphanous moment, but that’s okay, too.

You’ll be pleased to know that our table gardens appear to be faring well. Do you recall that I, at the request of my husband, bought some green-bean seeds online? Well, they seem to be thriving. And I guess I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, because a few of them are vine-plants as opposed to bush plants. A quick trip to the dollar store to purchase a decorative trellis has, hopefully solved the issue. We might end up using strings to help them further. We’ll just have to wait and see.

As well, those beans are flowering like crazy, as are our tomatoes. We’re getting a good amount of rain, so that watering those table gardens isn’t an every-night necessity. The last and final part of the process that will guarantee a good yield this year is completely out of our hands—which kind of ties in nicely to my thoughts above.

But it being out of our hands doesn’t mean we are powerless. No, even as I write this, I am praying for bees.

Lots of geminating bees.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

https://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

Still writing...

 June 19, 2024

I won’t begin this essay by complaining about the heat. After all, aside from a few days so far in the year of 2024, this spring has been more of a traditional one than most, lately. There were slightly warm days with much cooler nights; and there has been rain, a lot of rain. The rain was accompanied by varying degrees of chill in the air more often than not. The result is that for the moment, all of the foliage looks lush and green and very healthy.

Our table gardens have taken; some of the green bean seeds I received in the mail were, alas, climbers. My fault, entirely. We’re going to get a small plastic trellis and put it where the beans can use it, and hope that saves the rest of the neighboring plants that aren’t beans from viny entanglements. Some of our beans have blossoms, as do our tomatoes and even the two different variety of squash David has planted. In two separate gardens, of course. About a foot apart.

The gardens are his domain, and I am determined to keep my mouth shut. Not sure that I’m up to the task. But I have hope.

I’m about to begin my next installment of my Lusty, Texas collection. This will be the 48^th title in this “world”. After I had written the two historical novels that form the basis for this series back in 2010, I came up with the idea to have a short, contemporary series. I etched it out on a MS-word document, and figured I had characters and ideas for 4, maybe 5 books. Hot damn! That MS-doc was, before long, followed by an actual family tree which I had made up (as a bit of free swag for readers), and of which I still have some copies. The first family tree was followed, of course, by a second.

And when I was away on a writing retreat with my dear friend, Emma Wildes, we sat down and came up with “titles”. We aimed for one for every letter of the alphabet. I never actually thought there would be as many as 26 stories! Now that right there was a failure of imagination on my part.

And while it is true that I have far fewer readers than I once did, I still have a fair number who purchase each book. And I promised my readers that as along as they did, I would keep writing them, so here I am. About to begin the 48^th title in the series.

There have been two trilogies as well over the course of the last 14 years; one that is a part of the same Lusty, Texas world but with a bit of a harder edge, and one that is not. That other trilogy is actually of a “supernatural” world. I’m not certain if I am done with that world. Because when it comes to writing, I really do let the inspiration elves have their way with me.

A few years ago, I was able to write several novels (of about 60 thousand words each) a year. Since Covid, I’m down to one a year. Life has slowed down for me in several areas, which is what it is. I’m doing my best to focus on being grateful that I can still construct a story and write—though I do know that there are a few more errors here and there that escape my first look.

I feel grateful that my imagination is still working, that my mind is still curious, and that I can still immerse myself in this world of my own creation. There are messages in each of my stories for those who need to hear them. I am certain that those who need to, do.

And that, more than anything, is why I still write.

Aside from the pleasure I derive from the stories themselves, I give thanks that I remain a teller of tales that help to ease burdens and give rest. And sometimes, when I am exceptionally lucky, I discover that my words have given increase, as well.

Writers write so that readers may read.  Reading gives entertainment, but also refreshment and rest.

Not a bad way to spend my time, to my way of thinking.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

Grateful for the music...

 June 12, 2024

One of the things I’m most grateful for in this world is music. And yet, somehow, I’ve managed to let the music get away from me. Or rather, that connection that I had had for so many years to music and the healing and the joy that it can bring.

As a young mother, with a practicing alcoholic for a husband, music was my only escape. Our oldest son slept as soundly as you could imagine, and there were nights when I would slip into the downstairs den, and put the music on, full blast. These would be late night, when only I was awake.

Living out in the countryside with neighbors a healthy distance away, I was able to lose myself so completely in that music, that I may have, from time to time, slipped into an alternate existence, being a performer on a stage, belting out chart toppers like nobody’s business.

It was nobody’s business but mine. These days, I credit those many, many nights drowning in sound for the fact that I have tinnitus. Even as the constant hum annoys me occasionally, I consider that as having been a fair trade.

The nightly jam sessions ended about a year after David quit drinking. He’s been sober now for 41 years, so far.

Other times of stress have reminded me of my need for music. And while I no longer needed it quite so loud, or quite so desperately, but there was still something to be said for taking some time to listen, to float, to let go and just be. During the last few years of my working outside the home, there was about a thirty-minute drive from my work to my husband’s, and that was a time for the car radio to play. Not as loud as in the past, but loud enough.

Over the last few years, just when one would think I would turn to the music to help me cope with the stresses of living through a global pandemic and globally uncertain political times, I have not. Not sure why that is, exactly. I have felt no need to just sit and listen. No real need to escape. Though maybe that’s not quite true. I have, over the course of these recent difficult years actually binged watched something for the first time. Never binged watched anything before, but there was that space of a couple of months when my brother had had his first stroke, and our youngest son was having a big toe amputated…

In the last few days, I realized just how much I do miss the music. Oh, I’ve been watching the Voice, and even American Idol, but not therapeutically. I haven’t felt that same driving need to lose myself in music, but I do love it. I love to sing, although these days that is a challenge. I no longer have the voice I used to have but have dropped at least an octave. I was getting frustrated, trying to sing along to beloved songs and my voice kind of breaking up. But it was just a matter of learning where my register is these days—and either adapting the song of the moment in my heart to it or finding another one to sing.

I have never been able to name a favorite song, because there are just so darn many of them. Different songs with different words and different tunes for different times and different moods. But when I realized how much I missed just listening to whatever song struck me, I began a new routine of listening to a couple as the first of two steps before closing my computer, and myself, down for the night. It’s been like discovering music all over again.

It occurs to me that I am somehow progressing on my life’s path as I should be. I had abused music back in the day, and the why and the wherefore of that meant I really had to give it a break and redefine what it means to me.

The best surprise, so far, is that at a time when I can’t remember a name or a place or a word, the songs are coming back to me. I know the words of songs I haven’t heard in years! I understand why music is used so often and so well for the treatment of some neurological and speech disorders.

I don’t even mind the return of those earworms. Today upon awakening it was “Africa” by Toto. It was a nice way to begin my morning.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

https://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

An enduring lesson from childhood...

 June 5, 2024

When I was a little girl, growing up with a mother who worked full time and was a single parent, there was one lesson above all lessons that was impressed upon me. Breaking the rules was bad, yes. But nothing was worse than lying about it, after.

One might commit one sin or another and could expect a punishment that fit that crime; add lying to the mix, and God help you!

One might take something that was not one’s own to have, and that would be bad enough. That would most definitely earn a punishment. But lying about it when asked?

As a preteen child and then a teen, that was a fate I did not even want to contemplate.

And as far as I knew, the rest of the world felt the very same way. There was no epithet one could earn, in the world I knew growing up, that could possibly be worse than liar.

The way that the lesson on the horror of lying was imparted verbally to me was this: once you told one lie, you would inevitably have to tell another to cover up the first. And then another, and another…..pretty soon you wouldn’t be able to remember anything you had said because while it’s difficult to forget the truth, lies, on the other hand, are an entirely different sort of entity altogether.

Different metaphors were employed over the course of my pre-teen and teen years: a lie was a snowball racing down the hill with the power and danger of an avalanche; a lie was a fiery pit of hellfire opening and widening until all would be consumed. I truly dreaded having to walk through life with a huge flashing sign proclaiming liar hung around my neck—or above my head—depending. And the way my mother spoke the word, liar, told me that if it lay on the sidewalk before me, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go anywhere near it, let alone step in it.

The necessity for honesty and truth was ground into me, and to this day, of the list of things that I simply cannot and will not abide is lying liars who lie. I hate lying above all else. It’s a real deal breaker test for me.

The astute among you will begin to understand, then, why it is that I have been struggling to make sense lately of this world in which we are living.

All sorts of snippets and maxims have floated through my mind as I began to write this essay today. Wise sayings like, “if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything” and, “if you don’t have your word, you have nothing.”

I have long adhered to the idea that the purpose of life is not to hand us a good time, but to help us grow. And then, as we are learning and growing, every once in a while, we’re presented with a test. A great, important test that holds more significance than we could possibly even imagine.

Never have I felt more strongly that this is the case for us all, here and now. We are all being tested, I swear it, and I have a feeling that fewer of us are going to ace this latest exam than we would, all of us, like.

Another concept comes to mind, as well, and it’s one that, as parents, most of us used in the performance of our duty to raise our children. You corrected them, over and over and over, because if you didn’t, they would eventually become ungovernable. If you didn’t, they would never learn how to distinguish between right and wrong.

My friends, I tell you truly that the difference between telling the truth and telling lies is the difference between right and wrong.

Some of those folks I see on my television screen who proclaim to be Christian appear not to understand that as they portray themselves as good, stalwart believers in the Holy Bible standing before the podium as they rail on and on, that by their very actions in that moment they are showing themselves to be anything but Christ-like.

Don’t tell me the Holy Bible forms your world view and governs your actions when you cannot even follow all ten of God’s commandments.

To those who do that I say, please stop. You are mocking the very Word I do my best to live by. It’s shameful behavior.  Yes, of course, God will indeed forgive His children when they err. That was His promise to us, and He always keeps His promises.

But then, by virtue of their being His children, He knows that they would never intentionally use His promise as a free pass to, with premeditation, break any of His commandments.  Not the first. Not the second. And certainly not the ninth.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury