Zen and the Art

of Catching a Wink

by

Gabriela Bertleman

Denver Confluence Writers

Gagriela Bertleman

Just think, all the years we spent chasing our tails, carrying on with too much on our plate: places to go, children to raise, careers to pursue, clients to please, meals to cook, houses to clean, spouses to support, cars to fix, bills to pay, sports practice and violin lessons… an endless string of action packed days. It was a blur and surprising that much of it stuck with us at all.

But tell me, where did it get us? To the emergency room? It looks ever so much clearer in the rear view mirror of life. So let's take a minute — that minute we did not have for so long — and examine.

Remember those days during summer vacation, nose glued to the window waiting to go run outside — to play, chase the wind, run with the dog or watch a bug with full fascination — what happened ? When sitting with friends, laughing, was all we wanted to do? When we fell into bed, out like a light, instantaneously, to wake up in the morning for our first wee?

Could we ever have imagined we would struggle to go to sleep, with pain-filled toss-and-turn hours and a mind full of to-do lists of all the things that didn’t get done?

How we admire a child absorbed in watching a butterfly, a kitten playing with abandon — the pure joy — did we really have to give it up? Abandon we did… ourselves… for the chase. So how can we return to the blissful journey back to sleep? We’ve tried the pills, the beer, CBD gummies, the melatonin, the audio tapes… eventually falling asleep exhausted in front of the TV which, by the way, just hands over your mind to some Hollywood script writer — a modern day hypnotist.

We gave up the coffee after about noon, and the chocolate, replaced by 15 minutes on the exercise bike at 6AM, the first “chase” of the day. Yes, exercise, physical exertion is rumored to help, but it’s hard to push yourself when you feel like falling on your face, you’re so tired.

Clearing your mind can be as hard, or harder than cleaning out the garage or the clutter in your kids’ rooms. It’s like running a defrag on your computer to sort everything into order. And true, meditation before bedtime is helpful, so are breathing exercises, prayer, a warm bath, good sex, reading a book (not the phone screen!), anything that gives the mind a well-deserved break, like listening to music. Now, here’s an idea: how about somebody sing us a lullaby? That’s it, didn’t we swear by it? So, bonne nuit, go catch that wink… zzzzzzzzz…

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Our

Story

by

Lawrence Abby Gauthier

ace reporter

The Westphalia Periodic News

We were all seated around the long table in a small conference room at the Tattered Cover bookstore, getting ready to start the bi-weekly meeting of Denver’s oldest writer’s group — Denver Confluence Writers.

Under different names, the group’s continuity goes back dozens of year. Some speculate that it goes back to Kerouac’s time in Denver in the late 50s, but nobody can prove it

Collectively, over the years, current and previous members have produced dozens of novels and collections, some published and on Amazon and in literary journals.

Everybody who’s there waiting for the meeting to get started is a writer and so everybody’s working on something they want to discuss with other writers before exposing their private thoughts to the world.

Craig’s into an advanced draft of his novel about a college dropout from a respectable family who takes off in 1980 to join a punk rock band in London. In real life, when he’s not the fictional Darwin van Wye, Craig is a successful Denver-area lawyer and a real estate broker. He has a novel on Amazon called “F*ck You Your Honor.”

Mark, who’s led the group for nearly 20 years, has temporarily put aside his re-write of Melville’s Moby Dick (as seen through the eyes of the whale) and is 75,000 words into a future world, long after the 21^st centuries’ wars to define the meaning of “artificial intelligence” had been concluded, when AI was officially classified as a useful tool, like a crescent wrench to build better machines to make everybody’s lives better.

Bob’s been writing about a young guy who leaves his dying Rust Belt mill town in the 70s for the lure of Rocky Mountain highs. He becomes a ski bum in a mountain town. He meets an old guru with a white beard.

Bryan, a judge in real life, is in the middle of a murder mystery.

Mathew, a retired educator, is creating a young girl with magical powers leading her family through the fog of a dangerous forest.

Gabriella, the German poet, was there and Culley Jane, the only PhD, and me, an old retired newspaper reporter, and Terry, the newest member of the group. Terry started coming about a year ago. She’s writing about the   interrelationship of humankind with nature in the raw. The two of us have argued a lot about this during the past year. but are moving towards a shared and workable understanding.

After catching up with one another’s goings on in their “real worlds,” it was time to get down to business.

The meetings are scheduled to last from 6:30 to 9. Anybody can read something they’re working on, trying to keep it to under a thousand words. And then everybody starts talking about it. Craig always says there’s not enough sex or conflict. He says a story has to have one or the other and is best when it has both. The others groan. “There goes Craig again.”

Bob, originally from the Bronx, had worked in warehouses and on the docks and questions how the people he knew would take the story… and on and on it would go for two and a half hours.

Just as Mark was about to say, “Well, I think it’s time to get started, who wants to go first?”  somebody new walked into the room, clutching a leather folder and acting nervous.

“Is this the writer’s group?” she asked.

Everybody was happy to see her and expressed themselves so.

She took a seat at the table. She said she had recently retired and wanted to become a writer.

I wondered where she might be a year from now. Would she keep coming back? Would she become a writer? Her future was in her hands.