The Simple Apple The more I write, the more a mystery, writing becomes for me. I often think that writing is like being a weaver with many different colored threads that are woven together to make the essay, or story, into a sort of multilayered work of art. Then when people read, they take the writing and make it their own, and what they find is not always what I intended. So, putting what one writes out there is a form of letting go of ownership. I am sometimes amazed at what people can make out of my writings. It is like the inner worlds of the reader and the writer coming together, or perhaps the word collide can also be used. I am not a scholar or an intellectual at all. I write. I come up with a subject, sit down, and start typing. It is then that the essay or story will weave itself, or that is how it feels. Of course, it is all the years of experience and reading, that allow me to put things together, to give me the words to share. It can be a healing experience for me. I am a stream-of-conscious writer. When people ask me how they can do that, I will often say: “Start writing about an apple, let yourself go, and allow the deep mind or the unconscious to bring ideas to the conscious mind. Don’t judge, just write, and keep on writing.” I will do a stream-of-conscious piece now with you to show how it works. Of course, many of you already know the experience of writing in this way. Now, I sort of know how it works, but the finer points are lost to me. I just know that opening up your inner eye and allowing the images to speak to you can bring out aspects of your life, and also insights into life that you may not be able to think about without this kind of self-expression. So I will write about, what I recommend to those who ask me about how I write. That is, I will write about an apple and see where it leads me. The Simple Apple When looking at this apple, I am reminded of one of my first memories. I am in a crib, and my mother is trying to get me to drink some apple juice out of a baby bottle. It is a glass bottle, with grooves that have the amount of liquid in the bottle. It is not an in-depth image, but I can remember my frustration about the apple juice. I hated it! So, she would put the bottle in, and I would push it out. This went on for a bit, and she finally took the bottle away. The memory itself is not important, so I do not know why I remember it. Well, I am told I can be stubborn, which is not always something bad but can help seek to find oneself in the world. So, from the beginning I found myself trying to stand up for myself. Perhaps the flash of anger that I felt was what made the memory stick. Like a flashbulb taking a picture. When I was in the 1st grade, the family lived near a town called Desoto, in the state of Missouri. It seemed like a large place to me, but of course, if I went back, I would be amazed at how different it is from my perceptions of a little one. I was small for my age up to my junior year in high school. My mother loved to garden, and I guess it helped her to relax. It also put some food on the table. At the end of the field that my mom cultivated was a crab apple tree. I think it was this tree that helped me to develop a taste for apples. The apples on this tree were a combination of both sweet and sour, with that wild taste that apples can have. My mother tried to get us not to eat so many apples because we would go home and not be able to eat supper. She told us that our stomachs would explode if we kept eating them. Well, that did not work, and we kept eating. She knew that we knew that she was not speaking truly, so we just smiled and went off and ate some more apples. So, crab apples were forbidden fruit, and I guess that made them even more desirable. I guess if Mom gave us a basket to load up and bring them home could have dampened our passion for the fruit. She lost her chance at reverse psychology. The color of apples was also something that I did not like. Red is not my favorite color. Now when young until I was in my 60’s, burgundy, or perhaps wine, were liked by me. So, both my favorite and most hated colors were in the range of red. I wonder what Freud would think of that! Now I seem to like a range of colors. Dark green, grey, and yes, yellow. Not sure it means anything. Red, though, I do like in cars, and when women wear some red clothing. Other than that, it is still not endearing to me. I think it reminds me of my struggle with strong emotions, and angry emotions. If there is an element that I feel attuned to, it is fire, and it wearies me. So green and grey are calmer for sure. Being filled with fire though has helped me in my journey towards growing into a loving human being. Jesus calls us all to that. The kind of love that transcends family, religion, country, and yes whatever tribe we identify with. So, fire can be cleansing, or it can just burn everything to the ground. Even then, out of the ashes new life can grow. So, in the end, perhaps red is a color that is very positive even though I still do not like it all that much. So ends my simple stream-of-consciousness about the apple. See how it works. It moves here and there, then comes back, and the longer you write, the more threads you can see coming out to shine. So, if you feel that you would like to see how you feel or believe about ‘something’. Just open your mind, and start writing, no matter how silly it seems, or how scary, just keep writing. It is a form of digging, and the keyboard, or pen, is the shovel. -Br.MD
