Today is National Face Your Fears Day.  I really like this one.  It’s the opposite of the old maxim, “Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you.”  I prefer to know what it is I’m running from.

Facing one’s fears is a perennial subject in children’s literature.  Childhood is supposed to be a marvelous time of freedom and exploration, but anyone who hasn’t blocked off his or her childhood memories completely knows this isn’t even close to the truth.  Even under the best of circumstances, children live in a  world peopled with incomprehensible giants and surrounded by all sorts of grist for their fear mill.

What were you afraid of as a child?  A monster under the bed or in the closet?  Spiders? Snakes?  Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

I had a veritable jungle that I had to maneuver my way through every day.  There was a tiger outside the bathroom window that would jump in and eat me if I closed the bathroom door all the way.  There was a gorilla outside my bedroom window that used to stand and look in at me.  I wasn’t sure what he wanted, but I knew it wasn’t good.  If I kept the filmy inner curtains closed, though, he couldn’t get in.   There was an alligator under my bed, so I had to get a running start and leap into bed every night lest he bite off my toes.  When I went out at night with a big pipe wrench to turn the antenna on the TV (if it was turned one way,  it picked up Colorado Springs stations, turned the other way, it picked up Denver stations),  I sang “This little light of mine” all the way around the house and back so the bears wouldn’t get me.

Compared to the kinds of threats far too many children have to contend with–war, starvation, abuse of all kinds, homelessness, abandonment–my menagerie of fears seems rather silly, I know.  Well, except the bears.  We lived in the mountains and there really were bears in the nearby woods.  But, to me, all these threats were as real as real can be, and I had to come up with a strategy to deal with each one.

Nowadays, my fears take other forms.   They mostly revolve around being vulnerable and/or forgotten.  Poverty, illness, old age, loneliness.   These are the monsters in my closet now.

It’s all right, though.  My childhood experiences with fear taught me what to do.  Face my fears.  Name each one and devise a strategy for coping with it.  Love, gratitude, courage, wisdom, reaching out to others, accepting help when I need it.  These are the best defenses I have for dealing with my current crop of fears.

Of course, a bit of singing in the dark doesn’t hurt, either.  It still keeps the bears away.

York was a poor farm boy from Tennessee who joined a Christian sect that denounced killing and war.  He was drafted in 1916, shortly before his 30th birthday.  The government denied him conscientious objector status, so he went into the army where his commanding officer talked him into believing that it was right to defend his country.

The heroic act he became famous for happened on October 8, 1917.  German machine guns were mowing down the Allied Forces.  York, who was quite a sharp-shooter from hunting squirrels back in Tennessee, was ordered to take out the gunners, which he did.  He, and the seven men left in his outfit, then captured 132 prisoners, and he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

York wasn’t proud of what he did or interested in getting a lot of publicity for doing it.  But the media–then as now–loved to have something to crow about.  So, York became a hero in spite of himself.

York died in 1964 after a long illness.  What he said he wanted to be remembered for, and what he considered his greatest accomplishment, was not his wartime bravery but his support of education in rural Tennessee.  The Alvin C. York Institute, an agricultural high school in Jamestown, Tennessee, was founded by him and is still in existence.  It has the highest graduation rate of any high school in the state.

York fought his conscience through two world wars, waffling back and forth between his religious beliefs and the need he saw to protect his country.

He never wavered, however, in his belief in education.  It’s a shame they didn’t make a movie about Alvin York the educator rather than Sargeant York the soldier.  Maybe someday they will.

Today is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron Saint, according to American Catholic.org of animals, ecology, Italy and merchants.  The last seems very odd to me since Saint Francis renounced all material wealth, even going so far as to take off his clothes and walk naked through Assisi to show his committment to a life of poverty.

By all accounts, Saint Francis was a complicated and somewhat peculiar person.  On the one hand, he was sincerely intent on leading a life in strict accordance with the teachings of Jesus.  On the other hand, he was so literal minded that when  a vision of Christ told him to “go rebuild my house” Francis got some bricks and mortar and started fixing a delapidated church.   A  lot of people, particularly his father, considered Francis a few eggs shy of an omlette.

Saint Francis is credited with uttering the famous prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen

Chances are, he never said this, though, since the first time the prayer appeared was in 1912 and Saint Francis lived in the 13th century.  Not that I discount the possibility of saintly inspiration, as anyone who has read my YA historical manuscript could tell you.

On the other hand, Saint Francis probably did write the following canticle around 1224:

Most high, all powerful, all good Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing.

To you, alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
and clouds and storms, and all the weather,
through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water;
she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Be praised, my Lord, through those who forgive for love of you;
through those who endure sickness and trial.

Happy those who endure in peace,
for by you, Most High, they will be crowned.

Be praised, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death,
from whose embrace no living person can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those she finds doing your most holy will.
The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give thanks,
and serve him with great humility.

I find Saint Francis’ personification of the forces of nature fascinating, considering that he lived during a time when the Church taught that only men–and I do mean men, not women or children–had souls.   Perhaps it is his paradoxicalness, as much as his saintliness, that makes Saint Francis such a well-known and revered person nearly nine hundred years after his death.

With the demise of extended families, elders were seen in our society as useless and, like old horses, put out to pasture.  With all us Baby Boomers turning wrinkly and silver, though, that paradigm is shifting. Grandparents in other parts of the world have always had an honored place in their societies.   It’s nice to think that’s begun to be the case again in our own culture. Older people have the wisdom of long experience for which there is no real substitute.

I’ve been thinking about how many of my favorite children’s stories have wise elders in them.  Some are wizards such as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books and Dalben in Lloyd Alexander’s Pridain series.  Some offer the main character a safe haven and a listening ear, such as Hannah in Witch of Blackbird Pond, Matthew and Marilla in Anne of Green Gables and Crane Man in A Single Shard.  All of them add richness, texture and depth.

Do you make a point of putting older people in your stories?  I often do.  It just seems natural and right to have an elder or two somewhere in the mix.

Elders make good writers, too, expecially for children.  Many authors begin their careers late and/or continue writing into their seventies, eighties and nineties.  Scott O’Dell was sixty when he wrote Island of the Blue Dolphin, his first children’s book.  He penned nearly thirty more children’s books before his death at the age of ninety-one.

I found a list of books on starting a writing career later in life at September University, a good site for creative aging in general.

So don’t get discouraged if you are an elder who wants to write.  And if you are a writer, remember to include a few elders in your cast of characters.  Your stories will be the better for it.

I’m finally ready to blog again after a couple of frantic weeks of packing and moving.  It seems appropriate that I’m getting back into gear on World Turtle Day.  Not only does this nicely tie into my publishing company, Green Turtle Press, and my middle-grade fantasy novel, Turtle Island, (the title of which I took from one of the Native American names for North America) but it is also a good reminder to me to keep going with my writing, no matter how slow and discouraging the process sometimes feels.

As my oldest daughter told me when she was four and first heard the story of “The Tortoise and the Hare,” the moral of Aesop’s well-known fable is “Slow and sweaty wins the race!”–a saying that has been a byword in our family ever since.  Certainly writing, itself, is time consuming.  Turtle Island took me a year-and-a-half to write, which seems to be about average for most children’s novels.  The publishing process is even longer, usually at least a couple of years between the time the manuscript is purchased and when the book is released.  Self-publishing and ebooks are faster than this, but that’s a whole different subject that we’ll get to in another blog.  Back to Turtle Day.

There are many different types of turtles – the pig nosed turtle, the green sea turtle, the alligator snapping turtle, the meso-American river turtle, the leatherback turtle (the largest species which does not have a hard shell), the red-eared slider turtle, the common musk turtle (this type had also been called the stinkpot because it releases a musky and foul odor to scare off predators), the big-headed turtle that can climb trees, and the aptly named pancake turtle.

My favorite, however, is the painted terrapin, those cute little turtles that are sold in pet stores.  A friend of mine gifted my granddaughter with two  large specimens, and the 75 gallon tank they live in, because she (my friend) had, at the time, two cats, two dogs, eight puppies, two kids and a husband as well as the turtles and wanted to downsize her menagerie.  The turtles, named Peach and Banana for their orange and yellow undersides, are surprisingly engaging and interesting critters with distinct, if reptilian, personalities.  And, unlike their slower tortoise cousins, they are surprisingly energetic.  They don’t have a lot of goals–getting to the top of the sunning rock, being the first to get to the  turtle food, chasing guppies around the tank–but they go all out after them.

So let’s all keep going toward our personal goals, writing and otherwise, either slow and sweatily or with the darting persistence of Peach and Banana–whichever the circumstances call for–as we celebrate turtles and tortoises on their special day!