Billy Coffey

storyteller

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Blissfully disconnected

January 8, 2014 by Billy Coffey Leave a Comment

image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com

There is nothing but night and fire on this early morning. All else is gone. Word has it that a substation twenty miles away has blown. Crews are still trying to figure things out. At last count, nearly twenty thousand people are without power. A minor inconvenience, really, were it not that this is one of the coldest days of the year.

But there is a fire in the fireplace to warm the house and a dog on my lap to keep me company. As luck would have it, I managed to brew a pot of coffee just before everything went kaput. Here I sit under a blanket, watching the orange flames dance off a wall that in thirty minutes will catch the first rays of sun over the mountains. All is quiet and sleeping. And I have just realized that in this moment, I am as peaceful as I have been in a very long while.

Funny how that happens, isn’t it? Sitting here on this dark January morning with all of modernity’s trappings stripped away. Back to the nuts and bolts of living. It’s worth nothing that human civilization thrived for thousands of years with little more creature comforts than I am enjoying right now. I feel a strange kinship that reaches far back from where and when I sit. I wonder how many men how many times before have greeted their day with nothing but a fire and their dogs.

No email to check, no news to watch. Right now, I am blissfully disconnected from the world and utterly attached to everything that is real.
That this has happened so close to the New Year has gotten me thinking about resolutions. There was a time when such a thing was a priority in my life. I greeted every January 1 with not one vowed To Do but several, a long list of things to change and improvements to make. That mostly ended right around the time the kids arrived. It isn’t their fault. I just got tired of the constant disappointment of beginning the new year a new person, only to find the old me was really there all along.

I was always adding something, you see. Always thinking the way to move forward in my life was to either get or become more of something. There’s a certain logic to it, however childish that logic may be—more equals better. I think a lot of us fall for that one.
Sometimes it takes mornings like this to see things as they really are. There are times in life when everything is as silent and dim as it is in my living room right now. We blame others for that. We blame God. Sometimes we even blame ourselves. But maybe it isn’t a matter of blame at all. Perhaps it’s more an opportunity to understand that having more often means needing less.

Filed Under: perspective, simplicity, wants and needs

Christmas lists

November 26, 2013 by Billy Coffey 1 Comment

Screen Shot 2013-11-26 at 7.38.43 AMThe paper in front of me is blank but for the two words underlined at the top:

My List.

I’ve been staring at it for twenty minutes now.

It’s incredible to me that I’ve been asked to fill out my Christmas list so early. Halloween doesn’t seem so long ago. Thanksgiving isn’t even here yet. Then again, a quick trip to the Target or Walmart in town will tell you Thanksgiving really isn’t celebrated that much anymore, at least commercially. There isn’t any money in it. I remember growing up in my tiny little town, seeing the streets all but deserted every Sunday because none of the businesses were open. Now, a Sunday afternoon looks much like a Saturday. There is no Sabbath anymore, no real day of rest, so why should there be Thanksgiving. Go, go, go. Spend, spend, spend. It’s the way of the world now.

Sounds a bit jaded, doesn’t it? A little cynical? Probably so. Then again, I’ve often been accused of being a person trapped in time, more suited to days past than days current. In almost any situation, what you’ll likely get from me is something along the lines of, “I like things the way they used to be.” Maybe that’s just a product of my upbringing. Maybe I’m a forty-one-year-old relic. If so, that’s fine.

But this Christmas list thing is getting to me. I don’t know why. I’ve filled out lists earlier than the week of Thanksgiving many times (when I was a kid, the first draft of my letter to Santa was usually ready by the first of September), and I well understand the need to pinch pennies. All the best sales are in the next ten days. That’s what I’ve been reminded of several times the past week. So yes, I understand. That’s another product of go-go-go and spend-spend-spend. It’s so horrible and painful that it’s best to do it all like a Band-Aid—rip it off as fast as possible.

Bah. Humbug.

A secret, just between you and me: Sometimes I just want to skip the whole thing. Buy for the kids, of course. Put up the tree. Get the outside fixed up with candles and lights and the same plastic Nativity that’s so old and worn it’s become a family heirloom. But that’s it. Nothing else. No presents for family or teachers or pastors or Sunday School teachers. Instead, fold all that money up and sneak it into the nearest Salvation Army kettle when no one’s looking. That would be a real Christmas to me. Strip all the glitter and glitz away. Find the real beauty underneath. Like Sundays used to be. And Thanksgiving.

Have you ever noticed that the most special things in life tend to be the most boring on the outside? Sitting down to a meal with family? Kind of boring. Watching the sunset? Boring. Taking a walk? Please.

Talking with your child. Or your parents.

Watching the fire on a cold evening.

Listening to the critters in the woods from the front porch.

How many times have I done all of these things in the past year and decided what I was doing was merely wasting time? Time better spent working, Getting Things Done? I wonder. And now I’m wondering if much of the same thinking that went into opening all the stores on Sunday and having Christmas sales on Thanksgiving Day is in me as well.

There’s plenty wrong with the world. But I guess if you get right down to it, what’s wrong with the world is me.

I’ll tell you what I want for Christmas this year—365 days of those boring moments. I want a life stripped of the glitter and glitz. I want the basics. Those are the things that matter when you get down to it.

Those are the things that keep us going.

Filed Under: choice, Christmas, faith, wants and needs

Packing Light

September 6, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

Screen shot 2013-09-06 at 8.20.02 AMI always wanted to run away as a kid. Wait. That came out wrong. What I mean is that back then, all I ever wanted to do was leave home. No, that isn’t it either.

Let’s start over.

Growing up, there was a cornfield across from my house. On the other side of that was the railroad track that cuts through town. The train still comes through twice a day. More, if the freight is good. I remember standing on my front porch as those trains rolled through, staring at the open doors on all those empty container cars, wondering where that train was going. How long it would take to get there. How easy it would be to hop on.

I wanted to see the world. Chuck it all. Run away. I wanted to leave home and see the country.

Never happened, of course. But it did for Allison Vesterfelt. She left her home in Portland at age 26 with a friend, some bags, and a single plan—to visit all 50 states. The chronicle of her adventure (and that’s what it turned out to be) is found in her book, Packing Light.

Ally’s book caught me. She tells her story with a refreshing honesty, including just how frightening it can be to do something extraordinary. Imagine leaving everything behind—your job, your home, your family—and lighting out into the territory. Thrilling? Yes. Scary? Absolutely.

And yet Ally did it anyway, and on the other side found blessings that will comfort her for the rest of her life. That, really, is what this book is about—the lessons she learned along the way.

Things like embracing the unexpected. Changing your expectations. Losing your way. Choosing your path. Hers is a reminder that the great and mighty More a lot of us want in life really won’t bring us happiness. Most times, the peace we crave comes in having less.

“Knowing how valuable you are,” she writes, “and acknowledging your tiny role in a larger story is a difficult balance to strike. It’s easy to see one or the other, but it’s difficult to hang on to both at the same time. It stretches us, like a kid reaching for the next rung of a monkey bar, until eventually we find our arms stretched out wide.”

To me, that’s the best part of what Ally accomplished. Like all adventures, she went looking for the world and found herself.

Packing Light is a great read, and I highly recommend it. To learn more, visit the Packing Light page on Amazon.

Filed Under: Adventure, wants and needs, writing

Needs, wants and pretty blue pens

April 29, 2013 by Billy Coffey 2 Comments

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

It was my wife—God bless her—who said I was insane. And not only was I insane, but probably all the people in the world who called themselves writers were too. Certifiable. In need of round the clock psychological care and Thorazine milkshakes.

It was the pens, you see. She was going to the store, and I asked her to pick me up some pens. In my wife’s defense, I didn’t specify what sort of pens. And in my defense, I didn’t think I had to. We’ve been married for fifteen years. She’s seen me write before.

But she brought home black pens. I thought it was a joke at first. I even laughed. My wife didn’t call me insane then, but I bet the thought had crossed her mind.

Blue pens, I told her. I needed blue pens. Because blue ink produced the best words and black ink undermined creativity and the flow of artistic expression. How could anyone not know that? That’s when the insane comment was voiced. Jokingly, of course. Maybe half-jokingly. Which was followed by this:

“The problem isn’t black pens, it’s that you can’t tell the difference between what you want and what you need.”

Of course I disagreed. It’s a pride thing. But as the day wore on and I kept staring at my pack of black pens, I began to see she was right. As a writer, I don’t really have needs and wants. I just have needs.In the beginning there is rarely confusion between the two. When we decide we want to be writers, we just want to write. Life is simple because what we want is exactly what we need. We’re like babies then. And like babies, we believe the world to be both magical and ours.

But then we grow up and decide to get serious about writing. That’s when we realize the world isn’t ours to have as much as it is ours to borrow, and what was once magical can often become downright scary.

Trust me. I was there. Still am, too.

It starts out with needing to tell a story and then evolves into wanting to be published. Then from wanting to be published to needing an agent. It wasn’t that long ago that I told myself if I could only catch Rachelle Gardner’s attention, if she would only be my agent, then I would be a writer. That’s what I needed.

When that happened, I thought I needed a publisher, and when that happened I thought I needed a multi-book contract, and when that happened I thought I needed a bigger multi-book contract, and then somewhere in there my wife called me insane. Because as it turns out, those weren’t needs at all.

There are lessons that can be learned by heeding the experiences of others and lessons that can only be learned through one’s own failure. I’m pretty sure what I’m about to say falls under the latter, but I’m going to say it anyway:

If you are a writer and if you are reading this, you already have the essentials of success. The great secret is that the agents and the publishers and the book deals are just wants. Sure, you should go for them. Shoot for the moon. Dream big. Have faith. But know that being denied a want isn’t nearly as bad as failing to meet a need. Thankfully, as writers our needs are few.

We need a story to tell and a longing to tell that story in the best way possible. We need someone to tell that story to. And we need a determination to get up just one more time than we fall down.

That’s it. Meet those needs, and the wants will come. That’s not to say we’ll never be called insane, even if black ink makes the same words as blue ink. We’re writers after all. We don’t have to make sense all the time. Our hearts are bowed toward the hidden lands.

What do you want? What do you need?

“I dont’ ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out ‘Is he as crazy as I am?’ I don’t need that question answered.” — Philip Roth

Filed Under: wants and needs, writing

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