Traffic Jam

I did this sandtray quickly Thanksgiving morning. The basket of little cars in the collection jumped out at me, no doubt because I had a drive ahead of me and was hoping not to get into a mess on I80. So I created gridlock and then picked two passengers for one of the cars. I knew the guy was pissed at the traffic jam but the woman wasn't his wife, probably his boss so he had to watch his mouth--not easy for him I decided. This is a new job or a new boss and things are on the line for him. There was going to be trouble in this car. Then I had the truck (a railroad car standing in for a truck--memo to self, get a real truck for the collection) do something crazy, try to cross the divider line, would have been just a yellow line, to go the other way. That should heat up the conversation in the stuck cars. There is a lead Nordic warrior with a spear near the truck, probably the driver, very aggressive and ready to fight. Then there is a little monster kind of guy in front of the couple, who is the breeder of conflict in their car. There is an eraser with the slogan The No Asshole Rule, a big stack of money and a holy bible. This is the story:

Walker was trying to get his mind off the four lanes of traffic snaking in opposite directions, two each way and moving about minus three-quarters of a mile an hour. Gas prices were down and everyone was driving to grandmother's house this Thanksgiving instead of paying the exorbitant plane fares and extra fees for luggage, snacks, drinks and any body weight over 50 pounds. Except he and Joy, his boss, were not going to grandmother's house, but to a meeting with potential investors in a last ditch effort to save the company. Joy's text that morning said We KANT be late!!!!!!!!!!!! Did she think he had a super ray gun that was going to vaporize all the cars on the road so he would have a clear path to the man's office in San Francisco?

Joy curled her fingers around his hand on the steering wheel and stilled his drumming fingers. He almost jumped out of his skin. She wrapped her fingers around his and held them curled around the steering wheel. "I can't focus with that annoying tapping, Walker. I'm rehearsing the meeting in my mind. Just drive and don't distract me."

"Sorry," he said, "I didn't know I was tapping."

What the fuck? No tapping?

"I guess this traffic is making me nervous, you know, about the time and all." He strained his head sideways. Nothing was moving, but he could see around a slight curve that a semi was turned into the center divider. An accident. Crap and double crap.

"Maybe I should call Johnson's office and tell them we're stuck in traffic, but we'll be there soon."

He could feel Joy giving him a long sideways glance, her eyes burning into the side of his head. "It isn't good to arrive late with your hand outstretched, Walker. You should know that. Your head of Development. I left the travel arrangements up to you. I'm going to meditate to remain calm and I suggest you try to regain your center so you can get us out of this mess without undue anger. It clouds the mind you know."

He looked over at her, forty years to his twenty-eight. Fifteen years in the home gym business to his three but she was a 360 degree nut job. Except she had started the company with some cockamamie gadget she tacked on treadmills that "is guaranteed to massage your center of calmness as you work out." And it worked. The device was a simple vibrator that merely tickled the palm, but the literature claimed the vibration came from the center of being when a perfect state of wholeness was achieved on the treadmill. Joy had even sold him, Olympic grade cynic that he was, that there was a market for people who wanted to touch the core of their being while they sweated off the cheeseburgers. She was right. Callers on QVC ate them up when he was hawked the Art of the Spiritual Workout book packaged with Center of Wholeness and Joy treadmill on its monthly fitness special. They praised Jesus and the Center of Wholeness and Joy treadmill for turning their life around and giving it new meaning. It was also his job to convince them a few months later when they shouted outraged insults into his voicemail about the cheap piece of shit motors (he never realized what foul mouths those Christian women could be when riled up) that had a tendency to jam over 20 miles per hour and loft the exerciser across the room, that they had to work on their center of wholeness before they exercised again because the machine was so finely tuned to their psyche that it reacted violently to negative thoughts. So far no law suits. But the economy was zapping the core of everyone's being, QVC wasn't returning his calls to schedule his next appearance and there was one last payroll disbursement left in the checking account. As Joy said when he picked her up at her apartment, "It's the soup line for us if we don't score today."

He looked over at Joy. She was sitting in the meditation position with her hands splayed out in the mudra of deep concentration. So all right. He'd clear his mindof negative energy. He imagined what the gridlocked I80 east would look like from an alien's space ship approaching earth for the first time. A mating ritual between two long reptiles with multicolored scales on their backs, one inching forward, the other next to it inching the other way in an erotic slide? An aquaduct paved with semiprecious stones of many colors? Two conveyor belts traveling in a long loop transporting the inhabitants from point A to point B in lushly appointed compartments with slaves from a satellite moon answering their every command? Who would believe earthlings could invent a system of private transportation with insufficient road space for all the cars and allow them all to converge at the same moment on the same on ramp and hope to survive as a species?

The traffic was barely inching ahead. He rolled the window down to see what was happening with the truck. How were they going to get rescue equipment through this mess to get it off the road? But wait, the truck was moving. "Holy fucking Christ," he shouted. Joy bolted out of her meditation and looked around with a dazed expression. "What!"

"That asshole in the semi is trying to cross the divider to turn around! He's blocking traffic across all four lanes. Is he crazy?"

He stared at Joy for a long minute as though she had an answer that would get them moving. There was a soft crunch and they jolted forward. The car in front had stopped and Walker had plowed into him. In a flash a red-faced man jumped out of the car, opened the back door and pulled out a crowbar and came toward Walker shouting something in Russian.

"Do something," yelled Joy.

"What am I supposed to do," shouted Walker back. Tell him to contact his center of wholeness?"


Commentary: Well, look here. This is the third tray in a row I have done with an assertive/angry woman who has power over a man/men. Don't know what to say about that. I imagine this piece as episodes linking each car in the chain of traffic until we'd get up front to the truck driver who is tying up traffic on one of the busiest travel days of the year. At the start I didn't understand the bible or asshole eraser and wasn't conscious of them as I imagined the Jesus-praising callers on QVC, or Walker calling the truck driver an asshole. I looked at the photo as I was about to post this and saw those inspirations. Interesting, and I guess what sandtray writing is all about.

The Gangsters

I started this tray by smoothing the sand and then studied the collection. The gangsters jumped out at me instantly and they went in the lower right corner off the tray. I don't place any significance on location of the objects in the tray until it is finished when the relationships and placement begin to reveal themselves. But they were looking diagonally at the upper left corner, emptiy at that point and I started looking at buildings to place there. The gingerbread house jumped out at me as well as the church and then I chose the mother and father, the little girl, the man and boy sitting in front of the TV, the old woman and the swing or bench. I thought of Flannery O'Connor's story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find because it had a midwest/southern gothic look to it. I tried to get O'Connor's story out of my thoughts so I went looking for more objects. The convertible and bloody foot seemed to want to be there, then the dog, mailbox, pill bottle and the ghost behind the church. I still needed to fight the midwest image that I was getting from A Good Man because I didn't want to do a take on that story so I found the horses and decided it was a ranch, not a farm. I studied the characters around the house and then figured they all had a secret. The old woman was addicted to the pills, and the grandfather watching TV had something going on under that Norman Rockwell exterior so I found the Japanese doll and decided she was his true love that he had to leave behind after his tour of duty in Korea and they probably had a child together. Of course, his wife, the old woman, got hooked on the pills because of their dead marriage. That was all I knew at first. I didn't know what the dog meant, or the big bloody foot. Hadn't a clue about ghost behind the church. I figured the mailbox meant there was some communication that would be important but I didn't know what it was. At first I thought the blonde was a long lost daughter gone bad looking for a hideaway for the gang, but then the story started to unfold in my mind that there was something in the house she wanted and these people were in her way. The various objects began to reveal themselves as I began writing The Gangsters.

“The place looks like a goddamn hotel. You said it was vacant.” Linda flicked her cigarette to the side of the road and walked back to the car, past Big Gene and Mickey cradling their machine guns like they were the last bottles of gin on earth. She knew them, itching for a signal to take out the figures milling around the ranch house in the distance. Especially Big Gene. “What the hell happened?” Neither of the boys answered. Linda had that snarl in her voice that signaled a shit storm was brewing. It started on the getaway from the convenience store. Better to keep their traps shut and wait for things to blow over. Linda knew it was going to be bad. She could tell from the match burning inside her gut. If she didn't put the fire out now, she wouldn't be able to think straight if things got out of hand again. And she was the only one doing the thinking in this outfit. She reached inside the closed convertible for the binoculars she had left on the dashboard. By keeping her eyes trained on the house, she avoided staring into the back seat at the huddled form moaning under a blood-spattered Indian blanket they had found behind a gas station after the shootout. The house sat at the end of a horse pasture at the bottom of the hill, too far away to learn much about the occupants without the glasses. Mickey had parked the car behind some trees at the end of the dirt road and she used them as a screen in case one of the folks looked up the hill and wondered about the bottle blonde in the black hat training binoculars on them.

She couldn’t tell much. Next to the side porch a little girl seemed to be throwing a tantrum from the way she was rubbing her eyes and kicking at her hovering mother. The father was hanging back with an old woman behind him. A couple of horses huddled by the fence around the corral. Linda didn’t know about horses and could only tell that one had a tan hide, maybe that’s what they called palomino, and the other was very dark. They seemed restless and switched their long tails, occasionally rubbing their necks against one another as if they were whispering some plan for escape into each others ears. The corral was too small to hold such large animals she thought, they looked like they might bolt and make a run for it, the way she and the boys had after the ruckus at the convenience store.

Goddamn Big Gene can’t keep his head about him. Had to pull out his gun when the owner's dog started sniffing Roxanne. Nobody touches his Roxanne, not even a mutt. So he blasted the dog and then all hell broke loose. A cop comes out of the back room zipping up after taking a leak. He starts shooting before thinking. Big Gene answers him. Then before anybody knew it there were two customers crashing into the stacks of cans and toilet paper and the gang made a run for the car. Roxanne got her foot caught getting into the back seat and she started screaming with a look on her face Linda would never forget. Mickey had jammed the gas before she was inside and her foot got caught under the wheel. They got her inside and peeled out but not before the cop ran out of the store to take aim at the tires. He missed but had plenty of time to get the license plate number. All they wanted in that joint was some beer and smokes. Now they find the house and it's swarming with people and animals. What the fucking Jesus was going on? It was supposed to be empty except for the stash under the pipes in the cellar.

This piece interested me from the start and was fun to write. The voice came naturally from the 30's and 40's costumes on the gangters and immediately I began to imagine film noir scenarios and 30's gangster movies. I also started hearing my daughter's voice, who was addicted to those movies in high school and even now does funny riffs on those genres. I decided just to go with what was in my head and the story started to write itself. I had to look at each object in the tray and find a reference to it in the story. This is where I am seeing a difference in using the sandtray for inspiration rather than a written suggestion. The sandtray produces specific objects that have to be accounted for, chosen by me as directed by some inner guide who, I believe, was dictating the story to me through those objects and characters, just as that guide puts writing ideas in our heads the typical way, in thoughts. You could cheat and take out an item that doesn't seem to fit the story or is creating a problem, but from my experience with sandtray, every element has a purpose, even if that purpose is not immediately apparent. I recommend leaving the tray as is, adding objects if necessary and as desired, but not removing any. Sandtray work moves and you can advance the story by adding pieces to the tray. I was able to come up with some background on most of the objects and some easily moved the story along. Placing the Japanese figure behind the house made me think she was a secret, hidden and out of sight and soon I pictured her in a relationship with the grandfather in his young life, one he has never forgotten. Other objects were stubborn. What was the significance of that damn bloody foot? that eluded me for some time. When Linda goes to the car for the binoculars I studied the convertible and realized there was someone in the back seat who was wounded. Nothing more. Then I tried to understand that big dog. It was so large it had to have a major role or I would have chosen another, family pet or ranch hound size. My collection has several dogs of different sizes and temperments. Then it came to me. The injured figure was a woman, so there were two couples in the gang. And she had a damaged foot. Somehow the dog was linked to her injury and not merely a family pet. It was just too big, out of proportion to the horses even. How did she get injured or wounded? Then the scene in the convenience store came to me and I realized it was not a big dog per say but the dog had a big function, by sniffing at Roxanne in the convenience store, it led to the shootout, the police hunting them down and helped to, as my friend Margaret advises fiction writers, give my characters a really bad day.

I still don't know how the church will figure in the story or the ghost, or what the story is with that family. The canon still eludes me, maybe the family has roots that go back to the Civil War, or the ranch does. I think they got the house through foreclosure. It was abandoned and they needed a place for their horse ranch. They are a hard luck family and the place is pretty run down but now they are the owners. They are pretty disfunctional, too. I think the ghost is indicative of skeletons in their closet or maybe the ghost has to do with the stash that is under the house that they don't know about but has now made them prey to Linda and the predators. Sounds like a 50's rock band, and now that I think about it, the scene is set in the 50s.

I could run with this piece but I will restrict myself to using it as a one day exercise. I can always go back to it as a non-exercise serious work, but not now. These exercises are time consuming, doing the sandtray, pondering it until a story appears, then posting it, describing it, commenting on it afterwards. I'm find it very satisfying, however, and having all of the images contained in the tray is speeding along the discovery of the story. Images feed our work all the time, but finding them is random, and discovering something important as you are flipping through a magazine or grocery shopping or wherever inspiration hits us can come late in the piece and require much rewriting to fit in. However, in the sandtray, the elements are there immediately, and I find that even if I take a day or so let the story unfold before I write the page, the story is quite complete.

I'm wondering how this blog can benefit others who don't know about sandtray work. Perhaps the description of the process from creation of the sandtray to the commentary after the story is useful to help others analyze their own process. Also, I wonder if the trays I create and photograph might be used by other writers to create their own stories. Ideally, I am interested in demonstrating how sandtray work will produce our own, unique stories not influenced by someone else's suggestion. The sandtray is the source, not someone else's imagination. However, unless I discover a way to post my collection and figure out a program to do sandtrays online--not gonna happen in my lifetime--the pictures of a sandtray may be more effective than a written suggestion. I'll think about that and perhaps try doing sandtrays just to post as exercises, not for my own writing.

Writing in Sand

A blue-bottomed tray of sand, a collection of miniature objects and toys, such as the above, and the freedom to play with the abandon of childhood is all that is required to create scenes that release our creative energies and provide insight and inspiration as we go about the challenging business of life. My introduction to sandtray came over a decade ago when my writing group decided to embark on a collaborative writing project. That was the easy part. The question of what to write had as many answers as there were members, seven at that time, and we were at a loss as to which to choose-fiction, nonfiction, poetry, essay, multi-media, or just an anthology of our favorite or best work. One member who is also a sandtray therapist suggested we might solve our dilemma by doing a sandtray together. She answered our blank looks with an absorbing lecture on the history and process of sandtray, which began as play therapy for children who could not articulate traumas and conflicts but were able to describe them in the sandtray in three-dimensional form using a collection of miniature objects and toys that represented all aspects of life. The early researchers, Margaret Lowenfeld, a psychiatrist in London during the 1920's and later Dora Kalff, a student of Carl Jung, discovered that not only were the worlds the children created in the sand revelatory and useful to the therapist, but the act of creating them unleashed the healing ability of the children's psyches much the way their immune systems healed their infections. In other words, just by doing the sandtrays, the children got better.

Gilly suggested that we try an experiment and see if we could find our way out of our dilemma by using the sandtray. We gave a collective YES! and fist pump, or maybe it was just, sure, what have we got to lose. At any rate, at a later date we gathered at Gilly's and she introduced us to her collection of hundreds of miniatures arranged on shelves that begged to be examined and played with. She instructed us each to choose an object that attracted or repelled us, it didn't matter which, and place it in the sand. She had never done a group tray before nor used sandtray for this purpose, so she gave us the caveat that this was an experiment and she, as well as we, didn't quite know what to expect. But we were all game, and we began. We took turns feeling the sand and moving it around and then I believe it was Joan who chose a small airplane. The room was silent as we waited to see what she would do. She held it for a moment then with a sudden move, crashed it nose first into a small mound toward the edge of the tray that could have been a mountain in the sand. I remember a feeling in my gut as shocking as if I had been on that plane. Margaret, one of our poets, said, "Death is upon the land." And with that began the plot that by the end of the day was our novel of a Hollywood actress confronting fifty and mortality, who should have been on that plane to a private and high priced plastic surgery clinic in Brazil, but who substituted her housekeeper at the last moment so Luz could visit her family and OH (Our Heroine) could quietly disappear for a few weeks and find herself. We spent roughly the next year fleshing out the story of what happens to OH when the world learns from the mouth of Brian Williams that our beloved star has perished in the wilds of Brazil, and OH goes underground. The material was rich and fun and inventive, but eventually our members turned to other more personal projects and OH the manuscript went underground, though rumor has it, she is being resurrected and reshaped for possible publication in 2009.

Today our group still talks about what an extraordinary day that was and how remarkable it was that seven writers with diverse interests and stories managed to come together to create something new by simply playing the way we did when we were kids, when months of discussion had yielded nothing. I wonder if our President Elect would consider using the sandtray with his new cabinet!

The sandtray hooked me that day until eventually I decided I had to learn the process from the inside out to use this remarkable vehicle in my work with my own coaching and writing clients. I now combine the two skills into what I call sandtray coaching for want of a better word, because I do not know any other coaches who use this particular formula, which is far more powerful and effective than life coaching alone. Sandtray is largely used as a tool by therapists and occasionally educators. I am hopeful that I can find other life coaches who use the sandtray and we can share our experiences. I use the sandtray in work with people as diverse as golfers and painters.

In this blog I will explore the sandtray as a vehicle for writing exercises. Any writing teacher worth his or her salt introduces students to the discipline of using daily writing exercises to prime the pump. John Gardner has pages of these scenarios that writers can use as prompts to create plots, characters and scenes and to work on various aspects of craft, such as dialogue. For a writer with a functioning imagination, these can be enormously helpful in developing discipline, honing craft and discovering new material. Of course, the imagination will take these suggestions--e.g., create a scene with a woman with a scar on her face, a baby and flat tire on a darkened, deserted road--and go where it wants to, making a comedy, romance or mystery out of it. However, the original image comes from someone else, thereby subtly influencing the piece. Additionally, a writer who is blocked, whose imagination seems to be on permanent pause, is asked to do the thing it cannot do--use the conscious mind to come up with material, and for some writers these exercises simply don’t work. The problem is the roadblock between the source of inspiration and the conscious mind that translates that inspiration into words. This is in itself material for a sandtray session, to discover the nature of the blockage and how one might dissolve it. But working purely on the level of a daily discipline, how different might a writing exercise be, both in effectiveness in allowing the work to progress, and in discovering new work, if the inspiration came from ones own psyche? Using the sandtray as the inspiration for a writing exercise, I will attempt to answer that question. I am familiar with the scenes that easily flare up in my mind like a candle flame when someone else does the hard work of coming up with an idea. Tell me there is a scarred lady with a baby stranded on a deserted road and my creative juices begin to flow. But coming up with that idea on your own when your inner writer has gone on vacation is quite another thing and that is what this blog is about.

Because I am not currently blocked, in the sense that I can create a piece of writing at will, these exercises will not show how a blocked writer might sidestep a so-called writing block and create from a sandtray image. I am hopeful, though, that they will demonstrate a unique approach to writing, one that can access the creative source directly. I know that this approach has limited application; few if any writers have the sandtray apparatus at their disposal. On the other hand, they might seek out a professional such as me, to use the sandtray to jar loose those stubborn stories.

So, now, instead of using prompts from the outside, I will create a sandtray several times a week and use it to write a piece of fiction. I am interested in showing the process of imagination and creativity and how the sandtray can bring them together in a written form. The writing portion of the session may be just a page, a beginning, or a fleshing out of an idea. I am concerned with process and content here, not craft. I am interested in demonstrating the potential of sandtray work for writers and other artists. My first tray follows and I call the piece, Crystal Mountain.









This sandtray began with the creation of the hill or mountain in the center of the try and I carved out a river or possibly lake on either side of the hill. I then searched the collection and put the crystal object on top and surrounded it with dark polished stones. It did not particularly speak to me so I decided it need human figures. The tray flowed after that, with three explorer/archeologist looking figures on the right, a crouching man with a rifle in the lower left corner, various trees, wise men and a brass or gold llama in the upper left corner, a canoe, a wishing well and gold objects, some of which are also buried in the mountain, a skull box and hidden in the trees is a naked woman washing herself by the river and a baby nearby. There is also a crashed plane near the canoe that is hard to see in the photo. A line of turtles lead from shore to shore on the right and a line of crabs below them, as well as a school of gold and silver fish in the river. A canon is in the lower right corner. A large jeweled butterfly is behind the trees and the woman is bathing with a baby playing nearby. I pondered this for quite a while before any story came to me. This is piece I began:

The scene below him made no sense. Charlie checked the map to see what he had missed, but he knew the charts by heart. No map, no log, no diary had ever mentioned a village in these scrubby hills, and he had studied everything known about Crystal Mountain, but he couldn’t deny the ramshackle huts scattered along the shore. There wasn’t even supposed to be water for another three miles and here was a river meandering 200 yards below their feet, turtles shimmering silvery in the late afternoon sun as they swam in close formation along the shore like a military honor guard. A grove of trees oversaw the bend in the river. He didn’t recognize the species, all leaves and no limbs. The lush foliage swayed lazily in the soft breeze like sea grass turning this way and that in an underwater current. A mantle of clouds shrouded the top of the mountain across the river, the peak too high even for this massive cordillera. Everything about the scene was wrong.

Bettina brushed past Tom and grabbed Charlie’s map. “Where the hell are we? You didn’t tell us about this place.”

Bettina had that edge in her voice again. Any disruption in plans set her on edge and she flashed her irritated scowl as she tossed her head toward the collection of small huts across the river as if to say, how the hell did these get here. Ever since she had put up the money for this expedition to find the site of the ancient Peruvian burial grounds, Charlie had known the price of fulfilling his life’s dream was to subject himself to Bettina’s irrational moods.  

“I’m as confounded as you are, Bettina. There has never been a report of modern life in these mountains. The place looks abandoned from here."

“Not so,” announced Tom, handing Bettina his field glasses. “I think I see some movement in those trees. Looks like a woman. And I think there’s a baby crawling around at her feet.”

Bettina snatched the glasses from Tom's hand and stomped a few feet ahead before taking a look.  Something sparkled at the base of the trees and then flew upwards, jolting her and she leaped backwards.  The largest butterfly she had ever seen, as large as a hawk and iridescent as a peacock, glided across the river towards them.  It seemed to own the sky and was about to demand to know who they were and what business they had trespassing on this Eden.


Commentary on tray and story:

At first I regarded this as the setting for a trite Indiana Jones genre tale, outsiders discovering a lost civilization with buried treasure and danger abounding, a love triangle between the two men and the woman. It was fun to contemplate the plot, but it didn’t interest me as a writing project. Too derivative of Hollywood action movies, not enough psychological drama. I felt ultimately dissatisfied with it as a writing exercise.

Several days later I did a second tray which I will describe in my next post.