You Spin Me Right Roun’...

I’ve been looking up meditation retreats. There’s this one I’ve heard about for years that’s a 10-day silent meditation retreat – I remember a guy I knew once shared that his therapist advised him against going on a silent retreat! (He went anyway, and reported great tidings.)

But, one thing I always seem to forget until after I’ve gone on such a retreat or weekend away is that I can effect the same kind of stillness without going so far, and without paying so much.

I remember last year, I went north to Marin to participate in a half-day meditation retreat. The meditation itself was lovely; the grounds are nestled into the hillside near the ocean, and there’s an organic farm and garden you can walk through during the walking meditation part. But… the zen talk… eek.

This day's particular teacher stuck in my craw the whole time, so before the second “dharma talk,” I left. I felt good about having gone, being among the greenery and the eucalyptus. I even saw a chipmunk on my way back to the parking lot. But, I didn’t need to stay and “practice listening” to someone whose personality shone way larger than his teachings. It was way more about him, than his teachings.

As I left, I noted that I could have found the same or a similar degree of stillness, just by driving up into the nearby national park in Berkeley. I didn’t have to sit in a “zen-do” or listen to teachings – really, I just wanted to listen to the silence, and although I can do that in my own home, I prefer to go somewhere nature-y when I really want to recharge. 

I’m reminded of this as I look up retreats this morning: a day-long one at the same retreat center, the 10-day silent retreat place, even a hot-spring zen-center-meets-spa related to a nearby center.

But really, what do I want to achieve or gain or experience? Stillness.

I feel very harried at the moment, with a lot of irons in the fire around creative endeavors, work endeavors, and even friend endeavors.

I’ve been wanting to strengthen my relationships with friends, form new or stronger connections, and this weekend has been the perfect exercise in that – it’s been chock full of friend-related activities that have been truly wonderful. But, I’m tired.

Yesterday morning, spur-of-the-moment birthday plans were texted to me: “Join me in Marin for dinner and a hike under the full moon.”

Um, Yes, please!

None of the 6 dinner attendees knew anyone except the birthday boy, and we had a great time. The hike was fantastic. Epic, really. The view over the Bay, the fog rolling in, the lights below, the reflection of the “super moon” in the water. – That, my friends, was meditative.

But, it also wasn’t. Different personalities require different levels of reverence, and for some people, silence isn’t really an option. – I’d love to go back and experience it in the quiet. It was awe-inspiring.

And, I wasn’t home til after midnight … which if you didn’t know, is way past my bedtime. But, so worth it!

However, I begin to feel a draw inward. I’m an “X” in the “introvert/extrovert” Meyers-Briggs scale. Meaning, I am neither an “I: Introvert” nor an “E: Extrovert” – I fall so perfectly between the two, needing both in such equal amounts, that I am an “X: Right in the middle.”

So, with all of this external push (creative stuff, job stuff, friend stuff), Anty needs a recharge. (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids reference, fyi.)

But, it is important for me to remember that I don’t need to retreat from the whole world, put huge parameters around my life in order to do this. It’s as simple as committing 2 hours, getting in my car, driving 20 minutes, and crunching through the soft-fallen eucalyptus leaves until I get to a spot where I can sit – no incense required. 

10 minute blog:

(I know they say, Only speak if you can improve on the silence, but I felt I wanted to give you something this morning. Time is short due to doing my due diligence. And making up tongue twisters, apparently.)

Yesterday evening, I went to pluck one of the remaining lemons from the tree in the backyard of our building. In it, I found a robin’s nest with three sightless, flat and feathered chicks in it. Maws up and open.

I’ve been watching robins on the roof next door to me with worms in their mouths for a few days now, as I sit here at this kitchen table, writing, typing, breathing. But I never imagined there was life happening right there! The ingenuity of the nest-making was astounding, leaves harvested long ago, now time-reduced to a lattice outline.

It’s the noticing. The small moments when the chocolate vegan mousse cake you doubted, actually tastes like gilded decadence. When you decide to send a “hugs” text to your immediate family, just because it felt like a good idea this morning. When you go back through old pocket calendars, and read all the quotes and notes you’ve collected, including this rancorous gem from a rancorous man: “I’ve gotten to the point where patience is a waste of time.” – or this one, “I have a hard time taking my sanity temperature.”

For reasons hilarious and unknown to me, I seem to find myself in my second band with folks who are at least 10 years older than me. I love this. There’s little of the peacock chest puffing, and more of the genuine delight in participating in something fun, something that maybe we all wish we did when we were in high school, but didn’t. At least, I feel that way. And grateful that I get to do it now, when I’m less likely to vomit vodka tonics on myself.

Instead, I get to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon holding a bass in a basement with friends, and come home and feel inspired to take out my own guitar, and find out what I have to say anyway. 

Connect.

I haven’t much to say today, so I’m going to pull a Melissa and give you one of my favorite poems.

I first heard David Whyte on the carride home from my annual women’s meditation retreat perhaps 5 years ago. My friend, in her new and exciting Mini, maybe even with the top down, decided we were a little too altered at the moment to listen to music on the drive down the mountains of Napa, and so put in a CD of David Whyte. I’d never heard of him. Or his Irish accent. Or the way he repeats his own lines when he recites them, the way he pauses to savor and emphasize words. But, I did that day.

The next time I heard the poem recited, it was in the hospital, maybe a year and a half ago. The same friend brought a slightly battered, second-hand copy of the David Whyte book named for the poem. The nurse that day, with her Hawaiian flowerprint scrubs and her own Aussie accent, saw the gift exchange and exclaimed her own love of David Whyte. So I asked her to read this one aloud to us, and reluctantly, shyly, she assented. It was so still and lovely in that room then.

When you get a chance to hear him, do it. Till then, reading will suffice.

            Everything Is Waiting For You

            Your great mistake is to act the drama

            as if you were alone. As if life

            were a progressive and cunning crime

            with no witness to the tiny hidden

            transgressions.  To feel abandoned is to deny

            the intimacy of your surroundings.  Surely,

            even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

            the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

            out your solo voice.  You must note

            the way the soap dish enables you,

            or the window latch grants you freedom.

            Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

            The stairs are your mentor of things

            to come, the doors have always been there

            to frighten you and invite you,

            and the tiny speaker in the phone

            is your dream-ladder to divinity.

            Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into

            the conversation.  The kettle is singing

            even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

            have left their arrogant aloofness and

            seen the good in you at last.  All the birds

            and creatures of the world are unutterably

            themselves.  Everything is waiting for you.

                    David Whyte. listen. (start at 1:19; so good!) read.

“If I were a painter…” ~ Norah Jones

The earliest I can remember is drawing with sidewalk chalk on the dresser in my childhood bedroom. I was probably 14 or 15, beginning to assert a level of artistry and self-expression, and I decided to draw a chalk moon on one of the hutch doors above the dresser, and a sun on the other.

Senior year of college, much to my housemates’ chagrin, I began drawing on the walls. In my rented room, there was a walled up doorframe, which we’d left white when me, The Cousin, my best friend and her guy, A., painted two walls lavender and the opposite two a mint green.

This white moulding begged to become a frame, and when I was envisioning getting my first tattoo, I thought it reasonable to draw the image on my wall, so that I could live with it for a few months on my wall before permanently living with it on my body.

It was a sun again. Four feet of elaborate, vaporous rays that twisted, and in the center of the sun, I drew the infinity symbol, but shaded it to be three-dimensional, like a Mobius strip, looping infinitely. Eventually, I decided that the black & white kohl drawing was not enough, and spent a good deal of inebriated time coloring in the drawing with various nail polishes.

Unfortunately, the place I decided to get this tattooed was the inside of my left wrist, which is not a large canvas, and thus it lives, much simplified, on my skin. I was otherwise engaged at the time of “move-out” from that house, and so my father and brother had to clear out my room, and paint it all back to white, and over this artwork. My father asked incredulously what I must have drawn it with, since it took three coats to cover.

Living, later, in South Korea, in a rented studio apartment, I got the itch again. In those studios (which we would call junior studios), the refrigerator lives in the same room as your very small dining table and your bed, and so from the vantage point of my bed, I stared at this beige-ing plastic door, and decided it needed embellishment.

I used my acrylic paints to create huge designs, one in color on the top freezer half, one in black on the bottom. It was just abstract design, but it was playful, and certainly more interesting.

Eventually, my lover the painter came over one night, and together, naked, we painted the stainless steel panel that housed the water heater in my bathroom, which we could also see from the bed. Naked, inebriated, painted.

To complete the effect of living in a colored, effusive, manic wonderland, I painted the cabinets over my sink and small range stove. Purple and green again, like in college.

I’m sure to their dismay, shock, and irritation, my landlord discovered all this “improvement” to their apartment after I’d left the country when my contract ended.

And finally, when I was living in San Francisco in Cole Valley, the enormous expanse of my white kitchen cabinets called to my paint brush again, and I embellished them with a few outsized spheres and swirls, using the same colors that adorned that refrigerator in Seoul.

When A., my college room painter, was passing through San Francisco and came to visit, he noted upon seeing the cabinets, “Now, this looks like you.”

And yes, I owed a penny or two from my security deposit when I left that apartment, having every intention of painting the cabinets back to white, but just never getting around to it.

This morning, as I heated up my coffee and glanced around my kitchen, my vase of paint brushes caught my eye. Specifically a set that I keep in its original plastic case: these are good brushes, those. They were a gift from my Korean-years’ roommates during my first contract year there. I wondered to myself this morning when I’d last used them. Remarked that it’s been too long, much too long. Each of them, like pens, or a piano, or a piece you want to choreograph to, is potential. Each of them vibrates with the eventuality of what you can do with them, create with them, manipulate from them into being. They are possibility incarnate.

There was a time when I was still in conversation with The Cousin (not my cousin, fyi) when I remarked to him that it would be so easy for me to fall into the painting of our life together. Just fall into the frame, like something out of Mary Poppins, just tip over the gilding and onto the lawn with the white picket fence, the blue, cloud-flecked sky, and the ivy growing up the side of the house we live in together.

How easy it is to imagine that things are and were as easy as just stepping into an alternate reality, the one we’ve created for ourselves in our minds and mutual enchantment. A “reality” without mortgage payments or property tax on that ivy-laced house; without paychecks to support it; without the stymieing banality of pulling the garbage can to and from that picket fence.

Painting something doesn’t make it true. Imagining doesn’t make it easy. And desire doesn’t make it destiny.

It’s been a while since I’ve painted on my walls, but right now, the ones in my mind are devoutly Technicolor. 

Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

Call it Spring. Call it some planetary phase. Call it the fact that I’ve been back at my job for one year in April. But the past few days, I’ve begun to feel like things are about to shift. Change is afoot.

Could be wrong. Could be indigestion. Could report the same old, same old here for the next sixty years. But, I don’t think so. I don’t feel so.

It’s kind of a stupid thing to report, that you feel change is afoot, in a blog that is supposed to be about updates and reflections and actions. To simply take a moment to let you know that I feel like things are about to be different seems antithetical and anticlimactic. But, nonetheless, I tell it as it happens.

There’s some sort of coagulation that has happened, that I've begun to recognize. Maybe it was sitting with that woman on Sunday and reflecting on the change that’s occurred within me and my spending habits. Maybe it’s noticing that it’s been a year at this job, which has provided a foundation of stability and structure, and enabled me to heal. It’s also realizing that things are going to change soon at my work, the nature of things are going to be reorganized, and perhaps it’s just a time to reassess what’s happening and going on.

It feels like a time to pull my head out of the sand a little more. To reassert what it is that I want out of life, and address those things that hinder me from heading there, or even dreaming them up. It’s what I wrote yesterday in my morning pages: It’s time to dream again.

When you’re in a storm, all you have attention for and time to do is to batten down hatches and lower the mainsail and hope to Jesus and Allah and George that you get through the rough patch safely.

When the clouds do clear, you spend the time assessing damage, swabbing the decks of all the debris you took on board during the crisis, and getting a new roll-call of who’s still with you, who’s got a broken arm.

Eventually, the water has evened out, the crew is back to its old galley routines, and it’s time to point the ship toward the horizon again.

I’ve been very clear this time, as I ask for direction and guidance, to be open to what’s said/heard/intimated. How do you want me to earn? How do you want me to live? How do you want me to share the gifts I have?

I feel I’ve made an awful mess of hampering myself, like an anchored ship attempting to get anywhere new. And I know that some of the internal and external work I’m doing is to untether that stagnation, resistance, and fear.

A friend once told me, years ago, that things wouldn’t work out for me with theater until I addressed my trauma shit. Another friend told me while I was battling chemo that I wouldn’t get out of this pattern of self-immolation until I moved through my father shit.

Despite all the rowing, all the sails pointed in the right direction, no movement can be made if you’re still anchored to pain. No sustainable movement, at least.

So, I suppose this feeling, this sense that things are about to change, is an indication that I’m hoisting anchor.

Where I go from here? I’ve got to take a deep breath of promise and divine creative unrest -- and trust my compass.

(Thank you for indulging my ship metaphor! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did) ;)

"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility." ~ Stan Lee or Voltaire?

I recently had this text exchange with a friend of mine:

You know, whenever you in particular “like” something I’ve written, it makes me think that I have something worthy to say and a good way of saying it. – This scares the crap out of me. – Knock it off.

“Both those things are true! And isn’t that kind of fear thrilling?”

*thrilling*

I hoped the sarcasm carried through text.

Last night, I spoke to a group of gathered women, sharing with them my experience, strength, and hope for a little while.

Afterward, the feedback included sentiments like, “That was beautiful, eloquent, articulate. It was like a short story. You speak like a writer. That was like a TED Talk.”

Little do they, or you, know, that a tiny little shoot of a dream tucked inside my ambitious heart is to be a TED talk person – on what, ver vaist, but I suppose that’s not my business yet.

This Sunday, I’m scheduled to attend a small writer’s group that’s just beginning, friends and friends of friends. It’s supposed to be supportive, just evoking some words onto a page, doesn’t have to be Faulkner. But one suggestion is to bring some writing we’re working on.

And, my brain says, I don’t write.

Here’s what I say when people ask me if I’m writing: Well, I do this blog, but other than that, I’m focusing on theater right now.

I don’t really write.

I know this blog is something. And I know that it’s worthy of being written for me and for those of you that enjoy it. I (sometimes) know it’s not a “brush-away” thing, but it’s private, still, sort of. It’s not a public venue, really; it’s not something to read at a writer’s circle, or submit to a magazine or journal. And I feel really unclear about what kind of venue this, my, kind of writing belongs in.

I do also know that I am focusing on theater right now. To use the metaphor again of my internal round table (well, it’s rectangular, but you catch my drift), all of them/us want to act right now, and only half-heartedly do they/we want to write, in a professional capacity.

I know one of the detractors is fear. And that’s alright, I don’t have to tackle all my demons or desires at once.

A friend once told me this: The only difference between fear and excitement is breathing.

That kind of fear, the fear that I might have something worthwhile to say and share and give. Something people want to read and be touched and changed by. Something that gets underneath the armor of separation, and helps us all to feel a little more vulnerable, aware, to smile & laugh & relate. Yeah, the fear of that kind of power, and responsibility, is pretty big.

So, I guess I’ll just keep breathing. 

...And all the men and women merely players

Audition Over. I feel exhausted. I am hoping that some day soon, I can stop reporting my exhaustion to you, because I won’t be.

However, if I get into this play, which I realize is an SF State Production, I think, then there are rehearsals there every evening and weekend for 4 weeks. But, cart, horse, one bite at a time. (And, although that sounds exhausting, I know it’s part of “building a resume” and a body of work; so, worth it.) I won’t talk too much about this play, until I know I’ve gotten into it. To paraphrase my new go-to book, It’s Just a F***ing Audition. So, now, I go back onto Theater Bay Area website, follow-up on another message board the 25 y.o. told me about, and get another audition lined up. And another monologue into my brain.

You know, this memorizing thing is work. It’s amazing to be able to keep so much information in our heads. I remember words from plays I did years ago, when I click into that gear.

And that’s the other thing I realized as I walked out of the audition last night into the Sunset streets: I’ve done this before. I know how to do this, if still gelding-like. But this isn’t as foreign to me as I like to let my brain tell me it is. I've stood in small rooms in front of strangers and performed words to them before. I've conversed awkwardly with auditors, having rehearsed so many lines for them, I forget how to just have a normal conversation. I've filled out audition sheets, and printed headshots, and doctored a resume. I've stood in hallways waiting my turn before. 

I left last night – just as I'd left the CCSF audition last month – thrilled that I showed up. THAT’S the result that is most important to me. I was just so glad that I let myself try. And I did “not bad,” in my own estimation, which is like high, throwing-flowers-at-myself praise in my own scale. “Not bad.” Ha. In fact, really, I think I did well. They’re students, it seems, the auditors, and they gave some feedback that skewed positively.

I remember when my friend Melissa came to see me in The Vagina Monologues at Mills about 2 or 3 years ago, now. She said afterward, and her sister is a director, so she’s seen her share of plays and players—she said, I feel like I’ve finally seen you do what you were born to do.

It was the best compliment I’ve ever received. Because I knew she wasn’t a bullshitter, and because it resonated with me. And because it made my insides do a happy dance. Like, SEE, MOLL! We told you you could do this!!

On Tuesday night, the 25 y.o. came over to help me practice my monologue. He’s a director and an artistic director, so he’s seen his share of actors. So, very nervously, I did my piece for him. And I begged him afterward to be honest with me: if I was wasting my time, and someone just really needed to be honest with me, tell me to move on to something else. I don't want to be like that person on the American Idol audition tapes who no one ever told was horrible because they didn't want to hurt their feelings, and so now all of America laughs at their idiocy. 

He told me, no, he wouldn’t say that at all. But, he also told me that, like the bell-curve, I fall somewhere in the middle of the curve, “if a little to the right of center,” he said.

I could be crushed by that. I could say, well, forget it, if I’m not excellent, f*ck it. But, HELLO, even though I’ve done this somewhat, I’m a TOTAL NEWBIE. And if as an untrained, total newbie, I’m average, then that’s AWESOME!

I mean, come on, man.

My bass teacher said the same thing to me when I was working with him. That noting my incredible lack of training and beginner status, I was much farther along than he’d seen.

I’m good at picking things up. And I haven’t ever put concerted effort behind this acting vision before. So… seems to me… leads me to believe… it follows that… logic says…

I better keep doing it. Because I’ll only get better.

*INSERT CHEESY THIS-IS-AWESOME GRIN*

P.S. The 25 y.o. also told me there’s plenty of work in this town for a start-of-career non-equity actor. And I told him, Tell your friends – I’m happy to be in their crappy plays. ;)

The Good News

The good news is that I’m alive, so I can accomplish all the things I’d like to. In order, and in “the Universe’s” time.

Here is a list of creative projects and endeavors I’m involved in at the moment:

• Playing Bass in a band in SF 
• Memorizing and practicing audition pieces
• Looking up and applying to new casting calls
• Sourcing a photographer for a new headshot
• Submitting myself to modeling agencies
• Writing new songs
• Forming a new band in the East Bay
• Practicing jazz and blues standards with the keyboardist from the first band, in order to busk in BART stations (ostensibly eventually in actual lounges)
• Sourcing a voice teacher
• Taking an acting class
• Writing my blog

Here is a list of creative projects and endeavors that I have on back burners:

• Actually practicing the bass 
• Learning the piano
• Writing and developing my musical about race
• Painting! (and sourcing an art studio -- don't do oils in your kitchen, kids)
• Developing a “home organizing” on-the-side business
• Gardening (learning to)
• Learning to sew
• Re-developing my creativity workshop
• Reorganizing my closet (yes, that’s creative!) 
• Fixing the brakes on my bike and learning to ride again.

Not to mention the commitments I have outside of my regular work hours, including some personal inventory writing that I’ve been stuck on for months. Plus the daily things we all need to do, like eat, shower, grocery shop, cook food, spend time with my neglected cat. Let's throw in “dating,” just to make it a maelstrom.

So… I’m tired.

And I sometimes try to counter this fatigue by watching several hours of Netflix when I come home, which means that all of the above things get pushed back and I feel even more crunched and overwhelmed.

So, today, I’m meeting with two friends to talk about my priorities. I know I wrote about this earlier this week or last, and now I’m putting action to it. I have no idea how to juggle it all, and so balls get dropped, and things important to me get shuffled down the calendar like a shuffle-board puck. Clean cups move down no room at the inn tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Veysmer.

Because SOME of these things are meant to be focused on NOW. And some are allowed to be worked on later.

Someone once told me I can’t do everything, and I nearly lost it. She clarified and said, “You can’t do everything all at once.” Phew, okay.

I WANT to do it all. But, am I meant to? Who knows. I do know that I’m not meant to do it all at once.

It’s like shoving a spoonful of every part of your meal into your mouth at once. It doesn’t work, and you end up choking on a chocolate chip with gravy on your shirt.

BUT, if I take a bite in order and with precision, focus, and priority, then I have a chance of not only enjoying the meal of life, savoring what’s happening, and appreciating the company I keep, but this order and priority will allow me to digest it all slowly enough to create room for dessert. And by dessert, I mean sex. 

Look! SHINY!!

I downloaded the book yesterday, It’s Just a F***ing Date, by the same people who wrote He’s Just Not That Into You and It’s Called A Break-up Cuz It’s Broken.

One of the first things the introduction says is, you’re obviously stuck in something you don’t like doing, or you wouldn’t have picked up this book.

I love their books. I first picked up Not that into you when I was living in South Korea. It was a lark, there weren’t that many books in the English-speaking section of the bookstore, and I thought it would be more funny than anything to see the stupidity of these women who didn’t get that these guys just weren’t into them; that these women needed a book to spell it out for them in order to stop knocking on the closed, booty-calling door.

And yet. Of course, I got to see that I was one of those huddled women justifying all kinds of behavior (theirs and mine) in the hopes of romance. 3 a.m. text = he’s just not that into you. Not able to hang out sober = he’s just not that into you. Has a girlfriend? Sweetie, come on, where has your self-respect gone?

When I broke up with my last serious boyfriend in 2011, I was wrecked. Walk into the house and stand inside the front door empty for several minutes wrecked. It felt like every day I was hit by a Mac truck. And yes, I was the one who ended it. But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t love there, that I didn’t care about him, about us, it’s just, we weren’t meant to be an us.

My brilliant friend Katie once told me the following: The thing about grief is that something is broken, but you’re not, and you’ve got to keep going.

I had no idea how. So I picked up Cuz It’s Broken. It gave some practical advice, funny anecdotes, and a great dose of compassion. And in time, it healed.

I love their books. So, having read an excerpt from their new It's Just a F***ing Date book a few weeks ago, prior to this new dating thing, I thought to look at it again yesterday, considering that my manic phone checking was probably not what the gods of serenity have in mind.

And here’s some interesting intel I’ve gathered. One of their questions is, When was the best period in your life, and What was going on that made it great? My answer was surprising and heartening: the best period of my life is happening now, the last few months of my life. What’s happening in it? Playing in a band, signing up for acting classes, going on auditions, planning a trip to the sea shore with my cousins, buying a new (to me) car, upgrading my wardrobe, going on a meditation retreat, eating well, seeing live entertainment, working the steps.

Also, I was using the Gratitude Journal app on my phone that dinged twice daily to remind me to pause & write something in.

When did this change, it asks? When I was asked on a date by someone I’m interested in. That’s when.

Suddenly, my center of focus has veered sharply toward someone else, what they think of me, if I’m approved, if my life activities are good enough, if my success is enough, if I’m prudent but sexy enough.

In short, what changed is that all the things that attracted someone to me in the first place, all the things that were bringing me joy, and self-esteem, and hope, have been tossed in favor of what you think of me.

This is a terrible recipe for self-love!!

This is not the first time that my eyes have wandered off my own music chart onto someone else’s in the orchestra of life and dating. I’d explained to someone once that if life were an orchestra, the most important thing is that we stay on our own page, with our own notes, listening to what’s happening around us, but focusing actively on what’s in front of and important to us. It would be a disaster if the oboe began to play the notes of the viola.

But, that’s what has happened for me before; I get worried, I get crazed.

Not attractive to me. Or to you.

So, what can I actively do to get back to that place, the book asks next? Well, for starters, I can type some things into my daily gratitude app. I can choose two photos from my portfolio to send to this modeling agency that may be a dead-end, but I was stopped on the street for. I can go back on Theater Bay Area and find another casting call, and I can find another monologue and start on that.

There are PLENTY of things that I can do to get back to that place, because in that place I was simply doing what fed me, was important to me, was fun, and enlivening.

And one of the changes can be to remember, it’s just a f*cking date and was never meant as the end goal – the whole “meet you on the way to meeting me” DOESN’T WORK if I stop trying to actively meet myself, you know.

It’s time for me to allow the mass rush of thinking about this, the boy, etc., recede into just one part of the array of my life. I have so much else I was doing that created now as the greatest period in my life—and, really, it is. 

Dance of the Cerebellum.

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

There’s still too much of the game to be played before you get to see my trivialities, my lols, my 8,000 vanity shots.

There needs to be order about the thing, this dating thing, this ‘I wasn’t even sure if it was a date until I asked you mid-non date about it’ thing. And you told me that you hoped it would be. And so it was.

I write everything here. I write about love and sex and alcoholism and family dysfunction and self -exploration and -derision and -love. I write about healing and change and acceptance. I write about banalities and wrap them in a coat of revelation.

I only just began writing again, and I won’t censor because you’re here now. Even though, that’s what the game is. That’s what the beginning is. It’s an opening, always by degrees. Here are my cards, the ones okay to be seen. Next hand, here are a few more—are you folding yet? Am I? Here, one by one, is the rest of the deck, a little coffee-stained and edge-frayed.

I had a dream about you the night you asked me to dinner. I dreamt you told me you were 18. And we kissed. And I pressed mine to your soft, full lips.

And yesterday, when it happened in real time, you told me you were 25. And we kissed. And you pressed your soft, full lips to mine. …

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

There’s too much to be known and unknown, to be veiled, and slowly opened. Too much trust to be laid down before I am willing to open myself and what I offer here. And too much I want to say here in this writing--to myself and my friends--about that process of opening. This is my platform, my cauldron of community, where we all get to dive in and find the pearl at the bottom.

And I need to dive, explore, create, and parse. I need to tease and relate and recall and make sense.

I am a Libra, after all. Communication is our oxygen.

If I friend on the first date, you’ll see that I know what a Libra is and does. That I talk to trees and ‘heart the 80s.’ That I argue with myself about every last particle of myself.

"Respond to Friend Request."

I usually don’t friend on the first date.

"Accept."

But I guess there’s an exception to everything. 

For those of you playing along at home. . .

For those of you playing along at home, below are a few updates on things I have here written about:

• The caffeine-reduction experiment has been a near-fail since beginning the temp job, but continues to remind me to feel guilty.

• I realized this morning that the free bus I sometimes catch to BART can take me all the way to the city, instead of transferring to BART (thank you to my school’s student bus pass, making bus transit in the East Bay free).

• I put back up the series of my paintings that I’d taken down during Calling in the One, at which time I’d realized that women not looking at their lovers was something I wanted to move away from. I put them back up when the okJew was potentially going to come over, and I didn’t want a blank expanse of wall over my bed. I'm not sure if I'll take it back down. 

• I have not yet finished, but I have begun, the art project for my friend’s wedding. It sits on my desk, accusing me.

• I bought cat food.

• I graduated with a Master’s degree a month ago. And I was offered a weekend job at said pet food store. Generously offered (not the compensation), but no thank you. Not yet, at least.

• I have art that I need to make for the September art show my friend invited me to join. I’m not sure what I’ll do, but it’s been backstroking through my psyche for a month or so.

• I must follow-up with the boss at where I'm temping to ask her precisely what she meant when she said she would be happy to give me "a recommendation" for auction houses here and in the city (um, I meant NY city – I guess that habit still dies hard).

• My dad will be closing on the sale of my childhood NJ home in the next month or so, and is planning to move with his fiancé to their new Florida home toward the fall.

• I am eagerly awaiting June 20^th, when the results of the daily sweepstakes I’ve been entering for a trip for two to Italy will be announced. You may be the lucky winner.

• My writing style is influenced by who I’m reading currently.

• At the moment, I just finished Nora Ephron’s new book, and began a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace, whom I’ve never read, but seen the author’s name so many times on my BART rides that I thought to give him a whirl. I’m not sure I will continue.

• I will be art modeling this Sunday for the artist who I first worked for, and two of her friends. I’m not sure I will continue.

• I have 9 new voicemails I haven’t checked.

• I went on the walk I’d planned to take on Tuesday evening yesterday evening, and it was glorious. I ate what must have been a small, cherry-sized peach, unless it was of course, a cherry, from a nearby tree which I jumped to pluck from the low hanging branch. I’m not dead, so it was not poisonous.

• As soon as I get paid this cycle, I’m going to register for the summer acting classes at A.C.T., and I can’t f’ing wait. I looked up all manner of electronics yesterday that I could hypothetically use my more regular income of the next 6 weeks to purchase, and yet, I realized that what I really want are those lessons. And new shoes.

• I’m now working one-on-one with a woman who’s found recovery around negative patterns of behavior with sex and men, and I’m infinitely looking forward to freedom around some of this.

• I’m continuing to work with a woman one-on-one around financial recovery stuff, and am looking forward to being “placed in a position of neutrality” around money.

• I love Patsy.

• I haven’t yet played my bass with my friend with the drums up in Berkeley, and it too stares at me, not gently weeping, but with silent mewling.

• I realized that most of the writers I’m reading right now have written as freelance writers, and it occurs to me, that I might be able to do that, if I look into it.

• I haven’t applied to any jobs since last week.

• I used my 3 lb weights yesterday after my walk for about 3 minutes. And began to dread the 3 hour posing/drawing session on Sunday.

• Dr. Palm Reader’s office wrote to ask after me, and so I looked up my soon-to-end chiropractic benefits “in network,” so that I can get back to that kind of thing, without breaking my bank, or participating in a somewhat murky flirtatiousness.

• This is the end of my list. 

Literati

Yesterday was a day off from work, as they needed the room I’ve been stationed in, the library, so I got to experience a lot of loll and gag. Less gag, more loll.

I still did spend time in a library, peeling myself from my couch to go sit in the local library and email and submit applications for higher education jobs. Here, Southern California, New York City … Northern Florida. Throwing out the seeds and seeing what sprouts.

I also got another book out of the library, and began to notice a trend of mine over the last few months. The latest books I’ve read have been:

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

I’ll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do) by Mark Greenside

Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine by Eric Weiner

Seriously, I’m Kidding... by Ellen Degeneres

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

and now

Bossypants by Tina Fey

As I was checking Tina Fey’s book out, I was able to connect a few dots through the above list. Firstly, there are the books that are about redemption – about people searching, seeking, going insane, going sane. Mark Greenside’s book is more of a bridge to the other category, not being a redemption, but certainly a “coming of age” (at 40) kind of an adventure. The other category, of course, being the comedienne’s books.

Something about this strikes the right balance with me. That, yes, I want to read about your harrowing walks through dark nights of the soul and wilderness and Vegas (see : Man Seeks God), but I also want to read the levity, candor, and strength of women in showbiz who are being pioneers in a different way.

I’d never been one for non-fiction, and all the above are. They’re all “memoirs.” I was raised picking up the library copies of my mom’s Stephen King novels, and for most of my junior high and high school years, I’d sit on the couch in the downstairs living room, engrossed in the psychological and physical mystery of King’s characters and plot. Everyone would eventually go up to bed, but I was too page-turned, and soon, it was late. And I was by myself, reading Stephen King in the middle of the night.

This, was not an altogether pleasant experience, so I’d read further, because if I closed the book, I’d have to turn off all the downstairs lights, and walk upstairs in the dark with visions of deranged clowns lurking in my peripheries. So, I read on, and then it’d be 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning, and my eyes scratchy from being open so long, and I’d finally give up, too exhausted to care if there were a rabid dog perched somewhere in the stairwell. I’d climb up to bed, and fall in, too tired to be awake enough to contemplate the darkness.

There were the years when I didn’t read anything at all, really. I call these college.

No, (!) just kidding. But after college, I read nothing much at all, or nothing that stands out. And I don’t really remember what I picked up next, but it wasn’t that many years ago.

I remember when I first got sober, within the first year, I went to see a movie at an indie theater in San Francisco. I had befriended a group of people who were wonderful and hilarious and lovely, but none of whom wanted to see anything like what I was seeing that day. I enjoyed the movie immensely, and when I walked out, I began to panic.

I’ll never have the kind of friends who’ll want to see anything like this with me. No one has the kind of taste I have. I’ll be destined to watch things and do things that interest me alone forever.

Fatalism is not just a river in Egypt. Melodrama, the same.

I began to cry. Honestly.

I called the one woman I trusted, and sobbed to her on the phone how alone I was, and that no one “got” me, and that I was too weird to have friends.

She told me to come over to her house right then. I sobbed even more that I didn’t know the San Francisco bus system, and I’d be stuck in Polk Gulch forever.

So, she told me how to catch the Geary or the California bus, and picked me up at a mutual spot, and fed me tea and calmed me down.

A few months later, I was outside my car with a group of people. One of them I’d just met, and she looked into my backseat and saw a book I had there (I honestly can't remember what it was). She exclaimed with delight – she had been meaning to read that book! How did I like it, what did I think? And I told her she could borrow it when I was done.

It felt like a revelation, even though it was such a “small” thing. I leant her the book. She leant me one. I began to form friendships with people who had similar tastes and interests, and who would undoubtedly today come with me to an indie movie theater.

It took time. It took a lot of time. I have a friend now who is going through similar transitions and longing for those kinds of connections, having been immersed in a relationship involvement so that it’s been hard to make the kind of friends she wants. So, I told her that story of the movie theater breakdown and the book-in-the-car new friend.

At some point, I turned from the sci-fi, novel genre (though The Illustrated Man sits on my shelf – moment of silence for Ray Bradbury, and his children’s room/lion story that has never left my consciousness). Today, the books I read are not paths into the mystery of the mind and the world, but out of them. (Though, someone once gave me a copy of The Power of Now, and each time I tried to read it, I a) threw up a little in my mouth, and b) twice --TWICE-- simply threw the damn thing sputtering across the room – this last time, just a few months ago. I’ve since given it away. Self-righteousness in a “spiritual” teacher is an ugly characteristic.)

It’s just interesting to me to notice what I’ve been attracted to lately. That it points to a change in course. I yoked a friend of mine to driving up to Jeanette’s reading when she was in town a few months ago, and that friend now has my copy – a friend of mine, wants to read something I’m interested in too. A friend of mine is interested in the things I am too. And she's not the only one. I’m no longer bereft and alone on a street corner drowning in the electric whine of MUNI wires and the stench of human misery.

Thank you, Brandie, for asking me about that book in my car. 

Movie Magic

In an effort to vary what’s become to me a rather one-note blog lately, I’ve decided to lie.

I recently earned a decent wage from my spirituality & creativity workshops, and am supplementing my income with sales of my art work. Further, I am feeling so rejuvenated and supported by these avenues of income and service, that I have enough energy and creativity left over to practice with my new band – We play our first show this weekend.

There … did that work?

Well, in some circles, one might call that a “vision,” or dream. A goal, per se. And in those circles, Visions are highly regarded as lighthouses for us in the dark nights of the soul. So, I’ll take what I can get. It may feel like pretend, like fantasy, as I cannot see how to get from A to Z, but I don’t have to. Those are places that resonate with me to my core. If we add in that I’m a member of a local theater company, and we just ended our sold-out run, I think I’d hit nirvana.

I don’t believe I’ve mentioned this here, though I’ve used this metaphor before.

It’s like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Yep. That’s right. I’m going there.

When Indy, as we affectionately call him, is on his way through the cave to get to the Holy Grail, he comes to a ravine. There is no way to cross this. As it appears, Indy stands on one side, clinging to a statue of a Lion, and about 15 or 20 feet away, is the other side of the ravine, and the path to the Grail.

There is no way. He cannot “jump” it, it’s egregiously deep and sharp and craggy. And so, he recites the clue, as if the words somehow will give him wings.

“A leap of faith from the lion’s mouth.” A leap of faith. This is nuts. A leap of faith. But there’s nothing down there. A leap of faith. Fuck It.

He takes one step forward from the safety of the rock... and is held, solid and firm. The camera pans out from his angle, and we see that hidden, blended into the ravine walls, is a firm, stone bridge. Had he not stepped out from where he was, he wouldn’t have the vision to see that he was firmly taken care of the whole time. That there wasn’t a moment at which he was unsafe. He just needed to take that first step out from perceived safety to perceived risk.

Metaphors like this keep me going.

I’m a visual person, and a child of the 80s, so throw in a "Goonies never say die," and I’m ready to pack my rucksack, hitch up my courage, and step forward.

Despite my crawing about it here, it’s been suggested that I let other people know about the state of my affairs, if only to take my isolation out of it. Funnily, a woman whom I’m not fond of yesterday instructed me to “Figure It Out.” I could have slapped her. (Funnier still, it's already been strongly suggested that I choose another woman for these monthly meetings I have with my financial folks - which I haven't done yet... point taken?)

But, it all reminds me of another phrase, “You can’t save your face and your ass at the same time.”

I suppose belly-aching is different than sharing. Different from being open. I’d like to submit that I’ve done a little of both, and what I recognize is that I do have some blinders on. I do stand like Indy with a limited view of things.

And if sharing with other folks my honest truth, without being maudlin or Debbie Downer, can help me to take the next leap into the unknown, then alright.

Camera Pans Right.

Lights up on microphone. 

"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life"

When I was growing up, when my family went on long car rides, my dad had instituted a rule. My brother and I could only ask the question “Are we there yet?” three times, combined. Not three for him, three for me. Not phrased differently to bypass the rule. Three times. Are we there yet.

I’m sort of glad the Universe doesn’t have a rule like that, although I suppose it sort of does. For the number of times that I’ve asked what’s next, the answer remains as vague as the Magic 8 ball’s “Reply Hazy – Ask Again Later.” Apparently 3 seconds later is not later enough, and you get, “Cannot Predict Now.”

But, it’s sort of comforting in some ways I suppose. A friend said to me recently that we don’t know what’s next because it reminds us we’re not G-d. I also heard that G-d loves us just enough to not let us know what’ll happen next. The perpetual “SURPRISE!” type Higher Power. But, really, I think that if I ever knew really what was to happen next, I’d spend a lot of time manipulating to my way of thinking – if I’m meant to go in direction A, then I’ll start to pack for that direction, not knowing that perhaps I’m supposed to go to A, but with a byway in L, Q, and H in order to learn what I need by the time I get to A.

I was out with a group of us school poet folk last night at dinner after our performance poetry … performance. Which went highly well, I’d say. Pretty full theater, no technical problems, and, me, in my makeshift nudesuit – because really, when the else time would I have the opportunity to do that??

So, we’re out at dinner, and the women who are finishing their first year are asking about my experience there, if I took cross-courses at Berkeley, if I’ll stay in the Bay Area, and what’s next. And they’re just curious. I say that I really took school sort of as a walk – I looked into taking a GTU cross-course, but didn’t. But, I took painting, and singing, and acting. I mean, it is a liberal arts college (though you may not guess that from the highly funded business school it now hosts). I did take the school experience as a bit of a walk. It wasn’t academically rigorous. I think I took one class that had a lot of reading on theory and criticism. I took one that had moderate reading like that. And the rest, well, they were pretty much, write poetry, read poetry, discuss poetry. Period. It was sort of awesome.

I suppose I feel a little chagrined at not having taken more advantage of the opportunity, but then on the other hand, I think I also took great advantage in ways that weren’t as “rigorous.” I did just find out yesterday that you could rent the most awesome a/v tech equipment for up to two days – even lighting and high tech cameras and video cameras – so I’m a little bummed I didn’t take advantage of that – cuz it sounds AWESOME. I guess I do have a few days left! Maybe I’ll be a filmmaker for a few days, as I continue to send out tendrils into the work world.

I have one more class to complete. I have a class time on Thursday for Acting Fundamentals, and then our class performance next Wednesday. It’s just a scene, each of us students paired with someone and doing a scene assigned by the professor. But, I feel really comfortable there. I forget. I mean, after that flurry of activity in December and January around headshots and auditions and monologues, I let it all go to focus on school, which was appropriate, but now that I have a little more breathing room, I hear it. Like I hear the painting studio.

Stress and creativity aren’t quite compatible I suppose. But, in any case, being on stage last night (though I wish I’d reread my piece before I got onstage, as it was quite distracting to know I was/appeared naked!), and practicing my scene with my class partner, I mean, I just feel like I know this. There’s an incredible amount to learn, but I know about blocking, and staging. I helped the two of us create movement in the scene, to listen to the text and let it inform us. I also tried to not be bossy ;) as this was a joint effort. But I felt in my element.

I have an invitation to have coffee with an acting friend of mine – something that’s been pushed down the pages of the calendar like a shuffle board disc, and I intend to ask my acting teacher to coffee for an “informational interview” type conversation. But as I continue to look for work, to find out where and how I’m supposed to earn, and embody the question “what can I give” rather than “what can I get,” and let go of the Am I There Yet, I can also take FULL advantage of what I have in front of me – advocates, peers, and a wicked a/v department. 

Through the Tunnel

Well, I suppose I’m better than yesterday. A number of contributing factors. Met up with friends in the morning, got asked to go see a play this Sunday, got asked to go to that Dharma Punx meditation group tonight, made plans with a friend for tomorrow afternoon, made plans with a friend for Sunday afternoon, got my thesis paperwork signed by the folks I needed and it was confirmed that the last signature I need can be gotten on Monday without penalty, was congratulated (even without the uploading) that I will now have an MFA degree and that that’s an accomplishment even if I don’t feel it right now, ran into my professor who’s helping me with next Saturday’s workshop and got some details worked out, got my locker combination from the sports center and put on the sneakers I’d hidden in there almost 8 months ago, took a REALLY long walk through the awesome grounds at school, had a lovely little conversation with a lizard, walked through the school’s herb and healing plant tour, got some good rehearsal in for acting class, had some good convo’s with student friends of mine, came home and wrote the performance piece for May 1^st and really like how it turned out, and then had a long convo with a great friend of mine.

So…. yes, things pass. I needed ALL of that to get through the funk, and there’s still the lingering notes of Beethoven’s funeral march playing in the back of my head, but I don’t feel quite nearly as pissy or whiny as yesterday. This is good.

Plus, I’ll babysit for nearly all of today, and kids, even though I’m always nervous to babysit for that long of periods (how the f can I entertain kids that long!), they’ll help me get back into the more playful, much less self-serious frame of mind.

There was an enormo orange cat perched on the garage overhang as I was writing my morning pages this morning. I always try to get my cat to notice these things, and tap vigorously out the window, but she rarely seems to get it and thinks I’m just playing. D’ah, well.

Luckily, it feels, there’s really nothing more to report. Getting through my emotional tornado was enough news for me. Oh, I also got a few new books from the library before my scheduled phone call with this woman who used to work at galleries, and now works for a law firm or something for art and artists – i forget exactly what she does, but I wrote it down. I wrote a lot down.

We’ve been trying to schedule this call for nearly a year. I let the thread drop sometime in October, and finally picked it back up this month. And we finally got to speak. She was really helpful and informative, as I gather information about what jobs there are in the fine art world. She asked why I was more interested in the art world than the writing world, and I said, I guess I just feel so surrounded by writers, that I like the avenue of something else. Plus, I told her that personally, I love painting because it gives my brain an alternate route to process and develop things – she said to definitely use that sentiment in interviews.

Plus, she gave me info on the other worlds of fine art. The trifecta, apparently, is galleries, museums, and auction houses. She said that my writing background shouldn’t deter me (as in my lack of fine art/art history background), that as long as I “present well,” and do good work, there’s no reason that this world should be prohibited from me. Which is great news.

So, now I have more info on jobs in that field, a website for fine art jobs to check out, and a contact to run things by. She’s actually a friend of my ex, and he’d put us in touch a million years ago, so, shout out to him. I toyed with texting him my thanks, but figured the best thanks is to just go forward with this work. He doesn’t really need to know. … As my ability to let go of all outcome or response from him is limited, and it’s better that I just leave it be. But I am hugely grateful.

A lot got done yesterday. My eyeballs are quite red and dry from all the computer hours logged, so I’ll be glad to focus on kids today, the most anti-computer screen-like things of all.

It’s just sloughing off the old, I suppose. Fear is normal, but really, it’s just boogymen, and I have a massive flashlight powered by all y’all. So, thanks. 

Creativity and Spirituality

I got two emails yesterday. On suggestion from a friend who knows the woman who runs it, I’d submitted my resume to a tutoring company in SF. She said that she just hired an English mentor, but would love to keep me on file. And that she loved seeing the "mixture of spirituality and creativity that seems to be the hallmark of your professional life." (She also asked if perhaps that also echoed in my poetry, to which my answer is, not yet. But reminds me I want to read more David Whyte.)

I was surprised by her summation of my resume, which to me reads as: secretary, secretary, secretary. – And not in the sexy Maggie Gyllenhaal way. But, as I look at it from the outside, she’s not far off, and that makes me happy to see that despite my self-identified squabbling for a place in this professional world, I’ve been apparently creating a space for myself at the cross-road of topics that not only interest me, but which continue to be places where I do more seeking and reading and learning. Perhaps what I like to do does intersect with my professional life.

The second email I received was a reply to my resume submission for a job with Kitka, the non-profit organization of vocalists who travel world-wide. This was the job earlier this week I’d received from my friend out of the blue, and which I’d immediately dismissed as underpaying, overworking, and non-profit = non-stable/sustainable financial flow.

But, I applied anyway, despite my protests and whining. And I got a call back.

So, we’ll see. I would like to continue to apply to jobs, as it felt like an exercise in willingness and letting go of my ideas of where I’m supposed to be or what I’m supposed to do in this world. Besides, as I’ve heard quite recently, which I love to death is: “Sometimes you shake a tree looking for apples, and oranges fall out.” Aka – who knows? The Universe is pretty creative and wise, and likely has my best interest in mind.

Plus, it was actually nice to update my resume and take a look at what I’ve done since arriving on this here coast. The second half of my resume is “extracurricular work” and lists the volunteer or creative work I’ve done over the past few years. This includes my position as facilitator of the creativity and spirituality workshop I did last year… and will do again this year.

So, want to hear some cool shit? So, this Dr. Palm Reader/chiropractor I’m going to now (as a result of woo-woo coincidence), well he has a space in the basement of his office building (it’s an old Victorian house) that I’ve noticed gets used for yoga classes and the like. It occurred to me as I consider marketing this workshop to a wider audience than my college (where it’s been held) to ask what the deal was with that space – is it available for rent, etc?

Guess what? It is. And for relatively cheap, and the space is gorgeous, and perfect for my needs, and I’d get a key, and a lease for 6 months on the space. WHAT?? You want to trust me with a key to this wonderful place? Well, yes, they do.

I haven’t pulled the trigger yet – but it’s totally looking like a viable option for me – and I really wanted an accessible place in SF for people to come to. It’s in Hayes Valley; super public tranport accessible; and just super cute space with hot water and tea provided by them!

I’m humbled just thinking about how amazing and grateful I am for the a) idea; b) opportunity.

Lastly in this vein. I met with my professor who has been helping me to organize the version of the workshop that will be held at school next month. A workshop which I’ve been planning with and through her for several months. And it looks like it’s coming to fruition. I love the idea of having the opportunity to do the workshop for free as a “test run” and to help me get a clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t. Surely, there’s a lot I’ll learn as I go along.

But here’s the thing: this is a workshop I’d want to take. These are topics I’m passionate about. I’ve realized that sort of without my knowing or planning it, I’ve been preparing to do something like this for a few years. And my professor reflected back to me that people want this. Many people are looking for ways to tap into their creativity, for a way to get still, or for a roadmap to try. Ways to access what their intuition is trying to tell them, to access their internal nudges.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any period of time, you will know that’s precisely what I do and have been doing - however haltingly. Trying to get closer and more attuned to what I want in my life, who I want to be, and how to do that.

Here’s my last story: I have a friend who was a very well paid CPA (Accountant). She was financially rich, but felt spiritually bankrupt. She hated her feelings of single-minded material acquisition. So, she gave it all up. She threw her hands up, sold most of her everything, and went to India for 6 months to live as an ascetic Buddhist. There, she found herself to be spiritually abundant, but materially bankrupt.

And then she returned to the U.S. This is not the land where materially bankrupt works. So, she knew she had to find a balance. How to be able to hold financial and spiritual health. She began to do a lot of work, research, reading, healing. Finally, she realized that the work that she was doing, the research she was doing for herself, and the knowledge she was finding would be of value to others as well. Her own life’s path could be of service to someone else.

So, she started her own business, and now coaches others on finding their balance in holding the material and spiritual. She loves it; she is fed emotionally and financially by it; and others find help through her.

This is a model of what I’m realizing is happening for me. I know I can discount it and say, Oh I’m just rehashing what I’ve learned from xyz books and workshops myself, but as my professor said yesterday – people will pay for that summarization. They may not have the time – so I can offer to them what I am and have taken the time to find out.

So, we’ll see. I’m feeling more optimistic and confident in what’s happening and what’s next. And that feels pretty good. 

Red Light, Green Light, One Two Three

Remember that game? It was a schoolyard game when I was a kid, and I recalled the above phrase as I was folding my new hand and dish towels onto their rack in my kitchen yesterday afternoon.

I took down my red towels, and put up my new green ones. Spring, country, moss-colored luxury. Red light = Stop. Green light = Go. It felt rather metaphorical.

I’d bought the red ones several years ago for my last apartment, to go with the black, white, and red theme I wanted to have. And I carried them with me to this apartment. But, yesterday as I stood in the abundant radiance of Bed Bath & Beyond… I was attracted to the green. Apparently, with my few other purchases yesterday, I am moving from that former color scheme to a new one in my kitchen: mossy green, blond wood, and white. I like it.

It feels like spring. It also feels like change.

To me, the red now feels stark, instead of sexy or modern as it used to. The green feels soft, and cozy, and just a bit cheeky, like it’s about to tell you the punch line to a roll-your-eyes joke.

Last year around this time, I was invited to read some poetry of mine at a friend’s art show opening. At the time, I was in the thick of the awfulness of break-up land, and would rather slice my eyeballs with a razor than produce art. For me, art is a product of health and at least some healthy passion – be that anger, joy, or even contentment. As it was, I was quite depressed and lethargic, and “producing” anything felt like a Herculean effort. But I agreed.

During that time, as I was aware that I was not in any mood to create, that I was still in the contracted, inverted phase of winter, I noticed the copse of tall trees that I see out my kitchen window. Every day I see them as I write my morning pages, tall over the building next door, at least a hundred feet tall, and observe them going through the seasons of the year.

One of those March mornings, I noticed the trees were beginning to bud. I gasped. I’m not ready! I’m not ready for production, expansion, greenery. I want stark, barren, lifeless.

But, bud the trees did, and read poetry I did.

This week, I got an email from a woman at school inviting me to again participate in their annual open mic at the end of the month. And this year as I watch the trees begin to bud again, bolstered by their augur of Spring, I identify with their quiet expansion, and I answer, yes.

I can’t wait to see what I’ll write. :)

Two-Way Street

The phrase I hear in certain spiritual circles, You have to give it away in order to keep it, has always bothered me. So, lately, knowing I’m coming up against this as a block, I’ve been altering it to, I have to share it in order to keep it, just to make myself feel better about it.

I made a few realizations recently about my reluctance to share. Notably, in each case when I’ve been “down on my luck” financially, and have gone into what I call “lock-down mode,” I’ve been forced to surrender, and let go of my pride, or my ideas, and let other people know what’s going on, and let them help me.

It occurs to me that lock-down mode is a closed circuit. It says, anything that I get, I must hold on to fiercely, because I don’t know if I will ever get more (this goes for love, and finances, and jobs, and creativity, and more, I’m sure).

Lock-down mode is also a closed circuit because it is like battening down the hatches of a ship, bracing for a storm. Don’t move, or you’ll be swept overboard.

In these circumstances when I’ve locked-down, it’s been like increasing the speed of a flushing toilet, I realize. It’s gotten worse, not better, faster.

Abundance, community, love, creativity, require an open channel, an open circuit, one which allows energy in, and allows energy out.

I reported on here a little while ago about a meditation where I noticed that although still reluctant to do so, I allowed energy to pass through me into those behind me, instead of, as I’d done in a previous version of this meditation, simply fill others from my own bucket, denying and absolutely refusing to take in from those sending to me.

Either ends of this constriction is a closed circuit, depleting, and ultimately self-defeating.

Whether I choose to lock-down, and absorb, reach for, demand everything I can, and horde it; or, whether I choose to close off the inflow, and simply – and resolutely – give to you from my own bucket. This, is not a channel.

When someone had mentioned to me recently that I have to close these holes in order to be able to hold abundance, that there are places where I’m letting it seep from me, and will never in fact be able to hold it, this is a place of that fissure. Seems ironic that in order to have abundance I must begin to stop holding it, but, such is the paradox of spiritual axioms.

To quote what I’ve heard, There is enough time, there is enough love, there is enough money. Therefore, if there is enough, then I don’t need to hold on to it.

And, I need to address the other side too, the part of the inflow. Like in Tuesday night’s class when I’d recognized how little I’d been letting other people “give” to me.

In the moments when I’ve been broke, looking at the price of Ramen noodles in the discount grocery store, I’ve let go. I’ve stopped folding the end of the hose, and let it open, fear or not. And, miraculously, I’ve been taken care of … abundantly ;)

So, there are two sides of this constriction that I would like to address. The part that says, I can give to you, but you can’t give to me. And the part that says, once I’ve got anything at all, I’m holding onto it for dear life.

The “dear life,” it seems, occurs only, only when I do let go of strangling it.