Grown-upness

I was on the phone yesterday with a friend/mentor of mine. I’d asked her for an informational interview, with the knowledge that I had no idea what I was going to ask her – I’d let her know that in the email, too. She accepted anyway, and on the phone we were, as I sat beneath the dome of the downtown SF shopping center during my lunch break from the temp gig.

She knows much of my story and development over the last few years, and works in a field to help people, and, most importantly to me, seems to have some semblance of balance between work, creativity, and life. I thought she’d be a good place to “start.”

I told her the 2^nd thing that came up at the “money meditation” on Monday. The 2^nd question was “Do I (Molly) fear you (money)?” The answer was, Yes, because I mean responsibility.

Oh Responsibility! How I’ve run from you!

Over the course of my conversation with my friend, she reflected back to me that it sounds like I want to be powerful, without building or holding or being the vessel for that power. I do want to do great things (not like, ooh famous – just like, ooh cool), and, I have not wanted to really take the ownership of what it might take to get there. See, particularly, Magical Accidental Orgasm. There is no one coming to live my life for me. There is no one coming to take the risks and chances and changes that I need to make in my life and attitude for me. It’s up to me.

Or it’s not. I can choose or not to take the reigns of my life. I can choose or not to take the steps to holding responsibility for myself.

This responsibility thing, my aversion to it, came up earlier this year, in a workshop run by the very same friend. See, I have these old associations with responsibility. That it means more than I am able to handle. That’s what it meant when I was young – having to do things a child should not have to do, things that an adult ought to have been doing, but the adults in my life were not quite able to do that. So, I did. And I resented it, and I was burdened by it, and I’ve carried my resentment and fear of responsibility here through and to my adulthood.

Adulthood. That word came up yesterday in our conversation too. “Adult.” “Grown-up.” If I want grown-up things, which I very much do, then I have to learn to be a grown-up. Sure, I’m 30, but that’s no indication of adulthood.

Things that grown-ups have -- a job, a car, a house, a relationship, stability, vacation -- well, they earn these things by showing up for themselves in a responsible way. My same friend had worked as a house cleaner for ten years before coming to her pursuit of her current profession.

She also said, basically, nothing can grow in the dark. I am ripe with resentment, self-pity, longing, entitlement, and self-centeredness because of this ongoing rejection of the mantle of grown-up. I grasp at things I think I want, but I’m not willing to firm the foundation to get there – to mix the mortar, lay the bricks. Chop wood, carry sticks. That’s where I need to be at. Very simply, I need to lay hold of qualities and actions that I have tried to avoid.

The truth is that I have no idea what it would be like to take responsibility for myself. I’ve churned along at this hamstrung pace and mind-set for so long, I honestly don’t know. I’ve been talking here some about how “grace” and gifts from the Universe have been incredibly lovely, but that they don’t help me to build self-esteem around jobs and work and … being a responsible adult, basically.

To warm up to the idea of being a grown-up. Yes, very much I want to be one – I want what they seem to have. But what I see, I suppose is the externals. What I haven’t seen, necessarily, is all the work they have put in to get there. To do what is necessary. I haven’t done what is necessary. I’ve done everything else, I’ve danced around the entry to that path for a decade, and belly-ached, Why can’t I get there? Why is the door closed to me? It’s not closed. Never has been. I’ve been terrified of what it means to begin to walk down it. But the truth is, and forgive me, I got a cat a year and a half ago. She is a monument to my warming to commitment – has this responsibility, has responsibility for this life, hers, created any burden or pain in my life? Not in the slightest, and in fact, has brought untold and unforeseen joy.

This is what I too imagine that taking on responsibility for my own life may bring. Sure, I imagine it’ll be a little different, seeing as it’s mine, and my brain is such a lovely chatter factory. But, maybe not. Maybe, the doors will swing open as I take one step onto the path of grown-upness. Maybe, simply, I’ll feel better knowing that I’m on the path at all. 

Positions.

Over the last few years, I have gone from smoking maybe half a pack or so a day, down to nothing -- this, by no virtue of my own. There have been times when I was smoking a pack a day, and sometimes hardly at all, having started back in college, when I said Fuck It, I Need a Cigarette, following a dramatic break-up with my first “real boyfriend” my freshman year.

But, over the last two years or so, I’ve had to stop. Despite having developed strep throat several times a year in the past, and continuing to smoke until really, ultimately, I couldn’t breathe fully or swallow, whereupon I’d “quit” until I could get that nicotine relief back into my lungs, a different ailment began to happen when I’d smoke recently – after several a day, at night, I began to wake up from my sleep, not able to take a full breath properly. So… slowly, I cut back, and realized that even after one a day, I’d still get this tight chest pain, and shallow breathing, which was always not so fun. And slower still, testing the waters still… I’d go down to a drag from someone else’s or splitting half a cigarette with a friend. No. Dice.

Without fail, I’d go to sleep, only to wake up a few hours later unable to breathe. So, I “quit.” Or rather, I stopped. I had to – it wasn’t my choice, I’d rather not have, despite the health and smell and cost and yadda yadda – If I could, I would, but I can’t.

Yesterday, as I was sitting at my temp job in SF, I had a similar experience. Something being crossed off my list by no virtue or choice of my own. Within a few hours of sitting, doing data entry basically (I’m organizing the massive library for the interior design firm that I’ve temped with before – hired to work with them until it’s finished – so about two weeks) – my back began to hurt. And this isn’t like "oh, silly back pipe down," this is like "stop sticking a fucking fire brand into my lower spine."

I’ve known recently that sitting for extended periods of time has been aggravating my health, but it’s been easier to moderate as I haven’t been working full-time. So, yesterday by about 3pm, with near tears in my eyes, my three or four lower vertebrae about ready to jump out the back of my skin, I told my boss that I was going to leave for the day.

This was fine – she knows the work is grueling, and I’ll be back this morning, and I’ll attempt to moderate my sitting time more consciously. But, when I came home yesterday afternoon then, and came to my computer to apply for jobs, what am I looking at? Admin jobs.

For the love of Christ.

This, is being taken away from me as an option through no virtue of my own. Sure, I’ve been applying to admin jobs at cooler places, like the SFMOMA and galleries and art schools – places that seem more aligned with where my values lie – but, it seems, and is evidenced, that this too is not an option – or not in this way.

I simply cannot sit down for 8 hours. The job that I applied to yesterday listed under physical requirements that I be able to sit for 80% of the day and type for 50% of that. It’s a cool-ish job too. And yes, I applied, before I began to put two and two together.

So, this option is being wiped off the slate, and I’m left with another question mark. I’m honestly glad that it is being taken away from me – it’s a default position, it’s a fall-back, it’s what I’ve always done, sit behind a desk like a good worker bee. I’m good at it, but like I recently told a friend when she asked me if I liked those kinds of jobs, I said it’s like (forgive me) farting – it’s something I can do, but really I’d prefer not to.

Sorry. ;)

So, it’s been suggested for me to make a list of all the jobs that don’t require sitting for 8 hours a day, or more schooling at this point – though, maybe that’s just what will happen – though, sincerely, I hope not. And doesn’t require standing for 8 hours, like waitressing. Although, I do have a few offers for some catering work over the next few months, … which I haven’t replied to yet.

I was with a group of folks last night, and we were listening to a tape of a suggested meditation. This was about money, our relationship to it. We were to stare at a monetary bill of some denomination, and really look at it, and imagine it nearly animate – we, Americans, Humans, give money a lot of power and anima all the time, may as well find out what it has to say! The first question we were to ask it was, How do I (Molly) feel about you (money)? Its answer: Distant. … Duh, no wonder I am where I am.

There were a few other questions along these lines which need some more marinating and change, but as I change my relationship to money, how I can earn, how I can earn respectfully and with integrity and health, how I can be of service to others which is reflected back to me as a monetary value, how I can be responsible to myself, to money, to my jobs or career … I will apparently also be changing my position, physically and otherwise. 

A Fair and Balanced View

There are a few things that are hard to reconcile. For example, prefacing your poem to your family by saying it’s mediocre as you did not have time to edit the first draft – and after reading it in public at the ceremony at school, having people come up to you afterward praising the poem and asking how they can get a copy. I gave a woman my card.

It’s hard to reconcile my view of where and how I am in my life with the clouds of pride and support that beamed from my family and classmates on Saturday, graduation day.

It’s also hard to maintain a stoic, stark, medieval view of myself when I have women around me who “want what I have,” and a woman to call who reminds me of the length and breadth of this process of school, and indeed the last 6 years.

A fair and balanced view. How to achieve that around ourselves, whom we hold to such impossible standards that we’re always falling short. Or at least I do.

Because I’m not falling short. My measuring stick is broken and outdated and subjective.

Not much has “changed” outwardly over the last few weeks as graduation occurred, and it’s hard to know if much has changed inwardly, but, I think it is, slowly. I think my awareness of my rigid and flagellating stance with myself will begin to bring change with it.

I also decided to change my workshop to sliding scale, instead of a set fee. I had the thoughts to either cancel the whole thing (as I had/have only one registered/paid participant), or to host at my house the few who said they wanted to come, or do it in the city anyway.

I chose the latter, partly because I want the experience of doing it in a more “formal” or official setting. I still want to share these tools, and help others to learn whatever they need to learn from this. And also… I’m worried if I just cancelled it, people might show up at the event the day-of, and be disappointed ;)

So, we’ll see what happens with that. It still may just be me and my one registered participant. And if that’s the case, and I eat the rental fee, so be it. Not ideal, but my ideas about how the workshop should be are obviously not working, so instead of edging toward “fuck it” and not do it, or toward “you MUST” and do it for the set fee, I’m finding a middle way. – That feels like progress.

Also, I got to talk with my mom yesterday at the ass-crack of dawn when we’d dropped my brother at his flight at SFO, and had a few hours to kill before her flight. So, we grabbed some coffee and sat in Terminal 2 in those Ikea-looking tangerine-colored winged chairs, and we talked.

I decided somewhere mid-conversation to tell her why I’d stopped talking to her on the phone for almost a year. I didn’t “owe” her the explanation, but I did want to share why. I reminded her of that last conversation we had, and how she “hi-jacked” the conversation (a term she used about her behavior when I’d finished). How suddenly a light and fun and mutual conversation jumped the tracks, the shark, the point, and careened head-long into “My Mom’s Issues.” I told her that I don’t feel able to hold the space for that stuff for her anymore, that it feels inappropriate, but that I didn’t have the words or wherewithal to tell her that in the moment. And so, instead of putting up a boundary, I put up a wall.

And it’s held. She said she had to just accept that we’d communicate via email and text, and that that had to be enough. And for this year it was. Seeing her, however, I really was reminded of how much I miss her. And she said to me after I’d shared what went on with me, that if I felt able, and it sounds like I feel more able now, to tell her that she’s hijacked the conversation to let her know. And we’ll see if I can.

We both know we’re still in new territory. Our relationship has swung the gamut from oversharing, overly enmeshed, over identification all the way over to not talking for months and months, several times. We’re still finding our center in our relationship, as I suppose we’re each finding our center within ourselves. Back to the fair and balanced view. The Middle Way.

How can I hold the contradictions? How can I allow for myself to be vulnerable without a hard shield of protection? How can I see myself as a simple, or simply complex, human, with assets and liabilities? And, how can I allow others that same generosity?

Dunno.  ;)  But I think I’m trying. 

Three's Company

Best Laid Plans are luckily not always the best plans. Overambitious as visits with family usually are, my brother Ben and I did not get to see all of San Francisco in an hour and a half. He did say the sweetest thing, as we swept back into the car off of Pier 39 on our way to Lombard Street – that he came here to see me, not San Francisco.

My brother is 3 years younger than me, lives in New Jersey, and is a highlight of my life. It was not always rainbows and puppy dogs between us, but the last few years have seen a dramatic, but incremental shift toward mutuality, trust, and love. It’s been one of the greatest gifts that I’ve gotten, this renewal of our relationship on a basis of support and respect and admiration – to get to know each other as adults, or as adult as we are, rather than as two kids fighting each other for the crumbs of whatever there was available.

So, he and I got to briefly traipse around those tourist spots, and then had to get to SFO to pick up our mom. Another relationship which has formed and reformed many, many times. It’s in an iteration that neither of us know, and so we’re sometimes formal, hoping not to cross boundaries or offend, and we’re sometimes deep, treading carefully for the same reasons as above. Mostly, we’re funny. Mostly, the three of us together is like an old left-off conversation, dotted with movie references, and cackles of laughter – though my brother chortles rather than cackles.

An old boyfriend of mine got to meet her once when she came to visit me in San Francisco about 4 years ago. He said that we laugh the same. I’m sure we’re many things the same – sometimes I catch the strangest sights of myself, and am struck at how much that’s a “mom” move – reaching for a kitchen cabinet, I see the hollow of my thin, graceful wrist, and it’s hers that I see and remember. Sometimes it’s the way I click my fingers together when I’m nervous or anxious. And sometimes, it’s strange things that I’ve picked up from her, like when I was in college, cutting up chicken breasts in the kitchen, and I started clucking at the chicken – and didn’t even notice it until my roommate came it and laughed – this, is a mom move.

Irreverent, sensitive as all get out, brilliant, worried, with a kind creamy center like the inside of a cadburry egg that you cradle so you don’t crush it. That’s my mom, and also my brother and me. We each have varying degrees of it, but we are apples not fallen far from the tree. And however embarrassing it was growing up without cable or Nintendo, so that we watched Fred & Ginger movies, and all the movie musicals, and The Marx Brothers, so that no one our ages would get our references, we’re older now, and people still may not get our references, but I can appreciate that we have them at all.

A friend of mine told me maybe a year or more ago, how distancing she felt that her father could really only communicate in quotes from movies – that it wasn’t personal enough or intimate enough. I shared with her my and my brother’s experience, and said, for me, now, it’s actually one of the ways we do share intimacy – sharing something, a witticism, with each other that we know the other will get, and so we bond and revel in our commonalities.

My cell phone broke recently. In it were saved text messages over the course of several years. I’m a hoarder of texts. One of the last that I know I have saved in there is from my brother a few weeks ago: “Of course your president is an actor – he has to look good on television.”

For those uninitiated, this is a Back to the Future quote, just one in the long continuous conversation that my brother, and mom, and I get to share with each other across time and space.

We cannot be present in person with each other often. And when we are, we’re all still learning how to relate in a way that is open without overreaching, and fun without being superficial, among many more balancing acts that all relationships aim to master, but likely never fully achieve. We figured out that the last time the three of us were together was about 3 or 4 years ago.

Last night, at dinner, which didn’t go “as planned,” as my dad and his fiancé were stuck in the city and didn’t make it to the ceremony at school, it went perfectly. It wasn’t as I’d planned, it was better. And the three of us delighted in the bright, animated, multi-faceted, infinitely tangential company of one another.

For all that has come before, for all that it took to get us to that dinner table, for all that will continue to need to happen to help us show up to tables like that with one another, I have a family whom I love, and who love me dearly.

TODAY’S GRADUATION DAY! So, as Abe Lincoln said,

Be excellent to each other, and… PARTY ON DUDES!!!

Rituals, Rites of Passage, and the Spindly Lines of Fate.

Here.We.Go.!

I’d written last week to some of my fellow cohorts to ask if they wanted to mark our graduation with some kind of a “ritual” or ceremony. That very afternoon, I was invited to read a poem at the “Spiritual Send-off” graduation ceremony at school. Apparently, I really do and am meant to have a ritual around this. To mark and honor and acknowledge what a privilege this is, and to mark and honor and acknowledge what we've done and how we have shown up and completed something sort of major.

When I got into school two years ago, a friend of mine suggested we have some sort of ceremony of our own to celebrate and honor and give thanks for having gotten there, to wherever there was – an answer to a stated and unstated prayer or longing or wish. For years, when I’d ask folks what they did for a living - trying to vicariously divine what I ought to be doing for a living - when folks responded that they went to school full-time, invariably, I said that I envied people who could do that. Who did that. Underneath envy, is longing.

I knew for some time, and said it occasionally or often, that I wanted to “go back to school.” That I wanted to go for some advanced degree, but I had no idea what. I toyed with many ideas. Rabbinic School. Cantorial School (the singers in synagogues). Masters in Education. Masters in Jewish Education. Clown School (just kidding). Master’s in Literature… that always seemed to make the most sense, what with my undergrad in English Literature, but I had no inspiration for what I'd study in that or why.

Through a series of “coincidences,” I’d heard of Mills College. Although well-known here in our little Bay Area enclave, I hadn’t heard of it prior. What happened was, in about 2008, my friend in Brooklyn, whom I’d met here in SF, started a magazine. An arts and culture journal. She called me and asked if I’d interview a writer for the magazine who lived out here in the Bay, and despite my lack of experience, I said sure.

Yiyun Li was working as a visiting professor at Mills College, I found out in my research about her before our phone call. This was the first I’d heard of it. I toodled around the website, and something somewhere in me sighed, Yessss….

Every six months or so, I’d revisit the website. I’d never been to the college campus (The first time I even saw the campus was orientation day!). I’d hardly ever been to Oakland. But, I’d read the description of the English Department’s Masters’ program, and I felt …well, like I knew. Like I knew, but dismissed, closing the browser for another six months. That’s for other people. People who can afford to go back to school, or who really know what they want to do.

I found a notebook recently that has scribbled notes from a phone call with my Aunt. She’s an English professor at a university in Virginia, and has been doing all this for a very long time. My notes are probably from 2008 or 2009. They’re asking me to check out programs, and seek out writers I like and see where they’re teaching. They’re asking me to take action to help “figure out” what I want to study.

See, my above list of my options for Masters’ degrees remained. What did I want to study? Desire and action are two different things. Vague desire and clarity are as well.

But, at some point, all of those peekings at the Mills website came to a head. And in the Spring of 2010, I called the English department admissions coordinator to talk it out.

Huddled in a side office at my job, I sat on the phone with her, and she told me about the requirements for the Masters in Literature Program. The problem became, that I didn’t really do so hot in the last days of my undergrad (read: Pulling a Britney), and I didn’t have any connections with my professors from then, and I certainly didn’t have any academic papers on hand.

I called my brother, and asked him to go through my room in New Jersey, to see if he could find a paper of mine. He said he didn’t see anything like that as he sifted through a few years' of my papers and creative writings, but that “It is obvious that you are, and have always been a writer.”

This phrase helped more than he knew. I called Stephanie at the English Department, and as the deadline for application drew voraciously nearer, I asked her what I should do. I asked her, then,… what were the requirements for the MFA in Poetry Program….? (insert full body chills)

Those requirements, I had. 15-20 pages of recent poems. I had 16. No lie. Letters of recommendation – my gorgeous and supportive women Karen and Kristin who’d seen my evolution over a number of years and were aware of my poetry (go Facebook). And an essay. My essay. An essay which wove together the disparate streams of chance and circumstance and fate which brought me to the cave of longing for a Mills’ degree – about Yiyun Li, and the thread of creative writing through my life (thanks to Heather for that phrase), and about a mission statement I’d heard from a friend of mine – "To use my gifts and talents to be of maximum service to [G-d and] my fellows." That although I didn’t have my own mission statement yet, mine would be something like that.

It continues to be something like that.

The threads of fate conspired, faint as gossamer, lost as a cobweb in the dark at moments. At other times, bright and obvious as the red criss-crossed string of a movie manhunt over a map. Termed as I’ve put it, “an answer to a prayer I’d never have let myself utter,” instead of the MA in Literature, I applied to the MFA program in Poetry, and I got in.

In my friend’s living room a few weeks after I was accepted and in process of heading down a path I’d no idea to where, cross-legged on the floor, we wrote down all the things that we wanted to let go of – things that had brought us to the point where we were now, but which we believed weren’t serving us any more. To honor those characteristics and beliefs which had been necessary ‘til then, and then to burn them as a symbol of surrender and release of them.

So many of my “let go of” qualities were about doing it “on my own,” feeling like I needed to or had to do it alone, or that I had to figure it out.

I wrote down, “I can’t” and I burned it.

When the ceremony was at its end (“ceremony” being us burning several strips of paper over a bowl!), we wrote down what we wanted to take with us, as we headed out from there. On one square of blue lined paper, I wrote what I wanted to take with me from there, to Mills, to my future, to the world as I engage it more fully:

We Can.

SOLD

What the hell – might as well admit it...

So, each time I’ve read my Tarot cards lately, (which I heard once you’re not supposed to do, but the book I have says it’s the best way to learn. Who knows – so I just don’t do it too often). Nevertheless, I have been doing it mildly frequently over this past month in an effort to "figure it out," and darnit, if I don’t keep getting The Devil card. This card represents a lot about materialism, the bondage of self, and self-obsession.

And nothing leads me more to self-obsession than being broke, so I’ve been pretty much all I think about lately. Not a very lovely way to live. This morning, … in meditation (I can’t believe anyone still reads this stuff!), I realized that I’ve cut myself off from a lot of my connectedness through my contracted and constricted thinking around money, jobs, my life, my purpose, etc.

I have been reaching out more for help, but feeling actually calm, centered, connected, all is well? Well, that’s felt a little out of reach for me. Fair enough, it happens. But, it’s nice to notice that although I’ve been availing myself of more resources and networks and connections this time (only when I’ve thoroughly exhausted my self-propelled resources!), it’s still so Molly-centered, and gimme gimme. It feels icky.

An assignment that I’ve had since Monday is to pray for others’ happiness once a day for two weeks. Some specific others, but sure, it could apply to everyone. In doing this, I realized how much I’ve been focused on myself. And also, how depleted I am internally from working in that closed circuit. I haven’t “filled the well” in a long time. My well is dry. And others need me to get some moisture up in here.

Connecting back to sources I know that are nurturing, and getting back onto a schedule for myself will help (I was up till 1am applying to a job – not the best time…but I won’t have much time as the family all pours in from the corners of the eastern seaboard) are some ways to refill the well. Perhaps this then sounds like another path of self-obsession, thinking about how I can feel better, and maybe it can skew that way, but I’d like for it to skew in the way to help others – to refill so I have something to give. So I can actually have energy to put behind my prayers for others’ healing.

Specifically, last night, I had dinner with my Dad and his fiancé. They’ve come in for vacation/my graduation, and came to see me at school, and we went to dinner. They are planning on moving to, and have a house all ready to go for them in Florida. It occurred to me last night how much older they both have gotten.

I see them, and my mom and brother, maybe once a year, but usually every other year, and it’s been that way since I left for Korea in 2004. So, I don’t get to witness the slow aging process; I see them, and I’m beginning to notice the slower pace they walk, the much grayer hair of my dad, and the general aging look of them both. It’s startling a little to see so much change from visit to visit.

They are moving to Florida to retire, like good Jews, into a house in a “senior community” (I half envision Jerry Seinfeld’s parents in Boca… And I don’t think that’s half off!) She is older than my dad, and my Dad is 65, not “old,” but there’s a lot of aches and pains and aging issues. I can tell that he’s sad that he’s not as vibrant as he was. They “courted” by going to lots of dances and on motorcycle rides and kayaking and whatnot. They were very active, at some type of dance or other nearly every week.

Last night they said they don’t really go anymore.

In order to move to Florida, however, they need for my childhood home to sell. I’ve done a lot of work on letting go of this house, I burned sage when I was there emptying it last Fall to help let go of all it housed and witnessed, and in meditation, I’ve tried to do the same. To differentiate my identification with the house too – having seen it for a very long time as a neglected beautiful thing that could be so much if it only had enough love. I’m come a long way with that, and feel ready for it to go, feel ready for it to be owned and loved by a new family.

But, the house does need a lot of work, and it’s not selling. We all know what’s happening in the economy, so I decided every little bit of help counts, and this morning in meditation, I went to the house. I asked it what it needed to go to another family, and it said it needed Love. (Yes, really.) So, I tried to sit in a room in the house and radiate love out to it, so that it could radiate love and attract a new family.

Problem is, I’m running on fumes, and that’s how I recognized this this morning. I sent someone else in, a teacher/source I know, to illuminate it, but no dice. I need to work on receiving some light, to get back to being a channel, rather than a closed circuit running on self-propulsion for me to have anything to give.

Will it help the house sell? Dunno. Will it help me to feel more connected to those around me? Likely. Will it do me some good to think about others’ happiness and how they are? Definitely.

And, if you would be so kind, could you maybe send a little love to the house too? Envision a “Sold” sign on the lawn? Help my Dad and his wife move to a better place?

Thanks!

And So, She Wakes.

As I was flipping open my Morning Pages notebook this morning, it fell open to the back page. Written at the top was “Meditation: Lodge Day 4.” I usually write my journeys and meditations in another “spiritual” notebook, to keep them all together, but I couldn’t find it last Thursday when I apparently wrote this. I’d forgotten, and it makes intensely marvelous sense to me now, and I’m happy I stumbled upon it.

Again, bear with the “do we have to listen to another one of these woo-woo Mollyisms”!

As you may recall, I went to my first sweat lodge last Sunday, and we were told by the facilitator that the lodge “works” for four days after the lodge, hence, Day 4 above. The meditation on that day, then, went something like this:

The four characters of Beauty, Love, Sexuality, and Femininity [I guess I didn't write a blog about her, but a former meditation introduced my Inner Femininity to me as one anorexic and frightened looking young woman, who has been getting healthier for a few months] gathered at the lodge fire. Sexuality discarded her heavy cloak of shame into the fire. All of the rest of “us” stood behind her – all my aspects that sit at my internal dinner table, all my animal guides, and all my teachers human and otherwise. Then the 4 entered the lodge, not with “me.” In the lodge, they merged, joined, combined, and exited as one. She then purged all these prayer bundles [little sacks of tobacco filled with prayers, tied together with string, usually tiny, about the size of a nickel] and the last one was about the size of a bowling ball, filled with shame. It burned brightly and a phoenix rose up from the ashes and swam about the clearing. All the others whooped and cheered – there was great merriment [so it says in my notebook]. She grabbed onto the phoenix and made the whole trip back from the Santa Cruz mountains and to my apartment where I sat meditating. And she asked me, Are you ready? And I answered Yes. And she joined me, into me, empowers/powers me now [I write]. Am I ready? Yes.

So, what? I realized this morning as I read over this page that, in fact, something like this has happened. My dalliance with the married man began the very next day. Brief and physically Rated G as the now-ended tete-a-tete was, I have not felt that kind of power, or charge, or electric in a long time. That awake in a long time. 

I relate it to the awakening of a limb that’s long been asleep. Suddenly it starts to tingle, which feels sorta nice, and then, more suddenly, it begins to feel like it’s burning as it awakens. As the blood starts to rush almost anew into this place so long cut off. You almost wish it would simply go back to sleep again - better that than this. As you know, I’ve cut off much of these parts of me for quite some time, imagining, and having fed the story that my sexuality, femininity, beauty, and love bring me pain, destruction, self-hatred, and, again, shame.

So, beginning to feel the tingle of these parts of me again, these massive alive energized parts of me, means that I’m beginning to walk with my full self again. See, I don’t think it’s just about sex, or being a woman, I think it’s about me being a full and entirely embodied human. About allowing the blood, power, energy to flow into ALL of myself. And when that is allowed to happen, well, I believe I’ll be able to take actions I haven’t been able to take before.

I wrote a few informational interview query letters out to networks of mine last night, and in it, I wrote a line that surprised me at its truth. I wrote that I would, ideally, like to paint, act, sing in a band, and facilitate workshops. So, there you have it. I now have an answer to “What do you want to do.” Isn’t that lovely?

In fact, it is. I know that I’m still finding my way to getting there. But having full working ability of all my limbs has been the only way to get there. When, over the last several months I was told that I had to work on this sex stuff before I could get “more information,” well, I think I’m coming out of it/into it. I think I’m clearing it.

Apparently, sure, I have some work to do on how to do it skillfully. My old habits with righteously attractive unavailable men are much more familiar in my muscle memory – and as my muscles awaken, they seek the familiar. (And seek to post the NIN "I wanna fuck you like an animal" on facebook!) So, it’s about owning, and holding these parts now – how to hold them properly, and respectfully – without fucking shame.

Finally, I realized yesterday, as I was clicking “attend” to a workshop for Shamanic Journey work, that if my professional development could be anything, it would be this – sweat lodges, and collage parties, and shamanic journey workshops. That my professional development ought to align with my personal development. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Therefore, again, it’s about heading there. About allowing myself to head there. Sure, I may need to find a job for the mean time, the in between time, but with the full use of my faculties, with a widened and compassionate understanding of the voraciously ambitious and pulsatingly powerful support of my full feminine, human, creative self, with an eye for new behavior, and with a welcome acceptance of all that I am, and want, and yearn for – I believe that, Yes, I Am Ready.