Too Hot to Handle

There’s a maxim around here that goes: G-d will never give you more than you can handle.

To echo Wednesday, bullshit.

I think this phrase is missing a key point at the end of it: G-d will never give you more than you can handle with the help of others.

I think G-d or the Universe or life will always give us more than we can handle *alone.* I think, in fact, that’s the point. In order to be able to handle that which is handed us, we must reach out for help from others, or help from “god,” which often comes in the form of help from others anyway.

I think it’s important that we are given more than we can handle alone, otherwise, surely, we all would. If we could live like Sandra Bullock in “The Net,” ordering pizza via the internet, watching a yule log screen saver, and never knowing our neighbors, we would. But I still think about that movie every time I nod or say a passing hello to my neighbors: I am not anonymous; I am not alone.

In that movie (sorry, y’all!), Sandra’s character gets accused of something or other, but no one can identify her, and her identity gets stolen. No one except one character (her shrink) actually knows who she is, actually recognizes her. The neighbor says, no she doesn’t think that’s her, even though they’ve lived in proximity for a dozen years.

What kind of challenge of growth is there in that? If we were intended to live in isolation, there wouldn’t be all this talk about connection and community, mehta and helping one another, and my understanding of tikkun olam (repairing the world) has a lot to do with eliminating disconnect.

I opined to my coworker, who was listening to Pandora the other day when one of these new modern radio songs came on (I don’t remember which one). But it was one that eventually has a chorus of voices yell, Yeah!, or Hey!. And I theorized that the proliferation of “modern” songs that feature a chorus of voices at some point is a call for connection, to refill and replace the actual being with others—if we hear a chorus of voices yell, Hey!, on the radio, we want to yell along with it, too. For a moment, we are also connected to those voices, even though they be computer over-layed with one another.

This “new” sound I hear has a lot of that, and my opinion is that they’re also trying to create community in the best way they know how, to create a moment of connection and a feeling of being a part of a crowd…even when you’re just driving alone in your car, and the person next to you is as well.

I do think “G-d” gives us more than we can handle. In the utter inability to handle things on our own, I think we’re intended to reach out to one another or to a “power greater than ourselves” for help, for guidance, for support, and mostly, for laughter.

The amount of laughter you can have alone is much less than what you can have in interaction with each other – like I’ve been saying about random connections with store clerks or bus passengers: You never know what will be said by the other, and it creates something totally unique.

This morning, with all of this on my mind, in my notebook is a printed quote by Anais Nin:

Each friend represents a world in us,

a world possibly not born until they arrive,

and it is only by this meeting that

a new world is born.

I make it a point to say hi, or at least nod to or acknowledge my neighbors, to let them see my face, and I theirs, as I rush in and out of the building at the ends of a long day. I want to be able to recognize, and possibly say hi, when I see them on the street, and, mostly, I want them to be able to pick me out of a line-up. 

Seeing Someone

Yesterday, I saw my new somatic therapist for the 2nd time, and we’ve decided to continue to work together, for the next little while. I don’t know, exactly, what changes will be wrought from it, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to again who’s third party and kind and uninvested in propping me up or giving me advice.

Which isn’t to say she isn’t keen on helping me recover and heal, but she doesn’t really have any agenda except that. Which is nice.

At the end of the session, I said how it galls me that I was supposed to, all these years, work on trauma recovery and grieving, and now I have to go through recovery from the trauma and grieving of cancer to even get to that layer of healing and muck.

She said something heartening, which I’m not sure I agree with yet, but maybe will eventually: That it’s all connected. That if we work on one part, it’s pulling on all the others. Like a spider web, if I work and tug and pull and excise over here, it’ll ripple across and affect the other parts.

We’ll see. As always, the act of showing up is one of hope that things (that I, my life and how I engage in or hide from it) will change. I have hope, every time I call a friend or reach out for help or write this blog – this blog is an act of writing myself out of the darkness.

In my “stats,” I see someone read that first blog called “Cancer,” so this morning I went back to read it too. So much of what I wrote about the recovery process was true and so many of the questions are still the same, if not a little more in focus. My cousin is a doctor in palliative care, and reads my blog (Hi, L.!), and she emailed me the other day after she’d read my blog to say she’d never thought of life-threatening illness as trauma before, but of course it is. And to thank me for the bravery of putting my process of coagulation up for the help of so many.

It’s interesting to read back to that first blog, and to read the virulent ambivalence of being “an inspiration.” And it’s something that came up yesterday in my session: the desire to be someone who holds the torch, and the desire to stop being the f’ing person who holds the torch all the time.

The duality of being a leader, if you can call this that (which, frankly, I’m coming to see it is), is that sometimes you want to just march along with everyone else. You get tired of standing at the top of the mountain alone to look out and see where you should go next, what horizons need staking. You get tired of being the one who charges into the fray – of being the person, as I wrote in that blog, who just “goes with it,” faces it, accepts it.

AND YET, of course, for me, I want to be that person, too – I want to be the person who is a light for others; I want to be a teacher and a leader and an inspiration. I want to exact positive change in the world.

Yesterday, in session, we spoke about vascillating between both these feelings, and allowing it to be. It’s part of owning the all of myself: the fearless leader, and the exhausted soldier. The tireless explorer, and the guy who just wants to carry the horse oats and play cards in the tent.

I think part of my ambivalence is a conscious understanding of what leadership might mean, too. To recognize, without slipping into workaholism or unseeing “progress,” that I am, and have always been Both/And.

At some point, I also told her that I’d been scrolling through my profile photos on Facebook just the other day, since I’d put a new one up. And I came, on Tuesday, sitting in my car waiting to meet up with some folks, to the photo of myself at graduation from Mills College in May of 2012. That I stand with a cap and gown, long hair, and a “radiant smile,” I told her.

I told her how I began to cry, looking at that photo, out of grief that that girl had to go, and would go, through all this. That she had no idea what was about to happen. That the innocence of that moment and that glee was … time-limited. To see that girl, to know what she was about to go through, to feel so sorry that she does and will, and still is, is grief. To know that my right eyelid will never look quite the same, an eye infection during chemo causing it to droop slightly, so that I can see it now, though others can’t. To know what that graduation day meant to me – to accomplish something, to put my energies in and to excel, learn, progress, and shine.

I suppose, truthfully, I can say the same for my current profile photo. Almost 2 years later, headshots for theater gigs. The result of something I’ve also put my energies and monies and progress toward in order to shine the way I know that photo does, too.

It’ll take some time, as I wrote in that first cancer blog, to heal from all this. But I am a leader with a torch--though, please, sometimes, can you be one too?

Easy

“Pain carves out a place in us that allows us to feel more deeply and be more usefully whole.”

Bullshit.

This is the kind of thing you tell someone who’s had to go through shit and needs something to hold onto as a reason why. And I’m not going to tell you it’s not true or that I don’t believe it to be true, because, maddeningly, I do think it is.

But what about all the people who don’t have pain carve out a place in them? What about those of us who haven’t have the razor of life cut into our quick? What about those who have lived what some might call “normal” lives?

Are they not as valuable as human beings? Of course not. Are they not as deep in thought or artistry? Well… that’s really hard to answer.

There is a pervasive ideal of the martyr in our society (and, again, I’m not the first to write about this). There is also the thick idolatry of those who are young, innocent, unscathed, “beautiful.”

So, we have for ourselves, as a society, a conundrum: We both want desperately that kind of luxury and ease that calls to us from the pages of Sunset or Dwell or GQ, but we disdain those whose lives closely resemble them, condemning them for “having it easy.”

So, what do we really want? Do we want the life of ease, or do we want to tear down those who actually have a life of ease? And if the latter is true,… why, then, would we ever want to be a person of ease, and be the object of disdain and envy-laced judgment?

There is an affirmation in my repertoire: Life is easy for me.

How nice is that?

“Life is easy for me.”

What would that be like?

Life is easy for me.

I just smiled. 

Ease. Flow. Calm. Centered. Guided. Held. Easy.

Why should it not be?

An affirmation is something you tell yourself until you live and believe it, according to my own understanding. So this isn’t something that I can tell you today with assurance is accurate. But I can tell you that it is something that I would like to believe and live with assurance.

“Life is easy for me.”

Pain may have carved out a place in me that enables me to help other people who have been there. But there is a downside to identifying with others on the commonality of pain: What happens when one of you doesn’t want to identify with their own pain anymore?

A friend of mine inherited a sum of money a few years ago, after the death of her mother. She, my friend, is one of the pain-carved women. She is shorn and built and pyred from pain – she is one of the strongest and most admired women I know.

And yet. After the inheritance, she, on her own, bought a vacation home—she bought a second home, just because she could. She has a husband, and two kids, and this was what she wanted to do, and could do with that money.

It was only after the fact of the purchase, however, that we began to hear about it. She had to “confess” to us that she had this boon, this exciting news, this abundance. And she’d been avoiding telling people, precisely because of that envy-laced judgment.

However, she realized that not talking about her success was just as dangerous to her well-being as not talking about troubles, and that by isolating and hiding her good fortune, she would certainly falter.

Not talking about success, about “what’s going on,” is just as precarious as not talking about challenge. However, because we are a culture that feeds off mutual exchange of stories of strife, because all of our literature is based on triumph over adversity, or simply is an account of adversity, we do not share about it.

We are ashamed of our success. We are ashamed of our good fortune. We are ashamed to admit that life is easy for us—and so we couch it in “humility”: Oh, it’s only because of the inheritance from a death; Oh, but I had to overcome such hardship to get here; Oh, but it’s really only this one time that I’m getting a boon in my life – I promise the rest of my life is a shit show!

SO WHAT if my life were easy? What does it impede on you? (is a question I pose to myself as well.) What are the merits of slogging through a desperate existence, to live to possibly be honored post-humously as a great writer, as a Baudelaire (and the list is endless)?

A while back, I wrote you about a poem of mine whose only line went,

            Otherwise, who would eat the blackened one?

And I told you how I’ve come to see that the answer, which had so long been, “No one, so I better eat it first so you won’t have to,” has become, “No one. Period.” I’ve told you that I no longer feel as fated or compelled to be a martyr.

It seems the other side of that action is to embrace what our culture feels so aggressively conflicted about: Allowing my life to be easy.

Perhaps my “meta” affirmation, then, would be: It is easy to allow my life to be easy. 

Witchy Woman

I’ve been back to reading through that Louise Hay You Can Heal Your Life book before bed. Just reading through some of the affirmations, saying some of them out loud.

I’ve also begun more consistently reading my Tarot cards, pulling one daily.

And, it should come as no surprise to you that I have variously: burned sage, taken a bath in a blend of “protection” salts, participated in a sweat lodge, buried letters to G-d, dissolved some in the ocean, carried rose quartz in my jacket pocket, and burned a blend of incense powder mixed for me by a man in a dress.

When I was in college, I took a class on Witchcraft in Literature. I don’t remember much from it, except what the classroom looked like, and probably that most of the classmates were women. I know it’s not gender specific, but I feel like in the teenage years, many women (or those that I’ve come into contact with) delve in the occult for a little while. I mean, with the proliferation of movies at the time we grew up that embellished witchcraft as both hot and powerful, like The Craft, Teen Witch, Practical Magic, and Hocus Pocus (for a humorous bent!). Plus, the 80’s show, Out of This World, where the main teenage girl could freeze time (though, she was half-alien, not a witch), or Sabrina the Teenage Witch (a far worse show).

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both the movie and the t.v. show) can also be seen as a teenage girl “coming into her power,” the development and surge that happens in the teens. And I think there’s something about the occult that offers girls a channel for that energy; something that offers safe guidelines and something a little special and weird and creepy and, perhaps, powerful.

I’m not saying I believe in witchcraft; I’m saying I believe that we all want to believe that we have the power to change ourselves and our circumstances, whether that’s through spells or prayers or good karma or electro-shock therapy.

And I want to believe that I can divine some information about the world and myself through things like shamanic journeys, meditation circles, and, yes, Tarot cards.

Recently, I’ve been pulling this one card consistently. The 8 of swords depicts a woman bound with ropes, blindfolded, and surrounded by a barricade of swords. In the distance, there is a castle on a hill. At least in my book of interpretations, the meaning of this card is restriction, hopelessness, accepting inaction. The last paragraph of the description says, however, the ropes are not that tight around the woman; she could ostensibly wriggle free out of them, knock over the swords, and head home. She, the figure, waits for someone to save her, instead of acting to save herself.

The words “accepting inaction” have been echoing for me these few days and weeks.

I met, post-cancer, with a therapist who works with PTSD. I described to her the vision/metaphor I currently have of myself:

There is a birdcage. I (forgive me) am the bird. The door to the cage is open. Has been open for some time. I walk out of the cage into the freedom, but the freedom is too big, too unknown, too scary, and so I walk back into the cage.

I know I am not alone in describing self-made prisons. I know I am not alone in cleaving myself to the devil I know rather than the devil I don’t. I know I’m not alone in fearing that there’s a devil at all out there in the wide scary world. (Not like THE Devil. Pretty sure I don’t believe in that!)

But I have become restless in this self-made prison. In the looking at things that interest me, and backing away. In the participating in things I love for a little while, and quitting. In exploring what kind of work I want to do, and procrastinating indefinitely.

And, I do know that countering fears with affirmations is one of the only tools I have in my belt right now to help me wriggle out of those self-made, and self-maintained, bonds; to bend a crowbar behind myself and shove/encourage me back out of the cage, where, underneath all the doubt, I know it is not only safe, but inviting, enlivening, and waiting for me to play/lead/inhabit.

So, if I have to meditate to a drum that "mimics an alpha state" for 20 minutes, tack the Sh’ma AND a cross to my wall, or pull a card from a deck to help me feel like I have support and protection as I try, so very falteringly, to enter this wide scary world, so be it. 

Horse Thief

There’s a phrase I heard when I got to certain rooms in San Francisco: If you sober up a drunken horse thief, you still have a horse thief.

Lately, I’ve been getting the chance to acknowledge where I still act from Horse Thief tendencies and impulses.

I was a thief in High School, probably in Junior High, and actually come to think of it, in college, too. It was sort of "a thing" me and my friends did, to see what we could get away with, and also, because we were only stealing from big conglomerate stores, we felt (or at least I did) justified, since they were always screwing the little man anyway – What did they care if Maybelline mascara went into my pocket? That’s a fraction of a cent they’ve lost in profit, and I’m standing in solidarity with the Chinese children they hired to mark the packaging. (Riii….ght.)

I was, however, pretty clear about not stealing from people, only from these big stores, because there was a line I felt I still had to maintain, a standard of behavior I adhered to. It wasn’t right to take from little mom & pop shops, or to steal from actual people I knew. That was wrong. Stealing from the mall was just expected, written into their budgets in some corporate headquarters somewhere, and therefore right -- or at least okay.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve stolen anything. Probably since before I moved to SF. But that doesn’t exactly mean that the Horse Thief has been repentant or ousted.

I have all the stores I’ve “reappropriated” from on a list that I am slowly chipping away at, to make amends to, either by sending in money for items, or “paying it forward” by donating to a charity. Each will have a conversation with a trusted friend around it when the time comes.

But, I’ve lately recognized that there is still a pattern of dishonest behavior and thinking that infiltrates my current life.

When I was working through a temp agency while in grad school, I got to open the invoices to see what the company I worked for was actually paying the temp agency, and it was certainly higher than the rate at which I was being paid by said agency (which, duh, is how they profit). So I approached the company I was working for, and asked if they would just hire me under the table. That way, my Horse Thief logic went, it was cheaper for them, and I would get a few more dollars, since it wasn’t going to be taxed.

Um… Yeah. That didn’t work out so well. Even though I was “working a program,” even though I could talk about the necessity of honesty and integrity in life, and seriously really mean it, this dishonesty was creating holes in my abundance, and in my sobriety/serenity.

Plus, I got caught. The temp agency found me out, and called the company where I was a receptionist, and when I answered the phone, she “surprisedly” said, Oh, Hi Molly…

Oops.

So, there were emails and phone calls and conversations between the HR at the company where I was and the temp agency I’d spurned. After talking with some trusted friends, I wrote an email to the agency, owning up to my part of this deception.

And, in the end, when tax time rolled around, I got a 1099 from the company, anyway, since I’d earned a significant amount in the 5 or so months I temped under the table for them, and I had to pay taxes on that money anyway. Which meant that I ended up earning less from my time there than I would have if I’d just continued working through the proper (read: legal) channels.

I have a moral line about not stealing pens from work, or using stamps I didn’t pay for. But there are other ways in which this fear of not being taken care of, this fear that my needs will not be met creeps out.

This poisonous fear seeps into my life, and I make choices based on that fear. And eventually, I am screwed by it.

It’s been interesting to notice that this is a pattern that has continued into my adulthood. It’s certainly rooted in a long-held belief that my needs will not be met. That if I behave along “proper” channels, I won’t get or have enough. That if I behave by rules and laws that are set down, I will not be taken care of.

So, I better get my fearful, sticky claws into something, I better come up with some better, sneaky ideas, or else I’ll be eating ramen again.

I get it. I see it.

And I hope to change it.

A trusted friend does a lot of work with affirmations to counter fear. So, this morning, I used that tool:

I fear my needs will not be met.

I trust that the Universe cares for all my needs.

I fear that no one is looking out for my good.

The Universe cares deeply for me.

Sure, maybe it’s bunk. But, right now, I don’t know another way, except to “act as if” these things are true. To try to behave in a way that really does align with my morals, instead of with my fears. 

I have also heard that, with every bought of true honesty or clarity or bill paid on time or phone call from creditor answered, that we are closing up the holes in the sieve that holds abundance. Each time my covers are pulled, I get the chance to be more honest, and thereby the chance to mend the bucket into which the fullness of life is surely always being and going to be poured.

I cannot turn a drunken horse thief (or a sober one for that matter) into an upstanding citizen. But I can try to trust that I don’t have to be one anymore. 

Yo' Mama.

Apologies, reader, for the rain delay (lack of blog) yesterday. It was this wonderful Spring rain in the morning, and instead of sitting at my stoic kitchen table, and peering out the window while writing morning pages, meditating, and composing a blog, I took my mug of coffee into my studio’s bedroom/living room, tucked myself into the corner of my couch against the window, and sat next to my cat on the arm of the couch watching the rain make everything greener.

It was warm and cozy, and I just couldn’t bring myself to break the calm of the spell. The sound of the rain, the steam from the mug, watching my cat’s chest expand and contract with each breath. Oh, calm! How I miss you! Oh, rest, you ineffable minx!

I let my thoughts roam over the landscape, and thought how I missed my mom, when she was here last, and sat on this very couch with this very cat. And so, I called her. – Strange and funny thing to do, eh? Think of someone, and actually call them? Not text or poke or email – but make a phone call – God, it’s luxury and connection incarnate.

I knew she’d just returned from her annual trip with her beau to some Caribbean island (Back, Envy, BACK!), and even with only a half hour (barely enough time for us to scratch the surface of a conversation), I called to find out how it went.

I love talking to her. Sure, there are times when it’s grating, and I have to remind myself she’s human with flaws and working on them. But, on the whole, especially these past several years, talking with her is more refueling than it is draining – which is a gift.

She’s just hilarious. Our conversations meander, and side-track, and disambiguate, and non-sequiter, yet always find their way back, like six degrees of separation. It’s these things that I know I’ll miss most when she’s gone. And why I’m trying to get what I can now, to call, and make plans to visit, and email when I can.

Call it morbid, call it realistic. I just want to store it all. Engage in it all.

Coincidentally, one of the anecdotes from her trip was about interacting with the armed guard at the airport, the process of going through customs and homeland security, and the stark seriousness of it all. And, so, as she is wont to do, she planted a funny sentence into the bleak and rote exchange with the check-point guard.

He cracked a smile and then cracked wise. Suddenly, it was an exchange between people instead of objects.

I told her how synchronistic it was that just this very week I wrote a blog about learning from her to talk with strangers, to make our interactions with one another just that much more engaged and alive.

I shared with her my own story about being in Port Authority around the Bush Iraq invasion, and bantering briefly with a guard walking through the orange-tiled halls about exchanging his gun for some flowers.

I love that she does this, and that I do it, as I wrote the other day. It’s part of what makes this life worth living and engaging in, part of the surprise of being alive. When you engage, you don’t know what will happen, you’re rolling the ball onto the Roulette wheel. Maybe the person won’t want to play, maybe they’ll look at you with a “look, I just want to clock out, please stop talking to me” impatience. But, perhaps, both of your days will be lightened just that little bit. Maybe, in fact, it’s the only time you talk to someone all day, as can happen in our disconnected world of modern conveniences.

I asked my “intuitive” once what she thought about my moving back to New York-ish to be closer to her, since sometimes it really is painful to live so far away, to not get to pick up the phone and say, hey that movie’s playing on 72nd tonight, wanna go? Or, I just saw this exhibit is opening at the FIT Fashion Museum, meet up this week? Or, can you come with me to Sephora, I need to find a new blush?

Honestly, it pains my heart to not get to do that with her.

But, my intuitive, whenever this was, a year or so ago, had a pretty logical answer: If you go, you’ll be her caretaker, and that will not be good for you.

It’s true. There’s a fine line from being involved to being too involved, and there’s a pattern of being her caretaker that I don’t want to repeat from my childhood. And it’s a role I know I can easily fall into, without strong enough boundaries: Love as Caretaking, instead of Love as Equanimity.

The jury has been out indefinitely on my move back to the East coast. It doesn’t have to be New York. It doesn’t have to look like moving into caretaking distance. It can look like, "I’m coming down or up for the weekend, let’s do stuff," which is easier than "I’m taking a cross-country flight."

Luckily, I am not in charge of my destination, I’m only in charge of doing the work. Perhaps my boundaries become stronger, perhaps I am better able to stay out of the grooved rut of caretaker. And perhaps they don’t, and I allow myself to say, That’s okay, Mol.

But, on a rainy Saturday morning, I can still give her a call, and we can laugh, meander, and enhance one of the cherished relationships I will ever have.

Being There

See, there’s two things I’d forgotten in all the sturm&drang of rehearsals & work & sick & crossing bridges & lack of down time: I’m actually good at this acting thing. And I enjoy it. 

In the maelstrom of preparation, I forgot why I was doing this.

As I sat in our reserved cast seats in the front row of the audience, watching the other actors before my scene perform, I got a few minutes to gather myself, and reflect. Something the director said during the “let’s get PUMPED” speech before we got into costume helped to remind me: She said, This is for you. This isn’t for your friends, your parents, your partners: This is for you.

This is for me, I repeated to myself. I remembered that this isn’t for a resume, for a good story to tell when I’m older; this isn’t for accolades or for money. I am doing this acting thing, because I enjoy it. Because it’s FUN. Because, once I do get through rush hour traffic from Berkeley, once I do find parking in the Mission behind some dude drinking Steel Reserve and selling electronics out of his car, once I do get upstairs through the weird haunted building, I come to a black box theater.

In that theater, I’m there to have fun, to enjoy myself, and to share myself. I’m there to engage in something I thoroughly enjoy, just for the sake of it. How fucking novel.

It was and is nice to have been sought out during the wine&cheese reception after the show by a cute little gay boy and his girl friend, to have them sidle up during a conversation with a beamish grin, and tell me how great my performance was. That they got chills. To ask if I did that thing with my hands on purpose, and wow, you did? Wow. That was so great.

It’s gratifying to know that something that I actually enjoy doing is enjoyed and appreciated by others—that’s true, too. (We are only so spiritual!)

But then, isn’t that the point of theater, too—to affect another person. To affect an audience, to help them experience something? Sure, Mol, sure. Yes, you can enjoy the accolades, too. As long as they’re not what’s driving you.

In the chaos of rushing to work, to rehearsal, to home, to do it all over the next day, I began to feel weary. I began to feel like maybe I’m not cut out for this—that maybe this hustle is a younger person’s game. Maybe it’s too late for me to be high-tailing it all over creation in service of a pipe dream.

I really was beginning to wonder if I would audition again.

Part of my delay/hesitance recently, is that I knew I was in a production that was taking all my time & memorization space. Part of it is that I know I’m going out of town in April, and didn’t want to audition for anything new when I’ll be gone. (Cuz, it seems to me that working actors can’t really take vacation…)

And, part of it was/is just plain exhaustion and feeling grueled instead of fueled.

But, I am getting to see that perhaps this is just part of the process. Part of that “put in the hard work to enjoy the results” thing that I’m so loathe to do most of the time. HARD work? Meh.

But, perhaps that’s what’s required here, to get the feeling I had last night. Sure, I fucked up some lines, but people didn’t seem to notice. I still got to feel the sense of “right place.” In the chair, on the stage, in front of lights so bright you can only make out shapes in the audience; hearing the sound cues, the mounting tension of my scene, the mounting tension I bring to my scene. Getting to be there, getting to sit in that chair and show you what I’ve got – It was... well, enlivening.

There’s a phrase I’ve heard to name those times when you are so engaged that you feel out of time, out of the chaos of place, when you are so in something that “time just flies,” – it’s called being “in the flow.” When you are so engaged in what you are doing, when you are so enjoying what you are doing that you are somehow matching the heartpace of the Universe. When for moments or even hours, you just feel in it – your speed aligns with the speed of life, and you flow, you coast, you glide.

In it. To be IN IT. In life.

There was a moment, too, as I sat in the dark audience awaiting my scene that I remembered something I sometimes do: I survived cancer to be here, and I am HERE. Staking a claim. Making a name. Claiming my own.

The gratitude I felt to get to be in that PUMP YOU UP circle before the show: All chaos, time pressure, toll bridges are lost – and I’m just there.