Blessings in the Sun, & California-Bound.

Every so often when I'm driving home at 3 am on a Monday or random Wednesday or Thursday I think to myself, is this normal?  None of my married or parent friends are doing this right now.  And then I laugh and think thank you so much I love my life.  So I was a little late coming in to bloom--I haven't touched a drink or a drug in almost 11 years, and that is the central fact of my life--the choice I made to save my spirit.  To resuscitate me.  In my early twenties when most my friends were doing what I do now I was a sloppy drunk trying to insidiously control my drug use and the fear-clench always in my gut.  It was a lazy, dirty time. I had fun, and got down with unquestionably some of the coolest people on earth back then but honestly, I didn't like myself too much.

I didn't know how to like me, like really love me cuz I kept messing things up...I'm thankful for the re-set button in life.  For the enduring depth of wild spirit deep and abiding in me that for some reason I committed to learning how to trust.

It's solstice, longest day of the summer was yesterday--the sun peaks at its highest during the day today.  And whether or not people realize it, the high light-energy was totally catalyzed over the last couple 24 and for the next few, too:  Anyhow for me, last night the high energy out in the dance club was such crazy good fun.

Ha ha and so wild, too.

My sweet, sweet life, hand-whittled by choice.  Choice coupled with trust in the high harmony of putting my heart behind exactly what I love, and bit by bit eliminating what I dont.  Or learning how to be peaceful and accept.  I dance alot, I have such good friends, ohhh & all the all the light of the sun and surfing and salt water sea how I love swimming and to float and to be with the white wave breaking and pushing me, o music and yoga and doing body work and counseling people and being willing to serve.  There is so much that is full, as the sun on high illuminates all we love.

O sacred book and poems!  A year ago today I was at the Belmont Street Fair in Seattle it was cold and gray and I had just spent a month in the PacNW rejuvenating myself after two years of stressful burn-out at my job.  I stepped down and haven't looked back.  I am a waitress now!  How much has lightened, and changed.

On August 1 me and an old grl from highschool are driving 50 straight across.  I want to start under the sign in Ocean City that says Sacramento, CA 3073 miles and then hit the road.  We are going to Santa Cruz where she lives and I am staying with her for a month or so to get sort of relaxed and find my feet on the new ground of the West Coast.  Then I'll trip around a while, and find a place in the fall to settle down.

I am happy getting happier.  Why not?  A good meditation for the Solstice: what else could life possibly be about?

I loved him. And he still helps me love me.

I've had three long, or longish term relationships as an adult woman.  Each helped define me, term, label and mark the consistency of otherwise un-named or recognized parts of me. I otherwise took for granted: Oh, this reminds me of camping with Brandon, wow he really, really brought out the nature-lover in me....or  Oh, there I go again setting aside my decision making power just like I always did with Grimaldi, how I wanted him to be my dad....etc etc...  Dynamics of ourselves are deeply rooted, so much so that it's easy for them to remain just part of our natural landscape and not even notice.  Even more interesting is how I will learn something about myself, inspect that newly recognized aspect, then watch as it gets reintegrated back in to the whole of who I am anyway... Life is funny--changing but subtle in its evolution most of the time and most often how it all circles back around--which is why I guess that it means so much when someone comes along and really helps me flesh some new understanding or experience of me out.

Last week I was on a roll writing, literally delving bravely forward into subject matter that once evoked usually puts me in a testy place.  It was Tuesday, I was on the back porch of the Pines just me and my laptop and the forest breathing.  Late hanging red and brown leaves still leaf-talking their funny crinkly leaf-talk ways.  The ground all rich and moist and aerobic in how it expands on the air.  One of those amazing fall days warm and full that backsteps all fast to the summer again, so that it's full life and full death all at once.  I stood to take a coffee break and then a message come through from facebook on my phone:  my first real love and first real relationship, the guy I was with after highschool died. I met Joe right around age 20 and was with him for a year and a half and got my heart broken by him in the end, which was the reason I decided to apply to college on the Eastern Shore to just get away...

God damn did that news turn me on my head.  I was kind of a ravaged wreck, but as I said I'd literally just finished writing about some painful subject matter involving my own battles with drugs and alcohol and loss and without meaning to I slipped on that slippery crevice, that place where, it's been said, we dance on the rim with the duende hand-to-hand in combat  in hopes of not falling.  Well, I. Fell. In.  Thank god thank god thank god I am older now and have learned to reach out and scream HELP, to be honest, to pick up the phone and be a fucking hysterical mess, thank god I have good friends. 

I went to the funeral and Mandy came too and it was awkward and also beautiful and we were in the back against the wall because as customary when someone dies too young there was only standing room.  It was the day before Thanksgiving and the day after I had to be back in the Pines to start my new job.  And I am here now, working which equals writing not Java-ing, on the most beautiful spot by the Bay on my day off.  Happy to be alive and happy for Joe and sad as hell for his family and grateful as hell for awareness and just the little things that mean fuck yea, I am living and therefor going to enjoy this my precious precious miracle life.

If your heart is open and my heart is open...We beat.

She woke up humming to herself and then asked me who sings I Think We're Alone Now? She was futzing with her I-phone so I could only guess she was looking it up.

I dont know I answered. The Beatles?

In a minute it was on, coming through those mini-speakers of her phone all distorted. I stopped in the middle of the room to listen and I had to strain. But then the automatic motion of my body halted on the peak of my breath and demanded my awareness in that quiet inside way that feels like soft nudging or a sparkle--and then everything else fell in to place: everything stilled. The moment stopped. We were breathing, and listening to the music. Feeling every arc of voice every pause of breath and especially every word.

When it was done I just looked at her. Weepy, like we'd been since the night before. Wow, this is the song you woke up humming? and she just nodded wide-eyed. I always heard it as a love song I said, and she nodded some more than started to play it again.

We were surrounded by friends the night before, tons of friends, but in her animal head she was scurrying up the walls of herself spinning out because she felt so alone. She's a junkie but like me has been clean a long long while. When she finally talked about it the fear and self-hate I hugged her forever and told her the only secret that I truly know: that aloneness, it is what we all have in common, what binds us together as humans! It's what Buddha called suffering. But so many of us use that fear to alienate ourselves from one another when our real duty is to let it allow true compassion to grow. Because really, loving me and my tortured human parts are all I need to be able to learn to love you, and yours...

It was Sunday morning and like I said we were away on a road trip and partying with lots of lots of friends. And all I could think the whole time, the whole weekend, all I could clearly see the whole time was how much each of us, how much we all just want and need love.

I got home on Sunday it was late and I had to work Monday way early. The sun was out so blue and the trees were in that heavenly chorus that sounds so good and feels like breath on Monday afternoon and I was in Caroline County so I drove to the park in the woods and had a little visit with Chop. I took myself out to dinner, a lovely old-fashioned date with me. I brought Dani Shapiro's Devotion with me to finish, it's the story of a woman's crisis of faith and struggle for a working spirituality in her life and my writing partner, Erika, shipped it to me the week I quit my job even though she didn't know that that's what I was doing at the time. It has had me well-versed the last few weeks or so and I've been taking it in slowly the way I do chamomile tea or deep breaths of lavender oil in the bathtub. I got all weepy again, Monday night at the Italian restaurant, when I read:

The human condition--the knowledge of this--drives many of us to drink, to drugs, to denial, to running as fast as we can away from the truth of life's fragility. We think we can shore ourselves up. If only we work hard enough, make lots of money, are good and kind enough, pray hard enough, we will somehow be exempt. Then we discover that no one is exempt. What is to be done?

Wow. What is to be done? I thought about it and there are plenty of things that I do. Probably the most important of them all--I find time almost every day to sit quiet, and I have a special place--a chair that has come with me everywhere since I was 19--to do so. I just sit, and sigh, and relax and remind myself that so long as I can breathe and sink within then right now, in this moment, all is well. Sometimes all I can literally find is five minutes but even so I do this pretty much daily--so much so I almost forget to talk about it because I am so accustomed to this necessary me-time and so reliant on the results that I take it for granted. And I dont do it because I am disciplined or sacrosanct or because I feel like I have to in some rigid way...I do it because I crave the results. I Like Feeling Good. And it's made me convinced--I am the tool I came here with, and I am the only thing I'm leaving here with, so I and only I have the power to go inside me and find, or otherwise, effect my peace. To know and watch what's happening inside me, and to love all of it, which is the only way I might ever change. Love love love.

Love of me in my most raw and human condition. My most alone.

I sent my grlfriend the quote over email. It sounds so simple doesn't it? Love yourself. So simple but what's got us all on the absolute run.

Good Therapy

About a month or so ago I went to try therapy.

“Let’s see,” she said. “So you started using drugs regularly at 15. I am sure you have heard that whatever age you start using is the age that you basically stop growing. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to grow up. You are still, essentially, 15.”

Hmm. Maybe it’s possible that this woman, who for the first 45 minutes of our meeting did not allow me to talk except to answer her pointed questions, somehow missed the part where I mentioned that for over eight years I’ve been on a committed path of recovery and self-help, learning to take responsibility for me and aiming for emotional maturity.

Of the “adult” skills I’ve actually focused on, one has been the willingness to allow others room to be heard; so normally this helps to curb any immediate reactiveness to asinine fucking comments like the one above. But that day on the therapist couch the blood curled around my neck even as I smiled graciously at her opinion, oh, uh-huh, mmm-hmmm. It was later in the session when the radical, albeit kind, honesty kicked in. When she tried to tell me that my wanderlust and great passion for traveling too were indicators that I needed “to grow up.”

One of the other adult skills I’m really working on is learning to integrate information from various different sources and in the end use them to supplement my own views with all the regularly outputting stimulus of the world. I am learning, in other words, how to trust myself.

Needless to say, therapy, this time, didn’t quite work out.

I was 15 when I first found myself saddled up with my bags and my trinkets, my combat boots and cigarettes, scowling from low down in the passenger’s seat of the blue hatchback my mom behind the wheel, my brother’s perpetual chirpiness behind us his head in the middle between the seats. Up the Baltimore beltway then down 295, on our way to Dr. Lessey in the city. He had an office on Park Ave. On the corner was a soul food joint with bars on the window and a yellow sign for Lake Trout. Across the street and to the left was a store called The Leather Underground.

I had my learner’s permit, I was almost 16, it would soon be my regular, weekly route. Soon enough it was just me in the car. I was never brave enough to try the soul food. The bemused gay men in the bondage store, however, eventually knew this pink-headed purple-booted riot grrl by name. It was the early 90’s and hard to find places like that were ahead of the soon to come piercing trend. Leather Underground was the only place that I knew of that you could go for a belly button ring, and they used a 10 gauge cow-ring, not a bar, and there was nothing girly or petite about it.

Dr. Lessey was soft and gentle with gold spectacles and a sandman peace about him. I always pictured him with a nightcap on, the kind that triangles down one side of the head with a little cotton ball on the end, you know faded cotton-white with light blue stripes. And a candle in his hands.

It was six or eight months that I went to the city to see him. I was touched in a way that I couldn’t get my words to say, I was touched by the kindness of this sweet, quiet little man. I never told him about the pot I was smoking or the drinking that was edging beyond exploratory. I kept us occupied by tales of the girls I hated at school and this new, daring guy who showed up one day by my side, grinning down at me delicious in his eyes, walking me up the stairs to my homeroom. He had just gotten kicked out of public school. I was entranced and a month or so later when the same guy got locked up at Harbour Hospital in South Baltimore, Dr. Lessey encouraged me to go see him. I trusted the good Doctor. I used to bring my friends there to meet him, my brother, my boyfriend even (the boyfriend that I had secured as result of a visit paid to him at South Baltimore’s Harbour Hospital mental ward.) Dr. Lessey looked on in amazement, the only adult who didn’t judge and seemed uniquely interested, when my friend Briana showed up with me in his office sporting her knew Leather Underground navel loop. I loved how much he seemed, simply, to care.

Around the time that I really did start to make changes and work to get my life cleaned up, this would be roughly the spring of 2001, I entered in to another therapist relationship, this time with Father Ed. His was, I think, the fourth “couch” I’d been on by then. He was supplied to me for free by the uber-conservative liberal arts college that I’d already by then dropped out twice from, both times as result of drinking and drugs. Father Ed had me do things like hold fake conversations with the air; the air of course was always a character and usually someone close to me in life. I had to hold pillows tight and close and pretend that they were me. He was the first therapist I ever cried in front of and lord did it make me feel so, so clean. I loved him, Father Ed, for the same reason as Dr. Lessey, he truly seemed to care. That, and one clear, new thing: I was capable, or at least so beginning, of being honest. Truly honest about me. No more hiding the extracurricular’s that were so much a part of my life it wasn’t that I was even purposefully hiding them before, just that I took them so much for granted as a part of how I lived my life. The drugs and the alcohol were, plainly, part of me, of who I was, as natural as air or water or food when it came to the things I did each day. I just never questioned any of it, no matter the consequences or miserable thin vein of fear that seemed to increase with each passing year, feeling like ice in my blood and a cold wall at the base of my heart, steadily growing.

The honesty made all the difference. Clarity is a mixture of willingness, or at least a capacity, to be honest with myself and then trusting me enough to know that my own truth is the one that counts. The therapists that I’ve gained the most from over the years, as I’ve sorted through and grieved out my humanness and wounds, are the ones who’ve made it clear that they care and you can’t fake that, caring is a quality that is or isn’t. I know when it’s true, and more, affront when it is false or faked. In an atmosphere of care one feels safe, and safety is what is required, at least for me, to get to a place where I am willing to get honest with myself—on whatever level, at whatever risk of responsibility it means that I am going to have to take. And good therapy, for me at least, has been no more than the process of showing up to witness that allowing. Good therapists ask the right questions and then let the process of discovery guide its self. I always end up being the one who sees what I need to see just by having a safe place to say it out loud.

So if I’ve learned anything at all over the years, it’s that the answers are indeed within; and that especially it’s not a sign of weakness to sometimes need another’s help in order to get them out. In fact I’d say that empowering oneself like that is all about being Brave. But that other person doesn’t get to tell you what to do. They definitely don’t get to yield control over your ideas. Self-trust is the goal to me, and so it was that over a month ago my life started to turn around at its darkest point: what I thought would be the beginning step in self-discovery when I took the plunge on to a new couch turned out actually to be the exercise I needed to affirm the ending of self-doubt. And now that I am here, doing the Real Work with a book and some close friends as my guides, I am realizing that the two concepts are actually one and the same.

Angel Moves

Wow. Lots going on. The MGY gang just left--hosting this conference for young ppl recovering from drugs and booze is a loooot of work!! but enjoyable work, and we are officially at t-minus 17 days and counting until the big event. i am wowed and awed by the simple, powerful preciousness of bringing hearts together for a common good. two of the ppl on our committee have been clean and sober for one whole year! this week, it is like a room full of sunshine to see the smiles on their sweet faces as they celebrate themselves and anticipate the conference that they dedicated this whole past year of their life to, too.

i am blessed.

(you are too.) (believe it.)

listen, if you want to see something beautiful that absolutely tears at your heart strings, go to this link and watch "Cameron Dances." it's my "baby" amy's baby doing those angelic moves....
http://www.youtube.com/user/keithojensen

i am working like a maniac at my new job, and getting ready for this conference, and loving fall and in general showing up and believing in life. that's really all it takes sometimes, huh?

may you, too, believe....

Sarah Ban B & Sacred Spots

I have this quiet place where I go. It's in my room. (Yes, Brandon and I, in addition to our bedroom, have our own rooms.) (This is probably the only reason that we've lasted as long as we have.) This idea of a quiet spot, which I actually refer to as my sacred spot, is not original. It came to me from the book Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach. I was 21 when I got that daily meditation book for my birthday in March of 98. And by the Fall, when I was moving my stuff in to the slant-walled wooden-floored attic-apartment on Washington Avenue in Chestertown, to start my first semester at a real four year school, I was sold on the ideas that Sarah Ban shares about personal sacred space. But my translation, back then, of seeking bliss within included bong hits to catalyze that written about state of quiet and rapture. In my first Chestertown apartment I sat on a big stuffed maroon pillow from Wal-mart in the center of my bedroom with my little pink "daybook of comfort and joy", a gratitude journal, and my Cabbage Patch lunchbox with the pink plastic bong and insence in it rested by my side. I sat cross-legged, lotus style like I'd seen all the hip wise ones do, and tried to tap open those doors of consciousness I'd heard so much about.

By January, 1999, my mom re-handed me a copy of the same book she'd gotten for Christmas. I was so out of my mind on script tranquilizers that I most strictly associated myself with a big amoebic blob. I felt sludgy and goopy and like I just sort of melted across the floor towards whatever I direction I was heading in rather than actually using feet to walk. And the floor was heavy: it weighted me down. My face felt large and pulled at the same time. The rest of my body felt spinny and without actual confines. And worst of all, I didn't really know it. My consciousness was so numbed I couldn't tabulate any vision of my real reality. Meds are like that, or can be, anyhow.

I was two or so weeks out of the mental hospital and heavily overmedicated. I was diagnosed with a mental illness, a severe one, and put on gnarly doses of anti-psychotics, anti-seizures and anti-depressants to tackle it, to tackle "me". I swarmed around and around inside of me, sludging along on the outside. I dont remember much. But I do remember sitting down in the living room trying to read that book again. And it did not click. Those meds left my brain neurons, and all that life juice, just about two steps behind.

I dropped out of my second semester at Washington College to stop there at the Ward. One institution to another, how I've always looked at it. Is it dramatic to say the two aren't too terribly far apart? I'll never claim non-drama. So I didn't really have a room at my mom's then, when I came out of the hospital to recover. My room was vacant, in my little spot on Wash Ave with the pillow and scuffed hardwood floors. Which is why when I again went looking for a sacred spot, a place all of my very own, where I could celebrate me and relax and give permission to and better know me, I found myself crouched down on the floor next to the old pleather covered toy box that still sat in the corner in my brother's old room. And I took one deep breath and bowed my head there. And I whispered something--to something? I dont know what on either accounts but I am almost sure that it had to be something like help me. And then I heard mom's footsteps on the stairs, and I quick got up and zipped, or anyhow sludged away.
It was years before I was off the meds. And by then I had learned, from my own self and much due to regular daily pauses of reflection and time within, which just means true honest time with me, that I was not mentally ill but quite chemically sensitive--or in other words the medical definition of a drug addict. And who cares the nature of the drug--street or pharm--they all affect me different.

That book changed, or maybe saved, my life. To this day when I am funked I guarantee you it's because too much time has passed since I got to sit down a while with me. I had a great sit-down this morning. And a decent enough one with me yesterday, too. It had been a while. Again. Try it sometime.

Me, in my Sacred Space or "Meditation Spot" on Wash Ave, Spring 2002, sans bonghits, booze & most of all my "ideas"