Erika and I met in grade school. She was in band and I wasn't because of some bad shit going down at my home, that's all I remember about our real young connections. Red and green plaid jumpers thick as cardboard, white button-downs peter-pan collars and cable-lined knee high socks that were soft kellygreen and that I used to collect the knits off of to make my own little version of fuzzball friends, because in the eighties they had these pom-pom stickerhead things on big feet that my Catholic School gave away once a year as some incentive for some scholastic long forgotten thing, and I thought they were the cutest little creatures ever. By middleschool it was the words--stuffing sheets of frazzled loose leaf thin blue lines in to one another's hands under the desk in Ms. Fouse's class. Maybe this only happened once and I remember it because of the adrenaline scar--doing something we weren't supposed to be doing in the back of class. The trick light that put on in my eye. Erika's large curly cursive and the characters with all the traditional old-fashioned names. My loosely-costumed accounts of people we both went to school with, making stories out of the lives of people we knew.
I was a bitch as a teenager, suppose I still am or can be. Erika and I were teens together too but I wanted nothing to do with her because of her friends. I was doing drugs by then had pink hair and black cat eyes, purple combat boots. I drove junk yard cards I'd buy from my granddad's brother for a hundred bucks and thought I knew more about real life than the pretty preppy girls that she was one of. My dad lived in California and we didn't speak. I was tuff. At least to me.
Every January I think about these things, I think it is because my parents sat Sean and I down in January and told us they were splitting up. Dad'd been living in Manahtten by then for three months so really it was just about them having to say the words. That was 1989. It sucked. In January the past several years my pop and I spend his birthday weekend together at the beach, except that for now I live at the beach and it is January already and mom is in Mexico for the month and so he and I have been together just us when he comes down every weekend. We are watching the series Weeds together, the dvd goes in after the Ravens game ends and then we just scream and laugh and look at each other with shocked expressions slack-jawed speechless but in giddy commiseration the dark humor and insinuations in our eyes. That's dad, who used to cover for me when I was a teen and he'd come home from Cali for the holidays or for the McMullen gatherings. He came home this Saturday empty-handed after looking for a replacement pan of mom's that I burned up accidentally. I didn't ask him to but he did it and we didn't need to discuss that it he was trying to find a new one so that mom would never know. We cuss and laugh and shake our heads over what we see on the TV. He's taking my suggestions about changing his diet. As of last night he'd lost 12 pounds. We bitch about not being able to eat steak and the fluffy breads and creams together and the sugars we love so much. When he's not looking I sneak candy bars and fries, tacos with creamy melted cheese. We are so alike.
There is a pyschic term that I first read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With the Wolves. It is de dos mundos, or of two worlds. And to me this term is about the angelic, the demonic acts of not only the holy creatives, but further and even more importantly of those who embark on the authentic path. Which I guess really is the most creative thing one can do. The older I get the more I realize it is this, this Real Work that matters most--all else, all acts of art and creation thus evolve out of the struggle for ourselves, evolve out of the substance of who we are and those strides we take towards that person. To be of both worlds is to take the devilish plunge: to walk through the day by day topside world of work, family, friends and to likewise be willing to, at the same time, go inside our burrows, the tired winter pockets of gnarly filth or snuggly warmth and pull back the boulders we put there and investigate the little chemical nightmares or dreams that wait with knowledge for us behind all of that. The knowledge of our roots, of our healing, of our true-selves that inside of each and every one of us look like the devil sitting there. Those sad or scary or numb or deadened spaces are full with vitality and angelic lifeforce if we persist persist persist to shed light on them and winkingly clean them out. Erika is my writing partner now, my solace, my only shining angel lately and I told her last week on the phone--ever since Joe died the week of Thanksgiving I haven't been able to write. I told her the stories of what was emotionally consuming me with each tired step I took as the holidays washed us over. Erika too had hers. We agreed, it is time now only for stillness and reflection, it is this de dos mundos, this Real Work that right now in the darkest part of our season truly counts.
But it is hard to be here at the beach supposed to be writing, and not. And it is funny to me, and maybe at the end of the day why I write is because life is just so damn miraculously-fucked-up-AND-amazing that I feel I need to mark my own holy amen proof of appreciation of it all--but here I am, January again kicking it with my dad at the beach in his home, laughing and living with him in the topside world. And inside in the inner terrain circling back over the old old tracks with all the faces of him and me then, too, all the little demon-angels and angel-demons that live inside. And this precious funny fusion. Which is life...
Showing posts with label Real Work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Real Work. Show all posts
January 10, 2011
October 25, 2010
It is pertinent as hell. Words.
I don't remember the year I spent at Choptank.
I don't remember anything specific, it just sits more as a memory of sense, gray and swirly with the occasional feeling of peace thrown in to the thicket of my reserve filed back then.
I moved from Anngar Farm the first week of November 2008, it was a Friday and I stopped my car at the edge of our 400 acres of feed-corn and soy to talk to two flannel-clad surveyors parked on the side of the road. The farm, they confirmed, had been sold. For all I know it happened that very day.
I talked to Brandon on the phone for about one minute. Then I called mom. I cried most of the way to 301.
Choptank was an hour from Chestertown by the backroads, which are the only roads I traveled back then, it was something about the soothing lay of the road against my tire tread. It was calming, all that farm country, all those trees, the changes of fall seizing the land. I was working for Chesapeake and had roughly ten sites in two rural counties spread out between well over 100 square miles. It was the something I could count on--I'd been on the Eastern Shore for a total of eight years of my life by then. I counted movement by the markers of farmhouses, wide turns in the roads and fields.
Besides leaving Brandon, I left behind a town of friends. A movement of local culture centered around both homegrown food and music, one that I personally worked hard to motivate and set within a momentum. It was sudden, to all of them, my departure. It was sudden and wrecking to him. It was like death, a numb whack of shock to the chest, to me. It was a miracle those first three months that I could even breathe.
I can say only that I was depressed back then and that is why I had to leave, and in a large way this had to do with being incapable of stating what I wanted. I knew what I loved but was too frightened to cultivate it or own it. I really believed it was something I did not deserve and so I went back on things all the time. My truth was changing because so much of my truth included lodges of fear, no dissipating no moving through, therefor no knowing for sure what I thought I thought for sure I knew. For months after I left Anngar lived in me with a filter of dull over it, but the fall is here now, the geese are calling and the trees have that certain subtle whisper in their departing leaves. I remember now so much. The fields that shivered purple at dusk. The yellow light on the barns and the half-there outbuildings and the way the birds carved the air inside. The sounds my kitties used to make in the high camelia bushes right out front. Old time records through the speakers at night, night after nights of dinners and the high chaotic laughter of our most amazing friends. Unannounced drop-ins from Sam. Coffee in the morning hot on the throat and cup hot on the hands, on the weekends the cool side-porch view of the shady hardwood trees against all that green. The quietness there with my love. Holding hands.
Last week, or maybe the one before that, I found my journal from the year I spent on the Choptank River, out in isolation renting a room in an 1800's farmhouse, talking to the water and laying in the grass. Over the years, since the early 2000's anyway, I've kept a practice called morning pages--writing three pages of longhand mental minutia download. Just getting the crud out of my head. It's something, a trick I've relied on with consistency that came my way via two different helpful books, that simply is the one true tool that's led me through. But I forgot about it: when I took up writing a novel morning pages were replaced with stronger doses of honesty on my blog. How I used my blog changed then, for sure. Literally this became the place of truth-telling, of writing my way through and thank god for it. It's helped codify the process, helped me shave down at the edges and in the great balancing act of writing for self versus convening with the audience, it's been the primary vehicle of me establishing how best to tell what I know. So it shocked me anyhow, discovering the hundred or two pages of writing my way through while at Choptank. Page after page of the same old horrible stuff, literally so much grief. Some of it ancient, some of it pity-pot, some of it contextual and some of it nameless in ways that kept me deep in the dark hole. Oh god the bravery it took for me to write all the way through! I had no idea, literally no recollection, of those pages being there.
There are loads of things I would different if I had the experience to do-over, and aint that the funny thing of it--I'd do it different now because of who I am now, but becoming who I am today had everything to do with going through those mistakes and casualties the hard way. Ultimately it comes down to that's just the way it goes. I stand poised in her today though, the woman who didn't know how to firmly say who she was or have the strength to stake her claim in the world. It is my own tiny miracle, my own heaven that is mine and mine alone and meant for only me to understand. It is pertinent as hell. It is the ground beneath me and it is the country of wild within me labeled not only what I want, but who I am. I hope the people that I hurt through it have forgiven. It has been a long hall, that one where forgiveness is gentle and blame retreats itself and lets open the next door, that one dark eddy of grave self-sin. I hope they all know how much love there is within. I am moving on from the chapter, the words falling like clean rain or leaves funny and quiet, but imminent, all the same. I am trying to convince myself in my most silent parts that the words are worth all I have, are at least as important when translated in to what I've come to give, from what I've lost and equally come to learn I own.
I don't remember anything specific, it just sits more as a memory of sense, gray and swirly with the occasional feeling of peace thrown in to the thicket of my reserve filed back then.
I moved from Anngar Farm the first week of November 2008, it was a Friday and I stopped my car at the edge of our 400 acres of feed-corn and soy to talk to two flannel-clad surveyors parked on the side of the road. The farm, they confirmed, had been sold. For all I know it happened that very day.
I talked to Brandon on the phone for about one minute. Then I called mom. I cried most of the way to 301.
Choptank was an hour from Chestertown by the backroads, which are the only roads I traveled back then, it was something about the soothing lay of the road against my tire tread. It was calming, all that farm country, all those trees, the changes of fall seizing the land. I was working for Chesapeake and had roughly ten sites in two rural counties spread out between well over 100 square miles. It was the something I could count on--I'd been on the Eastern Shore for a total of eight years of my life by then. I counted movement by the markers of farmhouses, wide turns in the roads and fields.
Besides leaving Brandon, I left behind a town of friends. A movement of local culture centered around both homegrown food and music, one that I personally worked hard to motivate and set within a momentum. It was sudden, to all of them, my departure. It was sudden and wrecking to him. It was like death, a numb whack of shock to the chest, to me. It was a miracle those first three months that I could even breathe.
I can say only that I was depressed back then and that is why I had to leave, and in a large way this had to do with being incapable of stating what I wanted. I knew what I loved but was too frightened to cultivate it or own it. I really believed it was something I did not deserve and so I went back on things all the time. My truth was changing because so much of my truth included lodges of fear, no dissipating no moving through, therefor no knowing for sure what I thought I thought for sure I knew. For months after I left Anngar lived in me with a filter of dull over it, but the fall is here now, the geese are calling and the trees have that certain subtle whisper in their departing leaves. I remember now so much. The fields that shivered purple at dusk. The yellow light on the barns and the half-there outbuildings and the way the birds carved the air inside. The sounds my kitties used to make in the high camelia bushes right out front. Old time records through the speakers at night, night after nights of dinners and the high chaotic laughter of our most amazing friends. Unannounced drop-ins from Sam. Coffee in the morning hot on the throat and cup hot on the hands, on the weekends the cool side-porch view of the shady hardwood trees against all that green. The quietness there with my love. Holding hands.
Last week, or maybe the one before that, I found my journal from the year I spent on the Choptank River, out in isolation renting a room in an 1800's farmhouse, talking to the water and laying in the grass. Over the years, since the early 2000's anyway, I've kept a practice called morning pages--writing three pages of longhand mental minutia download. Just getting the crud out of my head. It's something, a trick I've relied on with consistency that came my way via two different helpful books, that simply is the one true tool that's led me through. But I forgot about it: when I took up writing a novel morning pages were replaced with stronger doses of honesty on my blog. How I used my blog changed then, for sure. Literally this became the place of truth-telling, of writing my way through and thank god for it. It's helped codify the process, helped me shave down at the edges and in the great balancing act of writing for self versus convening with the audience, it's been the primary vehicle of me establishing how best to tell what I know. So it shocked me anyhow, discovering the hundred or two pages of writing my way through while at Choptank. Page after page of the same old horrible stuff, literally so much grief. Some of it ancient, some of it pity-pot, some of it contextual and some of it nameless in ways that kept me deep in the dark hole. Oh god the bravery it took for me to write all the way through! I had no idea, literally no recollection, of those pages being there.
There are loads of things I would different if I had the experience to do-over, and aint that the funny thing of it--I'd do it different now because of who I am now, but becoming who I am today had everything to do with going through those mistakes and casualties the hard way. Ultimately it comes down to that's just the way it goes. I stand poised in her today though, the woman who didn't know how to firmly say who she was or have the strength to stake her claim in the world. It is my own tiny miracle, my own heaven that is mine and mine alone and meant for only me to understand. It is pertinent as hell. It is the ground beneath me and it is the country of wild within me labeled not only what I want, but who I am. I hope the people that I hurt through it have forgiven. It has been a long hall, that one where forgiveness is gentle and blame retreats itself and lets open the next door, that one dark eddy of grave self-sin. I hope they all know how much love there is within. I am moving on from the chapter, the words falling like clean rain or leaves funny and quiet, but imminent, all the same. I am trying to convince myself in my most silent parts that the words are worth all I have, are at least as important when translated in to what I've come to give, from what I've lost and equally come to learn I own.
July 27, 2009
update
i was journaling this morning. it was quiet in my space and sort of grey but everything was still and the outlines of the furniture in my room were strong and solid. it was the kind of morning where i was acutely senstive to my space. my scarves hanging all around, the color they add in the dull light through the shades. the books on my shelves. the flicker of the candle and the shadow on the wall: to and frow. i was quiet, and aware. contented in the peace that comes in recovery after you've worked hard to get to a new inner understanding, we call it having our side of the street clean. it's been a long process.
i noticed the date on the top line of the loose leaf in my journal and felt a tug of familiarity in my heart. july 27. 9 years ago today i woke up in the afternoon in my dark windowless room in ocean pines. i had a mean hangover and had to get to work in town. the phone was ringing: it was cuddy, from crofton. our boy fannon had died. fannon was my lover. he was my friend. he was someone with whom i'd grown up. he had a heart attack and was gone at 23.
fannon and me, all of us, we liked our drugs.
i'd been arrested for the third time just days prior. it too had to do with partying a wee bit too much. burying fannon was a blur. i didn't cry until 2 months later. i mean really cry, like really let it out. but on august 5, cuz they told me a i had to, i took my last drink. some months later, my last drug.
yea, so, 9 years after all of that and i can barely remember, barely connect in to that way of life anymore, or who i used to be that i needed that--those elixers, as a way to live.
this book i just did this wild and deep, deep work out of, read it. read it, read it, allow yourself to unfold through it. actually take the suggestions and do the work. cuz drinking and drugs weren't my problem, they were my solution. my problem was me and my so badly injured heart. and so many of us have that, the badly injured part, in common. and this book got in to those roots and then at once helped me build my own deep character on which to climb out. i am so, so thankful.
here is a poem in celebration. in celebration of what its like to be of dos mundos, or two worlds. the outside, day to day life. and the inner, more powerful and capable of being so fully awakened life of the heart and spirit. of the calling, of the impulse, itself...
For Alva Benson, And For Those
Who Have Learned To Speak
And the ground spoke when she was born.
Her mother heard it. In Navajo she answered
as she squatted down against the earth
to give birth. It was now when it happened,
now giving birth to itself again and again
between the legs of women.
Or maybe it was the Indian Hospital
in Gallup. The ground still spoke beneath
mortar and concrete. She strained against the
metal stirrups, and they tied her hands down
because she still spoke with them, when they
muffled her screams. But her body went on
talking and the child was born into their
hands, and the child learned to speak
both voices.
She grew up talking in Navajo, in English
and watched the earth around her shift and change
with the people in the towns and in the cities
learning not to hear the ground as it spun around
beneath them. She learned to speak for the ground,
the voice coming through her like roots that
have long hungered for water. He own daughter
was born, like she had been, in either place
or all places, so she could leave, leap
into the sound she had always heard,
a voice like water, like the gods weavng
against sundown in a scarlet light.
The child now hears names in her sleep.
They change into other names, and into others.
In is the ground murmuring, and Mt. St. Helens
errupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning
inside her mother's belly waiting to be born
to begin another time.
And we go on, keep giving birth and watch
ourselves die, over and over.
And the ground spinning beneath us
goes on talking.
~Joy Harjo
i noticed the date on the top line of the loose leaf in my journal and felt a tug of familiarity in my heart. july 27. 9 years ago today i woke up in the afternoon in my dark windowless room in ocean pines. i had a mean hangover and had to get to work in town. the phone was ringing: it was cuddy, from crofton. our boy fannon had died. fannon was my lover. he was my friend. he was someone with whom i'd grown up. he had a heart attack and was gone at 23.
fannon and me, all of us, we liked our drugs.
i'd been arrested for the third time just days prior. it too had to do with partying a wee bit too much. burying fannon was a blur. i didn't cry until 2 months later. i mean really cry, like really let it out. but on august 5, cuz they told me a i had to, i took my last drink. some months later, my last drug.
yea, so, 9 years after all of that and i can barely remember, barely connect in to that way of life anymore, or who i used to be that i needed that--those elixers, as a way to live.
this book i just did this wild and deep, deep work out of, read it. read it, read it, allow yourself to unfold through it. actually take the suggestions and do the work. cuz drinking and drugs weren't my problem, they were my solution. my problem was me and my so badly injured heart. and so many of us have that, the badly injured part, in common. and this book got in to those roots and then at once helped me build my own deep character on which to climb out. i am so, so thankful.
here is a poem in celebration. in celebration of what its like to be of dos mundos, or two worlds. the outside, day to day life. and the inner, more powerful and capable of being so fully awakened life of the heart and spirit. of the calling, of the impulse, itself...
For Alva Benson, And For Those
Who Have Learned To Speak
And the ground spoke when she was born.
Her mother heard it. In Navajo she answered
as she squatted down against the earth
to give birth. It was now when it happened,
now giving birth to itself again and again
between the legs of women.
Or maybe it was the Indian Hospital
in Gallup. The ground still spoke beneath
mortar and concrete. She strained against the
metal stirrups, and they tied her hands down
because she still spoke with them, when they
muffled her screams. But her body went on
talking and the child was born into their
hands, and the child learned to speak
both voices.
She grew up talking in Navajo, in English
and watched the earth around her shift and change
with the people in the towns and in the cities
learning not to hear the ground as it spun around
beneath them. She learned to speak for the ground,
the voice coming through her like roots that
have long hungered for water. He own daughter
was born, like she had been, in either place
or all places, so she could leave, leap
into the sound she had always heard,
a voice like water, like the gods weavng
against sundown in a scarlet light.
The child now hears names in her sleep.
They change into other names, and into others.
In is the ground murmuring, and Mt. St. Helens
errupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning
inside her mother's belly waiting to be born
to begin another time.
And we go on, keep giving birth and watch
ourselves die, over and over.
And the ground spinning beneath us
goes on talking.
~Joy Harjo
May 14, 2009
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.
“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.
May 11, 2009
For Teena
You know how I know poetry is here?
She shrugs, empties an enormous Tupperware full of frozen roasted vegetables in to a barely steaming pot. Both the Tupperware and the pot are bigger than any cookware I’ve ever owned. I could bathe in them; use one to bunch up naked in and the other as my awkward ladle. I don’t know how she does it: a call came from a mutual friend only moments ago; could she and her husband stop by for a visit? To the common eye our home has no food. Yet here Teena goes, preparing a feast of pork and Thai soup.
Because I want a cigarette, I answer. And some cocaine.
This barely grabs the response I am trawling for—some kind of dry laugh and a bit of witnessing, a hallelujah—even an eye roll of empathy will do. Her grin is sardonic enough, though, that’s just Teena’s general style. A huge part of why we get along: soft and hard in just right the places. She moves behind me to an industrial size catering trash bag and disposes of some packaging, laughs a teeny bit uncomfortably and states that Chop has a No Tolerance policy.
Just for cigs though, right? Not cocaine?
To relax her I go immediately in to a brief update on my recent recovery-process. Really even though it doesn’t look like it, I am doing something all those afternoons and mornings out in the yard or on the dock in the white sun or even under the clouds. With the journal and the books at my side, the intermittent moments on my knees gathering or at least identifying, and well, yes, conversing with the herbs; or else sprawled out on my blue chair seemingly staring at the sky or the river or the sun, arms hung over the sides chest opened wide; or laying gentle as I can on the purple tapestry curled up and cuddled with the earth so soft beneath me, the tapestry that, even with a dozen washings still smells at once like dust and the chemical that everything that comes from India smells like. And the wild, homecrafted herbal tea at my side, really I am doing something when I am out there. It doesn’t show probably but inside of me, I can promise you, this work is the most real and probably toughest that there is. I am being gentle, going slow as my spirit demands.
But I don’t need to put any of this in to words for her. Teena does know. She kneads at me here and there by joking about all that nothing I’m doing. We both know though. Just to assure her that she’s not gonna have some relapsed junkie terrorizing her home I do go on to explain about my most recent little bout of serendipity that came in the form of a phone call from Vermont last week. How the timing was succinct with the toughest part of my Real Work Inventory. This is what we do, Teena and me. Mingle irony at our individual lives, mocking one another gently as we mock ourselves because the pain that has rimmed this house this year is enough for a city of sleepwalkers, a whole morgue of zombies, to eat their way out on and grow whole on death and when you live like that only on death eating on the dead and living on the dead it is hard to see your way out sometimes, hard to remember your way back to life. But we have, we are, we do. It’s what we’ve together, somehow, done. Our own little mostly silent means of resurrection. So the jokes, which used to come in the form of relief, like spring rain, come now more as touchstones, reminders. And they corner with the reality of individual triumph, the sharing of serendipity that grounds us each in our regular, and growing, personal moments of peace.
What happens if you don’t give her any attention? Teena says, she is talking about Poetry now. Will the words wait or will they go away?
They’ll go, I say. And if I give over to them, they may not stop for the whole day, which would suck to be in my office with all that crazy paperwork and Poetry stuck on taking me away.
Maybe you could do your paperwork at Chop? She says and even with her back to me I know there’s the grin.
I laugh and know too that the Devil’s got my eyes now. I’m gonna go upstairs, I say over my shoulder. Teena is stirring her pot. Give Poetry a half-hour or so, maybe that’ll be enough…
I pause then, when I get almost to the stairs. Poetry, you’re such a demanding little bitch! I cry, just loud enough.
And even from the stairs I can actually feel Teena’s smile.
She shrugs, empties an enormous Tupperware full of frozen roasted vegetables in to a barely steaming pot. Both the Tupperware and the pot are bigger than any cookware I’ve ever owned. I could bathe in them; use one to bunch up naked in and the other as my awkward ladle. I don’t know how she does it: a call came from a mutual friend only moments ago; could she and her husband stop by for a visit? To the common eye our home has no food. Yet here Teena goes, preparing a feast of pork and Thai soup.
Because I want a cigarette, I answer. And some cocaine.
This barely grabs the response I am trawling for—some kind of dry laugh and a bit of witnessing, a hallelujah—even an eye roll of empathy will do. Her grin is sardonic enough, though, that’s just Teena’s general style. A huge part of why we get along: soft and hard in just right the places. She moves behind me to an industrial size catering trash bag and disposes of some packaging, laughs a teeny bit uncomfortably and states that Chop has a No Tolerance policy.
Just for cigs though, right? Not cocaine?
To relax her I go immediately in to a brief update on my recent recovery-process. Really even though it doesn’t look like it, I am doing something all those afternoons and mornings out in the yard or on the dock in the white sun or even under the clouds. With the journal and the books at my side, the intermittent moments on my knees gathering or at least identifying, and well, yes, conversing with the herbs; or else sprawled out on my blue chair seemingly staring at the sky or the river or the sun, arms hung over the sides chest opened wide; or laying gentle as I can on the purple tapestry curled up and cuddled with the earth so soft beneath me, the tapestry that, even with a dozen washings still smells at once like dust and the chemical that everything that comes from India smells like. And the wild, homecrafted herbal tea at my side, really I am doing something when I am out there. It doesn’t show probably but inside of me, I can promise you, this work is the most real and probably toughest that there is. I am being gentle, going slow as my spirit demands.
But I don’t need to put any of this in to words for her. Teena does know. She kneads at me here and there by joking about all that nothing I’m doing. We both know though. Just to assure her that she’s not gonna have some relapsed junkie terrorizing her home I do go on to explain about my most recent little bout of serendipity that came in the form of a phone call from Vermont last week. How the timing was succinct with the toughest part of my Real Work Inventory. This is what we do, Teena and me. Mingle irony at our individual lives, mocking one another gently as we mock ourselves because the pain that has rimmed this house this year is enough for a city of sleepwalkers, a whole morgue of zombies, to eat their way out on and grow whole on death and when you live like that only on death eating on the dead and living on the dead it is hard to see your way out sometimes, hard to remember your way back to life. But we have, we are, we do. It’s what we’ve together, somehow, done. Our own little mostly silent means of resurrection. So the jokes, which used to come in the form of relief, like spring rain, come now more as touchstones, reminders. And they corner with the reality of individual triumph, the sharing of serendipity that grounds us each in our regular, and growing, personal moments of peace.
What happens if you don’t give her any attention? Teena says, she is talking about Poetry now. Will the words wait or will they go away?
They’ll go, I say. And if I give over to them, they may not stop for the whole day, which would suck to be in my office with all that crazy paperwork and Poetry stuck on taking me away.
Maybe you could do your paperwork at Chop? She says and even with her back to me I know there’s the grin.
I laugh and know too that the Devil’s got my eyes now. I’m gonna go upstairs, I say over my shoulder. Teena is stirring her pot. Give Poetry a half-hour or so, maybe that’ll be enough…
I pause then, when I get almost to the stairs. Poetry, you’re such a demanding little bitch! I cry, just loud enough.
And even from the stairs I can actually feel Teena’s smile.
May 10, 2009
That girl
Lately I've been hanging out a lot with this girl. She's kinda tough and I forgot how sharp her edges are and also how fricken quick she is. There's a lot going on inside that she's trying deeply to protect. It's summertime in this shot above, near the end. 1994. Labor Day Weekend to be exact. Her and her then best pal Lindsey used to take pics like these at the end of every summer. Immortalization. She absolutely balks at fraud and authority. Balks, actually, is probably not the right word. Bucks is far more accurate.She is grounded in this picture because of a three-day house party that she threw in July. It went like this: Her and her long time on-again off-again thugg of a boy-man were sitting in the air condition one stickyhot Marilen day watching MTV and making calls to get some weed. It was hard to find the acid was everywhere but barely no bud. Her ankles were both busted from the first song, first set, first band to play Lollapalooza that year which was Green Day. The pit erupted like mad and it was heat and it was sweat and it was fierce and her too big MaryJanes didn't do enough to secure her feet in the rushing and pummelling her way through. She went down and ate a face of dirt before a hand was thrown to pull her up but it was too late by then the ankles both were twisted and sprained. He was shirtless and fat and stank and got beer on her the guy who landed fullweightdown on her feet and calves and the quiet there just for a minute of ohnowhat'snext but then that was okay, too, the acid made it not that bad and then he was up and threw her his hand. So two almost broke ankels rest of the day at the festival and somehow she used this and work as an excuse to stay home when mom left with her bro for the beach the next day. So house empty, a party was planned and it was a shittonnafun and worth every late night that she had to feign work as a greasy sub girl at the pizza shop in order to still get out and about and around her mom's imposed restriction.
This is one of the first shots of her learning. Learning how to be her. June, 1992. Ocean City, Maryland, down near the pier. These are the first days of the Immortal series. 93's shots and the ones in 94 will be taken at Labor Day, a means of marking the course that she by then has learned she runs. Summer is the prime time of exploration. She didn't know it then, but this shot is the beginning of Cataloguing, and so takes place in June. Archiving. Life of Journeyer. Purveyor of Soul and Experience. Search to be made, or to prove what is, Real.My father moved to California the day before this picture was taken. Mom took us all to the beach that same afternoon. Moment of linger in the driveway home from the airport and then a sigh and nothing, let's grab our bags and head for the beach. I got caught that weekend again with cigs mom found them in my purse but me and Linds didn't get caught sneaking out the side room at the Pines beachhouse to cross the ditch out back feet all muddy and 15-year-old pissy on light beer at Todd Johnson's houseparty through the woods.
It was the first time she ever really snuck away.
It wouldn't be the last.
May 4, 2009
The only thing one can be sure of changing....
Ughghgh. So, here's the skinny.
I'm about to drop it in a heavy honest way, too, so I surely hope there is someone out there that will benefit from this confessionalism. I am just about on my moon and dig it gals, whether or not you have found this to be true I am going to tell you what I know experientially and from the heart as a fact of the matter: whatever incessant emotional nags or swirls, rages or guilts or issues that cause stress and tiredness the week or so before your period, these are the ones that are chock full with the messages of your soul. The ones with the gifts, these are actually the invites as to how and specifically where to honor yourself and love you a little bit better. Well. Don't you know for a week or so plus (since the second half of my cycle kicked in) I have been resisting doing the "Real Work", or at least one very specific aspect of the Real Work. Which would be dealing with one very specific nag. Instead I have been trying to control said nag with the same old codependent behavior that I am working on getting to the bottom of in the first place. All busy trying to fix what's broke with what's broken and mad as a buzzing hornet's nest of on their moon mama wasps that's it's not going my mutherloving way!!
What is the Real Work? To quote as explanation from the book I am using, put on me by a mentor whom I trust with my life, in order to move through some necessary healing of old behavior in regards to self and relationships, I will define it as "...focused work. It can be intense. (ha!) What are we searching for? The darker side, the side that prevents us from loving ourselves, loving others, and letting others love us--the side that blocks us from finding the love and happiness we want and deserve.....Often, present responses are connected to our unresolved feelings from the past. To free ourselves today, we must heal from yesterday's feelings...." A page later it says "And yes, healing is possible. We can heal at as deep a level as we have been affected." It is a step by step process, a process that I know works and with which I am familiar. But ooooh my god do I feel like I am in a big pot of midway meltdown and suddenly everything has just gotten stuck. In intake, when I meet students who are like just a handful of points away from the range they need at assessment to sit for their GED, I usually tell them some version of the same thing. I steeple my two pointer fingers together like a mountain, look down over my glasses at them with big stern pointed love in my eyes and I say now look here and listen good. Here is your goal (I indicate the top of the "mountain" of my fingers) Here's you. (I indicate the top knuckle just underneath my left nail.) (Over the glasses, re-engage the eyes.) Now dig it, dig how realdeal close you are. You are SO close, but these last steps are crucial to make it to the top, and I'm just gonna level with you, they are the toughest steps there are. See how steep it is here? (Indicate knuckle again.) But you've almost made it. (By now we both are usually misty-eyed.) It's gonna take some hard, committed work. I'm talking real effort, a real commitment to yourself, for yourself. Can you do it??
Can you, Kel?
(By the way I found out today that at least 21 students from just two of my 7 Adult Ed classes are receiving diplomas and walking in a cap and gown in June!! Holy sugarnuts what I do does count!! And I dont even have the numbers for the year from my other 5!)
In traditional recovery, where I am at has been defined as the searching and fearless part. Later on, from the same book as above: "This process became experiential. I began to live (it.) Life prodded and poked me until I looked so deeply within that, as last, I could truly see me...This fearless searching, this looking within, became a forced process, imposed on me by my recovery, life, and my Higher Power. I didn't like it, but I learned to accept it, to go through it..." Man I so totally, totally get this. It has been forced upon me but force is the total wrong word, and I dont think it's quite what the writer means either, it's more like when she says how you just do it, "go deep, start with the top layer and then let the process take you deeper" and that's what happens. Once you get in there holy shit there you go and it's like a spiral down down down that just sort of happens from within your soul. And all the coincidences as you're going along--all the outside circumstances as you continue with going about living your life, they seem to magically align to help reflect back at you again and again deeper and deeper exactly what you need to see. My pal Beth from Oregon when I told her the Real Work I'd decided to take on, she was like, holy shit just hold on. I remember when she did some of it, all the pain she went through. I HATE IT. I freakin really, really do. But holy shit, hold on cuz the only way out is through...
The first three or four weeks were miraculous my god I thought oh this is it! My intimacy shit is cured. No no that's just the sparkle allure the soul uses to hook you. Now that I'm here, with the legitimate nags staring me down with pointed stern eyes straight in front of me ohhhhhhhh I dont want to look, which sucks cuz it's times like this that you really learn wherever the hell you go, well, there you are.
I dont want to be stuck here on these same old things anymore. I will do this thing damnit. No matter what. I just hate hate hate that now's the time that I really, like it says, have to look at me. And look at how (gulp) it is me, and my old beliefs, AND NO ONE ELSE, that have caused me the most harm.
Great magic of being pray for me people.
And also, in case the real work aint enough, Walsh reminded me today that Mercury Retro's on Wednesday. And we got the rest of the week, here backeast, full a rain.
Put on your wastehigh waders kids, things about to get thick...
On Mercury Retrogrades, from nightlightnews.com, used with permission from Risa (last retro ended mid Jan, we get one a season and recall that each season stimulates a new phase, and all phases are linked quite circularly if i do wax esoteric a moment myself, of inner growth):
Wednesday night (May 6th, 10:00 pm Pacific time) Mercury turns retrograde for three weeks. We prepare this week (tend to details, plans, purchases, etc.). When Mercury retrogrades the information received since Mercury’s last retrograde must be reviewed and organized for our minds have become overloaded with data. Retrogrades allow us to “houseclean”, put thoughts and ideas in order, and bring closure to previous events. We all become detailed Virgos during Mercury retrogrades.
~~
Yea. So. Be about it.
(insert picture of me rolling my eyes at me in the mirror over steepled fingers and eyes full of pointed stern big silly love)
I'm about to drop it in a heavy honest way, too, so I surely hope there is someone out there that will benefit from this confessionalism. I am just about on my moon and dig it gals, whether or not you have found this to be true I am going to tell you what I know experientially and from the heart as a fact of the matter: whatever incessant emotional nags or swirls, rages or guilts or issues that cause stress and tiredness the week or so before your period, these are the ones that are chock full with the messages of your soul. The ones with the gifts, these are actually the invites as to how and specifically where to honor yourself and love you a little bit better. Well. Don't you know for a week or so plus (since the second half of my cycle kicked in) I have been resisting doing the "Real Work", or at least one very specific aspect of the Real Work. Which would be dealing with one very specific nag. Instead I have been trying to control said nag with the same old codependent behavior that I am working on getting to the bottom of in the first place. All busy trying to fix what's broke with what's broken and mad as a buzzing hornet's nest of on their moon mama wasps that's it's not going my mutherloving way!!
What is the Real Work? To quote as explanation from the book I am using, put on me by a mentor whom I trust with my life, in order to move through some necessary healing of old behavior in regards to self and relationships, I will define it as "...focused work. It can be intense. (ha!) What are we searching for? The darker side, the side that prevents us from loving ourselves, loving others, and letting others love us--the side that blocks us from finding the love and happiness we want and deserve.....Often, present responses are connected to our unresolved feelings from the past. To free ourselves today, we must heal from yesterday's feelings...." A page later it says "And yes, healing is possible. We can heal at as deep a level as we have been affected." It is a step by step process, a process that I know works and with which I am familiar. But ooooh my god do I feel like I am in a big pot of midway meltdown and suddenly everything has just gotten stuck. In intake, when I meet students who are like just a handful of points away from the range they need at assessment to sit for their GED, I usually tell them some version of the same thing. I steeple my two pointer fingers together like a mountain, look down over my glasses at them with big stern pointed love in my eyes and I say now look here and listen good. Here is your goal (I indicate the top of the "mountain" of my fingers) Here's you. (I indicate the top knuckle just underneath my left nail.) (Over the glasses, re-engage the eyes.) Now dig it, dig how realdeal close you are. You are SO close, but these last steps are crucial to make it to the top, and I'm just gonna level with you, they are the toughest steps there are. See how steep it is here? (Indicate knuckle again.) But you've almost made it. (By now we both are usually misty-eyed.) It's gonna take some hard, committed work. I'm talking real effort, a real commitment to yourself, for yourself. Can you do it??
Can you, Kel?
(By the way I found out today that at least 21 students from just two of my 7 Adult Ed classes are receiving diplomas and walking in a cap and gown in June!! Holy sugarnuts what I do does count!! And I dont even have the numbers for the year from my other 5!)
In traditional recovery, where I am at has been defined as the searching and fearless part. Later on, from the same book as above: "This process became experiential. I began to live (it.) Life prodded and poked me until I looked so deeply within that, as last, I could truly see me...This fearless searching, this looking within, became a forced process, imposed on me by my recovery, life, and my Higher Power. I didn't like it, but I learned to accept it, to go through it..." Man I so totally, totally get this. It has been forced upon me but force is the total wrong word, and I dont think it's quite what the writer means either, it's more like when she says how you just do it, "go deep, start with the top layer and then let the process take you deeper" and that's what happens. Once you get in there holy shit there you go and it's like a spiral down down down that just sort of happens from within your soul. And all the coincidences as you're going along--all the outside circumstances as you continue with going about living your life, they seem to magically align to help reflect back at you again and again deeper and deeper exactly what you need to see. My pal Beth from Oregon when I told her the Real Work I'd decided to take on, she was like, holy shit just hold on. I remember when she did some of it, all the pain she went through. I HATE IT. I freakin really, really do. But holy shit, hold on cuz the only way out is through...
The first three or four weeks were miraculous my god I thought oh this is it! My intimacy shit is cured. No no that's just the sparkle allure the soul uses to hook you. Now that I'm here, with the legitimate nags staring me down with pointed stern eyes straight in front of me ohhhhhhhh I dont want to look, which sucks cuz it's times like this that you really learn wherever the hell you go, well, there you are.
I dont want to be stuck here on these same old things anymore. I will do this thing damnit. No matter what. I just hate hate hate that now's the time that I really, like it says, have to look at me. And look at how (gulp) it is me, and my old beliefs, AND NO ONE ELSE, that have caused me the most harm.
Great magic of being pray for me people.
And also, in case the real work aint enough, Walsh reminded me today that Mercury Retro's on Wednesday. And we got the rest of the week, here backeast, full a rain.
Put on your wastehigh waders kids, things about to get thick...
On Mercury Retrogrades, from nightlightnews.com, used with permission from Risa (last retro ended mid Jan, we get one a season and recall that each season stimulates a new phase, and all phases are linked quite circularly if i do wax esoteric a moment myself, of inner growth):
Wednesday night (May 6th, 10:00 pm Pacific time) Mercury turns retrograde for three weeks. We prepare this week (tend to details, plans, purchases, etc.). When Mercury retrogrades the information received since Mercury’s last retrograde must be reviewed and organized for our minds have become overloaded with data. Retrogrades allow us to “houseclean”, put thoughts and ideas in order, and bring closure to previous events. We all become detailed Virgos during Mercury retrogrades.
~~
Yea. So. Be about it.
(insert picture of me rolling my eyes at me in the mirror over steepled fingers and eyes full of pointed stern big silly love)
April 26, 2009
50 Instructions: Imagination
1.Trust in deep sense, no matter what. Friends will doubt you, family will pigeonhole you. Trust harder.
2.Do not be afraid to cry. Cry a lot. Forget how not to cry. Wonder if anyone ever died of crying. Think you might die.
3.Wonder what you were trusting in in the first place.
4.Hate what you were trusting in in the first place.
5.Get furiously assheaded about trust. Realize, slowly at first, that all mistrust is self-mistrust. All hate is self-hate, all anger is self-anger.
6.Realize one day that instead of crying you are actually giggling. A little bit at a time. At your self.
7.Start to remember trust.
8.Forget a lot.
9.See the network of serendipity that is helping you remember. You are It, It is You.
10.Fall in to fear again. Think you have no energy left.
11.Be amazed by your strength.
12.Celebrate you. And your strength.
13.Realize the friends that are still with you. Celebrate them.
14.Start drawing.
15.Rediscover music and how it charges you from Within.
16.Start to note that the Coincidences really are endless. Celebrate coincidences as they are Imagination made real and revel in the reminder: Imagination is your religion.
17.Fall in love again with the earth. Recommune with the sun, sing long songs at night to the moon.
18.Start to eat your lawn. It is full of Imagination.
19.Start to trust what before seemed like absurdity. Absurdity is a code word for Imagination.
20.Slow your flow at work because it causes you to be blind by your own overdose of self-importance. Self-importance gets in the way of your Imagination.
21.Realize you are laughing a lot. For no reason at all. Laugh at your self. A lot. Laugh with yourself. Love laughter because you think it is the singsongy foreplay of Imagination.
22.Tell your DS (deeper self) you think you know what you love...
23.Notch an eyebrow when It responds are you ready to grow?
24.Find yourself awake for the third night in a row at 4am and finally get in to the Real Work your mentor’s been using to quietly challenge you.
25.Realize in wonder some several days in to the Real Work that all your ideas, all your several years of life-fretting, all your planning, all your wheel spinning has slowed to a sweet gentle hum. All these worries and silent demands and false necessities have been proxy to your Imagination. You can almost taste the richness of the most precious word: Halt. You are empty inside. Deliciously empty.
26.So this is what Gretchen’s words meant The Willingness to Insist Upon Nothing.
27.Celebrate! This is just where you’ve always wanted to be.
28.You didn’t even know this when you set out to head for here.
29.Continue this Real Work with nothing short of profound awe and revelry. Everyday it is something New!
30.Fall in love not only with this Big Empty but simultaneously with Choptank, or place.
31.Watch outside-self start to fall away.
32.Realize you have nothing to prove.
33.Find the weather to be resolute in glory.
34.Delight as you see some of the deepest parts of who you are become more and more commonplace in your day to day world.
35.Allow for others the room to honor them selves.
36.Be ridiculously, lavishly in love with Choptank.
37.Realize the earth loves to hold you in the most tenderest spoon.
38.Realize swimming in the Ocean must be just like being inside the moon.
39.Sit quiet at night outside under the stars.
40.Breathe with the land.
41.Need nothing more than this.
42.Trust in the Process.
43.The process is Grace. Grace is Within.
44.Grace is unestimatable, limitless.
45.Recognize the grandness of this.
46.Laugh at your self some more because you are so very grand that the only word for this is Small. Realize too that grandness is very different from self-important.
47.Continue to forget this a lot, but smile because memory helps you laugh more!
48.Keep doing the Real Work. Take lots of time out to Play!
49.Imagination is just a word grown-ups replaced with Grace. Grace is the only Reality there is.
50.Live this Reality, gently, openly, sparklingly, day by day. Remember to laugh when you forget.
2.Do not be afraid to cry. Cry a lot. Forget how not to cry. Wonder if anyone ever died of crying. Think you might die.
3.Wonder what you were trusting in in the first place.
4.Hate what you were trusting in in the first place.
5.Get furiously assheaded about trust. Realize, slowly at first, that all mistrust is self-mistrust. All hate is self-hate, all anger is self-anger.
6.Realize one day that instead of crying you are actually giggling. A little bit at a time. At your self.
7.Start to remember trust.
8.Forget a lot.
9.See the network of serendipity that is helping you remember. You are It, It is You.
10.Fall in to fear again. Think you have no energy left.
11.Be amazed by your strength.
12.Celebrate you. And your strength.
13.Realize the friends that are still with you. Celebrate them.
14.Start drawing.
15.Rediscover music and how it charges you from Within.
16.Start to note that the Coincidences really are endless. Celebrate coincidences as they are Imagination made real and revel in the reminder: Imagination is your religion.
17.Fall in love again with the earth. Recommune with the sun, sing long songs at night to the moon.
18.Start to eat your lawn. It is full of Imagination.
19.Start to trust what before seemed like absurdity. Absurdity is a code word for Imagination.
20.Slow your flow at work because it causes you to be blind by your own overdose of self-importance. Self-importance gets in the way of your Imagination.
21.Realize you are laughing a lot. For no reason at all. Laugh at your self. A lot. Laugh with yourself. Love laughter because you think it is the singsongy foreplay of Imagination.
22.Tell your DS (deeper self) you think you know what you love...
23.Notch an eyebrow when It responds are you ready to grow?
24.Find yourself awake for the third night in a row at 4am and finally get in to the Real Work your mentor’s been using to quietly challenge you.
25.Realize in wonder some several days in to the Real Work that all your ideas, all your several years of life-fretting, all your planning, all your wheel spinning has slowed to a sweet gentle hum. All these worries and silent demands and false necessities have been proxy to your Imagination. You can almost taste the richness of the most precious word: Halt. You are empty inside. Deliciously empty.
26.So this is what Gretchen’s words meant The Willingness to Insist Upon Nothing.
27.Celebrate! This is just where you’ve always wanted to be.
28.You didn’t even know this when you set out to head for here.
29.Continue this Real Work with nothing short of profound awe and revelry. Everyday it is something New!
30.Fall in love not only with this Big Empty but simultaneously with Choptank, or place.
31.Watch outside-self start to fall away.
32.Realize you have nothing to prove.
33.Find the weather to be resolute in glory.
34.Delight as you see some of the deepest parts of who you are become more and more commonplace in your day to day world.
35.Allow for others the room to honor them selves.
36.Be ridiculously, lavishly in love with Choptank.
37.Realize the earth loves to hold you in the most tenderest spoon.
38.Realize swimming in the Ocean must be just like being inside the moon.
39.Sit quiet at night outside under the stars.
40.Breathe with the land.
41.Need nothing more than this.
42.Trust in the Process.
43.The process is Grace. Grace is Within.
44.Grace is unestimatable, limitless.
45.Recognize the grandness of this.
46.Laugh at your self some more because you are so very grand that the only word for this is Small. Realize too that grandness is very different from self-important.
47.Continue to forget this a lot, but smile because memory helps you laugh more!
48.Keep doing the Real Work. Take lots of time out to Play!
49.Imagination is just a word grown-ups replaced with Grace. Grace is the only Reality there is.
50.Live this Reality, gently, openly, sparklingly, day by day. Remember to laugh when you forget.
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