Wild Card Inside. (You Really Should Read This.)

There's this Feist song going through my head as I sit down to entertain the thoughts behind what will become this blogpost.

I feel it all, I feel it all is how it starts and what I want to write about is the potential recklessness of being as god-damned emotional as I am.  I''ve begun journaling again and am trying to take much time as I can to resettle and recharge, too, an intuitive move that I've been drawn towards since November and which, I understand now that I've finally begun, is motivated by my deeper wisdom.  What I call God (proof of either my pure faith or my true atheism: my GOD is the Vegetable Body, the other 92% or so of my body/mind/consciousness that keeps me going while I twiddle along and shit all over my mind with the piddly 8 or so percent of brain power I actually have or think I have competency over...)  Anyhow.  My deeper wisdom, ol VB settled in harmony around me in the kitchen this morning.  I need to journal right now in order to temper and reign in my emotional life.  I've tons of experience in the handiness of this.

It's how I've come to learn HOW to make good decisions.

Look, this is the Old World Western-Wound.  I dont care who you are or where you live, if you've got six kids a monster SUV and a hub who wears a tie to work, a hippy bliss-head wearing few clothes with most your possesions in your backpack and a happy home built by hand in the woods or a high-powered heel-wearing bus-jumping city glam girl with two dates one at happy hour and one at eleven tonight when drinks are half-priced, the point is we all come from the same tribal thing and that is the unconscious presumption that our emotions are somehow BAD or at best SILLY THINGS.

I was in my mid-twenties when I learned the importance of how to name what I was feeling, when I actually was taught by someone that there was a range of inner-life deliveries other than good/bad or even happy/sad.  And I'm coming on the end of my 34th year now, having just put behind me what I would say was my very first year of successfully living according to my own integrated rhythms.  To illustrate:

New Years Day Katie and I were sitting slap-happy as hell and laaaaid-out in a nest on my folks couch watching movies.  Classic sweatpants on Sunday style day.  My boss called to talk over some issues at work.  When I hung up I bitched for a few secs about one certain issue, in order to blow off steam and then resume movie-watching chill-mindedly.  It happened that at that exact moment my dad walked  in and proceeds to bark (my nice way of saying yell, as I've come to accept this is how he communicates: All reaction) Kel!  What have I taugyht you!  It's not personal!  It's work!  It's not personal or emotional it's just work!

Katie and I, as my brother and I so naturally do still, just looked at each other and than busted out laughing so hard and grimy that all we could do was immediately start making fun of dad and each other.  Do you get it?  Here's my father, emotionally screaming about me needing to learn to not be emotional when it comes to work.

And here is the tribal wound:  THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NOT BEING EMOTIONAL

Emotional lives are real as the chemical epicenters that trigger them.  Indeed, when it comes down to it chemical response is really all they are.  Doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman you've got chemical response centers.  But not having emotional lives, and men in particularly and the devaluing of them and their emotional lives, and the resultant suppressing of women and ours because of that, is the lie that Western Society has so suppressingly cultivated over the years.  It is responsible for all matters of power struggles.  I have zero, that is ZERO friends with whom I've not commiserated over our mom's subtle victim/martyring ways and the demasculation of men at home that ultimately rotates out of all of that.  And it is what it is, built on years of conditioned self-sacrifice.

And behavior is modeled when it comes to how we influence one another.

So therein, the deceptive nature of being true to ourselves.  Emotions suppressed, much like in Feist's video when she tries to bang out the fire sparks, will jackknife out in the most caddy-wampus directions.  The truth is lies in this case, as it is when we react or make decisions based on a charged feeling in the moment.  So learning to not react to them willynilly but also to honor them, feel and integrate them and the messages they inherently deliver MEN and WOMEN, proves to be our generation's most endeavoring order.  I read Committed by Liz Gilbert in the fall, and weeks later a blog post by an old friend in which both mentioned the pure luck of birth that so many of us landed in middle-class lifestyles in the West.  Meaning our problems, no matter what, are motherfuckin high-bottom.  And I will be the first to say that is true, that my people are no longer dominated by establishing compulsion: struggling to put food on the table or keep a roof over head.  My ancestors by and large progressed that for us/me--and with wisdom and more resources comes responsibility.  Period.  Poetry is political, you're life is how you be. And we're all in this together, afterall.

Suppression is suppression and personal power, and oppressing it through de-, and/or over-valuing our emotions by only ever reacting to them, is a behavior that we can either model, or undo.  The results are never-ending.

Word.


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Be Kind, Plato said

I was so dark and gnarly yesterday.

It was hella hot out, and I only got maybe an hour of complete sleep Thursday night. I had errands to run and other little life things I told a friend I'd help with yesterday morning, then lunch with mom and there's nothing that disappoints me more than paid-for bad food. Next was work at 3 and by the time I got in there I thought I'd fall over I was so miserable. Of course I got my period. Sometimes even the thought of PMA (choosing the positive mental) just pisses me the fuck off.

I have learned, however, to take myself--especially at my most foul--lightly. Be kind, Plato said, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. To practice this most effectively I have begun at home: compassion for my self.

There is a Sanskrit word for the Western understanding of Changing. It is Anicha. Anicha is the Buddhist quality of human nature: the flowing whimsy of the unswept mind.

Liken Anicha as a concept to a stream. You're chilling waterside, in the woods, watching the water go by. Ah it's so mellow, the air feels like dancing, the trees are sighing you can hear them. The stream sounds like a hushhh. The water is one body, but keep your eyes on one singular spot. Watch there goes a leaf floating on top. There goes a funny rivulet of bubbles....Now nothing but water but even it fuses and blends and seems to change forms, now a water bug floats along followed by a thin brown branch. Changing, changing. Anicha. The water surface changes and yet. It's always the same. This is the mind, the ego self. There too is the watcher by the stream. Quiet witnesser, where breathing lives.

And so this is the alchemy of magical thinking, Anicha. What 12-step rooms teach as This Too Shall Pass. (And come again, too) There was a time, a long time for me, that hopelessness of thought or emotion or physical slug trapped me, like Chinese handcuffs the harder I'd yank to get away the worse it'd take hold. Samsara is Sanskrit, too, and basically means those little mental loops we get stuck in, the ego with its roughian bloody jawgrip it takes hold, clamps down and causes the resistancy to growwww. Maybe your little loop of samsara is about paying a bill. Ah there it floats on by oh crap it's due next week... but that's when I was going to get my oil change too...Here's where you loosen up, you watch the thought without chomping down, ahhh there it goes. Or where the deathgrip grabs it, ego ego human control, takes hold. The looping intensifies. The loop track gets bigger. More and more fear and loathsomeness...What the fuck's the point? My always final absolute last bad thought in that miserable loop.

Somewhere in the center is compassion. For ourselves, our sick twisted imperfectly perfect little human minds. And oh the great joy of laughing at it, not taking any of it too seriously because why? If heaviness is just going to increase the misery flow? This is first axiom of those Eastern Wisdom Teachings: Life is suffering, because of addiction to the ego's flow. Detachment just means the wisdom of Anicha. And compassion is an action word, love and gentleness with ourselves....

What if all life was just about enjoying the flow, being open as possible to the nutty updown of the ever present moment?

What if Anicha gave you the power to choose for it to be so?

What if?

Or better~why not?

Mercury went Retrograde yesterday, nows a great time to practice lightening up on your self. Read all about here.

This one thing... Telling the truth.

This is Erika, quoting Hemingway in my head and it's what happens to me any time I sit down and start to write and cant get started. Tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth. Usually it's followed by me asking myself Kelly what are you trying to say?

There is a song it just came on as I finished that last paragraph and it made me smile and pull the comfort sheets of my self up tight around my heart because of the tweak it put in my chest the second I heard it start and the immediate smile and hush of breath it drew. It is one of those serendipity songs and one that always no matter what makes my spirit emerge from whatever tight little haunt of me in which it's hiding. It's one of my fighting songs, and it is the song of songs that would of course in this instance speak to me.

I thought that pain and truth were all that really mattered but you cant stay here with every single hope that shattered. Big Country. Oh this song. The one that Kelly J put on the CD when I sold my shit and went travelling in 2004--it played as I pulled out of Chestertown and left my disillusioned past behind. The past. The past? Let me say this to the past. It becomes you, shapes the you you become. For many months I have worked to heal my associations of me, and my patterns of my past that became patterns long before I had the mind awareness to know any better. I have begun to live motivated by one idea: we regret not what we've done, but what we have not. I have had to ask myself again and again, and sit quiet surrendering to me, to the long inner road towards peace and silence within to hear the answer: years from now what will I look back on and say because I did not do this one or two or three things, I regret? It is in this way I've submitted to me, to following my truth and being brave and strong enough to stand in and go towards who I really am.

There is one area--love, men--where I have a backlog of mess. I am in the context, here, now, ongoing, of forgiveness and peace in that area, it's a constant motion thing for me. And as to this, as to regret, and to telling the truth. There was one, a single real regret that clung to me and went something like this:

I should've been true to myself. The moment, the second I knew I was in love with him--and no longer in love with the one I was with--I should've been honest with myself and with everyone involved. I was so in love with him. I should've gone forward and to him, and not looked back.

I should've. But that's not what happened. And so how does life unfold--how does it mark you, and push you along when there is indeed this one thing that you look back on and did not do?
What happens is you quantitate, you consider. You loop over and over again in yourself and become lost in your self and hate and even further have more and awful disbelief in yourself. You become deeply deflated, hopeless even and don't know why, because often times regret hides itself if you are lacking in a certain capacity for self-honesty in some areas in your life, so that's what happens: if you are like me and you have hurt in a certain area of your life, old hurt, old covered-over pain from long long ago before you even really were you yet, than being true to yourself in that area comes out all slanted and sideways because to really be true means first to have to re-live through the old pain that's still there. And that's fucking hard. Especially when that part of you's always been broke.

Then, one day you wake up. It's a half-waking, but I'm a fighter, so you grab for it. And you realize god damn it, this is my life. This is my life. And perhaps this regret was the one, the one key to the door that is finally, for real and completely, going to make me own me in my entirety. That is going to make me stand up, and be true as I can to myself.

You start to get honest then, about your wants, your needs, about your past. About who you are.

I've identified the things, the couple of them. And I'm going whole-hearted after them. BUT MORE IMPORTANT. I get it, I get me now. I know me, and love me, all of me. I know how to be true to my self. Get it? I know now how to be honest to me. And to tell the truth, and not miss opportunity. I have healed from the early fucked up shit and abuse, or at least have self-awareness that is full and complete, and real. Not sideways and slanted and blind or numb in some parts. I have broke parts you know, who doesn't? But those are now the places I learned to nurture and be gentle with myself instead of denying and hating and refusing, because of denial and numbness and self-hate. Those are the places I have medicine, real virtue now. Where I can be even more gentle and loving towards me, and others, as result.

I am real now. I am whole.

This is my life. And I guess that one regret is no longer on my list because the gift that came from it is absolutely nonexchangeable. I hope that he--the lighthouse guy, the one who led me here to this deep and dark well of my self, the one who suffered at my hands and who I ultimately pushed away and forced to walk away without his own looking back--I hope he is well. I hope he is well: is full, is whole.

I am being true to my self, to my heart. It's all I ever really wanted to learn how to do. That part I don't regret, not at all.

More on Truth, and Following my heart

It used to be fall was my favorite season, but that seems to be the company I used to keep, too. Bonfire company, walking through the woods and camping company, peoplein flannels, that kind of thing. The truth of the matter is I love spring.

This bounty everywhere. I'm out on my walk and the forsythias are about gone--people think she's the first to show her delicate head but lemme tell you it's actually camellia, and oh is she grand how she bobs the branch all the way down with that deep brush of pink-almost-red--the bradford stinkass pears almost gone, but instead would you look at that? The neon green grass? The hot pink azaleas?! The most beautiful smelling lavender lilacs like little perfect stars waving high from the corner of some people's tailored lawn. The hollys with all the little white flowers of sex sweet breathing as you walk on by.

The first two weeks, when the dandys were everywhere at very first and no one had been out yet with their poison I took a couple walks to forage my favorite herbal weeds. Lawn tea, my own witchy specialty. There's so much I am aware of right now as I end my days perusing my town. So much I am captivated by, so much gentle sweeping light, fresh sweeping air. All I can think each time I walk is wow, how lucky and happy and thankful I am to be alive. And how much life is all around me. And how much there is this aligned well inside, this steeple of silence and peace.

It's been a year and a half since I first set out to "follow my heart" whatever that means, to learn to be true to myself as an adult woman. All I had back then to guide me was the most brutal dose of confusion and discontentedness, and this sense of acquiescence that had sort of settled over like a low fog. I didn't know it at first but that ill all the time dull feeling and always upset, that was a signal of the purest kind. There was a lot I had to learn about self-honesty. A lot of little tied up parts of my heart and spirit that were stuck and didn't translate so well. A lot of driving on auto-pilot and a lot of continued confusion, and also at times a lot of pain.

But bit by bits I've gotten stronger, I've learned to trust myself. That's what it is, what I'm trying to explain right now. Knowing that I can trust deeply in me. And practicing from day to day the truth of my current personal matter--how I'm feeling today. Not disavowing myself of that expereince, of my own reality as it is going down right now. Ah, yes the truth is mutable it's true. Just like they taught at Vipassana--changing changing changing moment to moment. But why do we think we need to force it, force away how we are in this exact moment? What the hell is that instinct injury all about? I am at worst when falling to the hand of my own stunning rigidity...

Right now a re-cap of SNL is on and it is hysterical. God I love to laugh, and I love to be moved to a moment of reverant reflection, stilled, too. I love to experience life. They showed Paul Simon's rendition of the Boxer just a bit ago. It was from the Saturday immediately following 9/11 and watching it instantly made tears well up in my eyes, but then right after there's Amy and Will doing a Little Mermaid act that literally made me belly laugh. Maybe my favorite part of SNL has always been watching the actors try not bust up at each other--or try to do their individual jobs so well that the goal is to make one another bust up? Same thing I remember that used to make me lose it when I was a kid and mom and I would watch Carol Burnett. Wow you know? Life. Mutable truth? In so much as we, at times foolishly, take reality as we see it from moment to moment via our limited perception to be all that is--and hoplessly so, no truth never changes. Autopilot has to do with shutting down our impulses and instincts from a place of fear. So that we experience recurrent patterns, ridges or grooves in our consciousness. Learning to feel, literally healing my sensate life has been such deep remedy to that. My truth has been mutable, and when I aim to love every part of it, the good bad and ugly, then it is Visionary, too. Then I truly have power in the matter, I am aligned. I get all flumuxed though when it comes to thinking you, she, he it are changable according to me and my needs and feelings and sensations. That is always a big challenge for me and I guess so long as I am living I will have lots to experience and lots to challenge that feeling-life, but the last year and a half of devotion to my own heart has paid off in so much that I get it--it's up to me to own me and that's what it means, being true to me--no matter what.

Years ago, in my early sobriety, driving with my friend Amy who herself at the time had about 10 months clean The Boxer came on a tape we were listening to and chills covered my body, and then hers, and then both of us had that eye-sheen of spontaneous confirmation-tears. Wow. Life you know? Me and my precious beating heart, the only thing I'm ever guaranteed to truly know...

The Hallway's Hell?

I was late yesterday morning for a meeting in my own office but certainly not from lac of trying to get there on time. That was one of my intentions for the new calendar year at the end of December/early Jan: respect people that you are in union with by showing up to meet them on time. I am historically a dawdler. Anyhow I was up with plenty of time to spare but I was just so sluggish there was no going any faster than the mud under my skin. It was rainy out, sooo rainy that there are coastal flood advisories all over the shore. And mostly, I was tired, like blinky blinky mostly sleeping tired all day.

I was quiet for the first half-hour of the meeting even though it was very informal. Quiet in general is not usually my way. Then it came out--Kim was finishing up a recap on the latest details of her own personal transitions when I just said it, the truth of the matter. "I've been over the bridge every weekend since I quit my job. I leave Fridays and dont get back til Monday morning, sleeping on friend's sofa and hanging out late every night. I love it I'm having so much fun at home I barely am even connected to the life I still have over here! It's all I can do to keep a single foot in the game..." I was whining, had thrown myself across the conference table but in a silly, self-indulgent way, and smiling, too. Brenda laughed, said "Well if all you've done is work for the past two years all you're going to do now is party! Who can blame you? You're an overacheiver!"

And that is it. Last night I was so exhausted, just tired tired tired. And it's true, I haven't slowed down. I was sinking fast in to a drained, hopeless place when I got home from work and I willingly let myself go there. I laid on the couch and watched Seinfeld and let the hopeless feeling take me. I took a little nap. Then I asked myself what I needed, and no answer came. But I know now that that bad feeling is actually remedy-asking, a specific language of my own personal soul. I looked around my house: unpacked suitcase still in place in the corner, where it's been for three weeks in order for me to just switch outfits in and out. Dishes piled in the sink, literal stacks of papers and bills in three different places. Dust bunnies everywhere in clumps on the stained wood panels. The old me, pre-Choptank, would have been so self-scrutinizing. But last night I just sighed, smiled and realized what I needed was to clean up, to set a little order around here in order to daily enjoy the little time I have left in this fabulous place of my own. I left the tv on and took intermittent time doing dishes, watching sitcoms, sorting bills, folding clothes. I ate dinner of potato chips and cheetos bc I have no other dinner food. I even eventually vacuumed, too.

God it feels good to go easy on myself. To take care of myself, and to listen. When I first got sober this lady Debbie told me that the first year is just about learning to name your emotions, and that the only ones we can usually identify in the beginning are good and mad. And then she told me that we are like pendulums, we get plucked and off we go in the direction of happiness, and it's so good to be there that when we move then wooaaaaah now we flail over to the other side, mad. And so we go, until we learn to honor all the little subtleties of in-between. The process. Really, I believe this: if I dont care for and cherish and nurture my self, if we dont take the time to listen and be quiet, and also to run and be crazy and vital and party and embrace, then who will? Who will be gentle with me if I'm not? No one lives this life for us you know? It's up to us to be open to our selves, our incongruencies and our own funny swings. I woke this morning, quiet, peaceful, aware. Aware of how blessed I am and in acknowledgment that the transitions, the in-between places, the time when waiting in the hall for the next door to open, how that can be hell but really it isn't meant to be, or to be seen as a problem to have. How come that's how we approach life, how come that's so commonly the attitude we take to change? Despair. It's so exciting to have the infinite horizon on the distance. Exciting, yes, and terrifying too. But to get the chance to be out there--doing it. I mean, that's just it, isn't it? That's just where I am and just where I am amped to be.