Thinking about living on Truslow Road, 2006. I'd ordered my boyfriend a 6 CD-set of folk songs from the Smithsonian Institute, which has archived recordings of every folk-movement you can imagine, and we were listening to it on our new record player, in our living room that had no television and furniture that we boasted was all second-hand. We didn't have the internet. Or a laptop, yet. I didn't even have a car. Just rode a six dollar vintage bike everywhere, that I'd gotten at an auction in the middle of farmfields outside town.
It's because I am listening to Spotify, this nostalgia, to an Al Jolson and Benny Goodman playlist because Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris made me all romancy and wanting for the twinge of myth to sit in my hair. But counter to the beauty of that film, the nuances of yesteryear and the wanting, the pure, lovely human wanting that it pigeons...what I am doing right now by thinking back is instead reveling in how satisfied I currently am.
I would love to hear some big band on a nice static sounding turntable, have no doubt. I would love the tinkle sound background murmur of cocktail drinkers and laughter. But I am equally thankful that my other option--internet streaming Spotify--brings a similar magic to my life. The aesthetic is different. For example, why I am willing to drive 25 minutes to Long Beach to buy medicinal herbs in bulk to make oils and teas and salves, instead of just settling for the already made stuff at the organic markets here in town. There's an intuitiveness to that for me, the hands-on steps, the moment to moment allowing of the instinctive nature to lead the process. In the same way I'd love to own a record player, breathe the dust of the paper album slip, feel the grease smudges on the cardboard while fingering the choices one by one. Feel the easy way the vinyl latches on the spindle. Hear the sound dust makes, settled between the grooves. If I could, I would be typing this by twinkling lights on the grape arbor in my own backyard in this sweet small town. That noise that just echoed...? Permanence. The ding of my typewriter bell.
But that means I'd miss the music right now, how it lightens my mood so that I have a small smile. The simple, practical beauty of writing right now, the discipline of using my craft, spending time with the words by just letting them out. Hitting a button and instant audience. The enticement of this. Or the way the air from the open window on the skin of my forearm feels right now--dewy, cool, like the grass does at dawn--and too the way it smells just as sweet.
And that's the difference between now and then. I struggled endlessly with being where I was, whatever that meant. And much as I struggled with valuing the joy of the present, I too pitied and even righteously resisted change, and especially technology, which is what made me think tonight of back then on Truslow Road. I was classically extreme, believed still as youth will that to be one thing entirely eliminated my capacity to also be something else. Those folkway recordings--songs that were over fifty years old, on CD--were some of the only CDs, other than EPs released by our friends, that we listened to that year. The funny irony, to be to snobbish even about CDs! Everything was on album. That to enjoy inspiration, to be moved by aesthetic or moved with a process, I thought it also meant I couldn't enjoy what was available through convenience.
Definitely not the click of enter on Spotify anyway. I actually have an IPOD now! Even if I'd been in Woody Allen's time travelling roaring twenties car and I came forward by just a few years and peaked my future myself, I NEVER would've believed that back then. An IPOD would've meant losing my edge! Ah, to value the integral overlaps of my own inner diversities. This act of being still, present, to the all the parts of who I was and who I am. It opens to movement and eases me naturally along. This is delight, right now, in how I converge.
Showing posts with label self-trust. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-trust. Show all posts
March 29, 2012
November 30, 2010
Poltergeist Love, the power-full prayer. & the hokey pokey.
Ha ha when the people say you're still writing?What's that book about anyway? Yes I'm still writing yes I'm still writing what's it about? Well what's life about? Up to your own two eyes. Human hearts and the poetic voice oh unfair unjust world. Ha, the sun. We rose up out of the primordial goop-funk amoebic then with gills then feet then thumbs. Now voices. Sing, speak, speak the earth the roots and the moon. About this stuff. That's what it's all about. That's what all this is...
??
I walked in to my room two months ago with the vaccum cleaner in my hand and smelled the most real smell of him one of the many many hims in the long list of powerfull hyms oooops did i mean that, misspell of course of course (i have devil eyes!) i did. I have poetry leading up to this. I smelled him and laughed, there was a shadow on the wall this happens so often with the openness the other side of the creative wall that i laughed but also, angered, quick chased him off. started to rerun the vacuum then had to tell someone so of course i told kel. now this:
i have written so long, so long so long (nights at truslow first time back room paul asleep in sleeping bag down coated warmness of woodstove heat trapped inside tall pine trees at truslow spring-truth please those long, terrorizing days o would you come voice or death something, be raised all those terrible days at anngar farm. o and let's not forget oregon? the time first, knelt on my knees ordered a used computer over the internet came in a box banged up set it in the corner of the trailor on a small table barely a foot off the floor beach days so much sun tree afternoons so much rain and i would kneel there, write and of course pray) i have written and written and waited so soo long for this and now i am here, having written it out every step and abracadabra open sesame code it took to bring me this far.
erika printed out all i'd given her by the end of august 14 months of submish. hundred plus pages? nothing congruent. now congruent as a dream! funny how that says as a dream as if in the sleeping sense with only one eye opened and not knowingly de dos mundos there is ever anything relevant to see. as if sight is relevant without it too.
Finally, i am there, this is not a dream. i can smell pine strong as spirit it is real right here with me and on fb another stooopid sign, i say to the muses
ooo holiest of holy all things as one all dark and light all encompassed version of all things encircled and the encirclement of all that ever was and this voice and the outter that handles it, and ever on, and the still uncapsized moment prior to breath, o all love and creation and loss, set it all aside now as i poool from this flood as i pull under and go down to come up with all i have within, set is aside let me do thou work holy of all most especially of my name you have the quality just help me with quantity show up to the page
i am set up now, my ducks in a row. this is fun, the most exotic strange poetic-practical place i have ever been.
??
I walked in to my room two months ago with the vaccum cleaner in my hand and smelled the most real smell of him one of the many many hims in the long list of powerfull hyms oooops did i mean that, misspell of course of course (i have devil eyes!) i did. I have poetry leading up to this. I smelled him and laughed, there was a shadow on the wall this happens so often with the openness the other side of the creative wall that i laughed but also, angered, quick chased him off. started to rerun the vacuum then had to tell someone so of course i told kel. now this:
i have written so long, so long so long (nights at truslow first time back room paul asleep in sleeping bag down coated warmness of woodstove heat trapped inside tall pine trees at truslow spring-truth please those long, terrorizing days o would you come voice or death something, be raised all those terrible days at anngar farm. o and let's not forget oregon? the time first, knelt on my knees ordered a used computer over the internet came in a box banged up set it in the corner of the trailor on a small table barely a foot off the floor beach days so much sun tree afternoons so much rain and i would kneel there, write and of course pray) i have written and written and waited so soo long for this and now i am here, having written it out every step and abracadabra open sesame code it took to bring me this far.
erika printed out all i'd given her by the end of august 14 months of submish. hundred plus pages? nothing congruent. now congruent as a dream! funny how that says as a dream as if in the sleeping sense with only one eye opened and not knowingly de dos mundos there is ever anything relevant to see. as if sight is relevant without it too.
Finally, i am there, this is not a dream. i can smell pine strong as spirit it is real right here with me and on fb another stooopid sign, i say to the muses
ooo holiest of holy all things as one all dark and light all encompassed version of all things encircled and the encirclement of all that ever was and this voice and the outter that handles it, and ever on, and the still uncapsized moment prior to breath, o all love and creation and loss, set it all aside now as i poool from this flood as i pull under and go down to come up with all i have within, set is aside let me do thou work holy of all most especially of my name you have the quality just help me with quantity show up to the page
i am set up now, my ducks in a row. this is fun, the most exotic strange poetic-practical place i have ever been.
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.
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