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...
January 10, 2011
January 7, 2011
Or the one you said you'd hold on to for dear life.
It's early--not early as it could be.
It's early like 7:30 early, I've been up since 4:45 Sam texted at 5:15 to bring my laptop in so she could play me new music. There is weather coming no doubt, the water told me so. It wont be much though the birds are still crying and yesterday there were squirrels running through the dead woods. Tyler is here, Sam, me. He hasn't slept since last night, fresh home from Bmore as of a half hour ago he rolls hard like I like to, we're talking TV series she's defending Lost, he The Wire and there is music on my laptop which I am taking in like gulps of air. I had no comprehension of how cut-off I'd be from the Muse when she went down--my laptop that is. No music that I love, no poetry no links no blogrolling and most of all, no room for Kel fast as I can to spondown and get it all out. The journals, they're full, but nothing to fill me back up with no music. It's a process. Reciprocation. I HAD No IDEA. I sat on the bed for three hours just listening to Pandora and my ITunes, feeling the life come back on deep inside me. The poems finally emerged then, I spondown'd on here then pulled out the leather back journal Erika overnighted (with her most recent adv copy Hem's Girl which I can't put down--word!!!!) that was waiting on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and I wrote a full, whole poem in that. I am re-setting my ways as result of not having this my core sustenance. I have learned something yet again the necessity of filling up, and the absolute non-negotiable: having a place to fill with the words, a place that remains the same.
Sam played me her man's music he is Philly local soon enough I played her Josh just one song an old one it's the first time I'd done that in a very very long time and that was enough. We work together Sam and me long hours ten hours at a time and so she is on to me as me to her: we hold the other's stories already, having known each other less than a month. Some of them anyway, a single bone or two but skeletal-enough. So that with sparing details or so many that they come out in mouthfuls a few bursts at a time we know what flesh were giving the other, which bone on which to hang this part. This was a new twist. This had new gold. Little light flecks on the skin. Long shadows from underfoot aura big as the aururaborelias in the western sky.
I'm seeing my friend Laura Walsh tonight I told her, I play her Walsh's music.
And soon enough there is the response, I feel the throes of the words from somewhere inside my chest and had to get on here it was a matter of health. Sam and Ty humor me, roll silver and we small talk and cut sidemouth cracks on one another especially about me on the clock. Here it is the skeleton I am yearning for the one o holy loss the lac of which leaves me with out structure or faith, and happy enough to deny that even a boneyard exists. How Charles Simic said. Who can not howl will not find his pack.
I am sick. Being packless sucks.
It's early like 7:30 early, I've been up since 4:45 Sam texted at 5:15 to bring my laptop in so she could play me new music. There is weather coming no doubt, the water told me so. It wont be much though the birds are still crying and yesterday there were squirrels running through the dead woods. Tyler is here, Sam, me. He hasn't slept since last night, fresh home from Bmore as of a half hour ago he rolls hard like I like to, we're talking TV series she's defending Lost, he The Wire and there is music on my laptop which I am taking in like gulps of air. I had no comprehension of how cut-off I'd be from the Muse when she went down--my laptop that is. No music that I love, no poetry no links no blogrolling and most of all, no room for Kel fast as I can to spondown and get it all out. The journals, they're full, but nothing to fill me back up with no music. It's a process. Reciprocation. I HAD No IDEA. I sat on the bed for three hours just listening to Pandora and my ITunes, feeling the life come back on deep inside me. The poems finally emerged then, I spondown'd on here then pulled out the leather back journal Erika overnighted (with her most recent adv copy Hem's Girl which I can't put down--word!!!!) that was waiting on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and I wrote a full, whole poem in that. I am re-setting my ways as result of not having this my core sustenance. I have learned something yet again the necessity of filling up, and the absolute non-negotiable: having a place to fill with the words, a place that remains the same.
Sam played me her man's music he is Philly local soon enough I played her Josh just one song an old one it's the first time I'd done that in a very very long time and that was enough. We work together Sam and me long hours ten hours at a time and so she is on to me as me to her: we hold the other's stories already, having known each other less than a month. Some of them anyway, a single bone or two but skeletal-enough. So that with sparing details or so many that they come out in mouthfuls a few bursts at a time we know what flesh were giving the other, which bone on which to hang this part. This was a new twist. This had new gold. Little light flecks on the skin. Long shadows from underfoot aura big as the aururaborelias in the western sky.
I'm seeing my friend Laura Walsh tonight I told her, I play her Walsh's music.
And soon enough there is the response, I feel the throes of the words from somewhere inside my chest and had to get on here it was a matter of health. Sam and Ty humor me, roll silver and we small talk and cut sidemouth cracks on one another especially about me on the clock. Here it is the skeleton I am yearning for the one o holy loss the lac of which leaves me with out structure or faith, and happy enough to deny that even a boneyard exists. How Charles Simic said. Who can not howl will not find his pack.
I am sick. Being packless sucks.
January 5, 2011
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.
FB users go here
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.
FB users go here
January 3, 2011
The Authentic Life. Begin Again.
The authentic self is the soul made visible. ~Sarah ban Breathnach
Upside down the view is touching and real as anything going on when my feet are on the ground, in fact, life felt most open, most real, most expansive and in touch with what my insides crave from that exact perspective. I was naked as the day is perennial, floating inside the earth in hotspring mineral water that came from deep inside the belly of the land. My head was leaned way back, resting on a rock, staring up at moss then roots then the trees arched over me then beyond. And me close as I could be to deep, deep under the Cascade Mountains, Northern Oregon, USA.
My friend and wise woman Gretchen had her buddy pick me up in Portland and drive me the three hours to her and the cozy room in her cottage on the coast. Gretchen lent me an old beater pickup and for three weeks I went where the wind wanted to take me. I spent a lot of time with her, my wise woman friend, and with Paul my brother in rebel-peace-making who I met working in a roadhouse steak joint on the Oregon Coast in 05, and also with Beth, my friend with the Lungta-Spirit and Anusara-calling.
I called my mom crying after the first week, saying how much I had ached to be there with people who I intrinsically considered my tribe, how very much alive and like myself I finally felt again. Beth and I floated in those hotsprings and slept in the cold, pointed night in Paul's tent in the lush evergreen woods. We hiked the coast range and communed deep with the well of wise woman wisdom which is found easily and naturally within when we take the time to still, and listen. And what I told them, Beth and Paul, again and again when they asked what was next for me was that I was giving my spirit all the time it needed to answer that question.
No time-frame, is what I said.
I had weddings and family obligations back at home, and a job waiting, and a room at the beach.
This morning, in that very same room, I thought a lot about the past year and about the importance, the commitment, of always returning back to our selves. This is the wild woman wisdom, the intrinsic trust in one's own connection within. I was 21 when my aunt gave me the daily meditation book Simple Abundance, and it is that book that I credit for Confirmation. Confirming the yearning. The natural and legitimate siren ring from inside myself that felt like propulsion and being stuck at once that was pressing me towards hand-creating a life that was meaningful, and real, to me. And that life has always begun first with settling in to find "me". I handed that book over to a young wise-woman to be this week, knowing well that it landed in the right hands. And in the mean time, I returned to my quiet space today, answerless still, but with a clear knowing sense from cultivating that connection: My next move harmonious to my spirit is soon to present it self, so long as I continue a day at a time to show up to me. To show up and begin again after for example 8 days of living out of my car through the tangled holidays stretched along the Baltimore-Annapolis corridor, to be willing to sit back down and begin again.
January 2, 2011
The Reverse Side of Diplomacy.
I feel a bit sorry right now for the people who love me.
On December 31, 2009, I was standing in Trump Casino in Atlantic City with Laura Walsh and Katie. Neon lights and the low white-noise dinging of electronic bells, the splintered salt-wrecked boardwalk under the black sky with fast grey clouds and the ocean rectifying itself over and over right outside. The moment all the drunks and the lushes hurtled out their bellowed cries of HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! this enormous sense of relief washed through me, one like I'd never known. I was so, so naturally thankful that 2009 was finally over that my spirit reacted with such intrinsic, unanticipated peace. This year, at Seacrets in Ocean City, my four inch platform heels dug deep in the sand, Katie grabbed my hand at 11:59 and said Let's Pray. And we did, and my prayers were all about giving thanks, and this time at the turn of the year with the sloppy tourists and bemused locals on-looking all around, what happened was a great flexed openness, a widening that felt like a smile inside of enthusiasm. This time I was so, so very excited not about the end of my year but about the good things to come with the beginning of a new one. Which is why it was so strange that the rest of my NY Eve was full of this deep feeling of having my heels dug in, a feeling so primal and rooted it felt almost like anger. It's how I've been feeling, or did, for most of the last month of the year.
I've worked hard, in slow subtle ways over many years, to integrate diplomacy in to my character because as a younger woman it was an area I was greatly lacking. Self-introspection has helped me to refine this, particularly by learning to practice how to let you just be you. That has happened by first learning how to lovingly accept me for who and how I am being or behaving right now, by becoming conscious of this and of what's motivating my thoughts, moods and reactions. Accepting me helps me not expect you to be anyone other than you, with your own set of thoughts and motivators and feelings and reactions. And indeed finding room to accept you for who you are and how you're behaving right now is liberating because it frees up my focus: your actions aren't all about me. It's very peaceful not having to take things personally. I truly believe I've made good habit out of meeting you where you are and the the cool bonus feature is that folks tend to dole me the same kindness in return. Meeting the world where it is from moment to moment can be a tremendously gratifying experience.
Until it's not.
At times you can appear very stubborn and selfish in relationships. You will give over 100%, but once you reach the halfway mark in giving OR receiving, a herd of elephants could not push you further if you feel the other is not coming up with his or her fair share... When angered you can be almost warlike, as if you were a general plotting a strategy.
This excerpt comes from my friend and mentor Gretchen who gave me an 8 page single-spaced print-out of my stars when I turned 30, and it was so eerily spot-on at the time that the experience of reading it was like watching a supernatural movie that totally covers you in chills. I actually had to put it away and couldn't look at it for several months because it mapped me out so accurately. That said, it's served over the years as a guidepost for my growth and has provided answers, insights and soul-breath where otherwise none has been. Which is why the segment above was running through my mind in bed yesterday morning New Years Day, with the following visual images waking me as if I'd awoke mid-dream.
In my head thick steel doors were literally slamming down and vaulting shut. Each door had a person or experience attached in a feeling-way to it, and with each closure I felt my self literally filling with vitality and a free-flowingness. Literally, I was laying there suddenly awake, with clarity but in a half-dreamy state. And doors were vaulting closed, and this feeling of absolutely NO MORE was filling me. NO MORE being taken for granted or exploited in my going-ons with other people was an awareness from deep within, and it quickly started to settle-up in direct vision for me and my own self-understanding. Suddenly my perhaps seemingly arrogant or selfish not-budging-even-for-a-herd-of-elephants-behavior of speaking-my-mind-directly-and-with-no-remorse over the past several weeks made sense. To be clear: since Thanksgiving, when I started my new job, I can site (but will not in detail right here) at least eight different specific work, social, familial, friend and/or romantic/sexual examples of me standing up in a fiery but clear-minded way and speaking my mind about behavior or decisions or treatment that were unacceptable to me. Examples of me being abruptly vocal or making choices in which I did not budge and did not feel apologetic at all for stating where I stood. And yesterday it was like the great reckoning occurred: I got the importance of being clear and clean within my boundaries, for myself.
The thing about it is that in the wake of this month or so I feel my actions or the times I've expressed myself could well have come out so blatantly that maybe they seemed brutal, or almost warlike. In every instance it's happened almost despite myself. Regardless of the quiet time, meditation, group-activities, being of service or other practices I've employed to try to somewhat yield this behavior. After more than once dropping straight ghetto on New Years Eve and telling it how it was, I finally just surrenedered. Fuck it, I figured. I am who the hell I am. There's really no escaping me.
And then it was New Years Day, and the clarity was with me about all these areas where I need to reassess what for me is ok and what's not. Because truly, who wants to have to be pushed to the warlike edge? Like someone once told me, it's okay to be honest but it doesn't mean you get to be an asshole...And I apologize if at all that's how I've come off!! Here I am, it is a new year, my focus having been re-aligned, reigned back in and me grateful for it, reflecting on these lessons and on what's to come with this new wisdom I've gained. I only hope that the people who love me, especially in the past month, can practice on me what I've really truly tried to lovingly apply over the years with them: accepting me for who I am and letting me be where I am at.
I guess I've got decisions to make that really aren't at all about any of them.
On December 31, 2009, I was standing in Trump Casino in Atlantic City with Laura Walsh and Katie. Neon lights and the low white-noise dinging of electronic bells, the splintered salt-wrecked boardwalk under the black sky with fast grey clouds and the ocean rectifying itself over and over right outside. The moment all the drunks and the lushes hurtled out their bellowed cries of HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! this enormous sense of relief washed through me, one like I'd never known. I was so, so naturally thankful that 2009 was finally over that my spirit reacted with such intrinsic, unanticipated peace. This year, at Seacrets in Ocean City, my four inch platform heels dug deep in the sand, Katie grabbed my hand at 11:59 and said Let's Pray. And we did, and my prayers were all about giving thanks, and this time at the turn of the year with the sloppy tourists and bemused locals on-looking all around, what happened was a great flexed openness, a widening that felt like a smile inside of enthusiasm. This time I was so, so very excited not about the end of my year but about the good things to come with the beginning of a new one. Which is why it was so strange that the rest of my NY Eve was full of this deep feeling of having my heels dug in, a feeling so primal and rooted it felt almost like anger. It's how I've been feeling, or did, for most of the last month of the year.
I've worked hard, in slow subtle ways over many years, to integrate diplomacy in to my character because as a younger woman it was an area I was greatly lacking. Self-introspection has helped me to refine this, particularly by learning to practice how to let you just be you. That has happened by first learning how to lovingly accept me for who and how I am being or behaving right now, by becoming conscious of this and of what's motivating my thoughts, moods and reactions. Accepting me helps me not expect you to be anyone other than you, with your own set of thoughts and motivators and feelings and reactions. And indeed finding room to accept you for who you are and how you're behaving right now is liberating because it frees up my focus: your actions aren't all about me. It's very peaceful not having to take things personally. I truly believe I've made good habit out of meeting you where you are and the the cool bonus feature is that folks tend to dole me the same kindness in return. Meeting the world where it is from moment to moment can be a tremendously gratifying experience.
Until it's not.
At times you can appear very stubborn and selfish in relationships. You will give over 100%, but once you reach the halfway mark in giving OR receiving, a herd of elephants could not push you further if you feel the other is not coming up with his or her fair share... When angered you can be almost warlike, as if you were a general plotting a strategy.
This excerpt comes from my friend and mentor Gretchen who gave me an 8 page single-spaced print-out of my stars when I turned 30, and it was so eerily spot-on at the time that the experience of reading it was like watching a supernatural movie that totally covers you in chills. I actually had to put it away and couldn't look at it for several months because it mapped me out so accurately. That said, it's served over the years as a guidepost for my growth and has provided answers, insights and soul-breath where otherwise none has been. Which is why the segment above was running through my mind in bed yesterday morning New Years Day, with the following visual images waking me as if I'd awoke mid-dream.
In my head thick steel doors were literally slamming down and vaulting shut. Each door had a person or experience attached in a feeling-way to it, and with each closure I felt my self literally filling with vitality and a free-flowingness. Literally, I was laying there suddenly awake, with clarity but in a half-dreamy state. And doors were vaulting closed, and this feeling of absolutely NO MORE was filling me. NO MORE being taken for granted or exploited in my going-ons with other people was an awareness from deep within, and it quickly started to settle-up in direct vision for me and my own self-understanding. Suddenly my perhaps seemingly arrogant or selfish not-budging-even-for-a-herd-of-elephants-behavior of speaking-my-mind-directly-and-with-no-remorse over the past several weeks made sense. To be clear: since Thanksgiving, when I started my new job, I can site (but will not in detail right here) at least eight different specific work, social, familial, friend and/or romantic/sexual examples of me standing up in a fiery but clear-minded way and speaking my mind about behavior or decisions or treatment that were unacceptable to me. Examples of me being abruptly vocal or making choices in which I did not budge and did not feel apologetic at all for stating where I stood. And yesterday it was like the great reckoning occurred: I got the importance of being clear and clean within my boundaries, for myself.
The thing about it is that in the wake of this month or so I feel my actions or the times I've expressed myself could well have come out so blatantly that maybe they seemed brutal, or almost warlike. In every instance it's happened almost despite myself. Regardless of the quiet time, meditation, group-activities, being of service or other practices I've employed to try to somewhat yield this behavior. After more than once dropping straight ghetto on New Years Eve and telling it how it was, I finally just surrenedered. Fuck it, I figured. I am who the hell I am. There's really no escaping me.
And then it was New Years Day, and the clarity was with me about all these areas where I need to reassess what for me is ok and what's not. Because truly, who wants to have to be pushed to the warlike edge? Like someone once told me, it's okay to be honest but it doesn't mean you get to be an asshole...And I apologize if at all that's how I've come off!! Here I am, it is a new year, my focus having been re-aligned, reigned back in and me grateful for it, reflecting on these lessons and on what's to come with this new wisdom I've gained. I only hope that the people who love me, especially in the past month, can practice on me what I've really truly tried to lovingly apply over the years with them: accepting me for who I am and letting me be where I am at.
I guess I've got decisions to make that really aren't at all about any of them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)