I seem to have a backlog of things, from this life or another one I don’t know, that are bubbling up to the surface right now because I am actually in a stable, secure place where I can handle it. I think. In my journey to become enlightened, I’ve been asking to integrate and love every single part of my human experience.

Wow, that was a bell that can’t be un-rung.

I want to say, I am ready for this to be over yesterday. Over the past few months, and most intensely lately I’ve been experiencing a lot of uncomfortable emotions like fear, anger, and depression. Sometimes I know what it’s about, but most of the time I don’t. Most of the time it just feels like emotional or physical pain. I also feel like over the past several months I’ve become disconnected from a lot of friends that used to be very close because I can’t afford the energy that I used to spend on them, and because I am so freaking sensitive that I can’t deal with anyone else’s stuff right now.

It’s hard for me, because I have studied a lot of Abraham Hicks and I really do believe in trying to find the best feeling thought and trying to move up the emotional scale. I don’t want to wallow in my misery. I want to break the negative-feeling patterns. A big part of me wants to be like ok, what is this drama about, I am ready to just be ok now. Get over it!

That isn’t working out so well for me, though. The more I try to push it away, the worse it gets. It’s like a chinese finger trap.

So, this morning when I woke up, and there it was, I just said “hi.” No scolding it, no saying “why me” “why now” or “go away”. I am experiencing pain right now, and that is ok. I think it’s great that I am in a place in my life where I can go through this healing process. I love it that I can feel many things at once, and that pain is not the only thing I am feeling right now. I am grateful for this opportunity to cultivate compassion for myself. It’s not the entirety of me, but it isn’t not-me either. I am done with the battle, and the kicking and screaming — I am going to try to learn how to dance with it.

Abraham would say, ‘overwhelm’ is when you’re summoning more life force to flow through you than you’re allowing.

The overarching theme of August, for me, has been exhaustion. So! I have come to a point where I want to consciously make an effort to baby myself, to see if I can coax my body into allowing greater and greater amounts of life force energy to flow through it.

I’m going to focus on making use of things that are easily and immediately available in my current environment. Here is what I am going to do:

- push the water. At least 8 glasses a day.
- push the fluids — non-caffeinated tea, juice, soup
- breathe deeply. It’s amazing that two of the most relaxing and healing ingredients to life, air and water, are available to most of us in unlimited supply and we don’t take full advantage of them. This is perhaps the hardest for me of all of them, because most of my breathing isn’t conscious.
- no caffeine. I have been working on this project all month and think I’m finally past the cravings and headaches. Yay!
- stretch, every morning
- meditate, every morning
- go to the sauna. I keep forgetting that I bought a bunch of passes a while back that I have hardly used.
- if I need to and have the time, if it feels good, I am going to permit myself an afternoon nap
- be on the lookout for more simple things to incorporate

Additionally, I am eyeing this 8-week program for beginning runners.

On the walk to the Westside, I thought about the intimacy that I have with my cafes. For example: I know what they have at the Westside and I know what I like. I know how much it costs, and that they serve it only on the weekdays and not on the weekends, and I know that they are likely to run out by 11. And at the Cafe Trieste, I know the baristas by name, and they know me, and I know what they have and how much it costs, and what I like, and when they’re likely to run out of it. I love that kind of familiarity — I love that the baristas smile when they see me again — I feel like they have an interest in my life, even if they don’t know the exact details of it as well as I know the price of coffee. They notice when I don’t come, and they notice when I am well or preoccupied or sleepy. And  yeah, I know, they’re just doing their job, and I am just buying my breakfast, but there are layers and layers of buttery sweetness to our little ritual that go beyond my handing them the money and them giving me the biscuit.

At this point, I could make this post about cafes, but I think that I am going to veer off in the direction of repetition. The intimacy of familiarity. 

Because this morning, as I was waking up, drifting in and out of sleep, my childhood piano teacher, Mrs. Van Norman, who passed out of her body maybe eight years ago decided to say hello to me. I, in my hypnogogia, was stricken with the power and beauty of the love and connection that extends beyond the grave.

Our relationship was full of the intimacy of repetition and ritual. I saw her once a week for almost 14 years. She taught me to practice practice practice! Every day, no matter what. The first thing she would ask, when we started our lesson, was “did you practice?” And of course we knew we’d better say yes! And if there was a tricky part, we’d just have to do it again. And again, and again. And if we did it well, we should do it again, because doing it again when it’s good is so beautiful.

But, believe it or not, there is such a thing as too much practice. I was astonished once, when she told me to stop practicing the piece that I was going to play for a piano competition. She said that I was starting to get tired of it, and putting it away for a little while would help. 

My two brothers and I were her only students at that late period in her life. She had said she wasn’t taking any more students, but when she met us she couldn’t help herself because we were so cute and sweet! We were the apples of her eye, and I believe she stuck around longer in her physical body because there was such pleasure for her in that transaction. She had a job: to guide us on the straight and narrow path of the classical piano tradition, and our job was to be taught.

But she didn’t only teach us about music. She loved music, and she loved us, and so every lesson was mainly about love. Loving Mrs. Van Norman, and showing it to her by being faithful to the practice of the piano. Loving Beethoven, who is so very easy to love, and loving Bach, whose intricate mathematical inventions I connected with very easily. But sometimes it was harder — Chopin was not so easy for me, for instance. I remember her saying once, when I was blasting through a nocturne, “Marian, a nocturne is not an invention! I think you need to go fall in love with someone, and then come back and fall in love with the spirit of Chopin.”

And so anyway, there was Mrs. Van Norman this morning, who went away from this physical plane, but resurfaced in my consciousness for a moment, to remind me of the wisdom and virtue in ritual, in practice. All relationship is practice, and all practice is relationship, and all relationship is about the dance of going away and coming back.

You see, when you meet something once, like a cafe or a person or a piece, there is an exciting kind of unfamiliarity about it. New things to discover! But in the newness, you can miss a lot. You don’t have a chance to notice the nuances of the different kinds of ways that it can be. You don’t know whether you’ll be $3.50 worth of satisfied with that biscuit, or whether it’s likely to be stale. You don’t notice that there are new pictures on the wall, as opposed to the old ones, or if that man likes to sit outside in the front on the weekends around 5pm. You don’t know if the new person is having a good day or a bad one, based on their demeanor, because you don’t know the way they usually are. You don’t know what parts to anticipate, which ones will be tricky, and what you’ll really like, with music, until you’ve played through it a few times. 

A lot of books are the best when reading them for the first time, which is why I mostly don’t read a book more than once. A favorite book would have to be one that I want to get into over and over again, admiring it from every angle, soaking up new details every time I read it, remembering what I was thinking or what I was doing the last time I read it.  The limitations of my time/space reality do not permit me to have this kind of familiarity with every book that I own or come across, for there are far too many books in the world, and too many words that have been written. But the ones that really do it for me like that — there is something special about that, even because I must choose them over others. 

There are many ways of coming back to something. Every time I come back to write, I am nurturing my relationship with writing. Every time I come back to a specific piece of writing, I am having my relationship with writing and my relationship with that piece of writing. And even, when I read something else that was written, I engage with my relationship with writing. And while I realize that it’s best to put in the time every day, there are times when it really is better to put something away for a rest before coming back to it.

This is the essence of true romance, I believe — the putting away, and coming back, and the feeling excited by the newness created by the absence and loving the oldness and the newness all at the same time. Each new time adding a layer. Layers and layers, I muse, as I take a bite of my biscuit.

I unfollowed a woman on Twitter today because she is an Atheist who keeps tweeting about how annoying the Christians are, how annoying their music is, how they all hate her because she’s an Atheist, how she hates Jesus (what did he ever do to her I wonder?) Her state of annoyance is annoying.  I am not a Christian, nor do I have a particular fondness for them, but I wonder if she really hates Christians so much, why she pays so much attention to them? Does she like being annoyed? Or does she think that by pushing against them she’s going to make them go away? Or does she think that by pushing against them she’s defining herself? Or does she think that she’s winning anyone over to her side? I don’t know. 

A wise and beautiful man, a friend of mine, holds his Atheism in such a sweet way. He doesn’t believe in God, but he doesn’t have an emotional charge about anyone else’s opinion on the subject. He doesn’t feel threatened or annoyed or turned off when I talk about my woo-woo stuff, because he knows it’s just me being me, and I don’t feel separated from him that he doesn’t always use the same language that I do to describe that creative life force energy that flows like rivers through his fingertips. And actually I don’t want everyone else to be like me — I don’t feel like that would make the world a better place. I like it that I have my ways and other people have their ways. There would be no conversation, otherwise.

It’s really strange to me to pick sides and define your enemy. As if the world were full of only Christians and Atheists, or if all Christians or all Atheists thought the same way. I bet you, Atheist woman, that there are a lot of annoying Atheists out there too. *cough*

Feminists vs Patriarchy, Republicans vs. Democrats, Lesbians vs. Everyone Else. Having spent a lot of time around lesbians, straight people, republicans, democrats, christians and atheists, I seem to perceive a pattern that often the most marginalized of people are also the ones who push the hardest. That makes a lot of sense, because if you are marginalized you’d have a heckova clear idea what doesn’t work for you. And that is great, actually except that it’s a sucky place to get stuck. This is what I do not want. This is really, really what I do not want. Let me spend a whole conversation, a whole Twitter feed, a whole dissertation or a whole life telling you how much I don’t want it and why. And when after all that, is a time when it would be appropriate to let yourself feel happy in spite of it all? 

It’s interesting to me to see people harp on Obama now. He gets so much stuff heaped on him, from everyone. He’s the catch-all of all external circumstances. If we can’t control ‘em, he should, and if he doesn’t, fail! It sounds like a canned replication of every other thing they’ve had about President X or political party X. It’s like madlibs. It’s like, I have this habit of thought and this is the way I think and I am just going to keep reacting to my environment in the way that I remember. How weird would it be to live in a society where we predominately appreciated the service that our president performs? It would be like living on a different planet! Or at least in a different country. What would that look like? I don’t even know. 

Controlling external circumstances, man, it sucks and it is a pain in the ass and just thinking about it makes me tired. And here I am pushing against the pushing against. I’m no better than that Atheist woman. I’m saying “hey, look at her, she’s doing something that I don’t want to do.” Of course I do it too. I am a relatively normal human being (ha ha). Let’s see… what are some of the external circumstances I use as an excuse to feel bad. 

Well, there’s street violence/street harassment. I can get all worked up in a froth about that, being angry that it’s like I have less of a right to use the street as anyone else. Rape. Not a fan. I get mad at jokes about killing hookers that seem to be all the rage on South Park and Family Guy. Aaaaand… the tricky thing is that almost anyone would agree with me that I am right to not like these things. I am perfectly justified in my moral outrage. But at the same time, these things have existed before I was born. They exist in a lot of instances at any given moment, all over the world. If I wanted to spend a lot of time making it my business to be mad about these things, I could make a career out of being an angry, angry person. 

But, I don’t need nor want to carry that torch. I am not going to pretend it doesn’t exist… because that would be pushing in a different way. But I am not going to go out and try to find it and complain about it and complain about it and talk to more people who are mad about it and start a club and become the president of the club and make a committee and have a protest. I am going to be aware that stuff that I don’t want exists — how can I not be aware of stuff that has come into my life experience? But then, I am going to think about what I do want, and what I like, and what makes me happy. I am going to dream of the world the way I want to be, and then I am going to create it. I am going to fervently follow the love of my own guiding star — no pushing required.

That story feels better to me than overwhelm. I want to tweak it a little more. How about — all kinds of things are lining up for me. I can see them right now. I am not used to allowing so much creative life force energy to flow through me, but it is the most wonderful thing that I have ever experienced. When I feel overwhelmed, I will remind myself that I don’t  have to ‘do’ anything for it to be good — it already is good. My job, primarily, is to vibrate with love. That’s where all the clarity, good ideas, the beautiful music, the uplifting stories, the prosperity and peace and people I love, and me, my higher self, and everything that I want — that is where it all is. That is the airplane! It’s much more work, and much more overwhelming/insecure/dangerous to be dangling by your fingernails just outside the airplane than to be sitting inside the airplane, even though in both cases  you’d be going the same speed. 

I am on a mission. A mission to be squarely in love. No two ways about it, just love love love.

But then inevitably came the time when it was over, our happy breakfast and singing song time. His hair was combed and his tie was tied, and I would not see him for like, forever, or all day which was the same thing to me.

Then mom and I would play peekaboo.

Today I said goodbye for the I-don’t-know-how-many’th time to my lover, who is moving to the East Coast for an internship. I have said goodbye and goodbye and goodbye and goodbye! I said goodbye to him every time he went home to his soon-to-be-ex-apartment in San Jose, and I also said goodbye to him in a pretty big way at the end of January when I decided to call off the girlfriend/boyfriend thing we had going on for eight months. Then, since he decided to start talking to me again last month I wished him well on his trip and said goodbye to him again, and then again on Friday night and again this morning. And that had better be enough, because now I am done. Finished!

I posted the death card (from the Deviant Moon Tarot) to illustrate this post because I think it’s morbidly funny — the smiling pregnant death mother stepping on the head of her pleading child. Maybe she is performing an act of kindness – maybe her child is asking to be killed. Maybe for these skeletezoid deathling creatures, death is just a big game of peekaboo. Hello, goodbye, it’s all the same. Say hello so that you can say goodbye, and say goodbye so that you can say hello. And that is really the thing, I think. The narrator of me doesn’t believe in the permanence/reality of death, goodbye, or separation. It’s just my character that gets all wrapped up in the drama of it. Realistically, though, it would be tiresome if we never said goodbye. I can’t imagine wanting to keep everyone all up in my face all the time. Bleh! Saying goodbye is great because it makes room for more and new stuff, just like killing babies makes room for new babies. Er…

So I wonder then, what is this, this flutter of the heart, this catch in my throat when I say goodbye sometimes? Is my inner three-year-old really stuck on this part of peekaboo, and not trusting that it’s all temporary? Is it a habit of thought, to go into the loss and separation thing? Or maybe I should just think of it as a reminder that I care, and leave it at that. Can’t be all daisies and chipmunks all the time, and what fun would life be if you can’t appreciate a little drama now and then.

And on that note, I will leave you with Barbra Streisand.

I drew a card for writing today, and this is the one that I came up with. I love it so much. It really does summarize what I am doing. The image is of the globe pouring her tears into a bowl that I am holding. And here it is: the integration of my life into something that I can relate, something that I can tell, something, an essence, the water, that is life-giving to me and the whole world around me. All against the beauty of the stars in the sky and the barren crater landscape, and something that looks like it could be the northern lights.

So here is to you my lovely world, my lovely universe. I am offering my bowl to hold your tears.

As she passed the shadow of an alley she caught a movement in the corner of her left eye. Following her with his eyes was a man in a black leather jacket. She pretended that she didn’t see him, but walked a little faster. Click-click click-click click-click
She glanced back, and saw that he was walking in the same direction. She crossed to her right-hand side of the street, and began to walk in the direction from which she had come. Now behind her, the man stopped walking. He crossed to her side of the street. She turned left around the corner, pressed her back against the wet brick wall, removing one of her shoes. How could he not know that she had stopped walking; her shoes were no longer announcing the fact. In the sound gaps left by the silence of her shoes, she could hear the man’s insidious leather soles. As his steps slowed. As he stopped at the corner. Click.

Time hung mockingly in the air as the mist condensed on the nape of her neck.

BANG shot the gun as she knocked it out of his hand with her shoe, cutting his wrist with the sharp heel.  She grabbed the pistol from his dazed grip and with it delivered a swift blow to his head.

With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing. — James Carse

Most people like to end their stories end at the end, but I like to end my stories at the beginning. “And they all lived happily ever after” or “And each one got exactly what they secretly desired” or “So it really depends on how you look at it.” It puts my mind at ease to know that everything is going to turn out alright. If I know that it is going to turn out alright, if I know there is a safe place to come back to, it doesn’t matter how uncomfortable things get in the middle, because resolution is inevitable. The suspense, the curiosity that draws me forward, is derived from the mystery of the middle.

I like to think of endings without their beginnings and middles, complete and whole in themselves. In a way, they are the entirety of the picture — the finished snapshot. Sometimes I just sit around and think of endings. One day I was playing with a deck of storytelling cards that had one-line endings for fairy tales. While I was playing with them, I was thinking about the stories that we tell, and I was thinking that it would be fun to incorporate some of these endings into the stories that I tell. It occurred to me to start carrying them around with me — at least the ones that I like, and start making up places in my life where they would fit. It would be fun to have props in this 3D choose-your-own-adventure that I like to call my life. It would be even more fun if I noticed that one of my ending cards came up, and showed them to the people who are participating in the story with me, so that they can trip out with me on my trippy little games. “And for all I know, they may be dancing still.” or “Her sorrow came to an end and her joy began”, or “And so the object was returned to it’s rightful owner,” which seemed like a particularly auspicious ending. I slipped it into the little plastic sheath where I kept my bus pass.

One day I was shopping for groceries with my friend, Walter, who is, I am sorry to say, a little bit of a stick in the mud. I headed out the door in a rush, and didn’t have a purse at the time, and was wearing a skirt, and anyway I stuck my bus pass in my waistband which probably wasn’t the smartest place in the world to put it. And sure enough, it and I did part ways somewhere as I imagine in retrospect, in the zucchinis.

I told Walter, just a little bit of a whisper in his ear, that I was looking for my bus pass but that he didn’t have to worry about it, just keep his eye out for it. What I did not expect him to do was start freaking out. He said “where did you last see it?!” “Well, I don’t know, somewhere around here… you know, it’s really not such a big deal, either it is or it isn’t here, and either one is ok.” “No it’s not OK!” he said. “It’s like $45 that you have to spend again.” “Yeah, I don’t know how I will ever recover.” I said sardonically. “It’s a big deal! I don’t know how you can be so casual about it!” “I don’t know why you go so easily into panic mode!” I said. “If it is here, then good. And if it is not here, how does worrying help anything? If it doesn’t matter to me at all, why should it matter to you?” Walter didn’t have a good answer, but he clearly thought that I was super flaky and he didn’t understand… never mind the bus pass, he didn’t understand how I hadn’t been hit by a bus or something after 25 years of being the way that I am.

Oh, the miracle of life!

At the counter, I asked the cashier if anyone had found a bus pass. She promptly handed it to me, and I pulled it out of the plastic sheath. One of the cards said “and then the object was returned to its rightful owner.” I showed it to Walter. “Read it and weep!” I laughed. “You don’t seriously think that it came back to you because of that silly card, do you?” “Why does it matter ‘why’ it came back to me? How can we ever know? I personally think my story is charming, but I am not going to try to make you ‘believe’ it. Your truth is whatever seems good to you.” (I personally think it’s a little nutty to think that putting such an overt message out to the universe has no meaning. Maybe I lost it just so that I could find it again.)

It’s hard to talk to the Walters of the World, because people who think that life is random and meaningless have a meaningless experience. There is space for magic in my reality, but not in theirs. Walter seemed angry that (against my strong advice) he had expended so much emotional energy on my situation. So, he grumped off, thinking that I was completely crazy to rely on fluffy things like fairy tale endings, and I laughed and proceeded to cast a spell on my wallet as well.

It has been returned to me, content in tact, several times since then.

Sometimes I wonder if my “return to me” spells encourage my things to leave in the first place so that they can return. I have since then discontinued the “return to me” spell and started casting a “stay safe” or “stay with me” spell. I have not lost my wallet since then, which is much better, because losing it is stressful and annoying, even if there are no Walters to stomp around and panic.

A few weeks ago, some kids stole three solar lights out of our front garden. My landlord was pretty tweaked. “I can’t afford to keep on buying lights if they’re just going to get taken away! It’s like we can’t have nice things in the front yard.” She wasn’t beginning at the end (which is, of course, totally arbitrary). I said “well, I agree with you, but that story doesn’t feel good to me.  Instead, the story I am going to tell is “whenever people take lights out of the front yard, the universe gives us even more.” Last night, my friend who is moving out of town called to say that he knew I probably didn’t need more lights, but did I want them? He had eleven to give away and he thought he would ask me first.

Most people like to begin their stories at the beginning, but I like to begin my stories at the end. Because every beginning makes a space for a new end, and every end makes a space for a new beginning.

I realized today that one of the things that I sometimes take for granted is WANTING. I want. My dad used to say in a finger-shakey way that there is no “enough”, that no matter how much people have they will always want more. But why is that a bad thing? Sometimes I tell myself I should just be happy with what I have, why do I have to want so much? But the thing is, I am happy with what I have AND I want. Wanting is something that I can appreciate, too. I mean, what would happen if one didn’t want anything? That would be pretty boring! And it is so much sweeter to get something if you have wanted it first. If you never wanted it to begin with, then it wouldn’t seem particularly special. If you were born and had everything just perfect so you could sit around and enjoy it…? *yawn* No one does that! Everyone wants something. I think it is great to want. It is a sign of vitality and enthusiasm and eagerness to live life.

I am a want-er, and I am proud of it! And let it never be said that I don’t know what I want. I might not know EVERYTHING I want but I do know quite a few things that I definitely want. And I have learned about who I am not, as well as who I am, and who I am becoming. My inner being just says “more and more and more and more and more and more and more.”