Kathy's Blog

To the Class of 2011

2011-06-18T12:55:00.001-07:00

My son graduated from the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts yesterday. LACHSA is filled with talented, dedicated artists, and my son, as a member of the theatre department, has spent four years with his classmates. We have hosted innumerable film shoots in our back yard, shuttled to and from rehearsals, given standing ovations at many shows, and have watched this group of kids blossom into talented, eager, hungry young artists waiting to take the world of stage and screen by the tail.

From the ceremony at Disney Hall, to our lavishly indulgent dinner at the Pacific Dining Car, to the blow out after party at our house (that ended 16 hours later)... it was a magnificent, celebratory day.

Graduations evoke tears in the same that weddings do. They are ceremonies laced with hope and optimism and possibility. They are the culmination of one long and hard won journey, and signify the embarkation on a new and frightfully unknown voyage. The tears are ones of joy and relief and fear and poignancy. The graduates stand at a perfect balancing point moment between youth and adulthood, aching to fly with new wings, while loving the good friends and the shared memories of their fellow fledglings in the nest.

My husband Roger, his first wife (whom we all adore), the boys and I had made reservations at the Pacific Dining Car. And we were delighted when we found that our son's best friend, with whom he is rooming at college in Boston next year, was also having his celebration there, with his mom and a friend of hers. We changed to a table of eight, ordered some drinks, and settled in to what became one of the most undeniably great dinners of our lives.

The food was perfection, the conversation went to deep and satisfying places. The hierarchy between generations was flattened, and we were all honest, funny, happy, and truly ourselves. We were people who loved each other deeply, whether we had just met or had a lifetime together, and we were collectively dedicated to honoring the two graduates' accomplishments and to wishing them well on their new adventures going forward.

This was my toast to them:

This is about causes and conditions. There are an infinite number of things that have brought each of us here tonight, and without those things this moment could not have happened.

About five years ago, a girl we knew was unable to go to LACHSA. She had been accepted into the theatre arts department, was a shining star in her family and school, and she -- like our graduates -- had a sparkling future spread out before her like a feast. But she died after closing night of the 8th grade school musical. And the hearts of our town, and her classmates, and certainly her family, were broken in a way that will never fully be healed.

She was 14. And she never made it to high school. My son and I mourned her loss and the loss of her potential and the loss of her light. And through that mourning, my son came to understand something about himself, and we learned about this high school called LACHSA, and he realized that maybe it was his job to take up the torch that had been left untended when Marieke died, and he applied to the school, and he was accepted, and in this way he learned his life's passions.

The first week at LACHSA he met his best friend. They have been inseparable ever since. They have grown together, gotten in trouble together, shared their four years together, and now they are continuing to college together.

Roger's son went to LACHSA and was three years ahead of my son. When Roger and I started dating, one of the things that we found most indicative of how we may be "meant to be" was this fact that we have three sons, three years apart, all three want to be actors, and all three went (or are going) to LACHSA.

So there's a girl whose brief brilliant life lights a fire in the heart of a younger classmate. He takes up the torch and attends the school of her dreams. He meets another young man. His mother marries the father of another classmate. His brother entered the school last year. We all sit together at a feasting table, and we toast the infinity of the future, and the complex lace of the past. We toast Marieke and all she has meant to all of us.

Causes and conditions.

We are all connected. The life of one person changed all of our lives forever. One person performs a great scene, or writes a great paragraph, or sings a perfect high C ... and destinies are changed in a breath. Our art keeps us sane, gives us meaning, weaves a web of grace around our lives of hard work and emotional turmoil. One person has a spark, and it becomes someone else's flame, and that flame becomes a candle, and the candle becomes a torch. And we hand this life force from one to another, and thus keep our souls, and our humanity, and our passions fueled.

To the class of 2011... I wish you infinite blessings. I want to dip you all in a bath of inoculation from pain and hard knocks, but know that it is exactly those things that will continue to burnish and shape you. We, the older generation, cannot protect you... but we can love you, and encourage you, and share with you the stories we have learned.

Enjoy your summer. Enjoy your future. And keep your spark alive. There is no limit to the number of lives you touch.

And the flowers bloomed like madness

2011-03-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

It was the anger. The anger and the wit. The anger, the wit, and the intelligence. Mixed with a crazy rock 'n' roll bass line and the passionate drive of the brilliantly deranged.

Aqualung. The album was my bible in my last days of high school. I played it in my eight-track in my Chevy Impala Super Sport and then later in my dorm rooms and in my single apartments. I sang and cried and lived by the riffs, the achingly perfect breaks, the volume, the words.

It got me through my bitter divorce with organized religion. It saw me through emotional upheaval and uncertainty of a nature I couldn't begin to articulate. It accompanied me off my high school campus to smoke cigarettes and hang with the smart angry political crowd. It went with me to college, took road trips with me, sang me to sleep. It fed me words. And it spoke for me when I had none left.

Jethro Tull is doing a 40 year revival tour of Aqualung. We just booked tickets to fly to Phoenix to see a show, as the show in L.A. directly conflicts with a fundraiser I'm doing with Opera A La Carte. (Rock 'n' roll lives forever, but Gilbert & Sullivan takes some work to preserve.) We are cutting out of work early, flying in for the show, staying overnight and then sliding back into town just in time to set up lights and run a production. Then the next weekend my son graduates high school. And two days later Roger has surgery. And the beat goes on, on either side of this moment we have decided to carve out for ourselves.

So this is our present to us. I could not be happier if I had a boat load of Prozac. Or any drug, licit or otherwise. We cleaned the house this morning, with the system cranked up listening to the old fabulous tracks. We are nearly forty years past high school. We are bogged down with Schedule Cs and HELOCs and FAFSAs and work commitments and career choices. We are in our mid-fifties, and are actively managing the deaths of our parents, the flight of our children. The words inside my head intone "if not now, when?" with insistent monotony, louder every day, while the heaviness in my heart grows. The answer, at this point, for many things, could actually be "never." We're at that point.

When I first lived and breathed by the Aqualung code, I had other passions consuming my heart and head. Freedom was something to be fought for, clawed for, won at any cost. The imperative was to get out, to become myself, to be born. It was as painful as any labor, leaving me coughed up on the beaches of young adulthood, panting and disoriented for years. I thought I'd seen it all. And yet I never would have guessed that the fire was a finite resource. That in the face of all the keeping on, we could someday lose the juice.

So grabbing at this opportunity is more than just spending our grown-up paychecks on a high school remix. It's a defiance against the mandates of prioritization. It's a wrestling against the density of our schedules. And it's an up yours to the perplexing way the checkbook ledgers diminish even as we work harder and harder.

It feels good. It feels good to reconnect with that anger and drive. We should all periodically give the finger to this middle aged shit. It's really such a very inadequate way to reward ourselves for making it thus far.

Crank something up today. Crank up the music that got you through. Spend a few minutes remembering who you were and what credos you lived by and what dreams kept you sustained. And maybe... maybe... just do one of those dreams. Strum a few chords. Book a couple of tickets. Write a blog. Do it. In honor of your own bad self who suffered so much that you could live. In gratitude for all you've been through to get to this point, today, in your long strange trip.

May you be defiant.
May you be triumphant.
And may the flowers bloom like madness in the spring.

Howl

2011-02-08T13:54:00.000-08:00

Saw the movie "Howl" (2010, directed by Rob Epstein) last night and was taken by a single fact of Allen Ginsberg's life. For awhile he was working in San Francisco in an office job, in advertising, making some good money. He said he enjoyed the fact that he could do it, but wasn't really enjoying it intrinsically at all.

He started seeing a shrink who kept asking him, "What do you want to do? What would make you happy?"

And Allen Ginsberg say, pretty honestly, that all he really wanted to do was write, get stoned, fuck his lover, and contemplate art all day.

The shrink said, well, go ahead and to that.

And Ginsberg said, I can't do that. I'll get old, and gray, and I'll have pee stains on my underwear, and I'll live in this horrible apartment, and I'll be alone.

The doctor said, no, actually I don't think that will happen. You're a charming fellow. You'll do better than that.

So Ginsberg did it. He dropped out, got stoned, fucked his lover, contemplated art, and wrote Howl.

Think about it.

A Christmas Tree Memory

2010-12-24T18:10:00.000-08:00

We have Truman Capote's Christmas tree in our living room.

It is about two feet high and covered with ornaments that were last placed on it by his own hands, sometime before his death in 1984. How it came to us is a long story, but we did not steal the tree, nor did we just find it laying around in some Sotheby's auction catalog and decide we just couldn't live without it. It was given to us.

It's been sitting on top of our china cabinet for about a week, and it has suffused the house with a subtle, charming, mystery. It feels like it's trying to tell us something, impart some meaning... but what that quite is is difficult to tease out. We know very little about Truman's private life and we don't know anything about who gave him the ornaments (some of them inscribed with first names and years) or why they were chosen. We don't know what rooms this tree has graced, what people have looked upon it, or how many Christmases in how many cities it has seen.

It's Truman's tree. A great writer. A cultural icon. A man we never knew. And for some reason, his tree is in our room.

It seems, oddly, a fitting ending to a most remarkable year. This year saw huge shifts of power in my life. Three major areas of my life changed radically, and painfully, with more stress than I've experienced since the mid-70's when I first was on my own. For most of the year the stresses compounded upon themselves, never having the grace to come at me in single waves. I was nearly always battling on two or more fronts, in addition to trying to maintain my normal roles of wife, mother, and faithful corporate employee.

The areas of these three power shifts were, oddly enough, all family related. The balance of power tipped between me and a father figure, between me and my mother, and between me and my ex-husband, which resulted in a balance of power tipping between my children and their father. There were seismic shifts all across the board, above and below, plots and twists of Shakespearean scope and Greek archetype playing out, betrayals and failings and heroism and defeat.

The difference of where I was at the beginning of this year as opposed to where I am at the end, is vast. I am now a trusted financial adviser for my opera company. I am now a trusted financial adviser for my mother. I have just barely survived a huge legal battle that has resulted in a long-overdue formalization of roles and responsibilities between my ex-husband, myself, and our children. Apparently it was my year to finally have my voice heard. To engage in adult undertakings. To get beaten up like an official contender.

And yet despite all this, most of the time it felt like the worst year ever. It has taken a huge toll on me physically. I've never felt so old or run down, and it felt for awhile like I was getting sick just about every other day. But when I look at it in kind of global terms... looking at what the state was at the beginning of the year versus now... I see that the daily stresses were really representing bigger shifts afoot. They were symptoms of larger adjustments that probably also had something to do with my getting married last year, and (going further back) nearly dying a year and a half before that. Like concentric circles rippling outward. I thought I had gotten plenty grown up a long time ago. But apparently there are always more hills to climb, more growth to be pushed through.

Truman's tree is a fitting grace note to all this upheaval. There are so many unknowns contained within these little green branches that it seems to exist simply to add mystery and grace. It coming into our lives has reminded us that serendipity still exists. That surprise is still not only possible, but inevitable. Things can change in a heartbeat and you can go from the plodding footsteps of despair to angel wings with a knock on the door.

So that's what I'd like to share with you on this Christmas Eve. The battles you may be going through could possibly be part of something larger, something ultimately beneficial, some painful kind of growth that it is now your time to endure. But remember that surprise can come at any moment. And we never know what wonderment will come at us through the switchbacks of fate.

Aristotle, by Billy Collins

2010-12-08T18:04:00.000-08:00

This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her, your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes –
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unsolders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle –
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall
too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair, and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.

From Sophocles

2010-12-03T20:01:00.000-08:00

"Philoctetes":

Heroes. Victims.
Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes,
Every one of them
Convinced he's in the right;
All of them glad to repeat themselves
And their every last mistake
No matter what.

Ruby Slippers

2010-12-01T04:59:00.001-08:00

And then, there's this.

Two nights in a row. Unable to sleep more than about three hours. I drift off gratefully, sweetly. The blackness of sleep is thick upon me. And then... something happens. The dog, usually. Or something. I wake up, holding onto my dreams, as if they are breadcrumbs leading me back to that promised land. I let the dog out. I let him back in. And then I crawl back into bed.

My mind starts to click off, my body starts to relax. And then...

The stories start. The stories of my life. The schedules and lists, the teeming people, each with their own voice, clamoring for center stage. Snippets of my past, my present, my imagined future drift in and out, a montage of characters and interactions. The consummate rewriter, I work with each little scenario, compulsively. I move someone over to this side of the stage, I change motivations. I see how it plays out this way, then that. Over and over. Until the setting changes and a new scenario begins.

And as I was doing this for the past three hours, for the second night in a row, a few new thoughts started peering out from the wings. Thoughts about actual stories, things I could write. Instead of going down corridors and losing myself in alleyways of the past and present, I found myself transported, briefly, to fictional paths, with new faces and voices and scenes.

I remembered the truth that I came up with a few years ago in the hospital. That there are three main things in life; the three elements that absolutely matter the most. And they have a hierarchy: the body is the most important as, without it, there's not much to work with any more; our friends and family and connections who give us the most amount of happiness and joy, keep us grounded, save us in time of need; and finally, there's art. The consuming and production of it. The art, whether music or theatre or dance or words or crafting cabinetry or painting walls, the art is the thing that ties it all together. The art is the component of meaning. The art transports.

And suddenly I realized, again, that even though life seems very bleak in the dark hours when the veil is thin, the magic of that third element is always with us. Always with me. I can always summon the gods of art and beseech them to bestow their magic once again. The gods are always present and will always serve when called.

The gods, the muses, the art... it's like Dorothy's ruby slippers. Something I forget I have at my command. Something I use functionally, unthinkingly, forgetting its underlying power. And every once in awhile, in a small moment of grace, I remember that there's something else available to me in this world of lists and turmoil and responsibilities. There are those magic slippers. There is the ability to turn to that part of me that creates and say "There's no place like home, there's no place like home."

Feelin' Groovy

2010-11-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

Everyone's heard this a hundred times before. Maybe a billion. But: When your body feels better, you feel better.

Duh.

But, golly gee. It's really true.

During one horrible night over the weekend, when I tried to go to sleep without my Nyquil-induced coma, I woke up at about 3:40 and just could not go back to sleep. I mulled over everything there was to mull about: my symptoms so numerous I couldn't distinguish my sore throat from my headache from my fever from my cough; my mother's age and increasingly proportionate sweetness and dementia; my own age and the fact of all our mortality; the things I wish I'd done; the things I'll probably never do... you name it, I mulled it over.

At 4:30 I took two melatonin, downed some cough syrup, and settled back into bed confident that I would be soon sliding off into dream land.

At 5:00 I was still staring at the clock, going back over all the things I'd lost, all the people who hated me for not calling them enough, the things in the garage that needed sorting out, my god! the storage unit, I'd never get that dealt with and I'd be spending money every month, for ever... like throwing it away.. flushing it down the john, and why? because I was a loser and could never just get down and do anything and I'd better get used to it because I was now never going to have my mobility back again so the storage unit would stay unsorted... you get my drift.

At 5:30 I began marveling that I could actually take one Melatonin tablet, at 35,000 feet, with -65 degree Fahrenheit air surrounding the little metal container I was bobbling around in, completely at the mercy of some unknown entity in the cockpit, who probably wasn't even trying to fly the plane but who was him/herself completely at the mercy of some piece of software some bozo developer put together somewhere to fly planes over long distances at very high altitudes with like some funky old QA process and no functional specs and a list of Known Limitations a mile long, with no place to rest my neck, and annoying people yapping behind me, and children crying and stupid images burning through my eyelids from the video in the back of the seat in front of me (the little plane crawling with excruciating slowness across the map of the US, ticking of the miles in 12 foot increments, the miles decrementing with agonizing slowness, the smattering of little hamlets of farmhouse lights clumped in the dark far far below us, their inhabitants slumbering in their warm feather beds after an honest day's work and maybe a half hour or so watching Sarah Palin's Alaska before slipping off into dreamland, then staring back at the little plane on the monitor....oh look... we've got a ground speed of 555 miles and we've traveled exactly 10 miles), and how, freezing and neck spasming and annoyed and somewhat molecularly freaked out -- I could fall asleep within about 20 minutes.

But that night, with two tablets, and a very comfortable bed, and a sweet husband by my side and a goofball dog sleeping quietly on the floor, and a good day of watching Swamp Loggers under our belts, and all well and right and good with the world: nope. Could not sleep.

At 6:00 am I thought, my GOD it's going to be the night that I woke up at 3:40 and never went back to sleep.

And then, I must've, because the next time I looked it was all of 6:30. Thus even ruining my story (and martyrdom.)

And while I was ruminating about every single last part of me and my life that had gone off track, and wondering how in the world I would ever get any part of it back in shape again... that my days of exercising were certainly over, and my days of actually feeling happy were obviously gone, and that any wonder or joy or sense of mastery I ever had over anything was now going to progressively erode away until I would be laying in bed someday, at 87 (my mother's age) and I'd still feel like me but I would be old. Old old old. And my body wouldn't work and my brain would be bleak and, basically, I'd feel like I was feeling at right that moment... only I'd feel that way all the time.

And, well, you know, that certainly cheered me up.

So I made a little deal with myself. Very slowly, maybe, possibly... I could try to get back on track. And I wouldn't try to do it all at once because that would absolutely be impossible. But maybe there was one, or maybe two things I could do, for a week, to kind of try to sneak up on health, both mental and spiritual and physical. I wouldn't just jump into it, and further dislocate every bone in my body. But I'd stealthily, and carefully, and quietly... just try two things.

I would sit in meditation for five minutes a day.

And I would drink more water.

That's it. I couldn't solve anything more. In a place where there was no foothold to start from, the first goal was to get a foothold. And meditation has always worked for me (which is good as I, you know, married the meditation teacher). And water... hey. Always a good start.

So I've been doing it. Two days. And the sitting is like an oasis to my frenzied mind. It just feels good to stop. And I know this, and I've done this. But, gosh, it really works. And it felt like a balm to my sore and wounded brain.

And water. Water: good.

And then today I went and bought about $100 worth of high end supplements from Whole Foods. Including a sleep-inducing something that promises something called "relaxation" (whatever that is). And a supplement that addresses stress and immunity. Hmmm... ya think? So, yeah, that went into the basket. And some teas with pretty pictures and nice marketing writing on the box that make you feel better just reading them. Or at least you have the potential for feeling better.

And ... I'm feeling better. Like, actually really better. Roger of course feels like crap because the angel of death is now in his body... so maybe I'm just joyful I've been liberated... but... it's true. Body feels good; you feel good.

Photos from the 90's

2010-11-29T21:30:00.000-08:00

I attempted to do something yesterday, which was kind of remarkable in itself. But what I chose to do troubled my sleep and got into my sub-conscious in a way that I wasn't expecting.

I have boxes and boxes of photos. And I'm trying to, very gradually, get them in some kind of order. I manage to spend about 20 minutes on the project once every three months (which puts me at an estimated completion time of about 2060), but I figured a rainy afternoon in which I'm too sick to do anything else would be a good time to hack away at it.

I picked a box with pictures from the '90s. And over the next couple of hours I saw a long, bittersweet slide show of the first six years or so of my kids' lives, highlighted by many birthday parties, vacations, visits to grandparents, school events. I saw the first months of baby pictures for Spencer evolve into his first birthday party, held proudly by his godfather. I saw him blowing out his second set of birthday candles out at Travel Town, surrounded by an assortment of people I can barely remember. At two, he was not yet in school so I hadn't formed the close network of friends that I have now, so the people at that birthday party were all friends from our former lives... from Gavin's school days mainly.

Then Taylor was born, and I have a series of him and Spencer and Gavin in the hospital room, Spencer grinning proudly like he'd created his brother all by himself. I have a couple of sequences of them at four years old (Spencer) and about one (Taylor). And then a few later at about five and two. But it's obvious that life got pretty busy in those years and the only time the camera came out was for special occasions.

I found some pictures of a camping trip I took Spencer on, up to Northern California up by Tahoe. It was a reunion of some of my friends from college, all of whom (including myself) turning 40 that year. We felt so old. And we all had our four-year-olds with us. Most of my friends and I tracked exactly when we had kids, whether it was a hormonal alarm clock going of or just plain understanding that we'd never be more ready than we were right then. Since none of us were ready, we all collectively held our noses and took the plunge at the same time.

So the pictures from that series show Spencer's first touching of snow, and a piggy back ride on the shoulders of an old friend from college. There was a romance between Spencer and that friend's daughter, a romance that time and space conspired to thwart. But it was a poignant moment when they all came back down last summer for the wedding and the teenagers from that camping trip got to reconnect.

There are many pictures of the kids and I visiting with my mom, and many pictures of the kids with friends. Lots of birthdays, trips to Disneyland, trips with friends up to the long-lost, much lamented Mira Mar in Santa Barbara. Trips to the snow up in Angeles Crest to sled and build fluffy little snow people.

And there is even a set of pictures of me doing something without the kids -- a trip I took with my mom to New York in 1998. We both acknowledge that was the pinnacle of our relationship and our pictures reveal our mutual exuberance, our sense of adventure and extravagance.

Something happened to me on that trip. It was at a performance of The Lion King, which I cried all the way through. I remember being pierced with the understanding at that moment that my life needed to have more of a sense of joy in it. That I had lost, somewhere, the wonder, the buoyancy, the excitement.

All the pictures show happy joyful kids. And adults. But there are shadows in the pictures that of course I did not see at the time. Occasions that seem so happy in the picture, I remember being extraordinarily stressful behind the scenes. And looking at these pictures with my older, more informed eyes, I notice a few things. First of all, I'm always juggling. I'm juggling the kids, or have a wary eye cast over on something that needs my attention.

My (now ex) husband rarely appears in these pictures, and not because he was snapping the shutter. He just wasn't there. Except for some early birthday pictures, the only time he appears is when we're in certain groupings, with certain people, and I now see those images with a different understanding altogether.

And of course, I know that the closer we come to 1998, the closer we are moving towards changing these kids' lives indelibly. I look back at my old house and the pictures taken there and remember thinking that would be forever. I remember thinking that my partnership with my husband was solid and strong and that we'd be making our decisions together all the way through college and beyond.

But now, of course, I know that the course shifted. The paths diverged. And at the end of that box of pictures, I found a set of shots showing the duplex I moved into at the very end of 1998. A sweet little two story duplex. The pictures are from when I'd just moved in. My mom is there helping me furnish it; I'd left all unduplicated furnishings behind, so as to impact Gavin as little as possible. I had my brand new rug from Ikea on the living room floor (the same rug that Roger also bought, when he also separated from his wife, on the exact day I moved from Gavin's house). I do not yet have my bookcases. But the outline of the new life was there. A new life. A new, and much needed, beginning.

The kids are beaming in my arms, and there's an unmistakable lightness to all of us. I have a picture of me goofing around with Taylor (the only one of the whole box of hundreds of pictures where I'm seen being goofy and fooling around). And even though you'd think that these pictures would be laced with pain and stress and fatigue, the complete opposite is true: there is a light, there is a joy, there is the buoyancy that I'd missed for oh so long.

Chronic

2010-11-28T10:30:00.000-08:00

Now we're both sick. Roger's feeling all funky and I'm still blech on my concoction of decongestants, expectorants, suppressants and anything else I can find that sounds like it will boost my weary immune system. However, we have a fridge full of Thanksgiving leftovers, we've cleared our schedule of social and work engagements, and they say it's going to rain later. So, all in all, not a bad way to spend a vacation weekend.

Oh. Warning: Since I've sort of committed myself to writing a blog every day, you can now delete this along with every other "today I filed my nails" blog that takes the minutiae of daily life and blows it into headline-worthy 72 point type. Just in case you're wondering what I'm going to make of all this sickness and lethargy, I'll tell you right now -- there's nothing going on and it's highly doubtful I'll find anything meaningful to say by the end of it. I'm just going to spew out dumb stuff and then go take a nap. So... if you want to keep reading, be my guest, just don't expect much.

So, this morning I did nothing basically but loll around with Roger watching infomercials about folk singers and channel surfing to find the best reality shows. We spent a good 15 minutes watching "Deadly Women" featuring atrocious dramatizations of crimes involving women murderers, then about 20 minutes watching with dropped jaws a show about pet hoarding, featuring a woman with 300 cats. Unfortunately, we could not find anything on about swamp logging, which is my current favorite. And we couldn't get a channel that had a show on about moving big things with great difficulty (in this case, the Golden Gate Bridge). That bummed me out.

On the other hand, we did watch a great documentary ("Helvetica") which really kind of made our heads spin (more) with all the nuances a typeface brings to the table. So that was great.

And I finished a terrific book (Chronic City). I'm now an official fan of Jonathan Lethem, a fellow Bennington-ite who did what it takes to become a staggeringly good writer and make us all proud. I'd kind of love to write a paper about this book. It is weird and complex and it has layers and it got under my skin. I couldn't put it down for the last half, and the last few pages I doled out to myself because I didn't want to lose the weird, fantastic, very disturbing world he created.

But end it did, I now I'm back to searching in vain for Swamp Loggers.

Anyone have a good suggestion for a book that will both entertain and sustain itself artistically at the same time?

Viral Meditation

2010-11-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is being written in a drug-induced haze. Not anything super fun. Just loads of over the counter stuff. "Tussin" (I love the generic names), Nyquil, Cold Away (chinese herbs which usually work great), acetaminophen, and albuterol (which imparts a nice speedy edge to the soporific effects of the other stuff). I'm also taking copious amounts of Vitamin D, and a whole variety of other Chinese herbs.

I'm so locked down in the miseries of my body that I can hardly think.

But, in some ways, that's not altogether a bad thing. I breathe from my mouth, I cough from my chest, my eyes water constantly. I am consistently and acutely aware of every present moment.

This is what meditation is all about, I think in my haze. Present moment sensory awareness. I'm unable to construct a single delusional thought, so much so that I'm actually quite... well, calm. I wouldn't say happy. But stressing about the past and future is basically impossible when the present is so downright uncomfortable. I gaze out into the world through my red and scratchy eyes and think, OK. Whatever. It's neither good nor bad. It just is. And then I just concentrate on my breathing again.

It's meditation. Forced on my by the viruses that must've found me somewhere at 38,000 feet or in some train in Boston or NYC. The bug has gotten inside of me and forced me to stop, or tried very hard at least. So, OK. I'm stopping. Or trying very hard. And in the meanwhile I'll focus on my rattling breath. And contemplate my present moment through my senses. And enjoy the freedom from any deep or worrisome thoughts.

Whatever works. Frankly, I'd rather be in some excruciatingly expensive zendo being fed high end gourmet food and doing yoga all day, but... well... just imagining that is more difficult than it's worth. I'll take a sip of water. Feel it go down my scratchy throat. And then I'll see if I can breathe some more.

Radical Parenting #2

2010-11-26T09:00:00.000-08:00

Here's another radical idea. I'm convinced that this one notion is the single most insidious cause of bad parenting and fractured relationships between parents and children.

Ready?

Your children are not you.

You can play Mr. Potato Head games all day long and figure out if they have his ears and her irritability, or whether that funny wheezing laugh came form old Aunt Martha, and all that is really fun and all, but it actually doesn't address the fundamental fact that these children of ours are separate people.

The new word here is "separate." First, children are people. And secondly, they are separate.

Separate.

People.

This is not mitosis. Your little amoeba self does not suddenly and spontaneously split off into another little amoeba and then there are two of you. Your children may have aspects that remind you of you and other aspects that remind you of their other parent. But they are not you and you are not them.

Their choice in plaids does not reflect your style acumen. Their F in geometry was not done solely to remind you of your own humiliations in Middle School. If they like friends that you wouldn't choose... guess what? It's not up to you. They are not your friends, and it's not your choice. Sorry. But they are separate people.

You cannot project your needs, wants, fears, aspirations, dreams, desires, phobias, neuroses, joys, challenges, and successes onto these people. They are not your projection screens. If you hate the water, it's not your place to keep them from sailing. You can teach them to swim -- that's permissible. But you can't keep them from sailing because you don't like the water.

Their opinions about you don't matter either. They don't get to project their shit onto you any more than you get to project your shit onto them. Seriously. If they think you're a big bad meanie, OK then. They can do that. It doesn't mean it's so. And if they love you to pieces it doesn't mean you're perfect either. Everyone gets to still take responsibility for their own being and doing. They do. You do. Separate people.

I saw two examples of this recently, both during our recent slogs through highly traveled airport terminals.

In the first terminal, Spencer was accosted by a woman traveling with three young kids. She had all the stuff. The big puffy airline travel seat, the big fat assed stroller with bags and attachments sprouting out all over the place, the kids with their backpacks and the pouch on her front for the littlest marsupial. She was, maybe, in her late 30's/early 40's and she was traveling with three kids. Three kids AND about $3500 worth of additional equipment.

She enlisted Spencer into helping her. She asked him to take her picture. She asked him to take one of the big airline seats up through the aisle of the plane to get her situated. (Not like he didn't have his own backpack, duffle bag, and my own overflow stuff to deal with.) All this was fine, except for one thing she told him that stuck in my craw. "Hey," she said to him. "You know, not many people could do what I'm doing here."

And, I'm like... what? You mean, this is all about you? The whole point of this whole parade is so you can show the world that you can do it? I mean, it's not the most egregious comment in the world. There are certainly far worse things that she could've said or done that would've bugged me a whole lot more. But... there was ego involved. She was engaged in taking care of her kids and it wasn't about, you know, simply taking care of her kids. It was all about her.

And then there was this kid on the way back. Little girl, maybe two years old. First time I saw her I was immediately taken by her unique fashion sense. She had on a bright green and gray striped jumpsuit and bright red galoshes, that had fake shoestrings printed on them. She was standing in the middle of the aisle stating something factual to her mom who was about twelve feet away. She looked sure of herself, sure of her world, and easy in her place within it.

I watched them in the terminal and they ended up sitting in front of us. The kid occasionally got cranky, and cried a couple of times. She was a very little kid, after all. But what got to me what the way her mother handled her. She talked to her, throughout, like a very caring person would talk to someone she really liked and respected. She was not condescending, she did not lay down the law, she did not threaten or cajole or plead or punish.

When the little girl cried on the plane her mom said, "Wait, stop. I need to understand what you need." And immediately the kid stopped. The mom said "point to what you want, OK?" And the kid did something and then it was all OK again. At the end of the flight I heard the little girl ask her mom if it "was all better." And her mom said "yes, this flight was much better. Thank you." They'd had the conversation, they course corrected and -- what struck me as so neat -- the kid had incorporated into herself the desire to be better. It wasn't because of fear, or desire for a new treat, or because she had been punished into submission. They'd had the conversation, and she wanted to know if the new plan had gone well.

Neat. I would love to know what happens to that child as she grows up. I know both she and her mom felt very lucky to be paired with each other. And I felt lucky to be able to watch them for awhile.

Separate people.

Virtual Centerpiece

2010-11-25T11:29:00.000-08:00

I used to have a tradition of asking everyone who came to Thanksgiving dinner to bring a talisman to put in the center of the table, a representation of something that they were thankful for in their lives. I know that one of my first offerings was a little figurine of a sleeping baby (because it was my first Thanksgiving after Spencer was born -- or maybe my second! -- and I was deeply grateful for all the intermittent moments that he actually slept).

As we await guests and prepare food, I'm going to start off a list of things that I am thankful for on this day, and then I'm going to ask my guests to come in here at their leisure and add to the list.

So here goes:

On this day when we give thanks, I am grateful for...

My incredible family
Roger, who is so committed to taking care of me, and us, that it takes my breath away
Spencer and Taylor, the most amazing people I've ever had the pleasure to know
My beloved extended family - Xia, Zach, Mel, Pythia, David -- who have brought food, helped out, and made this day so warm and cozy
Everyone who did everything while I sat here blowing my nose
All of our incredible friends, north and south, east and west (and even right at home)
My mom's improving health
My banana slug sweatshirt
Robitussin DM
Nyquil
Tylenol
Soft soft Kleenex (TM)
Our collective sense of humor

From Roger:
Grocery shopping for my family and friends, filling my cart, greeting other shoppers (especially the "amateurs" who only come out on holidays), and feeling bountiful.
Kathy for her ability to keep me calm.
Zach, who constantly amazes me.
Xia, for being in our lives.
Tay and Spence, for coming into my life.
That we have friends and family to spend the day with in good health.
My wonderful work and careers.

From Spencer:
My friends
my fantastically dis-functional school
my trailer, and treehouse!
My various bits of technology that make my life so much simpler.
And of course my wonderful mother who made this blog and myself,
oh yeah, thanks dad for your spermacle contribution.
And of course Taylor, my super awesome brotha/broski/brohan/brocundo/brodozer

From Sam the Golden Doodle:
My food.
Going on walks.
Playing with other animals (species not important).

From Taylor:
I'm a man of simplicity so I shall say that I am thankful for everything that has made me smile, and not some awkward sarcastic smile.

From Kathy again...

A great meal, a lovely afternoon with family. Very thankful for the fabulous food, the cleaned-up kitchen and, now, an opportunity to just... stop. Very very thankful for that, too.

Family

2010-11-24T12:00:00.000-08:00

Ah yes. The holidays are upon us.

Thanksgiving is one of my favorites. I do love the colors and lights of Christmas, but Thanksgiving is great because it involves food and people and gratitude.

For the first 17 years of the kids' lives, we spent Thanksgiving in some configuration with their dad. For easily ten years after the divorce, we'd manage to find a place in our hearts and homes to get together to share the meal, sometimes with other people, sometimes with some part of our family, sometimes just the four of us. When my ex-husband got together with his current wife, we all had Thanksgiving together, and when I got together with Roger he blended seamlessly in, adding his son and ex-wife to the mix. It was cozy and lovely.

Last year, we didn't do that. I'm not sure what happened last year. The kids were with Roger and me and we had a lovely extended family day, with Roger's son, his ex-wife, her good friends, and a couple of other friends who chose to share the day with us. We ate and drank and Roger played Alice's Restaurant on the guitar (under duress) and it was lovely.

This year, it looks like we'll do much of the same thing. It will be great, but... it's just not the same without the rest of the family. My ex-husband and his wife have cut themselves out of this tradition, for some reason. And, as weird as it may sound, I really kind of miss them.

Family is a funny thing. Family is composed of people whom you really love, and who really annoy you, and whom you would probably never choose to be with if you really had a choice. But family is special. And it's weird when it spins off into other configurations that consciously and adamantly separate out certain factions.

Anyway. We'll have family, in whatever configuration. And we'll be thankful for the things we do have.

Radical Parenting #1 (continued)

2010-11-23T09:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I put forth this crazy idea that children are people. And of course I'm being sarcastic because it seems, well, pretty obvious. But as much of a no-brainer as this notion seem, I actually think I'm going to get some pushback.

Here's what I imagine the thought bubbles look like:

Whaaa? What are you saying here, Kathy? If kids are people and they come out kind of mostly pre-formed, what about discipline, what about teaching them about the Things that Matter, what about being a guiding light and a parental influence? If you just let them, you know, be -- what happens to all your control?

Ahhhhhhhhh. Do NOT let me forget to talk about control, because I think all this is all about control. But I'll get to that later.

Here's what I'm saying and not saying: I'm not saying you just let them run wild, like little free naked hippie flower children babies. I'm not saying you don't teach them and guide them and, yes, even make sure they know when they've crossed the very fundamental rules of decency, honesty, fairness and respect. Of course we have a duty to raise children who tell the truth, who use their wise mind whenever possible, and who are emotionally healthy and whole. I'm not in any way saying we don't have a place in their emotional and behavioral upbringing.

What I am saying is that children are people. And as people, we should approach them like we would any other person. Or -- here's a very radical idea -- as we would wish to be approached ourselves.

When you meet a new person, you leave room for all sorts of possibilities, rather than going in with preset notions of how the whole agenda is going to go for the entire span of your relationship. So why can't we do that with our kids?

Here's another thought bubble I feel popping up out there. Oh, Kathy, you're just a softy. We are NOT friends with our kids. We are their parents and if we call ourselves their friends we're somehow going to let them down and we're somehow going to lose all possibility of control over their lives. (There's that control thing again.)

Well. Yes and no. I'm not saying we're their friends like their peers are their friends. We're not their peers and it's not our job or within the realm of possibility to have that type of relationship with them. On the other hand, we're not their owners, either. We're not. If we put ourselves into the position of being their owners we open ourselves up to a whole lot of confused and conflicting and, in my opinion, ultimately impossible positions.

Ownership gets back to control. I own my car therefore I can determine when to change its tires (or not.) I can determine when to gas it up and whether to run it into the ground and how often it should be washed. And in exchange for all this caretaking I expect a certain level of service from this car. I expect it to go forward when I press the accelerator, and I expect it to stop when I push the brake.

Seriously. Don't you see a whole lot of people approaching their kids this way? "Because I said so." "Because I said NO." "Because I'm the mom."

Again, I'm not promoting anarchy. It's more of an approach. Do YOU like it when your boss says the equivalent of "Because it's your job" or "Because otherwise you can't pay for your groceries?" Nope. No one likes to be handled that way. People want to be treated as... here we go again... human beings. And since children are ... RIGHT!... human beings, maybe it's better to treat them the same way as we'd like to be treated.

We are neither friends nor owners of these people. I would suggest we're something that's not either of these things. I would suggest that we're guardians, in the sense that we need to protect their physical and emotional well being. And we're guides, in the sense that we have important information that we have gleaned from years of our own life experience, and we are in a unique position to share that wisdom with these people in hopes that they can learn whatever lessons can be learned from it.

When we decide to have kids, we decide to have new people in our lives. They can be people who are very similar to us in nature and attitude; or they can be extraordinarily different. I propose that we treat them, at whatever age, as fully fledged, fully viable, people. People with their own rights, their own responsibilities, and their own hearts and minds. I propose that we do not presume that we know everything about them, just because we share some of their DNA. I propose that we let them just be. Like we'd let our friends to be, if we cared about them. Or like we'd like to be treated ourselves.

But this leads to Kathy's Second Radical Belief: Children are not us. Which I will discuss soon.

Radical Parenting #1

2010-11-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

Let's talk about parenting.

I have some pretty radical ideas about parenting, although it hadn't been brought to my attention until recently. Much to my surprise, I'm really pushing some pretty major traditional parenting envelopes in my various philosophies about children.

As I promised, however, I'm going to break out and actually put words to some of my more incendiary notions. So grab your Dr. Spock, put the toddler into a time out, and be prepared to hear the first of Kathy's whacked out assertions about these people we call our kids.

Kathy's First Radical Belief about Children: Children are people.

They actually are. They come out of the chute with their own brains. They have their own bodies. They have their own personalities. They like the things they like. And they dislike the things they dislike.

The moment my second son was born I realized instinctively what scientists have been arguing about for ages. In the battle between nature and nurture, nature wins. My second son, at the ripe old age of zero, was simply, and obviously, and immediately, a very different entity than my first son.

They are both their own people, and they started out with much of their personality already intact. They were knowable from day one. Which means to me that it is not entirely incumbent upon us parents to form these little blobs of clay into fully formed human beings. To that I say a big WHEW, and apologize to all the therapists out there who make their living blaming everything on the parents.

Now, that's not to say that we, as parents, can't fuck our kids up. We certainly can. Kathy's theory of radical parenting includes an idea that, while most of our kids' personalities are almost entirely nature-created, how our kids interact with themselves and the outside world are very much informed by what we model to them as parents.

Let me explore this a bit.

From us our child learns how to feel about him or herself. From us our child learns how to be with other people. We model relationships for him, and we show him how much he is valued. From us, his parents and caregivers, he learns how much to trust his own instincts, how much to count on the reliability of his feelings. He learns whether he's worthy or not. And he learns how to conduct his social relationships.

Our children, I believe, learn this by modeling, rather than by our talking at them. I think they watch us conduct our marriages, take care of ourselves, interact with others, and then they use that as a blueprint for how to interact in the same way. (Or not. Negative modeling is oftentimes far more of a powerful imprint than positive modeling.)

All the other stuff in a child -- their tendency to eat things that start with the letter P, their aversion to clothing that contain any colorful pigment, their learning preferences -- all that, I believe, is mainly nature-based. Anything that has to do with how they literally perceive the world through their senses is nature.

There are also peer influences, but I think you get my point. Children are people much like -- I know, this is where it gets a bit out there -- we are. Just as we are a combination of hard-wired preferences and tendencies, so are they. They come out like that, just like we did.

You'd be surprised at how rarely this concept actually looks like it's being acted upon.

Many parents, it seems to me, spend all their energy trying to mold these people into little dolls that behave and think like they think they should. They battle and fight and impose limits and force activities on them and fight with them and ridicule them and tsk tsk tsk that they are such a disappointment when they don't turn out exactly as the parents' current blueprint dictates.

Here's Kathy's Radical New Idea: we can just respect and accept the fact that these children are people in their own right, and we can get to know them. We can enjoy the fact that we have been graced with these very amazing creatures in our lives and we can treat them like the people they are, rather than the clones we may want them to be.

This gets into some other crazy ideas I have, so I'm going to stop here and let you think about this for awhile.

Respect and accept. They are people too.

On the Train

2010-11-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

Traveling north on the Acela Express with Spencer after a glorious 20 hours or so in New York City. The fall colors sprinkle through the trees in the towns we are traveling through, interspersed with little marinas, junkyards, the backs of warehouses, and the rest of the back yards of this heavily traveled east coast corridor.

I love it out here. The sky is a soft and gentle blue, the hint of the cold to come making itself known in a preliminary way. Before it gets warmer, it will get much colder. Before the trees turn green again, they will become thin stark sticks of gray. Random leaves whip by the train windows, hinting at the snow flurries to come. Inward looking anticipation in the air. The world is gathering its belongings to itself in preparation for the cold.

After Spencer's audition for Emerson was scheduled, I realized that we would have some time afterwards between the end of our duties in Boston and tonight's flight back to LA. I figured that relaxing was for old ladies and wussies and that we could maximize those precious thirty hours or so by taking the train down to NY. Thanks to the miracle of Hilton Honors (TM) points, and my exceptional travel management, we stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, garnered a wide variety of freebies while there, shut the downstairs lobby bar down at 1:35, and had a wonderful old time, all for free.

Glorious.

But as great as all that sounds (and it was great, truly), the pixie dust really came in the middle of our stay. Thanks to Roger, who knew the show, our friend Jill had snatched up some great TKTS tix to "A Life in the Theatre," a David Mamet play that was at once delightful, loads of fun, and more haunting as the immediate memories recede. As Roger said, it's a piece that works on many levels. It absolutely entertains (which is my first prerequisite), but at the same time it raises a lot of thoughts. Relationship of actor to audience, the nature of performance, the act of the creative process ... to what extent is an actor giving, and to what extent does he suck the experience dry in an ultimate act of ego gratification. Good shit.

Of course, in order to do all this with only two actors, you need some pretty top notch talent. And talent there was. The production starred Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight (O'Malley from Grey's Anatomy). Jill had procured some terrific tickets, about seven rows from the stage, so we were able to experience the energy and expertise at close range. Excellent acting, terrific technical mastery... thoroughly enjoyable.

But that STILL wasn't the best (although it was getting pretty close). After the show, and after Spencer was the first one up for the standing ovation (and everyone else followed), Sir Patrick and TR stopped the applause and said that there was going to be a fundraising collection after the show to help with HIV/AIDS patients. And, as a special incentive, the first ten people to donate $250 would get to come up on stage and have their picture taken with Patrick Stewart.

THIS is where the pixie dust came in. Luckily, Jill is a total geek and has the same sense of misguided (or possibly well-guided) values as I do. We glanced at each other, agreed almost immediately to split it on credit cards and bolted down to the very close stage left door. Yessir. We were second in line and proceeded to happily dig out our cards to swipe.

How cool was that?? Here we were backstage on a broadway stage, in a setting that is my equivalent of a church altar to a priest. And sure enough, about three minutes later we were all shaking hands with Patrick Stewart and thanking him profusely for an amazing performance. He was gracious, warm, and the consummate professional. Spencer whipped out his iPhone and we took the photo above, giggling like little geeky groupies and having our hearts just beating in our chests with glee.

We were fairly quickly ushered on but the really lovely moment happened next. The next couple did not have a phone with a decent camera, so Spencer popped up and offered to take it with his phone and then email it to the guy. Suddenly there's my son, in this bizarre and wonderfully weird situation, hanging out with the stage hands and Patrick Stewart, saving the day. That is when the pixie dust rained down. The moment of connection and synchronicity and culmination. After auditioning for Emerson in the morning, seeing a beautifully first class production about life, literally, in the theatre, and then ending up backstage... there was my son, integrating all of it with grace and good humor.

And the reason this all is so meaningful for us right now, is that it was all so needed, and gratefully received, for both of us. We are both in the thick of way too many conflicting pulls on time and heart these days. We are stressed, overburdened, beleaguered. And before it gets better, it will probably get worse. The winter we are going through as a family will not be over soon.

Pixie dust comes when it will. Unexpected, unbidden, and like a shower of grace from the gods.

In the Lobby

2010-11-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

Fall in Boston. The trees in the Boston Common are losing their color in great glorious swatches. Most of them are shimmering gold and dropping their leaves like early snow. Some are flaming out, like wild crazy 80's rock stars, completely drenched in vivid hot pinks and reds.

You don't need acid in the northeast when the trees are doing it for you.

I'm here with my oldest son, visiting colleges and prepping him for an audition to his first choice school. I am his willing accomplice as we roam the streets, dropping in at Dunkin' Donuts for sugar and caffeine reinforcements and navigating the T -- me going old school with a tear out map from the hotel tourist brochures, and him on his iPhone.

He usually wins in the navigation department, a fact that fills me with equal parts pride and chagrin. Up until I married Roger (whom I am VERY proud to say is as good with directions as I am) I was always the navigator in the family, the intrepid traveler, the one holding the map. There's always one person who has that designation in a traveling group: the guy who holds the map. And it's always been me, and now Roger or me.

But now I have this son. This... kid. Who figures out the logistics of traveling as fast as I do. Sometimes faster. He's taller than me, he holds the door open for other people, he knows the niceties of moving through the world. He hands spare change to the shivering guys standing outside the McDonald's. He handles himself so well I find myself increasingly relying on him.

It's the passing of the baton. I feel it in a dozen ways. My body is sore from the red-eye, so I let him to take both bags. I tell him to go figure out how to get from point A to point B, and I find myself not double-checking his route. I trust him.

I easily envision us in twenty or thirty years. Roger and I will officially be doddering, slow, frail. We will probably both be deferring to all three of our sons as the guys with the map. And I have to swallow the shudder of mortality that runs down my back and soothe it with immense rushes of pride. I see it daily these days: I have raised a son who can survive out in the wilds of a new city. Who can navigate a map. Who has street smarts and who is compassionate to strangers.

My worry about my son as he juggles school and applications and film shoots and theatre productions takes up a lot of my time these days. We are both under immense amounts of emotional stress and I watch us both for signs of failure, of falling apart, of letting the myriad plates come spinning off and crashing into the walls. But when I'm out here in the world with him, I get to see him as I hope he will be next year as he's off, somewhere, going to college. I get to see him exercising a reasonable amount of judgment, of being aware of his world. I feel reassured.

Like the trees, the time comes when we get to burst with color for a short short while. Then the leaves start to blow off in beautiful gusts, leaving the limbs bare for the winter.

Voice

2010-11-19T05:14:00.001-08:00

In September of 2008 I was given some information.

This information was, as they say, game changing. It made me understand that much of what I understood about my life was wrong. It made me understand that the world was not as I'd perceived it. It shocked me into realizing exactly how idealistic I am, how all too ready I am to believe that other people go through life with the same values that I have. It made me realize that certain events, certain actions, have ripple effects that catastrophically compound rather than diminish in intensity.

This was damning information. Damning to people I know and still love. It nuked friendships. It decimated trusts. It took out my world with a surgical precision.

And it was information that can go no further, because it would do the same to other people I love. People who do not deserve to know this information any more than I did.

Which meant, as I worked through this information over many many painful months, that along with everything else, I realized that -- for once -- I could not write about something very important and personal to me and share it publicly.

I could not write about it. Which has meant that, for the past two years, I have not been able to write.

It's been like a big intestinal blockage. The thing that most needed to be expressed, could not come out. I could no longer write the words that needed so badly to be written. I could no longer write the words that could possibly alchemize the poison of the situation into something useful, something funny, something benign.

I could no longer write.

What happens when a writer cannot write the story she has to write? What happens when that inner, urgent, passionate imperative to make sense out of chaos ... cannot be given articulation? Sure, it's painful to the writer. But, as I've asked myself over and over for all this time, in the bigger picture, who cares? Does it matter?

Of course it matters to me, the writer. I mean, intestinal blockages matter -- a LOT -- to the person who is blocked. But, seriously... and I'm sorry for going to this metaphor but it really actually kind of works... it's just not that interesting a subject to anyone else. Whether I write something or not, in the cosmic sense, is inconsequential.

I've recently learned that another blog that I created in partnership with someone else was taken down without my permission. Oddly enough, the same person who gave me the information that turned my world upside down is the same person who erased my words from the world without my consent.

I have a lot to say. And whether there's anyone out there listening is really not the point. The point is that my voice was stilled, and now I'm no longer willing to be quiet. I can protect the people I need to protect and still wake up with a roar. I can figure out how to break the silence without breaking hearts.

The size of the audience is not the point.

The point is voice.

The point is whether a voice, anyone's voice, has a right to be heard.

So, after thinking about it for a good long while, I realize that I have only three words to say:

Fuck that, people.

It's over.

Whether anyone likes it or not, I do get to have a voice. And it does get to be heard. And you can read it or not. I don't care. The point is that no one gets to erase my words. And no one gets to hide if I decide that I have information that also needs to get out. No one gets to password protect the truth, my friends.

So, starting today: more blogs. I have a fuckload of things to say.

And it's about time I start saying them.

Cynthia

2010-03-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

Cynthia died yesterday.

My beloved friend, inspirational colleague, seeker of truths. Hungry, rockin' out, haunted, laughing, brilliant... absolutely brilliant Cynthia.

Cynthia who always hung up the phone laughing. Usually at the absurdity of it all. Usually seeing the acute futility and absolute humor permeating any and every situation.

Cynthia whose liver was compromised during a random walk through Oakland one night a couple of decades ago, walking with her 20-something friends, deciding to get a tattoo at a non-descript parlor. A rose on her wrist to match her favorite top. Yeah, there was something funny about the guy at the front desk. A yellow pallor to his face. But they were young, and who would think. Who would think... who would think...

Cynthia who went through hell on earth the past two years, battling insurance companies and waiting on transplant lists and moving in and out of hospitals several times a month. Losing her apartment to bills that were unable to be paid due to the stalls and snags of the bureaucracy.

Cynthia, whose friends rallied around her spiritually and physically, surrounding her with love and the highest intentionality, willing her back from the brink over and over and over.

Cynthia, who finally got her much needed and much overdue liver transplant... but whose body was, at that point, so compromised, so wracked, so tired, that it didn't ever quite take. Whose body gave up: exactly one day after the health care system that put her through this horrific journey, was finally... finally overhauled.

Cynthia, whose voice we will never hear again.

She has already taught me lessons.

Like, to never postpone doing the right thing. Sometime last week I awoke in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep, riddled with anxiety about my cherished and beleaguered opera company. And while I lay there, I suddenly decided to pay her a visit. So I knocked on her spiritual door and said hey. The veil is thin. Why shouldn't we commingle our souls for awhile, take a break from it all, go for a fly-by to the beach, or the mountains, or wherever we want to go. And while we walk together, let's have a long conversation. Let's talk of movies and music, literature and love, sassiness and sex. Let's hang out, you and I... I said to her. It's been way too long.

So we did. And it was lovely. And when I heard last week that her devoted friends up north were collecting and taping voices to surround her with, I thought, gee, I should tell her about this vision I had about us. It would be cool, and she'd hear my voice, and maybe I'd play "Get the Party Started" by Pink because she always loved that song, and it'd be cool. And the technology was available to do it easily. And... I put it off. I was traveling... I was busy... I'd do it from Seattle, I told myself. I'd do it when my work was done. And I never did. And now I know: you never put off doing the right thing. Because you don't always have that time. You really don't.

And she taught me, again, how precious are our physical beings. As valiant and stubborn and brave and feisty and willing as Cynthia was, the body could not withstand the assault. So today I started exercising again. And drinking water. And taking better care, remembering that no one is immortal. No body lasts forever. And the sadness we leave in our wake is deep and vast and lingering.

Cynthia was my guardian angel for my book. She worked with me on all parts of it, the structure, the title, the deep underpinnings, the marketing, the vision. She made it sing, made it coalesce, made it sparkle. It was a project that we both loved, and she shepherded it into the world with as much care as if it had been her own.

And on the day we launched the project, in a little room off from the stage where I was to give my first reading, she gave me a refrigerator magnet that completely embodies who she was... who she is... and who she always will be for me:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky...

-Jack Kerouac

I'd say rest in peace, my dear dear friend, but I don't mean that. I want you to fly, to sing, to rock the world as you make your transition. I want you to get that party started, once and for all. I want lots of postcards on your way out. And I want you to burst into the heavens like fireworks and sparklers, roman candles and the 1812 Overture. I want you to explode with joy at the release from your tired body, dance on your grave, laugh at the absurdity of it all. Hang up the call laughing, beloved fabulous friend. We will meet up again next time the veil is thin.

Friday

2009-10-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

Roger has just started a new blog, and I'm here at work while he finishes up his first post.

Have just a few minutes, but wanted to just mention that very special feeling that Friday evening still seems to have. For those of us with nine-to-fives, work is done for the week, the weekend looms ahead...if not glittering with possibilities, at least as long in its potential span as it will ever get.

I always used to say that my favorite part of the week was that elevator ride down to the parking lot on Friday nights. Even though I'm old, and even though that feeling of endless summer is but a sad and aching distant memory, there's still a whiff of it in the air on these Friday evenings after work. Even if there's nothing planned. Even if there's nothing but a bunch of housework in store for me. Even if it's just another coupla days off... still, it's something. It's something.

Anyway. To all the rest of you working stiffs stuck with a 40 hour work week, enjoy. This is the place where it's good to be us, and not so good to be a free lancer, or a student, or someone who has to live by their wits, which translates to working around the clock in high anxiety 24/7. Nope, this is the point, the one point, where we can say OK, it's done for this week. And walk away.

Have a good weekend. And enjoy Roger's new blog.

Sullivan's Farm

2009-08-15T01:11:00.000-07:00

True, it was Gilbert and Sullivan rather than Jimi and Janis. And, true, we only had 5000 as opposed to 500,000. But we had emergency vehicles. And we were a gathering. And you could feel the energy.

I was trying to picture what 470,000 looked like. It would be slightly less than 100 times more than the audience we had at the Redlands Bowl tonight. 100 times bigger than this WPA-era amphitheater and all its surrounding grassy hillsides was holding. That's... big. But it was also sort of kind of conceivable as well.

I watched and ran the show from the lighting and sound area in the midst of the audience. Doubt there were many geriatrics moving up the aisles on their walkers at Woodstock, but there were plenty of kids at the Bowl tonight... conked out on their parent's chests, or against each other like floppy, deeply peaceful bookends.

Some time during Act II we saw a pair of red flashing lights coming slowly up the side street. I realized that a gathering even 1% as large as Woodstock was still big enough to host its own medical emergencies, create its own microcosm of community.

So I got a little thrill. When I mentioned that we were a little Woodstock over the headsets (not really hoping anyone would actually get it, but just saying it out loud because I was so tickled with the notion), one of the crew members (all of whom were born after our current set was built) (no lie) asked if I had been there. I snorted in huge derision and mock affrontery. Hellooo. I was, like, TWELVE at the time. What did they take me for, anyway?

And then I realized... wow. I really am kind of old. Most of my commentary this show has started with comments like "you know, I was there when they built the 210 freeway." "You know, I've been with this company from before they had computerized lighting boards." "You know, when I started Word Processing we used 7 inch floppies. Nope, not 5 1/4. Nope, not 3 1/2. Nope you wouldn't have seen these computers in your parent's living room when you were a toddler because this was before there were even PCs!"

That's been how it's been the past few days. Then there's this Woodstock moment with the flashing lights. And I saw that I had been graced with a little tiny postcard from the universe. See, it said on the back in a messy scrawl. Here you go. It's the best we could do on short notice, but here's a little message -- the balmy summer night, the crowd of humanity sharing the same music and food and weather -- the moments of hope are not yet over. For you, or for the world. There will be other grace notes of intersection, both big and small, when people come together and have an experience laced together by community and music. It happens far more frequently than you'd imagine, and it's magic when it does.

So take heart, fair days will shine... take heart, we are still stardust and we are still golden. We are closer these days than we have been for awhile, but we are still very far away from that idyllic garden we all were so eager to find. We'll get ourselves back to it someday. And in the meantime we'll find ourselves a song and a celebration and set our souls free free free.

Cheating

2009-07-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about cheating. The weakness of telling lies because telling the truth is too difficult. The trail of destruction the cheater's actions leave behind, and how it poisons all primary, secondary and tertiary relationships for years to come.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The more I know about cheating, the more disgusting a crime I believe it to be. I once theorized that sleeping with other people could be acceptable in an open, authentic relationship. But I don't think anymore that people can actually be open and honest enough to make that possible. And doing it in a covert way is one of the most emotionally destructive activities we can do to ourselves and the other people in our lives.

In the early days after my divorce, I had two affairs with married men. I am not proud of this and I grow increasingly ashamed of my actions as time goes by. I did not know their wives, and I rationalized my actions by telling myself that their marital problems had nothing to do with me.

Bullshit. I was wholeheartedly and enthusiastically helping the husband be less of a person, avoid his responsibilities, and develop his ability to be deceptive and sneaky -- all in the name of someday being together ourselves. What was I thinking? I was helping someone become someone I would despise. I was honing his skills of deception and reinforcing his ability to compartmentalize and rationalize. And somehow I kept losing sight of the fact that if we were ever to get fully together he'd now be fully capable of using those skills on me.

I have also been cheated on. Profoundly and profusely. I have discovered more than one boyfriend either in the act or after the fact. I have been lied to by jedi masters of deception. I won't go into it here because it does get to be a litany of the same kinds of words: betrayal, rage, despair at ever finding a safe haven of trust and kindness.

So I know how it feels, both ways. It is an ugly, gutless, selfish act. Take the easy way out and damn the consequences to the hearts closest to you.

That's the emotional side of cheating.

But yesterday I came across an article in last year's Psychology Today (Love's Plan B, August 2008) that has me thinking about other aspects as well, in this case the psychological side of cheating. The article talks about "Plan B" relationships -- relationships, or even fantasies of relationships -- that we carry around with us in case our primary relationship fails. Here's how the article describes "love insurance":

Although we may love our exclusive partner, we can still think about other romantic possibilities -- people we keep in a mental box that might as well be labeled "Open in case of current relationship's demise." No matter how content we are, we still seek a sense of security by creating a web of potential future romantic alliances. That's why people are hardly shocked to hear that a sizable percentage of men trawling online dating sites are married.

The theory is that we all have to keep gauging our viability in the marketplace in case the current relationship fails. And one of our security blankets of love is keeping a little something on the side, just in case. This little something something is more than just a casual fling or flirtation, but at the same time it's less than the primary relationship. It is nothing more, or less, than a backup plan.

This sheds some new light on the concept of cheating. Maybe we keep those options open because of some ancient genetic imperative to make sure that we, as women have a mate to take care of the offspring if our main squeeze gets in trouble with a boa constrictor. We all know about the "need to seed" that we attribute to men, but it probably works on the emotional level as well. It's like having a backup pint of Ben and Jerry's just in case you need some comfort food asap.

Which makes it sound pretty rational. But there is a catch: once you get labeled as a No. 2, you are rarely going to ever make it up the ladder to the No. 1 spot. Backup plans stay backup plans, even if the primary relationship goes sour.

Whether you're a man or a woman, the problem with being a backup is that once your inamorata labels you second tier, your chances of becoming the primary love interest diminish. Labels, once created, tend to stick. Plus, once you accept the role of runner-up, you risk seeing yourself as a perennial backup in many walks of life. You can find someone for whom you are Plan A -- but not if you're inertly functioning as someone else's Plan B.

Which brings us back to the fundamental assertion: it's just wrong. It's wrong morally, it's wrong socially, it's wrong emotionally, and it's also wrong psychologically. It's wrong in the same way that suicide is wrong, or anything else that negates our higher sense of self and dignity. It decimates the self worth of every one involved. It churns up innocent people in the wake of its selfishness... and usually those people are our children.

It's disrespectful - both to your No. 1 partner and to your No. 2. It's wrong when you're the cheater, and it's wrong when you're the one on the side, and it's especially wrong when you are both.

The Plan B relationship is not a relationship. It's a strategy. At best it's a safety net that no one actually ever wants or plans to use. It almost never turns into a Plan A and when it does, it's fraught with memories of the deception that brought it into the world.

I used to think that a lying, covert, secret love was all I deserved. That is simply incorrect, for all of us. Somehow we need to realize that doing things fully, in their right time, without deceiving other people in the process... is worth the fear, is worth the wait, and is worth the value of our sweet little souls.

It is terrifying to be someone's Plan A. It is vulnerable and precarious to put all your eggs in one basket. As someone newly married, I feel these things acutely. Roger and I have both been involved in situations with Plan B people (and, actually, Plan C and maybe Plan D people), and we both knew, even at the time, what shabby facades those structures were. How much less than authentic. How hard it is to be fully present, and how -- in the final analysis -- it's the only way to be.

We are tender little seedlings, precious beings trying to hold ourselves together in the midst of a turbulent planet. We have better things to do than to be each other's Plan B's. We have a higher purpose than to degrade ourselves in the name of some pale variation of love.

The Dharma of Travel

2009-07-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

As we settle in to being back in "real" life, I'm noticing something kind of sad and possibly important. Time goes by in a blur when one is doing the habitual thing. Days blend into each other. It's like frames of film going by without stopping for a 24th of a second for the eye to register. Life becomes a kind of swooshy blur, rather than a narrative to become engrossed in.

When we were traveling I kept a journal and was amazed at how long ago yesterday felt. There was so much packed in to each moment that the days felt long and rich and chock full of goodness. My days now are also good, but I've noticed they don't have that clear definition, that sense of constant wonder, the feeling that this is my LIFE and I'm really LIVING it to the fullest.

I think that one of the reasons for that difference is that we notice so much more when we're in a foreign country. Every sense is on full power, listening intently to the announcements on the Metro, feeling the change in humidity in the evening air, tasting the nuances of difference between a Parisian croissant and one from the local Winchell's. For two weeks I was inhabiting my body fully (and not altogether blissfully, due to the accumulation of wedding fatigue, jet lag, and the lugging of luggage). I was tuned in to every sense, in rapid succession, at every moment -- like five radios playing all at once. Not much opportunity to get cerebral and start worrying about what a loser I am for letting my yoga practice lapse. No time for maudlin grousing. There was too much of the world, inner and outer, to experience.

And by the time we were ready to pack up and come home, I was ready to stop all that wonderment for awhile. Living that fully attenuated to your senses and the world around is kind of overwhelming. There was a part of me that wanted to just stop and go back to a life where I wasn't constantly marveling at the way the street signs were constructed, the differences in journalistic style, the configuration of the toilet. Travel opens up all the sensory floodgates and everything comes washing in.

It struck me, of course, how travel is the ultimate meditation. In meditation we strive to train our minds to stay in the present moment by finding a sensory object to focus upon. In vipassana meditation, that object is usually the breath. It is always with us (hopefully) and always gives us a touchstone to anchor ourselves with. We pay attention to the breath and then notice our our minds always want to veer away into ruminations about the past, or anxieties about the future, causing us stress and fatigue and that sense of numbness that comes when life is passing you by without seeing each individual frame.

The trick to recovering that sense of wonder is not to travel more (don't ever tell anyone I said that) -- but to learn how to incorporate that noticing more into our daily lives. As Sherlock Holmes says, I am training myself to notice what I see. Travel gives us the opportunity to notice the entire world constantly. Instead of the film frames going by at 24 per second, travel bombards us with 1000 images per second. It's incredible, and mind blowing, and cannot be sustained. After changing countries several times, I started noticing how different the third day felt from the first. Our tendency is to make things normal. Even in a foreign country, after a few days the mind becomes acclimated and able to file experiences away in safe little files. We can't live with that kind of density of experience.

On the other hand, we can't live -- truly live -- without it. Maybe not at 1000 frames per second, but the sweet spot is somewhere between that and a deadened blur. We need to train our mind to notice what we see. Take in the small pleasures of little everyday things. Not letting habits become lost in the gray fuzz of the habitual. Not letting days go by in a daze.

There's a lovely graceful place to be, when we live in our "regular" world. It's a place where we are not deadened or numb, but are comfortable and attuned. Where we stop, frequently, and pay attention, on purpose, to our lives. Eating a bowl of cornflakes out of a new tangerine-colored bowl with a summer peach on top, is not that different from marveling at a French billboard. The joy is in the noticing and the appreciating, not in the content itself. The noticing slows life down so we can live it as it's happening.

Arriving where we started

2009-07-19T22:54:00.000-07:00

So we're home. Have been home for a week and, to all outward appearances, we have resumed life where we left off.

Our dreams are littered with scraps of Europe: a fruit market on the corner of Rue St. Honore, the cold lofty beauty of the Rose Window of Chartres, the discordant haunt of a bagpipe melody in Scotland. Roger says that something about Paris has infected him. He cannot get it out of his mind.

When we first got to Paris, Roger asked why we were doing this, why do we care about Paris. (I forgave him for this and we are, in case you are wondering, still married.) It had been a long ride in from the airport, past graffiti and trash and through a massive urban traffic jam that seemed, for all the world, like a plain old garden variety gridlock that we could get here in LA. The taxi driver was archly condescending, the streets narrow, and the sirens incessant. So Roger made a good point: Why? Why Paris? What's the fuss about?

Today, after he awakened and said that he was again dreaming of the city, I asked him if he's figured it out yet. And he said that, simply put, Paris embodies everything there is to know and love about life. The streets, the air, the architecture, all contain such a passion for living, such a consummate gusto for the art of the palate, the symphonies of space, the music of the streets, the rhythms of love and life force and passion... it's all just there. Fully and unapologetically.

It's like a rare rich wine, greater than the sum of its parts. It's a city that is hectic and moving; the locals walk along the sidewalks with tightness around their eyes and a clip to their step. Sirens blare and the pulsations reach deep into hidden alleyways, sheltered passages, narrow jazz clubs, secret doors. It's built in upon itself for many centuries, so much so that the mysteries have mysteries, each city block could seemingly yield its secrets begrudgingly for dozens of years and still have plenty to hide.

So we've touched these places, walked through Scottish graveyards, sung in pubs, strolled long paths by ancient streams. Two weeks is obviously not enough to do anything but sample a quick hint of foreign flavors, and then return to the known and comfortable... but it was enough to change us. We're back, but there's a difference.

Every day I am grateful that summer waited for us to get back. I am reveling in the heat, that searing anvil of sharp bright warmth that Pasadena does so well. I drive by the low slung ranch houses and remember how it felt to go inside them when I was young and visiting my better-off friends. Walking through the dark, oak-shaded yards and entering these air conditioned homes was a reprieve, and I felt like I'd entered a world of quiet muted efficiency, a life of grace where the temperature was modulated and the harsh sounds of the outside world were muffled and remote.

We'd drink Nestea instant iced tea in the spacious living rooms and play card games while we holed up from the weight and press of the air outside. Going out again, the air would feel encompassing and bold against our chilled skin. That was the feeling of being a teenager in the summers of love, with the Vietnam war accompanying our Swanson TV dinners, and KRLA and KHJ tuned on our handheld transistor radios, playing Light My Fire and Up, Up and Away.

I feel summer these days when I drop the kids off at camp, a ritual that I've been doing for more years than I can count. But right now, after returning from other places, I start feeling a whiff of euphoria just smelling the sunscreen on the tanned bodies, listening to the happy din of kids playing on the grass, knowing that there are silly songs to be sung and lanyards to be woven. It hits me in the solar plexus in a way that it's never done before.

I love summer down here. I love the feeling of salt water and sun and long daylight hours and the taste of a Dodger dog washed down by a cold cold beer. I love the soaring ecstasy of a good wave caught with a boogie board. I love the feeling afterward of having a body in tune with the powerful rhythms of the sea.

I know this place where I live. I've spent many summers here, but despite how many summers I have enjoyed, it is still all happening for the first time. Somehow, I've been graced with even more of that understanding than ever.

We've just undergone a series of life-changing rituals: a marriage, a reunion of family and friends, seeing people who represent every part of our lives for as long as we can remember, and a honeymoon. We've been on a hero's journey, one with obstacles and quests and treasures to recover. We have discovered that we have the tools to survive, both emotionally and in the world. It's not the world that's changed, it's us. And with that change we have come back, with newly-refined senses, to see our lives with brand new eyes, and inhabit the world with a fresh awareness.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

Dis-oriented

2009-07-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

As I write it is 4:10 pm in Paris, the day after Bastille Day. The festivities for Bastille Day last from midday on the 13th... and I suspect they'll still be felt for a few days to come.

Yesterday we woke up at 6 am in Paris, took the Eurostar to London, flew from London to Toronto, and thence to LA. When we landed, it was about 11 pm here on the Pacific Coast, giving us the rare privilege of a 33 hour Bastille Day. From start to finish, our travels took 29 hours, across 9 time zones and encompassed two taxi rides, two train rides, two sets of customs, and two air flights.

The human body is not built for this.

In maybe 10 million years, or even 10,000, if we keep doing this to ourselves, maybe it will be easier. Maybe we will evolve a switch that just lets us adapt to time zone changes effortlessly, or with a minimum impact at worse. We are not there yet. I woke this morning musing on the word "disoriented" -- without the east, without direction, without bearings. It's an appropriate word for today.

We talked a lot about Time during this trip. When flying over Greenland (on the way out) we realized that clock time has no bearing when you're in an air plane. Roger would ask me what time it was, and the answer became increasingly complicated. Yesterday, in Toronto, we tried to figure out how we should be feeling based on the clock: in Paris it was 5 hours later, in LA it was 3 hours earlier. Where were we in all of this? What does this clock thing mean?

And we realized: clock time only means something if two things are happening. First, you have to be on the ground. Clock time is only calculable if you have your feet in one place and the sun is positioned somewhere relative to those feet. The more those feet move east, the later the clock time because you are moving away from the setting sun. Move the feet west, chasing that sunset, and you have an earlier clock time. Simple. Sort of.

But the other thing is that clock time only means something between people. It's an agreement. It is useful for, say, meeting people at Starbucks. Or having conference calls with people all over the world. Clock time: good.

But if you take away the people and our need to agree on certain schedules, there's really no need for it. We don't need it to tell us we're hungry. We don't need it to tell us when the sun is setting. We don't need it to differentiate the changes between the seasons... and in some ways it makes some of those things more difficult rather than easier. We eat when it's noon whether our bellies are still full from breakfast or not. We keep working regardless of whether the days are short of sun or last until midnight. Without clocks, we could not have our technical, busy society. Clocks obviously enable all this. But when it comes to figuring out where you are, what you're doing, or how you're feeling... they are not fully up to the task.

The first thing Roger did upon landing in Munich was buy a watch. The watch got him, literally, grounded. And we used that watch constantly... to give us information about where we thought we should be in our day. We had a surreal breakfast last night around 1:30 am at Carrows. Right now, at 7:26 am, my stomach is growling and I could use a steak, a beer and a good night's sleep.

Dis-oriented. But awfully glad to be home. More on that soon...

Cafe Society and the Heart Chakra

2009-07-12T14:17:00.001-07:00

Roger is hearing the music of Paris for the first time. And in our conversations, we have been trying to figure out exactly how and why France seems to be so entirely different from the US. Not only France, but the little snapshots of Europe we've been lucky enough to see this time around.

I've used this metaphor a lot over the years, that the US is a young country and got very powerful very quickly. With good reason, we have become a very strong, affluent and intimidating country. But we've grown up very quickly relative to the rest of western civilization, and the uneven growth spurt has had some unintended consequences.

In many ways, we're like the big adolescent on the playground, who likes to throw his weight around and make sure all the other kids know who's boss. It's getting better now that we're approaching diplomatic relations with a bit more humility and grace than we have in recent memory, and of course the image is gross and crude and does not take into account a lot of mitigating details. Still, every time I travel abroad, I get the same image. Bullies on the playground; adolescents; a country still so young that it has not yet gracefully learned to understand some of the bigger picture.

And this time around, I've realized something else. Countries like France are not even ON the playground. They're sitting at a cafe somewhere, sipping wine and conversing about history and politics and art and love. They understand the importance of fewer hours in the work week, gatherings of friends, the need to take care of the sick in a compassionate way, the sanity of taking time off to spend time decompressing. This is something that we haven't woven into our culture and don't even understand the need for. We are too busy being on the playground, defending our position in the world.

Roger phrased it perfectly: the societies we've been visiting live in a whole different chakra than we do in the States. We are very "third chakra" -- the yellow solar plexus chakra, seat of will and action. Driven, motivated, pushing -- all attributes of the third chakra. And the French are more "fourth chakra" at this stage of their history -- the heart chakra, seat of emotion, compassion, refinement. They have certainly had their time of living in their solar plexus. We walked through halls in Versailles dedicated to the battles of Napoleon III, the conquering of other nations, the power of the state. And they've had their moments of humility as well, with their revolutions and occupations. They've done the third chakra, and -- at this moment at least -- seem to be living more in the heart, concentrating on activities that embrace the family, the social structure, the things that provide joy.

It's an interesting concept: that civilizations can move up the chakras as they evolve. One could argue that the further east you travel, and the older the cultures are, the higher up in the chakra ladder the people ascend. But then there are places where the cultures collide, and you have the technology revolution in India, and the commercialism in China, and it all gets very interesting and the center of power changes yet again.

All the aspects that we move through have power. There is no better or worse aspect. Every chakra, every aspect of an evolution, has a unique and powerful meaning and purpose. Individually we move through our phases, and our personal change is mirrored in the cultures we create around us. As we age and mature and learn, so do our civilizations. The tides of history evolve the underlying structures of a society much like the ocean creates new shorelines.

La Musique

2009-07-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

After nearly a week in Paris, I'm starting to be able to verbalize what the magic is about this city. I think it's musicality of it: the rhythms of the people moving through the day; the accent notes of detail and decoration that adorn the buildings, the bridges, the clothing of the women; the music itself that seems to seep out of every nook and cranny, revealing itself in an Irish fiddle player in the courtyard archway of the Louvre, a brass band partying on the quai of the Seine, a clarinetist outside the Musee D'Orsey. There is music everywhere, and to be in Paris is to be caught up in a song of such complexity and beauty it nearly takes your breath away.

We were in harmony with the rhythms of the city last night as we discovered a lovely bistro near Les Halles and had a late supper of l'entrecote, frites, and red wine. Watching the people stroll by we saw lovers and tourists and friends in an endless river, moving at different paces but all seeming to follow a certain inner beat. After we ate, we stumbled into a store that was filled with open bags of spices, rice, and dried fruit, and a ceiling hung with hundreds of clay pots, an antler head on the wall, and a back room filled with painted ceramics and other wonders from the east. On a fez hanging over the cash register was a Barack Obama pin... an instant testament to the intertwining melodies of all our worlds.

Afterwards, we walked in search of a jazz club we passed on our first night in town. Finding it, we decided to risk 36 Euros to go upstairs and hear what was on the ticket. What we got was beyond our wildest hopes - a quartet led by a guy named Khalil Chahine, with an exotic, eastern, fabulous sound. They are from Egypt, but the sound was like Pat Metheny, until they added this violin in the second set that turned the thing into a journey to distant lands. We sat enthralled until they were done, then walked back to our apartment in a sweet light rain around 1 am.

Today we went to my personal mecca, Shakespeare & Company, and pushed through the piles of books and people that symbolize for me a kind of wailing wall of writing, a place where I once stayed 30 years ago this summer, with a soaring heart and certainty of my eventual place in a venerated constellation of great writers. Today we found my book nestled in the stacks, left by me with Sylvia Whitman a few years ago on my last visit. Roger found it and took some pictures of me pulling it out of the wall, and then -- much to my delight -- a young woman started talking to us and ended up buying the copy.

We sat upstairs in a room that George Whitman, the owner of the store, once inhabited and that I once helped clean as part of my obligation for staying there. Looking through the window at the Seine and the towers of Notre Dame, I realized this was as much my holy ground as Chartres was for the pilgrims seeking a glimpse of a holy relic. It seems I have lost my faith in books and my work as a writer; coming back home to S&Co today acted as a re-statement of that faith, and a humbling gratitude for the gifts that I have been given.

So, for me, the music of Paris ultimately is about the words that have been written here. The rich literary tradition, the veneration accorded to writers, all can be felt in its bookstores, its cafes, the naming of its streets. When I am here, I write. And musicians play. And artists put incredible paint on canvases, or create pieces of sculpture that move you to tears.

This is a city where the tempo of the city life moves to a rhythm that is nearly impossible to resist. It pulls you into the streets on long summer nights, draws you into conversations, creates philosophies, and weaves romance around lovers. It puts a soundtrack to the streams of people walking past the sidewalk cafes, syncopates the nightlife in the pubs and clubs, and serenades the revelers on the boats floating down the Seine. Once you've been here once, Paris haunts your dreams and you wake up humming its tune.

Walking the Labyrinth

2009-07-10T14:15:00.000-07:00

We took the railway down to Chartres Cathedral today to walk the labyrinth. It is centered on the floor in the middle of the cathedral, and is as far away from the front door as the rose window above the door is high. Which means, so they say, that if the wall with the rose window were to hinge down to lie flat over the floor, the rose window would directly overlap the labyrinth.

The center of the labyrinth, so we heard, catches a beam of light on a certain day of the year (offset by a meter after nearly 800 years) that shines through the middle of the Rose window. A plaque showing the minotaur used to be in the middle, but was removed and melted down for cannon balls during the Revolution.

It's the only labyrinth in any of Europe's gothic cathedrals that remains both intact and in its original site. So when Roger and I took off our shoes and walked the path, we trod in the place where thousands of pilgrims have walked, over nearly 800 years. The stones were worn and slightly uneven and perfectly constructed to accommodate the stride of a human footstep. The air was rich, the stones were smooth, the vibes were intense.

What you do is enter through the only opening and just walk the path. The path is intricate and even though there's a definite pattern, when walking it the turns are unexpected and somewhat disorienting. There are 28 turns and the precise pattern of the design takes you through all the quadrants at different times, in varying distances from the center. It looks different on paper than it feels in three dimensions. You kind of have to do it to get what it's all about, and even then it's difficult to articulate why it's so simple and complex at the same time.

Once you get to the middle, you are supposed to take a moment to reflect. Some people move from petal to petal on the inner blossom, contemplating various states of ascendance, from mineral to animal to human, finally coming to the middle where the divine and spiritual state is signified. It can also be seen as a stepping through the seven chakras, and moving from the red base to the ethereal white light of the spirit. No matter how you see it, the center is the heart of the experience, and the place where the peace and contemplation repose.

I have walked Chartres-style labyrinths before, usually in a ritual that is dedicated to mindfulness and walking meditation. What was interesting about today's walk is that there were dozens of tourists, from many nationalities, roaming through the cathedral (and hence the labyrinth) as we were trying to walk it. There was a woman before us who was walking it prayerfully, and then there was Roger and, a few paces behind, me. Among us were waves of tourists and kids and picture takers and gawkers, standing on the paths in our way, running along the lanes in games of tag, and generally being about as un-meditative as you can get.

As we were walking, there occasionally welled up some ethereal choir music, coming from some unseen nook of the cathedral. The sounds of the squeaking of our shoes, the rapid patter of the kids who were chasing each other around the circles, and the distant murmer of voices throughout the dim canvernous hall were actually comforting, human, full of life. When we sat in a nook set aside for prayer later, I meditated on those sounds some more and found them to be extremely warm... and far different from the creaks and moans and whispers I fancied I'd hear if locked up in the huge stone building and crypt overnight.

The oddest moment was when I got to the middle after about 30 minutes of walking -- an experience that, no matter how distracted you get is still pretty profound -- and turned around to face the Rose Window. A tour group had just filtered into the labyrinth and were leaning up to take pictures of the window. Surrounding me was a sea of maybe two doezen digital screens glowing back at me in the dark, echoing the image of the stained glass. All the shadowy bodies were craned up at the same angle, all were taking in the sight using the camera as their viewing device. It was not enough to look up at the window; it had to be perceived first through the technology of the day.

It's a unique type of meditation, walking a labyrinth. And today provided new insights that I'd never had before. For example, some people go through life running through and over patterns that are interesting to pay attention to, and never get a clue that there's something else going on. They are intent on moving through the space, or getting on with the "real" stuff, or taking a picture so they can dwell on the moment later.

If some of the people do figure out that there may be something more going on besides just space to get through, there are various ways to approach that apparent pattern. We can study it, we can analyze it mathematically, we can consciously ignore it, or we can try over time to make sense of it. We can decide to be mindful of it as we walk it, we can make a game of it, we can race our companions through it, or we can get extremely peeved that we're constantly running into obstacles that dislodge us from what we perceive is our goal.

Finally, once we've decided that we're going to move through the experience with contemplation and as much consciousness as we are able, the experience itself dislodges and unnerves us. The more I felt I was getting closer to the center, the farther away I actually was; as I moved away from it, I was actually getting closer. Once I thought I'd figured out the pattern, it switched on me and turned back on itself. No matter how rigorously I put one foot in front of the other, at a couple of points I was sure I'd lost my way.

Very comforting, this last part. I always travel and vow to make things different, better, more exciting, more deep when I get back. I make plans to learn a new language, to study up on my history, to relax more, to keep my sense of wonder and openness. And yet, that's just my mind telling me it knows how to keep the bends in place, how to figure out the design before it happens. It never works out the way I think it's going to, but it always actually works out far better than I could've ever envisioned. The trick, as always, is to just stay on the path, one foot in front of the other, and watch the journey as it happens. As with the labyrinth, you kind of just have to do it to know what it's all about. And even then it's difficult to articulate why it's so simple and complex at the same time.

New Thoughts on Accountability

2009-07-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

OK. That last post was a bit one-sided. There are many facets to a story, and this accountability issue is no exception.

We've been noticing one area where Americans are far more responsible than (it appears, based on the world's worst empirical data sampling) our European neighbors: littering. Our streets are, basically, a lot cleaner than those we saw in the UK, Scotland, or France. Again, based on the worst statistics possible (the only sampling that would be less rigorous was if we had never stepped foot in these countries at all), we are finding littering to be an eyesore very much in France, and London, and (surprisingly) even in Scotland. Admittedly, Scotland is so very beautiful that even one misplaced soda bottle is an abomination, but we did see a couple of those, and some strewn about newspapers that were, in that setting, really jarring.

A hasty research on the 'net (made more difficult by the fact that my browser seems intent on displaying everything in French despite my many attempts to change my settings to English), indicates that the worst culprit in UK littering is fast food. And -- of the five worst offenders of fast food litter -- the US owns three of the chains (McDonald's, KFC, and Subway.)

So... we may not be that great about packaging our food, but we are pretty damn good about picking it all up afterward. And that goes for dog excrement as well. We're not too bad with that issue as well these days.

So, hats off to us. It may not make up for global warming, and it doesn't even start atoning for W, but it is a start, and it really does make a difference. I'm kind of looking forward to going home and not watching every footfall with care.

Accountability

2009-07-08T06:54:00.000-07:00

It's inevitable, I think... to compare who we are as Americans with the rest of the world as we travel through it and notice all the differences. And I've been noticing something recently that I'd like to capture here.

The first time I noticed it was on a posting on the wall of a train station near Hampton Palace outside of London. The notice said something like "The ticket office is now relocated due to repairs. I hope you are not inconvenienced by this. If so, please come and see me. (signed) The Station Master."

Another time I heard it was on the Virgin UK train, between London and Dumfries. There had been a massive screw up with the computer and all the reserved seated were screwed up. It was hot, crowded, chaotic, and actually a fairly unpleasant situation. The head conductor got on the PA system several times and said something like "I apologize for the problem with the reserved seating. It was due to a computer error. I am changing trains at Preston but will alert the next conductor as to the problem and make sure he is aware of the situation."

"I" am sorry. "I" will take responsibility to tell the next guy. "See me" and "I" will make it right for you.

Am I crazy, or is this unfamiliar language to our American ears? Don't we usually phrase things more in the passive voice, or couched in a less personal "we?" "We are sorry if this causes any inconvenience." "Please be aware that seats are not reserved on this train." No one says "I'm sorry," at least not in writing, least of all in public. No one says "This is a problem that happened on my watch, I'm going to take responsibility for it, and if you want to see me about it, I welcome the conversation." Our phraseology seems to always be constructed with one eye on the jury box, hedging away from taking responsibility, worrying that some attorney is going to smack us for saying out loud, and in public, that we are responsible for something that may, someday, cause someone to sue us for money -- money that we might not have had to pay had we just been a bit more careful with our words.

This idea of responsibility goes in the other direction, too. I was explaining to Roger last night that the French are a proud people, people who have contributed an inestimable amount to civilization and art and our western culture. They are part of a culture that stretches back many thousands of years, and they -- actually, shockingly, amazingly -- don't actually need us. They don't particularly love us, and they don't need to love us. They don't have to speak English (but they mostly do.) They don't have to kiss our asses. We are in their country, and -- for the most part -- we act pretty rudely to them. I have seen more than my share of belligerent, obnoxious, and stupid Americans in my travels, and have tried extra hard to change that legacy. But the fact remains that, individually and collectively, we have overall behaved somewhat badly in the world. And even though we don't apologize for that, or hold ourselves accountable, other people do. They remember the Americans who yell at them in order to make them understand English better. They remember the Americans who are pushy and rude and make jokes that are all too well understood by our hosts. They remember.

And then there's the collective. There's the role the US has played in the world during the Bush Administration. There's the fact that -- because of our race to greed and our cavalier mismanagement of an unthinkable amount of money -- everyone's lives all over the world have changed, jobs have been lost, financial empires have crumbled. There's this matter of a war that everyone, even us US citizens, understood to be wrong in action and intent and conception, and was engaged upon neverthe less. These people see this all too clearly. And just because we provide incredible diversions with our Michael Jacksons and ubiquitous iPods, it doesn't really excuse us from playing recklessly with the world's stability.

Taking responsibility. Accountability. I'm sorry to say, but I don't think this is one of our core competencies as Americans. We don't say "I'm sorry." We don't say "Please talk to us if you have a problem with what we're doing." We pretty much do what we want to do, and hedge our language to be as legally defensible as possible.

It smacks of immaturity. It reminds me again of how young we are, how callow, and how unseasoned. It reminds me of how much weight we throw around and how relatively easily won our power has been. I am not bashing the US.... we have contributed an enormous amount to the world, not only in technology and innovation, but in our ability to govern ourselves with relatively little bloodshed and instability. In our election of President Obama (and the overwhelming shift from right to left in Congress), we have shown that change can be effected in our system, and that we can self-regulate. I am once again not afraid to call myself an American when traveling abroad... but I am also very well aware that just because we collectively pulled our head out of our arses, we still have much to be accountable for.

Reversing this needs to start with us as individuals. Maybe taking our own personal responsibility a bit more seriously will start to ripple up to the collective. As we travel through Paris this next week, I am going to keep an eye open for ways to be more accountable, both personally and as a representative of our country. We are not a bad country, but we are a young one. Maybe increasing our individual maturity can help our nation grow as well, at least as we are perceived in the eyes of the world.

Auld Lang Syne

2009-07-06T16:34:00.000-07:00

Auld lang syne... idiomatically, it is sometimes translated as "once upon a time," or "long long ago." Once upon a time, we spent an idyllic three days here in Dumfries, Scotland. Those days happened to be today, yesterday, and the day before.

It's very difficult to put words to this country. Robert Burns, the poet laureate of the country and a highly revered man in these parts, was able to put pen to paper and compose thousands of words in song and poetry in his 37 years on the planet. I have been here for these three small days and am having a hard time formulating even a few.

But... the ones that have come to mind, go like this: It's different over here. We have visited a medieval castle (Caerlaverock) and Drumlanrig castle, which is still a home to the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry. We have gone to a village gala and seen a massed band of bagpipes and drums marching up and down the street, playing haunting and inspiring songs of valor and war and love and country. We have been escorted through several of the town's many pubs and found warm cozy clusters of people, laughing and drinking and spinning yarns. It has rained just about every day, and even though the nights do not get dark until after 11 p.m. right now, it is altogether too easy to guess what life here is like during the cold wet winters, when the night falls at 4:30 p.m. and does not lighten up until well into the morning.

We are in the border lands. These rolling hills have seen many centuries of fighting and blood. Loyalties shift constantly. Border rievers rustled cattle back and forth between the two countries, opportunistically taking advantage of the constant flux. The sense I get is that all this change has only solidified the people who thrive here; they are flexible, tough, and stalwart. They are attached at a deep level to their land, their heritage, their music, and their love of independence. They are not afraid of getting sentimental when they hear certain songs. They understand that love of country is vastly different from politics.

We have been staying at the Ferintosh Guest House, a B&B run by our dear friends Robertson and Emma. Again, words are failing at describing the experience. For one thing, the B&B is terrific -- well run, extremely comfortable, well situated in the town, and with terrific food and amenities. I strongly suggest everyone who reads this book a trip over here and experience it directly. So not kidding. We actually have contemplated canceling Paris (where we are flying tomorrow) to stay another week here. That good. And we will be back.

Our experience, however, has gone way past the comfort and fun of staying at a great B&B. We have found magic moments. Long conversations into the night, talking about politics and the world and people and relationships and family and art and theatre. Robertson shared with us his best whiskey, and loaned Roger his kilt tonight to go to a Jean Armour dinner (a dinner held in honor of Robert Burns' wife). Robertson and Emma took us to their favorite pubs and together we crawled around an old graveyard, reading headstones by the failing light. Our gratitude to them is boundless, and humbling.

The Jean Armour dinner encapsulated the magic. We sat in Burns' favorite pub (The Globe Inn, still in operation) along with about 50 members of a Burns society, a group dedicated to preserving his memory and celebrating his life and art. Tonight's dinner was to acknowledge his wife Jean, who not only understood and supported the poet, she also took care of at least one his illegitimate children and tolerated his many other mistresses. The men at the dinner were all dressed up as they paid their respects to the occasion. There were toasts and recitations and jokes that we could not possibly unpack from the brogue that surrounded them. There was whiskey and ale and an abundance of food.

They talked about Jean Armour and paid tribute to how she steaded Burns, learned how to live with him, understood him. These were not politically correct men; they made sexist jokes and were very much about being a men's club (that invited the women along only for this special occasion.) And yet they still understood a good woman when they saw one; and they knew that Robert Burns had a good one with Jean Armour. And to their credit they seemed to understand that the wives who sat beside them were good ones of the same caliber. And in their way they paid deference and homage to them as well.

They sang songs to haunting, beautiful old melodies. They recited poetry while the rain dripped from the eaves outside. They spoke in an accent that was almost completely unintelligible to us, but was unmistakable in its sincerity and respect.

And I kept thinking: All this is for a poet. A writer. He was a man who put words on a page. And yet he has become more than that as well. He is a voice for the lower class man. In him, they hear a comrade, a spokesperson, a flagbearer. His words are like the haunting, reedy notes of the bagpipes as they stir the warriors' hearts to march into battle. And I wonder -- why don't we have this in the states? Why don't we have these deep underpinnings of passion for certain songs, certain words, certain art forms?

I don't know the answer, and I certainly don't want to imply that we are without all forms of patriotism or love for our artists and our battles. But this is different. This truly is in the blood, and has been for thousands of years longer than ours has. This seems to come from many centuries of battles fought, blood shed, clans bonding together in death and victory. It also may be born of a class system that was so oppressive that our own forefathers fled it and established a country that was resolutely and consciously going to avoid a noble class, or any kind of class structure that results in such unfair stratification.

It feels very different to be in a land where family lineage defines you, where love of poetry and song can be expressed openly, where old men wipe their eyes when they hear certain tunes. I looked around the room tonight and met people whom I most likely will never meet again, older people who have lived lives I will never know, and who embraced us, the Americans, with friendliness and a strong desire to make sure we "get it."

I'm not sure we do, or can, fully "get it." But the feeling of being in an older world, a world where story is put into song and sung beside fires to ward off the cold, a world where the cozy warmth of a pub provides entertainment and community that television can never match, a world where there is a social fabric that is as elaborate and rich as a Belgian tapestry... is something that I want to carry back with me. I want to spin stories long into the night. I want to continue exploring places and things that make me wonder and long to know more. I want to grow old with some traditions. I want to be like the lady I sat across from tonight, her lips moving to the words of an old familiar love song, her face transfixed into that of a wistful young lass.

For Carla

2009-06-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

Today I went to Carla's memorial services. She was a fellow mother from my kids' elemetary school; her eldest and my eldest were in kindergarten together, and we moved in those circles for over a decade, watching our children grow in a sort of time lapse fast forward, while we felt we were staying the same. We age slower, we moms, but unfortunately her cancer cells were over-achievers, racing to win, and finally doing so. She died the week before her youngest son graduated sixth grade.

She was a lovely person. Reserved and gracious and graceful. I never felt I knew her very well until she found out that the cancer had returned, about three years ago. And it was in the way she died, that I learned to know her life. I learned what a spiritual being she was, and watched how she approached her fight with grace and a certain type of gratitude. She wasn't complacent, oh no. She hated this thing and hated what it was doing to her. But each step of the way she took in stride, sending out intermittent email reports that detailed her medical challenges and also let us all in on how she was dealing with them, mentally, emotionally, practically, and spiritually.

A group of women in our group banded together to bring her and her family meals, sending out schedules every month, and unflaggingly delivering them dinner several times a week. I was never able to help out, and I felt small, and powerless, and silent in the face of what she was going through. And yet, I knew... it was OK. She was the kind of person who would get how busy I was, single and raising the boys and maintaining a job. She got it.

So today I gathered with a large group of people to honor her. We gathered together at All Saints Church, and we sang hymns and participated in much needed, healing ritual. We clustered in groups and we shed tears and we smiled when we saw each other and then, remembering the context, immediately grew solemn again. The service was beautiful. It did what we needed it to do, giving us a context in which to grieve while providing a safety zone of structure and community in which to let down our guard, be vulnerable in the face of loss, and regroup with words of peace and prevailing joy and a greater plan that allows for this, and the joys of life as well. Whether we believed in the literal words or not, they were good to hear, a balm to the soul, just as intended.

Afterwards we gathered at their house and saw testaments to her life. Pictures on the wall, her friends and family standing up to speak about her, giving her life a collage of story and context and perspective.

It was a hard day for that family. One that had to be endured. One with so much input, so much extraordinary emotion, so much grief; I looked at her boys and wondered just how much they could possibly be taking in, and whether they knew that -- as hard as this day was -- it would not be as hard as the days they've been through, nor would it be as hard as the day six months hence, six years hence, six decades hence, when they would still miss their mother, it would still be unfair, and it would still be utterly and coldly and bleakly real.

And in the midst of it, I could not escape the fact that Roger and I are about to do almost the exact thing in exactly two weeks. We are orchestrating a large gathering of people, to go through a ritual together, to weep poignant tears together, to experience and embrace impermanence together. We are also renting table cloths and buying cases of wine and trying to determine how many cups to buy. We are also buying new clothing and coordinating with friends and figuring out how to get through a day of extraordinary emotion without losing it ourselves.

Whereas Carla's funeral was a celebration of life in the face of death, our wedding is going to be a celebration of impermanence in the face of life. The thing that makes us cry at both events is the tragic, inescapable reality of the fragility and the impermanence of this sweet sad frustrating mysterious existence. No matter how hard we try, the moments slip through our fingers like sand in an hour glass. We cry at funerals because of the finality of seeing our loved one's hour glass empty. I will never be able to bring them dinner. We will never see her face again. The boys have lost their mother in the receding rivers of time.

We cry at weddings because we know love has the potential to fade, that the two lives bonded together can so easily change their directions, and that death eventually will prevail, for all of us. Every union is momentary in duration. Every promise is weighted with caveat. Every kiss -- so sweet, so bitter -- is grounded in the knowledge that there will eventually be a last kiss, a last touch, a last breath.

We cry at both. We laugh at both. The difference is the infinitely small line between the yin and the yang. There is not one without the other. The ache of the funeral informs the champagne cork of the wedding. We have knowledge of both when we celebrate either. It is the dance, it is the only dance, and it is impossible to embrace either one alone.

We cry because we are safe, for the moment of time during the ritual, to relish the bittersweetness. We cry because it is good, from time to time, to not push the knowledge aside, to let it crush us just a little bit. We cry because it is real. And we cry for joy because we have the ability to cry for sadness.

We are amazing beings, we humans. We create elaborate systems to get us through these moments of intensity and pain. We lose ourselves in checklists to avoid having to see the big picture more often than we can bear. And we are able to give each other the love, the support, the tender touches that we all need to get through a day like this intact. Wherever her family is, wherever you are, I wish us all a respite from care... in sleep, in love, in the peace that may come from embracing the dance with the equanimity and grace that Carla showed us in her brief passage on this earth.

The Mindfulness of Joy

2009-01-01T19:41:00.001-08:00

We're in a new year. The town of Pasadena saw it in as it has for so many years -- with a compression of people, a heightening of energy, a mad frenzy that became uncorked this morning as over a million people watched the horses and the marching bands and the gloating floats, bedecked with profusions of springlike flowers. The stealth bomber flew overhead, filling the valley with its roar. The air crackled with brisk exuberant electricity. It's happened again; we've seen in the beginning of one more calendar year.

I am looking forward to this new year. In 20 days, the first politician I've ever fully believed in is going to take over the most powerful job on the globe. In six months, I'm getting married to a man I love completely. My life is full, and full of stories. Unfortunately, many of these stories cannot be discussed publicly in this forum, at least not as they've been unfolding. For someone like me, whose stock in literary trade usually stems from some delving into some juicy aspect of my personal life, this has been like starving to death in the middle of a sumptuous banquet.

I've been trying to watch to see what's noteworthy about happiness. Being happy is lovely, but different from what I had expected. What makes it different is very subtle. I am well versed in how to deal with adversity (take the blow, process it for three days with girlfriends, eat some ice cream, and when the stories start getting funny, I know I'm over the worst.) But how to deal with happiness? What kind of story does that become?

What I've noticed is that life these days seems to consist of discrete, almost painfully intense moments. It's like traveling in a new country; every moment is a postcard I want to write to myself so I can remember everything fully. I want to fold my life into some kind of full-sensory scrapbook, so I can pull these pieces out later, when I fear the muted colors will return, and the edges will be once again blurred by depression and ennui.

Here: I'm walking the dog one morning after the recent rains. It is cold but the sun is bright and shining on the world. There is so much moisture in the air that my breath comes out in steamy billows. I am walking Sam alone; Roger has gone on early to work, but our conversation still lingers in my ears and I am still feeling the warmth of our oatmeal in my body. I turn onto a side street and let Sam sniff around, and as I'm standing there I see that the tree I'm standing in front of is emitting swirling tendrils of steam as the rain evaporates in the sun. I look across the street and see that the same thing is happening with a rooftop: lines of steam snaking along the peak of the roof, wafting up into the cold blue sky. As I look, I see that all the other trees facing the sun are also steaming, and then the whole world is suddenly doing it. There is a sense of warmth emanating out into the cold and the world is now breathing with me and there is no difference whatsoever between me and the dog and the tree and the rooftop. We are all inhaling and exhaling together in this same moment of time.

Again: Christmas evening. We are at our friends' house with a group of other people and kids. The house is almost magical, it's so pretty. Everything is green and red and the soft glow of candles and the fireplace create a delicate, enveloping softness. The lights reflect in the windows and imply fairy lands just outside of reach. The food is bounteous and lip-smacking in its perfection. And after we're done eating and are still sipping our wine, we continue our conversation while the kids go back to their electronics. It is a good conversation; the kind that connects and inspires and makes you feel grateful to have lived long enough to participate in it.

There are seven of us: five in our fifties, one in her forties, and a mother in her seventies. And as I'm sitting there, I realize that years will roll over this table and, with luck, we'll spend many more Christmas nights engaged in other but similar conversations. We will get older. Members of our group will start to get sick, and die, and we will diminish. The potency of the friendships will prevail, but our physical bodies will change as we move through more time and life takes its toll.

It was classic Buddhist impermanence raising its head. The summation of the Buddha's philosophy summed up in three words: Not always so. I was struck by the ephemeral moment, and yet happy to stay within it for as long as it lasted. As with the feeling of oneness I had with the dog, I was having a deep meditative experience, without having done anything meditative in the least.

I hadn't realized this until this morning, but the feelings I've had recently are very similar to the state we strive for in meditation. That consciousness of the moment, the awareness of being right in the center of my being, tasting and smelling and experiencing things exactly as they happen. Not using the past to script the future. Not barreling over the present because it's unpleasant, or (perversely) too pleasant, or just unconscious. The thing I'm feeling is a LOT more like being in a deep meditative state of mindfulness, than it is like feeling "happy" all the time. It's not giddy. And it's not necessarily euphoric. It's extremely and intensely present.

I don't know which comes first: the joy or the mindfulness. But they are closely related, I believe. All I know is that these feelings of presence -- whether on the cushion or off -- are very similar. Not necessarily comfortable. Not necessarily easy. But absolutely dialed in to what is happening right now.

This is what I wish for myself and all of us this bright new 2009: a sense of being in our life right now as we are living it, an awareness of the moment from within the moment, and a deep appreciation of the gossamer threads that connect us to each other in our fleeting lives. The calendar leaves fly by so quickly. Let us know each moment as it presents itself.

Awakening

2008-11-05T08:25:00.000-08:00

There's been a madness in the world. For the last eight years, ten years, I'm not sure when it started. It's a darkness of the soul, a despair in the collective. It's shown itself in deep polarities, bitter entrenchment, rampant immaturity, and reckless abandonment of those things that usually hold the social fabric together. Things like integrity, honesty, truth.

These words still sound foreign to us when we roll them around in our minds. As do words like faith and hope and belief. Somewhere along the way we lost the sense that these things can truly be ours once again. Somewhere along the way we lost our light.

There's been a sadness in the world. Some of us found solace in institutions like church, and party affiliation, and solid answers. Others of us found their refuge in the New York Times, and anti-depressants, and solid questions. We have all been looking for solid ground. We have all taken the path that seems best for us and for our country. This is not a time to blame or point fingers: that time is over. I think this is something that has come around as part of the cycles, like a season that turns into darkness.

Looking back, I see us all in a deep soporific shadow. It manifests in ways that are horrible and disturbing. Role models who should be adulated are besmirched and beslimed. Friendships once solid crumble away under revelation and rage. We have none of us acted honorably, consistently, with direction.

I'm not sure when it started. Was it the greed of the internet bubble in the 90's? When the game of creating a business turned from looking at the market to seducing the venture capital? Was it the ends-justifies-the-means politics of the elections of 2000 and 2004? I don't know when the dimmer started dimming, but when churches start sporting posters declaring that they are against torture, because there is actually a national debate going on about its pros and cons... it's obvious the light is out, and we've forgotten even the concept of a flickering match.

Whenever it started descending, I see the sine wave of our times crossing from light into darkness on September 11, 2001. At that point we lost our mind, in sorrow and grief and rage, and started operating from a place of deep unconscious reactivity. Flailing about, on a personal and national level, we fought shadow demons in every corner (except, apparently, the correct one.) It was on 9/11 that we lost control, and the world could understand why even though it mourned the choices we made. And it was on November 4, 2008, that we regained control, and showed the world that our system, eventually, can correct itself.

You can only tell you've been asleep when you awaken. And today we awaken with a new leader, a new sense of freshness, and a new desire to move forward with honesty and faith. I am going to let myself believe in this country again, because it has proved - more powerfully than ever - that its concepts are solid and true. Things can change. The pendulum can swing.

There's been a madness in the world. A sadness in the world. And now it's over.

Zombies Run Wild

2008-10-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

I walked into a Halloween store the other day and felt profoundly disturbed. Everywhere I looked there were images of gore. Severed heads with staring bloody eyeballs. Truncated torsos. Scars and mutilations and carnage.

It was like visiting the inside of my brain. These days my head is filled with the pain that humans can inflict upon each other. Betrayals of trust. Fabrics of families and schools and countries torn apart by free-wheeling moral recklessness. The past reaching up to destroy the present and future. Mental illness. Greed. Selfish and nihilistic pleasure-taking. And the horrifying undercurrent of hatred and fear against one of the most inspiring and high-minded statesmen our generation has ever seen.

Shadow is bursting out all over. In our lives, in the world, it seems like we are getting polarized. The brightness is getting brighter, and the shadow is going crazy making itself known. Like bugs scattering when the light bulb is turned on, I'm seeing things scuttling back into corners. And the snapshots of their ugliness is imprinted inside me. Makes me recoil. Wakes me up at night.

Halloween has a purpose. It makes this fear and revulsion conscious, present. We can put on these costumes and laugh. We can alchemize the things that repel and frighten us, and turn the tables on brutality and atrocity and death.

Frankly, for me, it's giving me the creeps, even as I can intellectually understand it. It's too close to home. Too similar to the thoughts that are haunting me in my witching hours in the middle of the night.

Tonight I plan to do this holiday justice. Armed with a cosmopolitan, my lover and a kid who still loves to dress up, I plan on walking up and down the street taking good stock of all of this. I want to look at the false images of carnage and horror and understand what they mean.

Bringing the inside out is what we do when we open up our psyche's crypt and let the zombies run free. We are giving death the finger. And in the process of doing this, I can hopefully start seeing the world as it is -- my children healthy, my household safe, my body whole. Right this second, we're OK. The horrors of the past and future can stay there, in the past, in the future. The past and future don't exist anyway.

So let the monsters lurk and the witches scream. As long as we can bring consciousness to the dark underbelly, we're still OK.

The Piano

2008-10-22T06:02:00.001-07:00

Once there was a girl who played the piano.

She would play it when the house was empty, when her mother was out shopping or still at work. She would play when she need to feel something, and when words were too much, or not enough. She would play her white piano and something inside would feel very sad, and yet very much at peace at the same time. She would play the notes over and over and gradually, as the notes became more fluid and her hands became more sure, something inside of her would rest and be at peace.

She played the piano for ten years. She started when she was small and gradually she became more fluent. Her mother loved to hear her play. Loved it so much that she began to demand it, to shame the girl into playing for her pleasure. She would listen from the other rooms and somehow there was a taking, an appropriation of the notes. The notes coming out were so personal, so hard won, and so painfully beautiful, that the girl started being uncomfortable when she was listened to by her mother. She could no longer hear the music through her own ears. And when she listened through her mother's ears, the notes sounded awkward and wrong and full of everything the girl wanted to flee.

Soon, she could not play in front of anyone. Once she tried to play in front of her school and couldn't find the notes. The more she tried, the more she was aware of the other people's ears and opinions. And the more she was aware of the other people's opinions, the more she worried that she would be found lacking, or that they would want more of her, or that there was something wrong with her playing any kind of music and finding that sweet sad space inside her that loved to express itself outside of words. The harder she tried to make her fingers remember the notes, the less she could hear the music in her heart. And the harder she tried, the worse she became. Until she stopped in the middle. Completely blank. Unable to continue.

One day the girl came home and found there was a large space in the dining room where the white piano had been. Her mother had given it away, she told the girl. Because she no longer played it. Because it was just wasting space.

The girl screamed that she had been playing it. That she played it when she was alone. That it was one of the last refuges she had. But her words were not heard. Her mother was too angry that she had not heard enough of the music that she had been providing lessons to produce. So the piano was gone. There was no more chance for her daughter to withhold her music.

The girl grew up. She learned to survive and make money and hold together her own household. One day she bought herself a piano. It was old, it weighed a ton, it was bulky in her small apartment. She bought it so no one could ever take her piano away from her again. She moved it from apartment to house, from house to apartment. She loved the piano. But she rarely played it. And never in front of people.

One night she played it in that still place of great sadness and weight. She felt that sweet sad shifting of something being expressed when words weren't enough, or were too much. And she woke up the next morning and realized she'd been taking away her own piano all these years. So that no one could ever do that to her again. It wasn't enough to just play when the house was empty. She would simply not play. And then she would never have to know how it felt when the music was taken away without her ability to stop it.

The more things change...

2008-09-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

I went to an evening social event last night that happened to be exactly next door to the house I lived in while I was in high school in the 1970s. White wine in hand, R and I walked around the corner lot and I explained the layout of the house, what it felt like to live there, and how wrenching it was to have to leave.

The house is in an established part of Pasadena, a staid and graceful neighborhood of comfortable homes with well landscaped yards and 1930s architecture. This isn't the old money section of Pasadena around Orange Grove and the Arroyo, but it's an architectural step above the developments of the northeast. It's not the bungalows of bungalow heaven either. To me, living there for a few years, it was saturated with a kind of Ozzy and Harriet complacency... which made my skin itch with annoyance at the time, but that I now aspire to and crave.

I remember the streets through the filter of my troubled adolescence, with the smog hanging thick in the summertime and casting a haze down the vanishing perspective of the gridded streets. Much of the beauty of the neighborhood was lost on me. I rode my bike along the ragged sidewalks, and fantasized wistfully about the lives going on within the quaint English cottages, what it would be like to live in a home draped with wisteria and mystery.

My mom and I first moved to the neighborhood, into a two bedroom house that we bought for $19,000, and were already a freak of nature without a man in the house. She and I had been solo for many years, so I barely noticed it. But these were the days when a "broken family" was something to be commented upon in low voices and furtive glances. Living in apartments, as we had for the previous couple of years, this didn't seem to matter much. But this was such a stable neighborhood, it was obvious that we were unusual.

But the shock was yet to come. When we moved down the street a year or so later, it was because she had remarried and we could afford a much bigger house (at the obscene price of $45,000). The fact that she had remarried was not the issue. It was that she had married a black man. And black men were not something you would ever see picking up a paper in this neighborhood... unless he was the guy who had delivered it.

A black man. It got very quiet around our house. I can't say we ever had any specific problems, at least not that I knew about. But it was very... quiet after we moved to the big house down the block. It felt like there was a shield of discomfort surrounding us.

He was a black man but embodied very few stereotypes. He worked at the post office, was somewhat short and overweight, and was (as my mom would always describe him) as comfortable as an old pair of slippers. He wasn't Malcolm X (which was too bad as that would've suited my mood perfectly), he wasn't a cool hip poetry-spouting bebop king (which would've been even better). He was as conservative and boring as any of the other heads of household in a three mile radius. But he was black. And that was unusual and freaked people out and they avoided us mainly -- I think -- because they had zero idea of what to do with us.

Maybe we weren't really aware of how bad it was as we were dealing with problems of our own (they fought and were divorced within a couple of years, and the wreckage of the marriage carried with it a foreclosure on the house and the slim remainder of my childhood innocence.) There were no crosses burning on our lawn or anything like that. But the whole situation was greeted with deep mistrust and fear, which had nothing to do with the man himself and everything to do with the unknown.

As we walked by and looked into those comfortable long-lost windows again last night, I was heartened to see an Obama sign on the front lawn. And I woke up this morning and thought how far we've come in the last 35 years. It really is true, I thought. There is such a thing as progress, and enlightenment of thought.

But as I've mulled this over all day, my comfort has diminished. Once again there is a black man in the national neighborhood, and he's once again being treated with a knee-jerk repulsion. People are embracing a ludicrous ticket led by a befuddled old man and a self-righteous moose-shooting bimbo, embracing it like it's the second coming itself come to save the day -- and all because of this primal antipathy towards a man with dark skin. Once again, as it was 35 years ago, the neighborhood is reacting with mistrust and fear, which has nothing to do with the man himself and everything to do with the unknown.

Hanging Directions

2008-07-29T09:50:00.001-07:00

Be forewarned: this is really a very weird use of my blog this morning. But I need to know. And I need for you, whoever is out there, to give me some information.

I really had the wind knocked out of my sails this morning when I was confronted by a Whole New Thought. I won't go into details how it came up, but it was brought to my attention that some people hang their shirts with the buttons facing to the left (as it hangs on the pole in the closet) and some hang their shirts with the buttons facing to the right. I, personally, am a right-facing kind of gal. And the person I was calmly and rationally discussing this with is, as it turns out, a left-facing kind of guy.

Which is fine.

Really.

I'm OK with diversity of thought.

But, being me, I have to be, well, right. I mean, I have to do some research to prove that my way is better. Well, OK, not to prove. But more to find out if I've been some freak of right-facing nature my whole life, or if I've got company. And let me make it clear, that clothes-hanging is the ONLY place in my life that I prefer the right to the left. It's not a political statement, by a long shot. Actually, I'm just really interested in seeing if this is a gender-based preference (as he asserts) or just habituation.

So I started asking around. My data set, at this moment, consists of two people. One of whom laughed outright at the thought that anyone would even GIVE a shit and was pretty much happy when most of the clothes ended up mostly on the hanger, and the direction the buttons were facing was utterly and completely moot. (She also said, I believe with a hint of sarcasm, that I deserved someone in my life who was as preoccupied with button-facing as I am.)

Another friend looked at me like I was crazy (I'm suspecting I'll have to get used to that), without any comprehension of what I was talking about, until we determined that his pole stuck straight out (in his CLOSET, god!) so the way his buttons faced was kind of moot as the hangers were all facing him straight on. He did make a good point though: that when he gets his shirts cleaned at the cleaners, they are put on the hanger in such a way that the buttons WOULD face left if he had a pole that went sideways (in his CLOSET). So, OK. Maybe the cleaners have a point. But I'm not giving this up without more stats.

So, now I'm really curious. I'm curious about all sorts of things: which way buttons should face, if button-facing is anything that anyone cares about, if this is a gender issue, and (of course) which way people's poles face (in their CLOSET).

I'm glad you waited almost a month to see what new profound thing I'd come up with in this blog. All of you with RSS feeds (you know who you are) who were momentarily elated to see me post something... well, sometimes ya get what ya get. I DID write a pretty good post at www.theDHX.com the other day, so if you really need some dark profound shit, you can procure over there.

For me, today, it's buttons. Buttons and which way your poles face.

Please comment. Inquiring minds want to know.

Interdependence Day

2008-07-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being. Without interrelation with society he cannot realize his oneness with the universe or suppress his egotism. His social interdependence enables him to test his faith and to prove himself on the touchstone of reality.
--Mahatma Gandhi, 1929

The 4th of July has always been my favorite holiday. It doesn't involve mandated gift-giving, it usually involves beer and hotdogs, and it ends with fireworks. What is not to love about this day?

For many years I found myself in Boston on the 4th, camping out with friends on the Esplanade the night before, and spending the hot muggy day alternating between taking shifts on the blanket to maintain our stakehold, and wandering around downtown looking for ice, or beer, or a cool building to stand in. At night we'd heave a collective sigh of relief when the Boston Pops would take their chairs -- as much because the event itself was about to start as that the marathon was soon thereafter to be over. They would play and we would lie down on our weary backs, waiting for the ultimate final set to begin. And when they'd play the 1812 Overture, with the fireworks over the Charles, and the cannons blasting from the Cambidge side ... it was a transporting experience. All the forces converged at once: the cameraderie of being with friends in a yearly ritual, the banter back and forth, the swapping of stories from previous escapades coupled with the power of the music, the cannon blasts thumping our bodies with their sub-aural percussion, the piccolos slicing our inner ear with their achingly sweet high beauty, and the fireworks arcing high overhead.

I always remember those nights. I also always remember a 4th spent in Singapore, at the American School. It was 1979 and my friend Dee and I had been traveling the world for about six weeks. Dee's sister-in-law was a teacher in Singapore and we took a much-needed week to stop and regroup. We were happy to find some fellow Americans to spend the holiday with. From that vantage point, so far away from home, I could finally see that we were really only one country on the planet after all. That the world was not skewed in a way where the US was 95% of everything and the rest of the world kind of scrambled to fit in the remaining sliver of influence and importance. From that spot on the athletic field thousands of miles away, I felt at once diminished and rightfully in perspective, for the first time in my life. Home was a distant spot, far away from our horizon. It made the United States seem a precious, and relatively very small, place.

And yet, with all the exotic 4th's I've seen, this one just past was, I'm pretty sure, the best I've ever had. My last thought of the very long day was that if I could come back and re-live any one day of my life, a la "Our Town," this was a day I would gladly revisit over and over for eternity.

We did all the usual stuff -- the utterly charming South Pasadena parade and the fireworks at the high school at night. And in between we had a party with the obligatory hot dogs and beer and a blazing sun. But what made the difference this year was that I didn't end up celebrating my own independence as I usually do. I found myself reveling in interdependence. And the realization that that was in evidence on all fronts made the day sparkle with fireworks for me long before the sun even set.

Wikipedia defines it thusly:

"Interdependence is a dynamic of being mutually responsible to and sharing a common set of principles with others. . . . Some people advocate freedom or independence as a sort of ultimate good; others do the same with devotion to one's family, community, or society. Interdependence recognizes the truth in each position and weaves them together. Two people in a good relationship are said to be interdependent.It can also be defined as the interconnectedness and the reliance on one another socially, economically, environmentally and politically."

The party was a lot of work. There was shopping to do and a backyard to set up and food to prepare. I put the kids to work cleaning up the treehouse, sweeping and dusting the house, and they were willingly at the ready to pitch in with anything we needed. They were great. I also had my friend, my co-conspirator, around. I had always wanted a good guy to share the parade and the fireworks with, but his involvement went way beyond what I'd ever hoped for. He and I ran around Smart & Final comparing prices of beer and paper plates. We got out the drill and fixed the tree house steps when he found out (the hard way) that the wood was completely rotten. He helped me lug patio furniture around and ran out for ice and beer when we ran low. At the end of the day, the boys help me clear out the backyard and throw out all the trash. All of us were interconnected and worked together -- moving towards a common cause without sacrificing our identities or needs.

What I realized was this: it's not about independence any more. It's not about being free and a solitary soldier and heaping all the work upon myself in order to maintain my sacred uncompromising isolation. And it's not about being taken care of and sitting back to allow decisions to be made around and about me. It's about both. It's about allowing the breathing room to flow between people, where individual needs are met at the same time as the collective goals are being pursued. It's about a kind of trust. A trust that will allow changes to the plan. That will allow for better ideas to float up. That will allow for me to be taken care of at one point, so that I can better take care of the other person later.

Last Friday was truly a harmonious collective endeavor. The conversation flowed, the food was good, the day was leisurely and the sun charted its course across the sky. And when we sat exhausted at the end of the day on the new football field and watched the fireworks explode overhead, this time it was a celebration for me of being intertwined within a family I love and cherish. Instead of looking from a vantage point thousands of miles away, I was able to see it from within, and know that I was finally home at last.

Graduation

2008-06-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

I needed to buy some graduation cards the other day so I walked up to Vroman's at lunchtime. I stood by the rack in the stationary section and was surprised to find myself start to well up. Wow, what a basket case I am, I thought. I'm crying just at the thought of two people moving forward in their lives. And I knew I was hitting up against something kind of big.

We cry at ceremonies. What is that about? Why do we cry at weddings? It's not really the cynical "hope over experience" factor, I don't think. Because otherwise, why would we cry at graduations? It's not like they are consciously entering into a situation that very often goes badly... the graduates have worked, accomplished, are looking forward to a bright future, and are moving on.

Why does this affect us so?

I think it's because one of those nexus points of life that force us to confront beginnings and endings. We all know that things have a beginning, middle and end. At ceremonial moments such as a graduation, we are conscious that we are poised right at the juncture of an ending and a beginning. It's sad to see the past, filled with events and memories, neatly compartmentalized and slipped into a drawer. And, at the same time, it's joyful to see the future entice us with its unseen vistas. A graduation is that moment between archiving and opening.

At my son's sixth grade graduation yesterday, I realized another thing as well. Culturally, at least for those of us not attached to a single religious tradition, we are lacking in coming-of-age milestones. Not being Jewish, my family doesn't have bar or bat mitzvahs to work towards, accomplish and grow from. We say a girl becomes a woman when she gets her first period. We say a boy becomes a man when he loses his virginity. These seem, at this point in the 21st century, to be woefully primitive and unconscious events to hang such an important transition upon.

There are few lines of public demarcation in our current culture. And I've always felt that our noisy, inchoate, frenzied society reflects this lack. We have men who grow physically but never emotionally. We have women who are never easy with their womanhood, preferring to either stay little girls or move immediately to crone-dom. Everything between childhood and old age is frequently a blurry mess of uncertain expectations and obligations.

Yesterday, my son and his classmates stood up and gave their graduation speeches. Some kids performed a song or a dance. It was a ceremony they always knew they would be participating in. My son had been dreading it for years. And they all prepared, they all practiced, and they all presented themselves with staggering maturity, articulation and poise. We were watching young people grow up before our eyes. We were witness to their movement away from childhood. It was conscious, it was heartfelt, and it was profound. Not a dry eye in the house.

We are always moving from endings to beginnings and back again. I think that any time we can stop those moments and make a ceremony of them, especially in the company of other people, they are made that much more conscious and potent. Rather than being trapped in a flow of constant risings and subsidings, it's so very moving to stop the waves, just for a moment, and give the whole painful wonderful process a moment of respect and acknowledgment.

To the sixth grade class of 2008... congratulations. We are privileged to be witness to the amazing young men and women you are and the incredible people you will become.

You're Soaking In It

2008-05-18T23:28:00.000-07:00

I hate writing this blog, I really do. It really demonstrates what a nimrod I am sometimes, and how pathetic it is that it's taken me this long in life to get some fundamental concepts.

It was the popcorn bowl last night that did it. And the dishes from tonight's dinner. It may come as a huge surprise to many of you (given the usual state of romance in my life) that I am actually kind of a neat freak, especially when it comes to dishes. I'm kind of a fanatic about washing dishes immediately after a meal. During preparation of a meal, I'm the one throwing away every stray scrap and peel and washing the dish the second something gets taken off of it. I'm pretty annoying, actually. The perfect meal, to me, is one where you can wash every dish it's taken to cook it in WHILE you're cooking it... so that when you're done you only have the eating dishes left to wash. When possible, I'll wash the dishes before dessert, so I can really enjoy dessert. I used to be much worse, actually. But this is really how the inner OCD freak inside me likes to operate.

So. That's me. And the only reason I reveal all these ugly facts about myself, besides wishing you to feel secretly superior and tell your friends about my blog because it will make them feel secretly superior as well -- is because you need to know how enormously significant a thing it was for me to leave my popcorn pan, the butter melting pan and the bowl in the sink last night.

And not wash them.

At all.

Until this morning.

Huge. Unprecedented. But.. hey... it's been a kind of unasetting month. Pyshcic turmoil. Confusion and communication gaps. Ancient wounds being opened up and bursting forth with poisons and decays from fifty years ago. Days without tears were a norm for several weeks running.

And yet I'm learning some stuff. I'm learning to live a life without definition or a plan. I'm learning to survive uncertainty. I survived some hideous trips down memory lane and am thinking I may still remember how to laugh. And I seem to be learning that time helps immeasurably with resolving some issues. It's like time is the great hair conditioner of the soul. You pour it on and things untangle. Knots unkink. Seemingly insurmountable ganglions gradually diminish and become benign.

So I figured I'd try something wild last night: put the oily pans and bowl in the sink, squirt them with dish soap and leave them overnight. This morning, I got up, saw the pile of dishes, dumped out the water and deemed them easily ready for the dishwasher, and had them neatly dispatched in less than a minute.

Which was a lot easier than doing them last night.

Which means that procrastination helped me, rather than increasing my burden.

That's the painful part of this blog. Because I realized something: sometimes working to make something happen is simply not as effective as letting it be for a time... and then pretty much letting time take care of it itself. Time can do a lot of work for us in these situations. I am painfully learning to simply let some issues in my life soak in their own juices for awhile. I don't know what's going on. I don't know how to change the things I'm not happy about. I know a lot of things have changed for the worse recently, and I don't know how to fix any of it.

And I have to continue to not know for a long while.

As my son Chris once said, when I was agitating about some other guy -- "chill out, mom. Let it marinate a bit."

Let it marinate a bit. There is no substitute for time. As my friend the physicist says: T (for time) changes everything.

So tonight, I'm going to take the psychic dishes and just let them soak in the sink for awhile. I'm tired. And I'm tired of working so hard. I'm tired of being in pain, and I'm tired of being in so much control. Let time and soap bubbles and water relax the crusted gunk that's stopping up my flow. Let time and some benign neglect wash some old stuff out, with a minimum of effort on my part. If time can't fix the problem, then time will make that clear as well.

Psychic Farts

2008-04-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

Remember my co-conspirator? The man in my life with whom I have started to breathe in tandem?

We have hit the danger zone. The point in all new relationships -- usually occurring about the 2 - 3 months mark, in my experience -- where suddenly the transparency starts to wear off.

You know what I'm talking about. It's that feeling you get when you first fall in love and every thought just flows completely seamlessly between the two of you. "I and my beloved are one." It's such a lovely feeling. You both marvel at the juiciness of the strawberries. You see the same shooting stars. You know, without a doubt, what the other is thinking at every moment of the day. And the blissfully transcendent part of that is... is that you're right. You DO know what the other is thinking. Your souls ARE commingled. It's heady, druggy, surreal and marvelously real stuff.

And then there's that moment. It's that moment when you look at the other person and you have no clue... NO clue... who he is, what he's he's thinking, what he's doing, or how he even got there in the first place. It's like a bad science fiction shot where suddenly the protagonist is wearing some hideously disfiguring mask and the heroine looks at him and scrapes at her face in screaming horror. Oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! It cannot BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

The transparency has been replaced by profound confusion and obscurity. Nothing makes sense anymore. You start to order iced tea for him -- because that's what he ALWAYS drinks and that's what you've ALWAYS done -- and he looks at you with disdain and orders lemonade. Or you order lemonade -- because he ALWAYS like to change things up and last time he ordered iced tea -- and he looks at you with disdain and orders iced tea. The rules are upside down, insane. And you feel like you've been slipped crazy pills and stuck in the wrong story with the wrong man. And you have a horrible feeling that it's going to have the wrong ending as well.

We found that spot last week. It was at Islands with the kids. I came out of the rest room and saw him looking out the window idly. And I could plainly see a huge thought bubble coming out of his head. A thought bubble that said "Is that all there is?" I fast forwarded, on his behalf, through the next forty years of our mutual lives together and could hear him screaming inside. It was going to be decades of this Islands, these teenagers, this tired old woman, this endless grinding choice between iced tea and lemonade.

The Precipitating Incident happened within the next hour. He said something that hurt my feelings. I mentioned it later. He got mad. Suddenly we're in uncharted territory: Our First Fight.

I'll spare you the details. It included the usual pieces on my part: lots of words, not enough words, and a migraine. I don't know his usual pieces, yet, but both of us processed a lot. And to our credit we delved in, did the analysis and soul searching and apparently have come out the other side intact.

And this is what I wrote him this morning: It kind of doesn't matter where that "is that all there is" aroma came from the other night. He could've been feeling trapped first, or I could have. When two people are dancing so closely together, it's hard to tell who originates and who projects. Whatever it is, and whoever the psychic fart emanates from, it becomes collectively apparent fairly immediately. On some level it really doesn't matter who starts up the music... because we're both going to start swaying in time to it in relatively short order.

It's a rite of passage, this ability to be more fully human. Thankfully (I say this with all sincerity) we're working on the psychic and not physical level yet, in terms of holding and releasing our inner gases... but it's a big step. There's stuff inside that needs to come out at times.

I have no good solutions as to how to best navigate this dark ugly stuff. But I do know it has to come out at some point, otherwise everyone's uncomfortable and it gets out anyway. To totally belabor this ridiculously gross metaphor (and then I'll stop, I promise), I think the key here is honesty and breathing room. And compassion for everyone's humanity. We all have our secret thoughts. We all have our moments of wanting an escape, even from things that we love. We (sorry, really, this is the last one) all gorge on the pleasures of life and sometimes we eat too fast. Sometimes we don't give ourselves time to digest. And sometimes we just are victims of our own unconscious reflexes.

Breathing room and honesty. And a sense of humor, that helps too. If I figure out where to find some psychic Bean-o, I'll let you know. I promise.

Permissions

2008-03-26T08:38:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up thinking about the word "permission." It's a really interesting word when you open up the hood.

The "per" part is way cool -- it means "through," "thoroughly," "utterly," "very" -- as in "pervert," "pervade," and "perfect." (All my references, by the way, I got by clicking around Dictionary.com if you want to go play on your own.)

The "Mittere" part is a bit more complex. When used with Permission, it's defined as "to let, or to make (someone) go." When used with "Admit" however, they define it as "let go, to send" as in a mission. And when used with "Commit" it's defined as "to send, give over". The key thing I get from that is an active sending out and releasing.

So, in one way of looking at it, permission is an extremely active, maximum amount of sending out, releasing, and letting go. An active non-grasping. A conscious opening of the hands for the express purpose of releasing whatever is being held.

In software development, "permissions" are something a bit different. When a user is give a set of security rights, those are called his permissions. So you can have permission to edit one set of documents, but be in "view only" mode for financial spreadsheets. This kind of goes with this other sense of the word, which is "Consent, especially formal consent; authorization."

So it isn't just this opening up and sending out. Sometimes it's very very formalized. The "permit" is a legal document that authorizes availability to something. A permission is a physical (or digital) locking or unlocking that enables access to functionality.

Which makes me think we could do some interesting things with this word. Like, write down, physically, our permissions. What we are going to permit ourselves to do in this lifetime. Give ourselves a permit to make money, say, from our chosen dharmic path. (I so hope that's a word). Give ourselves a permit to be recognized publicly for our teachings and our creative skills. Give ourselves a permit to stop once in awhile (that's for me). Give ourselves a permit to breathe (that's also for me). Give ourselves a permit to be really, truly happy in relationship. Give ourselves a permit to love and be loved. On and on and on. Like a physical, written unlocking of some things.

Because it's not all about our grasping of stuff. Sometimes stuff has us in its grasp (inside our heads). Being locked in or out of something is a form of grasping. Having this deep feeling of not being deserving of something, is a locking in, like being inside of a clenched fist. Having a deep feeling of always being secondary, or invisible, or not enough... that's a grasping. It's a different form than we're used to thinking about. We usually talk about grasping in terms of aversion or attraction. This is when we are grasped, surrounded, kept from, not permitted... by our own thoughts. So the opening up and letting go is a permission. An active releasing. A conscious opening up of the grasping that surrounds us.

Little kids are taught to ask us adults for "permission" to do something. This is ingrained in us, this sense that we need to ask a higher authority for the ability to exercise a certain amount of freedom. When we're small, this makes a certain amount of sense; permissions are installed to keep us safe from dangers we don't yet understand. In software, this is known as a user's "security" setting -- if you are too inexperienced or too dumb to really be able to use all the functionality safely, you are constrained by the software itself to limit your freedom and access to certain pieces of the program.

But we're no longer kids, right? At least not in many areas. Maybe we need to look at the places that no longer need to be kept safely kept out of reach. Like excess money. Like excess creativity. Like excess love. Within moral bounds (like we can't give ourselves permission to go kill our boss when he pisses us off), we need to trust ourselves enough to use the entire program. Our security settings may need to be adjusted to accommodate the fact that we're no longer new to this life, we're no longer inexperienced, and maybe it's time for us to spread our wings and use all the tools available.

[Cross posted with my other blog at www.TheDHX.com. And special thanks to "L," my muse and playmate and partner in extraordinary conversation these days. You didn't exactly give me permission to repurpose my email to you this morning, but I'm doing it anyway.]

Saturday Night

2008-03-24T07:18:00.000-07:00

"I want you to help me fulfill one of my deepest fantasies," I murmured into his ear the other night.

He glanced up at me, startled.

"Okayyyy," he said, with a nervous smile.

I took a deep breath and uttered words I never thought I'd be able to say to anyone in this lifetime. He listened thoughtfully, mulled it over a second, then put on his game face.

"OK," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "I'll drive."

Fifteen minutes later we were roaming the produce section of the new Whole Foods. The store is an orgiastic explosion of beautiful food and happy healthy people and I've been going there as a sort of religious ritual ever since it opened. And every time I've walked its still-gleaming aisles, I've experienced the same aching yearning. And that was to do exactly what we were doing now.

To go to Whole Foods, with a lover, to shop for food for a meal we would prepare together that evening seemed, for so long, like some unattainable Emerald City of joy. I don't know why it took on that proportion, but it always kind of shimmered with elusive sadness to me, like one of the most simple and intimate activities two people could do together. It implies comfort, and leisure, and dedication to spending time together. It implies that you've seen all the movies and gone to all the plays, and that you're so caught up with all your bookkeeping that the only thing left is to indulge in a four or five hour dinner. It's European. It's something you would see in a Meg Foster romantic comedy.

Obviously unattainable.

And here I was, with a willing participant in my little dream world. We wandered through the orderly stacks of vegetables, feeling and analyzing our choices like we were picking out items for a museum. We stood in front of the seafood counter and I looked at the eyeballs of the iced fish and the green sheen of the mussel shells and took a deep breath of contentment. Deeming the fish selection somewhat limited, we went upstairs and engaged the butcher in a deep discussion about the attributes of the perfect spencer ribeye steak. My companion selected a worthy cut; the butcher massaged the soft tissue of the meat with thumbs, declaring it a good choice; and I dropped the cool package into the cart with a sense of a job well done.

We prepared the vegetables first. He washed and chopped while I got the barbecue going. I added some balsamic marinade to the mix and dug out a big spoon for him to toss it with. The division of duties soon blurred. The meal evolved nearly without our participation; we just followed some instinctive choreography and moved through our steps without really thinking.

Afterwards, we settled ourselves in front of the TV to see what old movies might be on. "An American in Paris" was just starting and as we curled up to watch Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron fall in love on the banks of the Seine, I realized that we had just engaged in a similar dance. The effort was in the past, and all that was left was flawless execution.

Conspiracy

2008-03-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

con·spire /kənˈspaɪər/ [kuhn-spahyuhr]
[Origin: 1325–75; ME < L conspīrāre to act in harmony, conspire, equiv. to con- con- + spīrāre to breathe; see spirant, spirit]

I find myself in a conspiracy. With a man. We are breathing together. Acting in harmony. Our spirits are commingling.

We hesitate to put a capital "R" in front of the word that describes what we may be embarking on. Like naming God, we know the danger of putting labels on things. Labels call to them their own destruction. We talk around it, acknowledging the essential messiness of all such liasons, their potential for pain. We have both been around the block so many times that a night with YouTube and a beer seems a very viable substitute for all human entanglement.
And yet.

It is good. It is scary. The feelings contain spectrums of color I swear I've never seen before. It is poignant. And much of the time it is oddly calm, like when you're driving 100 miles an hour behind a fully loaded semi, and feel yourself weightless and gliding, pulled by the slipstream.

Today he is sick. Not in a way that will keep him down more than a few days, but sick enough to be reclusive and inward. This little deviation is enough to call forth my own inner demons. Today my fear takes me hostage. I am consumed with it, unable to believe that the whispers of loss could possibly be false.

The fear is a hangover. The last time I saw him was as pure and simple as my imagination today is complex and dark. Maybe it's my own fatigue creeping in. He apologizes profusely for exposing me to his germs, is scared I'll blame him if I get sick. I try to explain to him that it would be fine. That getting sick would be a sign of connection that I haven't felt in so many years. My immunity is strong. But if I fall ill, it was worth it many times over.

I think about this today as I am encased in an office conference room, locked in an endless meeting. The conversation we had on my way into work swirls in my head, making me crazy with my inability to escape and participate in my real life. Words forms inside my brain, take shape with urgency, and I start scribbling madly in the margins of my handout.

This is what I write:

We are infected with love. We are infected with loss. We cannot help but spread our joy, our fear and our sorrow. It is a symptom, a condition of being human.

We don't do this to each other. It is a function of our being, of our breathing in and out. We spread our emotional germs as a by-product of our interchange, our interdependence.

We breathe the same air. I inhale what you give off. You inhale my detritus. I can stay safe only by never breathing in. You can keep from infecting others only by not ever letting go. Keeping everything to ourselves is impossible. I need what you've got, and you need me.

We are mechanisms that live by ingesting the refuse of each other. Our lungs rise and fall in tandem, like the waves upon the sand. We have no control over what we carry with us. We give off energy like radiant spores. Our energy infects and heals and soothes and agitates. We can attribute blame or feel guilt but the things we emit are outside of our control. Our cross-contaminations are what keep us alive.

Sometimes the air we breathe is suffused with joy. The smell of clean laundry, night blooming jasmine, a lover's skin. It is impossible to distinguish the perfume from the poison. To be afraid of inhaling one is to lose the other forever. The equation simply does not square itself out.

No matter what we call this thing, I am pleased to be infected with it. I am happy to have it in my blood stream. Without a doubt, it could turn on me and knock me on my ass so fast my eyeballs would explode. I understand that part. I don't like breathing air mixed with equal parts danger and sanctuary. But that's the nature of this conspiracy. It's never one or the other. It's a cycle of give and take. And the alternative to both is to sit in fear on the sidelines, waiting for the safe moment, for the clean touch.

Why We Do It

2008-02-19T07:54:00.000-08:00

Sioux City, Iowa. Temperature outside: 11 degrees.

I am out on the road with Opera A La Carte. For the 24th year, I am in a overly heated hotel room looking outside at a blanket of snow-covered flatness. We did a show yesterday in Wayne, Nebraska where the temperature at load-out was 3 degrees ("feels like -14" say weather.com). Yesterday the high was 11 and today it looks like we'll get to 20, so we're in for some balmy weather.

Today we drive to Lincoln, Nebraska. Part of this is fun, if you consider the simple pleasures of free raisin bran and whole milk in the morning a fun thing. (I do.) Sometimes putting in a show is fun, albeit hard work (the day goes from 9 a.m until midnight, so it's a long day.) And sometimes, like yesterday, it's not that fun.

Yesterday was one the two days in the last 24 years that I had serious and profound doubts that we would be able to have a show. There are always problems to be solved, but I have never really been in a position to really doubt whether we could do the thing at all. Good, bad or indifferent, the curtain always rises and some kind of lighting comes up and singing occurs and music happens and we do a show. We've had fires, accidents, heart attacks (in the audience), injuries (onstage), more "wardrobe malfunctions" than anyone can count, lost props, dropped lighting cues, dropped lighting instruments (that was fun), ripped curtains, failed scenery, 35 minute intermissions because of impossible set changes -- you name it, we've done it. Every show is different. Every show has its own brand of catastrophe. And every show goes the same way: it starts, it continues, and it ends with applause.

Yesterday was a new one for me. At five minutes before the house opened I had no lighting cues whatsoever. After a day of focusing, troubleshooting dimmers, hanging and patching and cutting non-essentials and (then) cutting essentials, we had finally gotten to a place of looking at cues. And realized, the very hard way, that my lighting guy didn't know how to run the board. Like... AT ALL. Couldn't save a cue, couldn't separate the house lights from the stage lights, couldn't combine more than several lighting channels (they had to be contiguous) more than one chunk at a time.

So my options were to bring up an official cue (with a bunch of different lights) WITH the houselights up all at once, or turn everything off and then build the cue in real time while the singers were singing. Which is what we ended up doing. While the house was filling up, we managed to figure out how to a) turn off the house lights (that was a big step), b) turn on the conductor's light, c) turn on one chunk of stage lighting at a time. Because we could do those three things, at will, on cue, in various orders, we had a show. A show that looked absolutely and incontrovertably BAD... bad bad bad... but a show. And, of course, the audience had no clue and gave us a standing ovation.

Why do we do this? This is a question that my boss (the director/producer and star) and I ask each other all the time. Over the years we've had a variety of answers: "Because we love the money" (yeah right!!!) or "because we're stupid" (my personal favorite for about five years). But the best one we've come up with, that has stuck for a long time is "because we don't know how to stop." This is actually the most true: we don't know how to stop. I don't know how to stop being in this company, with people I've known for half my life, working for a man who is as infuriating and endearing as my father. It happens so sporadically that I have a hard time training replacements and, like childbirth, once the pain is over with there's a curious amnesia that sets in. I don't know how to stop. The company is as much a part of me as I am of it. So here I am again, humping through the world in a Ryder truck, swaddled in scarves and gloves, driving through the night and living on Sun Chips and M&Ms.

Why do we do this? Another answer occurred to me this morning. After the cluster fuck of a show yesterday, a core group of us sat in my partners' room drinking some kind of midwest beer and talking a mile a minute until about 3:30 this morning. We were loud and laughed until we could barely feel our face muscles any more. We discussed the show of course but it rapidly went back to old tours, antics on the road, things we've all collectively seen, done or heard about. People we've worked with over the years. Stories about hijinks, near misses, whacked out personalities, and always the stories about hookups on the road, who's done what with whom.

The stories are great. Laying down sheets of PVC film in a hotel hallway and creating an olive oil slip 'n' slide in Texas. Skinny dipping stories abound -- in the Gulf of Mexico, in various pools (with and without pool covers), in any puddle large enough to justify ripping off clothing and jumping in. (The skinny dipping is a particular art form that two of our members have perfected... they now make it a mission to jump into at least one body of water per tour). Stories that revolve around people, mainly. And the quirky fabulous things that people do when stuck with each other in unusual circumstances for a prolonged period of time.

And I realized that there was a new answer to the "why do we do this?" question. It's because of the stories. The stories give this thing life and justification and release. The stories help us decompress and hold our sides with laughter. The stories are our legend and the glue that will bond us together for many years, long after the company has disbanded.

During yesterday's train wreck, I just sat there and tried to breathe and get through it. And as I did I realized two things: The show does go on, and an answer ALWAYS comes. The answer may not be "Ah ha, now I know how to run the light board." It could be "ah ha, if we can turn the house lights up and the stage lights up it'll look like shit but at least they'll be able to see the stage." It could be "if we make a ton of changes and sacrifices this is a way we'll survive." But the answer always comes.

Why do we do this show called life? It's not just because we don't know how to stop. It really is about the stories. It's about who is doing what with whom and what disasters we've skirted and how we've made it through another near miss. And at the end of the day, we huddle with the closest members of our tribe and remember and define ourselves with love, with laughter, and with the fondest of memories about the very worst situations.

The Ups and Downs of Dating

2008-01-15T21:14:00.000-08:00

The day before I got dumped last week, I had an extremely enlightening ride in the elevator. I was in my office building, on the 19th floor, when this kind of crazy haired lumbering guy lurched to a stop outside the closing doors. My co-rider politely stuck her hand out and opened the doors for him, whereupon he lurched into the car and started talking.

"Did you see the up and down arrows out there? They're burned out. I mean, I didn't see them. Have you seen them recently? All of them are burning out. I never know which way an elevator is going to go any more. With my luck, it's always going the way I don't want to go. Like, I'm surprised this is going down because, you know me, if I want to go down, the elevator is always going up. I've stopped even going into an elevator if I haven't pushed the buttons first. I mean, you never know which way it's going to go, but if you've pushed the button at least you can pretend that it's the one you called for. Still, with my luck, it's always going to be going the wrong way. And, of course, I'm always getting stuck. That's the way it goes with me. I've been stuck three times in these elevators. These elevators just don't like me."

For 19 floors, out the front doors, and all the way to the parking structure I heard this. I was nice and laughing along, but by the time we mercifully parted ways, all I could think was "what a bozo."

Since I was on my way to therapy, and figured I'd get a jump start on the whole metaphor thing, I was thinking about this guy as I got on the freeway and started driving. It was like traffic and my ex-boyfriend, I thought suddenly. This guy and I could be on the same freeway at the same time... and he'd call me up, pissed as hell, frustrated as can be, because he was stuck in traffic. And I wouldn't be. I'd be sailing along. But wherever this guy was, there was traffic. Mainly, I more than suspected, because he was always stressing about the traffic and it infuriated him no end to find himself in it.

Just like my ex-boyfriend, the elevator guy was just sure as can be that every elevator he was on was going to be going the wrong way. This was his identity. This is what separated him out from every other goon on the planet. And the times it went right didn't matter, because it didn't prove his point.

Of course, I felt lofty and serene pity for these poor mortals because -- after a week of lovely dating after the initial great blind date -- I was heading down the slippery slope of a glorious infatuation. We'd been talking or emailing daily, we'd had lunch, a movie and a great dinner in the course of a week. We had plans for the following Saturday to see a play. "When it works, it works," I told my girlfriends, with a happy laugh.

It had been so long since it had worked.

It was so incredibly great.

And, at the same time, I heeded the warning of the elevator guy. I don't have issues with my elevators. And I don't have issues with the traffic. I'm a pretty easy going girl when it comes to a lot of things. But I do have my areas of self-definition. And relationship is definitely one of them.

It's been a... umm... fallow time in the fields of fraternization. It's been a time of, well, regrouping. Reflecting. And, right, processing. Readying myself for the next thing. Which, really... really... hasn't been appearing on the horizon with any great frequency.

Or...

really...

at all.

For, like, ever.

You know when you're in a really hot relationship and the guy goes away for awhile and you go into work and say, MAN, I haven't been laid in TWO WEEKS. And everyone just groans. And you know how married people -- even married people -- get it at least once a month or so. And you know the Woody Allen joke -- How often do you have sex? Him: Never, like two/three times a week. Her: All the time, like two/three times a week.

This has not been like that.

This is six-months-between-kisses slow. Last calendar year was the worst it's ever been, in terms of intimate encounters, since the mid 1970s. Sex, like all out grunting sweaty sex? A distant memory. Sex with someone I'm madly in love with, with full connection and drug love and all the rest? ... I need my Alzheimer's deep memory retention to go back that far.

So, me being me, I have my stories about me and relationships. I mean, I kind of actually DID write the book. I come by my stories honestly, and I know that. And I also know that stories can be dangerous.

So I was guarding with all my might against jinxing this new thing with my cynical stories. When he didn't call, I just thought, in my Buddhist way, "Oh, he's not calling. It means nothing except he's not calling."

When I didn't hear from him for a day, I thought, after I chanted a bit, "Oh, that is fine. In the real reality, he is simply silent. It has nothing to do with me."

And when I started wanting to spin off paranoid fantasies of some ex-girlfriend coming back into his life, sweeping him off his feet, and he is conflicted, can't make the choice, but of course he finally does... and it's with her, and not me... again.... I dismiss those thoughts as old elevator stories. My elevators always take me the way I want to go because I don't think about them too much. And relationships can do the same, as long as I don't overthink them.

I did all of it right, except this time it was true. On Wednesday the email came: ex girlfriend, unfinished biz, have to see it out, sorry. No matter how much I scripted or descripted the scenario beforehand, I was still faced with the same old ugly truth: my elevator was going the wrong way. Again. You know me.

So what does this mean? It means I had very few choices in how to deal with the matter, but the ones I made are critically important. I could choose to be gracious and kind to him, and understand that sometimes life is complex. I could choose to accept that this has happened, give myself over to some old-fashioned wallowing, eat some cookie dough, and enjoy the knowledge that time is a great anesthetic. And I could choose to not use the word "again," ever, when describing the situation to myself in my head.

Yes, I got dumped. Yes, the "poof" factor has reared its head. Of my many superpowers in life is to indeed attract men who have other women as their first priorities. AND... it doesn't have to turn into an elevator story. It doesn't have to be something I only notice when it proves my point, and thus secretly relish. I don't have to only snort in self-derisive triumph when it happens again.

I can keep it simple and acknowledge that the path has changed. The path always changes. And sometimes the lights signalling the way you should go are burned out, and sometimes they're not. Either way, the goal is to just try to learn what you can from the ride. And if it's going in the wrong direction, then maybe you can dig in and learn even more. About yourself, about your expectations, and about the serendipity of the world.

Dividing by Zero

2008-01-01T18:53:00.000-08:00

I was just forwarded such a great essay that I'm inpsired to share it with you this way, rather than just sending everyone the link. It's called Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness at Work.

The basic premise is that our efforts to make ourselves happy usually are so extreme that they make us unhappy. The greater the energy we outpour to achieve what we think are "the right goals," the more fatigued we are, and the less time we have for what is the ultimate goal -- which is to live our lives fully while we're here on the planet.

You can read it for yourself... please do. And when you're done, this is my take on it. It's not a whole lot different from what the Buddhists and other eastern practictioners have been saying for centuries. Suffering is what happens when what (A) we think should be reality doesn't jive with (B) what is reality. Our little brains latch on to that disconnect and we spin around like little rats on a treadmill, working ourselves into a frenzy trying to make A look like B. The more A doesn't look like B, the more crazy we get.

Here's a perfect case in point. I went on a blind date last night. This is something I entered into willingly and (before we got too close to the actual hour of meeting) with a good dose of happy anticipation.

But as the clock neared the fateful meeting hour, the anxiety and unhappiness about the whole thing went exponential. I stressed about every single way this thing could go horribly wrong.

I stressed about where to meet him. I stressed about parking. I stressed about sounding too pushy. I stressed about sounding too passive. I stressed about my nails (like anything could be done to fix them). I stressed about my lifestyle, my job, my kids, my dog, my body, my way of talking, my way of thinking.

I screamed at myself to not say anything too revealing, to keep up my boundaries, to be more vulnerable, to act sophisticated, to act naive, to act smart, to act innocent, to not mention old relationships, to discuss what I've learned from previous relationships, to not talk about relationships at all, to not talk about my passions at all, to not talk about anything at all but to -- above all -- be interesting and be a good listener. In essence, the pep talk I was giving myself was to eradicate all aspects of my personality, try to be invisible, and... really... to just survive the night because nothing could be worse that what I was about to put myself through.

Seriously. If that isn't suffering... what is?

I forced myself to do a 30 minute sitting meditation somewhere during the day to shut my stupid brain up. Because I realized, somewhere amongst the chatter, that all the things I was worried about have actually no relationship to anything in reality.

In reality, I talk a lot. In reality, I write a lot. In reality, I'm opinionated. In reality, I'm just ... me. As Popeye would say, I yam what I yam.

What I was making myself totally crazy with was the disconnect between what I thought I should be (someone, well, else) and what I am. I was trying to avoid perceived judgment, without stopping for a moment to realize that the judgment has nothing to do with anyone but the judger. If he thinks my nails suck... that's OK. It doesn't mean my nails suck. It doesn't mean my nails don't suck. It just means he thinks my nails suck.

Who cares?

Nor did the possibility enter my mind that the guy could be not whom I am looking for. Maybe he'll have some annoying little tic that reminds me of some ex's other annoying little tic. Nothing to do with him, but a complete deal-breaker for me. He may have a myriad other things going on within himself that have nothing -- nothing -- to do with my nails, or shoes, or hair. And finally, anyone who is going to judge me even remotely as harshly as I was judging myself is no one I would ever want to be with anyway.

None of that entered into the conversation I was having with myself. It was all about the suffering and the need for me to match non-reality A with reality B.

So where does the craziness come from? It comes from the past and the future. From critical voices of parents and media ads to hopes and dreams and fairy-dust. It has nothing to do with the present. The present is like a mountain pinnacle... surrounded with space and air and light. This concept of "past" and "future" are meaningless up there. They have nothing to do with the view, with the sense of aching vastness, with the clarity of the breeze.

The past and the future do not exist.

Not up there. Not down here. Actually, not anywhere.

Which means striving for something in the future, and placing your present joy on hold while you do so, is like striving to divide by zero. It's a meaningless concept. If you are unhappy now, by definition: you are unhappy. Period.

I'm certainly not the first to come up with these thoughts, but the essay made me realize there's another way of looking at them. If striving for perfection later is making your life imperfect now... think about it. Because changing something now is do-able. Even if all that takes is just introducing yourself to actual reality and making friends a little bit with it. The fact was that I was about to have dinner on New Year's Eve. Which sounded like fun. (And it was.) And all the rest of it was just garbage that never needed to be dealt with because it was the rat on the treadmill, convinced that it could transcend reality if it just worked harder.

I'm not advocating not planning.

I'm not advocating giving up.

I'm certainly not advocating not giving a shit.

On the contrary... I'm suggesting we care more. About what's going on right now. And that starts by removing that sense of success being just around the corner.

So this year of the rat, I suggest that we give up that treadmill. Let's not lock into that frenzy of expectation and dissillusionment. Let's ditch the idea that if we just work a little bit harder we can make what we'd like to be reality match up with reality itself.

No treadmill. No resolutions to be "better." No nothing... except the occasional nod to the things that are, and a whispered thanks for being there.

Our First Podcast

2007-12-06T15:21:00.001-08:00

Jill and I did a podcast for a great site called Divorcing Daze. It was just posted and sounds pretty good. We come off as pretty smart and funny (it was the equivalent of a verbal good hair day)-- and have a chance to say some good stuff about the relationship between moms and stepmoms.

Check it out!

Hear My Song

2007-12-01T07:34:00.000-08:00

"It's about one moment
The moment before it all becomes clear
And in that one moment
You start to believe there's nothing to fear
It's about one second
And just when you're on the verge of success
The sky starts to change
And the wind starts to blow..."

From the musical "Songs for a New World"

For the past week I've been working with my son and a group of stunningly talented young people on a musical theatre proudction. It's a fundraiser they're putting on themselves, in association with Pasadena Junior Theatre, to help raise money for a trip they are planning to New York next year.

The show is a compilation of Broadway songs and monologues, culled from a variety of shows. The songs range from deliciously cute ("Omigod you guys" from Legally Blonde, the musical) to traditionally satisfying ("Oh What a Night" from The Jersey Boys}. There are songs about being at the beginning of life, an artist, different from the rest of the world and having that aching feeling of anticipation and uncertainty as you wonder what the rest of your life is going to hold. There is a monologue about the moment you realize that theatre is a magical world that can sweep you away with passion and drama, and bring you back again safely, but forever changed.

In short, it's terrific.

The production is tonight. My son is singing a song from Fame called "I Want to Make Magic" which, in my opinion was not constructed for anyone with normal vocal chords, let alone a 15 year old with a range that seems to omit every other interval of fourths. He requested some extra time here with me so we could have access to the piano, sheet music, and some time to actually find the notes and try to imprint them. The song is beautiful, but difficult.

I've been working like a demon at the day job and going over to the theatre every night this week to set up the lighting. Dinner has been a peanut butter sandwich left on my dashboard all day and consumed during the commute. I've been dragging myself into the small space, not any more of a theatre than a room in a church with a raised area and a small procsenium at one end, wondering when I'm going to learn I'm too old to do two jobs and live on 4 hours of sleep.

And then, every night, the magic has happened. By an hour into setting up the lights or writing cues or running a rehearsal, I'm back in my body. More than back in my body... I'm fine. I'm gloriously fine. The production takes me up, the alchemy of lights and words and music and human bodies performing art in real time infuses me, and suddenly I'm just locked into the sweet spot of life again.

This has happened every night. Despite the frustrations of working with an unknown lighting board, the threat of popping a fuse every time all nine (9) of my lighting instruments are lit, and the intrinsic fatigue that comes with working 15 and 16 hour days back-to-back ... every night it's been good.

Some images I've taken with me:

I look at those kids on stage singing and dancing and I know our future is in good hands. These kids have put this whole thing on together. They are committed artists who spend their days in high school and their nights and weekends taking lessons or rehearsing or performing. They are smart and bright and funny and directed.

One night I was looking for my son to get him to pack up. The houselights were still out and I finally found him in the back of the room, huddling inside a patch of light streaming in through a window, doing his geometry homework. This is how it starts, I thought. The life of being an artist. Figuring out how to make the rest of it work while you pursue your passions. Finding the stray bits of lights while the show goes on around you.

Theatre is a holy place and a sacred endeavor. In much the same way as a church, it brings people together in communion of a common experience. It uplifts and enlightens and changes. It produces transformative tears of joy. If the early Christians felt about their church the way I feel about theatre, the Crusades and other atrocities suddenly become a bit more understandable. I would consider strapping on some live grenades and driving into a shopping mall if I truly believed that act would save the institution forever.

Theatre is one of those things that make life tolerable. As one of the songs says, "Hear my song, it'll help you believe in tomorrow; Hear my song, it'll show you the way you can shine." Theatre raises our consciousness and soothes our soul and is a holy act for those of us who participate in its creation. Yes, it's hours of work, but so is flagellation with horse hair. And, I'd suggest, infinitely more satisfying when the final curtain comes down.

The DHX

2007-11-18T12:28:00.000-08:00

Not because I have an excess of time to write blogs (as those of you who check in here will have certainly noted).. but because a neat new thing has happened... I have started working on a co-blog with my ex-husband's wife, Jill.

The blog is called TheDHX after our "Doughtie Households Exchange" envelope... one of the things we've worked out in our ongoing efforts to improve communication and streamline life with two households sharing two children.

Jill and I realized that we have an unusually good system going and wanted to share that with other moms and step-moms out there, most of whom may not regularly get a dose of the other side's perspective. In the blog, I do my usual long-winded pontificating about life and my skewed version of things and how things should be done, and Jill contributes her point of view, along with a delightful smattering of pictures, book reviews, quotes and links to other blogs and resources along the same lines.

If you know of anyone in a blended family situation, please send them the link. It's turning into a very vital, heavily-visited, great site!

(And more to come on this one, too. Promise. I'm just still getting it together on how to do everything again. Peace out and thanks for the patience.)

The Top Three Things

2007-10-11T23:16:00.001-07:00

Think Terminator 2. Remember the guy who gets blasted into liquid bits that slowly flow together to reform the whole? That's what it's been like since I was taken apart and put back together again month ago today. The reconstruction has been slow, atom by atom, but the fascinating part has been in watching how the puzzle reassembles.

What I've noticed is proportions and order. How big are the pieces of our lives and what priority they take in the overall scheme of things.

When I got out of surgery, my insides and outsides were all switched around. I was hooked into a variety of bags and machines and tubes and sensors. Food came in through my veins and went out through a tube. My heartbeat was monitored through my finger and my blood pressure through my arm. My stomach juices came up through a tube in my nose and other nasty stuff came out through a new hole in my stomach. Inside was out. I was dependent upon external technology to keep my functions in process.

So the first and biggest part of my atomic reconstitution was purely physical. Body -- and keeping it intact and healthy -- is by far the biggest part of life. Obviously, right? Like, duh. No body; no life. But take a moment -- and we'll get back to this in a second -- and think about what priority actually nourishing and nurturing our bodies take in our daily life... and you'll start figuring out where I'm going with this blog.

Eventually... and it took a long time... my functions started happening in the intended order again. When I ate, the food went in my mouth. There are currently no unusual holes in my body through which anything is going in or out. Over the month, I have been able to again walk, drive my car, do almost everything that I used to do. None of which is possible without the first key component of what is important in, and to, life: the body.

What's the next most important thing? Without equivocation, I say it's people. Our relationships. Good conversations over long dinners, those moments of connection when you know you've found a friend that will be with you for the rest of your journey. Laughter that makes the stomach ache and purges the soul of all poisons. People sat by my side, brought me books and cards and tabloid magazines, grabbed the nurses when I was in pain. Nurses tucked me in as tenderly as they would their own child. The ties between us all are sacred, healing, and profound. Next to keeping our physical bodies alive and healthy, these relationships are the most important tending we can do.

Remember my story about the cellist, the morning of my birthday? Like an opening into the heavens, that music transported me, literally, out of my pain and gave me a moment of absolutely transcedent bliss. One night, probably with the aid of the narcotic drip I was friendly with, I had this vision: a circle in the middle, representing the body; a triangle encompassing it, representing the relationships with the people in our lives; and the whole thing encompassed by another circle. Because how do you describe that moment with the cello? It's not physical, and it's not relationship.

It's art.

And it's magic.

And it's a whole lot of other things: it's the zzzzzinggg of a good first date, the swoony romance of the New York skyline, it's the curtain starting to rise, the tingle from a story with a perfect ending. It's the roar of the crowd when the ball hits the bat for the winning home run. It's the weight of your dog at the foot of the bed. It's your child asleep after a hard day. The smell of sage on a summer afternoon. The appearance of an envelope with long-forgotten handwriting. A first kiss. The smell of bacon and coffee in the morning while you're still in bed. A pillow that still feels faintly like 98.6.

The third thing, that ties it all together... is that stuff. A good friend suggested a word, and for lack of any better (and because this is the only word that works at all) let's call it Love.

Body.

People.

Love.

Those are the big three, my friends. If you were to do a cross-section cut through the mountain of life, my guess is that those three things would occupy 98% of the strata.

What comes after those three things has also been revealing. I got back into my house and felt like I was wearing someone else's life. Here are these clothes, a cabinet of CD's and DVD's, a kitchen without many food products, a bass guitar, my laptop. How does all this fit in?

I learned that the next layers are the ones that serve the top three things: so cooking has become a main way I spend my time. Clothing... not so important. Entertaining myself... well, when it starts smelling like pixie dust (like a well-written novel or a beautiful piece of music), then it's beautiful and healing. When it's more like distraction, background noise to mask something that I don't want to deal with, it produces a lowgrade headache, makes me nervous and edgy.

And then there's money. Money is what takes most of our time. And of course it's important. It's very important. But what I would suggest, is that it's important ONLY to the extent that it helps further the Big Three.

Money pays for food and shelter, enables us to care for our children, buys us lattes to laugh over, purchases yoga classes to yoke together mind, body and spirit. Money buys us transportation and high speed internet so we can write blogs and visit our friends. Money is critical.

But it's only critical in how it serves: to keep us healthy, create and maintain our social connections, and facilitate the pixie dust of love, in whatever form it may appear. Get this, OK? The money is secondary, people. Which means the job that creates the money is secondary. And the car that takes us to the job is secondary. Unless your car or your job or anything else honestly falls under the category of love or art, everything that's not done to support body, people or love, is secondary.

I'm not saying it's unimportant. That's not it at all. It's just subservient to the real stuff. Not the other way around.

What is it we think about and stress about all day long? The secondary stuff. We snap at our kids because we're late to work. We fall asleep on the couch because we're exhausted. We work ourselves to the bone and, in so doing, let the things we do it for slip through our fingers.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, so I'm in no way pointing fingers. I don't really know how to stop it. I don't really know how to get off the treadmill and turn it back around. If I really believed that becoming a Basque farmer in Spain would restore the proper ratio, would I chuck the works and go do that? I don't know. I like my life. And my people are here. My people are #2 on the list. How do I reconcile that?

Here are some thoughts for how to maybe keep our integrity and do the right thing by the time we're graced to be alive and well:

1) Pay attention. I think that the most obvious answer is just to show up and be aware. One of the teachers in my life defines meditation as paying attention to just one thing. I think that's a key way to make this start to make sense. Stay here in the moment. Pay attention. Take care of the priorities as they come up, mindfully and thoughtfully.

2) Pay attention to the body's messages. Put good food into it. Take care of it. Instead of driving it like an old beat up jalopy (which, I confess, is my usual M.O.) think of it as a cherished classic. Give it the best fluids. Polish it up from time to time. Don't let the headline tear and droop. Save the pedal-to-metal stuff for the true emergencies, not the ones that you get all worked up over in your head.

3) Put the job and the money it its correct perspective. Working at a job you love and that pays you well for your talents is a high and worthwhile goal. It's just not THE goal. THE goal is for you to take that money and, at the end of the day, use it to take good care of yourself and your people and to find the nectar of magic in the world, wherever and whenever possible.

4) If you are engaged in the creation of art, know that you are an acolyte and your work is sacred work. Don't diminish its power to transform. Don't despair because the road is difficult and uncertain. You are one of the manufacturers of the world's pixie dust. Not everyone is blessed (or cursed) in this way. Quit whining because the artist's life is hard. Accept your gift, and then shut up and serve it to the best of your ability.

5) And finally, treat those closest to you with a little extra TLC. Starting with yourself. As I found out all too well, scar tissue can kill you. So lose the baggage, lighten your load, and take it a little bit easier on yourself, the people in your life, and the planet. Cut yourself some slack, laugh a little more, and find the love in those little moments.

Life in the Slow Lane

2007-10-11T22:40:00.001-07:00

After more than four weeks, and not without some trepidation, I'm returning to work in a few days.

The trepidation comes from a fear I have that somehow I will revert to the "old me." The me that doesn't have the perspective that comes from nearly dying. The me that inhales life without breathing it in. The me that is constantly confused about who is driving what in this mad race towards the finish line.

Not that I'm exactly sure what the "new me" is all about. In my fantasies, four weeks off from work -- something I've never had, ever, in the last 36 years of my life -- would actually be enough time to relax fully, to watch all the movies in the queue, to read all the books, to sleep all the sleep, to do everything on the list so fully that I would run out of lists to make.

Not the case.

I haven't even scratched the surface of the things I'd like to do with my time. Not even close. Here's what I have done, though:

I have dug in and read 2/3 of a good long book, this is true. Don DeLillo's "Underworld." It's long, it's literary, and I'll look smart when it's done and up on my shelf with authentic cracks along its spine. But it's just one book, and who knows when I'll finish it when I go back to my 30 second pre-pass-out end of day attention span.

I did -- thanks to a malicious and self-serving friend of mine -- start cracking the code on those insidiously tricky "cryptic crosswords" that appear under the already hard-enough New York Times Sunday puzzle. I started to learn how to unpack those, and that was similar to starting to learn how to inhale crack cocaine... not nearly enough time to do that new addiction justice.

I have started cooking, which is really the most compelling argument to the theory that they swapped me out with an alien being while in the OR. I'm actually cooking, and not just because I'm being protective of my poor sundered little intestines. I'm liking the process of it. I'm liking the control I can have over what I put in my body. I found myself reading the words "onion" and "garlic" the other day over and over, thinking about how beautiful certain foods are (not that I can or want to eat them, yet). I made a halfway passable chicken stock. I eat from different food groups. I love broccoli. I haven't touched caffeine since this happened.

But there are signs it's time to go back to work. I'm starting to be one of those people who calls up utility companies to complain. A lot. I've called the trash people twice and am now engaged in a passive aggressive battle over trash can placement. I became good friends with the electrical company repairmen, on the day they had my electricity out for 9 1/2 hours while they swapped out a pole that was ridden with woodpecker holes. I've stopped short from yelling at city hall for turning off the water without forewarning us residents, causing debris to foul my washing machine valve and incurring a $125 repair bill that, you know, I didn't really need.

I'm one of those people whom you run into while walking in the mid-afternoon and complain with about the shoddy state of customer service.

I'm also starting to fix things. This is dangerous. My girlfriend Cindy came over and I gave her moral support while she swapped out my kitchen and bathroom faucets. We did the obligatory three trips to the hardware store and I felt the rapture of the deep of being in a huge retail establishment with the deadly combo of cabin fever, no money and a credit card. Ohhhhh, the things I could buy. Ceiling fans and drawer pulls and a new workshirt and ohhhh, paint chips... I could paint some new walls.... it was bad bad bad. But we got the faucets working and I'm happy as can be about that. My credit card could not take another week off work however. I'd be down to the studs in the kitchen within days.

Let's not even go into the Target run. Slipcovers and sofa throws. And then there was the day I had the kids pull off every single dog hair from on, under, through, and around the sofa, prior to the cleaning people coming over. And yes, I've washed some curtains. Because, hey, when else am I going to find the time.

Things I've not done: written any books, written any blogs, done much exercising, walked my dog. At the point when I'm actually about to do some honest creative work, fatigue sets in and I go to sleep. I've become an expert napper, knocking off one, two and even three a day at times. I have also learned -- and more about this in a subsequent post -- the difference between moving through life alert and exhausted, versus moving through life actually well rested. There is such a thing, which kind of surprises me. But it's true. You actually can rest enough, at least for an hour or so. And it's a different propulsion through life than one gets when aided by anxiety and caffeine and the blunt instrument of sheer necessity to get to the other side of the day.

But... my great sleeping notwithstanding... I'm still often tired, and I haven't written anything great. I'm trying to let that just be OK. I mean, I have been sick. I'm giving myself a break on that one.

I have more that I want to share, but will save it for a subsequent post. I want to put down all the things that I want the "new me" to remember when I get into my "old life." Lessons from the brink, and all that. But first, I think I'll sleep some more. While I still have the chance.

Pole Dancing

2007-09-20T22:32:00.000-07:00

[Written from the hospital, 9/18/07]

I have a new friend. It goes with me wherever I go. Before I can go to the bathroom, we have to unplug it so it can roll along with me.

My IV pole didn't bother me half so much when I was in bed all day. But now that I'm pretty mobile, it's driving me crazy. It's a kind of amazing device and I marvel at its function: holding all the apparatus of medicines and pain killers and nutrients in one tidy stack, on wheels, capable of following me, the patient, everywhere I go.

The intravenous drip is an amazing concept. I look at the thick plastic bags of fluids and their little receptacles that catch the very regulated drips, and think... some kid, somewhere, got obsessed with the nature of dripping at a science fair one summer. And he made it his life's work and his friends made crazy signals at him behind his back and he had horrible dandruff and no one got it, but one day he said look -- if we can regulate dripping and figure out a way to get it infused directly into the blood stream, we can enable ourselves to do a whole lot of things for a medical patient than we used to be able to do. We can regulate exactly how much food and liquid goes into the body and then, by measuring exactly what comes out, determine if all the plumbing in between is functioning without leaks or building repositories. We can do without direct injections and stick that dreaded needle into a tube rather than into a screaming child's arm. We can let the patient determine when to give themselves more pain relief, and still not worry about lawsuits when he decides that Sister Morphine is someone he loves very very much.

While I can marvel at the technological intricacies of my IV pole for long moments on end, I am spending more time these days getting annoyed. A technogical marvel: yes. A great dance partner: not so much.

I have about four feet of tether on my leash. This is just enough for me to barely go around my bed without bringing the pole along. Why would I want to go around the bed? Well, me being me, and me feeling better -- there's a lot of organizing to do in my little room. Sometimes I want my computer over here by the window. And sometimes I want my little table with all my books and magazines and tabloids (I have such great friends) to be on the other side of the bed. Flowers need to be moved, based on long analysis of aesthetics and space considerations from my tilted up bed, from the counter by the sink to the table the nurses set up for me. And sometimes a truly urgent need arises -- like for a set of headphones so I can watch Grey's Anatomy on my laptop... but the headphones are about 8 feet away and... even if I stretch out the cables a bit... and lean out really really far... just outside of reach.

Then, there's the twisting. My dance partner especially likes to do the twist when we're going to the restroom together. Somehow my tubes get all tied up around the pole so every exit from the loo looks like a weird pas de deux, with my twirling it around backwards, trying to get enough leash back for myself so I can get into bed.

Since I started writing this, I'm happy to say, my IV has actually been disconnected, I've been cleared for solid foods, and I'm slated to go home later today. I have walked around the floor of my wing, amazed at the sense of freedom of being solid and substantial on my own two feet (and nothing more). I actually look forward to other dance partners in my future, ones that may entangle just as much, but in far more heartfelt ways.

The Present

2007-09-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

[written 9/17/07, from Huntington Hospital, California -- forgive the typos and the inability to find a working wifi connection.... and yes, I'm home and better. k]

A week ago last night, I found myself on the bathroom floor, writhing with severe abdominal pain, unable to find any kind of relief. My friend Cindy came to bring me important life-saving devices such as suppositories, saltines and 7-up. Nothing worked except the one life-saving device she didn't intend to be so important: herself. At 1 a.m., half passed-out with fatigue and pain and really just wanting to go to sleep and not worry about it any more, she helped me muster up some strength to go the ER. Although I didn't know it yet, a small band of scar tissues had wrapped itself around a chunk of my small intestines, cinching it off and starting to kill the tissue. In the process it was starting to poison me as well. If she had not been there to help me get up and together, it's possible that this story would've had a whole different ending.

Since them my life has changed to something nearly unrecognizable. Instead of marking time by light and dark, I watch the nurse shifts change. After the surgery Wednesday night I have had to reconstruct my life piece by minutely small piece. I am tapped into a new organism: the hospital. When I found a window that looked south the other day, I stood by it and realized I was looking at the hill behind my house. It could've been on another planet.

Hospitals thrum. They are busy constant systems, with fast-paced arteries buzzing with the transport of information and procedure, the living, the sick and the dead. Their business is serious, and working so close to the pure sweet essentials of life seems to make the nurses consistently radiate with love and care and joy. Being in the medical profession requires a gene so special it really should be deified. The women and men who have cared for me over the last week have, almost to a one, had such a light in their eye that I've felt blessed just to be administered to by their hands. Doctors administer their gifts with their skill and their eyes and their incredible brains. Nurses administer with their hearts and their hands. Both are essential. Both should be deified.

I marvel at the ability of caregivers to actually... care. The depth of empathy and compassion one human is capable of providing to another human is worth taking a moment to ponder. We all know how much and how easily we can brutalize, demean and destroy each other. But the sine waves' amplitude extends equally the other way. The willingness and insistance of my nurses to make a moment of my life just that much better through their effort has touched me to my core. I call one night nurse, Miki, my bed goddess. She had a way of making my bed and tucking me into such a heavenly confection of sheets and blankets and pillows that I would sink into it with a sigh of absolute surrender, lulled into a state of an infant's sweet sensual bliss. She doesn't know me. She didn't have to do that. But she gave that to me out of her heart.

Life can dissolve in a matter of hours. Putting it back together again is piecemeal, a careful step by step.

At first, I could exist in nothing but light and dark. The light burst in on me in the recovery room, flashes of chaos. It was like black film leader was interspersed in five foot intervals with six frames of image. Dim figures hovered over other beds, yelling out interrogatories: "Do you know your name?" "Do you know where you are?" I'd hear that and think, OK, I think I could answer that, but then I'd blank out again. I was sure I was in Seattle, because that's where Grey's Anatomy takes place, and obviously I was in a TV show. But I knew enough to know there was a difference between TV and reality.... but couldn't then figure where I was if I wasn't in a TV show. Blank black leader. Open eyes: a figure at the foot of my bed saying "You're taking a long time getting out of this." Saying "sorry," and blacking out again. Black leader. Open eyes: another figure next to me. I finally find a way to formulate what I want to know most of all. "Is it going to be OK?" I ask. "Can you please just tell me it's going to be OK." I black out before the figure can speak.

They finally wheel me out to where my friend... my amazing steadfast sister/friend Jill... has been waiting for me through the entire surgery and recovery. I think we thought it would all be over around 6:30. It is now past 9:30. She has left her kids and husband (who happen to be my kids and ex-husband) at home so she can stay with me. She thinks it's important for me to have someone be there when I wake up. She is right. It was.

After I got used to being alive, everything was still wildly out of place. My body looked like something out of a bio-morph movie, connected to external technology in more ways than I can count: a tube through my nose sucked out digestive gasses and poisons, as a tube in my arm dripped nutrients and medicine back in. A finger clamp kept track of my oxygen. I had a bag coming out of my stomach which collected the seepage from my wound -- oddly beautiful irridescent pink fluid that reminded me of strange otherworldly jellyfish. A catheter took care of other wastes. And something across my forehead did something else; I never figured out what was left to monitor but whatever that forehead thing did, I'm sure it monitored it. I was alive, but hardly autonomous.

The process has been to gradually move the blocks from one side of the line to the other. To start getting the systems once again internalized, so this bag of body that I move around in so easily can once again be self-contained. Processes have to be taken away and then reintegrated gradually. I ate nothing for two days and then was allowed ice chips for the next four. I was able to sip on juice yesterday, and today I am looking at my first "solid" food (jello... sitting so incredibly red and jiggly and chewable next to me) since I scarfed down snacks so blithely at work a week ago. I look at commercials for buffalo wings and spend long moments wondering about the species that can actually ingest THOSE.

By night, my druggy brain spins out reels of wild weird intensely intricate dreams, magical and mysterious but oddly mundane. I am travelling all over the world and revisiting all aspects of life, in an attempt to reboot the system and remind the memory cells of what this life this is all about. Last night I dreamt for hours about window washing in Paris. The night before I was on an outrageous opera tour in which my boss deemed my $200 plane ticket too dear so he had me hang on to the back of the 747 while we flew to New York. Once in New York, we did two small shows in Jersey in the middle of a full show in Manhattan, and in between times my boss rode around on a bicycle wearing a clown wig. In another dream, I have found my soul mate -- a weird Brewery-type person who has discovered that he also has the ability to fly (without hanging on to the back of a plane) -- and together we took off over a field and rejoiced in our finding of the other.

By day, I walk the floor of the hospital wing, looking out windows and telling myself what goes on outside these walls. This is West: there's the Rose Bowl where I used to walk, and will walk again. This is South: I live down there. This is East: that Burger King where the kids and I go when we don't have time to do anything else.

At root we are our biology. We are a metropolis of transport systems, messaging exchanges and I/O devices. We are the bags containing these intricate and extensive systems. And we are energy and thought. This is who and what we are, and what counts is our care and our attention to it.

Surrounding us is the next most important thing: people. Our bags of metropolises profoundly need to connect with other bags of metropolises. I can't start listing what the people in my life have done for me the last week. From sitting and reading newspaper stories to me, to handing me an endless streams of vomit bags, to taking my dog without thought or question. My friends and kids have been around me constantly, finding a nurse when I needed one. Being my advocate. Combing my hair. Putting on my socks. People in our lives are indispensible to getting us back together, piece by piece, block by tiny block.

The day I was admitted and before I went into surgery, I shared a room with an older woman, waiting for a surgery she ultimately never received due to a huge insurance foulup. Despite our compromised circumstances, we quickly became partners in crime, reminding each other of our room number, sharing war stories. Turns out she was an opera singer in her time -- and we had at least several acquaintances in common.

On Wednesday, her son -- an accomplished musician -- brought in his cello to serenade his mom... and of course me and Jill and Cindy in the process. After a wretched night of minimal pain relief and the new knowledge that I was about to have major surgery, the sweet sad strains of Bach and Mozart filling the small room was almost too much to bear. To go from pulling vomit out of my hair in a 3 a.m. waiting room to hearing this celestial music played live 8 feet away from me -- it strained all bounds of extremes. If there's a heaven: it was that moment. If there's a divine thought presence in the universe that is capable of sending down the sweetest birthday present possible: this was that present. My abdomen unclenched for the first time in 40 hours, tears rolled from my eyes. Exquisite beauty; divinely timed.

So that's the third thing this is all about: art. Art is the magic that binds it all together. Art transports us from our pain and can carry us to places of unspeakable peace. Art is the pixie dust. Art is really the only thing that counts besides our relationship with other people and tending to our precious personal biologies.

Am I happy this happened? That's a complicated answer but I suspect it tends closer to yes, on many levels. I am surrounded by flowers and books and magazines -- more art (both natural and manmade) to soothe my soul. I have been visited and called and well-wished and sent concerns by just about everyone I know for a full week -- by far exceeding my last mere 30 hour birthday party celebration. And a celebration is, oddly, how it feels. At least to me. I can't imagine not being alive so the "life-threatening" aspect of this whole deal is kind of a non-registrant in my mind. Like, duh, of course I'll be fine. The only question, as I lay on the bathroom floor, was when. It was never an "if." So to me it's been painful and weird and awkward and disconcerting (and probably expensive... haven't gotten there yet) ... but also it's been a celebration. I love the dance of these connections and histories and shared stories and our abilities to make each other laugh until tears roll and stitches strain. I worship the ability of art to do the same -- get in our souls, soften the tight spots, ease our pain, deliver birthday presents from the gods.

It's hard to imagine why, but sometimes a system may have to fail completely in order to see the underlying structures supporting it. All the hustle and jive of keeping the surface life afloat -- the life of jobs and cars and houses -- takes most of our effort but is, in reality, subservient to our primary task of caring for our biological metropolises and taking care of the people in our lives. The jobs enable us to feed ourselves and our children. The cars carry us to other people. Sometimes maybe one system must disappear for a time so we can fully understand why we spend so much of our lives servicing the other.

For me, finding myself completely dependent has shown me something I should've known a long time ago. Losing complete autonomy brings into sharp relief the thing that's been upholding me all this time. I have been given the irrefutable, in-the-gut, deeply moving and viscerally certain knowledge that I am in no way alone on this planet.

That's one birthday present I hope I never misplace.

It's a start.

2007-09-09T22:24:00.000-07:00

OK. So you're right. I haven't been writing any blogs and, truth be told, I haven't been working on the book that much either since returning from the road trip. And I promised I would, and I didn't.

In my defense, I only claim the distraction created by starting a new job and launching two kids off to their respective new school years. The new job is kicking my ass (in a great way) and I spent most of the weekend completely comatose watching Grey's Anatomy episodes.

That's the full confession.

I did, however, want to share what happens when two repressed creatives get together with four margaritas, a selection of finger foods and a road trip to discuss. I'll never underestimate the versatility of jicama again.

At the still point...

2007-08-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

Over twenty years ago, I wrote a story about a woman who wakes up one day, quits her job, and takes off to Billings, Montana (because that's the destination for the father and son in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.")

Yesterday, I packed up my office, packed up a van, and did much the same thing.

The idea for the trip started off as life imitating art (although I could never have orchestrated, consciously, the fact that I'd be leaving my job on the same day as the road trip began). I am deep into the updated version of the book, and the purpose of this trip is mainly to gather some firsthand info about what exactly this part of the country looks like. So now art is going to start getting some serious feedback in turn.

For anyone who has been missing these blogs, my heartfelt apologies. I am working on the book in any spare moment and the blogs seem to only come on me when I'm out of town. Right now, however, my life is packed up, my work is in transition and my home here in this hotel room with my kids. There is only the now to concern myself about.

I hope to share as we go along.

Words on a Page

2007-08-08T13:13:00.000-07:00

I was awakened this morning by a clap of thunder and the sound of water pouring out of the sky. I am again in New York and I cracked open my eyes to see it raining in pure sheets outside my open window.

As you may have gathered, I love this city. (Not this again, I see you guys rolling your eyes. Not the "oh my god I love New York so much it hurts" speech.) I'll spare you. But just know that every time I look out the window I am filled with a joy that is so deep and profound it actually worries me. Like I really am truly looking upon the face of my beloved. And how odd it is that the beloved is not a human being. Or maybe it's me really going for the unavailable again -- a promiscuous, polygamous city, 3000 miles from my home. Yes, that would just about match my patterns.

The heat and humidity is sexual though. A friend says this weather just stands outside your window and screams Stella! It stands out there in a wife-beater, biceps bulging, agonizing, laughing, moving, pounding, sticky with sex, heat and panting gasping smells and grunts and groans. You can't get away from the imagery. It is what it is.

I have been finding these incredible bulls-eye in-the-heart-of-experience moments this trip. Could be the meditation I've been adding to my life. I road the train downtown the other night after two hours of meditation and yoga, emerging from the studio high as a kite despite two very short nights of sleep.

Unable and unwilling to turn down the octane, I was able to stay dead center in the present experience all the way through the evening: The blast of the subway station as I descended into the inferno like Persephone; the rackety-rackety swaying ride on the N train downtown; the zoetrope flickering of the windows in the train racing down the tracks next to us, in perfect sync....

For the entire evening I was able to simply and exquisitely be. And the city turned on the juice in kind, providing me with exotic Omalu Capoiera martial-arts dancers in Union Square, They were standing in a circle, playing drums and strange stringed instruments, chanting in a call-and-response. The dancers performed in an improv duet of beautifully stylized martial arts forms, going up and over and through one another in flowing mock-battle, spinning on their heads, doing hand stands, primitive and surreal.

And then, this morning. My glasses off, the day not yet begun, the view out my window was blurred and veiled. The rain made a flat scrim out of the sky and all I could really make out was the water tower behind the Ambassador Theatre across the street and the various vertical edges of the buildings on either side and behind it. An achingly subtle movement of color, from sepia at the bottom of the frame, up to a dusky blue at the tope, held my attention and made my chest hurt with its beauty. It was like an ultra-refined Rothko, the change in hue imperceptible from moment to moment, but obviously carrying with it a movement from one state to the next.

The lightning flickered like a strobe light, in periodic bursts. Nestled in my cave on the 11th floor, I watch it without any fear. The city is so dense with structure, the heavens can't reach down and touch me with their violence. I look out and watch the day slowly creep through the veil, and details start to emerge like words on a page...

Part VI - Walking Down Madison Avenue

2007-06-06T22:55:00.000-07:00

This sets the scene. 72nd and Madison. Except most of these pictures were taken uptown.

Edward Scissorhands meets Men's Fashion.

What is seriously not to love in this picture? It's just window dressing but it makes me want to rob banks, pilfer small countries and do whatever it takes to live the good life.

Oh yeah. That's called "advertising."

Pretty, huh?

Purple chairs and purple dress. Does it make me want to go to war to maintain the right to dress in purple? No. Do the chairs make me want to buy the dress? No. Is it interesting? Uh. But I took a picture.

I love this display. It makes me want to drink coffee with such a dense chemical structure that it actually sucks light from surrounding rooms.

What I love about this is that they're so snobby they don't even TRY to translate it from the French. Like, pees off, les americaine swine. You are the whore scum of beggers. And oh yeah, we sell perfume too.

Part V - The Door

2007-06-06T21:32:00.000-07:00

Here’s the first moment:

Two people racing through the rain, towards the opera house. The rain is dancing over the plaza. The paintings in the opera house lobby are glorious through the windows. The lights and glass open to the world with aching grandness.

Take that moment and freeze it. Two people dashing through the downpour. Racing headlong towards art. Racing towards one of the world’s great manifestations and tributes to opera – one of the most improbable and magnificent of arts. A monument that embraces, respects and reveres the creative imperative.

Here's the second moment:

Same two people. Standing in front of the Waldorf-Astoria. She wants to show him the inside. He pauses, put off by the opulance. She grins and steps into the revolving door. She hears him say her name as she goes inside, looking back with a laugh. He pauses a second, and then follows her through the door.

Inside, the beauty of the lobby. The mosaic floor, the flowers in the atrium, the people moving back and forth without impunity. No one knows that they're imposters. No one is kicking them out. There is no reason they can't belong there as well.

Those are the moments.

Here's the situation:

I have been bouncing back and forth between hotels this trip, never quite knowing whether I will stay, return to LA, stay at a friend's apartment while she was out of town, or what. For some unknown reason known only to Expedia, the hotel rates in the Doubletree where I'd been staying more than doubled over the last two nights. More than doubled. But then they were going to go back down. So all I needed was a place to stay the two expensive nights.

I went to my friend's apartment. Nice apartment but small, even by New York standards. I stayed there last night but tonight was going to be a problem as she was returning to town late this evening. Her place is too small to actually sleep two people, so I was looking at a night sleeping in her twin bed with her.

Which seemed like a bad way for either of us to sleep.

I was heading downtown for a meeting and stopped at the Doubletree to use their business center. While there I swung by the front desk. Because I've been booking and extending and checking in and out all week, we're all pretty familiar to each other by now. I explain my quasi-vagabond plight to one woman (we'll call her "Laura") and she checks the rates. Nothing less than something that begins with a 5. Which, I'm sorry, is a fuck of a lot of money.

I go into the business center and find that the same room, online, is in the fours. And not the low ones either. That's better but let's not go nuts (yet.) It's still a ton of money, and twice what I'll be paying for the same room tomorrow night.

Laura promises me all sorts of amenities if I end up booking it because she understands I'm a ronin samurai and need a place to lay my sword. I say I'll keep it in mind but it's still a lot of money. We say goodbye, au demain, etc. and I go off down towards my meeting.

I walk down 50th and turn left at Park, right past the Waldorf-Astoria. I realize that I forgot to ask the Doubletree about where an electronics store might be to replace the cell phone adapter I apparently lost, and I figure that's as good an excuse as any to revisit the scene of our escapade a few days ago.

I go through those revolving doors and up the lobby stairs. Beautiful beautiful.

I head for the concierge and then I get a thought. Like... what the fuck. Let's see what they've got in the way of rooms. I go up to a woman (whose name, coincidentally, is also "Laura") and ask her about the rate. She looks it up: it's actually in the fours. And the low fours at that.

Wow. That's interesting. Cheaper than the Doubletree! But still... it starts with a four. Which is still ridiculous.

But wait. She frowns as she looks at the computer and then tells me to hang on. Says that she has to check something out, and she walks away.

I look around the huge lobby. There's some kind of meeting going on here. All the suits are out milling around. We just don't see that many suits out in LA. They all look like cookie cutter men, with the same sharp jawline, the same slightly cruel eyes. They are all good-looking, actually. But ageless. Trapped in their world.

Then she's back. And gives me a figure that starts with a three. Yes, it's expensive as hell. But then again... wow. You only live once.

So I say done.

And mentally put it in the stack called "we'll deal with that later."

I go upstairs to the prettiest little room you've ever seen in your life. With all the amenities you could want, and terry cloth robes in the closet (if I could wear both I would... instead I've been in just one all night.)

I go back to the apartment and bring my stuff back to the room, feeling like the richest and luckiest girl in the world. And then I go to my meeting with a skip in my step and a song in my heart. Maybe I deserve some of the bounty this meeting has to offer, too. Maybe I can someday work at something I enjoy and stay at nice hotels with impunity.

And this is what I realized:

In order to completely change my reality, all I did was ask.

I asked the Lauras behind the counters if this was going to be possible. I asked nicely. And it worked out.

What happens if we don't ask? Nothing.

What happens if we do? Sometimes nothing, at least not immediately. But if we don't ask, we're guaranteed to never find out.

It's the revolving door. You have to go through it to see what's on the other side. You have to dare to run pell mell towards your art. You have to embrace the passion of your calling. And then you have to to nicely ask if it can all be yours. And then, eventually, it can.

Part IV – Authenticity

2007-06-06T18:11:00.000-07:00

Being out here in the world has been beyond great. I've been able to find my authenticity again which feels like a precious jewel.

Here are some of the things I've learned the past few days:

Love can come, and go, in a heartbeat. It can be as surprising and powerful as a locomotive powering through your front door at 8 in the morning. Or it can be soft like a meteor shower. But either way, it comes in little moments. Trying to ensnare it and force it to linger will only cause it to become the stuff of the brain and the calendar.

Love, and its fleeting grace, is one of the best arguments for creating a practice of living in the moment. If you don't have those muscles working and toned, those shooting stars will fly by you all too quickly.

It is truly a blessing to be able to live within your own rhythms. One of the best things of the last few days, as I've wandered solo about the island, is the ability to acknowledge when my body is tired… and then to sleep. It doesn't matter if it's two in the afternoon, two in the morning, whenever. Between jet lag and the high octane potency of Manhattan, I am careening between full-throttle forward and dead-weight eyelids. It's been great to just acknowledge the body's needs and deal with them as they arise.

It's all about authenticity. One morning last weekend I woke up to a Cat Stevens' song – the one from Harold and Maude. "If you want to be free, be free…. If you want to be you, be you…. there's a million ways to be… you know that there are." And since I was in one of my favorite places in the world, and receptive to change, and breathing the air of books and smart funny literate people… I heard the lyrics down in my core. And I thought – well, why not? Why not decide… right here and now… to just … be… me? Just be me. Not more, not less. Not me + all the way the various people in my life see me. Not me + my job and my responsibilities and my lists and my obsessive crap. Not even me + my work. Just… me.

It takes some mental gymnastics to get to a place of being "just me." Dunno about you, but for me there's some barnacle-scraping that has to go on for me to get to a "just me" state. And – with the ability to pay attention for a few days about nothing but my own little life requirements – I'm starting to see the things that create calluses on my soul that deaden my ability to touch and to feel.

What I need -- what we all need I guess -- are touchstone people and activities (and non-activities) to keep us authentic. To keep the barnacles from growing too thick. The dealings of daily life start to blanket us with a veneer of details that sometimes cover us up completely. Underneath their weight we get small, we stop being able to breathe, we start fading and diminishing.

We all know who the people are who keep us honest. When I get back, I want to be more with them and less with the barnacle-inducers. Also, there are activities that help – like gardening, and yoga, and baking, and keeping spaces in your day to just do nothing. It's important.

So if you want to be free, be free. If you want to be you, be you.

And when those meteor showers come, just open your arms and let them rain down on you.

Part III - The Flower

2007-06-02T23:21:00.000-07:00

Stolen for me from the Waldorf-Astoria.

Part II - Odysseus

2007-06-02T22:58:00.000-07:00

The sirens of New York sing of adventure and words and wonder and stories. Their melody is one of infinite possibility. Their voices whisper and cry through the streets of the city, luring the traveler. They tempt her to declare: this day I'm going to be no one else but me.

Postcard 1:
Riding in from JFK on a Super Shuttle. Deciding to be frugal and save the 45 bucks on a cab and kill some time with a 20 dollar van ride. How prudent I'm being. How very economical.

The half hour wait for the van grows to an hour and fifteen. And when the guy comes he's still going to the wrong part of the island. "I'll take you anyway," he says, angling for a tip. Bone weary and dazed, I say sure. Of course. Take me away. Anywhere but here.

We go to the van. Already it's filled with young buck businessmen and a couple of quiet women also just in from California. Their mode of conversation varies: they are either making fun of New York, making fun of the driver behind his back, or making fun of the people on the street. They are very enamored of their sense of humor. One guy likes making funny Indian accents. The women say very little. The Indian accent guy talks about it being so crowded on the streets that people will get out and strap headlights to their heads and run into each other on the sidewalks instead. They’d get in fist fights and yell at each other. "Sidewalk rage," one of the women says flatly, breaking her silence.

The driver drives in short explosive bursts forward. Then he brakes with short desperate pumps. The van jackhammers back and forth with every jam of either pedal. The shock absorbers are so shot that each percussive blast forward or back just keeps the van shaking until the next change in direction. It's not a pulsing. The word "pulsing" connotes blood flowing through the veins in a somewhat orderly, if, well, pulsing manner. This is more like the spurting of an intermittently severed aorta.

Postcard 2:
Changing clothes in the Doubletree bathroom off the lobby. I have no room yet so I lug my overly heavy bags up into the public bathroom and manage to snag the executive suite, which in this case means the handicapped stall. I am still tasting bile in the back of my throat and my headache throbs with an unremitting insistence. This is my new home, this bathroom. I am one of those homeless people that everyone avoids looking at. I have my luggage opened up and I carry my toothbrush and makeup to and from the sink, dodging the normal people who have slept and eaten and used deodorant within the last 24 hours. I'm the shadow that no one wants to acknowledge. I strain with all my remaining strength to have an intelligent, non-derelict air about me. I want to scream: "God Damn it! I went to Bennington Fucking College! I’m not homeless, I just flew into the sun and this Super Shuttle guy tried to make my gall bladder come out of my nose!!!"

But I don't. I patch myself back together, congratulate myself for surviving thus far, and then lug my suitcases down to the checkroom, where I will pick them up when my room becomes available at the end of the day.

Postcard 3:
My job today at the show is to find my hosting booth and drum up business for tomorrow’s book signing. I am going to make sure my books have arrived and otherwise scope out the lay of the land.

My hosting booth is down in the small press section. RJ Communications are the people who printed my book and they provide services for people wanting to self-publish, without the extreme inequities of POD. (I can talk the publishing talk so well right now, you have no idea. I will try to spare you the lingo but it's great stuff and I'm obviously in the wrong business and this blog is not about that so I'll quit.) I get along immediately with the RJ people. They welcome me as an author and I put down my stuff, heading out into the trade show floor to get rid of my 250 bookmarks that have been neatly stickered with the date and time of my reading tomorrow.

Here's the problem. This is six football fields' (at least) of publishing biz under one roof. It is beyond huge. And everyone is hustling their shit. Everyone has a gimmick: there are people dressed in foam dollar bills and pink hats, large weird teddy bears, people with wings, a man in a Borat wig. Every time you turn around someone shoves a bookmark or a tee-shirt in your face, offers you a chance to win something, assaults you with flyer or a book or a catalog. Typical trade show stuff… but as I prepare to become one of these people I see that it's just plain rude to stop people in their tracks with a bookmark. Yeah, it may drum up biz but more likely than not it's just going to make them think I'm an asshole.

And I'm too tired to get the perk factor up to full and be at all believable. Every time I try to cheerfully ask if someone wants a bookmark I'm pretty sure the subtext reads something like: "Oh god, jesus, I'm so tired, please take a bookmark, please justify my life, please take one just for me and then I promise to go away and not annoy you with my presence ever again."

It's just not happening.

I find myself standing in line for the bathroom. There are lines in front of every ladies room. And every one of these women is target market. Smart, stationary, doing nothing but standing there in line. It kills me how stationary they are. What could they possibly want to do more than read my bookmark and then come and get a book tomorrow morning? It's like capturing the herd of elephants at the watering hole and just aching to knock them all of en masse and get a year's worth of ivory in one fell swoop.

OK that was a weird metaphor.

I'll continue.

So I talk to a few women as I'm standing in line, shooting the shit about how there's always a line in the women's room, and then I maybe hand out a book mark (with the same subtext as above but at least this time I've proven myself to be able to converse about other things before I turn on the sales pitch). And eventually I get a stall and I pee.

The second or third time this happens... interrupted by forays out onto the floor to try to find a good place to ambush people resulting in standing around dazed and then getting an ice cream followed by another trip to the bathroom because at least there I get to sit down... I think Fuck This. And I leave some bookmarks stuck behind the toilet paper dispenser in the stall.

Brilliant.

Simply brilliant.

What else are they going to do besides read my blurb and love me and come get my book?

So I stick some behind the diaper changer and on the shelf over the sinks and I'm thinking I'm pretty damn smart.

This is my new plan then. I am going to go to every women's room in the Javits center and leave bookmarks on the shelves above the sinks. I can't really go into every stall but I can brush by the women and go into each one and leave my mark.

I find a map, see that all the sinks are on one side of the building (thank GOD) and I start my mission. Walk to one: brush past people: leave bookmarks on shelf above sink; leave with a sheepish smile that says, yeah, I'm the author and I'm pathetic but hey we do what we gotta do.

As I go along I realize I'm not the only one who's thought of this. There are flyers all over the counters and kiosks of the hall but – as I found out by being dumb and asking about protocol – I've found out that you have to PAY to put them there. The powers that be will come by and throw them out if you put them down in these designated spots. But the restrooms, apparently, seem to be exempt from this precious sellable real estate law. And a subculture has started to form. I start seeing cards for diet books and metaphysical cookbooks and even a particularly clever poster that says something along the lines of "LOST: My pants. Well worn. I miss them. If you've seen them come by my booth and a handsome lothario will give you a kiss." With the booth number on tear off slips at the bottom of the page.

So I add my AIJ bookmarks to the extravaganza. I like this strategy. If someone wants one, they'll take it. If not, not. Clean and simple and non-invasive.

Which means I spent my entire first day at the BEA going in women's rooms. And thinking it's a modification of the Bilbo Baggins line: as soon as you step on the Road, you never know what's going to happen.

Postcard 4:
Getting out of the subway on the way back to the hotel. Getting that blast of hot sultry air from the train's underbelly as I walk out onto the platform, the station smelling like acetate, heat and humanity.

Then up and out onto the sidewalk. Big drips of summer rain coming down sporadically. Ozone and summer heat pulled out of the concrete and steel and brick. Elation and exhaustion combine. I am back in my favorite city and I have survived and it's going to be better because the three things I crave – sleep, food and a shower – are now next on my list of things to take care of.

She is lashed to the mast, this woman in New York. The sirens call and suddenly she wonders... what the fuck? And takes out her exacto knife and starts sawing away.

Part I - Icarus

2007-06-01T22:17:00.000-07:00

"...When at last the work was done, the artist [Daedalus], waving his wings, found himself buoyed upward, and hung suspended, poising himself on the beaten air. He next equipped his son in the same manner and taught him how to fly, as a bird tempts her young ones from the lofty nest into the air...." From The Fall of Icarus by Thomas Bullfinch (courtesy of Wikipedia):

I am in New York for the Booksellers Expo. I am wearing only one hat these days: writer. I am spending some good money to do this. But it's worth it, I reasoned when I made the plans. I'm spreading my wings. Tempting myself from the lofty nest into the air.

The thought of the trip coming up nearly killed me this week. I was sure that, like Icarus, my desire to fly would end in disaster. That I would fly too close to the sun, my wax wings would melt, and I would plummet to the earth, cured of my desire to soar once and for all.

The only other time I can remember feeling such anxiety in preparing for a trip was when I took myself to Iowa to research a novel I was currently writing. Then, too, I was beset with violent feelings of sadness and impending doom. I could not look at the world without feeling a wrenching regret that I was leaving all of it behind in order to pursue some stupid misguided idea that was going to inevitably and irrevocably ruin my life.

This time the anxiety had a physical component. For three days before the trip I was crippled by a severe migraine, one that had its iron fingers deep into my psyche. I was clobbered with images of death, loss, unrelenting self-loathing, and a powerful urge to quit writing and traveling and somehow become "normal." It felt like spiritual and emotional and physical nausea. There was nowhere I could go, internally or externally, where there was relief.

Thursday morning I called my friend Cindy, the sculptor, just to get her take on the situation. "It’s the curse of the artist," she said matter-of-factly. "You never think you’re good enough. You always want to just give up. But you can’t."

She told me that she can manage to do things that will forward her passion for her art if there is an obvious business component, such as a show, involved. But if she wanted to go to Europe "just" to research another artist, "just" because she has a deep compelling inner urge to do so -- oh no. She could never do that. She would be just as mortified and barfy at the idea as I seemingly was with the BEA.

Relieved (and now encouraged to vent my anxieties to everyone who would listen), I wrote to another friend who responded with equal understanding:

You betcha I get so sick of my internal chatter that I just want to barf.

You're resisting the trip: EVERY single time I have to make travel plans and spend money and pack a bag I fight it like crazy. Just like you: it's a trip you want to make but you're rebelling. I dunno: maybe it's the threat to the status quo…maybe it's fear of success…maybe it's just free-floating anxiety. It's all those things, actually. I usually blame it on my cat: I don't want to leave Buster.

Wow! I was not alone! Apparently other people also experience some form of sadness and fear at the thought of engaging with the absolute core of who they are.

I can't explain why such integration would provoke such sadness but there's something vaguely sexual about it. It's a profound vulnerability to the essence. Getting that close to the essential is like tickling a dental nerve; the instinct is to recoil, protect, chatter to distract.

But unlike the dental nerve, this is a nerve of the soul. This is a root that craves to be touched, begs to be seduced as often as possible – and should be. Not only is this a good nerve, it's an imperative one.

Given that this quest for the core truth is so inextricably bound with fear and guilt, what really are the choices? You can’t quit. You can't give up. You motor through it.

Which I did. I continued with all my closings up and lists and doublechecks. I got my stuff together and packed and plowed through the pain of the headache and the intermittent nausea and just kept going.

On the red-eye I was graced with a seatmate who was funny and smart and kind. I was graced with a good conversation before starting the long struggle to find the perfect position of head and neck and little blue pillow. I slept fitfully with hallucinatory strains of "I am the Walrus" commingling with Gwen Stefani's "Sweet Escape" on full volume in my head. The seatbelt light flickered on and off through the very short night and scenes from Lost played in an endless loop as I dozed, the visual component to my goo-goo-goo-ju soundtrack.

And in the morning I was roused by a bright beam of light coming in through my cabin window. I rubbed sleep out of my eyes and stretched my back, peering out to the horizon as we started our flight into the morning sun.

A picture is worth...

2007-05-13T23:05:00.000-07:00

WOW.

That was amazing.

I had SO many reactions to that previous post... and just about none of them matched the words themselves. Ranging from tears to congratulations, just about everyone who called or wrote was positive that I was selling my house.

Just to be absolutely clear: I am not. The sign literally showed up, by accident, in my front lawn. It was a mistake by Zip Realty. My address was similar to another house that was listed. Whups. "Zip" was apparently the amount of effort they had spent to fact check their listings.

What is amazing is the power of the image. I am not an image person myself. I am pure words. I will walk into the wrong bathroom if there isn't a word posted underneath the icon of a man or woman. I loathe Mac computers because they are so "intuitive" they don't have to use words. Unfortunately, this renders them incomprehensible to the verbal types in the world, like me.

An image of a For Sale sign in front of a house is so iconographic that it trumps any amount of words written beneath it. I mean, verbal or not, even I had a moment wondering if I was selling. (Which, I repeat, I am not.)

So even though I was obviously messing with language and implying one thing while saying another, no one who responded to me was willing to believe that the image was false. They would prefer to doubt the language, or at least live in its ambiguity. An image of a For Sale sign is blissfully non-ambiguous. It's obvious what is going on, so the words are discounted. Even though, actually, the truth is far different from the connoted meaning.

A picture is not worth 1000 words. A picture is worth all of them.

Life Moves Pretty Fast...

2007-05-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

No one can accuse me of doing things halfway.

For some time now, I've regaled my friends and family with my whining about how I'd love to live in Northern California, how I'd love to change jobs, how I'm living 100 yards from the place I most wanted to see the end of when I graduated high school a million billion years ago.

Friends also know that I have the tenacity of a pitbull. If I say I'm going to stick with something, damn it. I stick to it. So when I said I'd stay in one spot long enough to see the kids graduate from high school... boy, I truly meant it.

However.

Sometimes it really is time to make a change.

It started with cleaning the garage. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with all the baggage I'd been carrying around. Since I've more or less completed the project, I've felt so much freer. Able to look around and make some decisions. Able to see what really needs to be done.

I had to clear out the baggage all the way down. It was a tough decision. Very tough. But once I got the whisper in my ear that I could no longer continue down the path I'd been slogging down for what seemed forever, I just couldn't ignore it.

Sometimes you just have to change paths.

So I did it.

I pulled the plug on the old and am ringing in the new. This email is the official announcement. And I'm sorry if it comes as a shock to some of you. Some decisions are best left un-discussed.

I started on the new project about a week ago. Today I make it public: I'm no longer working on the novel I started in November, but have started reworking an old favorite of mine called Hurts Me Too. You will love it.

Oddly enough, it's about a girl who drives to work one day, stops for a croissant, and then decides to sell her house, take her kids out of school and take off for the unplanned untamed unknown.

Which I would never do, of course. Being the responsible woman I am. But boy, I sure am up for about 500 pages of fantasizing about it.

Oh, and this sign? It showed up on my front lawn today. Freaky, those powers of manifestation.

Exhaling

2007-04-15T23:16:00.000-07:00

This is the blog of a person with a very clean garage.

But what's amazing about my garage, is that it looks maybe 20% less full than it did two months ago when I started this insanity. At most 30%. But for the last 6 - 8 weeks, I have been throwing TONS of stuff away. Five - six hefty bags a week. Giving piles of boxes away to various charities. My estimate of the give/take ratio was about 80% being tossed or donated. And yet it looks like only about 20% is gone.

This is unnerving.

But it leads me to some interesting conclusions.

1 - I am extremely good at consolidating my baggage.

2 - Stuff proliferates. No matter how much you give away, there is always more to take its place.

This makes me think about breathing. It's been feeling like ... finally ... my house has been allowed to exhale. As the stuff gets thrown and given away, it feels like my household's pores are being opened. There are major arteries being unclogged. This has had some amazing ramifications. I feel much more able to take on new thoughts and projects. I feel less bogged down, more ready for the future. Like there is a flow going in: now that there is outward movement, we're ready for some new things coming in.

As a regular practitioner of yoga, I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about my breath. This is a good thing.

Breathing -- arguably the thing we do by far the most in our lives -- is at once very simple and yet incredibly complex. It's the place where consciousness and instinct meet. I can control my breath to a large extent with my brain, but can not control it entirely. Suicide by breath-holding is simply undoable (which is why maybe that's the threat of choice for a temper-tantrummy two-year-old.) At some point it goes back to being an animal impulse.

One day not too long ago, as I was prone on my back thinking once again about my breathing, I realized I felt FAR more comfortable inhaling than I did exhaling.

Inhaling makes me feel safe and strong. I'm bringing in a world of new possibilities, pulling them inside of me where I can control their disposition. I can accumulate experiences, sort and catalog them, expand my body to accommodate them.

The exhale, on the other hand, makes me a bit fearful. All that releasing... it's so vulnerable. What if letting all that precious life-giving air go is dangerous? What if something happens while I'm emptied out and I can't replenish fast enough to stay alive?

Then, too, if I let all that stuff out... what might I lose with it? On a physiological level, I might lose precious oxygen. On a metaphoric level, I might lose something that I'll miss deeply. If I let it all go... what if it never comes back? Breathing out makes me feel vulnerable and soft, open and exposed. With my lungs full, I can literally exist a few more seconds than I can with my lungs empty. The breath is my protection, literally, on a primitive level. It is the air we breathe.

But there's a flip side to the bonus of control and safety. When I could get around the tremors of fear long enough, I felt that letting out all that old dead shit felt great. Used air, dead air, carrying with it pieces of used up emotional baggage -- who needs it? The air is the conveyor belt letting all that old stuff out.

In cleaning my garage, I've started my house and my life breathing again. The blocked passageways have been evacuated. A flow is starting. I'm feeling changes in how I'm looking at my work (both writing and employment). I'm feeling changes about how I'm looking towards the future (more optimism; less dread). I feel more like I'm living in a boat than in an historical society. The things I need (and the things I simply love) are at hand. The signal-to-noise ratio is much much better.

And what's scary and amazing is how much is still left. I look around and I still havge way more than plenty. This is not a life of scarcity, or even taut efficiency... by a long shot. Yes, it's streamlined. But there's still nowhere near a dearth of stuff.

Which is kind of another lesson. Mo matter how vigorously I move the stuff out, I will never be stuck with nothing. Even if all the material objects disappeared with a whoosh, my life would still be filled with people and activities and project and words. The life force remains, even as you cleanse and prune it back.

Until this physical body stops for good, life is always going to be a continual flow of pulling in, holding to our hearts, and letting go. It happens with our oxygen, it happens with our old love letters, it happens with our parents, it happens with our children. We inhale our loved ones in, hold them to us, and then we need to let them go. And all the while there is new love to bring in, new things to discover, new life force to ingest.

We bring in.

We savor.

We release.

It's such a beautiful system, it almost takes my breath away.

Ghost Light

2007-04-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

It must be apparent to anyone who reads these blogs that I, well, haven't been writing any.

It sounds like the typical writer's excuse, but I have been busy. And I've been engaged in this garage cleaning binge that -- as anyone I know will tell you -- has been consuming my life and overtaking my metaphor pool for weeks now.

To dramatically understate: this is an intensive cleaning. I am going through every item in every box. I've set forth the laundry list of what this entails in a previous blog. And as I am seeing the end in sight -- really! -- I'm kind of starting to figure out parts of why I'm doing this.

It seems to have something to do with a milestone rebooting process. In being confronted by not only my entire life -- as evidenced by bits of paper stored in boxes -- I'm also having to deal with the lives I've created (my kids) and the lives from which I came (all my deceased father's worldly goods, as stuffed into boxes 6 years ago when I cleared out his apartment as rapidly and mind-numbingly as possible). I have also been going through boxes that my mother periodically dumps, in anger, on my doorstep -- boxes that contain bits of me (hair, baby teeth, ballet slippers) that she apparently cannot stand to have around any longer.

Between 17 boxes of my dad's conspiracy theories, and my childhood mementos thrown in boxes in an effort to eradicate me from my mother's life... it's been rather eye-opening.

To put it another way: it's amazing I'm as sane as I am.

Really.

Truly.

The hardest part was seeing how really crazy and obnoxious my dad was for at least the last 10 years of his life. Boxes upon boxes of highlighted letters, addressed to government officials, with commentary written that was either witheringly snotty (at best) or completely incoherant (at worst).

After looking at the same pieces of paper worked on over and over with minute changes on each version, a collage began to form in my head of what this man was doing with his incessant harranguing of Social Security, then-governor Pete Wilson, the Clinton administration (he offered them the opportunity to pay him $100,000 to buy his secret information about the Gulf War).

He blamed Governor Deukmejian for his pre-mature receipt of Social Security Benefits and the subsequent cut in all future payments. This original misunderstanding led to years of racism and accusations that Deukmejian had given my dad's personal money to the Armenian refugees in a fit of pique over my dad calling him a draft dodger. This expanded to a larger paranoia that the US Military "stole" a slide rule invention my dad had come up with during WWII. And this expanded to a general and all-pervasive hatred of authority and constant belittling of everyone he came in contact with who had anything to do with his money -- from the phone company to his apartment manager to Social Security and on and on.

And in this picture I realized that this was a man who was terrified of being a Nobody. He had to create these scenarios of persecution to reassure himself that he was important enough to steal from. That his name calling was heard. That his rants were pissing off people in high places.

I threw out vast quantities of this stuff, and saved a small part of it to burn. His 17 boxes of apartment detritus were distilled into two -- a box for his writng and a box for his personal things.

It was the last box of personal items that did me in tonight.

After seeing all the craziness, and separating out the beautiful stuff that he still was able to create -- a charming love story/novella about a love affair during the war, pictures of me looking hauntingly happy (in the early days of my marriage... a glow in my face I haven't seen in many many years), pictures of my sons hugging each other on someone's first day of kindergarten, every postcard from me that I ever sent) -- I finally came to the very last days of his life.

In that last box to be opened, I found the receipt for his last purchases (a couple of cans of tuna, some croutons and a couple bottles of beer.) I found a receipt for some work they had done on his apartment (three days before he was found barely conscious on the floor).

And I found notes for the TV set he wanted me to run out one night to buy for him at K-Mart.

It was a 19" set.

He had written up, and then torn up, a check for $157.40.

I had refused to leave my house at 9 p.m. to go get it for him.

He had hung up, pissed.

I had refused to call him back for several days.

And by the time I asked his apartment manager to check on him, it was too late.

He was alive. But it was too late. He died four days later.

When I got to the note about the TV set, I lost it. I had never felt sorry about my decision to stay home that night. I had never wondered what would've happened if I'd called the next day. But tonight it finally hit home. I sat on my garage floor and cried as if it had all happened yesterday. And then I realized... it almost had. The date of his crouton-purchase was April 6.... this coming Friday. And he died a week from Saturday, six years ago.

I don't know why these things take the time they do. In a parallel move, precipitated by the cleaning up, I'm sure, I finished copying a book I started six years ago for a memorial service that has never yet happened. It's a collection of pictures of my dad, and a few essays I'd written about him. For some reason, I finally finished it and will send it out this week to our small group of relatives. Six years late, but it's finally time.

My dad had this horrible, hideous lamp made out of an old Jim Beam bottle. It's tacky as hell and in no way reflects any part of the man who used to design high end shoes and determine fashion trends for the ladies of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It in no way indicates that he was a man who loved Paris and relished the Italian language and drove expensive cars and had his suits dry cleaned after each wearing. It's a horrible lamp, and he loved it. Which means I love it, too.

I put it in the garage as I've been also taking some time to adorn the garage with things I love -- like the license plates from all the cars I've ever owned, and little sculptures from the building blocks I had when I was a toddler. So I put up the Jim Beam lamp and screwed in a little night light bulb just to keep myself from sticking my finger in the socket when it was on.

For kicks, after I'd gotten over the crying thing and freaking out my kids and dog with the unusual display of sadness and pain... I turned on the Jim Beam light and turned off the overhead flourescents.

The garage was magically transformed. The glow of the wooden rafters suddenly became rich and deep. The American flag I'd hung up looked neat and funky. But most notably, I realized that I now had a "ghost light" for my garage. Ghost lights are always set up on a stage at night and left on while the stagehands go home. One theory is that it's left on to keep the ghosts company; the other (well, my other theory) is so that no one falls into the pit and creates more.

My ghost light is now fully operational. I will keep it on to keep my ghosts company as we sleep. I will keep it on as a tribute to the man who loved that Jim Beam bottle light. I will keep it on as a small requiem, and an apology for not going out to buy a TV set six years ago on Friday.

Most of all, I will keep it on in hopes that it will be seen and understood: he was a Somebody to someone. He mattered. Not in the rantings and ravings... but in the postcards he kept and the pictures he held near to his heart.

Life editing

2007-03-05T23:33:00.000-08:00

I am deep in garage-cleaning mode.

Like Han Solo and the Storm Troopers, I have spent much time running away from the evil Darth Entropy, exhausting myself in an effort to avoid his tyranny. But a week or so again, I turned back and attempted a full-frontal headlong assault, screaming my fool head off in hopes of scaring my enemies into submission.

It's a monumental task, cleaning a garage. Not normally a huge procrastinator, this is nevertheless a project that has been successfully postponed since I moved into my house over three years ago. Don't get me wrong: it still looked pretty civilized to the civilian eye. But I had managed to stuff as much matter as was humanly possible into the crevices and my surfaces were starting to get overrun. Surfaces are important. When those go, you may as well hang up your light saber and call it a day.

I won't go into how tired I was already when I started this garage project, or how much I hated my life when I realized just how much work was going to be involved. And I won't talk about my cursing my decision to pursue a profession that required so many BOOKS. I lugged boxes up and down my ladder; I pulled them out of one shelf and stuffed them on another. I took them off that shelf and tried something closer to the ceiling. In between I pulled out my trusty vacuum, stuck on the "crevice attachment" and crawled up into the crossbeams and under the shelves and behind the workbench, sucking up cobwebs and dirt accumulated over the years, and generally getting myself as grubby and sore as possible without actually killing myself.

I really started wanting my life back.

I really wasn't loving it.

Until one night this last weekend, when we came back from visiting some friends and I found myself at 12:30, standing in the garage and just fantasizing about what was going to go where.

Fantasizing.

About my garage.

And I realized in that moment that I wasn't just cleaning the garage. I was editing it. I was structuring it. I was writing it.

Oh wow, I thought. Garage as story: yes. That's what it is.

My garage is pretty typical -- from tools and toys to vehicles and volumes. In its recesses are highly charge sentimental items such as my childhood ballet slippers and the cane I bought for my father (which he refused to use). There are party favors from my wedding, crumbling pre-school sculptures, prototypes for my dad's almost-but-not-quite-insane inventions. My oldest son's favorite fire fighter costume from when he was two. Reams of drafts of stories long completed or abandoned. My backstage pass from the Miss California Pageant of 1979. Camping gear, an empty can of 3-in-1 oil stuck in the corner of a shelf, my dad's dried up bottle of rubber cement. Christmas cards taken of my and an old boyfriend on top of the World Trade Center. Souvenir hurricane glasses from a bar in New Orleans. Threads of history that stretch long before tragedy struck.

There is also a lot of trash. Many things have long since outlived their usefulness or sentimental value (such as a bandaid I had found fit to save since the mid '80's). Phases that were once critical have been passed through. The memories behind purloined matchbooks have been long forgotten, but the echoes of long-forgotten places remain: Yee Mee Loo's, Lulu Carpenter's, Suehiro, The Rainbow Room.

What a lot of stuff we carry around with us! But as I find myself looking around and figuring out where it should all go, I realize that it's very much the same process as writing: I separate elements into piles of what I want to keep, throw away and store for later.

What are the prized possessions that we just can't bear to part with, but that actually clutter up the works? What are the words that we once were so proud of but have long since been surpassed by other, better ones? Also, what are details that are so precious that without them the whole piece falls flat?

The boxes are like little paragraphs. I move chunks of them around from place to place, putting in areas where they will be most useful. When I get everything where it needs to go, eventually I'll go into each box and pare it down to just the essential elements. Taking out the bad words; keeping in the good.

What do we need and when do we need it? Those are great questions to ask when writing any story or cleaning any garage. What are our sentimental darlings that really don't belong? And what are the elements of pure heart that take your breath away, so beautiful and unexpected that you immediately catch your breath in wonder, or laughter, or some resonant memory.

We write, and we clean our garages, to put structure around the chaotic and random happenings of our lives. We want to keep our treasured words without being buried by them. We want to have our backstory build us up and lead us into the future, rather than bog us down, miring us in the past. We want to have an order that makes sense, that enhances our story rather than calls attention to itself.

A beautiful garage, like a beautiful story, is transparent. It is a place where necessary items are aligned in a certain order, designed for the easiest procural of whatever one is looking for at any given time. A good story doesn't let that beautiful organization distract or impede. Nor does a good garage. For both, moving around should be a joy.

At the same time, a garage must always be a work in progress. It should reflect the ongoing activities of life. The current project must always be out, to be worked on and noodled with. The space cannot be too sacred or it risks becoming sterile and hostile to creativity. A balance must be struck between room to breathe, space in which to move around, and an abundance of materials with which to birth new things.

Sisyphus in the Frozen Foods

2007-03-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

So last night at 10:30 finds me at Vons, wandering the chilly aisles like some demented latter-day Aqualung (an album I've been listening to perhaps too obsessively.) My hair is in my face, my eyes are glazed and tense, and I stagger behind my shopping cart like it's the only thing between me and total collapse.

Thursdays are nightmares: I have had to leave work, pick up one child from one part of town, drop him off at one appointment, pick up the other child from the other part of town, pick up dinner, eat it in the car, pick up the first child and get him to another activity, then take other child to do homework while I tried to work on my book, all within a two-hour time frame.

This week we have a number of situations on top of the logistics, all revolving around issues of time management skills and homework obligations which far exceed the amount of time they have to complete them. Once we finally get home I leave to take the dog on the walk (knowing if I stay and "help" any more I'll just end up making things even worse). I end up tyranizing the dog in the middle of my moonlit cul-de-sac while trying to have a civilized conversation with two well-meaning friends who are helping us out with my son's pinewood derby car this weekend. (Anyone who knows me knows that the words "pinewood derby" invariably appear near other words such as "chinese torture," "hellmouth" and, eventually, "vodka, straight up.")

It was that kind of evening. And it is only after I come in from walking (and screaming at) the dog, hating my irrationality and thinking only of reclining on my vast, warm, comforting bed... that I realize I still need to go to the market for some staples. Otherwise it will be one more stupid errand I have to do over the weekend, which is already booked to the max.

Cursing audibly, I trudge back out to my car and drive down to the market. But it could be worse: I have a list, the store is empty except for the crazy people like me, and it will get done. In the morning, if I don't annoy myself into a complete breakdown, I'll be glad I made this one final effort.

Staggering through the aisles I start to think of the myth of Sisyphus. I'm not kidding. I actually do. I've always been of the opinion that it's the rolling the rock up the hill that's the bliss; it's the moments of consciousness while walking back down that's the curse. So what, I muse in a kind of dairy section delirium, is it when you think you've rolled the rock up the hill for the day, and then find that the gods have added another hill, just for kicks? These midnight runs to the market: are they uber-bliss or uber-curse? The bliss is that I'm going to be even happier when I collapse into bed than I thought I would be 15 minutes ago. The curse is, well, Vons at 10:30 pm.

It only takes about 15 minutes to get everything on the list. The rock is nearly to the top (again.) I push my cart over to the checkstand and unload my groceries: Three big frozen cheese pizzas, four small frozen cheese pizzas, two small frozen mushroom and spinich pizzas... oh dear... two boxes of pop tarts, two boxes of Reese's Puffs... oh holy shit. Ah! Here's a gallon of milk -- that's almost like real food. And then all that's left is the milkbone dog biscuits, cat food, and rawhide chews.

I look at the checker and the bagger and know exactly what they're thinking: My god, woman: you're taking better care of the stray fucking cat than you are your own children.

I already hate my guts, remember. This just sends me over the edge. "God!" I say out loud, starting to laugh somewhat hysterically. "Can you believe all this? What a loser I am!" I can't help grinning madly: it's just AWFUL. And this is me -- the newly converted vegetarian, the person who just read a great article in UU World about eating closer to nature. I spend hour after judgmental hour regaling my friends about the horrors of caffeine, red meat and sugar -- and here I am buying not ONE item of "food" that isn't processed, fatty, sugary or all three. Not a thing on that conveyor belt, meant for human consumption, is remotely healthy (except, possibly the milk, but we could argue that too.) We'd all be better off sucking on the rawhide chews for breakfast every morning.

The checker of course is trained to not make shocked facial gestures when she sees what her scanner is picking up. She glances at me when I start the soft semi-hysterical giggling and looks nervously at the bagger.

"Uh, paper or plastic?" he asks gingerly.

"I mean, look at this," I hear myself saying, shaking my head and wondering why I'd forgotten the ice cream. "Is this terrible, or what?"

They smile in this perfect non-committal way and I suddenly realize that the store is minutes from closing and that my crisis over my abyssmal abilities as a mother is really low on their list of things to give a rat's ass about.

"Plastic is fine," I say, attempting to pull myself together.

And as I wheel my cart out into the cold clear night, I think, man, I can't wait until the morning comes. I need sleep. I need a clear start. And I need a sunrise that caries with it a clean sense of redemption.

Which, I'm glad to say, it does.

A quick plug

2007-02-06T22:53:00.000-08:00

By the way, I do want to take a moment and put in a good word for South Pasadena Music, the store where I bought my guitar. The place is the best of a small local business: personalized customer service, excellent selection of eclectic (and useful) high-quality instruments, extremely competitive prices... can't say too much about them. I have a couple of rather fat Guitar Center gift cards wasting away in my wallet because I'd rather patronize these guys than the corporate giant.

If you are in the neighborhood, stop by. Tell Walter that Kathy sent you ... maybe he'll give me another free pick.

(Still can't use one to save my soul, but just having a guitar pick in your pocket takes 10 years off your chronological age. Perhaps 15.)

The Rock 'n' Roll, baby

2007-02-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

You know, it's not all about serenity and shit. Sometimes it really is about just cutting loose.

For Christmas, I bought Chris a bass guitar and lessons. I signed him up for lessons, and found out that for five dollars more, a second person could join him.

Mmmm. Who could that be, I wonder?

Two days later, I buy myself my own Chirstmas present.

Like Gollum and his birthday present, this piece of exquisite machinery is immediately my precious. I stroke it when I'm not playing it. I look at it on its stand in the corner of my room and I memorize its curves and the way it displaces space in a way I've never memorized any man, any car, or any piece of personal adornment.

I remember once, when Jack was still very much an infant, during some sleep-deprived somewhat hallucinogenic pre-dawn feeding, I looked down at his face, his fat pink cheeks and his tiny tender clenched fists. I had a sudden pang of awareness that this sweet child, almost certainly the last baby I would ever bear, would be grown up before I knew it. I held his warm little hand against my mouth and memorized how his fingers felt against my lips, the exact shape of them, their temperature, the bumps of his knuckles, the softness of the flesh on the back. That same ravenous desire to consume is close to how I look upon my new bass guitar.

Very close.

Closer than I'll ever admit.

I have no clue how to play it. The beauty I see in it and the love I have for it no way remotely matches the sounds that I produce from it. When I play, the strings buzz like little chain saws, my fingers clutch at the strings like they are made of loopy strands of silly putty. My left hand reaches up to press on the strings with a painful contortion that immediately makes every muscle in my arm spasm and cramp.

I am unsure how to put the strap on. I am unsure how high it should be. I secretly want it to be up near my neck so I can hunch over it, like Tiny Tim and his ukulele. I want to have arms that are 16 inches longer, with gumby-like joints instead of old elbows and shoulders. My inner right thigh starts bruising from where the bass jams into my leg as I sit cross-legged on my bed, straining to find that right angle of leverage and attack.

There is so much to learn. My god -- the complexity of four strings and a stick of wood! There are so many ways to pluck the strings, press down on the strings, intonate the strings. Where to put my thumb, where to position my right fingers, how to tweak up my left hand to best reach all the notes, what part of my finger pads to press the strings down with, whether to press right on the frets, right behind the frets, or in the middle of the frets. I know there is a huge difference in how different things sound, but my untrained ears are still staggering around like clumsy oafs, unable to understand any but the most gross refinements.

I so love being at the beginning of the learning curve that I can barely sleep.

Our first lesson, the teacher starts us off with a C Major scale. I watch my fingers try to bend to the various notes with the fascination of watching a slow car accident. Nooooo, my brain goes…. Nooooooo… noootttttt theeeerrrrreeee…. but the slo-mo thoughts are never fast or imperative enough to get to the fingers before they spasmodically slap down on the wrong fret, or flop over the string so that the sound is closer to the wet thumping of an Orca's tail against an oil drum than to anything remotely similar to music.

No, music is the last thing on my mind. I am so completely taken aback at my level of incompetence, I instantly revert to my old school-day strategies: I use my brain. I tackle this thing on an intellectual level. I may be physically retarded and my old body may be unwilling to bend to my will, but by god, I can still analyze things into complete submission.

So the first thing I do is play the C-Major scale until it becomes less like a hostile menacing stranger and more like a distant relative that I might smile at at a huge family reunion.

The next day I wake up and instead of lolling around, dreading the day's list, I am up and sitting with the guitar before I'm even fully conscious. I play the scale and realize that, miraculously, overnight that distant relative has become kind of a conversant new friend. I play it over and over until I start getting sloppy. Then I stop.

The next time I play it (perhaps a few minutes after I’m actually supposed to be out the door for work), it's an old friend.

That night, it's mine.

I start losing one and two hour chunks of my life to this endeavor. In a few days I've memorized all the major scales and play them up and down the first five frets until they are as natural as brushing my teeth. I then write them down and notice that there are distinct patterns emerging. I study the patterns until I see the deep beauty of how they work, like suddenly understanding the golden mean in a flower blossom, or getting with a flash of intuition exactly how the angles in a triangle work together.

It's poetry, all this elegance. It’s math with juice.... the juice of communication and emotion and a profound physical alteration of reality. It's math with soul. I go online and intoxicate myself with research, reading about shape note singing and the way an octave is divided up into 1200 "cents," with each interval nicely allocated its own 100 cents (would that be a dollar?). There are theories of music that include words like "propriety" and "coherence." Not only does music have this deep structural elegance, it's also a seething wet orgy of metaphor. I feel flushed after a session of Wikipdedia, like I need to take a slightly cold shower or smoke a cigarette.

In our third lesson, the teacher shows up a pentatonic minor scale, with the added "blue note" – the addition of a note that just exquisitely takes this scale and makes it into jazz, into the blues, into... music. It's such an achingly perfect note that I am in a lather to deconstruct it, figure out why it works so well, determine how the intervals work in a pentatonic scale so that I can find this intensely perfect note in every key. This note is like the scale's clitoris... you press it and the whole thing shudders into life, crying and laughing at the same time.

I draw pictures of keyboards and fretboards on all blank surfaces in my life and use them to count out intervals. I figure out the 2-1-2-2-1-2-2 pattern of the minor scale and the 3-2-2-3-2 pentatonic. I know right where that sexy little blue note goes. I say the names of the keys out loud I drive, try to start visualizing the music that I start listening to repeatedly . I give myself pop quizzes before I go to sleep, and pretty soon I am almost sure of the names of all the keys on the first five frets.

The underlying patterns are a heady narcotic. For me, the mistress of extrapolation, finding all the patterns is addictive, like playing a juicy game. The more I delve, the more it opens up.

Where it's going, I don't know. But in the meantime let me give you a little hint: give yourself a treat and crank up a bit of Clapton or Deep Purple at your earliest convenience. Yes, it's reverting a bit but, come ON -- if you don't deserve some good old fashioned rock 'n' roll, who does?

The Stillness

2007-01-30T21:29:00.000-08:00

A good friend of mine is dying. I'll tell you who it is in a moment.

There are all sorts of ways to approach the end of our time on the planet. In some ways this friend of mine has been granted a new perspective on life, because she has a sense of how it's going to happen and when. She is granted a different sense of the big picture becuase, tragically, it's not that big anymore.

Now just being able to see how long you have to live is not in itself a happy thought. What I'm talking about is more about the consciousness that comes with a pure concentration of life. This is the frozen OJ right out of the can. The need and desire to dilute, to save it for later, is removed.

We were talking the other day and I came up with some thoughts about how to create an exit strategy that's meaningful. I certainly don't have it all together yet, but here is some of what I wanted to say to her as we wrestled with this issue:

It may be time to face the beast.

Whatever it is that you've been avoiding your whole life, now's the time to quit avoiding it. Whether it's bad relationships or a sense of self worth or getting in touch with the cosmic life force -- putting off that reconciliation a whole lot longer means you might just miss it. You may just die without having a sense of profound peace within your body, or connection with the cosmos or knowing how much you are truly loved.

What if you've been wrong?

What if avoiding turns out to have been more difficult than dealing directly? Wouldn't that be a bummer.

As hard as it may feel to turn and face the beast of your demons... you've done the avoidance thing for the vast majority of your life and it's probably not worked all that well. What's the harm in trying another approach?

I mean, the downside is going to happen anyway, right? You're dying. So... try doing the hard stuff and maybe you'll find out that it's easier than you thought. Maybe you'll find out that it's easier than not doing the hard stuff.

If you don't, you risk that moment on the last day where you wonder whether all that shucking and jiving away from your problems was really worth the hassle.

And if you do... who knows? Maybe your body will hurt less, maybe it will relax a bit more, maybe all the effort of avoiding can now go into the effort of healing.

Try to be silent.

I realized something so ridiculously profound tonight that it may be just obvious to everyone on the planet:

It's really deep in our human nature to keep the noise level up.

Really deep.

As any of you who've done any meditation know, it's nearly impossible to shut the brain up for more than a few glorious, freeing, lighter-than-air moments. Our brains hate to shut up. Our brains long for supremacy in their chatter. Our brains are terrified of silence. And they will support an infinite variety of co-conspirators in their campaign to keep the distractions up to a maximum.

Look at television. And advertisements. Radio. Music. Movies. iPods. PSPs. Nintendo DSs. Video games. Online computer games. DVD players in cars. Cell phones that play music and games and ring tones and take pictures.

I could fill pages with this stuff. But you get the point: with the exception of the yoga industry, and maybe the national park service, our society is entirely founded on the need and love of luring ourselves away from silence.

We love and need and insist on distracting ourselves.

I promised I would tell you who was dying, so I will.

It's us. It's you. And it's me. And it's my friend who has cancer. And my other friend who has cancer. And your friend who has cancer.

It's my dog who is licking my foot at the moment.

And it's our children.

It's unbearable. Every bit of it is too painful to comprehend. Distractions such as poetry and running mountain water and occasional trips to Paris provide much-needed balm for the soul. We all need to buffer some of it or we'd go mad.

So the distractions help, until they overwhelm.

But gratitude helps infinitely more.

And silence to sort it all out is not only precious but essential.

We are all dying. So maybe let's go a bit more about our business knowing that each slice of our life is precious and delectable, craving to be savored with mindfulness and gratitude.

We don't need to get morbid, we don't need to get more sad than necessary, but maybe we can use this consciousness as an excuse to turn off the chatter and listen to the songs of the stars for a few moments. Since we're all going to stamp our passports with the Infinite as our next port of call, maybe we can shut up the noise long enough to get an inkling of what's going on out there.

The Longing

2007-01-15T07:27:00.000-08:00

I recently had a very unnerving realization about myself. It's a habit I have that is so natural to me that I've never thought to even think about it. But when I did start thinking about it, it revealed something pretty significant about how I go through life.

When I go to sleep I usually indulge myself in some good old fashioned yearning... usually (but not always) something to do with the comfort of having a warm body beside me. It's not usually sexual. It's more about wrapping myself up in a sense of security. Like cuddling up with a stuffed animal in order to settle myself into slipping off into sleep.

Which is odd, since I'm really yearning for something I don't have and finding solace in the yearning, rather than finding comfort in the things I do have... but I'll get to that part later.

I guess it's kind of a girly thing. And it's steeped in cultural icon. It's very much "Someday my prince will come" stuff. And I've never seen any harm in it whatsoever. I comfort myself with dreaming about things that might be, people I may be with, places I may go. Someday my prince will come... and I'll be sleeping in a villa in Tuscany... and I'll have lots of money... and pretty soon I'll have yearned myself to sleep.

OK. Hold that one aside. Because I have another confession to make before I get to my point.

I recently spent a very pleasant afternoon with a friend in front of Buster's, in South Pasadena. We were comparing notes on mutual friends and places we'd been. We both love Paris, although he's been graced with far more time there than I have.

It was a winter afternoon and as we talked, the light went from the warmth of the late afternoon to the cooler tones of early evening. The amber lights of the store windows across the street came on, as did the Christmas lights on the awnings and trees. Periodically as we spoke a Metro train would roll through the Mission station.

At one point in the middle of the conversation, my friend looked around and said "You know, this could be Paris." I stared at him, my mouth slack with disbelief. South Pasadena? Paris?

I said something to that effect. And then for a few seconds we looked around: the cafe on the street, the little stores, the sense of a little community intersection huddled in amongst the larger metroplex. The colors of the stores, the clarity of the light, the intermittant sound of the semaphore bells as the trains came and went... yes, I finally saw for a transformative two seconds: it could be Paris.

That few seconds of looking at my world a different way lodged inside me in a way that I have found hard to shake.

It happened again the other day when I was walking my dog on the pallisades above Santa Monica. It was another beautiful winter's afternoon but this time I didn't have a tour guide to point out the highlights. Nor did I have to lapse into metaphor. I was simply walking along and noticing the people I was passing, the glory of the Pacific stretching out with its aching blueness to my right, the PCH below me flowing up towards Malibu -- symbol of all things Beach Boys and California Dream.

And then I had transformative thought #2: God, I love this town.

I nearly stopped walking, the idea was so radical. What? I yelled to myself internally. You love this town? Like love love?

And the answer came: Yeah. Sometimes I do. Like right now.

Driving home through downtown I was still kind of shaken to the core by the enormity of that thought, when I realized what was going on: I've lived most of my life in a town that I don't love, and longing for another place is as normal to me as breathing invisible air. It is just how I walk through the days, wishing I were somewhere else.

And then I started putting it together. By day, I long deep in my soul to be somewhere else. By night, I long deep in my soul to be transported into a life free of care. What else do I long for? And the answer came: just about everything.

I long for more time. I long for more ease about money. I long for a better body with which to do yoga. I long for better words to come out of my fingers. I long for a more challenging job. I long to be able to play bass better (that's a whole other blog). I long to do martial arts again. I long for all the people who are no longer in my life. I long for people whom I've never met. I long to be nicer to my children. I long for more quality time with my dog.

Oh my GOD. I am a bottomless well of longing. It is so part of me to long for things that I don't even know what it would be like not to.

Is this really true? I don't think of myself as a greedy person, a person who wants stuff. I really don't. I actually long (there we go again) for less stuff. So it's not a greed thing, or an acquisition thing, it's more a sense of having this yearning, this ache inside my heart for something more.

And I don't think it means I'm unhappy or discontented. I have an equally long list of things I am deeply and passionately grateful for in my life. When I say I'm happiest right here, right now, I really mean it. I do love my life and my kids and my friends and my dog. I love all of it and I long to embrace it more.

So what kind of person am I here then? Can I get out of this by saying I long but I don't want? I long but I'm happy where I am?

Sadly, the writer in my knows that that's splitting hairs. Longing and wanting are certainly in the same family. And being in a state of longing is really not all that far from being just a garden variety malcontent who is cranky about the state of her life.

It's not really a pretty confession, is it?

It makes me feel unbelievably graceless and clumsy. And pedestrian. And unevolved.

But with this revelation comes some indicators of how I can fix it. First of all, instead of going to sleep at night longing for something or someone I don't have, I have started listing off people and joys I do have. That's actually a much better bedtime story to tell myself, now that I've done it for a few nights. Instead of a fantasy, it's real. It's like soothing yourself with a documentary of all the good things that are really going on, instead of going to sleep with an ache because you don't know if the fairy tale will ever have a happy ending.

And when I wake up, instead of listing the things I want to do with the day, I try to start off with the same exercise. It doesn't work as well actually (because I am a huge lister of things to do with the day), but it does carry on through into my productive hours. I've found myself noticing things and mentally saying "thanks" for them.

I'm not sure but maybe my restless soul is finding this soothing. Without a doubt, it feels better (even though I feel like I'm in some kind of remedial AA "Attitude of Gratitude" bumper sticker land).

Mainly what I've realized is that all this longing is really a serenity-buster. You can't really shoot for full-on (or even half-on) serenity, when most of your life you are thinking that life is OK here but boy wouldn't it be more OK somewhere else? You can't really settle into being here now, when deep in side... you'd rather be in San Francisco, or Paris, or New York.

All the longing does is put a kind of huge disclaimer on everything in my life. And it's so big it's almost invisible. Oh yes, I'm very content (except that I don't like my hometown.) Oh yes, I'm happy with where I'm at (except if I had a really terrific boyfriend I'd be that much happier.)

It's not to say that I need to be complacent and cease striving for better things. It means that the longing for things I don't have becomes an underlying minor chord that subtly diminishes everything I do have. Instead of filling out the song, it detracts from it -- causing me to listen only partially rather than opening up all senses to the full beauty of the moment.

The Serenity

2007-01-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

I wrote a letter to God (or the Universe, or the Powers that Be... you know who or what I mean) last night.

I usually have a new year's motto but it ends up getting wierdly twisted (like last year when my goal was to get more space in my life for new things and I got burglarized three days later). So my first comment to the universe was a request that we not do this like opposing attorneys but rather work on the same side. You know, cooperate with the intent of the request and not find all the loopholes.

The idea for the letter came from this great book I am reading called "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. She writes a letter to God, even though she feels stupid for doing so and selfish for bothering the Universe with her own trivial concerns. I totally get that. But she got around that and so, as it turns out, did I.

I figure the powers that be are, well, pretty powerful. They don't have schedules and bandwidth problems like the rest of us. And... as she pointed out... if one person's anger and fuckedupness can affect the planet, so can one person's happiness and well-being. So in that sense it's OK to ask to be happy. It's selfish but it's not merely selfish. It's good for me, and it's also good for my kids. And my co-workers. And my dog. And, by extension, the planet.

So here's what I asked for... and by extension I'm asking it for you.

I want the serenity this year, and not the hit. This is a phrase coined by Annie LaMott, a writer whom I revere for her humor, honesty and courage. I forget what book it's in of hers, but it's the old addict's dilemma: do you want the serenity or the hit?

I think most of us, if we thought about it with brutal honesty, would admit to wanting the hit. The punchy high of a great creative success, the drug love of a passionate (if not completely healthy) relationship, the giddy manic swings of rock and rolling through life.

I certainly love those moments. But as I age and learn more about myself I also know that these swings carry with them a sometimes wicked backlash. And dealing with the backlash takes energy. And time. And it's a bummer. When all is said and done, the hit stuff is equal parts fun and funky... hence a wash... and kind of a waste of time.

So I'm consciously going for the serenity this year -- specifically in my next relationship, wherever it may be lurking. Part of the letter included my stating that I actually do deserve a good relationship and, actually, I really want it and am expecting it sooner rather than later.

It's not impossible, I point out to the gods. It actually isn't impossible for me, Kathy, to have a good relationship. So let's get on that, shall we?, I nudge with friendly cameraderie. And while we're at it, I'm going to make some changes in how I go about doing things. Starting with this serenity thing.

Well, my inner drama queen despairs at all of this. She whispers in my ear: what are you doing? You know how fun it is to have some huge issue to work through. You know how much you love the unavailable, the inaccessible, the inappropriate and, let's face it, the slightly insane. What are you going to do without those things? You're going to settle for a really boring boyfriend? just so you don't have too much, you know, fun?

And some other part of me tries to answer -- because it is a compelling argument: but maybe I can be happy without all the drama. Maybe it's possible. Maybe I can have a little insane and be serene. Maybe it can work out and be fun and be sexy and be solid.

I can't really definitively say this for sure, because I've never really experienced it. But I have to believe that love can be serene and not boring. I have to believe it.

So I'm asking for serenity. Not just in my relationships, but in everything. And not just for me, but for the planet.

Maybe we can be better without the drama. Maybe we can find love and fulfillment without the chaos.

Maybe in that state we can actually move forward in our lives, with it as our strength and our solace. Maybe our lives don't have to be so filled with hills and valleys that we spend all our time just trying to refind our balance.

I asked for other things too... like the freedom an ability to write good words, to be more of what I'm supposed to be in this life, to more fully and perfectly fulfill my contract as I move through time.

But it's all kind of wrapped up in this serenity package. If I can make those choices consistently, and if it ripples out in some indefinable way to others, my hope is that this whole mess will settle down a bit. We can be more calm. The world can perhaps begin to breathe again.

The Zen of Re-Gifting

2006-12-20T07:00:00.000-08:00

This is a tough season. It takes the usually simple pleasure of showing people whom you love that you care, and puts a gun to our collective temples forcing us to show everyone we know, how much we care, all at once.

It's expensive, time consuming and frankly annoying. We all vow to plan ahead better next time, or make everyone a little homemade gift from the heart (I'm sorry, but who has the time for that?) or save up so we spend within our budgets (yeah, right). And every year it's the same old thing.

It's a form of societal blackmail. I'm going to get something for you and present it to you, usually in public, for you to open (also usually in public). You are going to gush and thank me and, in turn, give me something back. I will then gush and thank you and then we go our separate ways, knowing what we knew before: that the other person likes us. Except this time we have something new to put away into our bursting cupboards or garages and we're incrementally poorer.

To make things worse, it comes for everyone at the same time, heightening everyone's irritation with the institution, with each other, and with the world at large. Making most presents gestures of required reciprocity, rather than true outpourings of love.

Now, there are presents and there are presents. For me, presents that give me an experience or further deepen our friendship are the the best. If anyone wants to give me a trip to the spa, please feel free to contact me and I will publicly recant everything I've ever said about the perils of the season. Or, you know, a trip anywhere. Or a meal that we can share together. Or a good conversation. I want deep, I want experience, I want the nectar: I don't want anything I have to make space for.

Recently, however, I've discovered the joys of re-gifting. Yup, you heard me. Re-gifting. The most socially loathsome, spat-upon, low-life practice that one can do. To hear people say the word you'd think we were talking about incest, bestiality, stealing old ladies' purses. One does not say the word in polite society. And one definitely does not ever admit to doing it.

But I have.

I do.

And I am going on record and stating it publicly:

I re-gift.

Not every present, naturally. Not even most presents. But there are some presents that just do not need to stop with me. Just as there are some energies that need to pass through one's life and onto another's, there are some things that I just don't need to own. I've realized that moving gifts through space until they find an owner that will truly appreciate them is an act of balance and equilibrium, rather than laziness and cynicism.

It's a martial arts philosophy: taking the opponent's energy and making it your own. You take the motion coming at you, let it pass through you, and use it to accomplish your aim. It's not a bad thing, it's a useful thing.

And, when you think about it still another way, it can be a beautiful thing.

Consider some of the other gifts we are given -- the gift of laughter, the gift of love, the gift of health. What if we were to start considering re-gifting those things as well? If, for some reason, the universe blesses you with a day in which you feel happy (it can happen) and you send it down the pipeline with a smile to the person crossing the street in front of you... you've just done a form of re-gifting. And what's cool about this type of re-gifting is that you don't lose the original gift... you actually enhance it. It gets better as it goes along, rather than worse.

I stood outside my house the other night, in the cold, in the dark. I needed some space away from the stuff that needed to be wrapped, the faltering balance in my checkbook, the list of things still yet to do. I had a terrible attitude about this whole season, honestly, and I just wanted out of the house.

I stood outside and looked up at my little Christmas lights, shining in their primary colored way against the black sky (and I'm sorry... I have to interject this here... does anyone else HATE those weird dark purple/blue/green lights that seem to be cropping up all over? I mean, YUCK... Christmas is about primary colors, brightness agains the dark... but I'm getting ahead of myself.) So I'm looking up and I'm reminded that this whole season is about the light in the darkness.

Whether you're talking Hannukah, Christianity, or "please oh pagan-god-of-choice make the days get long again" -- this is about getting through the dark times. We raise our little human candles at this time of year, our little beams of defiance and faith, and vow to make it through another winter. We give offerings to our gods of choice -- whether Best Buy, Amazon or Macy's -- in hopes that material abundance will translate to spiritual replenishment. We shiver together outside and then gather together at the table. And together we make it through another season.

So let's re-gift that feeling of being together while the snow falls and the frost crackles.

Let's re-gift that hope that summer will come again.

Let's re-gift with abandon all the things that are truly great about being human.

And let's re-gift the light that we manage to find where and when we can.

The City

2006-11-17T08:46:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting at Caffe Trieste in Sausalito and, truly, life doesn't get better than this.

You can keep your fancy hunky lovers and your villa in the south of France. I'm sitting here with free wi-fi, granola with fruit and yogurt, people surrounding me with conversation, and San Fransicso hovering across the bay, enshrouded in fog like Janis Joplin in an ostrich boa.

I don't know if I've discussed this in these blogs, but I've always felt that cities are primarily masculine or feminine in nature. Los Angeles is complex, multifaceted, difficult to penetrate, and -- if you are tenacious enough to discover enough of them -- greater than the sum of her parts. If you look at any one of her qualities, she's disappointing. If you live there long enough and probe deeply enough, and have enough patience to work through all her issues -- there is a sum there that is greater than her individual attributes.

Basically, LA is one of those women who provide a certain amount of surface glamour, give little, and require a lot of work to maintain. There's a word for that kind of woman.... oh yeah, that'd be the word "bitch."

New York, on the other hand, is masculine in the extreme. You walk up out of the ground from Penn Station and WHAM, you are walloped over the head with the power of the city. There is no attempt at discretion or coyness. New York is linear, aggressive, filled with phallic testosterone-juiced upward thrusting. From the subways to the skyscrapers to the throbbing atertial flow.... I rest my case.

Then there's Paris. Paris is, of course, extremely feminine, but in a different way from LA. Paris is the woman of elegance, all done up for the occasion, coifed and perfumed and gracious. There is no false step to her; every motion is refined and cultured and honed by centuries of being seen in public. Even the word "ettiquette" belongs to her. She is the kind of woman that men (a certain type of man, at least) fears, worships, takes care of, reveres.

San Francisco is more my style. Let me rephrase: San Francisco is my style. I come by this equation somewhat honestly; my father was born in his house on Cole Street in 1909, his family settled in the city in the 1800s. I've always run away to this place to find myself. Whether it's DNA or just temperament, when I breathe the air in this place, it's the perfect oxygen for my body.

San Fransisco is also feminine, I think. But it's got an unapologetic masculinity about it, too. It's a city with agendas and grace, with purpose and indulgence, with commerce and art. It's a writer's city, a misfit's city, the city where people who don't fit in anywhere else magically fit in. It feels warm without being cloying, it's open without being sappy and vulernable. Like New York, it's filled with magical niches and world-class everything -- from food to opera to art to writing.

San Francisco is what would happen if New York and Paris fell in love. Maybe in the early Barbary Coast years, this would've seemed like a tempestuous affair... but by now it's more the marriage of many years. San Francisco has been through her turbulent adolescence, has been pummeled by loss, has weathered some years. She has seen some interesting shit.

Am I hopelessly in love with this city? You betcha. Do I often wonder why I chose to leave it to go to grad school in LA? Actually... I don't. That was the road I needed to travel and it was a good road. It gave me a number of years of a good marriage and two kids who enhance the planet in more ways than I can count.

In the absence of regret for my choices, I do ache for it when I'm back here, though. I ache that I can't be here more, while at the same time revelling in all the moments I can visit. If and when I move back -- I caution myself -- I won't necessarily be happier and my various items of baggage won't miraculously disappear. On the other hand -- and I know this viscerally -- when the time comes I will, simply, be happier. I may be just as fucked up, but I'll be happier about it. I'll be in the place where the oxygen content more perfectly matches my blood, there won't be so much friction between me and my environment.

I love my life in LA. I love roaming streets where I have decades' worth of stories lurking on every corner. I know everyone; the high maintenance bitch thing is an attitude, rather than an actual presence.

I adore my friends down there. Our circle is solid and sweet and soulful and creative. I have created and discovered and nurtured a Northern California lifestyle in the midst of the Southern California metropex. It's true: my friends down there are the "my kind of people" I love so much up here. It's not that it's all here and not there. I have found the niches, I have found the moments of true art, I know where the soul is and I love it for its scarcity. Like rare gems, finding the soul in LA is an artform in itself and it's highly gratifying when a moment or a place is uncovered.

Maybe being up here... where every radio station is good, where every restaurant is intoxicating, where every conversation is worth unabashed eavesdropping... would get old. Maybe the great thing about LA is that it does take a little work and the good stuff refuses to be taken for granted when it's found. On the other hand... when it comes time to leave... I think I'll be ready. At some point in my life I will have earned the ability to be with my kind of people, in my kind of place and not have to work so hard.

Meanwhile, back in 8th grade

2006-11-11T06:40:00.000-08:00

I had a truly awful moment last night. The kind of moment that makes me wonder if there really is any hope for us as humans, in terms of emotional health. The awkward pain we endure in simply growing up is so searing at times, it's amazing we can ever get out of bed in the morning.

Here's what happened:

I have a dear friend from Jr. High in town. (Back in the day it was Jr. High, not Middle School.) Because my karma has not seen fit to let me leave the sucking vortex of the town I grew up in and left as quickly as legal means would allow, I now live within 500 yards of my high school's goal post and pass my Jr. High many times a week.

The Jr. High was a hell hole. A vampire den. A place of the most intense misery and humiliation ever devised. It was multi-cultural, which in our day did not (sadly) mean we were all enriched and enlightened by the unique qualities that the other cultures brought to the table. It meant that there were about two white kids for every 50 of everything else and that it was open season on whoever was dumb enough to stay standing at the end of each day.

Not only was I cursed with being white, I was cursed with being smart. As this was my third school in as many years, I was figuring out this one fast though. Just, duh, don't be smart. Do not ever be smart. Shut up. Don't let a glitter of comprehension flicker through your eyes at any time. Don't answer questions and keep the grades on the top of your papers hidden.

I was doing OK with the not being smart thing. It was much harder not to be white.

Gym classes were a nightmare. The black girls would put straight pins into the ends of pencil erasers and stab us in the legs as we walked through the locker rooms. They were HUGE 9th graders, amazonian in size and ferocity. In my memory they were the size of linebackers, beautiful in their hatred and dominion over us.

In the midst of this, I had a small group of friends. True to the demographics of the school, I had one black friend, a Filipino friend, a girlfriend from Saudi Arabia, one from Trinidad (of eastern Indian descent) and a hispanic friend.

I also had Phoebe.

Phoebe and I met in the library. We started laughing about the Pied Piper of Hamlin, for reasons I will never remember but in a moment that I will never forget. I have no clue what struck us so funny but within minutes of our first conversation (so my memory goes) we were convulsed in that type of laughter usually reserved for funerals and other completely inappropriate situations. It was laughter that, for me, had needed to come out for 10 of my 13 years, at least. Pent up, strangulated laughter. Laughter that explodes from the inside with a force so powerful it's scary... and then even more funny.

We were immediate best friends. She was, truly, my first best friend. No one had ever gotten me like she got me. She was SMART. She was a misfit. She was SOOOOO cool about it, too. She was the first person I ever knew who was as geeky as me IN EXACTLY THE SAME way as me. The kind of person who reads, and writes, and has a weird take on the world, and is able to laugh at all of it, including herself.

Phoebe was magnificent. She got me through.

Now. I must've hit some kind of puberty while we were friends. Because Phoebe had two brothers. One was our age and for some reason he didn't resonate too much with me. But she had a younger brother who was 10, I think. Maybe 11. And -- god help us all -- I thought he was the coolest thing on the planet.

He must've been my first big crush. And to this day I don't know what it was. Especially now, when I see what 10/11 year olds are like... I don't get it. He was cute, in a little brother way. I don't remember much else about it. Except my liking of him was a constant and continual source of fascination and acute embarrassment.

Everyone knew about it of course. Like, hey, this was ME we're talking about. Could I keep anything a secret back then? Of course not. Could I hide my feelings, squelch my passions, keep it cool, keep anything copacetic? Hell no. This was the beginning, my friends. All my patterns started here. With my inexplicable fascination with Phoebe's younger brother, Colin.

I endured the taunts of my friends. I prayed that Phoebe wouldn't abandon our friendship because of the oddness of my fixation (she didn't). I spent hours with my stomach in knots hoping that Colin -- in all his 10 year old wisdom -- wouldn't know that his older sister's maladjusted friend was completely obsessed with him. I'm sure he did.

And I endured all this, because that (it turns out) is simply what I do.

Nothing happened, of course. Colin went about his life eating PB&Js and doing whatever kids did before video games were invented. Sadly, their family moved to an adjacent town (about six blocks from where I'm now living) and Phoebe went to a different high school. We drifted apart and years, decades, went by.

But, thanks to the internet, we reconnected awhile back. Phoebe found me and we've seen each other once or twice. She's on the east coast, married with a child. And I'm here, so whenever our paths cross, we try to hook up.

Well, this weekend she's here. And we've made plans to see each other this afternoon. She was going to leave her daughter at Colin's house in Fullerton and come up here for tea this afternoon. It sounded like a good plan.

But when we talked last night, she said that Colin really wanted to see me. Would it be possible for Chris and I to drive down there for our visit?

Hmmm. Interesting. Well, sure, I guess, I said. I'm thinking that's kind of weird that he'd even remember me, but sure, we could drive down.

So she says here's his number. Call him up and figure something out. She and her daughter were exausted from a day at Disneyland... we can figure out a plan.

OK. Fine.

I jot down the number while I'm parking in the grocery store lot. The kids and I go in and do our shopping. We jump in the car and head out to the next errand: dropping off a check at the drum teacher's house. It should be noted that throughout this evening we'd been talking about various indications of love and I made a comment that every time I'm falling in love I stop being able to eat. Dunno why, but my stomach usually knows something is up before anything else does, and I just stop eating.

So we're doing errands and the kids are quizzing me on who I can eat around and who I can't and while Chris runs the check in I decide to call Colin and set something up quickly.

God help me. The second he answers the phone there is only one thought in my head, which is "Wow. Your voice changed!" I kind of start stammering through that and then it all goes to pieces in incredibly rapid succession.

I'm talking to him while Chris comes back into the car. Not only have I made the comment that I can't eat around people I'm falling in love with I also mentioned, while introducing these people that we'll be meeting today, that I had a big ass old crush on Phoebe's little brother, when he was younger than Jack is now.

SO. They kids LOVE that they know so much about their mother. They start going crazy.

I'm trying to talk to this guy ... a MARRIED GUY, a GUY WITH A CHILD, a GUY IN HIS LATE 40'S NOW... and they start making moony eyes, sighing "Oh Colin" under their breath, and then opening the door to fake-retch out the side of the car.

It's funny. It's hysterical. It's gut wrenchingly ironic.

And... it's not.

It's horrible. It's acutely and painfully embarrassing. It's KILLING me, actually.

Here's this guy who I really don't know from Adam. Never did know him. Don't remember him as anything other than a completely weird object of desire. And my kids -- who are OUR ages when we knew each other -- are killing me with their antics.

Suddenly, wham. It's 8th grade again. My friends are laughing at me on the playground. I'm caught with my pants down. I am on the PHONE with this person, whom I don't know, who may TOTALLY not have a sense of humor, who didn't ASK for this phone call, who is getting an earful of shrieking laughter and blatantly audible stage whispers as I implore my kids to shut up... did he ask for this? God no. He's just this person living his life. And here I come with all my crazy baggage handing him a big bucketful of chaos when he answers the phone.

I hung up quickly, tellng him we'll have to try this phone call again. Also, I had to explain why he was hearing other voices simultaneously saying "COLIN... oh COLIN..." and then making vomit sounds in the background. I had to tell him I had a big assed old crush on him. And that my kids are making fun of me. And it's so chaotic I just cannot tell what he thinks about any of it.

Oh my god. It was terrible.

It was so funny.

And it was so not.

It brought up every single thing I'm going through these days. I feel like I've evolved not one little bit from 8th grade when it comes to men right now. I'm a misfit. I'm a freak. I have cooties.

I'm standing in the hallways with a wide-eyed look on my face, clutching my books, wondeirng how in the world I will ever navigate through this maze. How will I talk? How will I survive? How will I ever, ever, ever not be a total geek?

Tantric blogging

2006-11-10T07:10:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking about these blogs recently and wondering why I'm suddenly writing fewer of them.

The contrarian in me thinks that the thrill started to be gone when my friend Tom figured out my formula. Once I'm figure-out-able, it's time to learn some new tricks.

This feeling started around late August, when I started this intense sprint/marathon of activity. It wasn't so much that I was insanely busy (which I was) -- it was also that there was SO much to write about I got backed up and found that the moment I had time to write up something that had a occured to me a few days previously, there were two other ideas competing for top priority.

As my grandmother would say, in her Polish accent: So much, too much. There was so much to write, so many thoughts and synchronicities. So much to do. Too much to even start.

And then there's this other thing that's been needling my psyche. What's the next project going to be? It's been a year since AIJ came out. People are starting to ask: now what? And -- now that I've proven that it's possible to squeeze a book out of the thin air of an overbooked schedule -- what am I going to do next?

This is what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid that the blogs have been giving me enough satisfaction that I'm sated just enough. I get my ya yas out here, sporadically but consistently enough that there's no more oomph left in me to make the words link together into a big sprawling storyline. I get to smoke these little cigarettes in a slightly euphoric post blog state JUST often enough to be happy.

I'm always a huge fan of going for the gusto in any way and every way possible. But maybe I'm kind of shooting my wad here. And maybe I need to hold some of it back in order to go for the bigger bang.

So I'm thinking of trying something out. Since I've been living with this concept of Going Without for way too long, I'm used to the idea. Boy, I hate this idea. But maybe Going Without with a higher goal and purpose is better than getting any old action simply to slake the thirst.

Tantric blog writing. Enough to get the juices flowing -- both from a giving and receiving standpoint -- but holding back a bit and saving it for the lollapalloza finale down the line a little bit.

My first thought is "man, that sucks." And the second is "Yeah, right." But maybe it's what's necessary to service the higher good. Maybe I try to save a bit on the side to work on something bigger/longer. Something we don't have to call a novel, yet, but something that may very well look like a longer piece of fiction.

So let's see how it works: shorter, quicker, more frequent bursts from my keyboard. Less fleshed out, more impressionistic. Sketches. Thoughts. Moments.