today's journey (so far)

started with my friend debra's blog ...
http://reachdabbleshine.typepad.com/28yearslater/

.... where I read about Joan Tollifson, who I then googled and enjoyed immensely ...
http://home.earthlink.net/~wakeupjt/rcommndd.htm

... and on her recommended reading list was Wayne Liquorman, whose Ram Tzu book is a favorite on my bookshelf that I haven't read in ages ...
http://advaita.org/AFwayne.htm

...which somehow reminded me of a poem I have kept in the front of my daytimer for about ten years now ...

Be like a bird
Who halting in her flight
On a limb too slight
Feels it give way beneath her
Yet sings
Sings
Knowing she has wings.

So I googled it, and it turns out to be the words to a song, adapted from a poem by Victor Hugo. Who knew? And it's not even 10 am yet ...

what endures

I just got back from a looonnng walk in the sun. It's gotta be 50 degrees here today.

As I was thinking to myself how lucky I am to have the kind of work where I can be out midday, and how fun it is to know so many playmates with similar schedules who can join me, a man who I'd seen on my daily walks for years and then did not see for a long time approached.

And for the first time in 8 years of walking the same path in different directions, we struck up a conversation. He told me with a big grin that a book he's written about flight training and beautiful women has been published, and that he sent it in to Oprah to consider for her list.

He's gotta be in his 80's, and it was such instant validation that investing in creativity is investing in the one thing that does not need to fade away with age. Well, wait, I guess Love doesn't need to fade, either.

Okay, one of two things, then.

The enduring nature of love has been obvious to me for years. But the concept that we can create until we die is relatively new for me. It gives me even more to look forward to as I age ...

Melting

I'm in a pretty magical space right now -- feeling flooded with grace. My social calendar is full to overflowing; salsa dancing, contra dancing, invitations to gatherings and parties, teas, movies -- new friends and connections of both genders coming in from all corners. My work is fulfilling, my kids are amazing, and my friendships are becoming deeper and richer with each passing day. Gifts are being delivered to my door. There's very little lag time between my inner questions and the arrival of the answers.

I feel as though every need is being fulfilled in its own sweet time, and I'm in no hurry for it to arrive. For example, I told some friends that I wanted to connect with men who carried the vibration of Mastery, and I have met several in the past two weeks. None of them have been right for me to date, and that is just fine with me. I'm simply enjoying spending time with them, be it moments or hours, steeping in the fragrant stew of Lives Being Lived Joyfully On Purpose. The flavor is penetrating deeper and deeper into my bones with each passing day, tenderizing the meat of me. One of these days my sense of Me-ness might just melt away.

I don't remember ever feeling this relaxed about my life. The only thing I seem to worry about is that I don't worry about anything, and I can't even sustain that for more than a few seconds.

Since I do not know by what grace I have arrived in this place, I don't know how to share it with you, except to tell you about it and hope a little of the fragrance wafts through the spaces on your screen. Here ... take a little taste from my spoon. It's delicious living like this, and the flavor only gets richer every time someone else jumps into the pot with me.

visual bliss

At a friend's birthday party tonight, I sat near a guy who mentioned that he was a photographer. You know how I like to google everything, so of course I had to come home and investigate his work online. I am stunned speechless by the, umm ... gorgeousity ... of this man's work. See, that's not even a real word. I told you I was speechless. You will be too.

I just paused for a moment to tell you about him, and now I am going right back to his site to be transported and transformed.

I think lunar is my very favorite category so far.
http://www.steelephoto.com/photo.php?set_id=4

Or is it Flatirons?
http://www.steelephoto.com/photo.php?set_id=2

Oh, I dunno. Do yourself a favor and look at all of them.
http://www.steelephoto.com/index.php

If you feel inspired to use his contact form to tell him how much you enjoyed his work, go for it. He seems like a very decent and humble guy, from what I can tell, and I bet he'd be happy to hear from you. And feel free to pass his site along - it's like a mini online retreat.

If you live near Boulder, I think I heard him say he has a show at the Boulder Public Library gallery for another week or so. His name is Peter Steele.

my life in music

You all know by now I'm a bit o/c, right? Well, my obsessions extend to music, as well. When my kids first introduced me to You Tube, I disappeared into my computer for several days.

When I found Incubus's Drive and Hemmorhage by Fuel, I played each of them continuously for over a week. Then I moved on to Tasmin Archer's Sleeping Satellite. And now, after a brief hiatus, my current perseveration is By My Side from Godspell, if you can believe it.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XR3sfbvtwUs

I thought perhaps my reverie would extend to the movie as well, so I watched some clips. But nope ... I couldn't stay with it more than a couple seconds. The religious concepts are way too harsh and rigid for me. So it's not a religious reverence that is holding my attention. Although I do resonate with the concept of some sort of Loving Force that is bigger than our conscious minds can conceptualize.

But the songs! Oh, the songs. When I was a kid, my mom was very hip. (She still is! It was her who introduced me to the Flaming Lips a few years back.) We had lots of cool albums - Hair, Godspell, Santana, Saturday Night Fever. I remember those songs like nothing else. (And I can still sing the preamble of the Constitution thanks to Schoolhouse Rock.)

I loved that scene in High Fidelity when John Cusak's character was reorganizing his album collection autobiographically, so that he'd have to remember that he listened to such and such when he was breaking up with so and so, and that came before he bought The White Stripes or whatever.

It occurred to me that perhaps my musical obsessions tell a story, too. I will never forget that Sammy Hagar kept me company on my little red Panasonic tape player when I was in bed with a horrible sunburn on vacation in Southern California at age 16.

So maybe I'll start saving them in order, and someday I'll create a soundtrack of my life. I've never been a scrapbooking type, and only remember to take pictures when the presence of a birthday cake reminds me to get my camera. Music and fragrance seem to be the anchors of my memories. I might as well go with it. Maybe I can archive my past with scratch and sniff CD's ...

reality?

Loved this quote that Rob Breszny included in his Free Will Astrology email today:

"What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are."

- Epictetus

the windmills of my mind

I remember we sang that song in elementary school music class. Round like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel. Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel. Or at least that's what the lyrics are in my memory.

These past few days I'm feeling acutely aware of the carousel of my mind, and its tendency to exaggerate, jump into the future, and overly dramatize what it tells me. I suppose this is the 'opportunity within the crisis' of the end of my relationship. My mind has plenty of fuel to keep it active and freaking me out: those thoughts that only surface when I feel bored, rejected, abandoned, etc.

So like the sailboat I saw on the ocean in St. Petersberg a few weeks ago, I've been engaging in constant course corrections. That mind o' mine is clever, and sometimes I don't even notice it has slipped into a story again until I realize that I feel like crap. But when I do finally notice, I take a breath, reorient my awareness into the here and now, and I feel fine again.

Just now, I was trying to get some work done, and I heard a soft little murmur in the background of my head predicting a bleak and lonely future and trying to drum up some support for its vision. When I turned my attention to it fully, and asked it to assess our present moment and see if anything was lacking, it sheepishly slinked away. But I tell you, not 3 minutes later, it was back, testing the waters again! Little bugger. I gotta admire its tenacity.

So the journey continues, along with the various voices narrating it in my head, each seemingly with its own agenda. But what is new this time, that I'm really liking, is that the ones that sound like Eeyore can't seem to persist in their gloominess when I ask them what they need that they don't have right here and now. They hem and haw and settle back down pretty quick.

So the course corrections only take a few seconds nowadays, whereas I think when I was younger it may have taken days or even weeks to realize which story was hurting and call it to join the present moment.

I wonder if at some point, this process will become automatic, and happen under my conscious radar. That would be cool! I'll let you know.

the point

Started feeling a little funky last night - sort of bored and aimless. Normally when I feel that way, I make some kind of bid for connection by offering my mate a backrub or starting a conversation. With him gone, those strategies are longer options, so I stretched and danced instead.

Which was very nice, but I still woke up with a vague feeling of If I don't have something useful to do, then, well, what am I doing here? "Here" meaning in this human body. (don't be alarmed, it's not a suicidal thought! I'm way too wimpy for that kind of thing. It was just a general musing.)

So in my half awake/half asleep state as the sun was rising, I tried to access a purpose for my life. The most amusing one I came up with was to produce carbon dioxide (it was amusing to me, anyway.) I also considered that maybe there is no purpose. Or maybe I'm just a sensory organ for the Divine Oneness and It's not uptight about what kind of feedback my little neuron of a self sends back to the mothership - any old sensation is better than none. But I really didn't have much luck coming up with anything other than those.

Then I got up and checked email, and true to form lately, my answer came right on the heels of my question. Today's daily Abraham quote:

Mining the moment for something that feels good, something to appreciate, something to savor, something to take in, that's what your moments are about. They're not about justifying your existence. It's justified. You exist. It's not about proving your worthiness. It's done. You're worthy. It's not about achieving success. You never get it done. It's about "How much can this moment deliver to me?" And some of you like them fast, some of you like them slow. No one's taking score. You get to choose.

Seems to weigh in favor of my hypothesis that we are God's hands, the instruments by which the Universal Mind gets to manipulate the clay of physical reality, and to feel the sensory pleasure of incarnation.

So if this is indeed the case, I am achieving my purpose when I enjoy the warmth of the sun on my face. I am achieving my purpose when I wiggle my toes and feel them actually respond with movement. I am doing what I came to do when I savor the sharpness of the cool morning air entering my lungs while my skin is warm under layers of blankets.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that those things are really enough ... but other times, I wonder what else could possibly be more important.

thoughts on breaking up

I'm writing this mostly as a note to myself, because I want to document this feeling in an attempt to anchor it for future access. I have a tendency to forget important stuff like this.

Just like with most of my previous relationships, after many months of internal hemming and hawing and deliberation, one day I woke up crystal clear that it was time for us to go our separate ways.

When this first happened back in 1997 with the father of my children, the clarity did not come after months of hemming and hawing and deliberation. It came out of the friggin' blue, and it terrified me. I fought it tooth and nail. There was a lot of collateral damage caused by struggling with my own awareness and trying to get it to go away because it was gonna be very difficult to make the changes it was asking of me.

Thankfully, in my relationships since then I've had more warning. And maybe I've directed just a tad less effort into fighting my own clarity - but really, to be honest, not that much less. I still go down arguing with myself every time.

So there are two things I want to remember:

One, that there is no way for me to win a battle with that kind of inner clarity. I may as well forget about trying to supress or change the message. And if I choose fight it anyway, sooner or later I'll exhaust myself and finally accept it.

and Two, these things have a timing all their own, and action does not always necessarily follow immediately on the heels of awareness.

There's such a qualitative difference between that feeling of "should I/shouldn't I" and the YES, NOW when it finally comes. I wrote a note to my future self in my journal to remind her that if she's still deliberating, it's just not time for action yet for reasons she won't have access to. And that it's okay for her to just be honest with herself and her mate, and wait a while until the required action becomes clear as well.

When it IS time, there's no way to miss the signs. That nudge toward action is worth waiting for, because it makes all the icky stuff that comes after it so much easier to take when I'm not wracked with self-doubt.

I shed a lot of tears during the month it took for him to find a new place, many of them in his comforting arms, but they weren't the kind of tears that come from wondering if this is the right thing to do - they were just pure grieving. Pain without suffering. And in a way, they were sweet rather than painful. The day he left, the tears just stopped, and I found myself feeling cleansed and purified like the air after a thunderstorm.

All this to say - when the time is right, I will know it. And until then, all I can do is remain present with myself and the situation as it is.

A friend sent me the gift of profound inspiration in a link to Eckhart Tolle on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPg9DnMP2D4

Oh, yeah, there's one more thing: Three, I am much more resilient than I give myself credit for when I am anticipating a potentially painful situation! This could be the silver lining of having a terrible memory. I don't store past experiences very well, which means I don't have anything to compare the present moment to, and therefore I don't notice it lacking anything. That comes in real handy! When I was wrapped in his arms I would cry thinking I would miss that feeling forever. The first night I slept alone, I was blissfully comfortable under my new blanket and it felt perfect. Go figure.

I hope I never need to read these reminders to myself. I hope my next relationship lasts for the remainder of my lifetime. But, life being what it is, I thought I better take some notes, just in case ... :)

the eyes have it

I read an article recently about scientists hooking up a bunch of sensors to people's eyes and tracking exactly where we direct our gaze when we look in the mirror. Most of us tend to focus immediately and intently on the parts of our faces we perceive as flawed, and ignore the rest.

This was certainly not news to me --I do that all the time, and I know this because I always come away from a mirror feeling ugly and old. Lately I've been having the impulse to shrink my bathroom mirror to about a 6 inch square - just big enough to see if I have spinach in my teeth or not. There's nothing like a good break-up to bring out my latent self-confidence/unworthiness issues! You know ... the 'no one else will ever think I'm beautiful' schtick. It sounds so shallow, but what can I say? I'm a complex woman, and that's definitely one of the many voices in my head. Luckily, they aren't all so harsh.

So I guess it was somewhat comforting to hear that many other folks also have this painful habit of focusing exclusively on their flaws. And this morning, I found myself trying an experiment. Instead of staring intently at my laugh lines and trying to magically erase them by sheer force of will, I tried looking into my own eyes. It was a shockingly strange sensation - and the newness of it made me realize I've been ignoring parts of myself for a very long time. But I no longer felt like shrinking my mirror ... instead I felt tender compassion for my aging self. So I think maybe this experiment would be a good one to continue.