Thank You Amanda Palmer; I love your sweet revolutionary heart…
And I couldn’t have said it better myself! This woman shaves off her eyebrows every morning and draws on new ones…she is never the same face two days in a row…she knows how to be new here!
Dedicated to an inspiring friend, Diane Hanselman
Yesterday I thought -again- about starting a new blog, because this one is clearly NOT going to be about interior design…at least not right now. Right now I am in the throes of healing, mentally and emotionally, as well as physically. Right now I am learning to walk again, metaphorically. Right now I am a child again, emotionally.
When I mentioned changing the name of my blog to something more along the lines of the content, my good friend Nadine said, “Maybe you could just do what is easy right now.” Wow! That’s a radical concept…and a recurring theme as I attend The Artist’s Way class I entered into seven weeks ago now. A recurring theme as I spend sleepless nights in pain, unable to get comfortable enough to sleep more than a few minutes at a time.
Maybe I could learn to be a little easier on myself…maybe I can stop making everything so darn hard all the time. In the middle of the night, awake on my back because my hips hurt too much to lay on either side, the voice that often whispers in my sleep said, “How can NOT SICK serve you better?”
Interestingly, this little voice always speaks in funny ways…It didn’t say “How can wellness serve you better?” That would have meant the same thing, but “the voice” doesn’t work that way- it says things in such a weird way as to get my attention…so that I have to think about it.
And so, I began to write my Morning Pages (a daily task in The Artist’s Way), determined to write until the pain and anxiety passed, which it did around 1535 words later! This stuff works. It’s that simple.
And here I write completely pain free and in the moment- in a state of complete peace, relaxation and so very in love with my life…and, no – I haven’t had any drugs!
From the state I sit in here, now, it is obvious that, as Lao Tze said, Easy is right, and Right is easy.
So maybe I’m crazy…but I’m goin’ with easy today. I’m going to be easy with myself, with my precious life. It’s no coincidence I’ve come and I can die when I’m done…Thank You for the reminder, Cee-Lo:
It woke me from a dead sleep…the screech of the wheels as the car came around the corner, headed straight for me…we lived on a curve, at the bottom of a hill, and it wasn’t unusual for cars to come too fast…I sat bolt up just in time for the red sedan to slow onto the lawn. The song was BLARING out the windows.
“How wonderful life is while you’re in the world…” was all I heard.
And having been shaken awake now the dream came back. My Mother was whispering in my ear…she was here, she still exists, she still loves me…Don’t go Mom…don’t leave me here alone…I don’t want to live in a world without you…
Months of grief had left me exhausted. I visited her in heaven, and I new it was real because it was vast beyond anything my conscious mind could possibly imagine. She had a desk there(!), and looked at me with immense patience while reminding me I couldn’t stay.
Was it a coincidence that the speeding car…a small red sedan just like the one she drove, came around the corner at that very second blaring that song? Or could it have been a well orchestrated plan?
You believe as you will, I will keep what I know. Yesterday I watched an interview with Pat Monahan telling about being incapacitated by grief after losing his mother, also to cancer. He couldn’t write, couldn’t perform, the band’s careers in limbo…and then she came to him, in the dream…”I’m still here. I still exist…live your life, I am watching…”
He woke with the melody and wrote down the words. He gave us this:
I am so worried. I am worried about my brother, I’m worried about my Dad. I’m worried about my son. I’m worried about my dogs, and I’m worried about me. My Dad and my brother aren’t talking to me. I wish they would talk to me and voice their worries. I wish my friend would have told me his worries, more importantly, I wish I could have voiced mine. I tried, but all he ever said was, “I can’t help you.”
“I can’t help you” is code for “I don’t want to hear about your worries, because then I will feel responsible for you.”
“I can’t help you” is a cop-out. It is a way to shut the other person up- and out, and it is a missed opportunity to shed some light through that crack of human flaw.
But guess what?! When we shut the other person out, we get their worries anyway. They come like a psychic e-mail delivered right into our brain. Then when we open our own worries, they get opened, too, just like the attachment that they are. And the virus is automatically downloaded before we knew it existed!
Wouldn’t it be so much easier to have said, “Tell me what you are worried about”? We don’t have to fix the problem. It doesn’t require taking responsibility for them. It just requires a willing listener. Let’s acknowledge them – not the worry- just them, and honor our human condition, wrought with problems and worries as it seems to be.
All spiritual teachings tell us that the answer lies in the question. When you are in the thick of your problems, this just isn’t helpful. Another way to see it, perhaps, is that every worry is an inside-out prayer.
So we help by listening to the inside-out prayer. We ask God, Holy Spirit, our higher mind, to turn the prayer right side out. And we don’t take responsibility for finding their answer upon ourselves. We just sit with it.
What I believe this does for me in my little pea brain, is to relinquish any GUILT that I might have harbored about not being able to fix it, and any time guilt is taken out of the equation a solution is close at hand.
The answers seem to emerge out of nowhere…which is why they are called miracles.
The irritation began with his qualifying me: “You don’t do that, do you?”…”because I could never be with someone who…” and he would fill in the objection of the week (dark painted toenails, too skinny, etc, etc…) Apparently I had just reminded him of something he did not like. My response was always the same, “I am not someone. I am me.”
He didn’t get it. So he’d have to find another way in, another way to trigger my insecurities…perhaps he could find me jealous…it would be really convenient if I could be jealous…that’s such a needy insecurity, and easy to trigger…
The recent ex lived nearby, and they shared custody of the dog. So when his family and I flew in from Michigan to visit, she naturally hoped to join the party. And I was fine with her being invited. But wait! She didn’t want to meet ME! Perhaps…if I could leave the party for an hour or so…
Well, I refused. Had I agreed to leave the party, I’d have walked to the corner Starbucks and called for a cab to the airport…”Well, I told her I’d ask…” was his explanation. That way, he didn’t have to take any responsibility for hurting anyone’s feelings.
I wasn’t about to let him off that hook. What was I doing with someone so emotionally immature, anyway? I just excused it…and did what any loving Mother would do with her beloved child: I held my own healthy space, and let him feel uncomfortable at not finding a solution equally suitable for all. I figured the awareness would benefit us both in the future.
But the awareness didn’t happen! A few months later he planned a necessary trip to England, and a side trip to Spain. He would stay with an old girlfriend in Madrid. “Does that bother you?” he asked. “No.” “May I ask why it doesn’t bother you?” Apparently it bothered him that it did not bother me.
I don’t get jealousy, I admit it. I never have. If HE chooses HER, how does that diminish ME? That’s an adolescent set-up if I ever saw one.
We are all so insecure, for so many convoluted reasons. I wish we could all just be honest about that instead of defensive. The world is so scary, life is so scary…I wish we could all learn how to be scared together.
Well, life here in la-la land has become increasingly painful. Apparently I have overstayed my welcome! This light dawns upon an interesting compilation of events, not the least of which is Hillary Clinton’s testimony this morning in the Senate.
Wow! This woman is smart AND present. IF Hillary ever spent any time at all in la-la land, it obviously didn’t hold her interest. Yes, she stayed with an ass of a husband. But I maintain that she always knew his weaknesses, yet consciously decided that their marriage served her life goals better than any other position could have.
Illustrating the opposite stance, I scrambled to dig myself a new head hole whenever I was being pulled out into the light of day. Just over a year ago now, I divorced my neglectful husband…but not before giving it seventeen years of thoughtful consideration. I quickly immersed myself in yet another highly dysfunctional relationship with a man who lives almost a thousand miles away. We hashed out our petty defenses via email and phone until I’d had enough of trying to prove my worth there.
Daily I continue to live with and support my father, who still treats me like an adolescent and berates me for not following his sage example. But my brother lives here in my home, too, also free of charge! He came to stay for a few months after his home was foreclosed upon four YEARS ago. He contributes nothing at all financially. So my father and I argue over who will pay the utilities. Actually, we don’t argue. He agrees to split them, and then he doesn’t pay his share and I catch them when they become overdue. And yes, I make the house payment. And yes, his income is three times mine…I could go on…
It just sounds like I’m trying to prove my stupidity. In truth, I have given my husband, brother, father and boyfriend numerous opportunities as well as ultimatums. I have set deadlines that have come and gone. Blahblahblah…guess whose problem it is?! That’s right -only mine!
When MIGHT I wake up???!!! Being entirely fed up and facing my last resort option of moving my dying father into assisted living and taking legal action to evict my brother, I picked up a book my friend Jane lent me last week: Love First. It is about how to do an intervention with an alcoholic or drug addict. While I am not dealing directly with substance abuse here, it was nevertheless very enlightening. There is a little checklist for the reader, a quiz so to speak, to assess the level of your co-dependent behaviors. Well, I’m not just an enabler, I am a “desperate enabler”…
Desperate, indeed…I think it may be time for me to TRULY re-invent myself, from the inside out. It is time, once and for all, to be the leading lady in my own life…so long la-la land…
An extra post today, for my friend Nadine who says I have a musical heart. Sometimes, like just yesterday in fact, she has to help me find my way back to my truth….and I am so grateful.
Over a year ago now I had started a blog on another site, but didn’t maintain it long. I couldn’t get it to work because of my technical ineptness. For the same reason, I ask you to bear with me here as I learn this process. I tell you this today because I am not sure that the old blog, called Broad In Daylight, wasn’t a more suitable name for my expression.
A friend mentioned yesterday that this blog doesn’t really seem to “go with it’s name”, and that’s probably true, so far anyway. He also said “I wish you’d just write like you talk to me”, and I considered that to be very sound advise.
One of my goals with this journal is to show you around some of the homes and studios of the many local artists I am privileged to know here in northern Michigan. I have been an accidental artist all my life. I say accidental because I began to draw and paint as a very young child. I don’t know how I got started or what kept me interested, but it had the fringe benefit of meeting other artists who were my early teachers.
I often found myself enchanted when I entered their environments. Artists have the most soulful homes. They aren’t “decorated”, and seldom even neat, but they sure are interesting. Nothing could better illustrate a living environment as a PERSONAL expression than the home of an artist.
There is an old adage that says “You cannot work at home, only live at work.” Artists live at work. Any artist will tell you that there is no separation between themselves and their work, or as one friend also says, “Artists live out loud.” This is what I mean by calling myself a broad in daylight…I live out loud. Any one who knows me knows that my life is an open book, that there seems to be no filter between brain and mouth, and that you always know where you stand with me. Years ago a therapist said to me “Learning to live in the moment will never be your problem!”… I don’t think she meant it as a complement, but…
As I am running out of type-able space on this page (talk about metaphors!) let me invite you to return and join me on this exploration. Again, it promises to be colorful in every sense of the word.
“When I came to understand that there are mythic patterns in all our lives, I knew we were all living a life we were told was reserved for gods, heroes and saints…” – Deena Metzger, Miracle at Canyon de Chelly
Within my mind and physiology lie mine fields and booby-traps too many to pass through with any hope of coming out whole. Every self-doubt, every ache or pain that beckons me back to bed mid-day, failures too many to list…where will this get me?
So pervasive, so insidious these habits; who am I to hope for anything…let alone for true love…
for abounding health…
for prosperity…
who am I indeed? And the spiritual battle ensues…
It isn’t that I’m unpracticed at spiritual battle. Quite the opposite is true, actually. I’m very good at it, better in fact for others than myself (aren’t we all?!) Having been a spiritual warrior all my life, even while too young to have any cognitive understanding of it, I learned to conquer demons daily. My life has been a dichotomy described only as “blessed turmoil”.
Lest you think I over dramatize let me give a brief background. I am the eldest of five children of cross-addicted parents. We come from multi-generations of substance abuse and the physical, sexual and psychological ravages that ride that monkeys’ back.
Yet somehow I have never had a substance abuse problem, do not now drink or take drugs or smoke. I tried them all at a young age and knew right away that I was not interested. The extent of any mental illness I have inherited seems to manifest as the habits I cited in the opening paragraph; self-doubt, self-recrimination. It seems my conscience is intact.
This can be no accident, my strength. This came built-in. But I have had to fight for it every day of my life, AS WE ALL DO. And because it happens that I have always drawn and painted and re-arranged and decorated since a young child (and that creative urge ALSO came built-in) – and because I see metaphor in all I do – I now see the mine fields and the booby-traps as doorways. Within my mind and body they provide both protection and obstacle at once.
Lord, I ask that all the doorways I encounter remain unlocked and open. 
Let my path to freedom remain unhindered by doubt and fear.
As I move toward freedom, let every doorway I approach be used FOR DECORATIVE PURPOSES ONLY. Amen.
The practice of being present is called into this new year. It is far and away the most difficult thing I have ever needed to learn…but it requires only that you give up thinking that you know anything. The Kingdom of Heaven is all that is at stake here. Only your health, your sanity…your life.
The past few months have been an ongoing near death experience! And I die hard…now life requires that I PARTICIPATE. The word, the concept haunts every meditation, every train of thought.
I don’t profess to comprehend what it means, but I’ve decided to give myself the year to explore it…and every day I seem to stumble deeper into the remote jungle of my mind, through the grueling pain of dis-ease and self doubt.
It feels like I am fighting my way through the overgrown landscape with only naught but a feather…only a virtual machete…and the progress is S L O W goin’…
There is no time to revisit the past… I need to participate, to show up to my day and what is presented…to begin anew this moment..
and this moment…
Beginning to write here is one form of my participation. My life has become too small and isolated, and this calls me out.
Getting my house in order – literally!- is another. As I said recently, I want to immerse myself in GREEN…I want to paint the house green, The Rules of Staging be damned. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Pantone chose Emerald as the Color of the Year. I think I will participate in Emerald.
As silly as this may sound, the idea of participating in life and immersing myself in green makes perfect sense. Green symbolizes life. In many Asian cultures it is believed to bring healing.
This is certainly a time for healing, for myself, and hopefully for my human community. Please join me in Bringing Forth the Emerald this year. You will be hearing from me…
A Painterly Home 