“I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell!” – Emily Dickinson
Apr20
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Mar16
…don’t jinx it.
Hahahahaaaa…it’s so true. Here in NW lower Michigan we only have 2 seasons: winter and July. But I know it is spring because of the light. Ah, the light. I do not mind snow; it’s beautiful. The cold is refreshing. But the dark wears me down. The relentless weeks on end of short dark days with tiny, fleeting moments of sun feels oppressive. Well, it is oppressive. And I deteriorate. I do my best to nurture my energy, but it dissipates quickly. And so by March I am weaker and meeker. And then the light returns…the days brighten and lengthen, as does my stamina – both physical and mental.
So flying west and driving east came at exactly the right time. As was spending time with a dear friend on that trip. It was very healing. My cat sure was mad at me, but he is considering forgiveness. He was well cared for and loved. Because I am old enough to know that anything can happen, I updated clear arrangements for he and my son in the event of my untimely death. That feels very freeing, and I recommend you do the same to the best of your ability. If at all possible, don’t leave that kind of crisis for your loved ones to deal with if you can help it.
Of course, I had no intention of dying. I’m not done here. In many ways, I feel like I’m just getting started at 71. I’m fortunate not to have any major health issues, and I wouldn’t trade my expensive education in the school of life. I wouldn’t go back for anything. Only forward. I was this many years old before I truly began to appreciate what a magnificent privilege this life has been, and is becoming. I am becoming.
Jan26
gnome sane?
Laura Linney won a Golden Globe for her role in The Big C. I was thinking about it the other day; wondering why was it was one of my favorite series? She kinda – okay totally – goes a bit bonkers. Wouldn’t we all in her situation? But that’s why the character was so inspiring. She’s so real…so present. So insane. I am reminded of a favorite quote from Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way – “going sane feels like going insane first.”
I want to go sane, preferably without the dying part. I’ve gone sane in the past. It’s not usually fun. In fact, it’s messy and painful and people hate you. Just FYI. For me, it means I’ve reached the end of my rope. I’ve been trying to address something, make changes in my life, and nothing is working. But something irreplaceable and priceless comes out of it: CLARITY.
Do we have to go insane to gain clarity? Good question, to which I do not presently have an answer. Since I am currently practicing what I have so long been preaching, I am relishing every moment as perfect. I am right where I need to be doing exactly what I am meant to be doing.
Several times in the past few weeks I have said (including to my doctor) that “there is nothing wrong with me that 3 consecutive days of sunny, 40 degree weather wouldn’t cure!” I stand by it.
Meanwhile, since that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, I shall endure. Some days more cheerfully than others. Gnome sane? Because I really do know, deep down inside, that this is all sacred.
Apr7
How to Be A Unicorn
Are you a recovering people pleaser? I know I am. It’s not pretty. Let’s just say that self care was never a priority and boundaries were barely even in my wheelhouse. O-blivious. I’ve often joked that I’m Rita Van Winkle, the great granddaughter of Rip, and we fall asleep for 20 year increments in our lineage. But it really isn’t funny.
So, I was this many years old when I learned that sociologists refer to self-aware people as unicorns. Because, rare. Did you know this?!
Now the pendulum seems to have swung to the opposite extreme and I’m an “introspector.” I’ve established and continue to renew my commitment to self development. I want to become a unicorn. I’m just smart enough to know that I don’t know how to do that. It’s an experiment. The stumbling block for me, where my defensiveness fails to serve me, is that I don’t give a flip what others think of me. With the exception of a few people I’m close to and respect enormously, nope. Not interested. You have to be equally committed to your own self development or stop wasting my time.
But I do know one thing for sure: ain’t no way out but through. And so we might as well get to it, shall we?
Mar12
there are things to realize…
We sprung forward. This time change is throwing me for a loop. Nobody I talk to, and I mean, nobody, likes daylight savings time. The older I get the harder it is to adjust. Every year we see countless articles about legislature doing away with this outdated practice – but some negligible little fly gets into the ointment. Last year I read they woulda, but they ran out of time…hahahaaaaa. True story. The Michigan house passed the bill but the senate adjourned before they got to it…or the other way around…At this point I cannot believe this is by accident. C’mon now. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but am I the only one who suspects that government is just trying to keep us tired?!
How can rest become an intentional practice for resistance? In my personal existence I have used napping as a form of escape all my life. Chaos could be momentarily quelled if I physically removed myself from the fray and went to bed. Long ago I coined the phrase ‘napitate’ – I’d start out meditating and if it went well, I’d end up napping. And by “went well” I mean nobody interrupted me. Good luck with that, mother wife manager cook nurse woman…
All this week I am referring to Tricia Hersey’s groundbreaking work, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. We are not using time correctly in our culture. We are using it as part of an oppressive strategy to keep the population in poverty. Time and poverty go hand in hand. Lack is lack; you do the math.
I once quit a cushy job because I could no longer tolerate listening to the same, repetitive conversation day in and day out and day in and day out – wealthy, privileged clients and staff complaining ad nauseam about the lack of help. “Nobody wants to work anymore.” “The younger generation has no work ethic.” Under my breath I’d whisper, “I have a solution. I can solve this dilemma for you in two words: LIVING WAGE.”
Guess what?! The younger people are on to this game, this agenda of little money for lotsa time. Of going home at the end of a long shift on their feet to a household of hungry family, of being constantly in a state of exhaustion. Whatever your opinion is, this fact is true: THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE. Now we are experiencing the pain of transformation, but transform we must. The minions are fucking tired.
“The more I sleep, the more I wake up,” Hersey says. And she’s right. How on earth can anyone dream when they’re sucked empty? Einstein is credited with saying, “Imagination is the language of the divine.” How do we support a culture of geniuses and imagine our way out of poverty if we can’t REST? How do we develop a vocabulary for this?
Feb11
Sunday Skool
Dec13
“Did You Feel That?”
Sophie Wilson gets it. She gets that a home is love. “I would leave this house for love, but nothing else,” she shares.
What is a safe space worth? There are holes in the walls and ceiling here. But it’s not about how it looks, it’s how it feels…they are part of the “noise the walls have absorbed;” the house has “soaked us up.” Does a house have a soul? Does it have a presence, a spirit? Is it a living thing? I believe it is.
Experience tells me that the energy of a space can – and often does – change. That the energy of a space has a profound affect on us; that we in turn effect that energy. Now we know there is science to back this up, but I’ve known it on an intuitive level since I was a child. So have you. There is a symbiosis that happens with an interior space just as with nature when we are outdoors. Isn’t that a living exchange?
My best friend’s family, the Owens, moved from the Detroit suburbs to South Carolina when we were starting high school. They took me with them. We beat the moving van by a couple of days and holed up in a hotel near the new house. The year was 1970 – I only know that because we bored teenage girls walked across the street to a movie theater and lied about our age to see the latest release: Five Easy Pieces.
While I was away my Mom redecorated my bedroom as a surprise. Doris was the unsung predecessor of the Martha…she knocked down walls and wallpapered and changed light fixtures on a weekly basis, like you and I go to the grocery store. Long before YouTube tutorials or even big box stores she strategically planned her bigger projects ahead in secret. You never knew what you might come home from school to find.
Our 1926 Cape Cod home had been built by an architect as three one-level flats to house three generations of his family, but my parents needed every square foot for the seven of us. And they bought it furnished. My room, with dormer windows on three sides, had been the elderly Mrs. Bertrand’s bedroom. It was papered in large cabbage roses. The bed, marble-topped dresser and vanity were heavy carved cherry. Everything had a rosy glow. It was decidedly old-fashioned. And my Mom thought that I needed something more modern. When I came home the wallpaper was gone. The luscious worn velvet quilt had been thrown out. The vanity bench needlepoint gone, replaced with a modern flame stitch.
I was devastated. But I never let my Mom know that. I pretended to be thrilled. She had the best of intentions and had worked so hard to complete the makeover in a matter of days. I guess even then I loved old things…
Aug23
The Power of Not Knowing, or, how to Navigate the World with a Sense of Humor
Artist, author and American icon Maira Kalman says “I love my empty mind.” Meditate, let go, empty, repeat. Michael Strang writes about this practice in The Surrender Experiment. It’s a way of life that requires courage. It’s The Artist’s Way.
In the movie Trouble with the Curve baseball scout Gus Noble is losing his sight. But he can recognize great talent by hearing “the pure sound.” I’m not much for sports movies of any kind, but I loved this one and Million Dollar Arm. They’re as much about life as baseball.
Nov14
‘Til There Was You…
Another of Doris the Resourceress’ favorites that she used to sing to me as a child…in case you didn’t know how lucky I truly am…
“You may be wealthy with treasures untold, chests full of jewels and coffers of gold, but richer than I you could never be – I had a Mother who read to me.” -author unknown
She sang to me, too…I never appreciated her enough…
Nov6
Drop the Act, or…Against All Odds, Honey, We’re the Big Door Prize
Remember when you were a little kid and you threw a temper tantrum in an attempt to get your own way? Why, your very survival depended on you convincing the adults to see things from your point of view…smarter parents smiled compassionately and responded, “Drop the act.”
Congratulations on your successful acting debut…but sadly, over time, you convinced yourself your act was real.
It’s now five-thirty in the morning, which last week would have been six-thirty. The only reason that fact has any significance at all, is because last week I would have been so glad to have slept this LATE. Maybe I did get a decent nights sleep after all…
I woke worried about my brother. Yesterday my sister told me that he is about to become homeless again; he called her to ask if she could take his old dog for awhile. As it happens, he had left me two voice mail messages, but I haven’t listened to them yet. John leaves me messages all the time. He just says “I love you. Peace be with you.”
I am the eldest of five children, and for a few months yet, we are all in our fifties. How we lived this long is nothing short of a miracle. Our household was so dysfunctional, it would make The Prince of Tides look like a Disney fantasy. My first inclination was to call my brother immediately and tell him he could come here. My home is about to sell, and I don’t know where I will be living a couple of months from now…and never mind that it has taken me the last three years to extricate myself from the abusive clingings of other family addicts.
Like my four siblings, John has overcome alcohol and drug abuse. He’s even managed to quit smoking – several times. He works hard everyday. He drives truck and delivers concrete, and although he makes a decent wage, he can’t pay his rent and utilities. He is addicted to Maria and her young children from a former marriage, and Maria is addicted to prescription medication for her chronic pain. And when he gives her the money to pay the bills because he is working six days a week, she spends it and forgets to pay the rent. They have lived without electricity for months now, but winter is about to set in.
I woke hearing myself talking to my darling brother, such a good-hearted man. “Your emotional attachments will keep you living in hell. They don’t exist in the Kingdom of Heaven. God has no use for your emotions, and is not interested in reconciling them. Neither is God interested in healing your physical pain, or in saving your life as it exists here now.”
“God does not care what you are thinking. You have been brainwashed into believing that your thoughts represent you, and nothing could be further from the truth. Thought does not exist in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
There is only one mind, one consciousness. I use the term the Kingdom of Heaven, but it means enlightenment, freedom, PEACE. God, as consciousness, is waiting to welcome us into this state of complete freedom from our physical pain and mental turmoil and emotional upheaval, to will us the Kingdom. We squander our inheritance when we cry and plead for our way, for God to fix our circumstances, to help us feel better, to help us continue to exist, and to dysfunction ourselves. Our adoring “father in heaven” smiles compassionately and says, “Drop the act.”
What does this mean in our everyday struggle? It means specifically that we must overcome our addiction to BELIEVING that anything we think or feel could possibly lead us toward enlightenment. Will I still ache with arthritis? Yep. Will I still get angry when you wrong me? Sure – to the degree I am invested in the belief that I can be wronged. Some days I’ll let it go sooner than others. I’m living one day at a time, and to the best of my ability, I’m gonna drop the act.
Withdraw your attention from your thoughts and emotions, and do not participate in any decision or behavior that you think is going to make you feel better or because you should or because anyone thinks you should. Now that’s easy for me to say, I realize…I am just learning myself. But I know we must stop trying to figure it out. Just stop, dead in your tracks, and listen for that still, quiet whispered prompting from your SOUL…from love. Not need. Don’t listen to need. Tell need to move to the back of the bus, “Get thee behind me.” It will lead you astray every time.
It will appear to most that you have lost your mind (oh, we can only hope!) and become lazy, uncaring…and when some person says to you – and they will – “God helps those who help themselves,” laugh and walk away. God isn’t interested in our petty preferences. He is completely invested in our freedom.
Learn to trust your inner voice, your truth, by giving it a chance. Stop trying to get your little way in the world. You have outgrown this behavior. Drop the act.
I love you, John. Peace be with you.
A Painterly Home 