What if God were one of us?…when I anthropomorphize God- and do not pretend you don’t!- he is a big, clumsy galoot like me…just a slob like one of us…but I’ll bet he cries a days’ worth of nourishment over the rainforest in awe of a tiny blue beetle…I imagine he wonders for eternity over a drop of dew hanging from a delicate petal…and I’m certain he rejoices as a father watches the moment that the daughter he has always believed in meets her destiny…if there is anything I know of God, it is that he is incomprehensible in his faithful and infinite love…a stranger…just like one of us…just tryin’ to make his way home…
Yesterday I told my Dad that I have come to realize I am solar powered. He looked over at me quizzically, as you can imagine…but it’s true…I don’t seem to have any energy unless the sun is out! And here I live in the darkest corner of the United States. Literally, the northwest corner of the lower peninsula of Michigan has less sunny days than anywhere in the fifty states.
It has been a long winter. We have had record snowfalls, less sunshine even than normal. We are still experiencing record low temperatures for this time of year. It was in the teens last night, my sidewalk and street are covered in ice. My dear little corgis and I have really packed on the pounds this winter.
But it has been a long healing, this isolation…through the dormancy of my expectations, a new life is beginning to emerge. The preacher likes the cold…he knows I’m gonna stay…
Your inner wise self is SO in love with you…self love is not narcissism, it is self care. Why is it important? Because it is the only way to save the world…it is how miracles happen. Live juicy, because the opposite of young is not old, it is new…and I am new here.
Peter Diamondis, one of the greatest minds on the planet, speaks about the moment when the fall of the American Empire began- not long ago, perhaps a decade or so now,and HOW this occurred…when RISK AVERSION became the acceptable modus operandi…and he says it is killing us.
He then presents the model of a new paradigm which will transform life on the planet…and take us into The Age of Abundance. Do yourself a favor and watch his inspiring videos.
We all hide our genius, in so many ways…we are Will Hunting waiting for our ride to work, spending our days mopping the floors… it is time to leave the mop in the closet and solve the problem on the board when no one is watching…to step outside our limited thinking and IMAGINE, to be ARTISTS.
Years ago one of my favorite Interior Design authors, Alexandra Stoddard, used a phrase in one of her books which I will never forget: “the insidious, evil, creeping taupe…”
Alexandra won my heart early in her illustrious career by advocating for the riotous use of color even in defiance of the Taupe era…that dull “griege” movement that seems to have taken over the design world since the seventies, like an invasion of some alien virus that permeated the human psyche unnoticed and unchecked. Alexandra warned us, like the early warnings from environmental scientists of global warming…
You Laugh!!! You think I make funny, outrageous comparisons…and I do…I posit however, no more outrageous than ANY comparison between the inner and outer realms of man’s consciousness…the American mindset drifted off course and we became subject to the dysfunction of a society with no clear conscience…politically correct, dumbed down, made into a taupe-y mush…and hence, Clinton couldn’t inhale…but I digress…
We live racked with guilt. Whatever we do, we mustn’t offend…we go to the meeting because we should…we are nice to the ornery neighbors. We need to stand up to those who would wittingly sell us their malaise, their taupe…or, as another brilliant artist of my generation describes the problem: “Richard got married to a figure skater, and he bought her a dishwasher and a coffee percolator and he drinks at home now most nights with the TV on and all the house lights left up bright.”
How do we say yes powerfully if we don’t have the courage to say no? More importantly, how do we know we are acting out of guilt if we aren’t clear about what we really want? I question when we became so complacent, how the compromises overtook us little by little, crept into our consciousness like an alien virus…
And this relates to Interior Design HOW? Well, my influences all have a common criteria intricate to their design decisions: NATURE, the natural world. It’s integrity is built in, dependable. Where do you see TAUPE in nature? I have looked, and the answer is that you seldom find it…you see it best in the mourning dove. That’s spelled MOURNing…because taupe is just sad.
Be a good dreamer. Defend your sweet revolutionary soul. Stop the insidious habit of acting out of guilt, out of your codependent conditioning…and for God’s sake PAINT OVER THE TAUPE!
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!
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.
A Painterly Home 