Restructuring...

We live in a backwards reality.  We eat crap that makes us sick.  In order to feel better, we take medicine.  We eat crap that makes us fat.  In order to lose weight, we take weight loss pills.  We eat crap that makes us tired.  In order to stay awake, we drink Red Bull.

We live in a cyclical reality.  We get a job we don't like so we can have more stuff.  The more stuff makes more bills.  In order to pay the bills, we get stuck working the job we hate. 

We live in a censored reality.  A stomach ache appears, we take a pill.  We are bored, we watch tv.  We feel sad, we buy something.  The moment we have a problem, we rush to find a solution.  We are completely detached from our own internal cues.

This is why I love President Obama.  He doesn't try to solve problems by piling on band-aids that only serve to create new problems.  He goes to the absolute base of the issue and attacks it from there.  If eating crap causes us to feel sick, get fat, and be tired, maybe instead of adding more chemicals, we should stop eating crap.  Instead of working a miserable job to afford stuff that can't even come close to providing us with the sense of fulfillment we are truly looking for, why not quit and give up some of the stuff?  Instead of rushing to solve a problem, perhaps we could listen to our internal voice and what it is trying to tell us.

At least this is what I am currently battling with in my life- cutting it down to the core and rebuilding from there.  But I think it's going to be really hard living where I do with all of the temptation that surrounds me.  It's so easy to take the quick fix, to revolve your life around the title that comes after your name rather than the name before it, to patch up problems and just hope that the dam won't break.  But it takes much more character to be still and listen to what you are telling yourself you really need.  And, in the long run, it provides much more peace.

 Sometimes this is what my decisions make me feel like.

Taking the good with the pee...

What do you do when you hate somebody?  Byron Katie says, ask yourself whose business you're in.  Pretty much every time, it's not yours.  My checkpoint says, does this hate, this thought, own you or you it?  Most definitely I am the one being possessed here.  Eckhart Tolle might say, let go of your ego.  For it is exactly the part that is telling me my hatred is justified.  But what do you do when these realizations are not enough to quell the anger?

Well, I turn to another one of the greats.  Though lesser-known and unpublished (in words at least), his sage advice calms my spirit every time.  "It's like with Bellamy (my dog)", he says.  "There is no point in yelling at him for peeing on the floor.  It's what he does.  He's a dog.  So, you just take him as he is, good parts and bad."  Ahh...  I didn't realize it at the time, but I married quite a guru.

Establishing checkpoints...

Well, it's official.  I put in my two weeks notice at my hotel job.  Although it is only a second job and I took it under the assumption that I would only keep it for a few months, here I am more than two years later finally leaving, and terrified.  I've wanted to for so long, not just so I could have an actual weekend like everybody else, but so that I would have more time to focus on my writing and photography.  The scary thing is we are not exactly in a financially secure place right now.  But, that aside, I have to trust my gut.  And my gut says it's time to go.  I went back and forth about whether to take the plunge- what about money, what about my mental health, what will this do to my team, what will my parents say, etc. etc.  The deciding factor came down to fear.  Why, with all positives considered, did I not want to leave?  Plain old fear of change.

I am reading a great story right now called Same Kind of Different As Me, and there is a line in it that adopted me the moment I heard it.   A homeless man and his wealthy friend are having coffee, when the homeless man looks down at the other's keyring and asks if his friend owns something that each of the eleven or so keys open.  The man replies that he does, though he'd never thought about it before.  Then, the homeless man asks, "Are you sure you own them, or do they own you?"  And, scene.  That was it for me.  This line has now become my checkpoint.  When I asked myself, do I own this job or does this job own me, the latter most definitely lit up like neon.  It was clear what I needed to do.

I can apply this line to everything in my life- relationships, jobs, possessions, thoughts.  It's my new shortcut to weeding out the negatives in my life.  And, I will ask myself this question several times a day, if necessary, just to be sure that my answer is clear on the one question that is most important of all- do I own my life, or does my life own me?

 Chris in motion.  Talking about owning your life would not feel complete until I mention my heroes- my friends (one pictured above) who do what they love, putting their all into every moment.  They just had a baby, which they have not posed as an excuse to stop doing what they love or to stay in one place.  They travel the world spreading passion for the arts and for life.  What better environment could a baby be raised in?

Insighting myself...

So today marks my actual one year blogging anniversary.  This is a big deal to me.  I began with the goal of posting once a day for the entire year.  But falling short this time did not feel like failure as much as it did triumph.  I have learned a lot this past year.  Though I began the blog as a way to encourage my photography, it quickly shifted to a focus on writing, and then to life management.  I think the most important lesson I came to through this year of blogging was that I am the only expert on dewin's life.  My childhood years were spent lost somewhere between wonder and reality.  My adolescent years were spent trying to get a grip on reality by looking to others to show me the way.  This year has marked a new era of looking inside myself for direction, for a balance between wonder and reality.  I have become a keen observer of my own inner workings, specifically the signals that I emit as an SOS when I am off balance.  And, I am slowly learning the different methods of triage that seem to work best.  I am sure this will be a life-long process.  I sometimes feel like every day now I am seeing the world from a new space.  It's so exciting it makes me wonder where I will see the world in five years from now, ten, or even twenty, if I am so lucky as to still inhabit it.  I want the world to change me as much as I want to change the world.  If those two things occur, then it's a good life.

The other night my husband and I watched one of my favorite movies, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.  I think it is a great metaphor for life, including its tagline- You have to believe it to see it.

Throwing in the cape...

Today marks the first day I took off my Super Woman cape and chucked it.  I've always hated that vision of the American woman doing it all, being everyone's rock, and tackling a man's world.  It's enough to make me gag.  But I realized today that I have been living it.  Not in that I'm this wonderful, tough, hard-working, ladder-climbing person.  I'm not.  I resembled the super hero in a more minute, detailed kind of way.   In other words, I am always trying to make everyone else happy.  And, today, working alone at a front desk with chaos zooming around me at 100 miles a minute, I lost it.  I lost my focus, my cool, and I lost my cape.  I suddenly understood how everyone else deals with this garbage.

Out of everyone who works the desk, I am the wussiest.  When things get hectic or guests gets rude, I am the one who freaks out.  Not in front of the guest, but inside.  I get angry.  I get flustered.  I want to be able to help everyone, while, at the same time, I hate everyone for intruding on my time and stress level.  I want to yell at them, "don't you see I am busy here?"  I guess sometimes things have to be at their worst before the lesson finally sinks in.  It was the moment when I had about 8 people at the desk waiting for 10 minutes to be helped, a guy I was currently helping who had a billing error which takes forever to figure out, one guy on the phone holding for an early check-in when we had no rooms available and he'd already called 5 times, and another lady on the phone playing 20 questions.  It was similar to one of those moments in the movies when the character is so overwhelmed that time stops, she looks around, realizes she is completely out of control, and says to herself, "fuck it".  I can only do what I can do, and if someone has a problem with waiting for 30 minutes at the desk, well that's just too bad.  Perhaps this is a new pattern for me, as this last line reminds me of my Billy Ray comment from the other night. 

Anyway, I think I made someone mad at me today.  Normally that would eat me up inside, but today, I just thought, "Oh well".  I was stressing out running late for my niece's dance recital after work, but I just thought, "I'll make it when I make it".  I was worried about spending money on a fancy dinner afterward, but I just thought, "Money comes, money goes".  And the world did not end.  I can only be what I can be, above that, I have no consolation.

The ballerina.  I can't believe it's been a year almost since I began this blog.  I remember blogging about her recital last year.  That was my first week of blogging.  It's cool to look back and see how the act of this near-daily writing has affected me.  It's really been a friend and an enemy, a way to break myself down and pick apart the pieces.  The greatest part, though, is that it has truly thrown my own talent in my face.    

Putting my mind in time out...

In the beginning, you only needed 
your head, a moon swimming in space, 
and four bare branches; 
and when your body was added, 
it was light and thin at first, 
not yet the dark chapel 
from which, later, you tried to escape.  
You lived in a non-Newtonian world, 
your arms grew up from your shoulders, 
your feet did not touch the ground, 
your hair was streaming, 
you were still flying.

Lisel Mueller


Tonight I watched The Banger Sisters.  It was supposed to be background noise to my many chores but instead it reached in and twisted my insides.  It's your typical predictable, good-hearted comedy that pairs one free-spirit with one, actually 5, uptight suburbanites and an OCD writer, culminating with everyone being a better person.  But myself being a person who can derive meaning from a pickle, it said something to me, specifically Geoffrey Rush's character of the writer.  It brought me back to a space within myself that has been compressed to the point of near invisibility.  I revisited it in my car yesterday when I was blasting No One Else on Earth and belting it all down the road.  Usually I'm at one with it as the wind rushes past me on my bike.  Other than that, that particular sense of freedom eludes me.  I am almost never without my sidekick, Mr. Should.  Should I be blasting my music?  9 times out of 9 the answer is no.  The people around me might get mad, or a baby might be sleeping in the car next to me.  Should I be riding my bike?  No, I should be reading, or writing, or cleaning, or doing emails.  I never noticed until tonight the extreme extent to which this word is infused into my every thought and tied to my every action.  It's disgusting.

I had planned to come home and write all night.  But for whatever reason I decided to start inputting all my old cds into my itunes.  That is what I wanted to do.  And, for a moment there I flashed back to what it felt like to be a second-grade teacher of a class full of unruly children.  You're trying to work on something, as one kid is yelling, "Teacher, she's doing something she's not supposed to" and another is screaming, "Teacher, she's not following the rules".  Meanwhile, two others are over there arguing and calling each other names.  "Stupid!"  "Lazy!"  I finally had to pipe up and scream, "Enough already!"  If I want to input music, that's what I'm damn well gonna do!  And then I put all the voices in my head in time out. 

So now my goal is to do whatever it is I want to do.  If that's write, then I'll write.  If it's not, I am no longer allowed to beat myself up about it.  If I want to clean, I'll clean.  But if not, I will learn to live with the mess.  If I want to blast old country songs while sitting in traffic, then that is what I'm going to do and the people around me will just have to learn to love Billy Ray Cyrus too.

Longing for today...

I was cruising today while jamming to Jessie's Girl, and I noted that while simple drum beats are one of my favorite things in the world, the best beat is the one that holds a note or two.  It's the anticipation of the drop beat that gets me charged up.  It reminded me of all the things in my life I am waiting for the drop beat on.  When I will be able to quit my second job.  When we will have more money.  When I will have kids.  When we will move to the country.  When I will get published.  Continually waiting for the drop on these aspects of my life feels a bit less exciting.

When I was in Pompano last weekend, I felt at home in a way though I'd never been to those parts before, because everywhere I looked I saw 1950s architecture and signage.  It was great.  The wonderful thing about it is that each building was its own piece of art back then.  I love the colors and the designs.  Driving down the road felt as though I were walking through a museum admiring the paintings along each side of me.  I also fell in love with the radio stations there as there was one that was having an 80s flashback weekend and played songs I hadn't heard since I was 8.  Ones I had totally forgotten about.  I started to wish that things were the same as back then, that time when architecture was about art not lavishness, when music was about the feeling, not sex.

It suddenly hit me that people in the 80s must've wished it was still like the 50s, and people in the 50s probably wished it was still like the 30s.   And, it is a likely possibility that people in the 2030s will look back with fondness on the 2010s.  They will long for the purity of Lady Gaga and strip malls.  That sentence was painful to type.  But, it's true.

There's this country song by Trace Atkins that I heard randomly one day a few years back and it struck me immediately and broke me apart until I was crying as I rode down Atlantic wondering why.

Before she knows it she's a brand new bride
In a one-bedroom apartment, and her daddy stops by
He tells her it's a nice place
She says it'll do for now
Starts talking about babies and buying a house
Daddy shakes his head and says, Baby, just slow down

You're gonna miss this
You're gonna want this back
You're gonna wish these days hadn't gone by so fast

Five years later there's a plumber workin' on the water heater
Dog's barkin', phone's ringin'
One kid's cryin', one kid's screamin'
She keeps apologizin'
He says, They don't bother me.
I've got 2 babies of my own.
One's 36, one's 23.
It's hard to believe, but ...

You're gonna miss this
You're gonna want this back
You're gonna wish these days hadn't gone by so fast
These are some good times
So take a good look around
You may not know it now
But you're gonna miss this

What am I losing by longing for the past?  Soon I'll be longing for today.  May as well be now.

50s architecture.  See what I mean?  It just gives me chills.

Being bored...

Now that I have completed my photography submission and partied with Hall n Oates, it is time to put the writing hat back on.  So far, so awesome.  I sat down tonight to work on a guest blog entry for a writer friend I met at the retreat in Colorado, and thanks to Debbie Gibson I came up with some great stuff.  I usually don't like to listen to music when I write; I need complete silence in order for my neurons to locate each other in the darkness of my mind.  But tonight I just felt like listening to cheesy old school pop, so I put on an old Debbie album.  The cool thing I found is that maybe sometimes it's a good thing not to have your synapses firing.  With the music playing, I couldn't sit and contemplate any one thought too deeply, so instead I just started writing random things that popped into my head, no matter how unrelated they seemed.  And, lo and behold, I found once more that I am my greatest mentor.

When I decided I wanted to start writing again a couple of years ago, I had in mind a book on creating a creative foundation for your children.  My favorite, and the central, point of the book is my belief that boredom is the father of creation.  As I was writing this evening, this line kept echoing in my head for some reason.  Boredom is the father of creation.  I had had this in mind as related to childrearing.  I believe children today are offered too many "interactive" toys that require little to no imagination because they do everything for themselves- dolls that wet themselves, trucks that make their own noises, building toys that can only be connected to make one sole outcome.  Tonight I realized that this principle applies as much to adults as to children.  Of course I am not getting writing done.  I am not bored.  I am constantly finding things to occupy myself- work, emails, cleaning, worrying.  Things that would not make the world stop on its axis if they were to be completed a day-or a week- later.

As adults we are rarely bored.  We are too busy.  That's an endless expanse of creativity that is not being honored.  I have learned in the last year of doing this blog (it will be a year next week!) how to integrate thought into my busy lifestyle.  Now my challenge is to integrate writing.  I need boredom.  I need to sit around the house and do nothing.  This, though seemingly lazy and unproductive, is where ideas are born.  When my mind and heart are not consumed with busy work, they will focus on the necessary.  They will focus on creating.  I think we could all benefit from a little boredom now and then.  This is why I miss front porches; this is why I love the scene in The Man in the Moon where she stares into her empty glass; this is why I miss the "old days".  We were less distracted by the trivial, and so more focused on the essential.  Ironic how my writing reemerged from my desire to get off the couch and has now led me right back to the couch.  (That qualifies as irony, right Chris?!)          

Some more of our friends from Butterfly World!