vim and vigor

A letter to my new business (aka me)

Dear new business,

I know you feel like you’re having a rough time these past couple months. Things seem really swell, and you’re up up up, until suddenly a needle appears, and bursts your little bubble, and crash! Back down to earth again.

Or lower.

Because after the impact—smack!—you realize that while things were feeling so wonderfully amazing and fresh and new, that was probably because you were selectively forgetting about less happy-fun things that “have” to get done.

It’s like hitting the ground all over again. Smack! Smack! Ow!

I know that when this happens—and it’s happened several times—you feel guilty as well as deluded. You end up wondering if the happy stuff can only ever come out of denial.

New Business, I want to tell you something important: Change can be really hard.

I know you’ve experienced a couple of overnight life-changing epiphanies, which seemed effortless at the time, and were just totally awesome.

But that’s not usually how things work. And those lucky, beautiful, awesome breaks have made it unfairly difficult for all the ordinary, long-term slugging-it-out change that has to happen most of the time.

With ordinary, long-term, slugging-it-out change, sometimes there are “casualties.” Sometimes things don’t get done. Sometimes people don’t like you any more. That sucks, but not changing sucks more.

And I think that sometimes you forget that those beautiful overnight changes came from years of not changing *at all*. They were unacted-upon but desperately needed change, bottled up for years. The champagne cork just finally exploded, and thank god for that.

Speaking of champagne, don’t forget to celebrate the victories you’ve already won… just because you find yourself looking around and what you see is a lot of stuff you’ve still got to do before you’re really free.

Think about it… you’re already ahead of schedule. You wanted to be in place by January 2010, and yet you’ll be in nearly full force by April 2009, instead.

That’s pretty awesome! And yet you are all angsty and morose that it’s not *now*, dammit.

I don’t want to say you SHOULD still be high on that, but it’s worth thinking about when you’re feeling in the dumps because not everything is done and perfect yet, and leftover bits of Old Business are still hanging about in in the corners, glaring at you and making you feel tremendously guilty.

I know you feel stressed out, and harried, and overcommitted, and totally overwhelmed right now and pissed at everyone.

But remember: you’re still in transition. You’re fucking up. You’re also kicking ass. At the same time. That is possible, and yes it’s awkward, but that’s where the value lies, doesn’t it? If it were too easy, that’d make you mopey too. I know it would—I know you.

Butterflies look great a couple days after they come out of their cocoon. They really look neat inside the cocoon, too. It’s the bit in the middle, with the squeezing, and the wrenching, and tearing, and wrinkled wings, all damp with cocoon goo, that we don’t tend to think about. It’s amazing and miraculous, but also tough and uncomfortable and really quite gross.

But you can’t have the before & after without the in-between.

As long as you can survive my redonkulous butterfly metaphors, you’ll be all right.

Love and admiration,

Me

intentional.

i am a compass needle pointing true north.
i am not alone,
but i do not fall into you before me,—
though our knees knit together
like zippers’ teeth—
preferring
delicious unknowing, ecstatic unbeing
preferring to forever
teeter
on the brink.

i am a compass needle pointing north.
trustier and truer than any star.
guide yourself by me, but know
i will not follow.
i have journeyed far and i have learned little
but that things are all lovelier
in the distance.
you may be north, but you are not
my destination.

spoken and then transcribed

Reading A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, struck by her use of the word ‘prosody’ and her description of how meter and rhyme were an integral part of our forebears’ lives, and felt natural to them, even if they seem stilted to us. And while I had spent the last 15 minutes reciting to myself all the poems I know by heart, I read that line of hers and decided to write a poem by speaking.

I’ve claimed before that I can speak in iambic pentameter, and I can. It takes a little working up to, but I’m a weirdo like that. I submerged myself in rhyme and meter as a child. And this is what happened when I just opened my mouth to speak… (only slightly edited).

if you were to challenge me
i could speak in prosody
i think i could even probably
keep it up a while

off the cuff, from the hip
meter from my lips does slip
you see, i had a long apprenticeship
when i was a child

i loved meter and exulted in rhyme
and i didn’t know it at the time
but some day, good home my skills would find
although not
the way
i expected.

loose-leaf legal, 07-28-2007

Written on a sheet of yellow legal pad loose-leaf, sitting in the car at the Safeway by my new apartment. I had been thinking as I did my errands around the house and driving around and I just felt like the words were going to spill out of me, splash out into the world and evaporate (or drown me) if I didn’t get them out. (I didn’t end up going into Safeway, either. I went home after the deluge.)

I had the sheet of loose-leaf in my car because John wrote directions on it for me to get back from his new apartment (when I ended up lost in Alexandria, somehow, by a route I’ve never quite been able to replicate). I keep it folded up in a little paper pocket folder in the back of my main journal.

I transcribed this completely unedited. The only additions are in brackets.

I need to write so badly. I’m losing the details of my life and god knows this seems to be an important time. I am scribbling this in the car in the parking lot of the safeway, trying to capture the sentences that were ripe in my mind only a moment before, but they slide through my fingers like smoke. Dammit! Goddammit!

I know the last few entries I’ve written [in my journal] were slipping down the path of “Dear Diary, let me tell you about my day”—outside events, outside in—if “in” at all. But the inside stuff is dramatic. It’s important. I need to understand it, remember it, not let it disappear with ticket stubs and miles and hours and days.

It’s raining—cold rain. I was listening to the mix CD Patrick gave me on the drive here and thinking. I shopped today at the [Takoma Park] co-op for the first time, soaked from rain, hauling my new guitar on my back, bumping into people… and forgetting the chicken.

And on the drive here, I was thinking about the way the raindrops caught in my arm hairs, glistened, chilled me, evaporated in the jet of the car’s air conditioning, and the plasticky pool toy smell of my MuseumsQuartier umbrella mixing with the earthy smell of all the lovely trees in my neighbor’s yard as I put my big suitcase in the storage shed, which itself smelled surprisingly reminiscent of another storage shed from so long ago.

And I need to write about Justin, the good times and bad. The late night trips to Silver Diner (when I needed to let loose more). The DVDs, new pillows, and Pho. The escalating fights, how he took on my worst traits as a mantle he could wear. The physicality—the spiral down death of our relationship. The patronizing, glassy-eyed night at the diner I wanted to punch him for being in love with me still. The nerve. The cheese fries, the crisp scallions. These things need to be remembered, understood, reserved. The games. The arguments. The times I thought my life was perfect, so content I could melt into the universe, just so happy I could bust and melt away. The [happy] crying at Christmas. The problems I let him convince me didn’t exist. The finality of it all—the way it ended—four! and half! months ago! Did I get over it too soon? How do I simply resolve, and then… get over it so instantly? Did I love him?

[Of course I loved him.]

partay, 11-11-2003

When I wrote this for my old online journaly thing (www.spiffariffic.com), I was 20 years old… and still a wallflower in social settings beyond just the handful of people I knew well. Yes, believe it or not, I was a wallflower. And I made a conscious choice to change into the socially fearless person you know today.

I’ve always been described as friendly, gregarious, ebullient… and while I am those things, they seem to disappear the minute I am thrown into a crowd of people I don’t know. I do just fine one on one, or even with a handful of people, but the minute I’m outnumbered by more than 3 or 4 people I start to freeze up. I lurk on the outside and study conversation, head flitting back and forth among the principal speakers, absorbing, analyzing, to figure out when to interject or what to say—worried people won’t like me, afraid I’ll make a fool of myself or be considered rude. I am almost painfully uncomfortable and end up having a pretty crappy (and exhausting) time. And I expect people don’t like me when this happens, ironically enough.

Fuck that shit.

* * *

So, what was I saying? Ah yes—fuck that shit. I have resolved recently that I am not going to waste my life and remain with a tiny handful of friends because I’m shy. No, sir, not me. I’m not going to live my life only to measure it as a long litany of regrets. So Saturday night I went to a post-Halloween party. By myself. A party thrown by someone I hardly knew and whom I suspected I might be annoying. If you’ve known me for very long you know this is just not the sort of thing I typically do, on pain of death, and never ever alone. So go me!

Said party was at the house of a guy (Brian—hi, Brian!) I met on the Baltimore Bloggers email list; he offered up some free G3 All-In-Ones, I pounced. Now, when I picked up the Macs we had a little chat, standing there near my car during a light, prickly drizzle of rain, for probably a good 15 minutes. I was my usual fairly charming self, because A) I felt instantly comfortable around him, and B) he was only one person, not a group. I kept thinking that I should invite him to hang out with me and David sometime… but in the end I lacked the guts.

I don’t want to live my life in a way that I often end sentences with “but in the end I lacked the guts.”

[The view from 2007: I’m so proud of me right now.]

* * *

So, it seemed that that was another dead end unless I resolved to actually be bold and invite him. Which I did, with the help of David Allen’s ineffable organization system, a few weeks later. But the whole process of me ending up at the party was a rather complex chain of events so I’m just gonna list ‘em as bullet points:

* Email Brian dinner invitation; feel pathetic and silly.
* No response. Feel more pathetic and silly.
* Get email from Baltimore Bloggers list about get-together; sign up, as it’s along those lines of meeting new people (even if the person I particularly wanted to contact wasn’t there).
* Go. Miss a turn and, through a really crazy chain of events, end up in Columbia. Get there almost 1.5 hours late.
* Stand awkwardly at hugely crowded table. Wave sheepishly. Only free seat is next to Brian. Nice one, Fate.
* Chat with Brian. Relay my getting-lost story several more times to various Bloggers (“You ended up where? How the hell?”), and work up the nerve to ask if he got my invitation.
* Be all happy, because he did reply (and thought it was a good idea) and I didn’t get it. Explain that I thought he may have thought I was either some freak or just really annoying.
* Swap phone numbers.
* Call a while later, the Monday before Halloween, but get no call back.
* Email. Get told they can’t come to our get-together but that I am invited to their party.

Now, I know this whole thing makes me sound, well, even more pathetic and silly, but at least for once I’m acting and being pathetic and silly rather than sitting and doing nothing and being really pathetic and silly (and lonely, too, and beating myself up over not acting).

But I went. I went by myself to the Blogger get-together at Mick O’Shea’s (even after being lost for over an hour, I was determined not to miss the rest). I went by myself to Brian and Ali’s party. And while I started out quite shy and feeling very, well, exposed as cheesy as that sounds, I made myself work at talking to people and in the end I had a great time.

Yay.

untitled, 08-11-2007

for me the wind blows gentle,
a fragile kiss from someone i know i’ll soon
be missing:
sad and lovely, honey and salt
and i’m not ready to let it go.

i smile through tears, cast shadows on
the asphalt;
i glow with sunlight and sparklers;
i soak in the shhh of distant oceans in
the rustle of
trees that nod and bow over the hum
of radiators and
the squeals of little children, the
slam of screen doors.

i want to hug the summer to me, i’ll
wrap myself up in it tight, i’ll
hide under its covers till it’s
daytime,
throw my arms out wide—
sails that hope to catch the breeze and
hope to keep it with them
always.

but all sails know
the fickleness
of wind.

on responsibility - 06-28-2007

Transcribed from journal on Sunday, Aug 5, 2007. (Mostly) written in journal on the plane to Austria, June 28, 2007. Everything after the sentence beginning “There is tremendous freedom…” was added on transcription. I’d like to write about this topic again in the future, from a more personal standpoint, but for now this is how it came out.

I catch a glimpse of the sunset through the western windows, somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia. On the eastern side of the plane the sky glows blue, the special look it possesses for only moments each day: peaceful, luminous and infinite. My eyes are dazzled still by the shining ball of the sun I had just been enjoying, but still I can see the blue through the purple and green after-images, cerulean with the softest kiss of grey.

“The streets had taken on a playfulness, and play is hope.” — A Nervous Splendor, p176 

Reading about these long-dead men and women and their accomplishments and strife, all before the age of 30, has got me thinking. We suffer an extremely protracted adolescence these days, where whining and wheedling and dodging help us escape blame, responsibility, self-stewardship and maturity.

It’s so easy to think that getting away with things—avoiding responsibility—is the right path for us, because we think it feels good (or that taking responsibility feels bad). We think we are avoiding punishment we don’t need (but perhaps punishment we deserve).

But by denying ourselves responsibility, we are not evading retribution but our own selves. Only if you take responsibility into yourself can you enact change.

There’s a difference between external responsibility—a thing foisted on you, a word people use to get you to do what they want—and internal responsibility for your own actions, owning up when you’d rather ignore such responsibility or weasel out of it. All the wriggling, contorting and justification only serve to add to our misery and feelings of powerlessness. We don’t want to believe it, but admitting the extent of our power over ourselves and our situation is the only way to exercise that power.

There’s a tremendous freedom in simply admitting your failings and reserving judgment on yourself: So, I did this thing. So, I have this problem. And then simply accepting it. You can beat yourself up, and pretend it isn’t true, and deny, deny, deny. And punish and flagellate and hate yourself… or you can just say, Yes, that’s how it was, how I was, and how it is, how I am. And it just was, just is. And from that vantage point—as near neutral emotion as you can get, as naked and honest as you can be with yourself—you see that you’re not a horrible person, but merely human.

At first, it feels almost like dying (you mean I need to admit this? but I spent decades denying it…). But then it feels like rebirth. And then, after a while, it is merely your way of living, the way you act every day, the subtle undertones of your behavior. And it is life-changing.

After all, you can’t change the past, you can only imagine the future… only the present is within your reach to change. Self-abuse and shaming never works. Why do we ever think they do? They don’t work when parents use them on their children (when our parents use them on us), but we grow older and believe that somehow they will work when we use them on ourselves. If anything, if that’s how we approach dealing with our mistakes, then the shame and self-abuse seem to draw us nearer to the thing we hate because we are used to the feeling of being loathed—by others and by ourselves.

That’s familiar.

And it’s what we think we deserve so we go about getting it however we can. And so the cycle perpetuates itself—unless we can look at ourselves straight-on in the mirror, be truthful and speak about ourselves with integrity and gentleness.

Once we can lay claim to everything that is true, without getting mixed up in the judging of our entire beings, we can begin to be truly responsible. Then we can decide what matters to us and begin to enact change. Then we can become adults.

hidden seams

how long
have i borrowed
your wit, your wisdom
your words?

i can’t tell where
your thoughts begin
and mine
bleed into them.

but does it matter?

i take you in
wholesale, piecemeal.
you become mine—
and i become me.

july 30, 2007

humidity

moist.
the most—singular—way
to describe
summer
in this state.

see sleepy roads—narrow,
bumpy—drip
with oak & maple trees; tulip
poplars, magnolias rustle
and lean in
close.

see sunlight splash through come-hither
leaves; puddle and pool
in the gutter,
sloshing.

and always—you can never
forget—to fail to
escape
the prick
of frustrated sweat.

it’s how you know you’re here.

july 29, 2007