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A good day

Over the weekend I heard a conversation between Atul Gawande, a surgeon, surgical professor, author, and writer for the New Yorker and Krista Tippel, a public theologian, genius conversationalist, and and host of the radio show On being. Gawande spoke about how his practice of medicine has shifted dramatically over the past quarter century. Rather than fighting for life at all costs, Gawande has been attuning to what his patients define as a life worth living - even while dying. A central question he asks patients is “What does a good day look like?” As I listened to the conversation, I was experimenting with a new form of meditation, which included listening, lying on my back, bringing awareness to areas of my body experiencing pain, and focusing my breaths flow to those areas. I’ve been experiencing a lot of stiffness in my left knee and left hip over the past few weeks. In those areas, I imagined a cobalt blue liquid flowing through and lubricating my joints. As my breath grew deeper, it grew louder. Within, the breath sounded like the ocean at low tide. Every few minutes, a different part of my body called for my attention. I shifted positions, sometimes placing both feet on the bed, sometimes letting a upright knee slowly descend until meeting the bed’s surface. I breathed through tightness and felt my hip flexor open. Over the course of 40 minutes, I felt the pain evaporate. The goal had been to find ease in the pain. I was surprised to experience ease alone.

Today oceanic breath flowing through the pained parts of my body has not been as easy. The expected annoyances of life - frustration with a partner, the passive aggressiveness of a lonely neighbor, a pinworm reporting at my child’s school which led to an unnecessary pediatrician’s visit, an expired inspection sticker and $50 fine, and the return of joint pain - have interrupted my breath flow, not to mention disrupted my carefully laid out schedule. Through these minor frustrations, Gawande’s question, “What does a good day look lie?” kept rising in my consciousness. The question prompted a deepening of breath, bringing whole attention to the moment, and being with what was. Slowly, I am learning that this is the essence of a good day.

Chlorophyll

Two days ago, while out for a walk, I saw a tree awash in gold and crimson leaves. All the others around it held faded green leaves, browning at the edges, and hanging limply. The lone tree brought comfort. She was somehow managing to go through her life cycles in spite of the climate chaos around her. The sun shone brilliantly on her. Was she bringing hope to the others? On a recent work phone call, some colleagues and I did a go round answering the question, “What’s keeping you going?” One colleague, who keeps his face close in to the screen, widened his eyes, shook his head, and turned away from his computer’s camera briefly. He returned his gaze and spoke of traveling most of the fall to attend to family members in Florida, support resilience efforts there and in Puerto Rico, and further develop some documentary film projects centered around indigenous people, land, and water. His lips made a small o and he breathed out a sigh. His next words were about chlorophyll. He had just learned that chlorophyll is what keeps leaves green and during the fall chlorophyll drains from the leaf. In the process, the leaf reflects her true colors. It seemed like a non-sequitur, albeit a beautiful one. And then I wondered whether all of his expending of energy over these last few months could be seen as a draining that brought him to a deeper connection with his heart. Looking at his tired face on the screen, I hoped his pace would slow, and that he would have space to ground at home for a time. I hoped that the sun’s rays might fall on his face, illuminating all the beauty, strength, courage, and love he holds and offers to the world.

To soar or crawl?

Last evening I found myself in a small pizza shop on the main thoroughfare in my town. I had an hour or so before I needed to drive to the closest independent movie theater about 20 minutes away in the neighboring town. Evenings like this are pure luxury now. With the parenting model of 2 people primarily responsible for 1 or more children, most of my mornings and evenings are filled with time spent caring for, and increasingly hanging out with my child. As I approached the small counter, one of the staff, a man of 60+ years with a squarish face, broad nose and thin lips greeted me warmly with a deadpan look. I ordered a side of broccoli. He called out my order in Italian to an unseen co-worker cooking in the back. Before finishing he turned back to me and said, “you want that with garlic and oil”? I nodded and sat down at one of the empty Formica tables. A large screen television mounted cater-cornered on the wall behind the counter was on. The local news was reporting on a corruption case involving a chief of police and county district attorney. As the anchor hosts gave an introduction to the story, images of the chief of police being escorted out of a building in handcuffs and the district attorney descending stairs flanked by his lawyers played on a loop. The man working the counter called for me and handed me a warm brown paper bag. As I walked to the car, the inkling to eat by the river came to me. I drove down to a favorite park and parked in one of the many open spaces. Most of the park benches were wound up in yellow caution tape. I brought my food to a picnic table and pulled out a foil tray with steaming broccoli. Wafts of garlic filled my nose. I fished out a forkful of food and chewed, and felt the garlicly oil spread across my tongue . A flock of Canadian geese flew across the indigo sky in their signature V formation. Two on the end broke off and re-entered closer to the point where the lead bird flew. In the distance I saw line of cars crawling across the Tappan Zee bridge. Such contrasting movements. A duck, floating with mates on the water, erupted in a peel of quacks seemingly mocking the folly of human ways.

Unborn dreams

Inklings. So many enter my heart in the course of the day. In the past week they have included 1) writing a multi-part chorus for each chapter of the book Emergent Strategy; 2) hosting a monthly potluck with families my partner and I would love to build with locally; 3) setting up a jam session with a local conguera who tours on the weekends and has lots of flexibility during the work week; and 4) offering leadership in a co-creating space. These inklings emerge when I am alone, usually walking, and intentionally letting thoughts of my project task list and schedule arise and go. I smile at them and feel warmth in my heart. And then I release them before my inner critic begins her rant about how I love to begin things but not see them through. She also warns that I have a lot on my plate already. Taking on any more will just lead to stress and a cramping of my time. “You’re always yearning for spaciousness in your life! Why would you want to over schedule?” Through the harshness of her tone, I recognize my inner critic’s impulse to protect me from extending outward too much. In the safety of my heart, my inklings remain pure and perfect ideals of how I want to spend my time and share my essence. There is no risk of failure. There is no possibility of nourishing connection, healing, vision, and joy outside of the organized, productive ways I am conditioned to believe in. In looking back over the past 20 years, I realize that inklings arise when inner and outer conditions in our lives align. If put on hold, they will slowly disintegrate and not be felt in the same way ever again. As unborn dreams, they will continue to haunt us until we learn to let them take hold and guide our uncertainty into action.

An experiment with honesty

We’re sitting in the dimly lit Japanese restaurant. My son scarfed down two orders of shrimp dumplings that came steaming in a bamboo serving dish. After a few minutes of Dora the Explorer on my partner’s iPhone, he conked out on my lap. I reach down and stroke his hair. Loving him up with physical affection has become an even greater priority than before. My father-in-law sits across from me. His full cheeks darkened from the two bottles of wine we’ve shared and he has mostly consumed. “If you want to do something, you will find a way.” It’s a mantra that often finds its way into our conversations along with its opposite, “If you don’t want to do something, you don’t.” This is not the first time a relaxing time together turns into a guilt trip. He and my partner go back and forth for several minutes. She is resolute that we will not do everything he is asking but only what we think is the most essential. The ask of my partner is for her to emcee his first book launch at the Filipino consulate. Setting foot in the consulate in the era of Rodrigo Duterte is sickening for my partner. But she is willing to be sickened for her father. The ask of both of us is that we take our son out of school early, arrange for child care, drive into the city, and both attend the event. Nothing short of 6-7 hour commitment in the middle of the work week. To attending my partner has said yes. To everything else she has said no. Father and daughter go back and forth for several minutes. Their voices rise and both keep their eyes on me though their statements are for each other. I remember adrienne maree brown’s reflections on the characteristics of liberated relationships. Radical honesty is one of them. “Asking the questions you really want answered.” is a way radical honesty is enacted. I reach across the table and put my hand on my father-in-law’s something that I’ve never done before but feels perfectly natural now, My father-in-law pulls his hand out from mine. I continue to lean in and ask, “What if you were to ask us what you’re asking in a different way? What if you were to say, “this event means a lot to me and I would really love for you both to come.”?” He says, “That’s obvious.” He follows with “My daughter knows that I love her.” I realize that in his mind I’ve overstepped by speaking to the way he relates to his daughter. Rather than recoil and repent, I stay quiet and keep his face in my gaze. Once again it is clear to me that this man who so yearns for love cannot ask for it. There are layers of conditioning and suffering that has brought him to this place. I hold this awareness for a few moments before releasing it down into the earth.

One step

“What you give attention to grows.” I am reading adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy, a love letter, tool kit, philosophy book, sacred text for anyone who yearns for more collective freedom and liberation and a myriad of possibilities with which to practice these. “What you give attention to grows.” is an idea that I have heard in other iterations for almost two decades. Now after two decades of it moving through my mind and spirit, it is taking root in my body and heart. It is no longer an idea but a life path. Yesterday, I once again marveled at the beautiful ones in my life who, as one beloved friend put it, “are walking their truest path to their highest power.” This choice has seemed so elusive for me. I have yearned deeply to do this and yet felt utterly lost in the process of finding my truest path. I’m also embarrassed to admit that I’ve stopped myself from practicing those things which feel like my truest path - practices which open my heart and feel like both free fall and flying (thank you, dcc!) - because they are not as spectacular as the truest path of those who I admire and whose work is, in tangible ways, reshaping the world. I forget that they did not begin there. They began with small expressions offered to small circles of beings and through intention and attention, their truest path evolved into a journey into the deepest parts of our soul and highest parts of our consciousness. In this time, I’m also struck by how our truest path is one that requires the yes of other beings. There is no going it alone on our truest path even though this path often invites us to go against the grain and step outside the boxes of the communities where we found/find belonging. Today, my truest path involved chanting during my meditation, it is writing these words for you now, it is emailing a local singer and sound healer to inquire about training this afternoon. Today, I commit to give attention to what I yearn to grow.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” - Lao Tzu

Drink

There are three butterflies I’ve encountered on my afternoon walks, which are not a daily practice, but increasingly a regular one. Yesterday, I ventured out after several hours at the computer. Something within me compelled me to rise, to get out and move among other living things, to feel the cool air on my face. As I prepared to leave, I felt a knot in my knee and a stiffness in my left hip. There was a pinch with each step. I walked down the block passing young people with light satchels and heavy book bags. The took long strides and cackled at one another’s jokes. I let the energy of free seep in. The pinch in my knee gave way to a sense of a knot that was working itself out. An episode of hidden brain piped into my ears. Shankar Vedantam’s voice, both soothing and questioning, filling my head. He was interviewing a psychologist from North Dakota who studies nostalgia. I let the conversation in without trying to gather insights to tuck away and integrate into future conversations, music, writing, healing work. I looked up at the Crayola blue sky and felt so thankful that between the choice of putting in more contract hours and moving my body in the world, I chose the latter. How often I don’t. How often I don’t see the choice. I neared a house with an unruly garden of tall, long stemmed flowers, whose name I do not know. Their mustard, fire orange, red, and violet petals were beginning to lose their color. And then they came upon me. One grazing my forehead as it buzzed over my head. The other two flying fitfully between the flowers. In succession, they landed on three and stilled their wings. The flowers swayed. Slowly the butterflies opened and closed their wings while appearing to drink from the flowers’ center. The value of such an action is unknown to me, though I sense that the health of the universe rests upon it. How might I drink in beauty today?

itsonlytheriver-blog

Flying

I set out this year to let go of everything I think to be true about what my work is. This is allowing me to distinguish between what is habit and what is best practice. It has allowed me to let go of things I don’t like doing and make space for new things to enter. In some ways it feels like a kon-mari de-cluttering experience, shocking and freeing. As a communications person, I always assumed, for example, that I need to care about social media distribution. Don’t get me wrong - I understand that it is effective in changing discourse, and I use it with clients. I just don’t care much about keeping a personal profile, and I stopped. It also feels like an echo chamber on my feeds, and I have been unplugging more than ever before. Not tuning out from what is happening in the world, just reducing the frequency and nature of how I get that information. While there were perks, at times too it has felt like I am falling. Free-falling is the term I used, like the opening sequence in Mad Men, when Don is falling from the top of the building but not hitting the ground. I was calling the experience a trust fall into the universe. Then the other night someone suggested, what if you are flying? And then another person shared the story of Lilith - cast away from the Garden of Eden because she demanded liberation from Adam’s control. Lilith grew wings. And it makes me wonder - anytime we feel like we’re falling, couldn’t we choose to fly?

museofnewcreations-blog

Personal narrative writing is, for sure, one of your callings. There was a collective gasp in the room on Saturday when you shared the reflection/asked the question, “anytime we feel like we’re falling, couldn’t we choose to fly?” It was an awakening question then, as it is now. Thank you.

Worthy of the role

I claimed my authority as an elder yesterday, when it was revealed that I was five years older than the next oldest person in the room. After claiming this authority, the next oldest person, who was holding space for a group of us who are experimenting our way into the next evolutionary leap in consciousness, turned to me and asked permission to take the next step in our process. “Yes.” I said in full voice. Such a shift. The yes did not come from a desire to please our convener, a man for whom I have profound respect, love, and gratitude, or a need to be as unobtrusive to the collective process unfolding within and among us. The yes came from a deep sense that it is time to step into this role for the fuller becoming of myself and the fuller becoming of movements of (r)evolution.

The last decade of my life has been one of upending change and slow drift. Without question, my best work in this period has been raising my child. I could not have imagined how much of my life would be filled with his presence and all the adjustments to my ways of being this would require. Having a child uprooted me from the grounding practices of my life – meditation, a daily instrumental practice, and working at a pace that allowed spaciousness and full attention. The uprooting was not the cause, but certainly exacerbated a downward spiral into depression and disconnection from any sense of purpose beyond being a parent. And yet, strangely, my child saved my free fall into despair by utterly depending on me to show up to life each day.

Over the past decade my working life – outside of the home – has been a patchwork quilt of artist-in-residencies, facilitation contracts, performances, interdisciplinary workshops, and retreat offerings. It is many seeds planted and watered for a time before I drifted to the next invitation or opportunity. Rather than viewing this as part of a lifelong pattern of adapting to change, I’ve often judged the last 10 years as an irresponsible squandering of time and skills.

Increasingly, I am in circles where I am the oldest in the room and the one with the least recognizable job title. In such spaces, I am reluctant to reveal my age for fear that others will judge me as harshly as I judge myself. But yesterday, that fear fell away. It took a lot for this to happen. It took looking at a shattered heart and sensing the fear, anxiety, trauma, and grief that remain embedded in my flesh and bones. Such a revelation did not break me because I was surrounded by a community of love and still standing, breathing, and alive.

Yesterday, there was a deep knowing that I have adapted my whole life in order to survive. There was a clarifying sense that through this life-long practice of re-iterating my self I am slowly becoming the essence of who I am and worthy of the role of elder.

Returning to purpose, over and over again

Sometimes you just have to sit your ass down and just write. Even when there are no images, stories, impulses, compulsions that propel you to the page. Practices, those regular, rhythmic, grounding experiences, have been hard to sustain in this chapter of my life. In earlier iterations of my self, practices were like breath. It was not so much discipline that ensured my meditation, exercise, instrumental practice, but a deep sense that I needed these in order to keep my head above the waves of despair and depression. It is true that parenthood runs roughshod over a sense of spaciousness in life. Gone are the mornings where at least an hour of slow waking practices was possible,, as well as late night winding down. By choice, I have also taken on contract work that fills most of the work week, leaving small bursts of time for creative and grounding practice around the edges and in the crevices of my life. Sitting down now, at the start of the day, with deadlines looming, is a courageous act. Stepping out of the transactional economy for these moments and sinking deep in transformative being is (r)evolutionary. A friend whose bold, nurturing, and playful actions in the world inspire me regularly recently shared “there’s something about your words on paper that gives me such peace.” How often I forget my purpose to write. The periods of forgetfulness are growing shorter thankfully. In my twenties, the period would last years. Now, in my mid forties, I come back to my purpose in a few weeks. With each return, I find my self anew. With each recommitment, I strengthen my resolve to not forget again. With each word that falls on the page, I open the possibility of peace entering another soul.

Fear and possibility

Fear and possibility are braided together into the act of creating. Strangely, the limitlessness of creation jams me up. I see that I am trying to hard to be profound. Not trusting that just being with what is here, in this moment will be enough of a guide to what I want to explore. A crow caws and a robin chirps outside my window. The curtain is drawn blocking out the hazy sun rays. The taste of peppermint toothpaste lingers on my tongue. My sinuses are full. Tonight, we will have a difficult conversation, a conversation about letting go of a dream. There is a risk to saying no to this, as there is with all dreams. Two years ago we dreamed of living in a co-housing community with two dear friends and comrades that they knew. All are roc’s committed to a just and vibrant world and ways of being that counter the impact of a global capitalist extractive system When the dream was most alive, we were living untethered to cold,, spiritually shallow, culturally impoverished suburban community we found ourselves in. A year later, we moved to small village on the Hudson River with multiracial neighborhoods, performance spaces, numerous restaurants, and families with whom we connected. The dilemma which emerged was: Do we invest ourselves in planning for a visionary co-housing community via email and teleconference calls that will manifest in 18-24 months or do we continue with small acts of connection in the analog world to build community in the imperfect place where we are. At 47, after years of moving from town to town, across state lines and national borders, I am weary to uproot and transplant again. I fear that I am letting inertia decide our future. If we were inclined to invest in a future community, I would fear gambling what we have here now. There is fear and possibility in each choice. Leaving both options open is what is daunting. Suspending in midair is unsettling after time. It is time to drop down in one choice or the other, and be swept by that river’s particular current towards a future that cannot be seen.

Essence of everything

Beginning again. How easy it is to let go of that which is most important. During this last cycle of clarity-emerging, the depth of feeling around my purpose was bone deep. I am here to write blogs, poems, essays, songs, to raise a conscious child who embodies his essence, to offer healing, connectional, visioning space to all who yearn for this, and pay attention to the wonder and pain of the world. When I lose my way, and begin to mistake my job titles and descriptions for who I am and what I create, I grow weary, or worse, bitter. When I look around me and begin to equate worth with ascendent career trajectories, graduate degrees, earning power, I forsake and diminish the many in this world who who sustain their communities, nurture practices of love, who make a way where none seemed possible without visibility or institutional credentials. No one will give us the time to do what we were created to do. No one will say prioritize this for if you don’t you will die a slow death while believing you are still living. Carving out this time in the morning to create while no one is watching, expecting, or paying, is r(e)evolutionary. It requires a boldness that can go unnoticed if you’re not paying attention. “Produce! Produce! Produce! Substance! Substance! Substance Scalability Scalability! Scalability!” the manmade world screams in our ears. Sitting and watching the sunlight fall on evergreen leaves trembling in the wind outside my window can seem pointless or irrelevant in this manmade world. But in the continually becoming world, intricate in design and form, those evergreen leaves hold the essence of everything.

Butterflies looming

Butterflies are showing up a lot in my life and consciousness. At a recent gathering of community-based organizations, small businesses, city agencies, and artists, an artist named Mariposa opened by sharing about her early years in the area where we were meeting and what was happening within her family, the community, and emerging justice movements. She talked about an artist-in-residence project she’s conducting in her home community, a workshop series where she distributes popsicles to children, young people and their parents or guardians, and invites them to write poetry in response to prompts related to climate resiliency. The idea for her project stems from her grandfather’s work as a piraguero. In her original vision for the project, she imagined moving through the neighborhood with a cart of shaved ice, and serving it as a first step in creating connection that would lead to jointly writing poetry. She quickly revised her idea to popsicles, realizing that this would lessen the time in serving and increase the time in joint creation. She read excerpts of poems that have been written in these encounters. Poems that reflect the writers’ feelings about a warming climate framed within a deep sense of home. At the same gathering, another artist was inviting attendees into three interactive experiences: an interview, a photo shoot of their hands, and a writing down of perspectives and feelings about climate resiliency. He called his project The Butterfly Effect. His project will build to a sculpture installation where upon a sculpted form, he superimposes pictures of hands and phrases and excerpts of people’s writings. In this moment, I’m not sure whether the sculpture will involve an audio component in which clips from his interviews will sound out from the sculpted form. Back at the start of the summer I went to a retreat about evolutionary consciousness and action that, maybe, just maybe, might help us make a necessary evolutionary leap towards a new way of being that veers us away from the irrevocable destruction of life on this planet. The retreat was lead by one who is now a loved, respected, and seen mentor who often wears a yellow shirt with a large butterfly with spotted, darkly outlined wings. And for the past year, I have been chewing on the life path of a caterpillar who enters into a cocoon, essentially eats its own body, grows and expands and pushes against its casing until it gives way. The being’s full transformation rests it pushing beyond its contained form at the right time and slowly expanding its wings out as fully as they can open. There are many moments when the caterpillar’s evolution can be derailed or short circuited. Patient daring is essential throughout the process. Consuming one old’s self. Letting a former body that has grown full with experiences in one phase of life slowly decay. Trusting that out of one’s de-composition, a new being will form. This journey of the caterpillar/butterfly haunts and guides me.

Joy and Pain, Sunshine and Rain

On Thursday, my sister-in-law labored to bring her first born son into the world. I saw a photo of him yesterday afternoon. He slept with his mouth open, and his eyebrows slightly furrowed, as though still processing the intense journey of the previous 12 hours. His beautifully round cheeks rested on his left pinkish forearm which was cradled by his olive-toned right arm. His thin dark hair looked as though it had been cut. The outline of side burns showed and his hairline at his temples looked like it was receding at 90 degree angles. As I stared at the photo, goosebumps spread across my arms and my eyes welled with tears. My partner had warned me of this. Warned me that if and when one of my brothers had a child, there would be a different reaction than when I learned of the birth of my cousins’ children or the children of close friends, children who I consider nieces and nephews. There is more of my genetic code in this child than my own son, who my partner carried. It is not this that draws me to him fiercely. What draws me to him is a continuation of what bonds me to my younger brother who is the son of my father and his second wife, who he married 4 years after my mother died. When my father and my second mother announced her pregnancy to my older brother, our grandmother, my foster sister, and me during the concerns and celebrations portion of our evening family prayers, m older brother sprang from his seat and leapt around the low-cielinged room with his pencil thin legs pulled up beneath him and his bushy black hair grazing the ceiling. He whooped and hollered while my 9-year old self sat smiling wondering what this would mean for our patchwork quilt like family. It was many years later, while watching The Sound of Music, and seeing my second mother tear up and my father hold her hand and caress it with his fingers as Maria and The Count sing “Something Good”, that a difficult truth sunk in: my father’s second marriage and my younger brother’s life depended on my mother’s death. As that reality seeped into my 12-year old heart, I felt both a resentment towards my father for unwittingly framing my mother’s death as something good, and an expansive love for my toddler brother who redeemed an irrevocable and devastating loss. On Thursday, I gazed at my nephew, my younger brother’s continuation, who bears a great likeness to him. Next Tuesday will mark that 43 death anniversary of my mother. Living and loving continues to be a practice of holding together boundless joy and heart wrenching suffering.

Whole and worthy

It’s so easy to slip down the slippery slope of unworthiness. I found myself losing my footing while out with colleagues after a gathering we’ve been planning for 2 months. This morning I was relieved to have a more behind the scenes role, one of listening deeply and documenting others’ conversations. Following the gathering, I listened to colleagues talking about dynamics in the fields of social change, collaboration, racial equity, and cross-sector partnerships and felt as though I had little to contribute. As I looked around the table, I recognized that in age, I was a contemporary of most, and yet felt like the weak link in the group. The familiar thought pattern that I have squandered many years of my professional life reared its ugly head and started spewing its bile over everything in its path, including my choice of drink (chardonnay in a tequila bar) my choice of transportation (driving into the city instead of taking the train) and my inability to converse in Spanish with the waitress. I am of an age where I am clear that much of my comparing and sense of falling short is the working of my own mind. This coupled with the generous spirit and groundedness of one of my colleagues helped me shore myself against internal verbal battering. As that vicious voice began to rise, I could hear my essence say, “I will not abandon you. I am here. You are my beloved.” This was enough to give me the space I needed to accept my life just as it is and to hear the rumblings of my unlived life fade beneath the rancid smells, the shouting mother’s voice, the hot air from car exhaust pipes, and light raindrops released from the blanket of grey clouds overhead. Here enveloped in the tapestry of this unknown street in the Bronx, I am whole and worthy.

The right mixture of inspiration and intention

It would be easy to give into the tiredness and not write today. Easy to conclude that nothing of meaning could emerge at this point. But something in my gut will not let me relent. It took so long to get to this place of saying yes to the creative fire within me. So long to acknowledge that I am worthy enough to make art that contributes to the transformation of the world. And so I sit, with a stiff, aching neck, with a heavy weight behind my eyes, with a tension in my thighs and an ache in my crossed ankles. I sit with not much beyond the sensations that my body holds in this moment. There is no other starting point for writing or living. Thank goodness the invitation is 250 words! Any more would be too daunting a task! This evening I saw an all woman band that moved through pieces of Afro-Cuban, Brazilian, and American Jazz. They were phenomenal, far exceeding my expectations. My internalized sexism expected them to be good but not virtuosos. Tight were their vocal harmonies, conversational were there instrumental solos. Each one building off the other. At one point the pianist beckoned the lead singer over to her electric keyboard to trade 8 bar solos. Their transitions were seamless as though just one person was playing. I was astonished as much by their ease in waiting and listening as by their improvisation. They listened with an open playfulness and trusted that instinct and their honed skills would meet the moment with just the right mixture of inspiration and intention. To live like that! Time to start now.

Writing Companions

Two days have passed since I’ve written and the familiar ghosts of doubt and anxiety sit close by my side, whispering in my ear that whatever was gained in the first 21 days of daily writing practice is now gone. “You are a charlatan.” Doubt whispers in my ear, his stale breath and raspy breath seeping into my consciousness. “Who are you to write???” Anxiety screams. Her self protective nature coming out in decibels. I let them stay. Writing in their presence fortifies my will. There is an impulse to write in the dark again. To labor long in the perfection of works that I will hide from the world like a parent who shields her children from any level of pain. Such an exercise is far easier than this practice of creating and showing the raw and unfiltered. While the exercise is easier, writing in the dark is insidiously corrosive. The writer does not know how gutted her insides are until well past the midpoint of her active life. And so I return to replenishing my innards by setting down word after word relinquishing all hope that it will be any good and thereby giving what is most important a chance to see the light of day. My soul’s longing peers out from the hole I’ve buried her in and cranes her shrunken neck to see the light of day. Her eyes squint when meeting the sun’s brightness. “Come. Come” I beckon to her. “Come and sit here with me. Take your place by Doubt.” Doubt lets out a raspy screech and folds over on himself. Anxiety raises herself, her jaw taut, her eyes bulbous. The presence of Longing is cause for heightened alarm. I feel Longing settle in, grounding in her roots. She inhales and exhales, each breath growing deeper. In her rhythmic inspiration, I find my flow again.

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