Definitely an emotional vampire. LOL Love the Manhattan Transfer version so much.
What a day! I coordinated a piano masterclass that got rave reviews from everyone who played and observed. Then the Broadway audition class did their thaing and wowed the house. Then the instrumental ensemble played everything from Killer Joe (they did the instrumental version) to Rumble In the Jungle. Awesome!
I was dressed to the nines from 6:00 a.m. to about 10:00 p.m. It was like being a person with a life. LOL
Tomorrow I’ll pay for it with about six loads of laundry and some clingy children. But all is well.
It’s nice when the heaviness and the sadness come up, that music comes up even stronger for me. Gotta love that universe, knowin’ what I neeeeeeeeedddd… And again, thanks to everyone who posted with support and poetry and doggie snuffles and hugs. Much much much appreciated.
I just feel sad. It’ll pass, and I have good support around me.
But I feel sad. I wanna wrap myself in a blanket and sleep for a long time. Fortunately, tonight is early bedtime and it’s cool enough for blankets, so I should be able to make that happen.
This isn’t sobbing sad, or lying on the floor in the fetal position sad, or unable to function sad. It’s just sad sad. The kind of sad that comes and goes, and feels stronger at night than in the day, and passes eventually… that kind of sad.
When you come up against a block, delegate it to your (inner) Manager & get out of the way!
- Abraham-Hicks -
This is some freaky stuff, you gotta know. LOL This woman named Esther Hicks channels this collective entity called Abraham and says stuff that people either tend to love or hiss at.
There’s a backstory to my interest in Abe-Hicks stuff. When I first realized I’m not straight, I joined a Yahoo group for women who are coming out while married to men. I noticed that a lot of them went to therapy. For a long time I thought I didn’t want to go to therapy because I imagined therapy to be about fixing what was wrong. Why should I go to therapy? I just found out that something was really right about me!
Eventually, though, I realized why my online sisters were heading to therapy in droves. When you hide your true orientation from yourself and/or others for decades, there’s usually a pretty compelling reason. In my case, the biggest reason was all the old horrible messages about what it meant to be gay. I won’t go into the list here, but think about the worst thing you ever heard about what it means to be gay and then imagine if you were taught that over and over all your life. Well, you might not have to imagine, it might have happened to you too.
So as my euphoria wore off, and as I realized that this discovery meant that my life was going to change pretty radically, all those old messages used to come flooding back into my head. Sometimes I would actually look at my house and think “It’s like I’m exploding a nuclear bomb in the middle of my house.” It was a horrible way to live, a terrible way to view my effect on my family. I ended up on the floor in the fetal position more nights than I care to count.
So finally I went to a therapist. And as it happened she was a highly trained psychotherapist with years of experience, a life long lesbian, close to my mother’s age, and she was really into the messages of these channeled beings. It was a fascinating combination. LOL
And I think it saved my life. My outlook on myself and what I was doing to my family were so negative, that it took this hugely over-the-top positivity to even begin to crack the armor of my desperation.
I’ve talked to people since then who embrace a more balanced view of reality, and I appreciate their take on it. My current therapist is a woman who, like me, came out while in a relationship with a man, with a child, surprising herself more than anyone… and she’s Buddhist with a decidedly eclectic spiritual flair. But there are times, even now, when nothing will bring me back from the edge of self-loathing but a good ole’ Abe-Hicks quote.
This one came up for me tonight when I most needed it. I was thinking about something that was really bringing me down. I didn’t really want to blog about it, or talk about it. I felt like if I gave it too much overt attention I would feel worse rather than relieved. I mean, it’s a delicate balance – sometimes talking something out (or blogging it out in this case) really brings relief, clarity, and a sense of hope for the future. But sometimes it increases an energy instead of dissipating it.
So I was feeling kind of stuck. Then I saw the quote. The idea behind the “inner manager” is that if I can’t figure out what to do, I just delegate it to my own inner guidance, my essential self, and let my brain rest about it.
For me, tonight, that feels like relief. I’m going to let my brain play with a fun movie after I get the dishes loaded up into the dishwasher. And I’m going to let my inner manager figure out a way around the block of my feelings. Funny, when I just do that delegating trick, I stop obsessing and I feel better right away. Relief. It’s a freaky woo-woo thaing.
Ever look back on some portion of your life and wonder what the hell just HAPPENED? The book I’m reading, Emotional Vampires, is actually a really light/humorous look at how to recognize and deal with people who emotionally drain you dry. It’s a solid read written by someone who knows his psychological theories, but translated into plain English for those of us who don’t quite get the technical lingo. Beyond that, it’s a respectful view of the positive aspects of those very people that drive us nuts. I appreciate that because sometimes I’ve wondered if some of the people I’ve been drawn to in my life were a sign of some defect in my judgment abilities. But the author points out that even the most draining people have their uses (there’s one type that apparently SHOULD go to war for example – lol – they just really suck at everyday, non-adrenaline-rushed, life). He also explains the usual trajectory of relationships with these different kinds of people.
I’ve found it MOST enlightening. I think I’ve enjoyed some wild rides with some daredevil types in my day, not so much because I’m inherently a daredevil, but because I needed a little external push/pull at certain times of my life to get me out of my shell, my closet, my rut, whatever it was. But once the rush was over for the daredevil in the mix, it was all very boring – while, for me, the “boring” part was the point. Well, not exactly, but getting through the craziness of the changes was going to lead me to greater peace later on. Peace was not the goal, however, for the daredevil types. Daring the devil was the point.
I like the expression beautiful disaster because I can think of a couple of key relationships in my life where the expression fits better than any other. I think beautiful disaster is the title of a song, but I’m not sure. I was reminded of it on a blog-slog today, you know where you go from blog to blog clicking on people’s links to their blogs and you end up who knows where – and I believe I found a blog with this as its title. I’m not sure if the blogger would agree with my use of the expression, but I think it applies pretty well to my life.
Beautiful is not quite accurate; disaster seems rather stark for an adventure that has been really rockin’; so put them together and you get something that may not be able to be salvaged, but that sure brings some great memories. Kind of like this angel here. I mean, yummmmmmy, but do ya really wanna spend your life there? I smell some drama. Heh. Fun ride, but prolly short.
This is kind of how that would end up:
It all ends up well in the end, as long as ya stay safe and keep breathing. I may be slightly less sane (well, see caption under rabbit for more accuracy) these days than I used to be. But I think I’m happier for all the messiness in my life. Disaster in beauty, beauty in disaster, and you know there are no wrong notes if you know how to improvise.
She’s a five month old golden retriever pup. She’s adorable and though we all work too much and she has to be alone too much, she retains her complete sweetness and light, and she adores her afternoons inside with me and the small people of the house.
You have to take my word for this, however, because every time I try to get a picture of her she lunges at the camera. So either I’m having to put the camera away or I get a photo where she looks like Cujo the Golden Retriever, which is not really her personality. LOL
How do you people get good photos of your dogs?
In unrelated news, I’m reading a book my therapist recommended called Emotional Vampires. I highly recommend it. It talks about how to deal with people who drain you dry. It’s like a psychology book for people who don’t really know psychology. Fast read, great sense of humor, and very enlightening. I’m learning a couple of things I did not know… perhaps I shall blog on that at a later date. But yeah, good book. If you’re in any relationship that has you wondering “what the HELL?” this book probably has some answers.
Back to dogs. I just did a google image search for golden retrievers, thinking I could at least put up a photo of a dog, indicating it’s not mine but has the same color coat or something. But really and truly, none of them, not a single one, is as cute as my Goldie. So here we are, bereft of dog photos, until someone can tell me how to keep my dog from trying to eat my camera. That is all.
Where will the madness end? And – AAAANNNNNDDDD – I planned yet another week’s worth of dinner menus, and included use of stock in two dinners.
You know, back in the days of the permed mullet I was going to be a diva, flitting glamorously from location to location trilling high notes to great acclaim and even greater fortune.
And here I sit, grading music theory papers, tossing the odd eye of newt and toe of frog into my frothing cauldron as the heavens roil about me.
Maybe I’m not trying to make stock. Maybe I’m trying to conjure up a woman.
I was in the local coffee shop today and heard the following song, which made me think of all the lonely women in my blogosphere. Heh. Enjoy!
So for all of us lookin’, waitin’, hopin’, expectin’, lotsa love, here’s my favorite version of Your Song. I love Elton John, but Al Jarreau’s version makes me weak in the knees. So I’m singin’ this to everyone reading this post who wants to know if somebody loves them. I may not know ya, but somebody does, and somebody is gonna sing this to ya. Take it from me and Al today darlins.
I just came from my local university’s production of Amadeus. The play is quite a bit different from the movie, as I remember it anyway… much more a psychological drama than a whodunit. At the end of the play Salieri vows to live forever by claiming to have killed Mozart, so both their names will be mentioned in the same breath down through history. Unfortunately, no one believes him. The play ends with Salieri declaring himself the patron saint of mediocrity.
I recommend the play to anyone who has a chance to see it. It’s very thought-provoking, while managing to be both intense and funny at the same time.
Salieri asks what happens when you bargain with God to live a life of virtue in exchange for talent, and then you realize God has given the talent you asked for to someone who has no conception of the rules of the game – as you have always believed them to be.
In the play, Salieri didn’t change the rules, or change his idea of God, or change anything except the bargain. He turned the God of his childhood into his enemy, and he turned the life of Mozart into his battleground with God.
What relationship the play’s themes have with how these peoples lives actually played out is debatable, and not really the point.
But it’s a question many of us ask ourselves: what happens when you’ve done it all just right, and then along comes someone who breaks all the rules and yet demonstrates complete creative genius? What does this mean?
I identify with Salieri in a lot of ways – always prayed, always did the right thing, always sought to live a virtuous life. And a great deal of creative possibility simply passed me by, wafted along by people who my rules wouldn’t consider acceptable (or possibly even sane).
Perhaps I decided not to battle with God in the same way the Salieri of the play did, because I’m a woman. The relationship of a woman with a male god seems somehow different than the relationship of a man with a male god. Somehow it doesn’t seem like a battle worth having, between a human woman and a male god. I just ended up looking somewhere else for my definitions of prayer, right living, and virtue. I found redemption (rebellion, too, maybe?) in goddess worship, astrology, feminism, and ultimately in realizing that my inner world is woman-focused in every possible way.
So instead of turning the creative rule-breakers of my life into my battleground with the divine, I’ve turned to them for inspiration. Sure, I resist. Even now, I resist. Even now, I want to believe, somewhere, somehow, in the apparent solidity of the life I worked so hard to create.
But even more I want to believe in the power of creative rule-remaking. I don’t want, like Mozart apparently did, to decide that any creative genius I might have needs to go hand in hand with self-inflicted disease and addiction. I do want to create a world for myself and those around me where our truth can be unruly, passionate, escaping the bounds of polite society. I want to create a world for myself where my truth liberates, rather than confines. I want to create a world for myself where I can scream “NOOOOOO!!!!” when the centuries of “this is how life IS” come falling down on my head or bubbling up in my brain. I want to create a world for myself where I can say “YEEEESSSSS!!!!” when it feels right to me.
The awareness is the first step. And the awareness of “this is my no, this is my yes” – that may be the new divinity I seek.
From White Nights, one of my favorite movies from the 80s, two brilliant dancers each break some of the rules of their particular genres and make something SPECTACULAR as a result. This being YouTube, the end is rather abrupt. If I find a better clip of the same dance I’ll put it up. In the meantime, enjoy.
I’ve been posting a bit about Carly, the five year old daughter of a friend from my parents’ group. She shows measurable improvement – today’s lung x-ray showed actual physical improvement. Everyone involved in her care is indeed rejoicing. She has a long road back to good health. My IRL friend who has been following Carly’s story on FaceBook wrote today. I had posted something to the effect of “keep the prayers coming.” She wrote, “Rejoicing is my prayer.” I adore this woman’s philosophy of life and her gentle way of living her truth, and I know that her gentle energy will indeed reach farther than the ends of her fingertips or the outer reaches of her thoughts.
I love the idea that whatever we are thinking or doing is our prayer, is our spiritual practice. I’m going to send my friend a message on FaceBook telling her she inspired this post, and if she wishes to comment and identify herself I’ll let her make that choice. But the idea that THIS is my prayer or THAT is my prayer or washing dishes is my prayer or blogging is my prayer or grading papers is my prayer or working with students is my prayer – I love it. I. Love. It.
This morning I went to my office intending to send off a couple of personal emails and then get down to some serious paperwork. Instead I spent the bulk of the morning with five people who each came to see me about completely different matters (only two were planned), but who each left me happy and enriched – and behind on paperwork. LOL Story of my life. And yet I wonder – what if it all is a prayer. The interactions with people, the unexpected time of connection – oh how I love a good human connection. The paperwork that I tend to regard as less important – still a prayer. The time I spend here, pouring out my soul on my blog – a prayer.
I think I may be answering my own invitation from last night’s post… the invitation to be with myself in all the places that feel the least comfortable. Perhaps all those places inside me are prayers too.
From childhood I was taught that prayers only had certain specific purposes, and they were usually to either ask God for something or to ask God to make me worthy of something. But the way I feel about prayer, as expressed by my friend today, is really different. It’s a way of embracing what is, acknowledging its value. It’s a way of looking inward to my soul and outward to my life and saying “I accept.”
I wrote today to another friend that I sometimes wonder what has happened to me. In the last four years since discovering I am a lesbian I have gotten way more girly and I’m learning to not just cook but care about cooking. My email included several comments about how I’m going to tweak my apple pie recipe to make it better. Next step: Make my own crust!!!! This is all crazy talk. If you had come to me five or six years ago and told me this would be my life now, I would have had absolutely no comprehension of what you were talking about. And yet here I am.
Sometimes I forget how far I’ve come. Sometimes I just feel the ghosts of the past coming back to ask for more. Sometimes I want to move forward so fast that it would put me and my family into a state of emotional whiplash. Camlin, over at Camlin’s Crooked Line (see sidebar) put up a beautiful post about inviting the ghosts in and pouring them a round. Ask them what they want. So what if the house is a mess. LOL This fits really well with some ghosts popping up into my experience this month. I’m going to invite them in. These are not scary wolves-at-the-end-of-the-bed ghosts, they’re just memories of good times that want to be looked at, maybe for the last time…
And so I will do that. And I will rejoice. And rejoicing will be my prayer.
One of my students is preparing Miss Celie’s Blues from The Color Purple for an audition. I loved her rendition of it, and I love the simplicity of the song and the intimacy between the two women. Here it is from the movie, where Celie’s response during and just after the song brings me to absolute bliss:
I know I’ve posted this here before, but I’ve been feeling sort of sad and sort of foolish and sort of uncertain and sort of exposed today, so I’m posting this again and addressing it to myself, to my soul:
The Invitation
by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to
be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can
disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
Also – many thanks for the thoughts and prayers for Carly. As I understand it she is stabilizing and improving, and expected to make a full, albeit slow, recovery.
