the dream life

the joy scream

Yesterday, my eldest niece turned seven. 

She honored me greatly by inviting me to be part of the entertainment at her slumber party. She requested that I show the girls how to decorate hula hoops, dye their hair rainbow colors and tell fortunes. I didn't expect any of this to play out exactly as imagined because I have been a seven year old girl and I know the way of the slumber party, but I thought the request was fantastic. It was perhaps the proudest moment of my life when I arrived at the party and Ava announced to her friends, "The famous LaLa is here!"

nature speaks

My friend Amy and I like to walk and talk. We're very good at it. We have a lot to say and our conversations are no-holds-barred. You absolutely need people in your life with whom you can talk about anything and everything and when you can do that while walking in nature, all the better.

We went hiking at Raven Run this morning. The temperature has dropped just enough to make being outside bearable.  Even though the creek beds were dry, the trails were lush with life: spider webs glistened in the sunlight, damsel flies and butterflies swirled around us.

We sat for a while at the overlook by the river.

Lately, I have felt a pull toward the trees. I find myself daydreaming about cabins in the woods, campfires, window screens, the canopy of stars, smoke rising from chimneys. Perhaps it's my usual late summer longing for fall, but I feel so strongly this need to live closer to nature for a few days or a week, to spend my days walking with the leaves and bark, listening to the animal music.

This, I've come to understand, is an essential part of my spiritual practice, one of the primary ways I connect and know mystery.  The back yard is good; into the woods is better. We are a part of this energy; the pulsing cyclical nature of nature. We don't live on top of the earth, we are a part of it. 

And nature speaks.

It's the heartbeat I need to hear; the place I need to place my head; the embrace I crave.

I was urged to commune with the earth mama today and I got the opportunity to do it in friendship. There was no peak experience, except that every moment is a peak experience.

Thank you, blue butterfly. Thank you for the whisper I can hear in my soul.

for the August Break.

bliss

Words are approximations. We name and label and sort because we need to communicate, but the words we use aren't really the thing. 

I don't want to have to say I think or I believe all the time. It's self-evident. If I've written something here, it's just a thought or an idea. Anything written anywhere is just a thought or an idea. When someone tells you that something is or something works, they are only telling you that the something is and the something works for them. At the moment.

No one - no healer, writer, sage, guru, doctor, scholar, psychic - can tell you anything more important than what you already know. No one is holier or better than anyone else. 

"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." - Buddha

It's a quote that gets tossed around a lot and for a damn good reason.

Increasingly, I am aware of a subtle hostility. The backlash against the positive. (There isn't really positive and negative, but we have to call it something. We approximate.)

So many people saying so many things. So many teachers teaching. Because we're each a teacher for another; because we have a message and another message; because we make discoveries and we want to share; because we have questions and we want to learn.

But I know what it is to want it to stop, to want to be left alone. So I understand when people push against the positive. And I understand what's uninteresting about happy, happy, happy.

The thing is, bliss isn't always about the happy. Sometimes it's just balance. Sometimes it's just easing off of the blade. Sometimes it's just breath.

Yesterday, we were on the interstate and a car whipped into us. The driver decided to change lanes, moved before he saw us. We collided but he corrected and no other cars were involved. We pulled over the shoulder to call and wait for the police. My car was damaged but Tracy and I were not. The other driver was not. 

In every moment, there is a choice. We place our focus. Sometimes it doesn't feel like a choice; other times we know that it is. I'm not talking about emotion. You can be sorrowful and grateful. You can be confused and grateful. You can be angry and grateful.

Sometimes you question your very identity. The solar plexus swirls, the heart clenches, the tears rise. You retreat. But it's still bliss. 

We do what we can.

We're not stuck; we're not lost; we're on journey or we're resting from the journey.

We smile. We say good morning, good night. We mess up. We push restart. 

We flow on.

And I love you. I do.

for the August Break.

freedom

With complete honesty and total alignment I can tell you, this passage of life that I'm living now is the very best part of my life so far, and because it's so good, I have only to expect that it's going to get better.

I'm thinking about this for a couple of reasons. One is that I do this little dance with aging. You know it. You either do it yourself or you see other people do it. It's boring and I'm not going to rehash it. I'll just say that from time to time, I do this dance with "getting older" and the dance sometimes freaks me out.

The other reason is that over the weekend I had a lovely lunch with a friend I've known since high school and we had a conversation about "the past." I try not to do "the past," but sometimes it comes up in such a way that it feel okay or even necessary to do a bit of reflection.

What I realized after I had that conversation was that I no longer felt any need to even glance down the regret road. I honor the path that brought me here. I praise it. I kiss its little face.

Now is the best time for me so far because I am the most comfortable in my skin that I've ever been and because I understand which parts of me are core and because I am free.

This understanding of freedom is relatively new and it has come to me as a result of a shift in attitude that makes me laugh with joy, to be honest. It's so simple, so fundamental, and the fact that it took me until now to get it, is truly delightfully funny to me. 

It's about integration and honesty.

swan

I don't pull cards hoping that something outside of myself will tell me something I don't already know. Spirit can speak there, but I don't see cards as a crystal ball. The cards to me are storytellers. They hold symbol and myth and archetype. They are mirrors.

I sit with them and swim in my thoughts and emotion and when the cards speak, they illuminate places in me. They repeat what I already know. My reaction to the message is the message. They bring me confirmation, they validate me and help me redirect.

More than anything, I end up laughing when I pull cards. Synchronicity always makes me laugh with that special kind of joy, the kind that bubbles up from the earth, like when you ask for a sign and get a billboard. Sometimes my awareness of the pure magic of this world is so intense, so all-encompassing, all I can do is tilt back my head and laugh in sheer overwhelming gratitude and wonder.

what right now feels like to me

For a while, it was all busting apart. Healing was like an excavation. Getting to the source within. The universe cracked at me with a little silver hammer, peeling away the layers and dividing me out into vials and jars to be labeled and sorted and stored. 

I would take out the jars and hold them up to the light.

On the back shelves, I stored the things I didn't want to look at any more and now and then they would push to the front again until I got better at looking at them, until I learned the soft rubber band of accepting and letting go.

I was most always aware of the spiraling forward, that the stopping was never really stopping, that backwards wasn't. But there were pieces and some had jagged edges and my eyes were often cast toward the hope of a future that I believed in but that I suspected I might not reach, not through any fault of my own and not because of a capricious god, but just because.

What I feel happening right now, in every moment and in every cell of my body is integration, an emptying out of all those jars, a pouring of love and joy straight in to the channels of my heart. It feels like truth, like truth-telling and listening with humility and less ego and the compassion that comes from understanding that love is the engine that drives this thing.

Not easy diluted love.

Big, hard, messy love.

The water, everyday, flows through me and like a fine mesh screen, I catch the pieces that need to be disintegrated or folded back in. I don't let them go forward into the next or the next. I feel and feel and let it go.

It is ownership. I am standing in the footprints of my own feet, perched on the hillside of my own creation. From this vantage point, I can see the miles of miracles paved with heartache and grace.

When I mean yes, I say, yes.

I'm not afraid to speak my need.

I'm not afraid to meet another's.

There are a thousand sparkling roads winding out in front of me and it doesn't matter which one I choose.

my heart's desire

 

I have a rebellious heart. 

I always have. I was talking about this with my mom on our trip and she confirmed for me what I already knew, that from the time I could utter a word it was clear that my number one pet peeve was people telling me what to do.

I don't like for people to tell me what to do when I know they're wrong, I don't like for people to tell me what to do when I know they're right. I don't like schedules, rules or absolutes. I don't think anything is black and white and I'm on my own timetable.

To be clear, I've never been motivated by wanting to get a rise out of people. In fact, I'd just as soon not. What I want is freedom to be myself-- to explore and breathe and live in a way that is true to the beating of my own heart.

Which also means the freedom to fail grandly, which I often do.

I once thought that my trouble with authority was a flaw. Now, I honor it as a part of my core essence. I love that I know this about myself. I love it because when I feel myself resisting something, I recognize the resistance and use it as a guide.

This part of my character is enhanced by equally flamboyant qualities: the incessant need to discuss my experiences (you know when you are with someone and you start talking about some personal part of your life and all this stuff comes spilling out and then you go home and think, oh my god, I shouldn't have said all that...I am that person every day), and a passionate sort of impulsiveness that leads to big gestures and declarations and cliff jumping without a map.

The self that is at the heart of my self makes 9 to 5 office work nearly impossible for me. I can't predict productivity and I can't stand the feeling of being boxed in. I don't thrive and have nothing to give when the rebel heart flares up.

I don't feel guilty about this. I don't feel that I should just suck it up or buckle down or any of that stuff. 

I feel with great certainty that I was born this way for a reason. (Not because I'm special, but because we're all born the way we're born for a reason.)

So, now I'm back from my big trip. I'm honestly back and rested up and ready to begin the thing that I am going to begin now that I'm back. You know, the big one, the thing, the reason.

Have you seen it wandering around anywhere? 

the lovely, doubted mystery

Living outside the norm, or what as perceived as the norm, is on my mind today as it often is. This morning, I turned on the television when I came down to make my morning coffee. I don't really do daytime television, but this morning, for some reason, I turned it on and there was a program about a well-known psychic medium. I know who this person is, but I've never read his books or studied his work the way I have others. I like him, though, and one thing I think he has done in his career is help to move psychic phenomenon a little closer to legitimization in dominate culture, and that is a good thing.

As it always is with programs about psychics and mediums, the show also gave air time to the world's most famous skeptic, and others who believe that all psychics are con men and women, that a psychic reading is nothing more than a big game of 20 questions. This person has created a test and issued a challenge that so far, no well-known psychic has accepted. The skeptic interprets this refusal as proof that the psychics know that what they're doing is fraudulent. 

silence

We moved into our rooms at Christ Church on a Sunday morning. The halls were impressive. Walking through the arched stone, it's difficult not to feel like you have magical powers or are, in the very least, communing with long gone souls.

The rooms were sweet and immaculate, and mine was surprisingly large, but they were dorm rooms, so I found myself plunged out of the world of our lovely and lush Oxford apartment into a cozy but simple accommodation with no television, no wifi, a shared loo down the hall and a small shower one floor down. If I'd thought of it, I could have loaded the iPad with a movie or two, but I hadn't thought of it, and without the Internet, I didn't even have a radio to keep me company. I joked to myself that sitting in my room made me feel like a cloistered nun and I was slightly alarmed at the mild panic I felt rising in my body.

This is my church

I ask for signs. I go out. I'm walking and listening to the Smiths through my pink headphones and I encounter a woman listening to music through her pink headphones. Her hair is the exact color that waits on my bathroom shelf. She raises a hand of acknowledgement to me and I raise a hand of acknowledgement to her. She smells like patchouli and suddenly I am ageless, beautiful. I look down:

and then a white butterfly swirls in front of me and then another and they fly with me like that, all the way home.

The undeniable deep blue velvet quiet

It was all go. For years and years, pushing forward or feeling stuck, doing the day to day, tending and assessing, envisioning possible futures. It was lists and dreaming and opening and asking, sorting the answers and trying them on for size. So much labeling and owning and discarding. Dreamboards and journals and workshops and long late night conversations. Wanting so much to be in a space that I didn't know how to describe. Wanting so much to feel that I was doing what my soul was meant to do. Defining myself:

I do this. I do not do that. 

I do this, but keep it a secret. 

I make that part public.

I call it work, I call it purpose. I ask you who I am. I ask myself.

There were signs, signs, everywhere and strong guidance and a path that unfolded leading me here and there and on and on and forward. So much go.

And then, the quiet. 

What do I do for a living.

I believe that I know now what that is now. At least in part. 

I believe in letting passion take the reins. I believe in purpose.

Spiraling

It's a spiral. 

We go forward then back, circling on.

There are passages of quiet, rest and contemplation; passages of questioning, doubt and resistance; passages of acceleration, magic and abundance. We know things then don't them then know them again. We claim things then let them go, assert then retreat. We evolve.

I can get overloaded easily. Last night I started to feel a little overloaded with the woo-woo*. 

I don't have a point; I just like Shirley MacLaine

I rarely turn the television on during the day. Yesterday, however, I was struggling a little and asking for guidance and I felt the nudge to go downstairs and turn on the TV, so I did. Immediately, I tuned into the Bio channel piece on Shirley MacLaine. 

Within the first few minutes, I received some messages that seemed to speak directly to the questions I'd been asking and as the story unfolded, these little hits just kept on coming. Small things directed at different areas and questions. Fascinating how that happens -- and it really does. It happens all the time. (So maybe I have a smallish point - life speaks in all sorts of ways. Even through the Bio channel.)

No limits

What if you knew that the quality of your life was not determined by chance; morality; your DNA; the position of the stars in the sky; a judgmental god; a sinister devil; your previous choices; your thoughts; your weight; your bank account; other people's opinions; your occupation; the wounds of your childhood; the laws of physics; or what you did yesterday?

What if you knew that you were completely free?

What if you knew that the recipe for miracles was love + imagination?

What would you do then? Where would you go?

This bliss

Do everything with so much love in your heart that you would never want to do it any other way.--Yogi Desai

This is my favorite weather -- sunny but cool enough for hoodies and campfires. Woody and I like to sit on the porch. He sleeps on the wicker couch right next to my chair. Cats come and go, soak up the sun and squabble. 

I listen to music and push words around and drink tea and sometimes I just gaze out, softly, at nothing and everything.