accumulate

money property

prestige accolades power

need more storage space

February 4-One Year One Day at a Time – Long Days Journey Into Night

In the Dallas airport having a hot flash.  Took off my coat, scarf, sweater and there is nothing left to remove.  I should be in Albuquerque, shoulda coulda  woulda.  Cyndi made it.  I did not.  My United flight out of Memphis International scheduled to leave at 3:02 did not arrive until 2:54.  We boarded.  We sat and sat and sat.  We deplaned.  As George Cariin used to say “If they have a preboard, why don’t they have a post board.”  There was no reboard or post board.  Flight canceled due to computer malfunction.  Knowing that I would miss my flight out of Houston, I had already been on hold with United for 19 minutes when we got off the plane.  A  dapper gentleman in front of me in the queue we tells me he is going to Albuquerque and that there were two flights out of Memphis.  One through Dallas and the other through Salt Lake. In the mean time, United answers my call and I pass the information on to the Indian call center gal who answered.  “Delta is open from Memphis to Salt Lake but full to Albuquerque.”  The nice man gives me the American flight information.  She puts me on hold, “I must call American.  Please do you mind hold?”  30 minutes later, I managed to get the only seat left from Memphis to Albuquerque through Dallas.  The kind man who helped me will leave Houston for New Mexico until 9:10 am tomorrow.  As it stands now, I leave here at 10:40 and arrive at my destination at 11:25 pm.

Trying to have a good attitude.  Practicing listing all those things for which I have gratitude.  I will be in Albuquerque when I wake tomorrow.  I have free Wi-fi here in Dallas.  Pretty sweet.  I can write my nightly blog now because there is no way in hell I will be doing that at midnight.  I took a couple funny pictures of myself to have as a memory of this long days journey into night.

While sitting here writing, I got a text from my good friend Hannah Pickle.  She and her partner own and run Raw Girls in Memphis.  Check them out:  http://raw-girls-memphis.myshopify.com/collections/all.  They messaged me “Check your front porch.  We left a little love.  Just some samples that we thought you might like.”  Damn.  All that good food sitting on my porch and I ate the worst bowl of gumbo I ever had at the Memphis airport.  I called Jimmy, who was watching The Reader.  “Honey sorry to interrupt your movie.  Look on the porch.  Just got a text from Hannah and Amy.  They left us something.”  He keeps talking to me while he opens the box ( I hear packing material crumpling in the back ground)  “There is  so much stuff here.  Let’s see.  Veggie fritters with a sauce, Red Beets, Shaved Celery Root in Dijon remoulade over organic mixed greens from Delta Sol Farms, healing pineapple ginger juice, Creamy Italian Tomato Soup with cracked pepper, and more.  I am salivating.  Bummer….bummed, but happy for Jimmy.  What a treat.

Think there must have been MSG in that awful gumbo.  My hands are swelling and cramping.  I am drinking as much water as I can. What a day.  Thought about starting out this post with these Rolling Stones lyrics,

You better stop, look around
Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes
Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown.
Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown
Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown

But I am not having a nervous break down. I am really remarkably calm.  Thank God for the internet and for the need to write.  I do have a few regrets.  My nose is dry from flying and I wish I had my nasya oil with me, packed away in my suitcase.  I wish I had not eaten that nasty gumbo.  But I promised myself I would eat.  I have been known to skip meals.  Not a good idea especially when I travel.  Too much vata already.  No food equals spacey!  I also wish what?  What else do I really wish?  Nothing.

Unfortunately I need to wrap this up.  My only other regret.  I packed the power cord for my laptop and my charge is getting dangerously low.  I want to post this before the computer fails.  Love to all of you out there who take the time to read my blog.  Thank you so much.  Goodnight.

 

The “Secret Of Life”

Everything in my life has lead me to this moment.  For the first time in my life I think I may have a modicum of compassion.  A writer must have compassion, empathy, a willingness to give up all censorship, internal and external.  This morning I was paralyzed by self-doubt.

I opened to a page in Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary.  I can do this.  I can write a novel.  One Year, One Day at a Time.  I can only write when I sit down.  I place my body in front of the empty page.  Then I wait.  I wait for the voice from within.  I do not write until I know it is not my mind, but something else, something deep inside me coming forth.   A word, a phrase, a name, an answer to a question.  I am me.  I am her, Susan, as she tells me her story and I tell her mine.  I empathize with her.  She is real.  I am her.  There is no other way to explain this phenomenon.  For months I have written in my Morning Pages,  I trust in the love and guidance of the Divine Mother to create through me for the greatest good of all.  I must trust.  I must show up and trust without question what I hear.  I am her, Susan.  I am me.  I am telling our story.

Dani Shapiro writes, “I didn’t question whether I could get inside the heart and soul of a man more than thirty years my senior, who had suffered in ways I hadn’t suffered, taken pleasure in ways I hadn’t.  In the first pages, Solomon wakes up in the morning and masturbates.  How did I give myself creative license to write such a scene?  Because I knew, I knew what he would do, and how it would make him feel before, during and after.  We are only limited by our capacity to empathize.”

May I continue to have the gift of empathy.  May I willingly experience “sorrow, grief, loss, joy, euphoria, thirst, lust, injustice, envy and a broken heart” so that I can truly be the person about whom I am writing.

The “secret” of life that we are all looking for is just this:  to develop through sitting and daily life practice the power and courage to return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment – even if it is a feeling of being humiliated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness.

–Charlotte Joko Beck

As  Pema Chodron so aptly puts it, “All those smiling enlightened people you see in pictures or in person had to go through the process of encountering their full-blown neurosis, their methods of looking for ground.

When we start to interrupt our ordinary ways of calling ourselves names and patting ourselves on the back, we are doing something extremely brave.  Slowly we edge toward the open state, but let’s face it, we are moving toward a place of no handholds, no footholds, no mindholds.  This may be called liberation, but for a long time it feels like insecurity.”  Okay, bring it on.  If, in order to write from a place that haunts me, “from the locus of my obsession and fear and desire,” I must, for a time, flail about, be out of control, confused, scared and lonely, so be it.

This Day, I Offer My Soul

“May this be the morning of innocent beginning, when the gift within you slips clear

Of the sticky web of the personal

with its hurts and haunts

and fixed fortress corners,

A morning when you become a pure vessel

for what wants to ascend from the silence

May your imagination know

the grace of perfect danger….”  John O’Donohue

“The grace of perfect danger,” a willingness to risk all to be authentic, to begin this day with a sense of innocence and wonder.  “We seldom notice how each day is a holy place where the eucharist of the ordinary happens, transforming our broken fragments into an eternal continuity that keeps us.” John O’Donohue’s words vibrate the wings of my soul.

I lie in bed, half awake and realize, as the day begins, I drank one delicious glass of wine last night, no more.  I offer myself to the Divine Mother, “Please guide my thoughts and actions today.”  I climb into my stained old robe and make my way into our kitchen. On the way, I make a detour to the bathroom, tongue scrapping and tooth brushing completed, I turn my mind to the morning “Joe.”   I look forward that first cup of coffee.  For years, as a yogi, I tried to give up caffeine.  Not today.  The warm, milking beverage slides down my throat.  Yum.  I open my journal, actually a notebook, and put the pen to the page, morning pages begun.  Life goes apace.  I read from Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing, The Perils and Pleasures of the Creative Life.  She reminds me, as a writer, how important it is for me to be a reader as well.  Good advice.  I spend more time watching TV than I do reading.  TV is more a way to pass the time, while reading nourishes my soul.  Dani writes, “Think about it: have you ever spent an hour reading a good book, and then had that sinking, queasy  feeling of having wasted time?”

Upstairs to meditate.  I let my meditation practice lapse over the past two weeks, devoting the majority of my free morning time to writing until I began to notice that I was anxious, paranoid and restless.  All signs of a rebellious mind.  Jimmy and I, started last Sunday, sitting for 30 minutes each day.  What a difference it has made.  Like time spent reading a good book, sitting in meditation is never a waste.  Now here I am, at my desk, writing.  When finished, I will eat a bowl of oatmeal, prepared with love by my dear husband.  I will put on my yoga togs and go out into the world to teach.

I am truly grateful for this day.  Oh forgot to mention, I ordered two books by Virginia Woolf, both on the recommendation of Dani Shapiro:  Mrs. Dalloway and A Writer’s Diary. 

Writing About Alcohol

Why do I write, day after day about alcohol, about my alcoholic mother, and about my relationship to alcohol?  Anne Sexton, when asked why she wrote such painful, dark poems, replied that pain engraves a deeper memory.  Virginia Woolf said strong emotion must leave a trace.  Dani Shapiro goes on to say,”These traces that live within us often lead us to our stories.  Joan Didion called this a shimmer around the edges.  Emerson called it a gleam.  ” A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,” he wrote. “Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it was his.” Dani Shapiro writes, “If you are a writer, you will find that you won’t give up that shimmer for anything. You live for it.  Like falling in love.  Moments that announce themselves as your subjects are rare, and there’s a magic to them.  Ignore them at your own peril.”

I cannot ignore the shimmer of alcohol, the stories it holds, the pain I and others in my family have experienced.  Am I an alcoholic?  The jury is still deliberating.  Those of you who rush to judgement, walk down this path with me.  See where it leads.  I am going to follow the shimmer, the gleam, the light.  I am writing into the light.

Last night we had a dinner party, actually a small neighborhood potluck.  Ten of us gathered at our house.  We drank, we talked, we laughed, we ate and we shared stories.

Since I began writing every day, I find myself asking people to tell me their stories because it is our stories that connect us.  In the course of the evening, I learned that one of my neighbors worked his way through college as a door to door book sales rep.  He made enough money to pay his tuition and travel to 65 countries in four years.   He was one of the first Americans to visit Vietnam after the war.  Among other things, he told us how he met his wife, who at that time dismissed his advances, but later traveled all the way to Thailand to see him.  He proposed there.

When we wrapped up the evening at 10:30, there were 9 empty bottles of wine and that did not include the one still half full in the refrigerator which went home with our neighbor two doors down.  Did I drink too much?  I did not feel light-headed or intoxicated during the evening.  I remember every conversation.  I have a vivid memory of the food we ate, Rendevous ribs,  coleslaw, a dreaming rice salad, asparagus cooked to perfection and cover with blue cheese.  And for dessert, pecan bars with raspberry sauce and ice cream. I recall with detail the clothes people wore.  One neighbor, who is absolutely gaga about holidays, had on a black cardigan covered with sparkling ornaments.  It was fabulous.  She had really decked the halls.  One man sported a crew neck sweater, while another wore a V-neck, cashmere one.  My husband wore my favorite blue shirt, the one that makes his eyes pop.

Back to the alcohol.  Back to my shimmer.  What did I notice?  The laughter.  The stories.  The camaraderie.  At the end of the evening, as we were washing dishes, I turned to my husband and asked, “Well, what do you think?”  He said, “It was great fun.”  Could  we have had as much fun had we not been drinking?  Maybe.  We are having another gathering here on Sunday night.  Neither of us will be drinking at that event.  In fact, I really don’t have any desire to drink again for quite some time.

Writing about this, following my shimmer, I feel very differently about alcohol.  It’s okay on occasion, but I never want to go back to a daily consumption.  In small doses it can be fun, but on a daily basis it is depleting, mind numbing, and ultimately boring.  Anything that becomes a habit, whether life enhancing or destructive, involves unconscious, automatic behavior.  I favor choice.  I do not want to be a human robot.

What about the after effects of a night of revelry?  My stomach is a little queasy.  I have a slight headache. Definitely not the way I want to feel on a regular basis.  The experiment continues.

One more thing.  As my shimmer around  alcohol pertains to my family of origin, I know more now than I did even yesterday.   I am not my mother.  I am very clear about that.  She never had dinner parties. Parties involve work, cooking, cleaning, setting up and breaking down.  Too messy.   And she had very few people in her life whom she could have invited.  She pretty much drank alone or with my step-father.  Living with my father was never a party.  If my stepmother did invite people over, my father always managed to start an argument with one of the guests, a sure way to break up a party.

I will not drink today.