The Beautiful Answer

Ah, the Healing

Short post tonight, because after so much work for so many days in a row, I haven’t had much time off. Of course, it’s for a good cause — the stuff I care about, my life and career. But I find that as I near this little blogging experiment, I am drawn more and more to self-care, and find that I need to get better at it for myself. 

I spend a lot of time helping others to heal. I love this work so much that I’ll probably do it in some degree until I leave the planet. But sometimes, you need to blow off the world a little, relax, read a book in a field somewhere. Today I took a long drive with my husband, saw The Convert at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City and grabbed some late lunch on the way back home. 

These are the rhythms of a normal, laid back life. I don’t get to experience these very much, with the schedule I’m currently keeping. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I am glad to be here, healthy and vibrant, building what I want to see in the world. So pulling away a bit doesn’t come from any resentment I may feel about working too much. Rather it comes from the need to restore and regenerate, for a few days at least, until I’m strong enough to give as much to myself as I give to others. 

Rock On

Add this to the million reasons to be grateful: I am safe. I am healthy and alive. I am happy, most of the time. I learn. I love to learn, and I get to do this on an ongoing basis. I can read, which is rare in this whole wide world of ours, and I am comparatively rich. 

I have had the gift of music and theater, my parents and grandparents taking me into New York City to see orchestras play classical music, ballets, Shakespeare Festivals and Broadway shows. Some of my earliest and happiest memories involve these incredible gifts. I have had the gift of renewal, meeting new groups of friends, co-workers, colleagues and mentors, who have helped me along my path at various stages. 

I have had challenges, certainly my share of them, and lived to tell the tale. People have helped me through these as well. People I may never even meet have helped me stay alive, by planting fruits and vegetables, raising animals that will become my sustenance and trucking these things around the country. They have helped me by listening, and even not listening at times. 

Recently I read an article about how the idea that we’re all connected isn’t just woo-woo crap made up by someone trying to sell you a self-help book. It’s true on a very scientific, molecular level. Your atoms crash into mine all the time at the grocery store, in line at the DMV, picking out a new book at the local bookstore. Every once in a while, usually out doing mundane things like errands, I will remember this and fall to my knees a little in my mind. My brain will do a little somersault of joy in the knowledge that I am not alone. I’m never alone, in fact. And if I should see your atoms shooting past me at the dry cleaner, I’ll give a little wave and say, rock on you crazy molecule, and godspeed to you. 

A Little Bit of Luck

I don’t believe in luck. There, I said it. I believe there are the creation of good circumstances, and being open, and making your chosen reality out of decent decisions, and tough choices and following, even if it’s hard, the path you feel to be true in that particular moment. So today, as the chocolate pound cake was baking and the substantial haul from the farmers’ market was being put away and organized into meals in my mind, I decided to work with the concept of luck. 

I used reframing and realized that I suppose I am lucky, in my way. I have been through more than my share of scrapes in my life, escaped poverty, and bad jobs and worse boyfriends and, heck, even survived a life-threatening illness last year. More on that soon, since I’m finally figuring out how I want to talk about this. But for the longest time I never looked at it that way. I thought I had managed, through sheer moxie and street smarts, to pull myself out of various situations. Arrogantly I suppose, I thought it was me who had made it all work out. 

Now, after many years spent directing energy for healing purposes, I know that’s not entirely true. I know that we’re always directing energy, always, even if we’re not aware of it. I know we do this inside our bodies, and even in the area right around us. I know we do this in our minds. So how much of it is luck, and how much is us? If it’s not conscious, is it entirely an external force? 

After I got my terrible diagnosis and went through what I went through to heal, I thought about getting the word lucky tattooed on my body someplace. I go back and forth between thinking it’s life affirming and that it might somehow might attract bad fortune, just to fuck with me once something unremovable has been inked onto my skin. But that’s the way it felt — as if I had been given a second chance, a new life, and that the old one simply wasn’t going to do anymore. 

So maybe I do believe in luck, a little. Maybe the universe has shown me, in no uncertain terms, that it’s there, and that it helps to create my reality right alongside me. Maybe today, and tomorrow, and forever, my old way of being isn’t even going to dare to peek it’s little head up anymore. That ship has sailed and it’s onward now, to whatever’s ahead. Personally, I can’t freakin’ wait. 

There But For the Grace of God …

I’m not a super religious person by nature, and have a pretty healthy skepticism of anything smacking of religion, woo-woo or intolerance. You see, some of the most spiritual people I’ve met have also been the least tolerant — other other ethnicities, creeds, cultural experiences, classes. The list goes on and on.

But I was struck today at how sudden it is that your own life comes rushing back at you. I had a life-threatening illness about a year and a half ago that I’m still trying to figure out how to talk about in public. It very quickly and very deeply put me in touch with what it meant to be alive, and gradually I came to accept it as a weird kind of gift, which had suddenly and somewhat unpleasantly reawakened me to my own life. On some level, I’m still processing it, and the healthy way I live now.

On some mornings, this one in particular, all of the vibrancy of life, the strange mixture of excitement and dread, the blood coursing through my veins, comes on me suddenly. So much so that I thought I was going to cry because it was overwhelming, seeing myself as me, but then as part of some huge cosmic whole, all of which is pulsing and seething with, well, life.

These moments are deeply humbling to me, in a way that’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t been through it. As I move through this year-long exercise, I’m sure I’ll find a way to express the confluence of emotions that runs through me in a way it never did before I was ill.

And as far as reframing it, I suppose I’ll concentrate on the very core of my life, and that old adage that probably belongs on some greeting card or other, about living each day to the fullest. You truly never know when things will end and, not to get too dark on you or anything, but what’s here is worth sticking around for. Take it from someone who almost didn’t.