don't stop the music

Walking to my car last night I ran into a neighbor and his friend. Sometimes it's ok to be vulnerable. You choose your moments or perhaps they are chosen for you. My building has covered parking in the rear of the building that opens to the street behind. There's an indenture in the wall behind the cars - a concrete stoop mostly hidden from view. Dominic and his friend meet here at what seems to be odd intervals to talk and (from the smell I would assume) smoke pot.

I take a seat between them without asking and am thankful when they don't object. An 80's mix of R&B plays on Dominic's phone. They are guys and I'm a girl, but there's no flirtation. People are people and right now I need it to be as simple as that. We commiserate over our crappy parking spots and swap stories of scratched car panels. We talk about Los Angeles. How it has changed and how it has stayed the same. Dominic's friend leaves.

Yarbrough and Peoples' Don't Stop the Music begins to play. I know this song from a disco tape my sister and I used to dance to as children. I don't have to think about it too much. The space hangs there between us, suspended by a few bars of music. I sing. And I let my voice carry. There have been so few moments lately, so little room for the heart. It doesn't lessen or even dislodge my hurt (which hangs somewhere between my ribs, sticky and unforgiving as tar). But I know I've been witnessed in some small way. And my idiot self is made easier to live with by it. 

Saturday, June 13

6:30 – Woke

7:15 – Morning sitting in the Ballroom

8:00 – Breakfast

Comments were made of the completion variety, several relating to the performance and the audience's reaction. My observation was that the right impulses seemed to arise out of being present, sometimes bringing about surprising or unexpected turns of events, obstacles, and fears, which were overcome by, again, becoming present. Afterward, I realized my comment was poorly timed, but was able to laugh at the irony. 

10:30 (?) - Intro team with Curt, Tony and I for guitar mechanics.

Some insecurity about whether commentary from me would be supportive or disruptive to the group. I felt I couldn’t quite hold the space. A wish to see what is needed for the Intros post-performance. 

Private lessons:

Friday, June 12

6:45 - Woke, showered. Two separate health issues which have been bothering me all week have come to a point.
7:20 - Sitting in cabin
8:00 - Breakfast
9:30 - Staff Meeting

Gave short, private AT lessons to Julian, John, William, and Igor

12:30 - Personal Meeting

I frequently lack an emotionally clear response to being thanked. Where the polite thing to do would be to acknowledge it, thus acknowledging the person giving it, I am sometimes uncomfortably-speechless instead.

A flight back up to the cabin. On our way to the dining room MB and I spy Michael Hendrix, shoeless, hot-stepping it through the grass back to the ballroom. He looks like a wood nymph. I find out later he runs without shoes. This is a thing.

1:00 - Lunch

I'm asked to join a ladies circle outside where a song is being presented. It is a spiritual. The idea is to sing together at dinner. An intention for the performance is suggested.

Gave Frank a table turn. Despite the wide gap in our experience, that he puts me at ease.

Ran into Glenn and begged a little 3rd Relation help. We worked on it briefly in the Ballroom, both of us dripping with sweat. 

Thursday, June 11

6:45 - Woke late, dressed in a hurry.
Acted on a gut feeling and wounded a friend's feelings.
7:15 - Did my sitting on the picnic table outside our cabin with birds.
Apologized.

On the way down the hill, thinking on how to manage AT in Sandra's absence and also honor and include Kim's AT experience/offer to teach on the course, a solution arrives. I've been wanting to work with the BNI kitchen team and she has a presentation on tensegrity that will take 15 minutes. We can split the BNI group at OM's regular time, making sure everyone gets a chance to work with both of us and relieving each of us of having to present individually for more than 15-20 minutes. This idea was met favorably by Kim.

8:00 - Breakfast was especially good.

I missed an opportunity to sign up for a personal meeting.

9:30 Staff meeting
10:30 AT in dining room w/ Kim and Erin

I go overtime with both groups. There is much we can work on when it comes to being present in the kitchen and my enthusiasm sometimes causes me to run long. Something to be aware of.

Wednesday, June 10

6:45 - Woke
7:15 - Morning Sitting

Passing into the Ballroom I notice several Intros in the Ratty Room. I join them, thinking RF will be presenting the exercise. When he doesn't arrive, I worry. This is, by far, the shortest-feeling 45 minute sitting I've ever had. After raising a false alarm, I find I had either misunderstood or failed to hear that he was presenting in the Wonder Room this morning.

Breakfast of slimy, tepid porridge.

9:30 - Staff meeting
10:30 - Orchestral Maneuvers
10:30 - Guitar Mechanics Intro team in Ballroom with Curt and I

"Curt, are they allowed to breath?"
Afterward, a moment's rest is stolen in the cabin.

1:00 - LUNCH - Borscht

Short meeting with Sandra regarding tomorrow morning, short meeting with Joe regarding a good time to work with the kitchen team.

During housework, a table is moved to the patio just outside the Ballroom for my use teaching private lessons. It has a view of the lake.

Have I mentioned it's bloody hot? And humid.

3:00 - Intro team in Wonder Room (using our arms and legs, looking around the room from the occipital joint, etc) / BNI repertoire in ballroom

It is a tight squeeze in the room (which is bright, with hardwood floors, a green chalkboard on one end and windows lined pleasantly with rainbow-colored curtains). As with the previous day's teaching, there is a moment where I wonder what the hell I'm going to do and whether or not anything I'm saying is making sense to anyone. I stick with it. This is a responsive group who are, for the most part, holding open a space for the teaching. Several great questions at the end of the session by several students who have hung back. In some ways, this moment is the most instructive. I see how one good question from a student can change things for the entire group. Some hesitation and curiosity about what the BNI team is doing in the adjoining room.

4:00 - Tea

Curt skipping stones.

Sitting on the bench with Frank overlooking the lake. This is the closest I've gotten to the water. He's interested in the fish - how they cross from their world into another the moment they break the surface going after a bug. He's hard of hearing, but can understand me. Have I been trained? No, but in the last few years I finally got up the guts to sing karaoke. Which songs? Julie London, Cry Me a River and Stray Cats. Would I translate for the meeting? Of course.

Tuesday, June 9

6:30 - Rise and dress

7:15 - Morning sitting

A moment walking in, a choice is made to sit on the right-hand side of the room. I realize as I am following my feet that there is sunlight falling on this side of the room while there is still darkness in the corners of the other. I take a seat, feel the cool air from the open window behind me on my shoulders and back. 45 minutes. First, circulation of attention through the body, two rotations of LHM and once through the 60-point exercise. A very asleep left foot needs awakening and I'm up.

8:00 - To breakfast. Eggs and oatmeal with strawberry yogurt. Silence visited, but I was not there to greet it.

9:30 - Staff meeting in the Small Room

Aim: Allow myself to follow the right impulses as they show up and support the presence of AT on the course.

The meeting is underway. Several scheduling bits and pieces are called out. I have a clear sense that the right place for me is with the Intro team at 3:00 pm but, I hesitate. I feel unsure. Is this the right time? Perhaps I should save it for after I've had a chance to get Sandra's feedback. Lunch maybe?

The meeting adjourns and, as we walk out, I realize I have just missed an opportunity to follow through with my Aim. I mechanically move to fix this mistake. I pull aside PG, who is in charge of the scheduling and let him know my 3:00 p.m. intention to work with the Intro team. TG overhears this and seems to assume responsibility for my mistake.

10:30 - Orchestral Maneauvers (OM) with Sandra (first two relationships) - I am late due to an unforeseen complication.

I feel as though I can't write until I have my own apartment again. There's a part of me I reserve for private places. I need privacy. I need solitude. Even if a thousand noises rise up around me, thump and bump at all sides, it doesn't matter if a particular space is mine. It gives me an excuse to be free with myself, to take off my mask of intellect and strip myself of expectation. I'm slow to know how I feel. I need places, physical places, where I can explore my internal landscape unencumbered. 

Change is coming.

Sometimes you can feel your center of gravity begin to shift before anything has really happened - the future reaching into the present, pulling you forward. My tiny boat has begun to rock. It's strange how prepared I feel coming out of AT training and yet I find I am still scared. Will I be strong enough to face the days ahead? Will I find any help? Can I do any better than I've done?

And the small community of friends and teachers I've had over these last three years has already begun transitioning from the old to the new. These relationships will never be the same. I find this reality difficult to face without some measure of sadness and feeling of loss. I do, however, recognize how necessary all the steps to get to this point have been and am trying not to get too sentimental about the next one, wherever it takes me. 

out of darkness

The most honest moments of my life have been in longing. Not for your arms or your comfort, which are great, but for death. My journals are full of it. My heart is full of it. Too much to ever forget. How can I tell you this, lover? Without being misunderstood? That life without death is empty.

The summer I went from church to church like a beggar and none would admit me. Even the last (whose doors I thought would open) left me stranded outside the sanctuary. But I stayed. I knelt. And through a crack in the door I felt the slow leak of heavenly air-conditioning on my face and caught how the mingled scent of wooden pews and Frankincense filled the place. How can I tell you this? That I was born impoverished? That I was born from horrifically glorious moments of utter certainty that nothing I can do is right. That I was born as light is born - out of the darkness of night.

where the action is

It's raining in Santa Monica. Were I in Atlanta I would call this a drizzle but here anything that's wet and falls from the sky qualifies as rain. It makes for an interesting mix of odors - of asphalt and atmosphere, potted lavender in one doorway, a homeless person sleeping in the next.

I'm not complaining, but too much sunshine lends an invisibility to things after a while. Weather changes can inspire us to look at the same things differently, or look somewhere else entirely. Driven indoors I remember that, while California is endowed with great weather and an abundance of natural beauty, not everything worthwhile happens outside. 

The Viewing

his nose hadn’t been that big.
his face had been round,
not sallow and oval.

his hands alone were
recognizable; their rough
strength knew the way

of the soil and also
the Gardener’s secret:
casement broken,

the seed is the sapling is
the tree is the blossom is
the apple is a glass of

spiced cider or Nana’s
last jar of preserves.
of these nothing is lost

but it’s not understood.
we step forward unsure,
are unconvinced

by the makeup.
of the two, death
is the greater deceit.

departures and arrivals

Why do I keep ending up where I am not? 

the spins

This morning, even after a long, deep sleep I find I awake still trapped in circular thinking. Taking a closer look I find this process is one that's purpose is twofold: 1. to decide how I should act according to what others might need or want from me, 2. to decide how I should feel about it. This is a land of hypotheticals and imagination, of clumsy paper-mache replicas and connect-the-dot drawings. There is a feeling which is tangible when you've hit upon something real. Something recognized by the body - maybe in the chest or solar plexus. None of these half-asleep, half-awake musings have that quality. The real question begins to emerge. Why this need to problem-solve? Especially when people aren't equations and no matter how much circumstantial evidence I put in, the answers I get out are largely based on my own past, disconnected from the present, dead. Just as dead is my attachment to outcomes outside of the moment. I want x to happen and y not to. How can I engineer this future for myself? What a tangled mess! Untangling however is thankfully, miraculously, mercifully simple. Be here, be honest, be brave. 

stone soup

I forget I have a choice, always, to be present and engage with others. I don't have to wait for them. Intimacy is a food. Sometimes it comes easily and naturally, sometimes it gets lost in the constant onslaught of day-to-day preoccupations. Sometimes I'm so hungry for it I lose perspective and, in my impatience, begin to blame others. But there is one thing I've learned and keep learning: you cannot wait for others to give, to be brave, to initiate, to move towards you - you must step forward yourself, and do it again and do it again. It's not a matter of taking what you need, people fall into that, but quite the opposite. It is stone soup. It is all of us in the kitchen together, giving from who and what we are, present to what it is we all essentially need - each other. 

33 years

Today I received a phone call from my Dad who received my letter. This was THE letter. The letter that took me 33 years to write. The one I believe we've both really needed. I don't know of anything you can understand a moment before you're ready, but sometimes readiness requires work and in this sense we haven't time to waste.

right and good cont.

Tonight 'right' won over 'good.'  Why don't I feel better for it? People, somewhere not too far from me, are kissing under a crimson and white peony sky. Not all of them hate each other. I don't envy any of those people as individuals. I am my self. I have tiger lilies and words, ants too - a random one blazing its way across my desk or waking me with a tickle at the elbow or up the forearm. These tiny visitors are softer and kinder than a hair shirt, but not warmer.

good and right

"Doesn't it feel good? I mean, doesn't it feel right?" Someone said this to me not too long ago. While it was more a suggestion than a question, I took the time to consider it. The assumption is that the answer to one will be the answer to both. It's convenient to lump these two together indiscriminately. It is decidedly inconvenient to lump these two together indiscriminately. The unnecessary is costly. Not everything that feels good is right. Conversely, not everything that is right feels good. 

with a view

Today I woke slowly. It's summer and for the first time since I've lived here I'm enjoying having the curtains drawn and my windows open. At this time of night you can hear grasshoppers and sounds from the 405. In the morning you can still hear the 405, but the grasshoppers are replaced by crows and occasionally a scream or two from the macaw that lives in the house behind ours. My view is of our neighbor's roof and the tops of the trees that line our street. The way the trees move is lovely and when you're beneath them you get the sense that their branches, similar to a weeping willow's, are reaching gently for you.

My room, having these last few days been slowly relieved of its mess, seems so large to me now.  Lately I've been too busy to pay it much mind. Now it feels strangely large. Large and quiet, as though it accepts me and I, in seeing, accept it. Perhaps these last days are the first I've really felt at home here. At home I'm allowed to feel simple and plain. I haven't felt this way, this strongly, in a while. It's wonderful. It occurs to me that simplicity and plainness are virtues, or can be, and I realize that I want to feel them more often. 

driving home

I saw the sun rise today. It's pink hues backlit the San Gabriel Mountains. I remember mornings when I was younger, laying in bed and watching the light (the miracle of light) gradually give shape, color and texture to the objects around me. How strangely they emerged from obscurity, carved out of darkness.

There's something beautiful about the world at rest, before the house stirs and the mechanics of our daily lives are set in motion. The streets are empty and the birds have not yet begun their chirruping. It was like that this morning. Driving home with the windows down I could feel the moisture in the air. Cool and clingy, it was dew settling on every still-calm or sleeping thing.

flowers from the Faire

Yesterday I had a hard time. I was having a hard time and it was looking like I might not find support. But support arrived. It arrived bearing gifts of affirmation. It arrived and didn't shun me for being a mess. It arrived drinking Pellegrino and smoking cigarettes. It arrived. It looked me in the eyes and told me I was worthy of love. And when, at these words, I began to cry, it kissed me. The kiss of kindness and understanding. So much so that today I am still tempted to believe.

Hope is a delicate thing.

It is also a hard thing.
How difficult it is at the onset to let it into your heart.
Your stubbornly armored heart.
Then it is harder still to hold onto.
And before all is said and done you may be asked again
To muster your courage.
For the hope that has to be let go of.

picking up the tab

Yesterday's rejection was the realization of one of my worst fears. So much so I have to ask myself if I didn't somehow make it happen. But, once I begin searching my faults for answers, I never seem to stop. There are too many to keep account and besides, on our own it is nearly impossible to have the full story.

But it's true that what we don't know about ourselves can hurt others. Avoiding putting people we care about through unnecessary pain is not the only reason for deep introspection and soul-searching, but it's not a bad one either. No one else should be asked to pick up the tab for our troubled histories or the agendas of our never-quite-satisfied personalities. 

I see in myself an inclination to avoid responsibility. But I want to be the kind of person who runs to, not from, these. Runs. I'll never accomplish my Aim if I keep moving in its opposite direction.

born to nun

For a long time now I've held the belief that continuing to pursue my Aim in any real way requires a life of abstinence from romantic love and the long-term company of another. Sometimes I believe it is because I am unsuitable, sometimes I believe it's because of a lack of suitable partners. I'm not sure it really matters which, probably neither is the case. And why I decided this would be my sacrifice, I'm still not sure. But sometimes I wish I would just let it go. 

On this day I tangoed. You must really love something to endure dancing not one, but three songs each with Mr. Sweaty-Shakes, Dances-So-Close-I-Can-Taste-His-Cologne AND Kama-Sutra Man. I'm not at all sure on this night I fully embraced the concept of "suffering cheerfully", but at least I know where I can go to practice it - along with my back ochos and molinete.

On this day I was forced to ride a creaky-ass bicycle to Abbott Kinney where I had brunch with another under a canopy of bougainvillea whilst sitting on a milk crate next to a leaky faucet and about 15 hungry finches eyeing my grub. It was a lovely day.

the fool

On this day I renewed my wish to keep an open heart in the face of things shifting and uncertain. If I stay present with myself and with others, if I trust what I've learned and who I am, things tend to work out. If, in the course of following my heart, I appear foolish to others, this is a consequence I am ready to accept. Today.

On this day I was fucking moody and surprised at how maladjusted I seem to be to EVERYTHING.

On this day I knelt in someone's lawn and prayed in the moonlight.

On this day I was happily distracted by the seeds of some rare and nasty malady taking root. It could simply be infatuation or, dare I say it, some deeper, longer-lasting kind of affection. Time will tell.