It’s probably clear to you by now that I feel like I should be somewhere else…and that I don’t want to do much to get there. I suppose if I could give up on the idea that I should be somewhere else I wouldn’t have to worry about getting there.
Yesterday I wrote a speaker’s agent, today I’m ready to give it all up and accept where I am. I’m okay for now. Maybe that’s what happens when you take some small action. Maybe I’m just settling back into the life I’ve got. Maybe it’s just a realization that you can’t jump ship. Wherever you’re going is going to come out of who and where you are now.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Saturday, May 29, 2010
What comes after...
If there are any of you reading/listening – any of you out there looking at life from the beginning – the beginning of your writing life – or the beginning of any new venture (no matter how long you’ve been at it), then I owe it to you to write a little about the feelings that can come “after” you step out into that life you’re just creating, and you come home with feelings that this new life has begun, and then – as always happens – you are left with yourself and realize that you still stand at the beginning. Unless you’re on Oprah, beginnings are just that. They’re one small step. And this can feel a little disappointing and confusing too. What’s the next step?
If you’ve got a spiritual holding place for all that fits into your “new life” ideas, this figures in too. Your spirit may take a leap much higher from a foray into the first steps of the new life – of community or vocation or some small recognition – than would your logical mind. And besides that, your spirit is totally unconcerned with practical stuff like next steps and may seem to be of no help to you at all. As I wrote in an e-mail to a friend, “At such times, this spiritual stuff sounds like a bunch of crap.”
It’s this kind of feeling, and a few well-meaning people, that had me putting this in my journal at the end of the night after one particularly long and confusing day …
Oh, do not even try to dissuade me from my angst and the part it plays. Go your merry way and leave me to my rantings. Love is not always nice and whispery. Sometimes it hollers.
I don’t know that it matters how content you might feel with “where you’re at” or how discontent either. I’m pretty sure if you don’t come home from whatever your “new life opening” deal is, and feel a sense of momentum you want to hang onto, and a sense of stagnation when it leaves you, that you’re probably kidding yourself. And more than likely, all your ideas about “keeping the momentum going” turn to dust when the feeling of slowing down comes, and you hit a grinding, lurching, restless place where you STOP.
Whatever idea you had – maybe of promoting yourself, or maybe of modeling your steps after someone else’s, or maybe of seizing the opportunity of some contact or opportunity that was presented to you – the idea that had you happily jumping off your own track and deciding to take a faster train – that’s the idea that ends up making you want to scream in the end.
The scream says, “But that’s not me.” Or “That’s not for me.” And you feel, when it comes, in part like it’s a crying shame… “Why can’t I do that?” and in part like being saved from making a fool out of yourself (and I don’t mean a true and vulnerable fool, but one of those fools who suddenly is talking like you know what you’re talking about, when you don’t.) This, at least, is my particular malady. When I get excited/determined/feeling sure I know that I’m heading in the right direction…that’s usually when I blunder on the side of thinking I’ve got to do “it” (whatever “it” is) the way it’s been done before.
For me, this time, it was feeling as if I had to know what I’m about, know what I’m doing, have a “philosophy” more or less. I had to set something down in concrete and say “This is what it’s all about.”
Life and spirit according to Mari Perron. Here it is. Read all about it.
When the truth is, I’m tromping through a field without a map, and I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going. It’s when I “got” that – strangely enough after watching “The Band’s” final concert, that I first began to feel a sense of a sort of spiritual liberation that didn’t stifle my soul.
So…I’m just reporting that that’s the track I jumped onto this time…the track of defining what I’m all about. The “my philosophy” track. I was getting into it too, for a few days. Then my own writing told me, as writing will, that I was sounding like a “talking head” and I’d better watch out. It didn’t just say, “Careful” it said, “DANGER.” It said, “Burn me and delete all evidence that I ever existed.”
I guess if “getting ahead” means “setting things down” that firmly, I won’t be getting there.
I have to admit that I still feel some angst that this may be true, but at the same time I figure there’s nothing “new” worth doing in an “old” way, and that if I hang in there, and hang a little more loosely that I’ve been hanging, a new way will come to me.
I hope so. It’s been a bit of a misery hanging out with myself while I’ve been in this “making something happen” mood. I don’t feel particularly lucky or blessed to have had this discovery that’s shown me the error of my ways. Maybe relieved on some level. But at another level there’s been only a slow lifting of a teeth-grinding sense of frustration –.
Who doesn’t want to feel they’ve found their way or their ticket to the good life? Or not even that – who among us – those of us who are standing outside of that graced life of making our living at what we love, wouldn’t turn over our house and our house payment, and maybe even our kids, to be there. Not heading there. But to be there now.
Some of this is as ordinary (and miraculous) as dirt. I’ve gotta say that the people I meet who seem the happiest are those who are doing what they love to do for a living. Doesn’t matter if they’re mechanics or landscapers or artists. You talk to them and you’ll usually hear a story about how they began. The kid who went to business school only to discover he couldn’t stand that kind of life and so started the landscaping. The successful artist who had those starving artist years working as a parking lot attendant or school bus driver. That’s all I mean by ordinary. It takes the sting out of it – the kind that comes of feeling there’s some extraordinary importance about your work, or your spirit, or the times in which you’re living – as if you’ve got to make an impact and make it now. It can’t wait. It takes the sting, too, out of those “I’m too old (or broke) to keep fumbling my way forward,” feelings.
And so you go back, hopefully or resignedly, to tromping through your field or your woods, and feel, at least occasionally, glad to be there in the thick undergrowth with that open sky and those stars over head…to be where you’re not closed in already…where you’re not in a fixed position.
If you’ve got a spiritual holding place for all that fits into your “new life” ideas, this figures in too. Your spirit may take a leap much higher from a foray into the first steps of the new life – of community or vocation or some small recognition – than would your logical mind. And besides that, your spirit is totally unconcerned with practical stuff like next steps and may seem to be of no help to you at all. As I wrote in an e-mail to a friend, “At such times, this spiritual stuff sounds like a bunch of crap.”
It’s this kind of feeling, and a few well-meaning people, that had me putting this in my journal at the end of the night after one particularly long and confusing day …
Oh, do not even try to dissuade me from my angst and the part it plays. Go your merry way and leave me to my rantings. Love is not always nice and whispery. Sometimes it hollers.
I don’t know that it matters how content you might feel with “where you’re at” or how discontent either. I’m pretty sure if you don’t come home from whatever your “new life opening” deal is, and feel a sense of momentum you want to hang onto, and a sense of stagnation when it leaves you, that you’re probably kidding yourself. And more than likely, all your ideas about “keeping the momentum going” turn to dust when the feeling of slowing down comes, and you hit a grinding, lurching, restless place where you STOP.
Whatever idea you had – maybe of promoting yourself, or maybe of modeling your steps after someone else’s, or maybe of seizing the opportunity of some contact or opportunity that was presented to you – the idea that had you happily jumping off your own track and deciding to take a faster train – that’s the idea that ends up making you want to scream in the end.
The scream says, “But that’s not me.” Or “That’s not for me.” And you feel, when it comes, in part like it’s a crying shame… “Why can’t I do that?” and in part like being saved from making a fool out of yourself (and I don’t mean a true and vulnerable fool, but one of those fools who suddenly is talking like you know what you’re talking about, when you don’t.) This, at least, is my particular malady. When I get excited/determined/feeling sure I know that I’m heading in the right direction…that’s usually when I blunder on the side of thinking I’ve got to do “it” (whatever “it” is) the way it’s been done before.
For me, this time, it was feeling as if I had to know what I’m about, know what I’m doing, have a “philosophy” more or less. I had to set something down in concrete and say “This is what it’s all about.”
Life and spirit according to Mari Perron. Here it is. Read all about it.
When the truth is, I’m tromping through a field without a map, and I have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m going. It’s when I “got” that – strangely enough after watching “The Band’s” final concert, that I first began to feel a sense of a sort of spiritual liberation that didn’t stifle my soul.
So…I’m just reporting that that’s the track I jumped onto this time…the track of defining what I’m all about. The “my philosophy” track. I was getting into it too, for a few days. Then my own writing told me, as writing will, that I was sounding like a “talking head” and I’d better watch out. It didn’t just say, “Careful” it said, “DANGER.” It said, “Burn me and delete all evidence that I ever existed.”
I guess if “getting ahead” means “setting things down” that firmly, I won’t be getting there.
I have to admit that I still feel some angst that this may be true, but at the same time I figure there’s nothing “new” worth doing in an “old” way, and that if I hang in there, and hang a little more loosely that I’ve been hanging, a new way will come to me.
I hope so. It’s been a bit of a misery hanging out with myself while I’ve been in this “making something happen” mood. I don’t feel particularly lucky or blessed to have had this discovery that’s shown me the error of my ways. Maybe relieved on some level. But at another level there’s been only a slow lifting of a teeth-grinding sense of frustration –.
Who doesn’t want to feel they’ve found their way or their ticket to the good life? Or not even that – who among us – those of us who are standing outside of that graced life of making our living at what we love, wouldn’t turn over our house and our house payment, and maybe even our kids, to be there. Not heading there. But to be there now.
Some of this is as ordinary (and miraculous) as dirt. I’ve gotta say that the people I meet who seem the happiest are those who are doing what they love to do for a living. Doesn’t matter if they’re mechanics or landscapers or artists. You talk to them and you’ll usually hear a story about how they began. The kid who went to business school only to discover he couldn’t stand that kind of life and so started the landscaping. The successful artist who had those starving artist years working as a parking lot attendant or school bus driver. That’s all I mean by ordinary. It takes the sting out of it – the kind that comes of feeling there’s some extraordinary importance about your work, or your spirit, or the times in which you’re living – as if you’ve got to make an impact and make it now. It can’t wait. It takes the sting, too, out of those “I’m too old (or broke) to keep fumbling my way forward,” feelings.
And so you go back, hopefully or resignedly, to tromping through your field or your woods, and feel, at least occasionally, glad to be there in the thick undergrowth with that open sky and those stars over head…to be where you’re not closed in already…where you’re not in a fixed position.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Tripping
12:30 and I’m home from work early. A stroke of good luck, or timing, or I don’t know what, just that I’m home and no one else is and it’s a gorgeous 75 degree day, no heater needed in the cabin, the door open. I promised myself a half hour here before I go in and begin cleaning up my trip mess. So far have emptied Angie’s big purse onto the bathroom counter so I can get it back to her. I’m not even sure what purse to re-stuff. It’s changed to summer over the weekend. I’ve changed so much I don’t even know what to write. I’m excited inside, sort of like I was before the trip.
I’ve got so many thank you notes to write. How do you thank people adequately for coming home with a feeling of excitement? Newness? Possibility?
This was a trip to talk about A Course of Love but it was NOT about books. It was about people! Just one person and another and another. A whole community of loving people. I am still tripping!
I’ve got so many thank you notes to write. How do you thank people adequately for coming home with a feeling of excitement? Newness? Possibility?
This was a trip to talk about A Course of Love but it was NOT about books. It was about people! Just one person and another and another. A whole community of loving people. I am still tripping!
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