The Worst Moment

The worst moment for the caterpillar is when it's still munching leaves and is beginning to think, "Is this all there is? Do I really just want to crawl around all my life munching leaves? This sucks! This is a horrible life. I could be doing something else. I feel like I was meant for so much more than just this. But damnit! I can't imagine what I'd be. You know what? Frack this! I'm going to cocoon myself up and not have anything to do with this stinkin' world..."

Bad Sleep.

Woke up at 2:30 – checked the clock because I suddenly needed to know how long I’d been sleeping. I’d heard something, a beep, a rustle, a collection of sounds that tried to wedge sense into my sleeping brain. And my brain - my ridiculous, anxiety-ridden brain - decided this situation required my immediate and conscious attention.

Running water? Outside? Someone running the garden tap at 2am. A homeless person has snuck into my yard to steal a bath. And he’d forgotten to charge his phone obviously because it kept beeping. He should use the patio outlet. He might need to make a call.

But I really couldn’t be woken up every night with this. I’ll have to install a lock on that gate. And then I’ll have to build up my fences because I could see the homeless people leaping over the fence to steal baths and have tea on my patio where they would play folk tunes on their guitars and laugh right outside my window.

All this work and distrust of humanity, and the horrible feeling that they would never let me sleep, only ridicule me for crashing their party. I’d fling open the window and yell obscenities in my half state of dreaming and all the homeless people would think I was such an asshole.

Then slowly, the sound of water rushing is resolved to be the wind in the trees. Just the wind. And the beeping becomes the random, rusty creak of something, like a hinge… I would figure out what it is, but the relief that I do not have to shame myself or go to the hardware store washes over me. All I need do now is fall back asleep.

Spider Mobile

Okay, so I don't wash my car a lot. I like it that way. I like that a spider of some kind has chosen my passenger side mirror as a home. I take care of my car, giving it the oil changes and decent gas that it likes. I make sure it runs well, but I don't care if it's a little sticky with tree juice. (I'm lookin' at you Ulnus glabra.) I feel my car makes a statement about how we need to worry about what's on the inside and less about appearances.

And did I mention the spider who has chosen my mirror as a home? I love that. I don't drive much so mostly it eats bugs around my house, but occasionally I take it out to eat.

Anyway, today I came out to find another spider had taken up residence. This one was an orbweaver, Arcaneus diadematus, otherwise known as the common garden spider. These guys are amazing. They build the really beautiful webs and eat annoying bugs all day. They are better than raid. I've run comparison tests. They don't bite and anyway, you always know where they are because they hang out in the very center of their enormous webs.



To make this web, the spider had to drop three anchor lines from the phone cable about 30 feet up. The rest of the anchor lines were on my car. Before I left my house, I carefully detached the web and moved it to a nearby camelia bush.

Wishing in the House of Yes

For this week, Jaimie Ridler's Wishcasting Wednesday is all about the Yes. What am I saying yes to? Is it something I want? Am I saying yes out of a habit of pleasing other people? Or am I getting to what I really, truly want?



I've started working with an amazing writing coach, Jane Anne Staw, and am finally saying yes to feeling good as I write. No more waiting to feel good if I get a good response! No more waiting to feel good once I master some trick of the craft! No more waiting to feel good!

Sorry cats! The door stays closed even with all the pathetic scratching. (Poor neglected babies, you'll have to wait to get your fancy treats and head rubs, oh dear!) The phone? Off. Email? Off. FB? Off. Any tweets I hear will be from actual, living birdies.

So a big, sloppy Yes! to writing as play!

Luxurious

What the heck is Luxury anyway?

One of the issues I deal with as I continue to kick depression in the teeth grow into the wholeness of my being is reward. In depression, nothing is rewarding. Neurologically, nothing produces a nice shot of dopamine. Nothing resets the parasympathetic nervous system to healing mode. Nothing feels good. You keep aiming for your North Star but every achievement feels just as shitty as failure so why bother going to all the effort to keep steering when you can get the same mediocre buzz from a decent episode of True Blood?

I have to teach myself how to feel reward. I’m only just realizing how bad I am at rewarding myself. One of the reasons I don’t recognize reward is that I immediately describe it as a failure of my own moral fiber. The feeling of luxury becomes the feeling of selfish indulgence. I could be bettering myself! I could be achieving my goals! But instead I’m doing something that, gasp, just feels nice!

This has to stop. We need down time. We need to exhale in order to inhale. We need rest in order to thrive. Recently, I caught myself framing my experience negatively and chose to reframe it as reward. I just wanted to see what this might be like. The result was pretty cool.

Which would you rather live?

I haven’t been taking care of myself. Since I got back from Michigan, I haven’t cooked the food I know makes me feel better. I keep trying to write, but end up watching bad television on Hulu while constantly looking at Facebook and Twitter, checking email. And then last weekend, despite all my intentions to write, I ended up spending Sunday reading a fantasy novel.

-or-

I have been taking care of myself despite being under the weather since returning from Michigan. I haven’t been hungry at all, some kind of bug?, and this has presented certain challenges to getting enough protein. I haven’t been up to cooking hot meals, so instead I’ve worked to eat healthy snacks. I realized that after a week in Michigan, I’d jumped right back into work. No time off to reflect or recover, no time to adjust for jet-lag. This weekend was the first opportunity I have had to do nothing. Or mostly nothing. I still managed two loads of laundry, and I took out all the trash. But for the most part, all I did was blissfully read a fun novel, the first time I’ve done that in three years thanks to the reading glasses I bought in Michigan. How wonderful to have a beautiful Sunday afternoon just to read. Luxury.

Wishing to Stretch

Jaime Ridler's Wishcasting Wednesday for this week is: What do you wish to stretch?

I believe that we don't always know what all we might be. Right now each of us is huge and myriad and strange and wondrous, but we’ve been taught to be finite. We are constantly pressing our infinitely intricate and miraculous existences into a definition. And everything and everyone we meet is also more than we are willing to imagine. This can be a terrifying notion, but it can also be an exhilarating one. It can make us fearful so that we lash out at anything that might tear down the illusion of our certainty, or we can choose to be grateful that we never, ever need to be bored.

I wish to stretch my ability to exist joyfully. I wish to stretch my perception of myself and in doing so give others space to stretch their own. I wish to stretch my ability to listen to others that I may better know this crazy, mixed-up universe I call home.

Wishing to Begin

Jamie Ridler throws a Wishcasting Wednesday every week on her creativity blog. This Wednesday her question for all of us is: What do you wish to begin?

Beginnings are such precipitous moments. They are changes of direction carrying all those unexpected thrills and risks. Too often, I zone out right at the beginning of things seeking somehow to escape responsibility for what may happen by pretending I'm "letting the universe decide my course." But abnegating my responsibility for my own life drains me of creativity - you need to own your choices to create - so first and foremost I wish to begin paying attention to beginnings!

I wish to begin a regular practice of creating art. In my family, my sister was always the artist and I was the intellectual. Well, I can be intellectual and create art so there! I can even do it at the same time if I wanna. Okay, that was so not an intellectual way to say that. See, I’m already beginning!!! (And just for the record, my sister can be a fabulous artist and an intellectual as well! Screw you, family boxes!)

And finally – for now – I wish to begin a journey of transforming the loneliness in my life into love and connection. I save the best for last. I grew up terribly lonely and alone. I used to be angry about this feeling that life and family had let me down. It’s good to be angry for a while about childhood things that scarred, but eventually we gotta move on. So I’ve learned some stuff about loneliness and I can use that knowledge to recognize loneliness in others. And because I have stood up for myself, because I’ve been angry at the way a little girl was left on her own too much with no mentoring or encouragement, I am moved to do what I can to alleviate that need in others.

So, what do you wish to begin?