That’s what I want to do. Go beyond. I have a very strong familiarity (meaning: I listen to it to go to sleep at night and can quote it verbatim) with 30 Rock. This quote at the end of Season 7: Episode 9 – Game Over (while the credits are rolling) always gets to me. She asks her entourage where they went the night before and the woman responds “Bed, Bath and Beyond.” Octavia says with force and excitement “We went beyond!” One, how often are you excited to go to a store that is around all the time and…
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It’s summer and hot. This is when I want nothing more than to stay inside with the fan going (and the AC turned down as much as my bank account can handle). I get my room temperature herbal tea and all my books. Not just any books. But all the books with any form of writing in them. It’s time to sort, categorize and rip. A long time ago I used to set aside a morning or an afternoon for this process. I would have so much writing spread across so many journals. Now I do it in shorter sessions…
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It is a relentless cycle I’m in… I realize that I’m doing too much… So I cut back… And I feel VERY LOST… so I…. Add something (lots of things) new and then I … Get resentful… And cut back again… Then I feel like I’ve opened the space to let more in… So I do… and then… It’s a cycle I’m stuck in and I know that only I can stop it. For the moment, I’m in the quiet time. I’m feeling nervous. On edge. Like it’s time to introduce something new. But (and this is how I break…
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a lot of things really don’t matter. And you don’t figure out what does actually matter without retreating. I am retreater. I met a friend for tea the other day and I said “I tend to retreat during Spring and Summer.” She responded “You said that back in the Fall and Winter.” So I retreat all the time. Because I am a retreater. I’m not surprised. I want to make sure I have time. It is vital for me to make space, to have space, to have time and space to make the time and space. It is the necessary…
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Maybe it’s time to let some of that go Why do I have to change who and how I am to fit this hypothetical, constantly changing, make-believe culture that changes every second? And changes depending on who I’m talking to? Anyone who creates and then shares takes a huge risk… “Will they understand? Will they get it?” That’s the hope. The fear looms large. I’m not afraid of people not getting “it”. (Whatever this “it” is.) It’s the inevitable pressing of others on me to make the elusive “it” more “understandable”, more “palatable”, less provocative. You know, so it can…
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when swimming in a culture that doesn’t seem to want that at all When things aren’t working (and that feels like ALL.THE.TIME), I find myself looking for systems and procedures that can get any one area of my life under control. It doesn’t have to actually get it under control – just needs to give me a semblance of control. It gives me some form of an understanding (even if it’s false) in a world that I‘ve always found pretty messed up and hypocritical. I tell myself that this semblance of control is needed to keep me from spinning out.…
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Metaphorically of course…unless… When the last season of The American Ex Wife Podcast changed its tagline (thank you lyz ) from “May the dresses we burn light the way” to “May the bridges we burn light the way” it tugged at something deep in my heart. I’ve been told all my life not to burn bridges. At times I’ve been happy I’ve followed that advice (when I was young and uninformed and didn’t know what was at stake.) And there are times… when I should have grabbed the torch, rounded up my girlfriends, set it all ablaze, toasting marshmallows and…
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The first pearl in my Necklace Writing Prompt from Beth Kempton’s Free Winter Writing Sanctuary 2024 – SoulStack by Beth Kempton It was a day like any other day. Life crumbled around me and I did my best to gather up all the pieces and put them back together each night. It was a semblance of a life really. But that’s what I thought life was back then. That day, sometime in the haze between January and April, those pieces shattered as they hit the floor. And that day, I wasn’t trying to pick them up. Instead I walked slowly…