LaurieWrites

All in all and I'm loving every rise and fall.

All in all and I'm
Loving every rise and fall
The sun will make and I will take
Breath to be sure of this
In the end and then
All will be forgiven when
Surrender rises high and I
Gave what I came to give

I didn't get Red Hot Chili Peppers tickets this weekend. I was prepared to do so, and through a technical glitch I wasn't able.

I've been acting like it wasn't a big deal, because oh my God, do you see what else I have to spend and save my money on? Tickets to this show aren't a big deal. I need to learn to practice moderation in the every day and then I know I won't be so pressed when the big things come. I don't even know where I'll BE when these show dates roll around. Who would even go with me? Why am I even concerned about this?

Because.

This is one of my favorite photos I've ever taken, on the inside track at Pimlico five years ago when my boyfriend Anthony Kiedis and Flea and those other guys played Virgin Festival.

It was an amazing day. I was alone, I didn't care. It is a film shot from a disposable camera. I saw the Chilis and the Killers and some other people. It was fantastic. I crawled inside that music.

I loved every rise and fall. How often does that happen?

n. lacking courage; very fearful or timid

He told me last week that I was a coward. I said get it straight: I was a scarecrow, not a lion -- a fool, sure, but not a coward. Except I guess in some ways I am pathetically afraid, the person I am with him, anyway.

I still didn't like it. It still wasn't nice to hear.

People, through some fault of their own or none at all, mostly make you what you are to them, and also who you are in their orbit. The way they talk to you, you to them, how they hold or discard your heart, how they smell (this is important), what they ask of you and how they respond -- it makes you this being that you weren't the minute before you met them, the minute-before person who you will never be again, although if it's not right that's who you'll always be after going back to. It's freaky and uncomfortable. It's science. It's something else, isn't it?

We scrapped out this long, heartfelt, baffling road, he and I. A coward could never have survived it, would have dropped dead eleven months in, the first time she was made to feel unnecessary, inconsequential, distracting from the truly important stuff. And more than a decade later, it's never over, sometimes it feels like, except I think that calling me a coward ends the game, even if he's even partially right. It's not something I ever want anyone to say. It's not something I want someone to have even a partial hand in making me be. It's not something I want to be capable of on my own.

It is not who I am.

This is me a little while ago, in the summer time, my favorite. Flawed, absolutely. I have so much work to do, always, always, keep on moving, doing the work. Figure it out. Make the calls. Be so much better. Do the hard stuff because if you don't, who will? Try to achieve some semblance of what you're capable of before you die.

I still, after careful consideration of this assessment, don't think she is a coward, at least not in the ways that count the most around here.

 

It's better that we don't talk that much anymore. I don't think we bring out the best in each other.

Wednesday

People are living. People are dying. People are suffering in relationships and jobs and life situations all around me. People are falling in love. 

People are doing what they are terrified to do and people are stumbling through the monotony of a job they hate or are just merely accustomed to enough that they don't know it's killing them. People are accepting the status quo. People are getting a dollar menu baked potato from Wendy's and going back to work to clock other people's hours. People are living with people they don't like because they pay the bills. 

People are living. Dying. Suffering. Falling in love. 

(Walt Whitman did this better, I know. He heard America singing. I suggest you leave now and reference his work.) 

How we are not all in awe of the crazy power of what is happening to people all over the world, every second, next to us or thousands of miles away, is a testament to the power of our biologically-fueled function of denial, mostly, and also our hardwired need to put one foot in front of the other. To keep walking. To play our hand, to get what's ours -- to assure ourselves that June will be better than January. 

People are numbed out. 

People are pointlessly hashtagging stuff on the internet like our lives depend on it. 

People are telling you every second who they are and want to be and aren't yet and what they need from you and holy Christ they are so frustrated! 

People are settling. 

A good friend had a baby tonight. Another just stated a big truth publicly, necessarily. Yet another is receiving care from  hospice in her home. Another watched her shows and went to bed. Another is up way past her bedtime, not long before her kids get up, assembling a gift, a ministry from her hands so that a very sick friend will see tangible evidence of her contribution on earth -- the human collateral that says she has mattered in the way she absolutely has.

I just told a relatively distant relative a truth I needed to tell only her, because I know she will understand. I know she'd read a chapter of my story today or eventually and get it. I didn't feel like I had much today, but I had that, and all of a sudden that was enough. 

On other pages, people are complaining because a huge corporation did not invite them to an expensive party in an artificial princess world, and as ridiculous as that is, who can blame them, really? On others, people -- people I love, even, or at least like -- call me names because of my ideology, my purely-felt interest in humane treatment for others, for equity, for the right to live right, as I see it.  

Tell me this world is not an insane, complicated, beautiful, horrible, fever dream miracle. Go ahead. Tell me that tomorrow we'll do better and I won't believe you. Tell me that every day most of us try? I will. 

New year's day

I'm sitting at the base of a small mountain in a place I've never been.

I'm sitting at the base of small mountains all over the place.

I've been moving nonstop since August and haven't reported back. I'm going and going and going, knowing I need to make a move that for me is monumental, scared to death to do it, rolling over every possible (mostly horrible, obviously) potential outcome in my mind, worry stone synapses and rosary bead neurons.

When Mary Oliver asked what I was to do with my one wild and precious life, I doubt that this pattern of behavior would make it into the desired multiple choice options from A to ZZ. This is some nonsense right here. This is self-torture of an outstanding degree, my own personal lunatic fringe. If you were doing this, I would take you out for beers and tell you to run, run, run in the opposite direction from the insanity. I would tell you to go, consequences be damned, because wasting one more day on this was not advisable. I give excellent advice to other people.

*********************

My year began in water.

I stood in the cold shallows of an ocean I love for longer than seemed reasonable but I couldn't help it. I looked at the sky and couldn't stop crying, and thought in the cheesiest possible way but a way that my soul travels nonetheless that starting off this span of time here had to mean something good, right? It had to mean better? It was set up that way, anyway -- as a demarcation and an escape, a running to, not away, at all.

Seagulls are irksome birds but their cries among the waves are a peculiar kind of music, and I wanted to take that with me, too. I hear it in meditation when I finally get my mind to shut down, especially when I'm asked to visualize something that calms me, that makes me feel at home in myself.

When I'm particularly off my rocker I think that things like that -- sounds, pictures, words, signs -- can set me right. My burning bush is multimedia, I guess, and mostly invisible so far. It's a collection of minutiae that has answered no big question yet, and my signals are so crossed right now that even the ocean on a day that signifies the first of the next didn't make anything clear.

Normally when I walk down to the water to say a pitiful goodbye until the next time there is a second when I feel okay leaving that makes turning around possible, a natural end that did not occur this day. I had to force myself to go, to get in my car and go back into whatever was next. It didn't flow at all, which is typical lately.

There are oceans everywhere, the occasional mountain. I just wish sometimes the answers were clearer, that I could navigate these changes and questions and challenges with more grace and less hand-wringing, more quiet resolve than hysterical chatter and questions and reliance on the advice of my friends. It feels like, at 41, the path should be more obvious to the other side of things, especially things that aren't working, things that feel so difficult, that aren't on their surface life-threatening when I know that is the case for so many others. 

But I can't and it's not, and I guess that just means I haven't done all the work yet, inside or out, to make that possible. Or maybe I haven't learned to accept the fact that sometimes the hardest is the simplest, that I have to let it be that way for it to be that way. 

On the last plane I was on, I wrote "More joy" in my little red book, as an aspiration, I guess. I meant it. I don't know what it looks like, but I meant it when I said it. I dared to write it down. I think that is something of a start.