Tag: joy

Creativity, Music, Things I Can

64. Things I Can Lift: These Arms

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Last night, I danced at my cousin’s wedding. Danced like a toddler does, right up front.

Like this.

I’m guessing everyone else out there enjoyed Sara Bareilles’ music video for “Brave” at some point in the past two years. I just today discovered it on About Face, a website promoting positive body image.

Just as she intends, Bareilles’ video shivers open a smile that leaks tears.

—

Remember the game you used to play in the doorway? You stand facing out and press the backs of your hands hard against the doorjamb. You push there, muscles working, and count. Twenty, thirty, one hundred. Then you step out, and after a breath, marvel as they rise.

As if invisible threads.

As if a secret deal to suspend the laws of physics.

For most of the hours in most of the days, I push hard against something. The clock, a hunger, my doubts, someone’s needs.

The deadline breathing fierce at the base of my skull.

The flashing cursor, the buzzing phone.

The undertow.

It seems a whole life becomes this pressed angle, wedged here in a narrow doorway. I barely recall the name for air.

Until song calls me out, and shows me again the secret to tricking gravity.

 

Family, Outdoors

Takes a Licking

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We do not comb our hair. We shove our feet into old sneakers. The dog dances around our knees.

The stained coat is good enough. At least it is lined and will keep the wind out. “Hold her tongue,” Bug tells me. He means for me to squeeze her snout closed to keep her from licking him. I do not do this. It would be easy but he has grown stronger with the latest surge. He is rough with the dog now. He is approaching her weight. He torments her with the grooming comb and scarves from the dress-up trunk. Instead, I place her head against my knee and try to force her still while pretending to be gentle. I try to model tenderness but it is hard when my most regular company is a 72-RPM boy and an oaf of a dog. Continue reading “Takes a Licking” →

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Happy 100 Days: Beginnings

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This whole thing started because I was stuck. Two years had come and gone since the Jenga blocks of our little family had fallen all around us. Apparently it was not the most solid construction to begin with, but that’s a different story.
 
I was waiting. Waiting for what is anyone’s guess. Something to change, maybe? For a surge of energy? A white knight? I kept waiting to feel ready for the next chapter. Was I ready to move forward with Giovanni or ready to let go? Maybe I was waiting for Tee to make a decision that would force me into decisiveness. I am sure I was waiting for a better-paying job to appear on the horizon (as if this is how such things happen), or to feel inspired enough to launch the project that haul me out of my financial pit. At the very least, I was waiting to feel something other than dread about the future.
 
I think I was waiting for a sign. Since I do not believe in signs, it will come as no surprise that none materialized.
 
All this waiting contained neither momentum nor acceptance. It was frantic. I kept swirling, spinning my wheels, slipping into the same old vortex of exhaustion and hopelessness. Pick your metaphor. Every one is a different version of a circle turning back on itself. Work was a grindstone. Conversations with both Giovanni and Tee were broken records. The needle never moved forward along the groove of the music to find its conclusion and lift away, making room for the next piece. No, it was all just revolve, skip, repeat.
 
Work was getting done. I was walking and dancing myself healthy, staying on top of Bug’s schedule, calming myself before the reactiveness and complications that seemed to weigh down every interaction with the people closest to me. Sure, I was looking well enough on the surface. “You really just have it all together,” one of my co-workers said to me. I gave her a “huh!” that made her jump. I was holding things together, but only barely. It just didn’t make sense to me that two years into this new life, and everything (and I mean everything) felt so hard.
 
I claimed I did not know how to do anything differently. Those familiar grooves, even the revolve and skip and repeat, were keeping me a kind of safe. Known safe. Nothing-has-to-change-and-I-can-manage safe.
 
But, boy howdy, was I miserable. Oh, and did I mention? Tired, tired, tired.
 
About three weeks ago, I found myself returning to the same refrain of despair after a brief detour. I had gone through a tailspin preparing for a series of interviews for a job opportunity that would have helped me approach self-sustaining. After the dizzying crash when it was offered to one of the other two candidates (the one with 14 years of experience in a field to which I have just returned, so who can blame them?), I brushed myself off, got back to the grind, and heard the mean little voice I had heard at least four thousand times before:
 
No one is coming for me.
 
For two years, this message has left me bereft.
 
But on this day, I woke up. Something sounded different. I looked that voice right in the eye. “Say that again. A little louder.”
 
No one is coming for me.
 
A key turned in a lock. The whole mechanism of my understanding slipped into alignment, and the door fell open.
 
No one is coming for me!
 
I am off the hook! I do not have to keep waiting for vague fantasies of rescue to come pulsing to life. No one is coming. It’s all me, and I get to do this in any way I see fit. No more clutching, grasping, longing, and struggling to endure this in order to get to that.
 
What a relief!
 
The reason I am stuck is not because I do not work hard enough. The reason I am stuck is because I am stuck. The only way to get un-stuck is to lift the needle, remove the worn-out composition, and replace it with music more to my liking.
 
I am ready to make my own happy.
 
I understand that “happy” is not a steady state nor is it a fixed target. I also know that whatever form it takes, it is an ingredient required for that elusive success I feel is so far out of my grasp. Without a little pleasure, I am just stuck in the same groove. Revolve, skip, repeat.
 
Depression, exhaustion, and a worst-case-scenario mindset have done far more damage than all of my professional and relational decisions combined. Or, another way to say it is this: feeling bad makes the universe of options constrict so completely that I make poor, short-sighted choices. And I generally choose inertia over bold steps.
 
So, “happy” may be an insufficient condition for getting un-stuck, but it is certainly necessary. Career success, inspiration, intimacy, and health all demand this one thing. Not harder work, no. I have been working myself hollow. Instead, it is throwing open the curtains and maybe humming a little good-morning tune.
 
Zippety-doo-dah.
 
That’s how this all started. I decided to right then and there to quit kvetching and start taking in the good, as Rick Hanson advises. It was a simple decision to begin the daily practice of seeking out a more positive, loving perspective. To calm my reactions and smile the tension down. I figured that doing this with any intention would require turning the good experiences over in my mind, rolling them around the tongue. First, seek moments of engagement, then collect them, and finally, describe them.
 
For these 100 days, I give over to the possibility of neuroplasticity, and let these practices do what they can to rebuild the tendencies of this long-suffering brain. This was the promise I made to myself when I wrote that contract with joy.
 
I will let in the light. I will find the new song. I will not shy away.
 
I will write it all down.
 
This final practice, I have discovered, kills two birds with one stone (or plants two trees with one seed, as the case may be), because writing makes me happy. Writing about happy things makes me doubly so.
 
Let the signs come. I may not believe, but I will keep my eyes and ears open. If they do not materialize, well, then, I will just have to go and cobble them together from whatever is on hand. Which is, after all, everything.
 

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Happy 100 Days: 99

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We only see each other in passing after months and months apart. She lives too far and I have the kid. She keeps reminding me she has never met my son, which is sort of extraordinary considering how much a part of me she feels. We make plans again to get together. We mean it every time.
 
She knew me before Tee. Back then, we walked together along the river and ate heaps of pancakes at the little grill where she sometimes worked. She always was the finest waltz partner. That has not changed. She lifts my arm up and over to twirl my cloddish feet in the most elegant of arcs.
 
After, in a dark corner away from the whirling dancers, we huddle together and gossip. I have known her for a decade at least. Longer? Yes, so we discover. A dozen years. Amazing.
 
We laugh like schoolgirls. Like sisters. I know the funny way she rolls her eyes, and feel what lives in layers there: the tenderness down under the scar down under the sarcasm down under the sugary flutter of the lashes. She knows my history so I don’t have to masticate all over again that mouthful of ineffective words just to get her up to speed. We get right to the laughing.
 
It is hard to believe either of us is so much older than we were then. We still circle back around to the same silly patterns. We are still always who we have always been. For once, this is a reason for hilarity rather than angst. Just leaning close to her welcome skin for 10 minutes, that fleeting return to the familiar, puts the fizz back in my tired blood. We hug good night with more promises of visits. She returns to the dance floor and I head to the parking lot. I cruise out onto the Beltway feeling the strangest of sensations. What is that, I wonder? Serenity? Happiness? Something new, but also like coming home.
 

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Happy 100 Days: We the Undersigned

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Whereas
in 100 days we will say good
night to this year. We will rise in the dark
January morning to a new
beginning.
 
Whereas
I do not remember
my resolution when this year began. I probably did not
find the courage to make one.
This morning,
the cool light of the equinox
returned it to me.
 
This is my contract
With Joy.
 
The agreement is made and takes effect on September 23, 2012 between myself, hereafter known as “first party” and the creative juice of the universe, hereafter known as “second party.”
 
The provisions of this agreement are as follows:
 
During her tenure, the first party will
Stay alive
stay awake
trust her gut.
Greet her sadness
before letting it blow past,
shake hands with anger
then release her grip.
 
The first party commits
to noticing one beautiful thing
for every one that brings her sorrow,
watching her step
for quicksand
and seeking a way
around.
 
Her service requires
smiling
when her face has forgotten how
glancing at the moon
when she would rather stay blind
speaking gently to herself
as if she already is the woman
she is becoming.
 
The term of this agreement is 100 days and shall be open for re-negotiation on January 1, 2013.
During the aforementioned term, the first party commits to choosing a minimum of 100 moments of happiness.
Each one, a pause:
She will submit a record of one each day
in writing
and when possible, speak
her gratitude for it.
 
For services rendered by the first party,
the second party,
maker of joy, will take care of the quality
of the goods
and the timing
of the deliverables.
The second party provides non-payroll benefits in the form of insurance
against despair.
 
Documentation of service will take the form
of punching the clock and ticking
the box.
One glimpse of beauty each day, a promise
small yet signed in a scratch
of autumn light at this, the first of the last of the year
in which two parties give
over
to a single promise
of renewal.
 

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Baptism

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A man at the gym asked me what my plans were for the weekend.
 
“Camping,” I said. “And swimming in fresh water.” What bliss! “It’s been my one goal for the summer. Lakes. Swim in lakes.”
 
“Not a fan of the beach, huh?”
 
This stopped me. I shrugged. Who doesn’t like the beach?
 
“No, it’s not that.” I put my hand on my heart and leaned in. “It’s just about going towards what I love.”
 
“Oh.” The stranger at the gym began to focus with great intensity on tying his shoes.
 
Does it sound odd? “Move towards what you love.” Maybe it is awkward to say such a thing during a casual exchange, but I don’t know how else to give it voice. A person don’t need to dislike wineries or shopping or baking to find herself doing less of these things. It’s only because she learns that her joy is in rock climbing, playing mandolin, or growing basil on her patio. Letting go of half-pleasures is a necessary cost of orienting towards bliss.
 
For years, I have believed a rich life is a varied life. “Balance,” say The Many, “is the key to wellness.”
 
What if balance is trickier than we think? Maybe we are simply excusing our piecemeal approaches to entertaining our fragmented selves. What if we know our purpose, our rightness, is in this small assortment of things here, and the more we do them fully, and the more we do them with our whole attention, the richer the flavor of our lives?
 
What if less variety, not more, is the secret spice?
 
Certainly, engaged citizenship requires baseline familiarity with a broad array of topics that affect our shared residency on this planet. Scan the headlines, visit a museum, serve someone in need, and learn a craft. Also, though, have the courage to choose. This one gift is my calling. Or maybe,This slim collection of activities are the homes of my true Yes.
 
To follow that call can be so very scary. What if I am wrong? What if I am no good? What if I fail to attend to all these other toys and creatures clamoring for my attention and I miss something big?
 
I can only say this: To know your love is a precious thing. It is the rarest treasure, and you have to dive, over and over, into those suffocating sea-caves without anybody pointing the way. Sometimes you can only see a glint of it and the closer you get, the darker it seems. You have to believe yes, it is gold, when all around people are hinting that you are a fool and all your plunder is rust.
 
Your hands begin to wander back to the mundane entertainments. Your mind whispers that it would rather be at ease with simple tasks than faced with the raw tenderness of its own unfurling.
 
By all means, avoid the call. It’s okay. Your avoidance will not last long.
 
Once you know, once you have spoken that truth aloud backward and down into your own belly, there is no turning back.
 
Then the TV is no longer a foe, the bottle has no allure, the 270 “friends” and their carbonated noise up on the surface of the earth are rendered silent. You no longer need to retreat from the things you believed were holding you back, and you do not need to name what you do not like. Instead, you emerge towards your own self becoming.
 
You lower your thirsty body into the cool waters. You know you have arrived.
 
Move towards what you love. What you leave behind cannot break your heart, because your heart is only just now being born.
 

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Self Help Book

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“Don’t look back.” This is a handy rule for keeping a journal. Write forward, write now. Or, in the priceless words of Natalie Goldberg, “Keep your hand moving.”
 
Not looking back is also a handy rule to break. Inside those nights that flood your throat with brine and scour the art from your hands, you might have no choice but to turn around and fix your eyes on the shoreline. Open the old books from the previous years. Peek at where you were. This is a good way to remember that you have arrived at exactly the place you need to be.
 
Tonight is such a night. My year-ago self hollers directions across the distance separating us, calling me back from the undertow. It is awfully cold and not a single star orients the sky. A person could take an unplanned detour into the Bermuda triangle. Thank goodness that girl packed the map and a bullhorn.  
 
The entry below, from April 30, 2011, is translated more or less directly from the cursive.
 
 
So, you let go of your joyful thing because you are not as good as the good ones (you tell yourself), you lack the drive or talent or passion (you believe), they are wise and better and more together and older (or something) and you feel so young and directionless and wide-open and full of unlimited possibility.
 
And so. You let go. You move on to a different hobby, find a love or a project or a child or a simplified identity to consume you. And your life is full, you smile a lot, you have friends, you climb things and make things and learn things and master things, and life is good.
 
It is all just rocking along until one day you stumble across a person doing the thing you used to know as your joyful thing. And that person? That person is so very young. That person has cobbled together a way to do the joyful thing from scraps of potential, a handful of opportunities, a pinch of time. That person is just as muddled as you were (and, in fact, still are). But, that person is doing the joyful thing anyway. Doing it with dedication, doing it well, making something beautiful with it. And you see now that no one was wiser than she is now. No one was wiser than you were then. You had an answer in your hands, in your life, in your daily practice.
 
Do your joyful thing. Do it badly. Do it in the spaces between. Do it sloppily and selfishly and with too much self-absorption. Do it no matter how much better someone else seems to be at it. Stumble doing it. Be awkward doing it. Make an ass of yourself doing it. Improve and adapt your way of doing it. Seek new approaches to doing it. Talk to others who do it (but not too much – you need to be doing it, not talking about it). Do it for an audience of 1000 even if no one shows up. Do it for god, for the neighbor kid who beat you up, for the other kid who rescued you. Do it for your ancestors and your grandchildren. Do it because you know you have to.
 
Do it because you suck at it but the world doesn’t care that you suck and the world doesn’t care if you’re a genius. It is not up to the world.
 
You are not great for doing it. You are not a martyr for not doing it. You are only less you if you don’t. You are only getting one thing right if you do.
 
Practice. Every sing day, practice your joyful thing.
 
It’s true you may never be any good at it. So, you should spend the rest of your days doing it because it is yours. You cannot escape it. It will haunt your years if you don’t do it. Don’t fool yourself. If you are not engaged in the daily practice of doing your joyful thing right now, something is askew in your life. You may be drinking too much, or having dreams of infidelity, or living a little too stretched to fit the role you’ve taken on, or you hate your job, or you don’t quite have the energy to make a decent meal, or you spend your evenings watching TV and zoning out on Twitter, and something feels wrong but you can’t put your finger on it. Maybe you still do your joyful thing a couple times a year, and you think of it as a hobby, and call your life “balanced.” But when you do it, it feels hard and a little forced, and doesn’t feel like the joyful thing it once was. And so you wonder, Was it just a passing fancy? Maybe it wasn’t really my joyful thing. . .
 
Don’t let yourself off the hook. You know better. The reason your occasional attempts fall flat is because your joyful thing is rusted out, thirsty, and in need of a good cleaning. You can’t just hop on and roll it around the block once or twice a year and expect it to function optimally. You’ve got to get back in there, take it down to bolts, oil it, prime it, feed it, get it moving. You need to work the kinks out a little every day. Every damned day.
 
Your joyful thing is not a toy. It’s not a hobby. It is you. It is your limb. An organ, maybe. You have to treat it as an undeniable, irreplaceable, necessary part of you. A part that will turn septic and poison the rest if the nourishment is cut off. A part that will feed and energize and balance the rest, if properly attended to.
 
It doesn’t take much. Just daily practice. Start today. Do your joyful thing.
 
Now, this very second. This is when you return to yourself.
 

Purpose

Composition

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You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.
– James Baldwin.

Is this what happens after the tender eardrum bursts? Is this what it is to bear the thick scars, to become deaf, to grow hard?

The third man in less than a year has chastised me for lacking empathy. The third man in less than a year has used the word “selfish” to describe what he sees. It seems this should sting, but oddly, it falls away. The swelling sensation in my chest for my son has to indicate some capacity for care, right? The dedication to Bug is so instinctive and self-sacrificing that this thing love, while perhaps not my dominant chord, is a riff repeated throughout the improvised song of me.

Perhaps the other exes will be nodding their heads as they read this. You said it, brother. That exhalation of relief at being rid of such a cold and steely thing. This is confusing, though. I have also been told I love a little like scalding, a little recklessly. Sometimes, when I get a verse of you stuck in my head, it is hard to shake it free.

A brief and totally unscientific survey of the years preceding the marriage indicates a pattern of ducking out from under the proffered embrace. I fling myself back into the path of my own cyclone, grab hold, and ride. Yes, even if it bucks and hurtles me away from the you whose train just carried me where I claimed I wanted to be.

Alas, this string of men may be right. Should I be peeling back prickled rind of their criticism? It would be nice to make a course correction if it is called for. It’s just that I find myself a tad too unconcerned with this interpretation. Selflessness may be overrated. (Spoken like a truly spoiled brat).

Early experiences with the blues teach a girl a few things. Like, take charge of your own joy. Don’t wait for someone to re-write the song in a major key. Go the way your blood beats. It was never Tee’s job to make me happy, and one of the things he told me recently is that a few years into our relationship, he stopped trying to put a smile on my face.

Sad, but you know what? Good for him.

The desire to be a generous mother and wife eclipsed my capacity for blazing my own trail. We try so hard, the driven among the women, to be soft and giving while the unwritten strains of our own magnum opus threaten to burst the seams. I am sure I am not alone in having tried to quell the jostling desire for a more symphonic score, to draw the string around the neck of the sack and press it down in the river of some man’s cadence until it stopped squirming, until it just floated away on his meandering current.

It does not work (unless it does, and which is worse?)

Certainly, I love to love. Also, though, I have learned to return to the dance, my sweat, the craft. Ink, work, questions, earth. It is unfair to rely on him to conjure the beauty. I have learned how to work the magic with my own hands. This has a price, of course. Not needing him might (oh, irony!) leave him hungry. No wonder I begin to look ugly when, upon hearing the growl in his belly, I toss him the bones. He is no fool. He sees me heap my son’s plate with an extra helping, then retreat behind my velvet curtain and feed in rapturous solitude on the meatiest bits myself.

Please allow me to veer to the side here and indulge in a little contextual inquiry. How is it that we are already a few bites into the 21st century, and a woman who unapologetically carves out time to tune her own strings has to ask herself if she is a loving enough creature? When I rise before the sun to dance or run or write, I know I am leaving that man to his own dreams. He wants me to stay. I get it. I have been the one left before, and it chills a little, right at the moment when the most delicious thing would be to slide up into a tangle of limbs. Girls who become women have to swallow the hardest lesson: the thirst accompanying the beloved’s receding back is what finally makes you decide to stop grumbling at the barren sky. Pick up your own instrument. Pluck out your rough tune. Turn your voice to the horizon and call the rain.

She wakes up when she realizes she no longer aches for company. She has, without knowing how it happened, stumbled upon a few marvelous secrets.

One: it is really a treat to work hard and succeed at something that matters in the world, and the more you do it, the more you want to do it.
Two: that thing you enjoy? It turns out to be just as fun when you do it alone, in the company of strangers or friends, or alongside a lover. It really doesn’t matter. Just doing it makes you smile down in your belly, and that is the truest source of your generosity.
Three: loneliness is the low-hanging fruit. Joy is just a little higher up. Take your pick. Both are within reach.

For me, the greatest surges of love occur when watching a companion out there, bringing his hands down across the taut skin of the world and banging things into place. Seeing him play and build, move and shake? That’s what sets this lady to shivering, not his proximity. Or, at least not only that. I, too, crave the comfort of the hearth, and it is so very nice to spin a cocoon of whispers and flesh, to fit inside someone’s breath.

Please consider this: I am as warm blooded as the rest.

When I turn away, I am not running away. It is not a cold thing. The door is open wide, and I am still offering up whatever scoop of love I have to give. It overflows, and I will gladly glop the best of it all over you once we have both worked up a hunger in our separate pursuits.

It is a gift to wind through the fine lines of the staff with a companion, feeling the buzz of resonance when hitting the notes together. I am not so self-contained as to welcome the prospect of a lifetime of playing one-handed. Being able to cherish and care for a companion, to practice love, not just as a three-chord ditty but as a collection of movements, is a breathtaking blessing. I hope I am fortunate enough to have a chance to attend to a partner’s place in things, and to help him open his voice to his true lyric.

If I am free to practice mine alone, I will leave him to his. My arms will stretch wider, my mouth will lift higher, and I will be able to hear the many layers of him. All I need is a few measures to compose myself.

Growing up ain’t easy. We resist it until we surrender, and then we pull our fingers from our ears and hear, at last, how clear the sound of our own pulse, how perfectly timed the beat of our veins to that of our feet. Finally, we do not concern ourselves with finding someone to fill the gap. We write the bridge in where it belongs, and then cross it to meet our companion, weaving together our whole and separate songs.