Hello, week: we are here.
Today is a Sunday chicken because I spent this weekend in workshops and just emerged, and I am trusting in right timing o’clock. It is good to be here.
{a breath for being here when we get here}
Thank you, week!
This is the 411th week in a row we are chickening here together!
What’s been working?
Breathing deep. Remembering that just because in a given moment everything seems completely wrong does not in fact mean that this is true. I can pause and wait and let the moment unfold. Trusting that tight things will unfurl, and do so beautifully. This is working.
I might try…
Listen to instinct sooner. Be willing to abandon a perfectly good plan.
Naming the days.
This week was the week of wild into wonder, and these were the days.
After-effects. New eyes. May this day bring great joy. Powerful re-entry. Asking for what I need. Calm + roots. I trust what I know.
Upcoming biopic if it were based on this week…
Hahahahahahahahaha.
8 breaths for the hard, challenging and mysterious.
- Massively overwhelmed by life, the universe and everything. I love how my crises are an equal mix of existential and seemingly practical. A breath for remembering one step at a time and nothing is wrong.
- Oh Orlando. Heartbreak. A breath for whatever needs to be breathed here, I don’t even know, I am retreating into my bubble so I can breathe in my heart.
- Today is Day 42 of not having a home, and while Now Is Not Then and I can see and feel all the beautiful ways that this is true, I am not always able to maintain my adventurous spirit. A breath for healing.
- I know what I want and it is not at all what I expected. This is disorienting. A breath for spaciousness and trust.
- I want to be dancing and I am not dancing. A breath.
- The faraway beautiful cowboy is very far away. A breath for this.
- The neverending project is neverending. Where is my sanctuary. What does it look like. How can I work on all these things and also work on what I want to work on/ A breath of trust and safe passage.
- Inhale, exhale. May all misunderstandings and distortions, internal and external, dissolve in love if not in laughter. May peacefulness prevail. Trust-more love-more release-more receive-more. Goodbye (and thank you), mysteries and hard moments of this week.
8 breaths for the good, reassuring, delight-filled.
- Returned from the coast with dreams, plans, excitement. A breath of joy.
- Found a perfect simple solution to the neverendingness of the neverending project. A breath for grace and play.
- An absolutely incredible mind-blowing weekend of mad hot epiphanies while working on Panther Training aka studying with an expert in pelvis and posture, which are very panther-related things. A breath for how deeply I am breathing.
- Decadence. A breath for fully committing to this in the right moment.
- Again: I know what I want and I know what I don’t want. A breath of quiet trust.
- I feel at ease in my life a lot of the time, which is kind of amazing given that a lot of aspects of my life are not easy right now. A breath for pausing to notice this.
- I am so fortunate to have the amount of freedom, inspiration and play in my life that I do, and I am grateful. A breath for all the miracles involved in this.
- Thankfulness. Treasure in the form of the softest dog, the happiest cat, friends who are happy to take me in, surprise miracles, beautiful coincidences. So much treasure. Everything is okay and so much is good. Nothing is wrong, even when I want to believe it is. Now is not then. All Timing Is Right Timing. Thank you for this grand adventure. A full breath of deep appreciation in my thank-you heart.
Superpowers I had this week…
Last week I asked for the power of deep rest, I want to be so well-rested and peaceful that I do not miss any internal intel about how I feel, what I need and what needs to change in my environment. And beautiful sweet surprises.
I received all this and more, as well as the superpower of Everything Beautifully Orchestrated.
Powers I want.
The superpowers of being my most embodied graceful powerful self who transmits in every moment that I am not to be messed with.
The Salve of Embodied Grace.
This salve is made of deep breath, awareness, deliberate movement, pleasure, and the total immersion in the commitment to not sacrificing physical and emotional comfort to attempt to please strangers.
Playing live at the meme beach house — the Fake Band of the Week!
This week’s band is:
While Wearing Shoulderpads
Their latest album is A Kingdom In Need, and this band is just one guy.
Announcement time….
More to come soon, but I left the monster manual in the place that used to be the the shop. So if you missed the closing of the shop, there is still something beautiful for you!
How was your week?
Come play in the comments. Share something from your week, take a breath, or just say hi! No rules, my format doesn’t have to be yours, we’ve been doing this every week for years now and there still isn’t a right way.
Everyone belongs. We let people have their own experience. We’re supportive and welcoming. We lovingly refrain from giving advice.
And of course it’s always okay to comment under a made-up name, whether for play and delight, or in the interest of Safety First.
Wishing you a glorrrrrrrrrrrrious day, a restful weekend and a happy week to come.
It’s fine if it’s not Friday anymore. There’s complete chicken amnesty — jump in whenever you like. Blowing kisses to the Beloved Lurkers too!
Follow
Right timing! Yes.
This has been a hard week for me in many ways. There’s today’s horrible and frightening tragedy of course, and then the crashing waves of reactions, which I am drawn to even when it might be wiser to withdraw; I search for the signal and keep drowning in the noise.
And on Wednesday, I was stunned by the loss — the utterly unexpected suicide — of someone special, an artist and a teacher, someone who was more of a beacon to me than I consciously realized. I am so very sad about this, and I am one small drop in the rippling tide of sorrow that his whole community is experiencing. Oh, this is hard.
And there is someone in my life with whom I want to feel more intimacy and ease than I currently do. I am at the point of seeing the patterns, but not yet shifting them as much as I wish. A breath for patience, and another for faith.
I am grateful for the good things in my week: writing, singing, connecting with clients in music and with words and without words, the love of my partners and my daughter, petite epiphanies that become grand when combined, refreshing food and drink, vibrant colors, comfortable spaces.
I’m going to apply some of that salve now. Thank you. <3
You are delightful and delicious, Havi, and I am thankful for you.
Cluck cluck hoppety hop…
What worked? Lying down.
Hard, irritating, etc.
* Dear local musical festival, it is well after midnight, on a school/work night for many locals. Fireworks beginning after midnight? Not. Cool.
* Parts of my skin are raw or rotting. It is not pleasant.
* Ugly comments.
* Missing both cocktails and brunch b/c of need to lie down.
Pleasing, soothing, reassuring…
* Having a bandeau in the bathroom drawer.
* Having an envelope in the car with the correct house number on it when I’d punched the wrong one into the GPS.
* Being able to defer chores in favor of recuperation.
* Recognizing the unviability of Plan A in time to prepare for Plan B
* A friend’s grade-school niece won a writing contest with an essay on bisexuality
* A thank-you card from one of my own nieces
* Spending the start of the weekend with an old friend and her hundreds of flowers
Warm wishes and cool, refreshing drinks to all y’all
That’s a lovely salve. I might go swimming in it.
The hard:
– heat
– fatigue
– lack of sleep
– too much too many too loud
– having no way to express any of this except crying, in King’s Cross station and at church
– Rubbra. Gorgeous, but difficult, and I kept missing rehearsals because my head’s a mess
– weird sermon about Ted Hughes’ manpain
– lack of summer shoes that aren’t falling to pieces
– oh, Orlando
The good:
– some excellent friends
– excellent family, too
– news from the Episcopal Church of Scotland (note: Anglicanism seems to do much better at being progressive where it isn’t the dominant religious force… funny, that)
– continuing superpower of Marvellously Unfazed by recurrence of levels I’ve played before
– lots of things to write and to write about
– bread and butter
What worked:
– noise-cancelling headphones
– opening the notebook
Always right timing.
What worked: deciding I missed someone and reaching out to say “I will be here at this place probably” and then my friend texting me to say “he is now at this place” and me going there and him coming over and standing next to me for the whole rest of the night because I had said I would be there and he wanted to see me too.
The Hard:
Mixed confusing feelings about new things. A breath for not needing to decide right now.
Wondering if the wall you put up around your heart is permeable.
The Good:
Having someone take themselves on a little tour of your house where you have all your weird things and treasures and they pick them up and look at them and like them and don’t run fleeing because of what lives in your brain.
When someone takes you to breakfast and then drives the long way home so they can show you places that matter to them.
Seeing him again out with friends and realizing that he had been talking to his friends about you (in a good way) and thinking about things and realizing the last time a new person felt that way about you was 12 years ago. A breath for right timing.
A hundred other tiny lovely things.
<3 <3 <3 I feel so much love reading about this
Hello, chicken
A lot of hard:
-Very Old Patterns… blech.
-Hurting someone I love without meaning to, and without a solid plan on how to change this
-Someone else changing their mind, which creates a lot of unnecessary work for me
Hmm. Similar: one person’s process is strongly affecting another person’s reality. Different: I’m on the giving end of one and the receiving end of the other. Similar: both situations are very frustrating. Different: in one case I’m mad at myself, but I have control. In the other case, I’m mad at someone else and have less control. Huh.
Similar: I have a feeling what may help is utter stillness – *pause*
And things good (breathing):
-Friendship – still learning, ever learning what this really is
-ragged-robin, dame’s rocket, buttercups, daisies, trefoil, bleeding heart, pink columbine
-Noticing, language, space to process and to Be
Wishing you all the most spectacular flowers beside your path this week <3
Oh, thank you so much for the flowers!
(And a rose campion for you!)
<3 the salve. Always just the thing I need.
What worked: doing the easier thing.
The hard:
~ Sinus infection is still ongoing. My immune system was brought to its knees by stress.
~ Still haven't gotten back into my groove with daily creative practice. I've let The Situation throw me off so badly and now it's hard to get back.
~ Read a journal entry where Slightly Wiser Me predicted that things are only going to get worse if I don't bail right then, and I didn't believe her and tried so hard to make it better. She said I can have it easy, and I didn't think I could.
The good:
~ My talk submission for the conference was accepted and announced already, yay!
~ First appointment with the therapist went great. I managed to make a decision about what I want from The Situation right then and there and sent the email the next day.
~ Ever since I've sent that email I've been feeling relieved and certain in my decision. I feel good about paying the price of admission for this huge, rich, multilayer lesson that I've gotten.
~ Lawyer friend called just to ask what's been going on, and supported my decision as well.
~ Hanging out with friends and real, deep conversations. So happy I have people like this in my life.
Superpowers I want: Eyes On The Shining Beacon, Luscious Leisure
Monday chicken! Cluck!
Last week sucked kinda bad.
What worked: taking care of myself. Praxis. my roses. making Aphrodite water. Working thru the list and asking for Next Steps.
the suck:
-the husband in the hospital
-the days leading to this. really, the degradation and dysfunction was unreal
-when I say “I am sick of this shit” I am not being metaphorical. literally sick. literally, of this shit.
-when your heart is closed for so long, and there’s a good reason to close it, and you do it to protect yourself because Safety First. and then you open a little and your heart flies right out of your body and wants to nest where…it might not be welcome and it is not safe. that.
-despite the tired and awful, I had made a commitment to a friend long ago and this weekend I had to be in service for hours, and I was really REALLY worried about my care, my energy level and being present with her.
but so much sparkle:
-this hospital visit seems to be a watershed moment for the husband, and he has risen to the challenge and is acting more healthfully than he has in years
-I rose to the challenge with my friend, kept her cared for and got her to places and enjoyed meeting her friends
-I made new friends over the weekend, and had wonderful talks with other grownups about art, writing, activism and sex.
-my roses are blooming, the apple trees are setting fruit.
-every day I manage to congruent a space in my house. I love the feeling of dysfunction didappearing
-getting very empowered to just throw shit out
-the work is good
-magick! my practice is strong and engaged
<3 for congruent!
*pebble* *flees* *hides*
<3
This community. So many brave people trying to be in the world with love and presence and compassion. I feel so much love and gratitude for you all, for this space. Thank you
<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3