A breath for these tough times

Sending out extra wishes of Safety & Sanctuary for everyone in the path of the hard things, what a scary time we are in, inhaling and exhaling, for compassion, strength, courage, swift and steady miracles.

Announcement / last chance for Emergency Calming Down Techniques

I’ve been reeling hard lately in some cursed combination of heartache, numbness, political anxiety, winter stuff and some wild panic episodes.

Have been holding on (for dear life) to my Emergency Calm The Hell Down Techniques from a long time ago, and it’s been helping.

I am giving away a copy of these (ebook + audio recordings) to anyone who gives any sum of money to the appreciation funds / discretionary fund in the hopes that we can all keep practicing together, for each other and for the collective, and also for ourselves in these scary times. ❤️

New Moon Bingo, Union and Reunion

Wrecking ball o’clock

I was driving to yoga class to see Sasha.

Sasha who begins class with “I LOVE YOU, EACH OF YOU. I LOVE YOU. THERE, NOW WE BROKE THAT WALL!”

I love Sasha back. I love them for saying that. Mainly I love them for being an enthusiastic breaker of walls, I love their giddy, gleeful wall-breaking energy, it is delightful to be around.

A bit like a golden retriever who is also a wrecking ball. Of love.

Everything is going to break but we are really going to laugh while it’s happening.

Driving

Driving, on my way to be deliciously broken, by love. Smash me up, gently and with sweet compassion.

That’s where the reconfiguring begins.

Time for some good reconfiguring.

Adjacent to unanticipated reminders of death

A car passed me somewhat aggressively, and it was a hearse, which seemed funny. Like not funny-funny.

But also: who exactly is in a hurry in this vehicle? Yes, that is funny.

Why are any of us in such a hurry towards a final destination, or towards anything? The fact that there is still time, or might be, theoretically, is itself an astonishing gift if I pause to think about it.

If I pause for the pausing.

The hearse stopped and I was pausing, behind it.

Death

The hearse was just standing in the road, and I was feeling impatient, because I wanted to get to yoga class, the place where I practice death, and being destroyed (in a good way, lovingly) by love.

And other reconfigurations of self.

This too was funny to me. Noticing: I am in a hurry to go practice being still. Still, in corpse pose.

Keep it moving!

Meanwhile, waiting for the death carriage to keep it moving.

What a life this life is. Many funny-poignant moments hiding in plain sight, if you pause, which people quite often do not like to do.

Or: culture does not like us to pause. We might notice too much about how we feel.

Parked poetry

The hearse was right next to a parked car, next to the bumper, which had a bumper sticker:

DEATH TO FALSE PIZZA

The juxtaposition was tremendous. The poetry. So good.

So I did that

The poet Rumi said: Close your eyes, fall in love, stay there.

So I did that.

I did it for a while. That’s another way to break a wall, or to be revived.

Laughter and breaking, laughter in the breaking

I did that and thought about death vs death to false pizza, and how I myself was on my way to practice [final relaxation], and love.

Yes, I did that. Which is to say: I closed my eyes, fell in love with life, and stayed there, for a moment at least.

Like Sasha would say, but saying it to life:

I LOVE YOU. THERE, I SAID IT. WE BROKE THAT WALL.

Mmmmmm. The poetry, again.

To life. To life!

The poetry, and also the laughter

Death to false pizza!

What a thing to put on a car in this time of seemingly everything actually dying. It wasn’t funny but also it was somehow very funny.

I laughed so hard I startled myself, then called my brother to tell him about it and hear his laugh, the best laugh in the entire world. And I made it to yoga right on time.

Old school old school

In high school, in Michigan, they handed out bumper stickers that said “A lot of teenagers are dying for a drink”, which I guess was supposed to raise awareness about drunk driving?

Just looked this up online and you can buy it on ebay, where it is listed as VINTAGE. Kill me now.

To life!

Pieces

I remembered the boy I was sort of sometimes in a romance with, back in those VINTAGE DAYS, whose name is the same name as most recent ex of terrible illogical heartbreak last year, not that heartbreak ever has a logic to it.

More specifically I remembered the day they gave us those bumper stickers, and how he cut his bumper sticker up into pieces and rearranged them on his car.

A reconfiguring.

Newly rearranged, now the bumper sticker suggested: DRINK FOR A DYING TEENAGER.

Reconfigurings

I thought about this, while waiting for the hearse, on my way to have Sasha declare love for me (and everyone, and life) in a way that would make me cry, before practicing death, and re-emerging into life.

Death to false pizza could just as easily be pizza to false death.

So many things can be reconfigured.

Many of them should.

Sometimes the reconfiguring is the healing. Sometimes the reconfiguring emerges from the healing process.

Everything has components

Everything has components, and the components can be moved around.

This can be hard to remember. And yet, there it is.

Everything is a pattern, and patterns can be rearranged.

Patterns can be lovingly interrupted. Patterns can reconfigure, and bring about or invite further healing downstream.

All of this is the essence of self-fluency.

The anagram generator is reading my texts

I mean, probably not, but it feels like it.

I had a deadline, and the deadline was stressing me out, so I put the world DEADLINES into the anagram generator, and received in return:

Ideal Dens, Ideal Send, Leaded Sin, Sailed End, Leads Dine, Idle Sedan, SLAIN DEED, A Need Slid, Senile Dad…

Which all feel relevant to my many current situations.

I especially love Slain Deed. Let’s get the assassin on this!

What if / and so on

What if the dead in deadline is like death to false pizza?

Or death like shavasana, final resting pose in yoga, where you go dark, you restore to be revived, you revive to be restored, and so on.

Maybe deadlines aren’t as scary as all that. Maybe they just need to be reconfigured.

A need slid. Let’s reset and restart.

Let’s find some ideal dens. Let’s line things up, and play dead, but only for the sake of play. And so on.

Back to Rumi, always

“Don’t move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move.” – Rumi

As Sasha would say: I LOVE YOU. LET’S START THERE.

Can I say this to myself when I am afraid? Can I say this to myself when I am not afraid?

Can I move the way love makes me move? In the world, and in this moment?

Maybe. Or at least, I can try. I can drop the seed in and wait, behind the hearse, next to the bumper sticker, listening to my brother’s delightful raucous cackling at the absurdity of it all. Amazing.

Medical forms of dead lines

I had to fill out scary-to-me medical forms for a thing I am taking care of this week. Please light any and all candles for only good news and all ease.

This was not enjoyable. Though I do like forms, and changing forms. So there’s that.

The arborist put Medical Form into the anagram generator and came back with Calm Fried Om, which is a pretty accurate description of how I feel about this.

Calm. And Fried. And Om.

All of it at once.

All of it at once

All of it at once.

Death to false pizza. Death to lines (deadlines).

Symbolic death practice to be revived, reset and restart. Saying goodbye to things that are done. Or letting them beautifully reconfigure.

And so on.

Take an axe, for example

Back to Rumi, who said:

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side. 
Become the sky.
 Take an axe to the prison wall.
 Escape.
 Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
 Do it now.

Yes.

What if we joyfully take an axe to the various prison walls — of consciousness, of culture, of perception, of old ways?

Possibly in the same way that Sasha is a wrecking ball of love.

Or in another way

In the way of a wrecking ball of love.

Or in the way of the anagram generator.

Or in the same way that my high school whatever-that-was cut up a bumper sticker to make poetry.

Or in an entirely new way. There are options.

Many ways things can change shape and reconfigure. This can seem scary, and also: what if it felt hopeful? It is, or can be, that too.

Union

I was in Astoria, Oregon, on my way to Union, Washington, and stopped by a place I used to live years ago to brush teeth and freshen up.

Also I flirted with the shy butch receptionist, because I hadn’t yet ruined anyone’s life that day — in a good way, in the wrecking ball of love way, by being an epipen of vitality & joie de vivre, which is a thing I am really good at doing, and I am not good at most things but I am good at this.

Order was restored. I love to be a flirtatious wrecking ball of aliveness. Sometimes I forget that, living out in the wilderness alone, but I have remembered and it is delightful.

I reunited with myself, en route to Union. Poetry, again.

The Bridge

The bridge that always talks to me had things to say, and I found it very funny that the Bridge keeps telling me to rejoice in being A SOLO ACT when I am headed to UNION.

My friend Laura said: Ok mystic bridge! Union with the divine whilst solitary!

Yes, that’s another delightfully paradoxical practice…

Like pretending to enter death in order to wake up and feel more alive, and that being the reason I go to yoga, and how I ended up following a hearse to a clue about death (to false pizza).

Everything can be reconfigured. Everything can be a good clue. There is room for the paradoxical, there is room for the improbably improbable, there is room for things to get zany.

Union and not-union

Union (a tiny town in Washington state) was characterized by much bickering.

I can look at people I love and see some potential future reconfigurings in their lives and in mine that could also be a form of poetry. Or not.

Who knows if people will pause to pay attention to the many clues, the possible beautiful rearrangings of words, shapes, scenarios, relationships, patterns…

I continued on my way north to see another friend and be an epipen of vitality for them, a Mary Poppins of let’s choose towards life, and then I returned, which itself was a reconfiguration.

New Moon Bingo

“I did not have finding you again on my new moon bingo card,” my long-lost beloved friend said to me.

And yet, there I was. There we were. Reconfigured, reunited. A Union and a Reunion.

And what if we were brave and put our wishes onto bingo cards? A new moon bingo card, for example.

A bingo card of Expansiveness. A bingo card of being a Beautifully Boundaried Beam of Light. A bingo card of surprise delights and delightful surprises.

Let’s play.

The Egg & I

This is a name of a road in Washington State, and I called my brother so he could look up the origin story, and here it is.

I have begun using this as sort of a code phrase to get me to do things. As in, I have an imaginary companion even as I am a solo act. We do things together.

The Egg and I are filling out medical forms. The Egg and I are making cards for New Moon Bingo. The Egg and I are headed to yoga.

What if

What if there are no deadlines or dead lines.

What if there is just flow and union and being an epicenter of vitality and Let Us Choose Life (which sometimes we do by practicing being dead, like a line, and then starting over).

What if a line can be beautifully boundaried, and the various deadlines can reconfigure themselves beautifully?

Last week The Egg and I missed a deadline and it was okay. The Egg and I also missed writing here and being here with you, and now we are back. It was a big time of reconfiguring, and that was okay too.

Reminders

I might get a [death to false pizza] sticker as a reminder of this trip and its Slain Deeds and its many clues about life and choosing life after briefly pretending to be dead, or forgetting what it is like to feel alive.

Which happens.

It happens and it is part of the ongoing process of being a human and existing, aka a process of learning about yourself and the world and how you want to cultivate a relationship with yourself and others, how we want to show up…

How do we want to show up? We forget, and we remember, and re-remember, and reconfigure, and it’s beautiful and sometimes sad, and also sometimes thrilling.

I LOVE YOU. Let’s break that wall. Let’s breathe a breath of wonder together, and remember.

May it be so, or something even better

Here’s to choosing life and aliveness, and being here, even when it is so fucking hard (and often it is), and to learning about ourselves, and finding some sparks if we can, or staying receptive to future sparks if we can.

I love you, I love that you read my thoughts here, thank you for that. It means a lot to me.

Let’s source some wild joy, some loving clarity, or whatever is needed most, let’s play.