this is the 379th week of wishing, come play!

The thing about smog.

When I enter a smoggy city with thick congested polluted air (Fresno, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City), my whole body rebels, all my senses registering high alert.

Eyes watering, chest tight, I feel sleepy, irritable, impatient.

The lack of clarity especially feels restrictive, not like mist or fog that enhance a view even as they obscure, heightening beauty and mystery.

More like: my body and mind are not comfortable here.

Then after a few days, it becomes normal to breathe unpalatable air, I stop noticing that vague unsettling feeling, I adapt.

We can make an argument in either direction about whether that adaptability of human spirt is useful (sure), or whether it’s dangerous (that too), but the point is this:

The atmosphere we immerse in — what we we see, hear and breathe — becomes our normal, even if it is a crappy, depressing normal, even if it is an absolutely horrifying normal, and we even stop noticing that this is not an okay normal.

Air can stand as a metaphor here but also: air is not only a metaphor here.

Oxygen and circulation and environment, the stuff of vitality and life, this matters.

The Sandwich.

I was once in a relationship with someone sweet, thoughtful, generous, and loving. A buddhist who meditated and did yoga and brought me flowers, always a kind thought in his heart for everyone.

I noticed that his parents, while wonderfully warm and welcoming to me, had a habit of making snide gossipy remarks about people who weren’t around. They would sneak these in between nicer comments, in a maneuver I began to think of as The Sandwich.

“Oh we saw so-and-so, she’s the loveliest person, of course she’s really let herself go, she’s gained so much weight, she looks awful, but she’s so nice.” “Oh yes, so-and-so is very ambitious but not talented at all, really just wasting their time, but nicest person, really nice.”

And when my lover was around his parents, he’d unconsciously pick this up. Suddenly the guy who only had compassion for everyone was making these little negative critical sandwich judgments.

I understood he was just adapting to the normal that is the normal of how his family communicates. And I recognized that if I spent enough time with them, this could become my normal.

It bothered him that I wasn’t interested in hanging out with his family more often.

And the truth is, while I thoroughly reject the notion that loving someone means I need to spend any time at all with the people who raised that person, I really didn’t want to be around The Sandwich.

More than that, I didn’t want to see the loving-hearted person I cared about morph into someone who unconsciously cut other people down.

Okay, also I was aware that my only real motivation for showing up had become making sure I wouldn’t be the the subject of a mean snippy sandwich along the lines of “Oh, Havi is so great, but [ten flaws about Havi], but we love her so much!” Awesome.

No thank you to this toxic air, I don’t want to breathe that in, I don’t want this to ever seem normal to me.

Real estate.

I am currently sitting in a house in Los Angeles, way up in the hills with a gate and giant picture windows and a view as far as the eye can see. It’s not a particularly large house, and there isn’t anything interesting about it other than the view, but it’s worth well over a million dollars.

If you live in a place where houses cost millions of dollars, one of two things happens.

Either it seems normal to you to invest in a million dollar home, or it seems normal to you that home ownership is not remotely an option and it doesn’t even show up on your radar.

Million dollar homes do not coexist in the same world as my normal and so it is difficult for me to understand why someone who had one wouldn’t just sell it immediately, invest the money, and go retire right this second. Live in Mexico. Eat fish tacos. Write all day. Be happy.

That’s what I would do if someone gave me a million dollar home in LA.

But presumably if I stayed here long enough, probably not even that long, I would start to see this as an awesome desirable place to live. My normal would change course.

What is waste.

I try to live as close to a zero-plastic zero-waste life as I can, and yeah, sure, I make some conscious compromises here and there, but that’s my aim, the trajectory of how I want to live, something that is always in my sights.

And I would have told you that this is a very significant part of who I am, but then I went to Idaho for a month and oh wow, did that ever fall apart fast.

In Portland, everyone recycles and most people compost, it is relatively easy to acquire bulk food without plastic packaging, I may be considerably more fringe in my choices than most, but my lifestyle is not wildly at odds with the broader culture in the same way that it was in Idaho.

At first it felt unbearably painful to toss food scraps, or worse, glass. Once it’s in the earth, it’s in the earth forever, and it isn’t going to decompose. I agonized over each item in the bin, sending it off with a grieving heart and whispered apologies.

But after a few weeks this gradually downgraded to more of a small twinge, and I imagine that if I had stayed, my normal would shift more, even though I don’t want it to.

It became easier to make compromises for the sake of “convenience”, and slowly, without noticing, I had become part of the broader culture, making choices that normally (that is, in my previous normal) I would never have considered, like purchasing a drink in a to-go cup, or using a paper napkin instead of the cloth one in my bag.

My entire perception of what seems wasteful and unacceptable shifted in rural Idaho. It still bothered me to see people use plastic cups (and straws!) to drink water instead of a glass, but it became a normal kind of bothersome, something that just is, something you don’t need to think about.

Smoke.

Many years ago when I was a smoker, I had this idea in my mind that I didn’t smoke very much, but this was really only because I was a bartender in south Tel Aviv and spent my days and nights in the company with people who smoked pretty much constantly.

Most of the regulars smoked four packs a day, lighting one cigarette from the next, the hardest part of my job was keeping all the ashtrays emptied.

Oh, and trying to keep the place from burning down. We had constant trash can fires because they would leave a smoldering butt in a pile of pistachio shells and wander off to the bathroom with a new cigarette.

And so, because I smoked so much less than the clientele or any of my co-workers or my lover, I was able to believe that I wasn’t much of a smoker at all.

Out with friends, I’d smoke one cigarette for every three or four that everyone else did, so clearly I wasn’t smoking that much, right?

Then one day I was out with Alona, the manager at the other bar where I worked, and we ran into Gili, my best friend’s girlfriend. She said, ohmygod I can’t believe how much you guys smoke, and I was in shock, because obviously I smoke way less than Alona, so why would you even put us in the same category.

My normal was so skewed that I couldn’t see how [a lot] and [even more] could look the same from the outside.

An amusing reversal of this happened later that day at Gili’s apartment, when it became clear there was a huge disparity between my normal for smoking pot (a couple times a year maybe?) versus the normal of all of her other friends (all day every day), which meant that her normal (just in the evenings) seemed moderate to her and wildly excessive to me.

But really, what is normal. Or: what about when normal is unacceptable.

This week we learned that sexually assaulting women is Donald Trump’s normal, as is his expectation to encounter zero consequences for being a rapey predator who terrorizes women.

I read a thoughtful piece about that called What Trump’s brag reveals about this election and our culture, which, among other things, references an interesting study that concluded some types of harassment are so common as to become normal, in which case women may come to perceive them as ‘bothersome’ as opposed to scary and threatening.

The idea is that women essentially build immunity to unacceptable behavior, as you would to a virus, in order to be able to function at our jobs.

This resonates truth for me. A friend and I, recently discussing our university days, were shocked by how many awful incidents of harassment we had experienced, but more shocked by how little they had registered at the time, because other harassment was so much more egregious.

Just one example, once I was late to a professor’s office hours and came running in to plop down on a chair. He looked at my chest and said, “Do that again, I like it when they bounce like that.”

So gross. And yet I honestly didn’t even consider that harassment because harassment in my mind, back then, was more like all the times another professor put his hand on my friend’s thigh.

I didn’t recognize his words as belonging to the same continuum of predatory people in positions of power testing the waters of what we would put up with, pressing up against boundaries (and sometimes pressing up against our bodies).

Wildly inappropriate things happened to me over and over but I stopped registering them as inappropriate because they were so common, and also seemingly so minor, at least in comparison to the more egregious stuff happening all around me.

Car-free and carefree.

I’m nearly forty and have never owned a car.

This is a highly unusual state of affairs here in North America, but guess what, I’ve never needed one.

In fact, the one common feature of the various places I’ve lived both abroad and in the states is ease of walkability (is that a word?), places where cars are unnecessary and there is nowhere to park them anyway, so why bother.

Right now I’m in Los Angeles where not owning a car is something people cannot grasp, you might as well say that you don’t brush your teeth or that you don’t own underwear, because not owning a car is so shocking and horrifying that people wring their hands at the thought of it.

They also think a ten minute walk is extremely unreasonable, even though the weather is more conducive to walking than anywhere else I’ve lived, i.e. places where a ten minute walk barely even counts as walking. I know this about LA, and still it surprises me each time I visit.

But if I lived here, I would probably become someone who drives to the cafe that is not even half a mile away, and that’s why I don’t live here. I don’t want that to be my new normal.

Oh, air.

I will say it again.

WHAT WE SEE, HEAR AND BREATHE BECOMES OUR NORMAL, even if it is a shitty, depressing, horrifying normal.

And if we stop noticing the incongruence, the disharmonious state of being surrounded by values or behavior that does not support how we want to live, then we agree to a certain degree of toxicity, and it becomes increasingly more difficult to take care of ourselves.

Obviously there are any number of things we just can’t change and it’s certainly not fun or healthy to be in constant rage state about the rigged game, tilting at all the windmills, incensed about the things that are not okay, because god knows there is no shortage of them.

I am talking about something different: a conscious relationship with the air we breathe, noticing which aspects of our environment support us and which do not, figuring out where we can tinker with things a little.

Or a lot.

What do we do about air? Or: what can we do about air?

Cultivating awareness comes first, as it always does: What am I noticing about my normal and how it changes or shifts in different situations? What assumptions am I making about normal, what has become normal to me but is not actually okay for me?

Then the next piece is bringing attention to desire: What is my true yes? What would be 120% yes? What do I really want?

Next I look at what is working versus what isn’t, without judgment. What needs to change when it comes to the air I breathe? Where in my life do I already insist on metaphorical clean air? Or actual clean air, as the case may be.

And then I can look at my options. What changes or adjustments can I make, even in tiny but symbolic or otherwise significant-to-me ways? Because, even if I am dealing with various limitations and/or perceptions of limitations, there is always something that can be messed with to add spaciousness.

And then we keep practicing. Noticing. Checking in. Where am I and where is my yes? What have I begun accepting as normal and okay that I am actually super not okay with?

(A small example)

Last week at a dance thing, I hung out with couples, something I never do, and specifically straight married couples.

At some point one of the wives said something about how she gets her husband to tell other men to leave her alone if they are being too forward on the dance floor, and that I need to get a man to do that for me, and I only barely twitched.

That almost imperceptible mini-twitch was a sign for me. Or really, not the twitch but how barely noticeable it was. That was the sign for me that my normal had shifted, because normal for me is a full-body visceral reaction of no no no what are you saying what unsovereign shit is this.

My normal normal reaction, as a independent woman who is content and happy in her solo life and passionate about freedom, would be something like this:

I appreciate the kind suggestion, and I am fully capable of standing up for myself and setting my own boundaries. And, should I determine that I require someone else’s support in that, it shouldn’t have to be the person I’m sleeping with, it should be anyone who cares about human decency. I deserve to be treated with respect BECAUSE I AM A HUMAN BEING, not because I “have a man” or anyone else who perceives that I “belong” to them and it’s their job it is to protect me.

But instead my reaction was more of a laugh-shrug because we have different perspectives. At some point the air around me had stopped seeming wildly suspect, and had become more like a mild irritation.

I realized I needed an immediate change of air, because this for me is actually grab your oxygen mask before you pass out levels of complacency with regard to the entire sexist coupled primarily-hetero rigged game culture that I have zero desire to take part in.

What is my wish here?

Of course part of my wish is that the culture will change, and, more specifically, that the work of self-fluency (everything we do here) will support the changing of culture.

But mainly this is a wish about how I interact with [air], it is a wish about awareness and agency, being conscious about both my choices and my compromises.

It is a wish about focus and intention. I want to be as present as possible with how I breathe, not just in posture or dance or a yoga pose but in all forms of what surrounds me.

I want to be someone who insists on making conscious choices about what air I am willing to breathe. [When I can, where I can, as I can. Safety First, always, and of course sometimes change needs to be cautious and incremental and that’s okay, we don’t need to force anything.]

More than anything, this wish is a continuation of my previous wish about Delicious Space. I want to choose Delicious Space, I want to choose to be in a gem state (a state of glow, light, reflection and refraction), whether or not I am in The Gem State (Idaho).

This is a wish about a new normal, about intention and love and outrageous wild improbable new levels of self-acceptance, may that become my new normal.

centered

This is the month of Centering, with the superpower of Delicious Space, and my return to center is directly related to the choices I make related to what I breathe, how I breathe, what is acceptable or tolerable in my space, and what needs to change.

last week’s wishes

last-week-me wished a wish called delicious space, and it brought me both to a very delicious space (my friend’s apartment), and delicious headspace, and the realizations that I am working with/through now, so that was a very good wish that went deep.

invitation: come play with me…

you are invited to share this post and to share many !!!!!! about what is here,
or share appreciation or anything sparked for you while reading

deposit wishes, gwishes, superpowers, qualities, ingredients, intel, possibly in code

safe space for creative exploration asks us to let go of care-taking and advice-giving

wishes are never late because whenever you wish is the right time for wishing

we remember that people vary and my wishes don’t have to be yours, each process is unique, and this is a good thing

here’s how we meet each other’s wishes: with great kindness and appreciation and awe, whispering (and sometimes shouting) oh, wow what beautiful wishes

♡

Hello, week: we are here.

Thank you, week. Thank you, space to reflect.

{a breath for being here when we get here}

This is week 429 of this ritual, and so we chicken.

What’s been working? What do I want to play with….

Saying THANK YOU to my no for being my no.

Thank you, objects, situations, choices and circumstances that are not 120% yes. Thank you for showing me what not-yes looks like.

Thank you, sweater that is almost right but not. Thank you, cafe for being is a little too noisy and prompting me to leave. Thank you, people I do not wish to dance with again.

Breathing for the hard, challenging and mysterious.

• Oh, man. This week. It’s Thursday but I’m calling it. Actually this week was so hard I was ready to just call it by Monday morning, just give up, have a good cry and write the world’s longest Friday Chicken of woe, all before the week even really started. Breathing patience, compassion, receptivity to the superpower of Hey Things Suddenly Get Better!
• Abrupt unanticipated drastic change of plans (by the way I’m in Los Angeles instead of Idaho) with only a few hours to process. The change of plans was actually a good thing, but it asked me to access resources of adaptability and agility that I just did not have in me at the moment, due primarily to extreme zombie-exhaustion. Breathing trust: look, everything is working out beautifully and in my favor, even if it is unexpected and temporarily uncomfortable.
• Actually, many forms of Adjusting Expectations. That was a thing this week. Breathing presence.
• Four nights with minimal or no sleep, culminating in a night of four hours in bed with no fewer than nine interruptions of sleep. I also learned that my personal definition of considerate roommate behavior is not universal. Breathing for rest and recuperation, and glowingly healthy boundaries, may I get better at setting expectations in advance.
• I am a highly sensitive clairaudient empath, so being in a room full of three hundred highly ambitious dancers who have just watched the pros perform, lost in insecurity fog running their internal mantras in the key of “I’m Not Good Enough”…it’s extremely overwhelming. Remember that episode of Buffy where she hears everyone’s thoughts and they are awful? That’s what it was like, and all my filters that usually protect me got overloaded and I experienced the total state of panic and anxiety brought on by feeling everything at once. Breathing love for being me, it is not always very fun but that is who I am.
• People around me had trouble with my state of falling apart, even though I actually think I handled it quite gracefully, taking care of myself and making a speedy recovery, considering the severity of the situation. Breathing. I don’t know why people don’t have the self-fluency skills to recognize that someone else being in pain is not about them or any of their concern (oh right, it’s because of the rigged game), but it is seriously exhausting to have to deal with people who go into their stuff about you having a moment of being in your stuff, and I have zero patience to do any caretaking for that. May there be good healing for this, and for the rigged culture that dismisses any pain that isn’t visible. I have lots more to say about that but saving it for later, because otherwise this will be a five thousand word chicken.
• Being around couples, and various toxic things related to that, gender role bullshit and unexamined assumptions, like going from clean mountain air to a polluted city and not wanting to breathe that in or even be around it. Breathing for clean air, an environment that reflects how I want to live.
• Being around other forms of toxicity like fatphobia and slut-shaming and “oh I only want one tiny bite of cake” and all the broader culture things that do not live in the culture of me, but suddenly being exposed to all of that, and watching how it slowly begins to become normal and not as noticeable, and I do not ever want this to be my normal. Breathing my power.
• The angry avenging-avenger is still with me with her doubt and fury, she comes and goes, but oh these overwhelming moments of fire-breathing and wanting to destroy everything. Breathing presence and grace for our transition to Diana Rigg’s glamorous Avenger who is cool and collected, and can set boundaries without destroying everything in sight.
• The plan that changed from ten hour drive with friends to three straight days of driving plus a funeral on the anniversary of my mother’s funeral. Breathing gratitude in the form of “thank you, plan, for being so completely crappy that you are obviously redirecting me to do something else”, may I get better at paying attention to my yes.
• The anniversary of my mother’s funeral. Bleak. Breathing.
• Sadness about the museum and how much I love it and also What Unsovereign Shit Is This if I pay for it to continue to exist instead of it paying me to curate the exhibits, that is no way to live and not something I can agree to model in the world. Breathing clarity.
• That is not even close to all the things but that is enough things because I don’t want to name any more. Breathing for this too.
• 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.

Breathing for the good, reassuring, and magical!

• Seriously it was marvelous treasure that my plan for the week became increasingly more unappealing, because once the penny finally dropped and I realized I was being Redirected, my heart felt so light. Speediest transition ever from Holy God Why Does Everything Suck So Hard to being at ease with life. Aka Oh This Is A Miracle I Am Being Handed A Free Pass To Not Do Any Of The Crappy Things, No Wonder Everything Was Getting Increasingly Awful, I’m Being Redirected! Breathing for treasure.
• Speaking of pennies that take a long time to drop, this is a theme right now: something looks like a Series of Unfortunate Events when actually it’s more like, things are finally so bad that I have no choice but change course, which is a good thing, I suspect this is also the case with the museum, because that really does explain the increasingly ridiculous issues we’ve been having. Breathing for seeing the good.
• Clues everywhere, dragonflies everywhere I turn, we even parked on a street called Hope just when I was feeling completely hopeless. Breathing appreciation: I see you, sparks.
• My marvelous friend Agent Ravenstar who was like, oh OF COURSE you are coming to LA and staying with me for two weeks and we will have adventures. And then I didn’t need to solve any logistics at all, which is fortunate because I hadn’t slept in forever. Breathing thankfulness and delight.
• In fact, my wish this week was for Delicious Space and here I am in her gorgeous apartment which seems positively palatial to someone whose frame of reference is “motorhome” or “crowded hotel room”. I have my own room and beautiful bath and it is full of books (the room, not the bath), and rainbows everywhere, and it is absolutely the very definition of Delicious Space. Whereas spending three days squished up in a car, and visiting Salt Lake City (not my favorite place, understatement of understatements) and attending a funeral on the day when I’m already torn up about losing my mom, and not being able to get any work done all week, that would not have been delicious space for me. My wish came true, and if it required a massive amount of Redirection, I am okay with that. Breathing peacefulness and joy.
• Cooking! There is a kitchen here and I get to do all the cooking! Inventing delicious nourishing magical meals with quality ingredients and having someone to cook for who appreciates it, this is a dream. Feeling so much delight about this. Breathing happiness.
• Massive progress on projects and secret ops despite fatigue. Finished two rounds of editing the next YEARbook ebook, wrote bits of the next two, and came up with all kinds of fun creative solutions for various unsolved mysteries. Breathing creative power.
• Found the most marvelous clue while editing, I hadn’t remembered that I wrote this but it was so perfect: “She doesn’t try to problem-solve but instead acts through REMOVING incongruencies wherever they arise.” Yes. That is so wise. Let us do that. Breathing .
• Love is treasure. Deep intense closeness and sharing with the faraway cowboy, big honesty, big clarity, big sweetness, and a heart of love. Breathing love.
• The night I slept for ten hours and woke up significantly more functional! Breathing grace.
• Inventing/discovering the best proxies and having wild epiphanies as a result. Breathing for joy sparks.
• Dance convention was beautiful. I had some fear of a repeat of the last one when a crisis of confidence (and of everything) had me hiding and crying in the hotel room, but this time I was ready to bring the party. Dancing until 6am, magical moments, creative self-expression, pulled off a new move and nailed it the very first time, happiness! Breathing for connection, intensity, seeing favorite people, being a panther, the moment when the total stranger you are dancing with beams at you because they are so overjoyed to be sharing this moment with you.
• Thankfulness. Treasure in the form of the most wonderful hidden spice shop, finding the perfect code name for doing laundry, the best mug, dancing in the kitchen, dancing everywhere, eye-flirting all over LA, silliness, play. 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.

Last time I asked for the superpower of completely at ease being myself, because that’s the only job I want. And the advanced version of this, the superpower of I AM A STAR. Got it and working on it. More of that please.

And I want the superpower of Speedy Recognition, for example, when I am being Redirected, or when something that does not look/sound like love actually is, or when I really just need to go to bed. Maybe this is related to the power of knowing/trusting when is the right time to burn it down and when is the right time to rebuild.

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!

this is the 378th week of wishing, come play!

a list of wishes

• I want to skip stones to learn what I know about making space delicious. What would be delicious business space for me? I mean, I used to own an imaginary chocolate shop, and I ran two decidedly non-imaginary retreat centers, which embodied delicious space, and I used to be a yoga teacher once upon a time, which is all about delicious internal space. Surely I can find an answer…
• new job: what is it and when does it begin?
• what is the best (let best = simple, immediate, clear, doable) solution for the building fund?
• what is here for me by the bay? / what is here for me on-and-down the road?
• what would tara do (the guest star on Leverage) and what does it mean to be a guest star, in all senses of the word star and guest?
• in 23 weeks which is a significant amount of weeks for me, we will arrive at 400 wishes, 450 chickens, 12 years of this business, and my 40th birthday: by the time we get there, I need to either transform/reconfigure this space into something sustainable that is a fair thing to model to the world, or let it go with a loving and thankful heart and find out what is next for me
• I don’t need to know what is next, but I want a star to steer towards, right now I know that I care a lot about my legacy, I care about the work of self-fluency and very interior design, I care a lot about the community, and I am not willing to model to the world something that doesn’t work.
• a very good rabbit hole for me right now is the life of Norma Kamali, I would like to investigate this more!
• it isn’t fair to the clandestine campers if movie hour is canceled because Timmy threw a rock through the window, but also circumstances mean there’s no way to watch the movie, so on behalf of the camp director I am requesting a very fun and playful solution to this, something so good that no one minds about not having movie hour, like maybe there are cupcakes instead or an extra long and luscious nap time, we are receptive to many beautiful ways this could work out to everyone’s benefit!
• more balance play / think like a dancer / I don’t need to tell the story
• clues to investigate: trust the diamond / solved by being spanish / dipper and crown / letting it be light

centered

everything that happened in September
(the month of INTENTION and I Am So Very Clear)
brought me here, both to this new clarity about my yes,

now I am ready to learn about my center
and possibly also the center that houses my business
as I investigate delicious space

last week’s wishes

last-week-me wished a wish called welcome to center
and it brought me here
this was a good wish for me

invitation: come play with me…

you are invited to share this post and to share many !!!!!! about what is here,
or share appreciation or anything sparked for you while reading

deposit wishes, gwishes, superpowers, qualities, ingredients, intel, possibly in code

safe space for creative exploration asks us to let go of care-taking and advice-giving

wishes are never late because whenever you wish is the right time for wishing

here’s how we meet each other’s wishes: oh, wow what beautiful wishes

♡

Hello, week: we are here.

Thank you, week. Thank you, space to reflect.

{a breath for being here when we get here}

This is week 428 of this ritual, and so we chicken.

What’s been working? What do I want to play with….

Clues. Like riding the Magic Water road on the way to do tashlich, my favorite magic water ritual.

Next time I might try: not being so attached to the plan? The plan is just the thing that gets me moving, whatever happens next is the adventure. And hey, now I’m in San Francisco and next week Arizona and who knows after that.

Breathing for the hard, challenging and mysterious.

• I don’t know what happened this week — Sucktober! — but my ability to focus on work or on anything else was absolutely zero, and my confidence is shot. Breathing trust.
• The mystery of the museum (and my total inability to resolve it, combined with a deadline by which it has to be resolved) has me feeling intensely frustrated. Breathing compassion: this frustration is very understandable, and whatever I do next will be the right move, even if I don’t know what it is yet.
• Still experiencing these on-and-off waves of hurt and anger about something that is in the past, and I don’t have anyone I can talk to about it. Breathing comfort, remembering that I always have the companionship of my wisest selves.
• Besieged By Monsters (it’s my new band and it’s just one guy). Comparison comparison comparison comparison, it never leads to anything good, and yet I got sucked all the way down that hole and couldn’t get out for days. Breathing truth, let’s remember truth: no one is better than I am at being me, which is the only thing that matters. And the best thing I can do for myself is not compare.
• How is it that I can hole up in rural Idaho and still find life too loud? Phones and microwaves and mysterious beeping, and why is the world built to be noisy? Big HSP discomfort. Breathing recovery.
• Unexpected things throwing me off. Breathing for delicious space.
• Missing. Breathing for this.
• 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.

Breathing for the good, reassuring, and magical!

• Spending an hour a day on the balance ops, learning about the me who can smile while wobbling. This is more fun than I thought it would be. Breathing for treasure.
• I invented a new form of dance! Or maybe a kind of drill, I don’t know. I feel very excited about this! Breathing for excitement and exploration.
• I have a really good idea that might change how I feel about the museum, it’s a bold move, but then maybe that’s what is needed. Breathing possibility and a love of doors.
• Love is treasure. Breathing love.
• New friends. Breathing appreciation.
• Being in the pool under the clouds and in the storm and under the vast sky of stars in the cool air. Breathing.
• Have been able to mostly transition from my angry avenging self, the who wants to burn everything down and lash out to hurt anyone who has every hurt me, to my Diana Rigg glamorous 60s Avenger self who solves problems by being calm, powerful, sexy and at ease in any situation. Having that very fabulous mental image has helped so much in making the switch — each time I catch myself in Destruction Mode and remember that I can actually solve this through being wildly glamorous instead. Thank you, proxy! Thank you, costumes! Thank you, play! Breathing joy.
• My charming and brilliant friend Steve released an audiobook of his short stories, narrated by a very entertaining British guy, I am so excited about this (take a look/listen here), not only because I made him talk philosophy and life dreams with me by text while he edited. Breathing happiness for friends and the beautiful amazing thing that is creative self-expression and invention.
• New approach. Idea sparks and stars. Breathing for incoming good.

Superpowers.

Last time I asked for the superpower of wild audacious powerful sexy radiance. I want to experience what it is like to be be in glow-state star-state, unapologetically taking up space and feeling amazing, thank you.

Working on it!

I want more of that, as well as the superpower of completely at ease being myself, because that’s the only job I want. And the advanced version of this, the superpower of I AM A STAR.

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!

this is the 377th week of wishing, come play!

the meeting point between not-knowing and knowing

obsessed with the idaho sky
constantly changing, endlessly fascinating
I like the cloud-watching maybe almost as much
as the star-gazing under the milky way
not a light in sight
just a wonderment of stars

under this sky I go back and forth between
sweet clarity: total certainty, saying yes to my yes
and then the opposite of that, the
immense not-knowing of the void,
the wobbliness of it all

thinking about things I might possibly want to do, like maybe….

• go to Boise (just for a day)
• take off for San Francisco (maybe for three days)
• not go anywhere (for as long as possible)
• change careers
• write about bells
• rescue the museum
• burn down the museum
• rebuild the museum
• sell tickets to the bonfire
• open all the doors
• hide out in Idaho and being a recluse (not in winter though because it’s cold)
• get blank business cards and write on them in invisible ink because I change my mind each day
• take up pole dancing, take down everything else
• live by the canyon with no neighbors and no curtains

but then so sure of everything

I want to devote myself to Very Interior Design
do less and choose ease
savor this moment
close doors that need closing to
open the door of the bell of opening keys
beautiful exit
beautiful entry
simplicity simplicity simplicity

adaptability and grace
I want the ability to switch modes faster
or to protect myself when I can’t
wild glamour a la Diana Rigg
a different kind of Avenger
the kind who wears sexy boots and strides through
[everything]
with confident ease and wild trust

come into center

I have been wishing wishes about space and spaciousness
making space for my yeses
what if nothing is wrong
what if nothing is wrong with letting go

balancing

I have been balancing: in the pool, on the board, in my dreams
because balance is the art of knowing that you are
in a constant state of falling
and being okay with that
as you make your small adjustments
with a smile

centered

being okay with not-balance is of course
the superpower of being centered with yourself,
so how funny-perfect to discover that
we are in the month of CENTER

everything that happened in September
(the month of INTENTION and I Am So Very Clear)
brought me here, both to this new clarity about my yes,
as well as to these useful and sometimes uncomfortable
moments of wobbliness and questioning

delicious space

this month brings the superpower of delicious space
clearly this is needed
and maybe that’s how Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel is able to
maintain her internal sense of [calm, cool and in command]
even in the most precarious of situations

she has her boots and glamour
but also her trust in her ability
to maintain a sense of center

to maintain a sense of center

center and periphery
shields up
force field activated
and then I get to relax: suspended in the quiet
at the center of the center of the center
inside my circle of delicious space

this is my wish: what do I know about it

I keep getting thrown off center
yanked out of whatever state
(relaxation, creativity, holiness)
that I have immersed myself in

and then floundering and bewildered because
[what is] = so completely different than what I anticipated
but this is the aliveness of life,
going in and out of these states
the wobbling is the practice

maybe center is about resetting:
re-establishing yeses and boundaries
making more space for what I need
as well as more space to adapt to
sudden surprises

head

the head weighs a lot, which is why balance and centering
involve being clear and intentional about head position
not looking down

here we are at erev rosh hashana
the eve of the head of the year
the holiest day
high + holy

and I had a miscommunication with friends
because they are not jewish and so they assumed
this is the kind of new year that is about celebrating
when it is the kind of new year that is about contemplating
though also about blasting
it is not a party, it is a very big and intense door

eyes up
straight ahead
this is the head

stones for a new year

where do I want my head
how do I make safe — no, delicious — space for what I need
what supports my yes
what will help me adapt more easily
find my center
my delicious space
even/especially in moments of perceived tumultuousness

time for more quiet
waiting it out
listening deeper
taking it to the water,
filling up on appreciation for
the wild skies,
cloud formations
quiet and free under the stars

how do I want to meet this new year

clear the decks
clear head
approach with curiosity and intention
and sweetness, of course
always with sweetness

welcome, come in
what if the space I make for you is delicious
what if the space we make together is
even better than that

last week’s wishes

last-week-me wished a wish called rainbow oasis
and I have been immersed in the pool, watching the play of light
finding my safe places
this was a good wish for me

invitation: come play with me…

you are invited to share this post and to share many !!!!!! about what is here,
or share appreciation or anything sparked for you while reading

deposit wishes, gwishes, superpowers, qualities, ingredients, intel, possibly in code

safe space for creative exploration asks us to let go of care-taking and advice-giving

wishes are never late because whenever you wish is the right time for wishing

here’s how we meet each other’s wishes: oh, wow what beautiful wishes

♡