glowing

I made butter this week from fresh cream
in a jar
not sure exactly what I was expecting
but the butter that emerged from this experiment:
holy god

so exquisitely glowing with [BUTTER ESSENCE]
I placed it in a red dish
next to half a stick of leftover store-bought butter
which suddenly looked phony, tired, a pale anemic imitation
of my butter

my butter was a rich golden yellow
and tasted of life and magic

I made a mushroom omelet for lunch

with my gorgeous butter
this is a not-uncommon lunch for a Havi
but everything was different this time

the mushrooms sizzling in the richness of butter
an entirely different form of alchemy taking place
this omelet redefining omelets forever through flavor: incredible
almost agonizingly so
my enjoyment in consuming… borderline inappropriate

I didn’t feel drawn to add cheese or spiciness
it needed no adornment
the sensual experience of taste so all-encompassing
that my thoughts couldn’t drift

pleasure demanded presence
it asked for all of me
to be there with it

pleasure asking for presence

my two favorite things
combined

they work so well in combination
{PRESENCE + PLEASURE}
I’m not sure yet but I think
this week’s wish might be about combinations

combinations of qualities
and combinations of ingredients

touch

I go through my home
touching everything
not only because I am a Wild Sensualist
(and also on the unicorn spectrum)
but because I am trying to feel
what wants to come with me

I am preparing to move from
three thousand square feet of home into
one hundred and thirty six square feet (plus bed)
of suiteness/sweetness
and so it is time for fearless intentional choosing
and asking the right questions
with love

what is 120% yes for me?

that is the question my brilliant friend Agent Annabelle asks

I am letting myself be guided by her yes-question
as well as the beautifully rebellious words of three other wise women
all of whom love pleasure as much as I do
and all of whom understand:

allowing yourself to be someone who loves pleasure
and admits to loving pleasure
is both complicated
and wildly subversive

we live inside of a culture that censures pleasure-taking
disapproves of delight for its own sake

but I have tasted the transformative healing power of pleasure mixed with intention

and so I am turning away from the finger-wagging culture of shame-guilt
and The Game Is Rigged,
away from the entire world of
[Get Things Done and Be More Awesome and Do Epic Shit]

turning inward towards my own glowing jewel-heart
nourishing it with presence and pleasure
choosing joy and wild fearless being:
letting being be equal in meaning to doing

tingly

Marie Kondo says everything in your home loves you and wants you to feel
like you are in love: tingly sensory pleasure
and that if this isn’t how you feel when you touch an object,
then it needs to go

so that it can love someone else that way
who will love it back that way
or so that its essence (love) can come back to you in a
new and better form

either way, you touch and love and let go
in order to actively cultivate
that full-body joy-spark sensation in all aspects of your life

taking pleasure

Gloria Steinem says, only buy what you fall in love with,
she described the pleasure of acquiring sheets for herself as orgasmic

she says it took her until the age of fifty to realize that
you are allowed to make a home just for you —
home is not just reserved for the people who made
the expected/usual choices
and ended up with Families
(or something that more or less falls into that category)

she says, “we think there are two choices, be free or settle,
but that’s a lie;
birds need a nest and they still fly”

she says she takes so much pleasure now in her nest

this is what I want

a pleasure-nest
for delicious rest and retiring into things that
support freedom

what a beautiful wish to wish!

I want to be a pleasure-taking nest-building clear-seeing
free spirit in all things

(with an orgasmic relationship to sheets)

please yourself

Nigella Lawson says you must
please yourself to please others
and this is true for all forms of both creating and being

As I said to Grace, with great feeling:
Nigella is a subversive POET OF PLEASURE,
why are we not devoting our lives to studying
the hidden wisdom in her books that are purportedly about cookery
but really about JOYFUL ALIVENESS

I love her assertion that choosing to feed yourself
lovely delicious simple-to-make
pleasure-things has meaning,
so that we may “enjoy life on purpose rather than by default”

why has no one said this before

or maybe that’s the wrong question

how have I not been able to receive this before
what have I been doing with my time
nearly four decades in this experience of aliveness
without realizing how vitally necessary and healing it is for me to
engage with aliveness
to say yes to pleasure

to hear my yes
and wait for it to hit 120%

what do I know about 120%?

it is so funny how this works
if something is 89%, that feels like a pretty strong yes…

but when you bump up the scale to 120%
I know it isn’t logical
but it just sheds the exact right amount of light
on things that really are not yes enough to warrant
taking up space in my life

playing with this has shown me
just how many situations and relationships I agree to in life
that are maybe 67% yes

120% changes things
it’s kind of exciting
and a little scary

it’s the difference between yes-this-is-good
and MY CUP RUNNETH OVER
because the joy sparks are so plentiful, so joyful, so spark-filled

what else about this wish?

may you live to be one hundred and twenty
is a thing that jews say

it’s kind of like shorthand for
“I wish for you a long, healthy, happy, peaceful life
that is everything you want it to be”

120 is a stand-in for
[all the good things]

there’s something more about this wish….

this intentional practice/pursuit/engagement of YES
is related to pleasure and to home,
freedom and nest,
adventure and security
wildness and plenty
sovereignty and rest

and the relationships between these qualities
and the joyful practice of LESS

intersecting

this is where yes meets less:
luscious minimalism

doing less in both time and space
choosing contained spaciousness
and naps as portal-bridges to healing

opting out of The Game Is Rigged
wherever and whenever I can

playing at the margins
taking fifteen glorious minutes
to make butter
[let “butter” = anything]
that alters my internal state of being
anything that asks me to taste, to luxuriate in this moment

my breath slowing

pleasure claiming me
as I invoke it
both of us (me and Pleasure) fully engaged
in sweet aliveness

choosing this
even — especially? — when things are hard
and vaguely terrifying
when I forget truth
in moments of numbness or pain, in dark and narrow places

I write words on my palms with my fingertip
feeling how they absorb into my body
changing the streams
letting my body transport meaning
we are made of water and light
and language

words travel and go deep,
so I choose mine deliberately:

LIFE / HERE / NOW / GRACE / THANK YOU

what do I know about my wish this week

it’s about sanctuary, as so many of my wishes are

except until now it never occurred to me that
choosing sanctuary can be pleasure,
and pleasure can be my sanctuary

safety first is my guiding light in all things
but what if that too can be joyful, pleasurable,
another way to I take care of myself with love:
120%

now

a friend is flying to Ireland and I texted “fair winds”
except autocorrect thought that fair wings was a better wish
wings for freedom
and for birds who love nests

everyone in my life is traveling right now except me (it seems)
and I am noticing a twinge of lonely-envy
so it is time to turn inward, again,
and remember that internal adventuring in my kingdom
is always available to me
endless realms to explore

what happens if I experiment with
pleasure-nests
in this internal space

trusting my own horizons

I will ask to rendezvous with Incoming Me on the turquoise metal bridge
maybe we will have a picnic
and maybe she will whisper her secrets to me
beneath the trees

superpower of yes to my yes, no to my no.

october (on the fluent self calendar) is BE BOLD MORE, with the superpower of yes to my yes, no to my no

how perfect that I set forth on the boldest possible mission — Yes 120 — in the month of be bold more, with this marvelous superpower that just glows with permission, curiosity, clarity and love

thank you, past-me, for choosing this for me

last week’s wishes

I wished a wish about quality ingredients…

and then surprised myself by making the most luscious butter
which was both a quality ingredient
and an ingredient that released and revealed new qualities in me

invitation: come play with me…

you are invited to share many !!!!!! about what is here,
or share 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, Friday: we are here.

{a breath for being here when we get here}

Thank you, week!

This is the 377th week in a row we are chickening here together….

What worked this week?

Napping.

Sometimes I want to keep gnawing at a logistical dilemma, and not pause and not rest until I have something approaching an answer.

Invariably though, if I just listen when my body sends me back to bed, I either wake up with the solution or I wake up not caring so much about not having figured everything out yet, and often both.

Saying thank you.

Grief is not easy, and I am deep inside of it, and the only thing that helps when I am like this is to say thank you to everything, for everything. It is a form of naming things and saying I AM HERE, but with added appreciation.

Next time I might…

Do some advance monster-troubleshooting

I’ll be thirty nine this year, it’s not like this is my first breakup rodeo, even if this one hurts more than I remember anything ever hurting in my life.

So I know how my well-meaning monsters work. They want this to be all those years ago when Itamar left Tel Aviv without me, they want this to be the time Braude chose Vancouver and far away. They want me to believe I have been forgotten, so that I will be mad instead of sad, and get over it already.

They’re trying to protect me, of course, but they do this by telling me very convincing and very hurtful lies. And it somehow just now occurs to me that it was all lies then too.

Remembering that yes, this is what happening helps a lot, but/and: what helps even more is bringing in the negotiators, and talking about truth and Now Is Not Then.

Upcoming biopic if it were based on this week…

Breathe And Say Thank You, Cry And Say Thank You: the Havi Brooks story

8 breaths for the hard, challenging and mysterious.

1. The aching pain of sad goodbyes: he is gone. A breath for breathing my way through the ending.
2. Oh, my sweet sad heart that hurts so much. A breath for my heart.
3. Monsters telling me lies about how he has already forgotten me, and doesn’t love me anymore and that’s why he really left, to be free and as far away from me as possible, and most of the time I know these are lies, but sometimes I’m like, oh this is fascinating tell me more, as if there is anything to learn here other than the fact that yes, of course, some self-defense mechanisms are self-destructive and cruel, and there are reasons for that, and that doesn’t mean we have to buy into any of it. A breath for remembering truth.
4. It gets dark so early now, and I do not like this, and I feel a Hermiting coming on, a withdrawing from the world, and I do not know if this is good for me or if it will be too isolating. A breath for me.
5. Portland gets bigger and fancier and more unappealing to me by the day, and the street harassment is exponentially worse, and being here is not my yes, but I do not know where my yes is, and I do not have the means (at the moment) to go explore and find out, so let’s have a breath for me who both wants and does not want to be a wanderer, and wants and does not want to be effortlessly rooted.
6. The beautiful boy is gone, not here, away, and I have so much trouble getting used to this, I bought his favorite olives yesterday even though he is in Montana, as if having olives for him would be enough quiet magic to draw him back to me. Another breath.
7. There is so much big change in my life right now, and so many decisions to be made and real-and-perceived deadlines, and I am feeling completely overwhelmed, and also I need to go back to work for a few months, to take time off of my shmita in order to have more shmita, and I understand why this is important, and my feelings about this are very mixed. And also I am so sad about this ending with my lover that I can’t seem to focus for very long on any of the other things that need my attention. A breath for finding the treasure in all things, may this get easier.
8. Inhale, exhale. May all misunderstandings and distortions, internal and external, dissolve in love if not in laughter. 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.

1. While the most beautiful weekend was also the saddest weekend, it was full-to-overflowing with sweetness and treasure, and I will never forget it. A breath of immense gratitude for the gift of that.
2. When I am not under the spell of monster-lies, I remember that I am deeply loved, adored and cherished, not only by the boy but by myself and my wise selves, and also by source/LIFE. And I remember that love cannot be lost, because the very idea of that is absurd, a distortion of the true essence of love. I can forget that love is available to me and lives inside of me, but that doesn’t make it not-there. Broken-hearted is a misunderstanding. There is always more heart, more wholeness. A breath for this full-heart wisdom.
3. So much of the agony of last week was not just the pain of the end but not knowing if we’d ever see each other again. Now we have a date for a someday. I mean, it’s very far away, and who knows for sure if we will make it there, but I don’t care, it’s an X marks the spot, a map of jewels, arrows drawn on a slip of paper, and this helps. A breath for faith, and for hopefulness.
4. I am so fortunate to have such warm, generous and loving friends, who show up and glow love and support for me, and send texts that say all the right things. A breath of appreciation.
5. Oh the luck-magic of good timing which allowed for so much extra support and companionship this week when I needed it so much. Lira was in town, Marisa came and stayed with me for two days, Kyle had the day off and took me out to breakfast, I am sitting with Ms Amye in a favorite cafe, and Audrey is in town too and I get to see her Sunday. A breath of thank you.
6. I have new sheets and they are they color of RUBIES and marvelously soft, and I already really loved being in bed, but now it is just the best. A breath of joy for the transformative power of color.
7. For the past two weeks I have been stuck on a seemingly-endless project and not able to make progress, and then one morning this week, this suddenly shifted and now everything is moving. And a parallel process is happening in dance, where I have been on the cusp of so much, and on Wednesday I had a remarkable lesson with Jen where suddenly I could see the seeds growing where before was just dirt and hope. A breath of relief.
8. Thankfulness. 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.

Sparklepoints, superpowers, salve, fake band of the week!

Operations completed and forward movement!

Even more progress on the 2016 Fluent Self calendar, steps taken on the Fountaining op, and lots of ideas about both Sweet Honey and Shed Shed Shed. Thank you, fractal flowers.

I now bestow upon myself a quintillion sparklepoints, like a Fairground Stripper, and you are welcome to do the same for you.

Superpowers I had this week…

The superpower of remembering that actually everything is fine, thank you last-week me who asked for Deep Beautiful Trust In All Is Well, I had sweet moments of that and it helped so much.

Powers I want.

I want the superpower of choosing towards Delicious Space.

The Salve of Delicious Space

This might be the most healing salve there is. It is immensely powerful. It works mostly under the surface but it will make everything glow.

As I rub it into my skin, I remember that I am allowed to want supportive environments and supportive people in my life. Unsovereign bullshit starts to fade away. I make fearless intentional choices, small ones, and they add up.

I become very aware of what does not belong in my space, but it doesn’t bother me anymore, I don’t feel conflicted, I just step back and stand in the calm knowing that I am allowed to let things that don’t belong gracefully exit.

I am part of the grace and I am part of the exit, nothing is forced. I choose towards delicious space, and everything that doesn’t belong there is invited to find its own way out. I allow some doors to open, I allow some doors to close.

There is a sweet simplicity to this, and it comes from not being worried, and the reason I am not worried (even though, yes, I usually am) is that worry doesn’t belong in delicious space, so once I have chosen delicious space for me, there is no room for things that don’t belong there.

This is a very difficult salve to describe, so I am just going to flash an image of the round silver container it comes in, with a tiny rose in a tiny crown on a tiny boat, and trust that the feeling of it will waft its way to you.

Playing live at the meme beach house — the Fake Band of the Week!

This week’s band is for the beautiful boy who is so far away:

Big Sky Fans

Their latest album is Inaugural Uses, and, of course, it’s just one guy.

Quick announcements!

While clearing out the house, I discovered a hidden stash of the gorgeous Stone Skipping cards! $22 for an extremely magical deck of cards plus shipping, or for $30 (plus shipping) we’ll add a cheery red Playground mug, since I found some more of those too! Tell the First Mate if you’re interested.

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!