Venus

catching my breath

whew. i've had a doozy of a week. i didn't read anything from the joy diet. i didn't return any calls from girlfriends. i stopped thinking about the future... for now... and i just lived through the moment.  living through the moment this past week sort of felt like wading through mud. 

this is vague. but, that's okay.  all i can say is i've caught my breath and i'm resting peacefully on some solid ground, thinking about the muscles i need to build so that next time i find myself waist-deep in a pile of mud i can find my way out with a little more assuredness that there is, indeed, even ground up ahead.

joy diet week two: truth

I had a hard time connecting to this chapter's assignments.  I thought it was because I hadn't had a full week of nothing before delving into truth. But, for some reason I just couldn't actually bring myself to do the truth exercise everyday.

The exercise starts with a 15 minute dose of nothing, followed by the question: what hurts right now? Each time I tried it, I found myself without an answer. Or, more aptly put, with the answer: nothing.  A cookie cutter diagnosis of my issue might come back as a simple case of denial. But, to be truthful, nothing hurts right now.

I've done a lot of work over the past year and a half. A lot of healing. A lot of repairing. A lot of re-aligning with me, re-configuring my head and heart with what I know to be my true self. So, I think to ask myself, "what hurts?" felt like asking, "what's tense?" immediately following a 90 minute full body massage.  I know there will be more pain in the future -- perhaps in the near future, or perhaps down the road a bit. But, for now, I'm in a fairly relaxed state.

As I reflect on the week, I think another question might have worked a bit better for me. And I'd like to experiment with it over this next week.  That question is: what's true right now?

I always have a hard time with self-help techniques that suggest a consistent deficit. I see the value of having the "what hurts?" question in my self-actualization toolbox. But, I think maybe different moments require different tools. And, perhaps I just needed a more neutrally worded question at this moment.

I felt a bit like a remedial joy dieter when I realized I wasn't putting the time into this chapter. I thought it meant I couldn't, in good faith, move on to chapter 3. But, a little bit of boredom on the train one day convinced me to open up the book again. And chapter 3 is wonderful! It's all about... desire.  What do i want to do? What do i desire in life? What do I believe my purpose to be? 

Now, those inquiries really light me up and resonate so deeply. This all kind of leads me back to the belief that life is an on-going series of cycles. And sometimes many cycles are spinning simultaneously for us. My primary relationship might be in a different part of the creative cycle than my career life, for instance. Or in this case my cycle towards joy is just not in a painful phase. I'm in the desire phase and i like it here.

(re)Connecting

it's been kind of cool to reconnect,  through facebook and blogs, with a young woman i knew long ago. it seems like we knew each other in a different world... when we were both kids. she found me on facebook a few days back and i'm glad to see the updates from this vibrant and smiling young woman.

i'm also enjoying her blog The Library of Alexandria. she's challenged herself to read 100 books in 150 days. i know i couldn't keep up with that schedule... even with my bus/train/waiting for bus and train time.  but, she's definitely keeping up and blogging about it. she's reading biographies and memoirs and fiction too. so... check it out.

nothing for real

i finally found 15 minutes to do nothing. honestly i found 20 minutes to do nothing. after my string of marathon workdays the hour and 45 minutes of... shall i say expendable... time i had last evening seemed like an eternity. i don't mean eternity in the "oh my gosh this is SO boring" kind of way. i mean it in the "ding, ding, ding" i just hit the jackpot on the slot machine of time kind of way. 1 hour and 45 free minutes. all to myself. "oh boy, what should i do?"

well.  i did nothing for part of it. and then i recovered from doing nothing, because it made me euphorically sleepy.

i forget who it is in the book blog that suggested doing nothing in child's pose, but i tried it. it didn't quite do it for me. so i ended up in more of a kneeling prostration, a la call to prayer.  i heard my heart beat loudly.  and i could feel my breath deeply.  and my back got the kind of stretching it craved too.

so, i kind of hooha'd at beck's idea of seeing my thoughts go by on a ticker tape and categorizing them while they pass me by.  i thought "that sounds like an awful way to get to nothing..." a) i don't always see words when i think, i see images or impressions. and b) i don't really want to concentrate on all that stuff when i'm supposed to be going nowhere to concentrate on nothing.  however, i tried it anyway.  and i found out something new: 

a surprising number of my thoughts could go under the sub-heading "future."

identifying that was a real good way for me, actually, to move towards nothing.  i could just say to myself... "oh, wait. that's for the future." or "that's in the future." the more i did that the more i found myself wanting to get back to the present. and so for the final few moments of nothing i breathed in and out with the word "present" or maybe it was "presence." and as i did that i realized my mind wanted to meander back into the past... interesting. i thought i'd kind of tied up a lot of the past. but, nope. not quite. 

so, tonight, after my evening of work, i will try to use my nothing time to meditate on the present and my presence in it.

more of nothing

I want to thank Ken Burns for the National Parks series. I watched part one last night with my boyfriend. Honestly, I was waiting my turn and biding my time until the season premiere of Brothers and Sisters, the one TV guilty pleasure I actually schedule into my week. But, today, I just can't stop thinking about that John Muir. Founder of the Sierra Club, Muir spent years, it seems, in Yosemite. And though people find him eccentric, I find his conversations with plants and waterfalls remarkable. What a remarkable way to simultaneously do something and nothing, no? To sit next to a flower until it explains to you its essence? To stand behind a waterfall so you can feel how it feels? What a great job!

Seriously, I just loved hearing about a man who had that part of the creative process so completely mastered -- that part where you simply pay attention and then articulate for others. How many of us have stepped foot into one of our national parks and felt completely overwhelmed by the beauty? How many of us can do much more than stare and feel the immensity? And here's a man, John Muir, who crouched down in the middle of the immensity and took a close and personal look at the minutest details. Nice.

a week behind on nothing

I'm a week behind on the first Joy Diet assignment. I was to do nothing for 15 minutes every day this week. Instead I did something, continuously, for 12 plus hours every day this week. I worked and worked and on my breaks I watched tv, walked to the store or ate lunch. 

Yesterday it seems like I did nothing all day. But, really I watched a Hooterville marathon on my local retro tv station. Those Douglases on Green Acres sure are a hoot. And Sam Drucker's a pretty reasonable guy. Oh and I napped.  But, simply doing nothing... that didn't happen.

I've now picked up the book, cracked it open and begun reading. I'm still confused about this doing nothing idea. Am I supposed to meditate while doing nothing? I'd like that. I'd love to rebuild my meditative life. It's been hard to find that time with work and relationship-building going on these days. My guy usually gets the last call of the day - sometimes the only call of the day since I'm not much of a phone-talker. But, maybe I can extend my day 15 more minutes and give my soul that last call. Hm. The thought sounds relaxing in itself.

week one of the joy diet: nothing

I'm waiting for a book to arrive at my local Barnes and Noble store.  And when it does, I think this blog will become a bit more active again.  The book is called The Joy Diet and it's written by Mary Beck,  the author of Finding Your Own North Star.  I haven't read the latter, but the title sounds fabulous.

While I read, I will also be participating in an 11 week book-blog.  Bloggers across the country will read the book on the same schedule and then post reflections about the experience with the book and it's exercises. It's kind of a public, collective personal growth experience. And I'm prettyexcited about it. I think it will dovetail nicely with the writing class I'm taking at StoryStudioChicago this fall. 

Week one's theme is nothing.  It's an interesting moment in time to ponder nothing. I'm in high output mode at work.  We're in the closing two weeks of our quarterly production cycle. So, basically for 12-14 hours per day I match images and sounds (edit video).  I don't have much choice between doing and not doing at the moment. I wonder if sitting on the train for 15 minutes a day will qualify as nothing. (See, I need the book so I can find out!)

Editing video was honestly my first love. Oh, I could sit in that dark studio in my high school's basement forever.  I would leave, admittedly dazed, hours after the last bell rang,  right alongside the athletes.  I am always grateful that I get paid to do creative work, in the field I chose for myself half a lifetime ago, and in an environment that offers much more flexibility that most in my field. But, after 10 years, I feel the difference between creative time for me and creative time for it;  generating something new from me vs. generating something new for someone or something else.

But, in all honesty, I think most of my time is creative time.  Life itself is a creative process, with  mini-cycles in motion constantly. Sometimes several are moving simultaneously, each in their own phase.  Whether I'm conceiving, incubating, ah-ha'ing or working on output, I am in the midst of creativity; we all are I think.  I'm looking forward to having a little creative output in the writing department and meanwhile counting my blessings for the new relationship and new frame of mind and  I've been incubating this summer.

And now, for The Joy Diet...

 

on my mind

self-worth
rural women
midwestern women
personal gems
sacred journeys
weaving
quilting
scrapbooking
storytelling

no rules for the intuitive

i'm loving this site right now.  i smile pretty much every time i visit it:
http://celebritygrammar.wordpress.com/

delara pointed out this book-blog and i'm thinking of doing the ten week exercise.  i think i'll learn from the book, my process of going through it and writing my responses to the ideas in it:  http://tnc-thejoydiet.blogspot.com/

 
 

Elisabeth Hasselback: Archetype

Elizabeth Hasselback and I are, reportedly, the same age. She's taller, tanner and more prolific in the babymaking department than me. But, being the same age and the same nationality I'm going to venture that she and I have something in common. That something is TV. We both belong to a generation, the first perhaps, to have lived our entire life watching TV. Our parents, I'm sure, can all remember the time before a little glass screen emitting light entered their homes. And our grandparents can remember decades without its influence.

Recently, Ms. Hasselback said something that crowned her as the TV generation archetype. In her assessment of Obama's evening with Professor Gates and Sgt Crawley, she insisted that the woman who called 911 should have been invited to the beer fest too. Her colleagues made several attemptst o introduce the idea that a conflict between two people needed to be resolved and those two people were Sgt Crawley and Professor Gates. The woman's call to 911 may have directly instigated the conflict. But, once she put the phone down she was no longer a part of the fight.

As the argument continued, I found myself wanting to help out Sherry and Whoopi with one more thought. I wanted to mention that Barack Obama isn't the producer of the Brady Bunch Reunion. This wasn't about tapping into the nostalgic heart of TV audience members by having the side characters show up unexpectedly.