Center of My Universe

I'm so shallow that even a labyrinth can't keep me focused on eternal verities. I wish I could understand the concept of walking toward the center as a process, but I just want to skip ahead to the end and see how it comes out (am I spiritual yet?). How embarrassing. I'm really trying to get better at not finishing people's sentences or taking the easy way out when it comes to exercise, writing a book, reading a book, or falling in love (are we there yet?). Impatience coupled with laziness is my bete noir. I like to dabble and cut out early. My friend Jeff paid for us to take salsa lessons and the studio is so lame and I'm so bad at it (picture a cow doing the fox trot--seriously, I turn into a four-hoofed hoofer on the dance floor) that my usual m.o. would be to take one lesson out of the package of four and then consider that I'd had the Experience and talk about it incessantly in order to convince myself that I'd accomplished something. But this time, I'm sticking it out for the full FOUR LESSONS. Two down, two to go--next up--group dance! With the lights down low. I probably won't get more graceful, but by God and Fred Astaire, I'm seeing it through to the center.

Secret Life

I want to be a person who keeps a journal but I got tired of rereading entries that veered between monotonously recurring emotional laments and "warm today, planted some basil" one-liners about My Day. Unfortunately I have volumes that are filled with this kind of stuff. I read it and marvel at the tears I wasted on X or wonder why I thought I'd never ever get over Y, whose last name I can't even remember. When I found an online workshop about keeping a visual journal, I signed up, bought all the supplies, printed out the lessons and put them in a 3 ring binder as instructed--and promptly fell behind all the other participants who seemed to be journaling, pasting, gluing, painting, taping and cutting incessantly and then posting comments to each other about their progress every 10 minutes. I think these women woke up with doublesided tape and an Exacto knife in their hands. I finally had to opt out of the message boards because I felt so inadequate compared to these dynamos. But just signing up for the workshop lit a little fire. I'm not following all the lessons, but I made a list of topics I want to write about. On my first entry, I used silver gesso to paint my journal pages and then wrote two pages on Secrets. Covering up that relentlessly blank white page helped me turn off the blank stare I usually get when I open my journal and feel compelled to find profound sentences and then slam it shut when I can't. Maybe because it's not all about Poor Me.

Oh Kentucky

This is a photo of me with my grandfather in the tobacco field he sharecropped in Kentucky. He was indifferent and often callous to his 6 daughters,  but I adored him and I think the feeling was mutual. I was a "town" girl who traveled 100 miles to the country every summer to stay with my grandparents in their house with no indoor plumbing, air conditioning or television. I loved every minute. Once when I was homesick, my stern, unemotional grandfather drove into the nearest town on his tractor to buy me fresh oranges. When I was a toddler, he carried me to the barn one night to listen to an owl. He convinced me it was talking to me and I still believe it. Can you say "princess"? My father was on a ship in the Pacific in WWII for my first two years so we never really bonded, and my grandfathers and my uncle were the only men in my life. When I was a baby, my uncle would come home from a night of carousing, wake me up, put "Brazil" on the record player and dance me around the room. I had a mostly absent and distant father all my life, but I had fresh orange juice, midnight dances and owls who knew my name.

Bridge to Where?

I wonder if Hillary is a Libra because we are both having an awesomely rotten week. I feel like I've been sucked into Mercury Retrograde backwards -- like being picked up by an enormous Bad Karma tornado-hairball combination. Where it will put me down and in what psychic shape, I can't predict. I know (because I've done my time on Self-Help Drive, USA) that these upheavals and life changes that seem like dead ends are really bridges to...somewhere or other. I just hope it's not the afterlife, the dentist or corporate-life-in-death. But I'm feeling more like a spatchcocked pigeon in the middle lane than a consciously evolving spirit fresh from a yoga class. I came home tonight and thought about hooking up to my Respirate biofeedback machine, but instead I said, fuck it, I'll have a glass of wine and 3 Advils. Because sometimes you don't want to be consciously evolving and dealing with your problems...you just want to watch Jackie Warner bust a move on Workout or watch Free Willy on HBO and cry your eyes out (uh oh...a little too much wine there). As Scarlett said, tomorrow is another day...and I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.