What's Holding You Back?

I started writing Morning Pages this week after a long absence, because as an editor, my first instinct is to edit myself as I write instead of letting the ideas flow unchecked and unjudged. I don't use a journal for Morning Pages, only legal pads, because I don't want it to seem formal or finished. It's my version of homework. Someday I'll go back and circle any sentences or phrases that I might use in essays, but for now it's just three pages of freeflow thoughts/gibberish/worries/fears every morning. Eventually, a nugget of important information sometimes emerges. What rose to the surface today is that my life feels painfully fenced in. By my job, which used to be a passion and has now evolved into a boring marriage between parties who have nothing in common. By my writing, which has become a chore because I feel as if I should be trying to writing a book and maybe--gasp!--I don't really want to. Or at least not the kind of book other people want me to write. By the predictability of my days. Not that I want a tornado to touch down in my yard in order to shake up my life, but I would like to stir up a creative tornado to blow down the fears and laziness that keep me immobilized. I'm going to try and hang some lights on that fence to remind me that I'm lucky I recognize I need to change, lucky I didn't become so accustomed to this comfortable little cage of home/work/tv/bed that I failed to see it could become a prison. But when I try and think of ways to stage a break-out, I know it will take more than having an artist date, starting a hobby or thinking happy thoughts. I need to rediscover the single-minded fire and ambition I used to have. I've never been the kind of rebel who dances on tabletops or rides a motorcycle across Australia, but I've always had an outlaw outlook that now seems to be behind bars. Have you ever found yourself in this state, and if so, what got you over the wall?

Get Fired Up!

When I go to work in the morning, I'm loaded up like a pack mule. I don't want to haul my sizable ass and three bags full of books, products to photograph, laptop, glass (not plastic) microwavable lunch bowls, workout clothes, makeup (if there's an event), 3 Moleskine notebooks (personal, planner and professional), stainless steel water bottle (or plastic if I'm lazy) and maybe my big heavy hardcover idea book (if I'm feeling creative) up four flights of stairs. So I take the elevator up, stairs down. But tonight I thought I would surely ignite from work-related stress, so when I saw this sign, I thought, "Stairs? What about the window? What if my head catches on fire from angry spontaneous subcutaneous combustion? What would happen if I just walked out and started driving west?" I love to play with that idea, imagine the road unwinding behind me, but pretty soon I realize my ATM will only get me about 600 miles and then I would end up in Kentucky where I started out. We're all over a barrel if we work for someone else or we're not living off the grid raising our own vegetables and getting our power from solar panels. Everyone I know is facing wage cuts, furloughs, hiring freezes, but what can we do about it? Where are we going to go? Most people will end up working like indentured servants instead of resigning. Instead, we'll just become resigned to a fear-based life of deadening jobs that provide health insurance. We are going to be too scared to take risks, too scared we'll lose our houses, too scared of our own shadows to see a silver lining.  Let's make a pact--no matter how scared we get, let's remember what it feels like to be free spirits. We'll need our wings again some day.

Pot of Gold

This was the view from my hotel room one afternoon during my visit to Boston, but my iPhone camera couldn't quite capture the golden outline around each branch of the trees. It reminded me of an illuminated manuscript, a visual epiphany. One of the workshops I attended at the Nieman narrative journalism conference was about finding the extraordinary in ordinary moments--this brief transformation of a mundane view from a sterile hotel room reminded me that I need to open my eyes instead of sleepwalking through so much of the day. The whole weekend was a jolt of much-needed inspiration because lately all I seem to do is worry about the stock market and my coworkers and bills I need to pay and should I have applied for a government job decades ago as my mother urged instead of pursuing my grasshopper dreams of being a writer. 

Feed Me

I just spent a weekend cruising design blogs and staggered off to bed on Sunday night satiated with Cute, Adorable and Fabulous. Is this what my life has come to, I wondered, as I fell asleep with visions of  dreamy paint colors, amazing headboards and stenciled wallpaper swirling through my brain? I used to get in dramatic arguments with lovers outside Irish bars that involved smashing Irish Coffee cups and then falling into each other's arms under noirish street lights. I stayed up late talking about T.S. Eliot and masturbation. I have been known to jump in fountains! But now I can be found lurking around sites that feature other people's tragically hip lofts in Brooklyn and stuffed objects and artwork that feature hybrid creatures that are a cross between humans and bunnies. Yes, I would love for my house to be a work of art like the one created by Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell and her lover Duncan Grant, but I also want it to be organic, an outgrowth of my own personality, not something I have to study or emulate or copy from tearsheets. My iconic house memory is of my grandmother's house in rural Kentucky. It was filled with inherited objects--silver, quilts sewed by long-dead aunts, furniture that had the patina of decades of use by ordinary families. It never changed over the years except for occasionally repainting or cleaning the wallpaper. It was timeless, solid, lovely, simple and hopelessly old-fashioned. Several generations had passed through it, sat in the chairs, leaned their elbows on the enameled kitchen table. Their spirits lingered. I want to live in that kind of house, not an Ikea idea or an easy-to-assemble resemblance.  After my weekend of design dessert, I want a timeless, solid, lovely, simple and hopelessly old-fashioned supper of a life. 

This is Enough.

Late afternoon. Shadow play. Cracked sidewalks. The world in repose.

The planet on pause. Put down your newspaper. Turn off the news, the latest murder, the airplane crash, the embezzler in his penthouse, the missing wife, the catastrophic oil spill, the aging playboy in his pajamas, the news anchors who will never be as broke as you, the predators and preyed upon, the storm chasers, the maniac with the assault weapon, the celebrity addicts, the blood in the streets, the Dow financial thermometer. Step outside and see what the weather is right this minute. Taste the air the way dogs do. Lace up your shoes. Put one foot in front of the other.  Love your little world. It's all you can do right now. It's enough right now. 

Bondage

A friend told me this weekend that her new mantra is, "Everything is great!". I'm trying to adopt that because it's so much better than, "What the hell happened to my 401(K)?!". People gravitate to the former and flee the latter. If only CNN would figure that out. But this weekend I have to confess to a meltdown in a parking lot. Before I left home to meet friends at another friend's boutique,  I'd made the mistake of looking at the reports on my retirement investments and realized I could end up scrounging for nuts and berries just to survive in my old age. Or maybe my kids could just set me afloat on an ice floe when I became a drag on the blubber supply. Gruesome visions of Suze Orman reproaching me for financial profligacy danced through my head. Because, yes, I have been a grasshopper, and I deserve a disgraceful, penurious old age. As I sat in my car crying, I knew I should repent the dinners eaten out, the trips taken, the stupid shit I bought online.  But I'm so tired of feeling guilty for the worldwide financial collapse. So tired of talking heads shaking their heads over Americans being greedy consumers addicted to big screen tvs and fast food. So tired of movie stars wagging their fingers at me about clean coal. So tired of the endless magazine pieces on the virtues of the simple life. I feel like I'm living in a new Puritanical Age which requires me to confess my eBay sins. Yes, I know we're living in The Age of Reduced Circumstances and Limited Expectations...but every now and then, you just need to take a vacation in the Denial Hotel. So I blew my nose, went in the shop and bought a pair of dominatrix-style high heels that made me look tough and brave and wore them to a party that night and didn't repent buying them one little bit. 

Savoring Italy

This photo was taken in a house in Siena, late lazy afternoon. I think I slowed down in some fundamental way in Italy--yes, I was writing furiously every day, drinking in new experiences and landscapes, feeling the usual unsettledness that comes over me when I travel, but I also tasted things deeply, lingered over aromas (the smell of crushed herbs -- chamomile? -- in the lawn will stay with me forever), felt the lens of my eye opening wider. Today I went to a wine tasting at noon--unholy hour for wine--but it was so dramatically different from  gulping a glass at a party for the fortitude to face strangers or mindlessly pouring a glass when I get home from work. Because we were sipping, I could take time to smell the ocean in the white wine from Italy, feel the sun and wind and earth of Tuscany. As one of  the American wines opened up, its aroma shifted from a strong goatish whiff to subtle (sweat on the skin of someone you love) to sublime (an orchard of ripe fruit with drunken wasps reeling about in the summer sun). I'm sure that's not how the winemakers would describe their bottles, but slowing down to savor stirred my sense memories on this ordinary Saturday afternoon and took me to so many places in my past and my dreams.

The Mail I Didn't Receive

This week my mail was stolen out of my mail box. A sweet little standard box with a red flag on a post outside a white picket fence entangled in a jasmine vine. I've lived in my neighborhood 7 years, and this is the first time I've been vandalized. Worst of all, it was someone who lives nearby, according to the neighbor who saw her. I'm sad and angry all at once. It's hard times out there and people might be verging on desperate, but it breaks my heart and pisses me off that now I have to install the Alcatraz lockdown version of mailboxes. That the Barnes & Noble gift card my daughter sent me was stolen. That this woman might have taken my Social Security check if I'd been an old lady living on a fixed income. But then I started fantasizing about what was stolen.  The announcement that I won the MacArthur Genius Award? A letter from an old lover who realized after decades that he could not live without me? An apology from someone who wronged me years ago? A job offer from Tina Brown? The possibilities inherent in what I didn't receive are magical. 

Happy Shack

 I spent too much time today trolling zillow.com trying to figure out what my 1,074 square foot house is worth now. Is my 3 bdrm better or worse than my neighbor's 3 bdrm 3 blocks away? Is my lot slightly closer to the ritzy neighborhood I can't claim to be part of or does it lean over into that lower-value neighborhood to the east? Why didn't I add a bathroom when I had the extra money? What the hell happened to my equity? Unfortunately, what zillow can't take into account are the number of porch parties held in this tiny house. The peace that blows through my prayer flags. The rosebush a friend gave me after my mother died and the note I wrote to my mother and planted under its roots. The nights listening to rain on the roof. The first dinner I cooked here for a new lover (okay, it didn't work out, but it was still a landmark). The games of Scrabble and Cranium. Gin and tonic with my best friends on summer Sunday afternoons. Coming home from work and pulling the house around me like a security blanket.

Always Again

I'm always utterly amazed when the cherry tree in my front yard blooms. It takes me by surprise every time. All last night and all day today, dramatic storms rolled through my neighborhood. Rain and thunder, thunder and rain--my favorite weather. In the midst of all that sturm und drang, the pink petals stood out like a neon sign that said "spring is on its way back." I'm sure most of them will be knocked off by the violence of the wind and water, and the temperature plunge will finish the rest, but it still bowls me over to realize how much we depend on these little messages from nature. We pave over the earth, scar it, deplete it, poison it and lock ourselves up in office buildings and schools with no windows, and still it survives and calls to the wild places in ourselves that cling to our souls like those tender, tough blossoms on the cherry tree.