RELAX.

WHY IS IT SO HARD TO DO THIS SOMETIMES?  who are those people who don't put any pressure on themselves?  i want to be one of them.  i need to meet some first though, so i can study their method of keeping things nice and easy and fun.  okay, well until one walks into my life, i can day dream about having no pressure put on me.  but then i think of the animal world, and the sweet little sparrows that get gobbled up by a cat or a hawk, and the sparrow has his own sort of pressure....gotta find food for the family, and stay out of the cat's mouth.  and then the cat or the hawk is hungry too.  and it's always a bit of a 'i need it now, and the longer it takes for me to find my next meal, the hungrier i'm gonna get.'  pressure is everywhere.  it's not escapable.  so, it's our relationship to pressure that makes us all unique in how relaxed or stressed we are.  my homework from barbara this week is just to relax and have fun, and see what happens.  hmmmm.  i am realizing what a dadgum tense rigid tight serious nitpicker i tend to be.  lately, like in the past few days since my last accupuncture appointment, in which my practitioner suggested i treat myself really tenderly, and with the love and concern i would for my babies if they came to me telling me they have headaches, when i have my own tension headache, i have been talking to myself in such a sweeter way.  i didn't even realize just how hard i am on myself most of the time.  HARD.  so the answer to the question, why can't i relax?, is really pretty clear now.   i'll let you know how i feel after a week or two of talking nicer to myself. mmmmm.  you are so amazing heather.  you're the fiercest, coolest, kindest, loveliest girl i know.  i love you, heather.  i love you so much.  you are awesome.  you are my best friend.  i'm glad i know you.  thanks heather for sticking with me.  ha.  but seriously!

fear.

love.  

jesus seemed to be able to choose love.  i love love, said my sister.  i love love too.  why does it feel, seem like so much fear gets in the way?  is fear more powerful than life?  am i more powerful when i am in love, or in fear?  trust.....a joke it seems sometimes when you give it to anyone other than yourself.   it just sets you up for disappointment.  but if you simply love and forgive another, you are free, right?  but what about when you are repeatedly betrayed?  and then broken.  ah, to be broken is freer in a way.  a lot less to hold together.  nothing to hold together.  broken.   come on.......free.  not attached.  not bound.    sharp and free.

on my mind

getting drunk. with friends.  i don't mean just having a drink.  i mean drunk.

laughing.

completely relaxing.

good deep sleep.

soup.

trimming my fingernails.

hot hot summer.

marijuana.

sage.

tobacco.

pretty loud led zeppelin.  and lynyrd skynyrd.

mushrooms, the fun kind.

freedom.

expansiveness.

release from tension.

earth energy.

hot hot sumer.

fun fun fun.

my man's birthday.  the 40th one.

improvisation.  

video recording myself to get insight on the way i hold my body.  my physical tensions.

erykah badu.

the smell of hair, when it hasn't been washed in days.  i kind-of like this smell.

hand lotion, for colorado winter skin.  the hands and butt.

funny people.  funniness.  belly laughing.  

bees and honey and flowers.

new knowledge.

the healing power of a good friend.

gratitude.

luck.

blackness.

getting the perfect degree of  drunk.

soon.

a marital fight

I just saw david for the first time, as someone REALLY separate from me.  I mean similar to how separate a stranger can feel, similar in the way that I felt enough space between us that I could see him from another perspective, from a farther back perspective….and what I saw, is a man wanting to make sure that his boundaries are healthy strong and in tact…and the way he did that was by wacking them all over me, hurting me in the process.  All I asked is if he’d do he dishes before his kindmen meeting, and he replies with this, “I never ask you to do the laundry, you just do it when you get to it.”  This is funny right?  And another way of saying, “I don’t want to clean the kitchen now.”  Why couldn’t he have just said that?  Why couldn’t I just see that that’s what he was saying, in that moment.  I have a feeling that if I were witnessing this argument taking place between some other couple, I would have totally gotten that, right away…..and I wonder if I would have just watched the couple go through the same dance we did.  Which was me saying, ‘this is not a threat, just a question that was on my mind.”  And him saying, “well, in the past you asking me a question like that means, ‘clean the kitchen or I’m going to do it and be pissed the whole time.’”    Ok, dudes.  What’s the big deal.  Distill it down to, “kitchen?”, with a sweet little glance, to give him a wiff of the energy he loves about you……and he looks over and just says, “I live for cleaning your kitchen,” in a deep smirky sexy manly way.  And then slowly walks into the question, I mean kitchen, and cleans it while cracking a few jokes, looking beautiful and introspective most of the time, but also casting a few eye glances my way to let me know he’s also staying present with the room.  Mmmmm, so hot.

 oh, no...is this beginning of my first trashy novel??

taken

so brief, and so beautiful this break from my house of influenza.  when is the last time you did not step out of your front door for 5 days?  

coolness....that's all i can think of but it has nothing to do with what this post is about.

1/6/8

a monumental day….olive’s first stroller ride. Olive’s first tooth burst through the gum. Max and zhi’s second bike ride………I can’t write now cause I am tweeking on kid energy.

1/7/8

hoakay. Today, The beginning of our attempt to find to find rhythm in the midst of max and zhi going to preschool, which we all of a sudden, in the fall (I mean autumn, as well a kind of *fall* from life as we knew it), found it impossible to do. For all of December I stayed home with our munchkins. And now it’s January 7th, and I’ve let them out again! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! They’re out, in all their easy preciousness that we got them swimming in again, in a school yard, albeit a Buddhist schoolyard, but still a school yard nonetheless. a small little replica of the big wide-world, sort-of, and they’re going to bring home all sorts of horrifying behaviors, we know this. Maybe they’ll bring home some beautiful sweetness too? Yes, I like to focus on the shit for some reason. Actually I don’t like to focus on the shit, but I sho do have a habit of doing so. They’re going to bring home all sorts of horrifying germs too, most likely. It’s life on earth, I guess. If we want to dance with others, we have to be able to stand up to them, with our own selves streaming out. We have to be able to see others and their illnesses, without absorbing them into our skins, everytime. I mean, I totally get how we find ourselves in a deeper way, how we have to seriously grow our roots to keep standing in our bodies when we get sick, or all of a sudden under someone else’s spell. It’s often a huge growth opportunity. But it’s a lot of freaking work to constantly be learning as much about ourselves as we can, to constantly be focused on anchoring into our own ground, so that when we are up against another powerful, dynamic presence, our own does not feel weak, see-through, and flittery. And we all needed a break! I’m just not sure it was a long enough break. They never are, though.

As I see my kids struggle with this, and I mean max really, I see myself riding the same wave, paralleling him. I’m Finding more of my weight, and more of my lightness all at the same time. How funny that we need weight and lightness to feel balanced. Ummm, well, that is almost a universally known statement, or at least here in boulder. But still I never thought about it like this……… I’m picturing an archetype-type fat fat heavy dark hairy growling man (why a man?) as my weighty grounded anchored physical body, there’s no way he’d blow away in the wind. And then to balance him out, there’s this little bird, a little fairy butterfly girl, that sings and dances and eats royal jelly and pollen and honey all day long and sleeps inside a buttercup at night. They need each other, they love each other, they are each other in an honest-fearless-polarized-strange way. This is what I want to remember for max too. When he is totally repulsing me with his spinning, or his dirty dirty dirtiness, I want to remember to look at him very carefully, and find his physical body’s connection, however solid or weak, and also find his spirit’s connection, however far-out, or touchable. And just go from there…….but also find my own connections, and relate to him in terms of these simple dynamics. Ooooooh, it’s kind-of a lot to track. Maybe with practice it will just become my new first language! Maybe it already is and I am just deciding to speak it again. We’ll see. We’ll wait and see.

1/8/8

I have to burn things…….Even if it sometimes could be considered wasteful, because I sometimes burn things that could be potentially useful to somebody. But anyways…..i have to burn things sometimes. Today I burned somebody else’s old dead dreams. For whatever reason, I ended up with the material of their stillborn? Creation. It needed release, and the way I typically handle these types of materials is to just burn them. I love my fireplace….she is always up to help me out with these little stuck, stagnant, dead physicalities (not a word). Thanks dragon lady. Thank you very much. My kids are also up for helping me out….happily throwing in whatever random object is needing release. 

sister sister

love my sister........that's all i want to say.  i love her.

oh, and there was this little bird that sat at the top of a tree outside our mom's house all morning long on christmas day.  in the heavy falling snow, it sat there, occasionally flying off, but coming back to perch on the same tiptop branch everytime.   i kept noticing it, and pointing it out.  i loved that bird's role in our day.  don't forget about the birds, sisters.  they are frisky little survivors, even on the coldest day of winter!