How I *should* be living

Wake up! at a decent time. Let's say: 7

Huh. I already lost interest.

Well, okay:
Meditate
Walk/exercise/breathe outdoor air
Write
Chores
Remember goals
Accomplish some of those goals
Play & Create
Some form of brain edification
Communicate with the outside world

Not:
I want to go back to bed.
Okay.
Oooo Gilmore Girls!

~sigh~

I write the wittiest thoughts!

I do write the wittiest of . . . thoughts. Yes, so often do I blog in my head! Or craft stories! I even find things strung together so beautifully in the middle of a text. How odd that these do not get published or recognized. . .

When I was a little girl I remember wishing I could write my thoughts onto a sort of ticker tape in my brain that would somehow make it out into the world. That way I would not lose the stories or, rather untimely yet surely hilarious, retorts that passed through my head. But a ticker tape inside my head would be both difficult to implant, run, maintain and somehow print. Would the paper be dispensed through my ear? Would I then need to retype the thoughts?

But they would not be lost!

Thus I ramble.

Often I think of writing things that begin with "How to Stop Sucking in 5 Days or Less" or maybe something with a legitimately positive title. Then I do not pick up a pen in time, or I do not get out my laptop. And if I do the words and thoughts seem to drift away before word or the internet finally open.

Alas clearly my remaining a non-prolific writer (and most definitely why I am an unpublished one!), is the fault of technology or ink and paper. Yes. Not me.

Not me.

Says the girl now bored of her own words.

not a haiku

I stare out the window

I cannot find the moon

I see only the distance 

From me to you.

My 2013 One Day Blog: Hammers & Headaches

I find that though my words to respond to things occasionally changes, what I am responding to doesn't change often enough. Yay for so many blogs over the years, I can find my unfortunate patterns! Who knows? Maybe I'll break one.

The Loveliness of Being: Hammers & Headaches
June 6, 2013

Have you ever just felt that no matter what you say or do you leave yourself sounding like a fool? Like you get so caught up in your own thoughts that you end up pushing away the people you care about? You don't mean to, but you say stupid things and think crazy thoughts, and lose your place?

That's what my week has been. Continued disconnects, or misconnects really. Since most of my communication with the world is in writing, that might just make it worse.

Perhaps my head aches and lack of focus are not helping. My not sleeping and increased pain. The anniversary of my career ending (my tendency towards the dramatic . . .), and of other losses. But none of that is ever an excuse to be mean or misdirect negativity.

My response to all of this tends to be retreating farther into my thoughts. Throwing more words into the void to fix what I said before. But it's like punching a hole in the wall and trying to fix it with a hammer.

"Hammers & Headaches" & 1.25 other posts, all June 6, 2013

https://lovelinessofbeing.wordpress.com/

Today's "Conscious Challenge" was crazy appropriate (5/23/15)

"Watch how you judge yourself Notice the ways you judge yourself. Where did you get those judgments? Who or what decides that you are worthy or not? Observe how judging yourself affects your behavior, your relationships and your life."

It was a hard day.

http://www.consciousday.com/current-challenge

"A life lived in chaos is an impossibility . . ."

". . . for the artist."

Madeleine L'Engle wrote, "A life lived in chaos is an impossibility for the artist." Tonight I was flipping through the many tabbed and dog-eared pages of Walking on Water and enjoying notes written in it over the past 10 or so years, when I happened to open to a page lacking in any of those markings yet there at the top was this quote. How strange to find it!

Strange because I have it written somewhere and every time I see it I find it upsetting. That is until tonight. Oh, the beauty of context and time! Stumbling across it I now see how it makes sense and holds true (I also found that I had left out "for the artist" which is quite key to the purpose of the quote). All the years that I have read it I never wanted it to be true. I have lived in a state of chaos for so long. Clung to the notion that life is a sort of controlled chaos and that since chaos, or at best controlled chaos, is all I know so this cannot be true. For me it is more than a state of being, it is what I am. It is me.

Controlled chaos is how my high school art teacher described me. During the critique of our final projects, self-portraits, she looked at mine and said that it did very much describe me. That in concept this fractured picture (a painting on the top page cut open in the middle to reveal a layered and messy self on the inside page), and my identity are like a Van Gogh, expressing a controlled chaos. So this quote from my beloved Madeleine L'Engle has always been vexing. If it was true then what I thought was one thing is very much not, the entire concept ultimately misunderstood. And much, much worse, it felt like that means that the fractured girl I presented in my senior year of high school was describing a brokenness that not was not a place to live, yet I still identify with it in my adult-self. And that all of that means that Patty Post's words that were so magical, have turned sad and I am more stunted than before. (That's a lot of power to give to 8 words!)

Though perhaps I have been wrong. Perhaps it is both a trap and a construct. A prison that I have built for myself. A fairy-tale'd existence in a child's mind that is more Rapunzel's isolating and door-less tower, than the fantastic world I find in Van Gogh's skies or the cobblestoned street of Cafe Terrace at Night. This type of existence is glued together by a belief that within the crazy there is a calm. But there isn't. In the calm there is a calm and in the crazy--in the chaos--there is a beauty of a million moments strung together as twinkle lights and swirling life, but those moments are pieces to the whole. They are not the whole and not all of our moments should live there.

I flee from the calm for it scares me. Yet I long for it. I must find my way to it. Summon the courage to choose CALM over CHAOS. Even though it is nearly always in motion and there is an ugliness growing as more and more I slip between an uncomfortable edginess with an increasingly upsetting land of exhaustion and disarray, and the cold damp bottom of the well (another story). The ugliness is still what I know and there is a safe-ness in that. However it is becoming much more work to live within it, not the good work. The kind where I am always treading water and losing the hopefulness that I need and that belongs inside me.

I have been to the calm and I love it there. But it takes a very different sort of work to get and stay. This includes discipline and focus. For me it has to start with the courage to truly move out of the crashing and consuming storm and into the present moment. Tonight I have started to believe that in the calm I may find the energy to create. Through the years and amid the madness that I thought once drove the artist in me, stifles her. I have all but stopped creating. Is it possible that walking out of the storm and into the stillness, will lead me to the home I yearn for?

I have glimpsed something in the calm, and I am starting the believe that it may be where I can again connect more clearly with my faith, and maybe even find the belief in a future (at all) that I have lost. Maybe I can walk my path in chronos time, yet dwell in kairos experiencing truth and beauty. Believing for myself the joy and hope I believe for others. I think I would like it there.

circles

I wake up in pain.

I go through the day and find these gorgeous moments surrounded by dysfunctional, mildly paranoid chunks of time. 

Then I leave feeling surprisingly okay. Until I melt. Crying and fragile.

The night washes away until finally I'm so tired that I cant even get myself to go to bed.

I love and I dread.