I do a lot of things during the day that I’m not sure I mean. It’s like there are things I really want or impulses I am following, And my actions are not what I would have picked.

It’s like going to the grocery store hungry, You don’t make the right choices. So my choices to do that or not do that seem to be Coming from a place that is not in balance.

I can be better than that, If I could make sure not to be hungry.

But what am I hungry for?

Woke up early *thinking* again…damn my head…and in all the other thoughts were self recriminations that I had not gotten anything to celebrate my husband for our six years of marriage.

I honestly hoped I could sleep again after I got up to write out the thinking.

Nope

Then I thought…he would love a somecrust cake! He mentioned wanting cake!

Brilliant!!

So, soothe the dog to prevent barking as I leave IN MY PJs to get somecrust delights!

They aren’t open yet

15 minutes of car sitting watching the early rising senior citizens take their early morning constitutionals in Claremont village

Laughing at myself. Hoping Veronica does not wake herself and therefor chris at 7 this morning and undo my well meaning gift of cake

Hello fellow humans! I am particularly human today

Is there anything worse than a big change that is about to happen, then gets delayed but is still about to happen? the tension, the unknown is looming and booming.

I almost want to go back away from the change

and yet the change is already in place. No backing out now.

is the change really going to be different? I’m supposed to envision it, and yet all I am hitting is uncomfortableness. I’m supposed to envision the amazing beautiful future.

my heart hurts in the now. Is it really so simple?

I can usually keep a plant alive. Not always. But I’ve always had a potted plant with something in it near me. I like the plants that dramatically wilt to remind me that they need water. I will notice an impatients plant with unsubltle drooping wilted leaves and then go around and put water on all the pots.

There is a trick to it. If the water hasn’t hit the soil in a while, the first thing that happens is that the water skims off and out, splashing out and everywhere but into the dirt where the plant can use it.

The soil needs the water and the plant wants the water, but the first reaction is to repulse the liquid like a reverse polarity magnet. “Get away from me!”

It even creates a kind of current as the water starts a motion to leave the soil’s surface.

This phenomena happens in our desert landscape when it rains. The soil is hardened, slick and not at all willing for the water to merge in. There has been unseasonable rain this fall, and our TV keeps interrupting the regular programming with claxon sounds of warning

FLASH FLOOD IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY

BEWARE

I’ve never been in the beware zone of a flash flood, thank heaven. But I’ve seen my potten plants sheet off the life-giving water that way so I can imagine a whole landscape and the danger it would give if the rain had nowhere to go.

I am the god of my captive plants’ life. I have to wrestle with them to get the water where it needs to go. I’ve found that if I put a little bit of water on the resistant soil and let it rest. the soil will eventually come to terms with the change of state from hard and dry to acceptance. One that first little bit of water penetrates the surface,, THEN the soil will allow itself to accept all the water it can. The water fills in all the spaces in the soil and most especially the areas near the roots so the plant can get what it desperately needs.

I can be like that. SO STUBBORN to resist what it turns out I am dying for. Even if I have an inkling that what I’m starting to experience is a desperately needed change, I can push it away and assert my mastery over the circumstance.

“Yes, well, this water feels weird. I was thinking that once I dropped all my leaves, then the moisture currently in the air would be more than enough…More than enough! No need to change a thing.”

I need to sit with this unfamiliar newness. I should let it penetrate. Once the flow into the heart happens, it will be so easy and good.

I’ve been listening. I’ve been reading and asking.

I just finished listening to myself, and reading myself.

I re-read The Parable of Miriam the Camel Driver again. It is time for a parable.

Since Miriam is ME, I find that I am in the same groove. I am finding the same results when i do the same things

The same frustrations, the same responses from others.

I have a vision of what I can accomplish and what I’d like to accomplish. I have stuff I want to DO, things I am DYING to do.

Crying to do.

The same blocked road happens.

This means, if all the books I am reading and questions I am asking lead to this result I don’t want…

The books and ready answers don’t work, or specifically they don’t work for me. Same difference.

I need to ask different people different questions. I need to find a different road, and a new map.

It is up to me.

And THIS time, I intend to be clearer on what i what and where i want to go

One of my many podcasts pleasures from years ago was an interview held at the Los Angeles Central library with Toni Morrison. She’s an elder stateswoman of the literary author world.Her stories are beautiful and chasms of sadness…such that I warn people before recommending they read one of her novels.

At the question and answer section of the evening someone asked her something about accepting false comfort. She answered (I paraphrase) “At my age, I will accept whatever comfort I can get.” I am a woman of a certain age at this point, and I think I get it. Yes, Toni. It may be time to be less fussy.

When it’s all fresh, and opinions matter *so much*: the music I choose the authors I espouse, the friends I am seen with. As a young woman, I had the time to be so choosy. I was very ready to have my choices represent WHO I AM to the world.

I was not at all certain who I was without them.

Here’s Toni saying she is over that.

This week Chris took our family to Disneyland. This is not the first time we’ve gone there. Early in our dating (a year? you see how cautious I was then, evan a year was early to me) he took me to the home of Walt & Mickey. I was not  sure of this at all, Disneyland was so bourgeois. He took me the day after Christmas, with all the decorations up, took me to the one sit-down restaurant. I looked all around and asked him “But is it art?”

We discussed it all throughout the day. It was of great concern to my 20-something sensibility. He had  arguments that Walt Disney had a persistent vision that pervaded more than just the amusement park. Frank Capra entered into it as well, taking about asking people to look at the best part of themselves and the world.

But Disney perverts beautiful fairy tales! He supplants them–the Little Mermaid does NOT get the Prince! The lesson of turning into seafoam is lost. I didn’t know if I could forgive him.

And now we pause for the water to pass under the bridge. And for me to have a kid. I read somewhere that during pregnancy the mother gets invaded with the child’s DNA. Our foundations are reworked when a  kid enters the picture. Talk about changing the debate.

I didn’t ask if Ronald McDonald and Grimace were art, I just knew that if Veronica woke me up at 6 am on a Saturday I could take her to McDonald’s playland and I could get a full cup of coffee inside me while she had fun. Art was a lot less important. Bring me more bourgeois distraction and consolation. I understand now.

Of course, I live in California. We are a hub of popular entertainment and trend-setting. And I live in the Los Angeles part of California, which is arguably the apex of superficial judgement on how people “look.” I often see people —ORDINARY people–who have signs of plastic surgery blaring across their appearance. It’s horrifying.  The striving striving for perfection. To be more exactly like what is perfect, or more exactly like what is not, because that is what some people like. Where’s the target again? And how different is my cynical judgement of culture?

I really like a nice cup of coffee on a morning when I wish I were in bed but I can’t be. I’ll take it from am/pm or from McDonald’s or pay more at Starbucks if I have to. All these choices? They lead to a cup of coffee in the end. Which is what I actually find comfort in.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sorry Sigmund Freud. I tried to read you back in college, but you gave me the uber-creeps at your insistence that the patients you were seeing were thinking different objects were something other than their physical appearance. So heavy-handed! Let us have some room to come to our own conclusions. I heard that Freud is out of fashion anyway.

So back to basics. Dennis Prager, a radio host, has a recurring “Happiness Hour.” As a talk show host, he has a lot of strong opinions on a variety of subjects, but he’s picked happiness to come back to. In his weekly Happiness hour, he declares that we have a responsibility to our loved ones to try to be happy. He has a point. If I walk around persisting in misery, it’s an affront to all the people who wish me well. They want to help me, but if I don’t participate in their attempts to be happy I’m a problem for them too.

Happy is good for me, why should I put arbitrary roadblocks in my path to happy? And more than just selfish me, it’s good for my community to be happy. Individually and collectively, this is worthy.

So I spent some time in The Happiest Place on Earth(tm). My daughter is delighted past words to give plastic head Mickey and Minnie a hug.  I would be a an unconscionable pighead to be cynical about this. I should judge the taste of a 4 year old? And then again I find myself breaking my face with a huge smile at the white glove waving.

We all gathered in the last shady spot on the curb to get ready to watch the 4 o’clock parade in the 100 degree heat. My brother and my parents were there too, so we all got ready. My daughter had never seen a parade before.

I’d never seen one like this before. Mickey and Minnie had the first float, preceeded by six marching drummers. I never went to highschool, was never in band, but I have heard how much of an identity being in high school and college band creates. Here were six young men, but grown, marching in time and flipping their drum sticks in perfect choreography.

I know there are so many graduates of band camp that don’t do that now…and here are six men doing it for a living for the masses. I feel an odd pull of  incongruence. But they were smiling. And the beat was banging and Minnie was dancing in her circle skirt. My daughter had  her fists balled up, mouth stretched into the O I know means delight, jumping up and down.

Then float after float, with real actor faces and dancers: Ariel and Princesses and Aladdin. I could remember the hard-drinking actors I know from cynical and hip Los Feliz, and think about their incomplete dreams of stardom. But Aladdin and Peter Pan are handsome and they are waving at me like they’ve never been happier in their life to see someone.

I’m waving back. The dancers are smiling in the same 100 degrees that I’m hiding from. And I’m crying.

Yes, I am crying. Let’s be happy, shall we? Let’s have friendly faces and joyful hands waving in greeting all the time. I don’t mind if they are faking. God bless them, they are actors after all;  they are making a living.

So, in conclusion, I have the Disney bug. I can’t answer the question of whether it’s art or not, but I don’t care. I don’t have to go back there to experience happiness, I do have more than one source. All my annual pass-holder brethren, I get it now. That crafted and planned and manufactured experience reminded me of how I am supposed to be spending my life. I’ll take that comfort.

The lesson today is not to forget All the other lessons. All those lessons I was so sure I understood now have to come out like a fire drill. Like a defense plan. Of course the best defense is to be so superior to the attacker that defense is barely necessary.

Oh was that a lesson?

I am here. I am not a victim. I am me.

So I will find, no not find a way. Being me is not context specific. I will keep being me in all aspects of my life.

If I lose this job, there is no doubt I will find another. None. Chris and I will partner to take care of Veronica and all will be well

If I lose this job it was meant to be. I have nothing to fear.

Remember the lesson today? It is to remember. Oh I struggle

When I come home from my work day, loaded down with purse water bottle, laptop bag, keys  and whatever other detritus I scraped out of my car, I am always greeted by my dog. “Hi Lucy! Good dog.”

But the unloading of stuff, the offramping of bags and oh-yeah-i-forgot along with the inevitable dash for the bathroom always seems to take priority over my good dog.

“Greet the dog,” Chris reminds me. It is apparent that she suffers an sense of incompletion, her whole body wiggling and writhing, bumping her muzzle into me while I’m trying to get things situated. “She loves you.”

I must scratch her ears and receive her joy at my arrival. Chris is better at this whole ceremony, he delights in Lucy dog. He scratches her first and makes time for her. He gives her good love of scratches and attention.

There is a perfect metaphor here. I accept Lucy’s love with nonchalance, disregarding it and taking it for granted. He sees her love and raises it with a big dose of it back at her. The delight in her dog body with how he scratches and talks to her! It is glorious.

It is good to be loved. I do like to receive it. And I am learning more fully how it is even better to give love.

One of my favorite books talks of this canine relationship: “No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes;” ― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The dog lets us love her. She loves us without expectation. I ignore her, and she still rejoices in my presence. But she will always and always be ready for us to give it back to her in whatever form we can muster.

I have dear friends that I do the same thing to, I can call them and share my discouragement and fears. They will telll me encouraging and appreciative things: “You are fantastic! You can do it!”

But I hang on to my doubts. Maybe they don’t mean it…maybe…not really…

There are times too, when I put down all my heavy stuff, and look right at my friends to see them. I can lay aside my doubts and insecurities and give to them what they really deserve.

A sincere, specific and true statement of appreciation can lay flat the walls of Jericho. For the recipient, whoever he or she may be, yes. But for me too…If I can craft such a gift, what a work of art and thing of beauty! To affect someone’s life and leave behind a precious touchstone that they are seen as they wish to be or didn’t know they could be.

It takes courage to express something like that. The revelation of self and values feels so naked.

What makes it magic is the cooperation of the other. Like a high five–“Don’t leave me hanging!”

There is always the big chance that the love I hope to express will be awkward or inappropriate or in some other way not right.

My dog does not judge.  Good friends don’t either. The conflicts are not important, to call back to my book. To recieve love, but even more to give it back in my unique expression of it, that’s a life’s work.

“The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes. ” ~ Pema Chödrön