Author: sophiesills

There’s too much catching up that I owe you, so I’ve made a brief, 10-day retrospective:

Days 33-43 – A couple of days before I left for my trip, my dad said something that I thought was strange. He said, “When you get there, I think you’ll be disappointed.” I wondered how I could be let down by a place that I’d never been to? But that’s the very reason why I might be; it was all expectations grounded in no reality.

It’s been 10 days since I first landed in Berlin and from the instant I walked out of the airport, I’ve had the sense that I love it here. Not only that, before I came even, I already didn’t want to leave. When my ex-husband, who also spent 3 months in Berlin before we met, asked what I liked most about it, I said, “I like walking along the canal,” which is the only tangible thing I could think of. Of course, I like the food and culture and people, that everyone rides a bike, that you can drink a beer as you sit by the river, and, in fact this is what you see many young people doing, gathered in the afternoons or evenings here in Berlin. I like the cafes that line the canal. I like the seriousness of german culture. I like that art is everywhere. I like walking and taking the bahn. I like the orange shingled rooftops and the view of them from my 4th floor apartment. I like the tall ceilings and old hardware in apartments and that the apartments are built around courtyards. I like that it feels like autumn and the old European city architecture. 

I like everything about it here.

Last night Clare and I went to the James Turrell light instillation in an old (circa 1924) cemetery chapel. The LED lights hidden within the structures of the windows and walls, the alter, and apses follow the movement of natural light outside as the sunsets. It both mimics and enhances the natural light. This time of day has always been a profoundly violent one for me because of the shifting light, it disturbs me and makes me sad. So you can understand that this experience was overwhelming, the mood magnified, both awesome and inescapable.

Afterward, Clare and I went to dinner where we met with her friend Emily, a writer and magazine editor living in Berlin. After telling me that she did her MFA at University of Arizona, I realized that she knows my ex-husband. She remembered him posting excited comments to Facebook when we got married. “And now, I’m meeting you,” she said. The coincidence blew Clare’s mind. It was already wild enough that Clare and I would be sitting across from each other at a restaurant table in a city and country so far from the one where we’d known each other before. I knew Clare before LA, though. In San Francisco, her boyfriend was best friends with my old boyfriend. We once we on a camping trip together.

When people say the world is small, you can’t imagine how small it is until experiences like these where you feel like eventually, you might end up meeting everyone on the planet someday.

In many ways, I can’t tell if it is what I expected it to be or not.

Walking home from a bar last night, I could hear my boots clicking along the sidewalk and it reminded me of living in San Francisco, my boots clicking down those streets you walk or bike or take the bus down, but never drive. It felt safe, though it was dark and late, because lots of people were out. I always felt safe in San Francisco too, because of this.

I feel very free here. I don’t know if this is particular to Berlin, maybe I’d feel this way in any European city, but it feels just right. Going back to LA seems unimaginable and I’d like to figure out a way not to.

But I also have to admit that there was a let down. Before I left, I met someone who lived not in Germany, but a country close by and I thought we would meet up when I got here. I’d missed his presence since he left LA. We’d only spent a little over a week together there, but I had, of course, created an expectation. I was open to whatever happened once we met up, but the openness was still contingent on meeting up. When I got here and learned that it was not meant to be, my expectations didn’t know where to settle themselves. Somehow the failure of this idea compounded the loneliness I suddenly felt of not knowing anyone here aside from Clare, her husband, and my friend Ariane.

I wondered then if this was the disappointment my dad was talking about. Could be. But, though this man, in his small way, inspired the open spirit it took to get me to move here, I see he was a bridge to this adventure and does not need to belong to it in any other way.

In the last few days, I’ve met so many people. I have dates not just with Germans, but people from other countries also doing stints in Berlin for whatever reason. It is the international richness, too, that I love about Berlin. America is wide and big, but it is just one country. With all its diversity, it is homogeneous, in that, our cultures are bonded in more ways than they’re not.

A few nights after arriving, I had drinks with Ariane and her french neighbor. The intertwining and exchangeability, interchangeability of languages deepened what was communicated, I think, because grappling with languages fuels the need to understand and be understood. It was beautiful.

I don’t feel too lonely anymore. I don’t get lost as much. Public transit is easy. I wake up in the morning and ask myself what I want to do, who I want to be. I can be anyone. I get to be the parts of myself I was afraid of, or didn’t understand, before I made myself do a frightening thing and then discovered how sweet it is.

From the Turrell installation.

Day 33 – My sister put me in touch with one of her co-workers who’s husband just opened an art gallery here. I went to the opening last night and it was awesome, also great to be around lots of people speaking english and to make new friends!

The artist is Chris Johanson. I remember seeing his art instillation at Adobe Books in San Francisco, years ago. He rearranged all of the books in the entire store by color. I feel like he kinda started the trend of people doing this on their bookshelves at home. It looked incredible, but made it impossible to find the book you wanted.

Last night’s show is called Imperfect Reality with Figures and Challenging Abstraction. I felt like the title really spoke to me. Since I came here, I’ve been navigating the gap between what I thought it would be like and what it’s like. More on that later.

(images courtesy of arrestedmotion.com)

The prevalence of the color blue reminded me of something else from my writings before I decided to go to abroad.

The word “leaving” is a locution woven into my thoughts without harness of place or purpose, but I conjured pictures I’ve seen of Germans gathered around lakes and swimming. From my own travels I recalled sunbathers and picnickers lakeside in Zurich, and in the warm Parisian evenings, people carrying a blanket and bottle of wine down to  sit by the Seine. Once my husband and I clinked wine glasses and ate cherries on the river that goes through Lubjiana amid Astro-Hungarian architecture and walkways bustling with college students and young families.

I’m feeling down. I even texted my Frank, hoping he would offer to bring our dog over to cheer me up. 

He texted back, “Wow. You must be bad off. Most people would jus say, “I’m feel blue.”

Me: “What did I say?”

Frank: “Blue feeling.”

I am blue feeling. I want to be completely and constitutionally blue. Like how the Chinese ascribe red for vitality and life. Blue, cobalt or clear or powdery, or fatty, swaying itself  against a rocky Slovenian shore or dalmatian island, lapping the 2 concrete steps into the sea. You hold the rail along the first few steps then dive in both feet at once because there’s no other way.

(image courtesy danacohen)

Day 32 – On my second day in Berlin, I moved into my apartment in Neukolln. It is an airy studio furnished with a bed, large desk, not just one but 2 rocking chairs, some other seating options, and a small rug that I meditate on. It is perfect! I’m on the 4th floor and my window opens up to the courtyard.

Before I knew where I would go to, or even if I would really leave LA, I did some writing about it. I had been feeling stifled and stymied, but was kind of paralyzed, afraid to take the leap. Instead I waded a bit in the waters of possibility. Then the signs started streaming in. Here’s an excerpt from those writings:

I woke up to an email this morning from Budapest. It was from a writer I’d met once. When I saw pictures of him standing on a balcony from his new Hungarian location, I pictured it furnished sparsely, with a bed of clean starched sheets and a writing desk near a window looking out onto the night sounds of a city thousands of years old.

I wrote him an email asking if he was doing a writing residency or if work brought him there. And now he writing me back, telling me how he did it.

For two weeks solid I’ve been feeding myself fantasies of European living. Watching House Hunters International obsessively, picturing myself in their shoes, wondering how desire translates itself into doing the thing you want. Rather, when one decides a want is a need.

Do I look more like a Berliner yet?

Day 31 – My first day in Berlin and I’m mesmerized by Clare and Jakob’s apartment, which has been transformed into some kind of beautiful sculpture garden filled with Clare’s 3D collages and floating flower-topias.

I couldn’t be luckier to have such a soft landing in a foreign country. It’s been almost 2 years since I last saw her. When she and Jakob moved here, I dreamed of coming to visit. After my divorce, I thought maybe I’ll move here. I longed to rewrite my life with type of deliberateness that comes from choosing and making what you want to create. We may feel like we’re spit out from a void must live out our lives where we land, but there is also always the potential for something else.

Clare’s art opening is October 8th and is titled, Intimate Immensity. The structures she’s created reminds me of something I mentioned before, the practice of holding a magnifying glass up to the myriad of the minute that compose our landscape and seeing the immensity there.

If you’re in Berlin in early October, come by the opening and say hello!

Day 30 –  Dear Readers, forgive my delay. I wrote Day 30 from the airplane and it has taken me a couple of days to settle in here in Berlin. I’ve not been here long, but does that refuse me the right to say I love it here? Because, I do!

I flew from LA to Iceland for a quick layover, then boarded the plane for Berlin. Here is my diary entry:

Day 30 – From the airplane window, I see what is outside at these heights, the big open, split in two at the horizon. The bottom half, an almost perfectly unbroken cloud bank that looks more like a frozen ocean, rippled with the textures snow drifts impart. The top half is an expanse of blue, punctuated by a big round moon. It looked like the size, and color of a new silver dollar, pasted within the frame of this little rectangular window with soft corners. The middle space is hazy orange and pink…

A few minutes later, the pink stretched, pink is leaking from the center. I sit back in my seat with a miniature bottle of white wine I’ve just cracked open and remembered something, but it isn’t a memory from something I’ve seen or done before, but the kind of nostalgia you feel when you’re waiting for it to happen. Every possibility seems as available and familiar as the smell of orange blossoms on hot summer nights in the place I grew up. Something old and new is about to happen. It is right there and it feels like it always has been, like falling in love with a stranger. So you go diving into yourself, probably to the same place where dreams exist, I picture it like a photo I’ve saw of a geothermal bath in Iceland surrounded by snow, steaming from its own warmth. It is called Blue Lagoon and I think that beyond thoughts place I’m talking about should have the same name.

Now, everything outside is purple bleeding into pink, into red, into orange and so on through the rainbow. And as the color that served as night takes over, I feel safe in the airplane going by myself to a country I’ve never seen. Maybe it feels like when I went off to camp, or college, or when I came home from San Francisco, that first year, for the holidays. I will never understand why new experiences feel like old ones and old ones feel new, like falling in love, or, like folding into the bed your mother or sister has made up for you, like when a cat jumps in with you, curling itself into your bent shape, purring, as if to sleep without the warmth of another living thing would cause you to freeze to death during the night.

I am looking forward to the cold. I’m looking forward to seeking out warmth instead of the heat that’s blanked LA. In LA it was starting to feel like there was nothing we could do that would let us throw the blanket off.

So now it is dark out. The plane feels like a submarine swimming through the bluest dark parts of the ocean and the moon is a porch light.

Day 29 – Moving Day! The subletter moves in this afternoon. My cat’s getting relocated to my folk’s house where she and I will hang until I fly out in a few days.

Last night I dreamed that my lover invited me to a party, but when I showed up everyone at the party belonged to some old, elite club that spanned generations and shunned anyone new, especially brunettes. Everything I said was wrong. I used the wrong utensils and drank too much wine so that it turned my mouth purple. Instead of defending me, my lover turned against me, he said he never really knew me, but now that he did, I should leave.

Walking home, in the dream, feeling dejected and lost, a limousine pulled over. The driver told me to get in. Steve Martin was sitting inside and said he was taking me as his date to the old elites’ dinner, which he happened to be on his way to, where he planned to deliver a big f*ck you speech to the old guard. Together we’d usher in a new era of humor, spontaneity, free thinking, and democracy.

Of course this dream was about worrying I’ll feel out place. Of course, “brunette” means Jew. Of course, this dream was about Germany.

Last night, before I went to bed and dreamed the dream, my sister and I sat at Edendale’s crowded back patio, sipping cocktails. I said, “imagine everyone here speaking German.”

I’d experienced vertigo at a restaurant earlier. It was a cozy, softly lit little space; the last place one would expect to feel suddenly like they were side-swiped by a truck. My sister had gone to the bathroom and came back to find me sitting stiff in my chair, clutching the edges of seat so I didn’t go tumbling onto the ground. I’ve never had vertigo before. I didn’t know it feels like your brain is doing somersaults in your skull.

This morning, I settled into my meditation as usual, focused on envisioning what feels good and right. I never hear any voices from god while meditating, and I try my best to quiet my own thoughts, but an a few occasions a song streams through the silence.

The first time it happened, it was the line from a Yo La Tengo song, which was a surprise since I haven’t listened to them in like 10 years. In my quieted mind, the voice broke through and said, “you can have it all.” Awesome, I thought. A few nights later I went out to dinner with a friend that I hadn’t seen in since graduating college. In talking about her new life (she’d made some big changes recently) she said, “you don’t realize it, but you can have it all. I tell all the women I work with because it still blows my mind, but you really can.”

A few days after that I was working in a cafe and another song from the same Yo La Tengo album came on, so I googled it because I couldn’t remember the album’s title. It’s called, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Man, I thought. Nothing’s a waste, everything’s a sign. The opposite, inside-out side of nothing is everything; you can have it all.

Getting back to this morning, I told myself I’d hold off on analyzing my dream until I was done meditating. I had just woken up, was still stuck in the emotions of it, struggling to extradite myself from the reality of that world and settle into this one. I sat down, found my position, breathed a few times in and out to begin my meditation practice, and then the song, The Place Where You Belong rang through the empty quiet.

Behind my closed eyes I had been picturing where I was going. It was more than Berlin. The place where you belong.

My friends’ band, Lemonade, covers the original Shai jam, and I like their version more. In fact, I fucking love it.

Day 28 – The mind gets cluttered. That’s what it does. For me, this shows up most frequently fas indecisiveness. I may have mentioned before that I have a note to myself on my desk that says, “practice small acts of decisiveness.” It really helps. I also tell myself, “leap before you look” and “first thought, best thought.”

It all means the same thing, go from your gut. Not that the head is wrong, but it gets in the way.

Allen Ginsberg developed “first thought, best thought” as a way of embracing writing with immediacy, bravery, spontaneity, and presence. Kerouac said that writing this way reveals “the actual workings of the mind during the writing itself; you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way.”

To untangle and prioritize my thoughts, which were causing undue urgency, also known as crippling anxiety, I wrote down in one sentence what I needed to get done today. I put aside writing and teaching, because that could do those in the evening, and focused on my trip. What is the main goal I need to complete? Here’s what I wrote: To be completely prepared for my trip to Berlin.

Then I wrote one action I could physically do to get me closer to achieving it. I started to write down, practice german. I mean, it makes sense, but can I get on a plane without practicing german. Yes. What could I not get on a plane without having done. Having packed! That’s what I wrote and that is what I got done today.

 How simple and yet, what I needed to do didn’t come to me until I pushed the competing and confusing “I shoulds” out of my head.

I sometimes find it hard to get what people mean when they say “just let it go.” They’ll direct this advice toward anything from an addiction to obsessive worrying to irrational fears. But how do you let go of thinking? Or, how do you let go of paralyzing procrastination caused by overthinking, that is, how do you let go of not doing something.

This exercise of writing down my goal and one thing I could physically do to reach it helped me, because when I swept the “shoulds” aside, it let the next actionable step stand out like neon.

There is thinking and then there is looking at your thoughts.

About letting go, I don’t think it every means doing nothing. It should not suggest one stops moving. More like, leap before you look. But it also, it also doesn’t have to mean move yourself to another country. Tara Brach says in one of her talks about letting go that it isn’t good or bad, it just is.

Instead of should, it is a type of letting be.

Day 27 –  I stood some books up straight to make room for another one on the shelf and discovered an old travel journal tucked behind the row. I store my journals out of sight because I don’t want anyone to read them, including me. The writing is terrible, and worse, so painfully self-conscious, that it generally takes a decade before even I can look at it again. I remember burning a journal once, or many pages from it, that I kept when I was a teen because the thoughts noted in it repulsed me so much. Now I’m a writer and spend 70% of my day reading my own thoughts.

The travel journal I found today is 11 years old. I kept it when my best friend, Molly, and I traveled around Europe together. There are some gem lines. Here’s one regarding a guy I met at a hostel, a Jewish-Canadian wearing Teva Sandals who serenaded us with Ben Harper and Hayden songs, so, obviously you can guess what came next, “I brought him back to my room. With Molly passed out in the bed next to mine a few feet away, the risk was clear, but not compelling, so we exchanged fervid kisses without discretion, and our clothes were quickly discarded.”

We exchanged promises with “drunk and sleepy hearts. We were strangers and that was the best part.”

I don’t think the rhyme was intentional. Also, what I was reading at the time that made me want to write like that?

At one point I remark how “fucking romantic looking out train windows is.” Molly and I had a lot of quiet train rides. I remember trying to figure out what I should do with my life, what kind of person to be. I remember too, my mom telling me that she wondered the same thing riding across India and Turkey by train in the early 70s with my dad. In my travel journal I ask myself if I’ll become, a lawyer, a teacher or writer, or mother and wife. Reading it now, I feel like I’m answering myself.

We forget all the different people we’ve been. It’s too easy. This evening, for example, I’m a totally different person from who I was this morning.

At six o’clock this morning, while walking Fritz, I found 3 fake leaves in different locations on the ground. When I saw the first, I stopped and asked myself, “what was I thinking when I saw that fake leaf?” I remembered. It was a big, round happy thought-wish and it charged me to think this was a sign affirming it. I kept walking half a block and found another fake leaf, identical to the first.

It was too much! I avoided looking at the ground, walked another half block and let Fritz pull me across the street. As we crossed, not believing it happened twice, I looked at the place I saw the first leaf and made myself recall what I had been thinking. Then Fritz stopped to pee on a tangle of vines. I looked down and saw, in a pile of flowers and leaves, another fake leaf. I laughed out loud and kept laughing, now and again, until we finished our walk and headed home.

(my friend Erika’s picture of Scotland)

Day 26 – They guy subletting my place moves in 3 days from now. I leave in 7. I bought new luggage and it is orange and I love it. My office is filled with to-do lists. Sudden insights and story ideas are scribbled across manuscripts’ blank back pages. Every empty space has something that was floating around my head pegged down to it.

I take a lot of deep breaths. I rub Frankincense on the bottoms of my feet and tell myself that I am relaxed. Breathe in, “I am,” breathe out, “relaxed.”

I’ve been practicing German and have become very good at telling people what they are, should anyone in Germany forget. I’ll say, “You are a man. They are men. I am a woman.” I mean, “Er ist ein mann. Ist sind manner. Ich bin ein frau.” I’m adept at identifying both water and bread, too. Helpful if I find myself in prison.

Also this, l want to visit Scandinavia while I’m there. Denmark, Sweden and maybe Findland. In one day, I thought about Helsinki like 100 times, even though I’ve never before thought about Helsinki even once. Have you seen that show SLOW TV on Netflix yet? I watched one about the Northern Railway in Norway. I dream of riding it through a snowy winter landscape while drinking a hot Norwegian beverage, as tunes from the 1954 film White Christmas (specifically the train scene) and Bing Crosby’s sweet voice drift through my heart.

I learned that there are other things to eat in Berlin besides sausages. I don’t eat sausages, so this is great news. Nedelle wrote a piece for PETA about the veggie spots in Berlin. She says Berlin is a veggie foodie haven, actually.

My dog is moving to Athens, Georgia with my ex. Thinking about not seeing my dog, Fritz, again makes me feel like I can’t breathe. Luckily, it is really easy to fall in love with dogs, and cats too, and trees and rivers. Most all living things. Thank god for that.

I met my best-friend’s baby. I see how things can be difficult and wonderful at the same time.

Erika is in Scotland and posted the picture above from Glencoe Valley, Highlands. It makes me feel that sense of “fantastic” that Knausgard describes, which I wrote about yesterday. Like, feeling both hungry and full. The picture also relaxes me.

To Do, 9/7/16

I need to go to Whole Foods
I need to call Verizon about international data use
I need to edit my essay A Living Thing
I need to do laundry
I need to grade papers

I need to practice German. Das ist wasser. Ok. I am, too.

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
-Eden Phillpotts

Day 25 –  I remember from my 3-month-long trip to Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia a few years ago, that time slows down when you’re traveling.

An article on Lifehacker explains:

The reason is simple: the longer it takes for our brain to process information, the longer the period of time feels. So, when the brain isn’t doing a lot of processing, like, say, on your commute to work that never changes, the time it took to do so doesn’t feel that long. One study from the Journal of Consumer Psychology suggests that the more attention we pay to an event, the longer the interval of time feels. Another study from the Journal of the Association for Psychological Science had similar findings.

I’ve been thinking lately about events and encounters that slow down time. They feel like little bursts of life happening beyond our ability to understand them. My ex used to make fun of me when we’d go for our evening walk, because I’d wax on about the smell of jasmine or passion fruit or even the subtle shift at the start of a season’s change. But the more I breathed in, it expanded the breadth of the moment.

Practicing mindfulness, even the act of listening to your breath going in and out, is like holding a microscope up to the moment, so that everything that looked smooth is actually an intricate latticework, built not just of the thing itself, but of its history and every influence that makes it what it is now.

Like I said once in a poem, “Objects are solid and moving beneath.”

Day 24 – The desire within beauty has always intrigued me. The heart of the idea, as I put it in an essay, that “to want is really to want more of something” is hard to pinpoint.

I’ve been slowing reading Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle. Since I’m behind everyone else who have likely read up to the 6th book, I’m just now reckoning with his famous descriptions of minutiae. One such philosophical maundering struck me. He talks about the feeling he gets when looking at particular paintings. He says:

…the feelings the pictures evoked in me went against everything I had learned about what art was and what it was for…even though the pictures were supposed to be idylls, such as Claude’s archaic landscapes, I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire.

…The pictures made my insides tremble, but for what? The picture filled me with longing, but for what?

…But the moment I focused my gaze on the paining again all of my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go?

Have you felt this too? The longing that is in something fantastic. I think this is the thing that also makes certain books impossible to put down, how we say that we’ve “devoured” it. It is something from the idyllic that is not fulfilled by its idyllic representation, but spurred by it.

I was driving up to Sacramento to meet my best friend’s baby when I heard a song lyric that seemed to respond to this question. From Bill Callahan’s song Winter Road, he says:

The blinding lights of the kingdom can make you weep

I have learned
When things are beautiful
To just keep on
Just keep on

Often, it is when things are dark and impossible we tell ourselves to just keep on. I meditated on the idea for a long time.

When things are beautiful, when the beauty is staggering, it can be paralyzing. The mind wants to understand what the body is experiencing. Reasoning gets in the way and we find ourselves further from it.

Do we want it? Do want to be it? Or, might it serve as is a reminder of what possibility means. Possibility is neither having nor becoming the thing we desire, but to hold the thing within us.

I’ve talked about my morning meditations before, those dedicated to manifesting. The point of these is to hold the idea of what I want as a vision, not one that I see coming true, but as one already part of my being.

Day 23 – I’ve been waiting for months to hear back from a very excellent magazine about an essay I sent them. I had submitted once before, about a year and a half ago, and got a slip of paper in the mail 9 months later telling me thank you, but that they were going to pass.

This time, when the email popped up,  I held my breath. I’d submitted one of my favorite essays, the first one that finally clicked. I feel like a pretty accomplished poet, but the non-fiction thing is something I’ve had to teach myself how to do. And it’s taken a long time.

I’d struggled to write this particular essay for months, so long that I began to doubt whether it would ever be good. It went through 15 drafts. Then, the thing that I hope for, when all of the seemingly disparate elements come together informing the theme of the essay AND when the story itself finds its most clear, distinct shape, happens and I am the happiest woman alive. The funny thing is that I forget that I can get there. Something keeps me writing, though, and revising and brooding on why I’ve brought these ideas and people and events together in the first place. Every time I don’t think the essay will make it. But it always does, in the end.

Here’s the response I got from the magazine:

Dear Sophie,

Thanks for sending us “Wife to Myself.” We really liked this piece; I’m genuinely sorry to say that in the end we decided its not quite right [for us]…

We found the writing in your essay lovely – for example, when you talk about imagining the domestic dinner scenes behind softly lit windows: “I felt my own presence vulgar, dreaming myself into their windows, longing to be invited in.” And we were intrigued by the underlying themes of the essay: wanting your own family from a young age, the aversion to twilight, your transformation from a slovenly roommate to someone who pays attention to domestic matters.

But several readers read this, and we all felt that there was a missing piece here: we wanted to know more about the unravelling of your marriage…

The editor goes on to suggest that maybe I was reluctant to include such personal information. Her feedback is of immeasurable value to me. In fact, I didn’t even know this lapse in the story existed.  Now that I do, I can respond to it.

The editor’s personal response made me almost as happy as if the piece had been accepted. I know the essay is good and that the editor had enough faith in my writing to help me see what’s missing, heartens me.

In her closing comments, she said that they really liked my writing and hoped I would submit other essays. I am grateful for this reminder to go forward when it is hard, when I think an essay sucks and will never get better, and when I think it is good, but can improve it still.

Fail better; I suppose that’s the take-away!

Day 22 – In one of the Magic Lesson’s podcasts, Elizabeth Gilbert has a conversation with a woman who wants to tell a story, through photos paired with text, about her brother. The woman has been taking photos of her brother for a while, documenting his struggle with PTSD and drug addiction. The bigger project of organizing the raw materials daunts her. She can’t get started.

There is a moment when Gilbert asks her why she started this project, how has it changed her life.

The woman takes a minute to compose herself and, in a deeper tone of equal amounts shame and relief, she says, “it helped me stop judging him.”

I had paused the podcast for a minute. The question prompted me to consider this about my own creative project, a collection of stories/personal essays. More than two years ago I started writing them, but over that time, they’ve changed. Their texture is different. Earlier ones don’t have the empathy and strength of voice more recent ones do.Of course, the more I write, the writing itself improves, but there is something else at work. Every new day informs the past. Until recently, I didn’t quite understand what they meant.

Their function has changed. I want to see something within my experience that will serve others, the way others do for me. When I decided to move, it was so clear that the stuckness my essays were effected by, my inability or the slow-going it took to get them up the hill to their peak, is because the were being written from a place in the past. Literally, I was writing them in the office that had been by husband’s. My story had come full circle, but not transcendent. In other words, in order for my stories to have that kind of movement, my own story needed to actually move.

In the interview Hemingway gave the Paris Review (Spring, 1958 issue),  I think he puts it best:

INTERVIEWER

Finally, a fundamental question: as a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

HEMINGWAY

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Also, this, my essays did begin to be true until I stopped judging the events and the self (the various iterations of the selves I’ve been) that appeared in them. It cannot be “truer than anything true and alive” if you wish it dead, if you wish parts of yourself were not what they are.

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(image courtesy of Collective Evolution)

Day 21 – And…I’m nervous. As my adventure date approaches, the glow is wearing off and reality is setting in. I have to remember that I want to get out of my comfort zone. I’m choosing that. Traveling alone, not speaking the language, not having many friends there, blah blah blah.

OK, this is my one little life. I wanna live.

Also, there was a new moon last night. Earlier in the week, I had decided I’d set some intentions for myself on this occasion, but instead I set reverse intentions. Sometimes we cling to old, familiar comforts when faced with the challenge to make a leap, then you realize that those old comforts no longer serve you.

Erika reminded me that we’re still in the energy of the new moon, so with my mistake-laden reverse intentions in mind, I’m going to make some new ones!

From the Collective Evolution website I learned that we also had a solar eclipse in Virgo last night. It explains:

This type of eclipse (annular) is commonly referred to as a ‘Ring of Fire’ because when it is in its totality, the Sun’s light forms the lit up edges, appearing as a ring…

Solar Eclipses are very potent New Moons that generally happen every 6 months. Astrologically this is recognized as a time of powerful changes and new beginnings in specific area(s) of our lives. These changes build up in the 6 weeks before and play out during the following 4-6 month period leading up to the next one. However, this upcoming month is when we will see most of the shifts taking place. 

We are encouraged to consider what Virgo-themed changes have been happening in our lives:

How can you make your life more efficient and productive and what is preventing that? What are your counterproductive patterns (and/or habits) and how can you rearrange your lifestyle in order to transcend them? What do you need to do to improve your health and overall well-being? Some people have been experiencing health complications, which is the body trying to get your attention to make positive changes. Pay attention to any signs like that. (http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/08/31/ring-of-fire-solar-eclipse-in-virgo-this-is-whats-going-on/)

(image courtesy of Relaxing Music)

Day 20 – The other day, my instructor opened our yoga class by talking about the idea of abhyasa. She described it as the daily, nitty-gritty work we put in to achieving our grander goals.

In my morning meditations I often focus on what I want to manifest in my life. The idea is that we create this image, send it out into the universe, then let go of it, understanding that it is in the hands of a greater wisdom. It requires the belief that it will be taken care of paired with the work of going about your daily business to get you there. It sounds contradictory at first, but the heart of it is total trust, both in yourself and in the higher , timeless wisdom.

Yoga Journal explains the idea of abhyasa and the idea of “Balancing Effort and Surrender“:

The word abhyasa is rooted in, as meaning “to sit.” But abhyasa isn’t your garden-variety sitting. Rather, abhyasa implies action without interruption—action that’s not easily distracted, discouraged, or bored. Abhyasa builds on itself, just as a ball rolling downhill picks up momentum; the more we practice, the more we want to practice, and the faster we reach our destination.

As also means “to be present.” This reminds us that for our practice to be effective, we must always be intensely present to what we’re doing. Eventually, such resolute, vigilant enterprise on the yoga mat becomes part and parcel of everything we do in daily life. (http://www.yogajournal.com/article/philosophy/balancing-effort-and-surrender/)

I’m so grateful to my instructor for sharing this idea with us!

Day 19 – I’d been thinking about moving for a some time. While hanging out one night with friends, two of which were visiting from another country, and in seeing how much fun the foreign friends were having here, I got serious about my adventure fantasizing.

Then, there was a message.

I noticed that a writer I’d met briefly was posting a lot of pictures of himself in Budapest, so I wrote him and asked if he was doing a residency there. This was his story.

He said that he didn’t like the company he was working for, and he didn’t like where they had him living, so he decided to quit that job. He bought a oneway ticket for Budapest, rented an apartment and was working on writing his second novel there until the spring when he would come back to the states and decide what to do with his life. Fuck, I thought, I love that story.

A few days later, I’d booked my flight, found an apartment in Berlin, had someone to sublet my apartment while I was away, and lined up the next few classes teaching online (to secure my funds). It was all so easy. The little ropes tying me to this life were so easy to snap, one by one, like in Gulliver’s Travels, as one friend put it.

Day 18 – I started thinking seriously about how happiness could be cultivated. I’d picked up the book, The Happiness Project, at the airport several months ago and started reading it, but then stopped. It was very good and practical, but, something about it overwhelmed me. After I read Grit, I realized what it was. For so long, I didn’t know what I really wanted out of life and from myself. That had to be the first question I asked myself.

Actually, the reason I read Grit, the desire that allowed the recommendation from a friend to manifest in my life, happened a month earlier at a dinner with my friend Ashley.

She’d come out of a divorce and had to ask herself what she wanted. She’d been unhappy without knowing it for years. To fix that feeling she clung to the thing she knew and got married ,even though she and her partner had never cared before about getting married before. Well, it all fell apart, of course, and she started doing some self work. She said she’d always known what she wanted but thought it was weird. “I want to live with my dog in my own house and have an amazing career.” After her divorce, she found the job she wanted, moved into her own house, funded by the money she was making with her new career, and now lives there with her dog, loving her life. 

What do I want, I had asked myself after our dinner date? I meditated on this question extensively. I want to write. I don’t want to write copy for products or work in marketing, but I want instead to tell my own stories.

I’ve been doing that, so why isn’t it moving me forward?

I think there were many reasons, but namely, I didn’t have faith in even making that the primary goal. I had to say it aloud and believe in it myself. Then, I had to do it.

The next question was, why aren’t I writing more? This answer was easy. I work from home (teaching online) and write from home too. Though I have an active social life, I see friends constantly, I go to coffeeshops to work, I go to yoga classes, I get out, etc., I still spend the majority of my life in my house, the house I moved into with my then finance and the expectation of a very different life.

If the stories I’m telling were going to serve anyone other than myself, they had to come to a place of having moved forward, of having learned something true and useful. You don’t tell a story that has no point. You tell a story when you’ve figured out the meaning or lesson from your experience and you think it would serve someone else to hear. It is not that my stories were sad or lacked epiphany or insight, but that they were born, literally, in a place seeded in the past.

How far could I get with this tether to my old life? That made it very easy to snap the ties I felt to the comforts of my house, my life, my stable predictable day-to-day.

After it occurred to me that I am doing what I want to (writing) and I know what my passion is, the next goal is to do it better. And, do it bigger.

What I found interesting about Grit is that one of the precepts it promotes is one found in all spiritual guidance for living with purpose and mindfulness. It mandates that one engage in work they not only enjoy, but that serves others. My stories could not fully help someone else until they were fully helping me, and vice versa. We (me and the writing) both had to grow and expand and open to every possibility.

What does this look like? Full trust in my ability to write a good story.

And I do, time and time again. It amazes me with each instance that this happens, but it does happen, with hours of work (and sometimes years of working on just one essay.) Something clicks and the story transcends itself and what I thought it could be. I jokingly say, “it was written by divine inspiration.” But it’s not a joke. I work and work and work, but then something else comes through, I tap into it and it comes through me. That is the part that is beyond my ego and makes my representation of life useful to someone else. So I trust myself to put in the labor and the universe to support me.

What else does it look like? Getting out of my comfort zone. Moving to a country where I don’t speak the language or that I’ve ever even visited. Jar my senses. This is the cure to fear. When you are afraid to do something, it shakes you wide awake and afterward, you’re a million times be content and confident from having done it.

My dad has said, “get up and make your life happen”

My mom says, “go out and make your life shine”

Both begin with the impulse toward movement. When I heard these words of advice, though, I got caught up in the how. How the hell do I make my life shine? I work and try, but nothing is happening. What do I do? I sit still and listen.

This is my one life little life. I say, fuck it to fear. Where are the crystals I energized at the sound bath last night?

Does this make me sound crazy and new age? Yes, but saying fuck it to embarrassment too, is another tenet to being open. As long as what I’m putting out there, what I’m sharing with the world, comes from a place of loving kindness and my authentic desire to do good, and with integrity, I give zero shits about looking silly. 

Only if it is a hurtful, negative thought do I think twice about putting it out there.

Tis is the life I’ve chosen to live, so I can live it better, do it so it suits me. I am naturally curious. I want to be startled every day. I can stand at the precipice or I can just jump.

My dad also once shared with me the piece of career advice his own father gave him. Just pick something and stick with it. While the choice of what you pick shouldn’t be totally arbitrary, as Duckworth says in Grit, it should be something you like and have a natural interest in, the sticking with it is key.

Just the act of throwing yourself into something, of basing the majority of your decisions — those grand plans as well as the day-to-day to day tasks –around accomplishing that thing you believe in, is rewarding in itself. Laboring at something you truly dedicate your time and energy and heart to, generates its own kind of love.

(image courtesy of artboullion.com)

Day 17 – I was reading about mindfulness from Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project, this morning. In this book she posits the question, “What do I want from life , anyway?”

In the aforementioned chapter, Rubin talks about finding the idea of meditating unbearable, but still wanting to cultivate “conscious, non-judgmental awareness.” As I read this, I looked down at my cat who was curled in my lap, looking up at me.

Oh yeah, I thought, this is exactly where I want to be right now, so I should take full advantage of being here. This moment is perfect.

During my morning creativity rituals, which entails reading something that inspires me, I tend to get filled with ideas. My mind files these ideas into different essay threads or ways to integrate new, beneficial practices into my life. It gets me excited and my intellectual juices flowing. As Rubin reminds us throughout her project, curiosity invigorates.

I looked down at my cat and thought, in a couple weeks I’ll be in Germany and I won’t get to do this. One day, she’ll won’t be in my life at all. But, more importantly and much more positively (and gratefully), she is here now and I am very happy about that. I told her so.

I turned a few pages in the book and read the line, “Instead of walking though life on auto-pilot, I wanted to question the assumptions I made without noticing.”

I’ve been thinking the key to saying YES is to reject the impulse to hold beliefs based on principle. To open yourself up, you have to move from the assumption of NO to YES.

Yoko Ono’s famous Yes! art instillation came to mind —more so, John Lennon’s reaction to it. I’d heard him talk about it once, the now infamous Ono exhibit where the two met, and how things could have gone very differently between them.

I googled it. In an interview Lennon describes the exhibit, how you had to climb a ladder, then hold a magnifying class up to the ceiling to read what was printed there. Here he is talking about it:

“You’re on this ladder — you feel like a fool, you could fall any minute — and you look through it and it just says ‘YES’ …Well, all the so-called avant-garde art at the time, and everything that was supposedly interesting, was all negative; this smash-the-piano-with-a-hammer, break-the-sculpture, boring, negative crap. It was all anti-, anti-, anti-. Anti-art, anti-establishment. And just that ‘YES’ made me stay in a gallery full of apples and nails, instead of just walking out saying, ‘I’m not gonna buy any of this crap.’” (http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/john-lennon30.htm)

If it had said, “NO,” I imagine he would have walked out the door and never looked back. But it didn’t say no, and he didn’t leave, and we all know how the rest of the story goes.

(the one and only time I beat Frank at chess, which happened to be in Croatia)

Day 16 – I heard an author talking about how all we have is the present moment because seeking more than that, seeking some kind of certainty, well, certainty doesn’t exist.

A friend asked if I was meeting up with anyone in Berlin. While I have a friend or two, I mostly know no one. It scared me for a second, to realize this, until I remembered that that is exactly why I’m going there. Nothing like making new friends!

I remember once, on a rainy night in Dubrovnik, Frank and I made our way to a local bar filled with young Croatians. Frank liked to play chess, so we brought our portable chessboard with us everywhere. In the bar, people crowded around looking at the board, then telling Frank or I what move to make next. I was no real match for Frank, a man who spends much of his free time playing chess online with masters, so after he beat me, a local challenged him to the next game. His English was surprising good.

The young people there speak it, unlike many middle aged Croatian folks we met who speak some German, French or Italian, but little English.

What sticks out to me was how nice it was to speak English and to share the customs of booze and bar activities. To converse freely, with someone other than Frank, since he had been the only person I spent time with during our travels who shared the same language, was an unexpected delight.

We had a raucous drunken night, stumbling home later by way of a flooded upward stairway along a narrow Dubrovnik alley that had become a small river. It was one of the best nights. To be folded into a tiny corner of a culture so different from ours, but at the same time, no different at all because we are all people and happy there together.

(from a broadside I made in 2010 at Mills College)

Day 15 – In the early stages of an essay, I wrote the line, “I need the space to think differently.” Though it went through many drafts and revisions, that sentence stuck. The word “space” here works in two ways: 1) as in enough room, and (2) as in place, a new purposeful location.

The essay was titled, “Missing Person” or, sometimes, “I Go Missing.”

It was not about leaving, actually. Regrettably, it was not about making the decision to create a space or place where I could think differently, but about many failed attempts to do so, without really knowing what I was trying to do. I see, in retrospect, it was about wanting to change and move forward, but not knowing how or who I wanted to be.

Now, I understand that, if you try to leave without grounding yourself first, your spirit escapes and you go missing from yourself like smoke from the tip of a cigarette.

It can be hard, sometimes, to remember who you are. What makes you happy, what you love, who loves you, what you’re supposed to do. Giving works. Giving to others helps you let yourself back in. Maybe because in recognizing that others are forgivable animals, recognizing how much you love them, you can love it about yourself too.

In that vein, I like to re-read these opening verses in A Song for Occupations, from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

Come closer to me,
Push close my lovers and take the best I possess,
Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess.