(Leonard Cohen does a headstand on the side of the road while waiting for the broken-down tour bus (1974). Photo by Emily Bindiger)
Day 14 – In yoga today, the teacher said something that caused me to pause, “When you practice yoga it is for an audience of one. No one but you is watching to see if you push yourself or if you give yourself a break to rest. You decide what your body needs and give yourself that.”
I realized that in yoga, I often take the more challenging variation of a pose, even when I know I probably can’t do it. I also rest when I need to. Until she said this, however, I never actually noticed that I do this, probably, because I consider myself a vehemently non-competitive person. Nor am I an athlete. So opposed to sports participation and being forced into competition with my peers, that even in elementary I protested. If the volleyball or softball made it to me way out in left field, I’d raise my arm without even a feigned attempt at catching it or caring.
This was not considerate to my teammates, however.
Whatever it was about sports teams that caused me to reject them, probably my lack of confidence in my athletic ability paired with the fear of being hit with a ball, despite the fact boys constantly yelled out to me, “the balls not gonna bite you,” I understood that I liked doing physical things that I had total control over.
So, I practiced ballet. Sometimes, even today, when I have anxiety and want to still my mind or I can’t fall asleep at night, I envision myself doing barre exercises. I can them in my bones. They’re rigid movements and the routine brought be great pleasure.
In both ballet and yoga, the control I speak of, is more the idea of mastery. My body actually responds very quickly to these practices. I can see my muscles grow defined after just a few days. Pushing myself gives me a very visual reward that can’t get lost in my thoughts.
I couldn’t do a headstand yesterday, but today I can. I couldn’t do the splits yesterday, but today I can.
Because I’m not competitive with others, I’ve mistakenly thought that I’m not driven in all areas of my life. The teacher’s comment reminded me that I am dedicated, motivated, and self-confident.
I love strenuous movement that I can practice alone. Like writing. Like travel. It’s all kinda the same thing.
Day 13 – Something I heard on a episode of Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast “Magic Lessons” caused me to examine the impetus of my desire to move.
In the episode, “Turn the brutal into the beautiful” Gilbert has a conversation with photographer Brandon Stanton (creator of the gorgeous and brilliant Humans of New York project. He explains the idea of courage, how courage is not something that happens by waiting around for it, but that you get it by doing what you are afraid of doing while you’re afraid of it. The latter is the important part, I think.
He goes on to say that “time is the most important commodity we have.” It made me of consider all the time I’ve spent trying to hold onto something I don’t really want. Stanton shares the story of how he went from a bonds trader to an artist. He’d always considered himself a creative person, then this prestigious job trading bonds fell into his lap. He told himself that he’d make his money, then carve out a space to make art. Two years later he lost the bonds trading job and realized he had spent 2 years of his life putting all his brain power into how to hold on to this job that wasn’t even what he wanted to be doing in the first place.
His solution was to make just enough money so that he could be in control of his time (or most of his time at least).
* * *
A few people have asked me why Berlin. I don’t speak German and it’s kind of a lousy time of year to go weather-wise, especially since I was dreaming of European swimming holes and crystalline waters lapping pebbled beaches. I dreamed it all through the smoky, firestorm this summer in LA has been.
Also, I did I mention that I’ve never been to Berlin? Nowhere in Germany, actually.
I found myself saying, “I can stay in Berlin or I’ll travel around. I’m open. Italy this summer sounds nice. But, I could just as easily go Budapest.”
The day I decided to move came after the most bizarre 36 hours, which began when I spent an impetuous and impassioned night with my new foreign lover who was returning to his homeland in less than a week. After a dreamy, soft morning with him in my white blanketed bed, drinking coffee from white coffee mugs, I got a call from my mom saying that an elder family member was put in hospice care and I needed to come immediately.
My brother and sister left work mid-day and together we drove to Newport Beach to see her. When we left the hospital, we breathed the air of the living and were grateful, so we went to the beach. We swam past the waves and I submerged my body and head in ocean, opening my eyes underwater, and floating onto my back so my toes pointed skyward. I felt part of the sea and everything else.
That evening, I got drunk accidentally at a Mexican food restaurant with my family, then fell sleep in the backseat of my sister’s car for a surreal drive back to LA with my brother at the wheel guiding us home. I woke up the next morning and thought, shit, I have to check email and see if I got that Dr. Phil job. That’s right, The Dr. Phil, but don’t get it excited, it was only a copy writing job for the website.
As I opened my computer, I got a sinking feeling that I didn’t want the job, actually. I told myself that if I got it, I’d take it because I want to be open to all possibilites and I need $$$. This would mean, however, that I’d keep living the same life I lived now, but 8 hours of my day would belong to the Dr. Phil.
I also told myself that if I didn’t get the job, I was moving to Berlin. No doubt about it. If I got scared or it felt difficult, I would power through. This was my promise.
I didn’t get the job. My ego felt a little pang of hurt, but it was followed by immense relief. And, of course it was a sign.
Like selling my ring. Doing something scary, but meaningful and deliberate, is LIBERATING. Deciding to leave my home has galvanized every part of my life.
Stanton prefaces his idea of courage begetting courage with the notion that becoming adept and accomplished at something happens the exact same way.
Practice and diligence is echoed all throughout the book Grit, too. Stanton’s advice really nails the point though: You become an expert by doing the thing, not by waiting for knowledge to impart itself on you.
I guess this is all to say that I see courage and expertise as inherently linked, both needed for taking that leap!
Day 12 – It is no accident I had these insecurities during the full moon. Sorry, not sorry, for being witchy and new age and out there.
I googled the full moon and learned this:
“In fact during full moon, everything will be magnified, good and bad. Therefore full moon can be both viewed as a time of crisis as well as a time of opportunity. It depends on our overall state and activity during the full moon day to cultivate its positive or negative effects.” (A Time of Opportunity, pranaworld.net)
Here’s an example. I felt like crying. It was interrupting my attempt to meditate. I thought, should I call my mom and cry on the phone and complain and wallow? That would feel good. And there is a time and place for catharsis, certainly, but then I thought, then I’ll be immersed in that feeling and I don’t actually want to be. I want to acknowledge it and then find a way out from the inside of it.
Hoping for what you want and getting it are like the planets lining up. It happens only for one brief second before what you wanted and what really is, slip past each other. The act also reminds me of a kiss. It cannot last forever and the next moment will be entirely its own unpredictable thing.
From space.com’s 2 minute video about August’s full moon, I learned, “There is only one infinitely short instant when the moon is truly full.”
Day 11 – I paced my apartment this morning, overwhelmed, frantic. Had I not spent all day yesterday thinking about hope? This morning, I woke up, and one little sign banished it. Not even a sign, an absence of one. I attempted to get back into that place of openness. I reminded myself of a song lyric I heard that two days ago, “Everything will be alright if you just let go,” how I had repeated that line over and over to myself through a panic attack, until my heartbeat returned to normal and the lyric was integrated into my being.
But as I paced between my office to the kitchen this morning, searching for the inspiration or impetus to write, I noticed the blue spine of a book on my shelf. Knowing, if I should do anything at all, it is to follow signs, I came back and looked at what it is, Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I told myself I would read any essay I happened to flip open to. I landed on the essay titled, On Self-Respect.
Didion talks about what I’ve been thinking of as dynamic/ generative hope, but what she calls “self-respect:”
“Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things that one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”
Maybe this is the combination of grit and hope.
It is a reminder of the idea that we work hard, believe in ourselves as natural functions of the universe, let go of reputation, and trust that we will blossom into not what we can imagine for ourselves, but into the possibilities we cannot fathom.
This trust is, as Didion puts it:
“To have the sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”
So much of what defines us comes from doing what is hard. These challenges also are what leads to happiness. We are not trapped with in the whims of the day to day traumas, or what I talk about in one of my essays , “The Way Back to My Body,” when you feel cut off from life, “when you are alone in yourself, as if there is no universe to feel apart of, only stuck in a body abused by chaos or rapture.” We can transcend them.
In Grit, Duckworth talks about how feelings of hopelessness are tied to a perceived lack of control over your life. While you can’t control all circumstances, you can control your reaction to them and you can control what you choose to hold on to versus what you choose to let go of. Listening to yourself, trusting that wisdom, means when to say yes and when to say no.
It is easy to stress and fret and hard to let go. But you can practice at it and improve, then you see how much easier releasing hang-ups and worries is.
One of my favorite practices, which I learned from Manifest Your Destiny by Wayne Dyer goes, “With every breath you take, feel yourself taking in unconditional love. With every exhalation, expel thoughts of fear.” Centering yourself and detaching from attempts to control is liberating.
Balance means accepting the good with the bad and taking it all in stride and without paralyzing fear. It is here now, it will also pass.
These past few days I’ve been feeling really open, like too open almost, everything is rushing in. I can barely keep up. Like my entire periphery has decided to join the foreground.
It reminds me of when you stay up all night to the morning with your lover or remaining party stragglers and you’re exhausted, but revved. Then you have to go out and order a huge stack of pancakes to bring you back down to earth.
Day 9 – This morning my dog woke me to walk him while it was still dark and I was groggy, wanting to stay in bed longer.
He pulled me down the sidewalk. I was still rubbing my eyes, when I saw a woman approaching. I managed a sleepy smile to which she responded with a robust “Good morning!” and a giant, loving grin. That was nice, I thought.
As I kept walking, the next person I encountered said the same thing, not with quite the vigor of the first, but very friendly. As it kept happening, I looked down at my little dog to see if there was something cuter about him today than other days, something to elicit such open friendliness from each passing stranger on a Tuesday morning. Cute little dogs tend to soften people, naturally, but this was something more. By the time I got home, I was brimming with joy and shinning my own a huge grin for anyone I walked by.
Truly, your mornings shapes the rest of the day. Your outlook begins when you wake up. A popular mindfulness practice used for achieving greater happiness, presence, reducing stress, increasing productivity, manifesting, creativity, etc. is to start your day, before you get out of bed even, by expressing gratitude for what you have.
I don’t remember if I actively did this or not, but generally when I get up, I greet my pets in the morning. I’m filled with the joy of their presence, which easily feels like a new gift each day, I tell them good morning, I love you, I’m so glad to see you!
As I said, nothing was different about my dog today. Nothing is different about today, today. Except, today I sold my engagement ring. It was not easy to do. I briefly considered it before, when my ex-husband got a new girlfriend, and the ring seemed to mock me, but I didn’t follow through. And the ring was SO pretty. The prettiest thing I’ve ever been given. I sensed that somewhere inside of me I actually believed it was the only one that I’d ever receive.
But fuuuuck that. I loved it and I let that shit go.
Not until I was driving home from Beverly Hills, re-listening to Tara’s aforementioned Hope podcast, did I remember the deluge of friendly faces this morning. I realized that kind, loving start to my day had fortified me. When I walked into that high-rise to have my ring evaluated and resold, I felt supported. Then, as I sat there in the office admiring its sparkle and feeling wistful, I suddenly got very tired of looking at the sad, beautiful thing that no longer served its purpose, its promise for a future that didn’t work out, and I was ready to be done with it.
It’s not sad, just a story already told.
The consigners swept it away and into their ownership; all I felt was total liberation.
I texted my best friend about what I’d done and how it would help fund my adventures abroad. She said, “you go girl.” I will!
Here’s the note-to-self doodle I made to remind me about this particular bit of symbolism, so I can include it in the essay I’m working on.
Day 8 – I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about hope. In a book I’m reading called, Grit, author Angela Duckworth follows up her discussion of optimism with a discussion of hope. She says there is a science behind hope. “This growth mindset, the belief that people are designed for change and growth, is what disposes people to be resilient when things don’t go well.”
So much of what happens to us is because of what we believe can happen. Hope.
When I think of hope, I see the word YES in my mind’s eye. The first title I had for this blog was actually: 30 Days to Saying Yes. For me, hope has been fueled by a million minute decisions to say yes instead of no. I see YES as being open to the idea that there is a solution to a problem or another approach to a shitty feeling. It’s hard, but like I said, every single time I catch myself thinking pessimistically, I try to remind myself that I can decide how to approach what I’m experiencing.
Duckworth reports that optimists “are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes to their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.”
Why would you be hopeful when your problem looks like a room with no door? What if you start by deciding that the room could or could not have a door?
Yesterday, my friend told me about her bummer tarot card reading. She explained how she pulled two so-so cards and then a disappointing third. It was the Two of Swords, which looks like a giant X. She said, it has different meanings, but she reads it as a big ole NO. The question she brought to the cards was about love and if it’s something she’ll encounter on her trip to Scotland at the end of the month. The big X took the wind right out of that sail.
It reminded me of all of the times I’d gone out to a bar or party, hoping to meet someone. As soon as I’d show up and quickly scoped the scene, my heart would drop and I’d regret bothering to put on eyeliner and unwalkable shoes.
Or, how another friend recently put it so aptly, “Just once I’d like to meet my future wife on a cross-country flight.”
About the X card, I said to my friend, “Maybe this is the universe’s way of taking your expectations out of your trip. Then, you can go into it totally open.”
She said, “I’m open to the card being true, but I’m also open to it being not true.”
Later, I sat down to listen to a podcast by one of my favorite spiritual thinker/enlightened individual/practitioner of mindfulness, Tara Brach. Because I’ve struck a synchronicity jackpot lately, the most recent episode was on the subject of, you guessed it, hope! It’s titled, “How hope can heal and free us.”
Seriously, I believe it can.
Brach talks about different types of hope. For example, the ego’s hope, what she calls the shadow side of hope, is when we grasp at things and set our hopes onto one specific outcomes, how this “robs us of the current moment.”
The moment is expansive with possibilities, but it is easy to attach to one that thing we really want and think there is only one path to achieving it. She says, real hope, the kind that expands us, means being ok with it not happening (whatever it might be).
Since normal life is composed of valleys and peaks, or as my sister says, “good shit usually follows bad shit,” and the reverse, hope has to transcend the day to day.
I see this as being about the moment, but not attaching too much the particulars: a romantic fling you didn’t see coming, a trip abroad a few weeks away, a party with so many people you think you might fall in love a hundred times, OR a party where you meet no one and wish you hadn’t put on long-wear lipstick, or a job you didn’t get that you really wanted, or drawing a big X from the cards when you wanted the tarot version of a green light.
(The brilliant artist Sean Higgins graciously allowed me to use this image, Intervention, 2008) for my book cover. It is beautiful and I have loved it since the day I met it.)
Day 7 – It feels so good to do something I was afraid of, moving through it to the other side. I think of the idea that there is no trying, just doing or not doing.
Where does procrastination or inaction come from? Maybe it comes from thinking you can’t or you’ll be judged or feel embarrassed or look stupid while going for it. Maybe you think you weren’t meant for big things or that you’re on some level unlovable or that you’re unworthy of anything more than unhappiness.
I had to meditate on fact that worthiness is not a mutable condition, but a natural expression that comes from and belongs to the timeless wisdom of the universe. What the hell does that mean? It means, my weird and fallible self is the same as a tree. You would never look at a flower and say, that flower is doing a shitty job of being a flower. You would never think that a tree has too many pine needles.
The first poem in my book, Elemental Perceptions: A Panorama, I think, was an effort to tell myself (and my readers) this. Here’s the poem:
This is How a Prism Works
The light enters the glass, bending and refracting it, breaking it up into its constituent colors. The tower separates the color from the light. She said, believe me that you’re a beautiful human being. Think of your insides like a grand spectrum, a forgivable animal, teasing and mortal. The big mirror splintered, then came the din, bearing the cosmos and urging you. You are a body, but try watching your mind think, listen to the maundering; it traces the pacific coast. You can mesmerize all that daunting blue. And when the light breaks, try to appreciate the view.
What else am I saying here besides you are a “forgivable animal”? I’m saying, observe your mind work, watch it think, without (for a moment) doing the thinking itself. I often wonder what the hell spiritual teachers mean when they say, “lead with your heart,” but I think it means let go of trying to control everything and let your controlling mind go. Give the figuring out a break.
One of my favorite reminders from Wayne Dyer: “Stop trying to control and let your life unfold.”
This doesn’t mean you should stop working or doing or reaching for your goals. You should put everything you have into them. But that means being present and putting everything you have in the moment into those actions and that energy.
I haven’t talked much about what happened when I started listening and paying attention to life, but doing so turned out to be the catalyst for my decision to moveabroad. When I stopped trying to control everything, I was overwhelmed with a flood of signs. Actually, a biblical-size deluge.
Here’s one example. I live next-door to a residential care facility. They have a new patient who moved in maybe 6 months ago. She is the bane of my existence. And I feel bad about it.She screams, with the pitch and urgency of someone being murdered, with a rancor so shrill and unbearable that I often want to murder her myself. She is severely disabled, so I feel like an asshole and remind myself to be compassionate. She’s most often heard screaming, “Get outta here” for hours on end. It sometimes starts at 5am, right when I happen to be meditating. It’s always the same. I hear her, I get frustrated and angry, then I tell myself that I’m jerk and that this is my daily lesson in patience.
When the idea that I wanted to move popped in my head, I was kind of frozen for two days, unable to decide if I was going to take this urge seriously. I spent many morning meditations trying to open myself up to the wisdom of the universe and shoot for a little distance from my thinking mind. I was trying to lead with my heart. Then, the lady next door starts screaming. It hits me what she is actually saying, she’s saying “get out of here” and suddenly I feel like she’s talking to me. I start smiling wildly because it’s like a riddle I just figured out. I need to get out of here! I need to move to Germany!
I want to leave you with an excellent quote from Kafka. It might seem contradictory because the first line is “You do not have to leave this room,” but the essence is that the world will offer itself to you if you are still enough to watch and listen to it.
“You do not have to leave the room. Remain standing at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”-Franz Kafka
Day 6 – Lovely synchronicity, I opened my email this morning, read a message that linked to an interview that kinda bored me. So I googled the writer being interviewed, Jenny Zhang, and opened a link to one of her essays. The opening line is, “I have lived my whole life swearing there’s no truth more complete than Walt Whitman’s parenthetical line in the poem “Song of Myself”: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I’ll read the rest of her essay tomorrow. This perfect lining up of signs is where I’ll stay today.
Day 5 – Even my hair is getting curlier. I just got out of the shower; curliest day yet, which I attribute to my new general breaking the rules attitude.
I had coffee with my friend Karina today. She gave me a present she purchased from a flea market this morning: a Berlin scarf.
This is the first time I’ve seen Karina since she got back from visiting our friend Clare in Berlin who moved to there with her husband and has been living and making art there for 2 years. Karina said she told Clare that I was different than how I was a couple years ago. Clare is a special person. She had a psychic vision about my future that she intimated to me, coincidentally, the morning I decided my marriage was over. It was a big vision and her words gave me fortitude and courage I needed at the time.
After coffee with Karina, I considered how I’d changed myself from an unhappy person into a happy one. Since my divorce, I worried that I’d gone back to exactly who I was before I got married. Re-initiating a life of grasping, suffering, and irreverent faithlessness. But then I got so tired of that. I got tired of responding to the question posed to me at parties, “What have you been up to lately” with the same tired answer, “teaching and working on my book.” I felt stuck and like my life was not one I created. But it was, of course, everything in my life is the result of a decision I made or position I put myself in, minus the normal ups and downs, brightness and dimming of events outside our control.
Karina said I used to be so anxious. I remember myself chain-smoking, drinking like a fish, and frantic to get into a relationship.
I’ve always had so much energy and desire, but I didn’t have confidence or a direction of where to put it. I wrote an epic poem titled Barf, Sexually, which employs the refrain, “what do you do with your love?”
I mean, where does one put her devotion?
Also, where do you put it? I’d like to know—feel free to leave comments 😉
I started thinking about the practical application of my transition into a more mindful, purpose-filled person, the things I actively did to change my outlook.
Namely I started meditating and practicing yoga. That lead to more and more spiritual work, to learning how to be still with myself even through the fear, which I saw underlie my every thought and action. Meditating and practicing yoga brought me from worrying and over-thinking to trusting and staying present, how that makes me feel like the world is full of possibilities, how I am not locked in one small self and one small story, but as Whitman wrote in the poem Song of Myself, “I contain multitudes.”
Early into my daily meditation practice, maybe three months, I had a voice come through to me, it was my own voice and it answered my question, what do you do with your love? It said, “It’s easy: you love.” That was it. “Sophie, you love.” Don’t worry about the how.
Don’t worry about funneling that love into a particular receptacle that is probably too small because anything you can imagine is too small. It is small because it is limited to what you know, while the open contains the truths you do know and the ones you could never have imagined. The unfathomable is the source of hope.
How did this all happen? Certainly not just from getting divorced. But that was the catalyst. When that life-path failed, I swept it out of the way and made room for the unknown. I trudged through the hard work of letting go of some dreams I’d been holding on to since I was a kid.
I did this by believing what was always meant for me, as a living thing worthy as any other living thing is of being what it is, and NOT by thinking that I could trick the universe into giving me what I want.
I gave up control. I gave in to the idea that trying to control my life and happiness completely, excluded all the other possibilities of what a happy life meant. When a friend said to me, “you don’t have to be married to Frank, you can find someone who you really love — I finally understood. My ex-husband is good man, but we were not for each other and that is ok, too.
Letting go of the idea of the life I thought I’d have with him was impossibly hard… for about 3 days. Then my sister told me to make it my choice instead of a thing being done to me. Her advice resonated. My sorrow went from hopeless suffering to a new opportunity. There was no more having to beat a dead horse. It was a relief.
What hurt though, what terrified me, must have been as clear as day because in the first 24 hours of deciding to separate, while I sat on my parents sofa and wept, my dad said to me, “You’ll have children, sweetheart, don’t worry.” Not, “It will be all okay, this is for the best, you’ll find love again,” but the thing I was most afraid of that I wore like a neon orange jumpsuit, “What if I never have a family?”
I would not have a child with my ex. What this looked like, at 34 years old, was “What if there’s not enough time to meet my soulmate, fall in love, and have children all before my healthy childbearing years are up?” The feeling of urgency and desperation that line of reasoning evoked was overwhelming to the point that it choked me, so I embraced the choking fear, and like Chinese finger torture toy you win at the arcade, I figured out that when I just gave in, it released its grip.
Fine, I said, the worst case scenario is just as likely to happen as the best, so there is no reason to worry. What’s worrying going to create except desperation, which we all know a bad look. If anything might influence my future, it is openness; it is rejecting all shoulds, rejecting the idea that there is one way to be happy.
My aunt asked me, about a year after the separation, what I would do about trying to have children. Would I freeze my eggs? Would I look for a sperm donor and do it myself?
I’m not ruling these out, but right now the answer is no.
When I hear about companies paying for women to do this, it feels like the women are being forced out of the present moment and locked into a particular future (also it is fucked up because the other implicit argument in that is that women are not valuable workers unless they push back motherhood). I think I would rather experience not being able to have children than to marry myself to a static, frozen (forgive the pun) future.
This relates to the question I asked myself about how I went from unhappy to happy. Really, all I did was change myself from being pessimistic to optimistic. In Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit, she discusses how people see suffering differently. At the heart suffering is often a feeling of hopelessness, which depends on whether you see suffering as something permanent or something you can change. “Permanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem logical to give up. If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist…these explanations are temporary and specific; their fixability motivates you to start clearing them way as problems.”
One line really got to me, “Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages.” Since my divorce, I thought the main problem was differing views of marriage my ex and I held. I see marriage as infallible, that is, yes, you’ll have problems (maybe lots of them), but that is to be expected and you work on them until they’re fixed. My ex-husband’s view was, life is too short to be miserable. If problems don’t get fixed, you cut your losses and move on. Both are fair arguments, but they are diametrically opposed. We used to quarrel about this all the time. I’d say, “how can you believe our marriage will improve if you don’t really believe problems can be fixed?
I reasoned that my view of marriage was traditional, while he had a modern one—which is true—but it also speaks to our different approaches to suffering. I had a boyfriend say to me once that I’d stay in a bad relationship no matter what, that I didn’t think highly enough of myself to get out of it. That is only a little true. The other part is that I have, at least with love, an attitude toward optimism. I can see how this has both served me and not harmed me at times.
When the plan fell apart and I got divorced, I decided to change some of the perceived areas of lack to perceived abundance, and that engendered more optimism.
I started reminding myself of what I am grateful for starting with the basics, “the sound of my cat’s purring, my soft bed, my sister and brother, my parents, coffee, air-conditioning, etc.”
A new friend recently said to me, as my cat sat beside him purring, “I like the sound they [cats] make.” These little things are everywhere and would compose an entire life if you let them.
Here is another practice of redefining the idea of scarcity or lacking, I listen to Nina Simone’s “Aint Got No, I got Life” over and over. I’ve been doing this for a few months. The song is part of my morning jams that get me stoked on the day.
She says, “Aint got no water, aint got no love”
Aint got no love is the refrain because it is the seemingly the most cruel lacking, “why am i alive any way,” she asks. Then the tune changes:
“I got my arms, I got my hands I got my fingers, got my legs I got my feet, I got my toes I got my liver, got my blood Got life, I got my life”
Also, I’d argue, she has love too because she has the love that she gives out and away!
Day 4 – I want to take actionable steps, but I also want to trust. I have to remind myself that these both are and are not mutually exclusive. I have to trust, that means trusting that the how will come to me or I will come to it and when it does I have to act on it. But the other and bigger part of trust is to give up the idea that I can know or control how it will come to me. When I am actively envisioning my desires, I try to exclude the how and just put the vision out there. When I am pursuing any one actionable task, I forgive myself of the idea that I have to do it perfectly in order for my dreams/desires/hopes to manifest. Trust that the big vast blank unknown I see with my closed eyes and meditate it not empty, but filled with possibility. The same as when I close my eyes to meditate and my vision is filled with mysterious light.
I met with a colleague of the university I teach at, Ariane, who moved to Berlin 14 months ago. She gave me tips about preparing for my trip and what to expect when I get there. For example, most Berliners speak English, but it is polite to ask in German first if they do. She had insights about acquiring a visa, should I decide to stay longer, and she referred me to a friend, a fellow writer, who is looking to sublet his apartment in East Berlin’s hip neighborhood, Neukolln, for a couple months.
Something I said to Ariane yesterday morning surprised me, that I want to leap before I look. I want to go in to it blind, but not ignorant. She said, that’s an important distinction.
During my tarot card reading, Erika pulled both the Fool card (adventure/journey) and the Emperor card (rigidness). I told her about my struggle to think differently, that for so long I had tried to squeeze a life’s worth of different possibility into one thread, as if a whole braid of lives would fit in a single strand. Frank was the strand, but my love was too big. I saw only one path, my conceptual framework rigidly defined by a single vision of happiness: love, marriage, baby, but it didn’t fit in the receptacle I chose to hold it. That was my past, rigidity and by-the-bookness. The present is the fool (forgive the immediate association). Erika said this card is about the adventure I’m about to begin, have already begun when I decided to open myself up to the eternal now. These cards validated my decision to trust in the universe’s greater vision of my life. What I can dream up or desire pales in comparison for all that can’t even be conceived of. All the more confirmation to trust: being where I want to be is the boon to being present.
I looked up the Fool card on the House of Intuition’s website and I was surprised, but gladdened again to see its full meaning. From their website, “the Fool represents beginnings, innocence and novelty. The story of the Tarot is often referred to as “the Journey of the Fool,” because it depicts the evolution of the spiritual seeker from ignorant fool to enlightened master. But don’t be fooled: in many ways, the entire secret of the Tarot is summed up in this single card.”
Day 3 – At the funeral, my sister Emily said, “When you’re in the ground, the earth is digesting you.”Seeing the roots growing around my grandfather’s casket, snuggled next to his second wife, the loved one we were burying, nestled between her and his first wife, was actually comforting.
My grandfather died a year ago. Yesterday I went to his second wife’s funeral, then my brother, sister, and I drove to the beach where I swam in the ocean with 15 of my family members. I think we all wanted to celebrate life; celebrating life is a common grief ritual in Judaism.
The salty water was good. I could taste it even through my eyes. My parents called the beach we were at Connie Island, it was so filled with people and noise, but when I looked down the shore toward the afternoon sun, I noticed all the kids running back and forth from the water’s edge and their castles and sandy buckets, running between the rushing and receding foamy water. Skinny little twig legs and arms, sopping ponytails, the ruffled waist of a one-piece bathing suit, the diaper bulging beneath.
I rode the ferris wheel with my little 3-year-old cousin on one side of me and my 6-year-old cousin on the other. We put our hands in the air and the top and yelled as we flew back down toward the ground. The 3-year-old told me she liked the view from the tippy top. She squealed and pointed out the ocean to me. She said, “I like when the ferris wheel goes fast and my hair flies up.”
Then, my brother, sister, mom, dad, and I took a photo booth picture. Back to the original 5, the nuclear family, us 3 child adults and 2 parents. What are we?
I dreamed last night that a girl, maybe me, was loved by someone but couldn’t get to him, couldn’t leave the building she was captive because a looming, angry and unpredictable man-monster wouldn’t let her. This monster attacked anyone who looked his direction, and though not very big, he was stronger than any other man. So she hid and no one could save her, but no one could see her either, not her best friends, not even her dog. She became a tiny person, like a lilliput, hiding in tall grasses and swimming from one place to another unseen underwater. People tried shooting the monster with guns, but they were potato guns and the monster raged through the streets undeterred. The President was called. Then, the girl, with the hope that he could be stopped, but no idea of how to subdue him beyond the failed efforts everyone had already tried, came out of hiding. It was a terrifying dream. The man was not a man but the dark part of everything unknown. The girl was me.
And then this, the exact email I needed to get right now from a friend and brilliant writer who just read my essay in progress “Wife to Myself.” He told me he loves it, he said, “Your brain is amazing.” My weird brain. My heart is renewed
Day 2 – From my friend Erika’s Instagram post, which was balm to my moody day:
“This leaf jumped out at me today. Not literally. But sort of. I was in a cranky as shit, push the world away, close my heart kinda mood and, well, there it was. And of course, it fits perfectly with the message in today’s cards: Keep giving what you’ve got to give. Give out only what you want to receive.”
I was feeling small, stuck in my own self and thoughts and heart, worrying that what I have to give isn’t enough. It wasn’t until I pulled Erika’s post up a second time later that day, to regain some inspiration, that I realized her impact on me, that what she is putting out there helps me, what I’m putting out there will help you (I hope). It doesn’t take the perfect word, just the expression of one’s authentic self.
The words themselves in this blog post are perfect, as it happens to be, but that she said them reminds me that we can, and do, all help each other.
I really bristled, a few months ago, at the Op-Ed in the New York Times titled, Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself” is Terrible Advice.’ I disagree with the ideas behind this article because “being yourself” isn’t the same as being your authentic self, which is a self acting as a function of the larger world’s wisdom, but instead is some weird, ego-driven false self.
Anyway, if you’re afraid to put it out there, your story never gets the chance to help someone else. If you never share it (from a place of kindness, generosity, and love), you’ll never know how it could help someone else. Lydia Yuknavitch, author of the incredible memoir, “The Chronology of Water,” said in a recent interview in Lenny Letter “I believe in art the way other people believe in God.” I read that as: art gives people faith.
“In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.” -Thoreau
This is a blog about moving to another country for a bit. It is a travel narrative, but it is also the story of deciding to change my life. Obviously, that decision is the first change. Here goes the rest— riding the back of adventure, purpose, pursuit, desire, fortitude, and good will.
What I’m done with= no, I can’t, I didn’t, I won’t.
I think everyone is their best when they are themselves, their deliberate, authentic selves, so this blog is also a place for recording what it is like when you choose to open to all possibilities.
Day 1- Don’t think about being scared. Tell myself I am not scared because telling myself that re-conceptualizes the idea of fear. I am excited. I am saying Yes.
You need another person only to live a certain kind of life. I was remiss for so many years, maybe every year up until the last one, maybe until 6 months ago, when I realized I don’t need another person to live happily, just to live that one kind of life that I wanted for myself, but required another person. Like I was trying to squeeze all my hopes into one hope that didn’t fit with the person I forced it onto. A partner and babies and all that is a life a want, but it is not the only life. Tell myself: it is not one story, but a stand in the braid of many stories.
My friend said to me on the day I announced my divorce, “Sophie, you can wake up into the life you want, one that is fully your own.”
(photo curtesy of 
30 Days to Berlin 