Spring Cleaning

These photos show me doing something purely for the joy of it: climbing boulders in the Fountainbleau Forest, outside of Paris, a few weeks ago.

I started this blog nearly four months ago and have written in it, most weeks, just for the joy of it as well. It’s clear that this project is much more about joy than fear: Doing one thing each day that scares me seems to have the effect of opening me up to what I really long for.

But today, back here in Oregon, a tentative sun shines over a landscape that’s brand-new with spring. I see a crisp blue-and-white sea as I look down from my forest hideaway, and see dark pink buds on the salmonberry bushes lining the mountainside.

The green energy of spring has taken me over, as well. I imagine that it flows like sap through my veins, spurs me on in my projects. As today's "thing that scares me," I set myself the goal of giving away fifty things I don’t need anymore. In one hour-long sweep of closets and cupboards, I find (and then give away) fifty-two.

What I love about letting go of things is that clean, free feeling I have afterward, new and fresh and hopeful as springtime. And that sense of “Aah…. So what do I want to invite into my life instead?”

This has been a major theme, these past few months. As I open myself up to what brings me joy, I realize that the list is long – and that I want to make some choices about where I focus.

I find myself wanting more for this blog, too. I want to write for the joy of it, yes. But I’d like to find a sense of purpose in it as well, to see how it can contribute to the lives of others – to your life.

If you have any thoughts of how that might be possible, please comment below. I’d love to hear.

Chalk Cliffs and Molten Cheese

Scene 1: Ten days ago. I walk along a series of massive white sea cliffs at Beachy Head, on England’s southeastern coast. There are seven cliffs, called the Seven Sisters, and over each rolling green hill I see a new, spectacular view. Now the sun is bright against the tall, curving face of a cliff, the sea blue below; now the sky looks dark and violent, cliff and sea are churning shades of gray.

And in this beautiful place, where there is so much life, flowers mark one spot on a high cliff. Little signposts with names, dates of birth and death. One says the name of a man, and “At peace now.”

I stand before the flowers and say the words I’ve said hundreds of times – probably most often along the roads in India, where I lived last year. In Delhi, a man with no legs would shuttle himself across hot asphalt on his arms, winding amongst cars at a stoplight. Or I would see, from the window of a car speeding along an overpass, a car accident and a rich Delhi woman’s hand raised to slap the face of her driver.

The words are: “May you be well. May you be happy and healthy. May you be free from suffering.”

It’s possible that these words help only me. And I don’t know the stories of the people that have jumped from these cliffs.

But I hope, as I breathe in the cold air, alive with salt from the sea, that they could feel the ocean’s roar in their own veins, and that they could see how the ever-changing light on those cliffs doesn’t change the cliffs themselves, or their beauty.

The wild magic of those white cliffs against the sea juts right up against the evidence of the terrible sorrow that humans also experience. As I take it in, I make a wish: to remember the luck of waking up and breathing and walking this earth. To remember it every day, every moment.

How hard can that be to remember?

**

Scene 2: This is how hard.

It’s less than a week later and I’m back in Oregon, in an orange-tiled kitchen. I’m tired and jetlagged and distracted. I take the lid off a pan. The cheese on top of my refried beans is nice and melty. I put a spoonful of beans and cheese into my mouth and it is…. Hot. SO hot.

Time slows down and becomes focused on one thing: my mouth, and the cheese in it.

I try to spit it out. The cheese holds on for dear life, clinging with its molten-lava stickiness to the roof of my mouth. Even my tonsils get burned. When I look at my mouth in the mirror the next day I see white blisters coating not just the roof of my mouth but most of my tonsils as well. No wonder it hurts to swallow.

You can maybe imagine what happens next. It’s not that the pain is so bad (and it’s blown out of the water when I compare it to that of the other people I say that “may you be free from suffering” prayer for).

It’s just that my mouth is so… sore. And on top of that, I’m mad at myself for doing something so mindless. And somehow… I add a whole bunch of other stuff to the pile of suffering (relationship confusion; not knowing Exactly What I Want to Do Next in My Life…). And before I know it, my whole life feels sore.

And that’s how I spend the next couple of days: concentrating, hard, on how sore my mouth – and my life – feel.

Until I finally remember something useful. On the phone, just minutes before I took that bite of melted cheese, a friend was talking about Tara Brach’s book Radical Acceptance, and about Brach’s exploration of what it means to be her “own best friend.”

This isn’t a new concept. If I were to try to explain to my 19-year-old self why it is that I feel exponentially happier now, two decades later, than I did at that age, it would have a lot to do with being my own best friend. It’s one of those mysterious gifts that older people are always telling you about when you’re young and think that 19 is as good as it gets. I am (usually) so much more able, now, to be my own best friend: to wish myself well, and to enjoy who I am, rather than constantly trying to squish myself in to a shape that is not my own.

But somehow – with the soreness in my mouth, the soreness in my life – I had forgotten. Forgotten to be aware of my luck at being alive on the earth today, and forgotten to be my own best friend. Which really amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it? Taking joy in your own aliveness, just because you are…. Alive. Not perfect, just alive.

I last posted 2 weeks ago. Since then (apart from scalding myself with melted cheese) I’ve “scared myself” by adding a counter to this blog to see how many hits it gets (Halleluia! It’s not just Mom and Dad. Thanks for joining me!). I contemplated life and death on the white chalk cliffs of Beachy Head. I survived five Bikram yoga classes in five days, while I was in London. Bikram is an intense series of poses made far more intense by a heat index of 149 degrees Fahrenheit (room heated to 105 degrees, at 60% humidity – “Yoga Journal” says that pro football players have died of heatstroke at a heat index of 109 degrees).

I’ve been saying for years, though, that I think the most courageous act most of us ever do is to love. And that’s certainly been the case for me in these past weeks: risking being vulnerable and confused and scared and unsure and torn, in a quest to learn to love more fully. I won’t go into detail, but I wasn’t alone on those white chalk cliffs. And my longing to be grateful for every step I walk on this earth is really about that: being aware of the luck of this force of life flowing through me. However it shows up today.

Fear, joy, anger, love, blisters on my tonsils: all just proof that I am here, that I am vital and alive as the surf below those cliffs, as the sun shining and fading and shining again against their white chalk faces.

A Loaf of Bread, a Bottle of Wine… et Toi?

My Spanish friends and I had been stomping around the mountains outside Madrid all that cold day, collecting wild mushrooms. The last of the mushrooms now rested in pools of garlic-scented olive oil, next to the torn-off end of a loaf of pan rustica and more than a few bottles of red wine.

“What’s more attractive, a drop-dead gorgeous woman or a normal woman who feels good in her own skin?” Alfredo asked the rest of us, as we sat back in our chairs and drank in the warmth of the fire.

It had been, in the eyes of most of us, a perfect day – laughing and arguing boisterously as we hunted for the mushrooms, and then, back in the warmth of Alfredo’s house in the sierra, cooking and eating the earthy, garlicky mushrooms and drinking wine.

I was probably the only one who didn’t think it was the perfect day. All this eating and talking was fun, but shouldn’t we be DOING something? This was ten years ago and I’d already been living in Spain for several years. I loved Spain, but often had the sense that I should be Doing Something More Important.

My Spanish friends, on the other hand, seemed to believe that doing less could lead to more fun and enjoyment of life. They were masters, as on that day of the mushroom hunting, at having more fun with less. Alfredo had at least ten people over for dinner that night, but there was no spending the day stressed out, shopping and cooking. Instead, we had fun tramping through the countryside and then more fun cooking and eating together.

The “less is more” idea seemed to work with a lot of things – Spanish women were a lot more elegant than I was, and their closets were far less jam-packed than those of my friends at home. Spanish parents went to restaurants with their friends and held adult conversations, rather than trying to entertain the kids all the time… and the kids seemed relaxed and happy.

I admired what I saw as a sense of spaciousness and ease in many Spaniards’ approach to time and to life. There was a sense that you didn’t need a lot of stuff, just good friends and good conversation.

Alfredo’s attempt to start a controversy with his question about attractiveness fell flat. All the Spaniards at the table – both men and women – agreed that a normal woman who feels good in her own skin would be far more attractive than even the most beautiful woman.

I, however, sat looking into my wineglass and wondering what the answer to that question would be in the US. I mean, I could see that a lot of men are interested in women who seem natural and true to themselves. But still… a lot of the messages I’d heard growing up in the US had been around some version of “more is better.”

And it wasn’t just “work harder to have more stuff” (but a lot less time to enjoy it). “More is better,” when I was a teenager anxious to learn how to be a woman, meant firmer thighs, bigger breasts, better clothes, shinier hair, whiter teeth, more vivacious conversation, even acting “more natural”…

And for all of this, I had to exercise more, smile harder, “work” on my personality… not to mention working harder to make more money so I could spend it in the constant hunt for better hair conditioner and the perfect sweater (all with the intention, later, of having the perfect car and perfect family and perfect house).

Phew. When I write about it, it all sounds like a lot of work.

In contrast, Alfredo’s question, and the response of that table full of friends, seemed to fit into the “less is more” idea. To “feel good in your skin” is really just to be who you are and to be deeply comfortable with that, isn’t it? And when you have that, how much other “stuff” do you really need?

I think this applies to everyone – whether your “stuff” of choice comes in the form of a better car, or a really great meal, or more money in the bank. Not that any of those things are “bad,” just that… Are they additions to lives that already seem spacious and full of joy and love and all the other things we long for? Or are we using them to fill a space inside of us that seems empty? Are we using them to convince ourselves that we matter, that we are loveable, that we can command respect?

Last week I was in Paris, a place that offers all sorts of chances to consider these questions. For instance, is it really the cheese and wine that matter? Or is it that I have such a beautiful memory, from the last time I was in Paris, of sitting at a table in the springtime, drinking cheese and wine and talking for hours with a friend?

Is it possible that I’m trying to match that memory through the cheese and wine, rather than realizing that what mattered was the spaciousness and freedom and connection I felt – talking to a friend for hours and sitting bare-shouldered in the balmy air of spring?

Along with pondering these questions, this week I took the risk to:

1) Speak French (my French is rusty-on-top-of-bad-to-begin-with).

2) Extrapolate, in French, on a long-winded thought of mine, while aware that the two people listening might be gritting their teeth in agony.

3) Climb some very tall boulders in the Fontainbleau Forest.

4) Cook dinner for a French person (and therefore risking being considered evidence of stereotypes about Americans being terrible cooks…).

5) Think about the ways I spend my time and life energy that seem life-serving, and the ways that don’t. (Haha… it hasn’t escaped me that “spending my time worrying what French people think of my cooking and language skills” falls in the latter category).

6) Consider how my use of life energy affects my relationships (this was “scary” because the break-up I wrote about last week was due to his perception that I wasn’t investing enough time in it. How well do the things I choose to invest my time in reflect what I value? – that may very well be next week’s question).

**

It was ten years ago, now, that I sat at that table at Alfredo’s house in Spain and thought about the questions of feeling good in my skin, and of “less is more.”

One of the women sitting around the table with us that day was the daughter of a Marquis, though she would never tell you that. I’ve been thinking a lot, this week, about the way she looked when I saw her last – probably five years ago now. I bumped into her in a little park near her house in Madrid, in the springtime. She had one of her young sons in tow and the other in a baby carriage. She was wearing a well-worn pair of jeans, and she was just – enjoying the park, enjoying the flowers beginning to bloom, enjoying her sons. She looked like she felt good in her own skin.

But it was more than that. There was a sense of spaciousness, of enjoying the moment, that I long for – a spaciousness that I want to bring into my exploration of how I use my life energy, today and every day. 

As I step out into the day here in London, where life finds me this week, I will try to remember that.

Escape

Nothing gives you more perspective – after a couple of weeks in which many thousands of people have died in Japan, and the term “radioactive plumes” has become a part of your vocabulary, and your boyfriend has broken up with you – than to stand in the dining car of a train with a glass of wine in your hand and watch a part of England, and then the Chunnel, and then a part of France zoom by.

Old cathedrals, new gas stations, miles of green fields that have been tilled for centuries, all against a gentle lavender-colored sundown… The weight of history, the weight of modern life, and the weight of the past two weeks all seem to blur together with the speed of the train.

This blog post has had three incarnations over the past two weeks, but I’ve posted none of them till now.

I’m calling it “the courage to not post when your heart is breaking”: Breaking at the sight of a fat-cheeked toddler in Japan being tested for radiation exposure on the news. Breaking for the white-capped Pacific Ocean, the backdrop to my childhood, to my whole life, and the way it may be affected by those radiation plumes. And breaking for a love lost after many attempts to keep it alive.

I wrote the first version of this post to the tune of evacuation sirens, as the Oregon Coast was on tsunami alert. The second version was a rant against consumerism, the way that our drive for more “stuff” also drives the operation of nuclear power plants on earthquake fault lines, not just in Japan but all over.

But I notice that my response to those multiple heartbreaks was to bring myself here to Europe, to a place that reminds me of ease, and peace, and hope. And yes, I consumed quite a lot of resources to get here. So I sort of had to take back my rant.

Maybe it’s more complicated than just “don’t consume.” Maybe it’s about being aware of what we consume and the way that it fits into the world, and also of what makes us feel most alive, brings us the most joy. It’s not that I plan to eat cheese and drink wine and reconnect with old friends in France for the rest of my life. But somehow it seems just the right thing to do, right now.

All of the things I did to “scare myself” in the week prior to the earthquake and tsunami seem insignificant in comparison to what nature and nuclear facilities have caused. Reducing the clutter in my life, looking at what I have to show for the past 20 years of life energy spent at work… these are nothing compared to facing the question that has come up for me since then.

It’s a question that I want to keep at the very front of my mind every single day, a question that I’m trying to address with this year’s experiment of stepping into my fear. But it seems to be a question that really only has urgency when something shakes us to our core and reminds us of how fragile our lives really are. The question is this:

What haven’t I done yet, that I long to do before I die?

I don’t know the whole answer yet, but I do know that I want to ask myself the question now, today, rather than waiting until it’s too late.

And while I’m asking myself the question, I want to remember to breathe in the view outside this train window – to watch as the lavender strip connecting sky to trees to land turns dark purple and lights begin to speckle across the horizon like low-lying stars. 

Cinderella Kicks Me in the Face

What’s a little motor oil to a self-sufficient lass, right?

I noticed, as I read the book I wrote about last week, Your Money or Your Life, that something jumped off the page at me in that sort of itchy, uncomfortable, tenacious way that Things I Should Pay Attention To seem to have. You know, like the reading equivalent of a scratchy wool sweater, which turns your skin pink and itchy no matter what you do, as you go about your day?

The book calls into question an “unspoken assumption” about fixing cars, namely that “if you are a woman you do not and cannot fix your own car.’”

I had a funny feeling, while reading those words, that they might be talking not just about cars but about money as well. Not that there aren’t many, many women out there who are very good at dealing with money. But I’ve thought for some time now that if I had a daughter I’d want her to learn a martial art, just so she'd have a back-up against any old ideas about not being able to protect herself.

And in a way, knowing how to handle money is as much about protecting yourself as learning a martial art.

I was surprised to even have that thought – the one about there also being an old unspoken assumption that women don’t or can’t deal with money.

I mean – what?? I’ve always been able to support myself just fine, thank you very much. And I was brought up in a family where we girls chopped wood and hammered nails and dug ditches (quite a lot of wood and nails and ditches, actually, as we acted out my dad’s dream of building a “homestead” in the wilds of Oregon). And my brothers all did dishes and cooked. One of my brothers, I’m proud to say, is an incredibly strong mountain climber who sews his own climbing gear. On a sewing machine.

Still, there was that thought, hanging on me like an itchy sweater while I tried to pretend it wasn’t there.

I thought, first, that I’d tackle the more literal idea, the one about fixing cars. So I started the week by checking and filling the oil on my car myself, for the first time ever (well, at least since I was a teenager and my dad tried to teach me how).

This was scary because I’ve always wanted to know as little about cars as possible. My relationship with cars, come to think of it, has been a lot like my relationship with money. I’ve always wanted both to be sort of “seen and not heard.” That is, so reliable that I never have to think about them.

So, after twenty-four hours of feeling proud that I’d taken a small step toward learning to do basic stuff for my car, I thought, “You know what else has an edge of fear? How about having a really frank conversation with my boyfriend about money?”

And – I froze.

Believe it or not, I still haven’t started to talk to him about it. Instead, I’ve been having a conversation with myself about it for most of the week. The conversation (in abridged form) has gone something like this:

Q: “How about writing him an email now?”

A: “Do I really have to have this conversation with him? What about the mystery, what about the romance, what about reading Neruda’s love poems and writing each other haiku?”

Q: “Who are you, Cinderella?”

That’s right, Cinderella. Did all my parent’s work, to make sure I knew I could do anything my brothers could do, fail? Am I some 1970’s-born, feminist-raised, Barbie- and TV-abstaining version of “Cinderella Ate my Daughter?”

I’ve always had decent earning power, luckily. But the more I think about this Cinderella question, the more I notice that while earning power has its perks, it’s never been something I got particularly excited about. So (cold hard truth here) – is there some part of me that thinks being able to make a living is handy but would still love to have a wonderful man come along and say, “Hey, that’s a heavy burden you’re carrying all by yourself. How about if I take care of it?”

Or is it maybe just that I long for a world in which the poetic, mysterious side of life counts as much as that thing called “making a living?”

I love how the world can be so literal sometimes: On the very morning that I started to wonder about all of this, I was struggling to light a fire. The wood was wet, and I tried to start it several times before it finally got dry enough to stay lit.

So I was spending a lot of time blowing on the embers, that morning as I pondered Cinderella. And when I saw myself later in the mirror, there were ashes stuck in my eyelashes, in my hair.

Come to think of it, Cinderella did get swept away by that prince. But she was a hard worker too. And I’m guessing it took some courage to sit there amongst the ashes – which, in a way, could be a good metaphor for sitting with the realities we’d prefer not to see in ourselves.

I wondered, this week, if I should be doing a different “thing that scared me” each day, or if I should just stay with these questions. I decided that sitting amongst the ashes was enough. And I have the ashes in my hair – in the form of this somewhat embarrassing story – to show for it. 

Freedom, Fear and Money

When I was a kid I was sure that my family was going to end up in the poorhouse. I imagined myself grubby and forlorn but feisty, dressed in threadbare shades of gray like in Oliver Twist (which is quite likely where I got the idea).

I told myself that as long as I reached the minimum working age of 14 before it happened, all would be well. I would be a heroine, going off to work at Taco Time to support a family of seven. Resplendent in orange-and-brown polyester, face glowing with pride over an order of Mexi-Fries.

Now that I’m no longer a kid, my approach to money is less fantastical but still partially founded in fear. I’ve always tried to live well within my means, with the objective of not having to even think about money. But I wonder if avoiding thinking about it is just another way of trying to manage fear.

The other thing I’ve always thought about money – when I did think about it, that is – is that what it can really help you buy is freedom.

That is, money becomes important when you have a job you hate and either can or can’t leave it because of money. And money can help you get an education, travel… basically, it can give you greater mobility and the power to define your own life rather than have it defined for you.

This week I’ve been reading a book called Your Money or Your Life. It looks at money as something that we choose to exchange our life energy for, since we spend so many of the hours of our lives working for money, spending it, working for it and then spending it again. The book invites you to step out of that pattern and decide how you really want to spend your life energy.

And that – the question of how I want to spend my life energy – is right up my alley.

So – you guessed it. This week a lot of the “things that scared me” had to do with money. I took a hard look at my bank account (where I discovered a $1000 overcharge in insurance premiums); I went on a “money fast” for two days, to see how much of my spending is habitual rather than serving real needs; I tried to bring consciousness to deciding whether to renew my gym membership; I stopped having a smoothie every day at an Internet café and found a great spot to get online at the library instead. I also found the desire to be intentional in the way I use my life energy seeping into other parts of my life, and canceled a couple of weekly appointments so there’s more time to focus on what I’m most drawn to doing right now.

Oh, and I decided to continue the experiment. I notice that there’s a real edge, for me, when it comes to stepping into fears around money. And I suspect that this, like the other fears I’ve been exploring for the past couple of months, may lead to more freedom. So I’m going to stay with this particular fear for the month of March and… see what happens.

Will it be fear, or freedom, or both? The next month will decide.

Peeling the Pomegranate

Have you ever really paid attention while coaxing the glowing red seeds of a pomegranate away from its white membrane with your fingers? I was doing that a minute ago. Each little cell was perfect as it came away in my fingers, each with its dark seed in the middle, its deep red flesh.

I was thinking – as I bit down into a mouthful of those pomegranate seeds and felt the walls of each little cell burst between my teeth, filling my mouth with its bright, sweet juice – about how yesterday I sat in a circle at an NVC retreat and looked around at 26 faces.

A week before, I’d been in that same circle and seen 26 people – some wrinkled, some not, some heavier, some thinner. Just an ordinary group of people. But yesterday I looked around that circle at one face after another, and each one was as beautiful and perfect and whole as a pomegranate seed.

As I looked at them, I thought of Persephone and her descent into Hades. During our week together I’d gotten to see each of these people go into dark places and – here’s the part I don’t get to see that often in the rest of my life – not just face those dark places, but share the journey with others. I got to see one person after another drop their masks and be completely real.

I’m still trying to work it out. In that circle yesterday when each of us had made that hero’s journey and emerged into the light (or at least emerged into the light for now), did the faces look so beautiful to me because of what I’d seen each person go through, and because I got to see their real-ness as they did so? Was it because, as one of my friends said, “Jasmine, you’ve fallen in love with these 26 people. That’s why they look so beautiful to you.”

Or was it that they had actually become more physically beautiful as their faces softened and their eyes widened through contact with their own real-ness?

I’m not sure. But what seems clear to me today is that the willingness of these 26 people to be real with others – to be connected with what makes each of us fully alive – really did make me fall in love with each of them.

This week I stepped into my fear by reading the first five pages of “My Ass (In the World)” to an audience. I think it may still become a one-woman show once I embrace my fear of acting, but that’s a project for another week! I specifically chose the person at the retreat that I thought of as the scariest, and asked him to work with me. I chose an old housemate from a list of people with whom I have unfinished emotional business, and sent her an email. I asked the retreat’s leader to work with me as a “demo,” and I sat in front of 26 people and unmasked my long-time struggle to be fully authentic in romantic relationships.

I also got inspired to face a life-long avoidance of anything that reeks of budgeting, and started to track which needs I’m trying to meet through my spending. Taking a real look at how and why I spend money promises to be deeply scary, for someone who as a kid told herself that her family was going to end up in the poorhouse and that the important thing was to reach age 14 so she could support seven people with a job at Taco Bell. (More on that next week).

One of the women at the retreat told me that each day she answers the following question in her journal: “What would I do, if the world was a friendly place?”

My question to myself today is:

What would I do, if being more real would only make me more beautiful, more connected to others, more alive? What would I do today, if I trusted that my being is like a pomegranate seed: perfect and whole just as it is?