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George Bernard Shaw:
"Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it to future generations."
I think it's time for me to be completely silly. My sense of humor seems to have deserted me these past few months. It's been seven months now since I've been on my own really - and five months since my mother died - and it's starting to feel a little better. I know that the grieving isn't over, but it's slowly starting to lift. I don't want to quote Pema Chodron, or my book about grief, or anything serious. I just want to say that life is pretty good right now and though I can't think of anything funny and I'm desperately trying to, I am grateful to be feeling optimistic.
Tomorrow, Abigail, my loft mate and I will be moving across the hall to our friend Sandy's photography studio, as we have the loft re-decorated in time for company to arrive for Thanksgiving. I'm excited to see what Michael, our "re-decorator" does. He takes what you have and completely re-arranges it and every apartment I've seen him do is great.
The holidays are definitely a challenging time and probably they will bring up some sadness for me this year - since I won't be with my family - but I'm excited that my daughter Zoe has a job and I'm hoping to visit her sometime this winter. And I'm grateful for my dear friends and for being a size 6.
I'm reading an excellent book: "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor - "A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey." And I better read a little before I fall asleep.
I did read that David Lloyd died a few days ago. He wrote for pretty much every great sitcom of the 70's and 80's and his most famous show was an episode of Mary Tyler Moore called "Chuckles Bites the Dust."
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants."
Sometimes there's just nothing better than a really good laugh.
Our trip to Miami with 320 women coming together from all over the world to attend workshops with Regena Thomashauer (aka "Mama Gena") was fantatic. The time spent with the women I met last year in my pod was also very healing. The message that we get at these gatherings is about women following their pleasure in all areas of their lives, their work, their relationships, their connections with other women, taking time to play, taking care of ourselves, supporting and helping each other to achieve our desires. I took a Nia dance/exercise class with Debbie Rosas, who created Nia and that was fantastic. We went back to the Greek restaurant Opa again and brought more friends and everyone danced on the tables (including my friend's seventy-something mom) and we all had a really fun night. We swam in the ocean and the pool every day. The weather was perfect. Anthony Bourdain, my favorite foodie was at the hotel. I haven't felt so healthy in a long time. My headaches disappeared and I stayed up late and my appetite came back. It was a fantastic four days.
And then last night, back in New York, my friend Emily and I went to see Robert Kennedy Jr. speak at Town Hall about the environment and about energy sources. He calls himself a free venture capitalist and talks about the urgency to end our dependency on oil, to update the power grid, to increase our wind and solar sources and to stop allowing big business to control our lives. He was articulate and funny and clearly knows what he's talking about. And thank God that Obama is in the White House and beginning to make the changes we need to make to save our planet and that people like RFK Jr. and others are on the case.
From "Healing After Loss" by Martha Whitmore Hickman:
"Bit by bit we need to loosen our hold on a past we cannot keep and get on with the life we have."
I'm off to Miami today for a long weekend, to be with my Mama Gena women (250+ women from all over the world.) I will miss my dogs and I'm sure they will be even more confused, wondering where everyone in their family has gone and why they are living in Soho again, away from their park. But they seem to be adjusting, as we all are.
I'm hoping to have some fun this weekend. Enough grief - time to dance.
I've heard it said that people who have gone through particularly grueling life challenges are probably those who are in the "advanced class of life." They are people who can deal with some heavy duty problems. My mother was one of those people. This morning, I read this paragraph in a book called "Healing After Loss."
"We have but to look around us and see the many others who have suffered losses. They are legion. They walk the streets with us, get on and off the bus, shop with us in the stores. They have survived. And some of them have been made stronger and are now pillars of support for others."
This morning, as I was doing my quiet meditation, I sensed my mother's presence, as well as the loss I feel in my life without her. My mother was a complex person. And she loved me. I felt anger sometimes towards her. And I respected her. She drove us all crazy sometimes. And we miss her. She hated the way she looked after she got sick. And she still had an inner beauty. She was funny and tolerated no bullshit. She disliked the nursing home she had to live in at the end of her life and she had more "boyfriends" there than any other resident. The average age of these "boyfriends" was forty. She would be sitting in the solarium and a few of the aides would come by and say, "Hey, Helen! How are you doing today? You look beautiful." And she would light up. She complained that her aide, Janis, and Janis' best friend, Wendy, laughed too much and were too happy. And she loved listening to their gossip. I miss her and wish we could have one more afternoon sitting together in the backyard.
After spending an entire weekend at the Mastery and eating the best food I've had in a long time (eggs baked with sausage and asparagus, delicious chicken, rice, roasted carrots, carrot cake) - after being nurtured with love and food for an entire weekend, I have a better idea what the Mastery was about. I'm not going to write much about it, because I don't want to spoil it for anyone who might take it, or something like it.
I will write a few things that I learned or - that I've been learning and were reinforced over the weekend.
"The quality of life is not determined by our circumstances, but by what we do with them." I lost my mother this year, my marriage ended, my daughter moved away, my job ended, I had to move, it's a lot of shit. I am sad. I am grieving. But I can still enjoy life and allow myself the space to feel a range of feelings, rather than suppress them. Those feelings are not facts - they are just feelings.
Use "and" - as in "I loved my mother AND she was a difficult person." Rather than "I loved my mother, but she was a difficult person."
Resentments are like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.
Blame: "if we knew then what we know now, everything would have been different...and we didn't know then, so what's the point in blaming ourselves or others?"
Our feelings are an inarguable truth: "I feel sad." That is true. But worry is drama. And I know I love drama, but it drives me crazy.
"What other people think of me is none of my business." That's freeing.
We talked about patterns in our histories that we would like to break. A few of them were "living in negative predictions." "How can I ask someone for help?" "I need to rescue people."
Put a period in a sentence after the facts. "The subways in NYC are all screwed up on weekends. It is annoying." Rather than, "the subways are all screwed up on the weekends and it makes me late for everything, and I get so angry that it ruins my entire day and then I'll get into a fight with my friends."
I loved this line from the movie "Sordid Lives" which I have never seen, but someone mentioned: "Get off the cross, we need the wood."
It is through difficult times that we have the most growth. (I find that very annoying.) I have had great epiphanies while shopping. (I'm kidding.)
Is the glass half empty or half full? It is both.
This weekend, I walked into a room that had about five or six people I knew fairly well, and about fifty others I didn't know at all. And I fell in love with all of them. The participants of the Mastery and the people who helped out by cooking and just being there in the "back row." They came from all over the world and everyone's stories were different, yet the universality was so evident when people shared from their heart. What a gift. My dream is to find a foundation that funds organizations like Friends In Deed and help them with a very large grant.
