October 29th, 2010.  Bob’s Java Hut

Calm warm coffee shop.  Dark roast.  Inhaled my egg and cheese biscuit.  Rode in the 25 degree morning as the sun came up and illuminated the sky, pale blue almost-November sky.  A lot of clothes to keep out the cold, but the chill kept creeping down my neck.  I hate a cold breeze on my neck.  I’m steeling myself against the ensuing winter.  My friend Per from Norway’s voice in my head, “There is no bad weather.  Only bad clothes.”  Then again, he doesn’t mind hanging out in places like the North Pole.

Now for your Friday Food for Thought:

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward. – Author Unknown

Imagine…You wake up in the morning, swing your legs over the bed, lean down and pick up a heavy backpack waiting on the floor next to your bed.  It’s filled to the brim with a bunch of useless crap.  Heavy, burdensome, useless crap.  You bend over, pull one shoulder through the strap, stand up, hoist the other strap over your shoulder, and begin lugging your baggage along your day’s journey.

The end of your day, exhausted from the burden.  Your backpack hits the floor with a thud, not far from your sleeping self, ready to be picked back up in the morning.

Carrying our mental baggage throughout our days is just as, if not more so, onerous than physical baggage.  Regret, resentment, anger, self-doubt–all of these things run willy-nilly through our minds, muddying our present moments, taking up precious space, lightness of being, and awareness of the blessings that stand before us.  When we carry useless mental baggage, we starve our souls of the vital sustenance of gratitude and inspiration and joy.

Hanging onto resentment [or self-doubt, or anger, or regret] is letting someone [or something] you despise live rent-free in your head. – Ann Landers

Writing Exercise: Letting go… What are you lugging around in your mind and throughout your days that is sapping you of joy and energy?  Lay it down.  Beginning with the words, “I am laying down…” write down everything you want to let go of so that you may live with a lighter mind and heart today.

What if you just decided to leave that extra luggage, to refuse to carry it around any longer?  How would you feel?

“Knowledge is learning something every day.
Wisdom is letting go of something every day.”
-Zen Proverb

October 15, 2010
Bob’s Java Hut, Minneapolis, MN

Another juicy autumn day.  Blue, blue October sky.  Wind.  Riding my bike down Lyndale Avenue this morning, Cloud Cult blaring through my ipod, I thought I might levitate right off the asphalt blurring beneath me.  Now I’m eating this nasty, yummy egg/sausage/cheese biscuit thing minus the sausage.  All these different lives, every kind of story swirling around this neighborhood coffee shop, walking in and then out of the squeaky hinged door as I sit writing.

As I do before every class I teach, on the ride here I prayed that I will find the words that whomever reads this needs to hear.  I sat down, wrote in my journal with my blue Sharpie, drank down a cup of green tea, perused the “Dalai Lama’s Little Book of Wisdom,” and sat and stared out at the cars on Lyndale without really seeing them, wondering when the words were going to come to me.  I went to the bathroom in search of some kind of serendipitous graffiti on the wall, some kind of original idea or illumination, went to the bathroom and forgot to look, and sat back down when it hit me–the irony–I’m ending up writing about the very phrase that was blaring through my ears when I was asking the question:

“When it all comes crashing down, try to understand your meaning.  No one said it would be easy, this livin’ it ain’t easy.”
–Cloud Cult

Here are a couple more to drive the point home:

“Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.” -Bernice Johnson Reagon

and

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”
Joseph Campbell

Snapshot:

Me.  Permed shoulder-length hair.  1992.  Madison, Wisconsin.  Dad in the hospital for depression.  Mom in the hospital for alcoholism.  Me, on a couch in my manager’s second-floor apartment above State Street, just having moved out of my boyfriend’s apartment.  New job.  Lonely as hell.  Broke–financially and emotionally.  Smile on the outside, gutted to the studs on the inside.  Walked into Espresso Royale with a new fabric-covered journal and wrote: “These are the first words I have ever written in a journal.”

That moment I had no idea I was saving my life.

Snapshot:

Me.  Straight, highlighted bobbed hair.  2003.  On a couch in my friend Dani’s apartment that she shared with her fiance.  Just broke up with my boyfriend, who had been my best friend for that last decade.  We had a short, tumultuous relationship that ended on Easter morning after stuffing my pockets full of candy to eat during church.  I wasn’t supposed to do that in church.  That’s what he said.  It was the last straw that broke the spell. The next day I would begin teaching Level One ESL at Washburn High School.  That day I stood at the door, feigning confidence, shaking hands with all of my new students as they walked in the door.  More students than desks in that class.  I had no idea what I was doing.  A shell.  Nothing on the inside.  After class I walked up to my friend’s apartment without going inside, sat on her front stoop, and cried under a bright sunny spring sky.

That moment I had no idea I was saving my life.

Snapshot:

Me.  Now.  At Bob’s Java Hut.  2010.  Straight long hair that I’ve been pulling out in bouquets of 10-20 strands a day.  My pal Wiltse tells me that’s what happens as we age.  I tell her she said the same thing to me after I told her I had to get a crown on my tooth. I am standing in a beam of grace, sheer luck mixed with courage, serendipity, and visions I had nurtured in the pages of my journals for years–my health, my two children, my husband, my home.  All of my creation.  All grown in the earth of my despair.

Writing Exercise: Think back to the worst moments of your life, moments that you felt lost, alone, and without direction.  Today, as you sit reading this and reflecting back, what did those moments reveal to you about yourself?  What treasures did you recover or discover about yourself?

I believe that these moments are necessary to live rich, meaningful lives.  They force us to use courage, for without fear and struggle, there is no such thing as courage. When we uncover the gifts of our struggles and use them in our lives, we are able to step in line with our own divinity and walk each of our right paths.

I hope I have found the words that you need to hear.  Until next Friday, ride these winds of Life, this sheer adventure as if your life depended on it.  Because it does.

Save your life now.

October 6, 2010.  Bob’s Java Hut

This is how I begin my journal entries.  By writing the date and where I am.  I write about my immediate surroundings to ground myself in the now.  For example, I am sitting here looking out at Lyndale Avenue, the gritty beauty of this corner I know so well.  I began coming here back in 1997–thirteen years ago!  Holy shit!  Now I’m 38 and I love it here as much now as I did then. This is the most spectacular fall day, the warmth and the saturation of color.  I love this corner, thick with urban flavor, commuters in skinny jeans with no helmets, leaves dancing on the sidewalks and in the gutters, blown in the wind of the cars going by. My coffee is half gone, as well as my Naked juice.  I’m starving, but they don’t have any donuts left and I don’t like any of the breakfast sandwiches in the case.  I have ten more minutes to write before I have to pick up some groceries at the Wedge and haul them home in my pannier bags on my bike, and pick Oliver up from school and Lucy up from Ada’s.  A blessed, lucky day.

It’s crazy to think that I began coming here with my pens and journals thirteen years ago.  Almost daily I wrote and pushed against my own boundaries.  I couldn’t have known how my life would end up, but I created it as I went along, bending and flexing, falling and getting back up.  I think back to that tumultuous and free time when I wondered what my life would be like “when I grew up.”  I wish I could whisper in that young woman’s ear, “You are right where you need to be.  Calm your fears and have faith in yourself.”  Then again, if I could have whispered that to my young self, maybe I wouldn’t have had that fear and insecurity to push against and leap from.

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”

-Pema Chodron

Here’s your two-part writing exercise for your Friday inspiration:

Part 1: What do you want from Life?  What do you want from your days?  Take 20 minutes of your time, plant yourself in an inspiring place, light a candle if you can, and take time to name what it is you want.

Part 2: What is holding you back?  What is keeping you from growing toward your sun?

Don’t seek comfort.  Where’s the adventure and discovery in that?  Call forth your bravery.  Seek to grow, to learn, to fall down and get back up.  Seek inspiration.  Seek your God-given purpose.  Take a flying leap beyond yourself, again and again and again.