Faith

So…okay. I’ve been putting certain words in the search and being totally surprised by what comes up. Kinda like blog-roulette.
This one is nearly three, what? (yes three), years old and came up when I put in the word Delicious, (because I hadn’t had lunch and I was thinking about pie). Right then, the game morphed completely. The universe started reminding me of exactly what I needed to know this very moment…and this one..this one too. Because I currently live in a constant state of ambiguity.

Delicious ambiguity. Can ambiguity even be delicious?
Let’s find out. Shall we?

*I also revised it because, well, it needed it.

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”
~Gilda Radner~

I LOVE that (and her, btw), What a contradiction, right? Like scrumptious self-consciousness, or yummy yearning.

In AA they call it letting go and letting God.

It requires faith. The definition being: belief in something unknown and unseen as being real. Whoa. Anybody else feeling dizzy?

AMBIGUITY (noun) 
The quality or state of having a veiled or uncertain meaning.

Synonyms  ( I just had to include these) : darkness, murkiness, mysteriousness, nebulousness, obliqueness, obliquity, opacity, opaqueness.

Sounds spooky, right?
But then you add the word Delicious and wtf? It softens it right up.

I saw this quote a couple of weeks ago and it’s been rolling around in my head.
What did she mean?

The lack of clarity about a situation does not necessarily mean it cannot be desirable. (I have since learned this to be true. Not easy, but true just the same.)

I think Delicious Ambiguity means to Revel in the Unknown (can that even be done? yes, yes it can!).

That what appears ambiguous often holds many delicious things for life. I suspect it means, keep your eyes open, your MIND open, and things will reveal themselves. (Oh, man, this was just a suspicion on my part back then but I can attest to this three years later.)

I have this little prayer and I’m saying it every morning.
It goes like this:

Dear God,
Put me in the right place even though I don’t know where that is.
And dear God, when you do it, can you make it comfortable for me and help me to see the sense of it? Really, spell it out, I’m kind of dense.
Can you make it easy and delicious and bring me the right situations and synchronicities to put me in this place I don’t know about…yet?

Thanks.

(Wait. And can bowls of chocolate ice cream line the way to keep me sustained on this journey of faith, you know, to remind me of its deliciousness? Too much?)

Okay, fine.

Carry on,

xox

To all of you out there, and there are many, many of you, who are willing to be toast on your way to transformation—we are all in this together—and I applaud you with my crispy, toasted little hands!

Love,
The piece of burnt toast you’re smelling right now.
xox

Ray: I’m thirty-six years old, I love my family, I love baseball, and I’m about to become a farmer. And until I heard the Voice, I’d never done a crazy thing in my whole life.

Voice: If you build it, he will come.
~from the movie Field of Dreams

I’m baaaackkkkk! And I missed YOU!

I went away to devote a block of time to the screenplay I’ve been enlisted to write.
The one about death and life thereafter.

The comedy —the buddy picture—my own person Field of Dreams complete with a cryptic voice and characters who are invited to participate in this magical fairy tale I’ve been fortunate enough to be gifted with writing.

I haven’t always felt that way.

At first, it was so (insert baseball pun here), out of left field, that my inner skeptic was pooping her pants. I have a nose finely tuned for bullshit and this entire endeavor reeked of it.

But after a while, after a ton of questioning and “prove it to me’s” I plowed under my corn and built my field just as I’d been directed. I started writing a screenplay (which I had no interest in doing and absolutely NO experience at), that was dictated to me by my pal, the dead screenwriter.

And you know what happened? The more I got out of the way—the better it got. So much so that now, when I read it to people, ( even people I’ve just met  like the women at the retreat last week), THEY SEE THE PLAYERS ON THE FIELD. In other words, they believe in the magic and that never ceases to amaze me.

I remember loving Field of Dreams when it came out. Who doesn’t want to believe that there’s more to life than the mundane and ordinary? What Ray did seemed crazy but his courage (disguised as wavering conviction), wins everyone over in the end—even me.

I know. It’s a movie. But crazy as it sounds it’s also become a template for my life.

All ideas start as crazy fantasies. They do. Every. Single. One. of  Them.

They come out of nowhere, bite you on the ass, and invite you to come along for the ride.
What do YOU do when that happens? Do you up the volume on the radio (get caught up in life), to drown out the voices (ideas), or do you plow under the corn (take some risks), and build the field for the players to come and play (give your ideas life)?

I used to ignore the Voice. For years, I turned my back to the players on the field. But what kind of life is that?

When magic presents itself—I say, make the leap.
Not everyone will see the players on the field but that’s okay, those that do far outweigh the ones who cannot.

Plus, Magic can’t be contained. It bleeds into all other aspects of your life and that does NOT suck. I promise.

I’ve gotta go now, it’s the second inning and I’m up at bat.

Play ball!
xox

John Kinsella: Is this heaven?

~Dialogue from the movie FIELD OF DREAMS

* I love finding all these lists of things that are going right in the world (you can find more on The Observer’s Voice Facebook Page), and I love sharing them with YOU even more! Here’s one by the great Pam Grout.
Just when you think humanity had fallen off the deep end, remember that there is so much that is going right with the world‚ sadly, it just doesn’t make the 6 o’clock news.
Happy Holidays my loves!
xox

“What worn-out shticks are blinding you to the blessings that life is conspiring to give you?”–Rob Brezsny

People magazine sent me out to interview a Kansas City Secret Santa who passes out $100 bills. Twice. It was a hoot and a half to join him, to see the expression on people’s faces when he’d peel a couple hundys off his stack and hand them over.

So in the interest of continuing my long-standing journalism career, here are 20 additional reasons to be of good cheer:
1. A mystery woman walked into a Toys R Us in Bellingham, Massachusetts and paid off the entire store’s layaway balance, allowing strapped parents to pick up Christmas gifts for their kids.

1. Gas prices have dropped below $2 just in time for holiday visits to family.

2. The gorgeous beaches of Cuba have reopened to vacationing Americans.

3. Oakland Raider’s tackle Menelik Watson donated a week of his salary ($37,000) to Ava Urrea, a four-year-old girl who has had 14 heart surgeries.

4. Natalie DuBose, whose Ferguson, Missouri bakery was vandalized last year during protests, received more than $250,000 in donations from total strangers.

5. The curve is bending on new cases of HIV. More people are being treated than becoming infected.

6. Enough said. This note was left on a car in Edmonton, Canada.
   

7. Gay marriage is now legal in the United States.

8. An Ohio high school student took his 89-year-old great-grandmother to prom because she’d never been.

9. A cop in Montreal has been stopping drivers and, instead of passing out tickets, is passing out $100 bills.

10. Global life expectancy has risen by six years since 1990.

11. Nearly 200 countries signed a bill to reduce the use of foreign fossil fuels.

12. A Dallas woman has donated more than 15,0000 house cleanings for people going through chemo.

13. A 12-year-old from San Jose, California, built a Braille printer (it’s called a BRAIGO) out of LEGO Mindstorms (it’s the souped up version) that lowers the going $2000 price to an affordable $350. He even offers open source plans online for free.

14. A police captain in Omaha, Nebraska organized a Valentine’s card campaign for her sergeant who remarked that he’d never received a Valentine’s card as a kid. He got hundreds from people all over the country.

15. A former professional ballet dancer developed a dancing wheelchair so all of us can dance.

16. Michelle Obama has volunteered the last five years to take calls for NORAD’s Santa hotline.

17. A New York City software engineer gave coding lessons to a homeless man. He offered him either $100 or two months of coding lessons. After just three and a half months, his homeless protégé developed Trees for Cars, a smartphone app that helps commuters organize carpools.

18. Scientists dated a bristlecone pine tree in California’s White Mountains as the world’s longest-living organism. It’s more than 5000 years old, older than the pyramids.

19. And this video (which I already shared on Facebook)

https://youtu.be/82tAGFRiNC4

And remember, my dear friends, this is the holiday season to do more of what you WANT to do and less of what you think you should.

Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the just-released sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Mirth, Magic, and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.

http://pamgrout.com/2015/12/18/21-reasons-to-be-of-good-cheer/

* This is a flashback from a couple of years ago when my inner poet ran the show. It seems apropos to end this week of tested faith with a poem.
A rhyme about faith and luck and his friend chance; perseverance and truth.
Enjoy your Friday you guys
xox

Some days my faith is huge and bold,
So large an ocean cannot hold.

Then other days, it’s all dried up,
just a drop in the bottom of a paper cup.

I vacillate between the two.
Fate waits to drop the other shoe.

Then luck comes by with his friend chance,
this is my lifetime’s little dance.

Some days an ocean, some days a cup,
I stay the course, I won’t give up.

I play the game, my heart is true,
with faith as my partner, how about you?

Carry on
Xox

*Hey you guys,
You know I share everything with you, well, whatever I can get away with without getting arrested!
Anyhow, last Friday I had a huge existential crisis—a colossal crisis of faith.

Yeah, I know, I’m the only one, boo hoo, poor me.

I have a project that means a lot to me that is requiring humongous amounts of courage, and it is being highly uncooperative and testing my patience to no end.

It’s been a long while since I’ve felt so, so, low-down-gutter-shitty.
Friday I just woke up that way.

Being that I’m a writer, I wrote a long, rambling, gutter-shitty manifesto. (If I’d been an artist I’d have painted an all black canvas with the word FUCK or HACK on it).
You get the picture.

Then I sent it to my husband and four of my besties. And I waited…

During all of this emotional flailing around the voice in my head said: You are overreacting. You don’t need sympathy—you need trust and faith. (GOD! when will you quit being so goddamn right, so goddamn all the time! That is SO annoying!).

Anyway, I waited for something from my tribe…I suppose it was sympathy, okay I’ll just say it, I was waiting for sympathy with a layer of compassion and a dash of empathy and love.

You wanna know what I got?
Crickets. I got crickets—nothing.

My computer showed that the manifesto had sent. My husband’s computer showed he did not receive it.

When I tried to re-send it later that night to my one poor friend who happened to text—nothing. Again it said it was sent when it was not.

I had asked for a sign and apparently my computer was hacked by that part of me that knows better. It wasn’t having any of my sad-suckiness. It showed me no sympathy on Friday. NONE!
It let me squirm in the uncomfortableness of doubt and ride the emotions until they passed. (Two days).

So there you have it. I feel better, but I still can’t STAND doubt! How about you?
Have you had a crisis of faith? How were you able overcome it? How long were you in it?

Here is the part of the manifesto that I feel you guys could relate to and doesn’t have the f-bomb as every other word!

Carry on,
xox

Ugh.
I feel like I’ve been left hanging.

Like I got up the courage to say “I love you” to someone and the other person just smiled.

Or, like we agreed to jump off the cliff together, and as my foot leaves the edge, I am able to turn just enough as I hurtle toward the abyss—to see the other person still standing at the edge.

I feel bamboozled.

It has made me profoundly uncomfortable and has opened the door to doubt.

I fucking hate doubt.
I like forward motion, Courage and momentum. Not all of this start and stop shit.

wtf am I doing?
wtf am I saying?

Am I a fraud or some delusional hack?

I can’t shake it so I’m going to have to ride this wave and then wait for it to pass.
Give me a sign Universe—anything!

Did you like the game hide-n-seek as a kid? What about the 2.0 birthday party version, warmer/colder where someone guided you to your destination, to your prize, by yelling warmer! (closing in) or colder! (moving away)?

“Warmer…warmer…you are hot—you are on fire!” I’d hear those words over the pounding of my heart as my skinny little arms flailed around excitedly, knowing I was literally on top of the candy bar, box of crayons or whatever incredibly desirable prize lay just out of my reach.

Goddammit! I loved that game! I still play it regarding the things I want now in my adult life.

If I talk about a certain thing that I want or fixate on it like a dog with a bone, I’ll start to notice things just like it materializing all around me.

I’ll see the same scarf I love on three people in a week. Warmer!

When I was deciding whether or not to continue dying my hair, everywhere I looked were these chic women absolutely rockin’ their gray hair! Warmer!

If your neighbor suddenly shows up with your dream car in their driveway? Warmer!

All of your friends married to great guys? Warmer!

Once upon a time I fell madly in love with a very specific pair of brown boots but they were way more than I could justify so I convinced myself that I would just have to admire them from afar (which by-the-way felt completely unacceptable).

Several days later, in an act of Universal cruelty, a customer came in wearing the objects of my affection—those super-hipster brown boots. I wanted to jump over the desk and murder her for her shoes. Instead, I locked myself in the bathroom.

The next night I went to dinner with a friend in Malibu and as we walked from the parking lot to the cafe, there was a high-end shoe store along the way. In the window: those fuckingly awesome brown boots!

You’ve got to be kidding me! I anguished, then I remembered the warmer/colder game.
Warmer! I yelled, clawing at the glass like the ginger-haired, shoe-hoarding madwoman I was, listening to it echo into the cool night air. Warmer…warmer…warmer.
My friend kept on walking.
I drank too much at dinner and I remember leaving a big, red lipstick kiss mark on the store window as I whimpered over and over again, warmer…warmer…warmer…
My friend promptly drove me to boot rehab.

About a day, two weeks, maybe month later, one of my other friends witnessed my obsession with said boots as I screamed, Warmer! through the entire Century City mall after seeing them on a shopper.

“What’s the big deal?” she asked, a little afraid to get too close to me.

“It’s those wildly expensive brown boots! I would die for them!” I was panting, out-of-breath.

“They’re half-off at…”
I didn’t even wait for her to finish. I ran so fast through that maze of shops to get those boots, I set a land-speed record.
When she caught up with me I was holding the box close to my chest, “You are hot—you are on fire.” was all I could manage to say.

More recently, like a little over a month ago, I noticed a friend got published on The Huffington Post a few days after I submitted a story. Then another.
I was thrilled for them. Instead of feeling envy I knew my prize was literally burning under my feet, ( as a matter of fact, my own Huffington Post notification was sitting in my junk mail waiting to be discovered later that afternoon!).

And that’s the point you guys. You can see other people around you achieving the things you’re striving for and you can feel competitive, consumed with anger and jealousy (which feels cold. Colder!) —or you can yell Warmer! and realize that the reason it is all around you is that it is about to burst into your own reality!

Warmer! & carry on,
xox

This is a story about a whining, spoiled bitch. Not me, the other whining, spoiled bitch in our house.

My dog is the spoiled brat daughter I never had.

She rules the roost, runs my life and continuously sucks all the oxygen out of the room.

Her boxer-shark puppy stage is now simply a distant memory of hyper-energetic fur and razor-sharp teeth reeking their constant havoc. No human arm or furniture leg escaped unscathed—we all have the scars to prove it. Yet, these days I’ve almost grown nostalgic because this second stage—tween-boxer—is a fucking nightmare.

She is just a month shy of her second birthday which in dog years makes her about thirteen and a half, which explains the entitled, leg stomping, bitchy attitude—and the whining.
Good Lord almighty in Heaven, the whining!
Will it never cease?
What horrible sins have I committed that my penance would be such as to be subjected daily to this bitch’s endless whining?

It has become the soundtrack of my life.

And it has no basis in reality.

That’s the thing, it’s not like she’s locked up in a kennel, or left to fend for herself on the mean streets of LA searching for scraps to eat or a cardboard box to call a bed.

OH HELL NO!

She is the most pampered, overindulged, spoiled dog you will ever meet, which makes this whole “my life sucks—that walk was too short—why don’t you guys have kids for me to play with?”  dissatisfied dog act that much harder to swallow.

The other day I had to go for an early morning blood test so I took her with me in the car because I was tired of hearing: You never take me anywhere.

My plan was to get the test and then drive home via Burbank (completely out of my way) and drop her off at her favorite daycare facility Bow Wow Bungalow, to spend the day playing with her friends.

She played the sad-sack card whining the entire time.
I just turned the music up louder.
Which made her up the ante with a howl/cry.
Those cries are hard to drown out, so I had to crank up the volume even louder and proceeded to drive on.
I looked back at her in the rearview mirror—stink-eye—the death stare shot directly back at me while she twirled her hair and popped her gum.

If you had the misfortune to be sitting next to us in the stop-and-go traffic on the 405 that morning, you would have been accosted first by the music—Lady Gaga at full volume like those hoodlums at the stop lights that play their music so loud it registers on the Richter Scale.

If you had looked over you’d have seen a frazzled, middle-aged mother in a station wagon, screaming obscenities back at her petulant, whining, teen aged…dog. Who by that time was looking in the other direction, ignoring me completely, muttering under her breath “Talk to the paw”. (See photo above)

For the entire hour-and-a-half round trip drive, she whined and complained—right up until the street just before Bow Wow—then when she realized she was about to enjoy a day at Doggie Disneyland and she suddenly changed her tune.

Her face broke into a big smile and her whining turned to yelps of surprised anticipation. Her Velveteen Rabbit ears perked up and I think I even saw her wag her tail.

Oh sure, NOW she was filled with gratitude.

“Love you mommy, love you! You are the bomb! I’m so happy, you’re the best mommy ever!” she cried with joy all the way up the stairs, her little nub of a tail wagging furiously as she disappeared into the bowels of this dog Utopia.

Dammit she reminds me of me, I lamented on the blissfully silent drive home.

Hey, don’t laugh, I’m no different from you.

I whine and complain, pop my gum, stomp my feet and twirl my hair, the duration of pretty much every journey I undertake in life.

“Where am I headed? Where is life taking me? Why is this taking so long? Uhhhhh, this sucks, It’s not at all what I want to be doing!

Bitch, moan, complain—with a howl/cry and a stink-eye.

Wow, that’s identical to the tween-boxer’s backseat behavior.

I played the role of the Universe that day—I knew the destination was going to be off-the-charts fantastic for her. All I asked is that she shut up and enjoy the ride.

My little dog played me. She was void of even a whiff of patience. She thought she knew better. She second guessed every second of the trip.

She bitched and moaned because in her mind we should be at the park.

But I/The Universe had bigger, better plans for her/me.

Fuck. Lesson #1002847 learned.

Carry on,
xox

*Sad-sack stink-eye face.

I was reminded by Facebook that three years ago this week my dear friend and I attended a Peter Gabriel concert at the Hollywood Bowl. I have a love/hate relationship with that feature on Facebook, but that is fodder for another story.

When I saw the photo of the group of us I was stunned. Had it really been three years?

I looked closely at her face in the picture. She is beautiful in a patrician Grace Kelly kind of way, blonde, cool and collected. But I could see the numbness behind her eyes, and I remembered the fear in those days. It was palpable.

She had been diagnosed with cancer just a week or so before if my memory serves me, and this concert was an early birthday—cheer-up—everything’s going to be okay, present.

I started to get transported back; to the days of chemo, radiation, watching her lose her beautiful long, blonde hair. Back to the day she shaved half of her head and sent us the photo just prior to going full-blown bald. Man, we all cried…until, fuck, wouldn’t you just know it, she had the most gorgeous scalp and perfectly shaped head imaginable! She wore the wigs until the stubble grew in at which point we begged her to dye it platinum and own it. Why the hell not?

She looked like a fucking runway model. I kid you not.
People who hadn’t seen her in a while and were in the dark about her diagnosis fell over themselves marveling at her beauty. I literally saw a guy fall over his own feet staring at her.

Once she found out she wasn’t going to die, the fear subsided. She started to glow from the inside out and not from the radiation.  She glowed because she wasn’t marinating in fear anymore.

Fear is a serial killer. Remember that.

Fast forward three years: Don’t you EVER grow your hair out! we all begged—and she hasn’t.
She rocks that short white hair like a 90’s Annie Lennox, something she would have NEVER done prior to the cancer.

She has been transformed in so many ways they are too numerous to count. It’s no exaggeration to say that pretty much everything is different about her than the woman in the picture—not only different—it’s better.

 I think she walks taller in the world. She waged a battle and beat a pretty nasty foe and she’s got the scars and the swagger to prove it.

She’s a hell of a lot more authentic. She’s becoming more and more who she really is—even occasionally flying her freak-flag—Above is a picture of her this year at Burning Man, a warrior Goddess, who fulfilled a lifelong dream and in the process realized she had found her tribe.

Courage is her middle name now, not Ann or Penelope or whatever it was. I think she should legally change it.

When you go through something like that you can’t help but grow up. She’s a grown-up now.

And a magician.
When she was diagnosed she had been unemployed for a while, broke, with no prospects on the horizon.
I’ve watched her these past three years manifest perfect health, money, a great job—and then a dream job. I just met her for lunch and she’s probably the happiest I’ve ever seen her. Her eyes are bright and wise—her face—serene.

That’s the thing about life you guys. If we only had a crystal ball during the shitstorms that could show us the future—our future.

That not only does everything work out, it works out better than we could have ever imagined!

I’ve always told myself,(because we all know I don’t reside in the real world too much), that after a particularly difficult time—the Universe rewards me. It showers me with magic. I’ve seen it happen over and over again and now I’m seeing it with my sweet, courageous friend.

So let this be your crystal ball. Hang on. Have faith. Be brave. Magic is on the way. I promise.

Carry on,
xox

Photo by Roberto Melotti
http://www.robertomelotti.net

* This was a poem I wrote last summer when everyone and everything was going to shit—Hey, wait a minute, that feels a lot like this summer! WTF?
Take a look, know that we’re all in the same leaky, stinky boat together, and that This Too Shall Pass.
Change is a constant, remember that.
Now go have yourselves a crazy-ass weekend!
xox

There side by side they stand,
Faith and Hope, on the other side of Fear.
Beckoning me to come toward THEM.
Back MY way they won’t come, that’s clear.

I scream prayers but they don’t listen,
I yell and don’t make sense.
This new way has not been christened,
I weigh my options, I straddle the fence.

Insisting I take a step forward,
reassuring me, guiding me home.
They never waver, they won’t judge me,
no matter how off course I roam.

“Don’t you dare suggest forgiveness,
when my heart is broke in two!
Never talk of “new tomorrows”.
Look through MY eyes and see THAT view!”

But come with me they wouldn’t,
down my dark and twisted trail.
They explained they really couldn’t,
if I wanted healing to prevail.

“You can only catch a glimpse of us,
there inside your angst.
To really see us, drop defenses, mend those fences,
practice gratitude – then give thanks.”

“For inside every dilemma,
every horror known to man,
lies a nugget of redemption,
You’ll find it, we know you can!”

Faith and Hope stood side by side,
at the end of that dark trail.
They had walked a ways ahead of me,
THEY had done it first – so I couldn’t fail.

Hang in there loves,
xox