future

“What if your intuition was your future informing your present?”
~ Me

You guys!

What if there is no beginning and no end?

What if by naming something you give it life?

What if conciousness exists outside the body? Then would death still be the end of us?

What if time was not a straight line but rather, a circle?

What if the dead aren’t really “gone”, they’re just operating “outside of time?”

What if in moments of great conflict our future was able to inform our present?

What if you knew in advance that heartache lay ahead—would you go down that path?

What if the devastating loss of a major election caused just the right person to run for office? Someone who in a million years never thought she would run?

What if socks really DO disappear in the dryer? (Thought you might need to laugh.)

What if things are more than they appear?

What if there is more available to us than we could ever know?

What if there is more to life than meets the eye?

Maybe, just maybe you guys—we need to wake up—and ask more questions…

Carry on,
xox

Oh, Holy Christ on a cracker is that ever true!
We just had a Capricorn new moon and that my friends, facilitates jettisoning all that is not working in our lives.

We get a cosmic do-over. A universal re-write (the best kind of re-write there is).

Wait. This all feels eerily familiar. That’s because, if you’re like me, we’ve done a full, life-retrospective every damn year around this time.

And some years look better than others. They just do. But for those jinky ones, the ones that make you cringe with regret, oh, how I’ve relitigated the past. I’ve played the roles of judge, jury, and executioner.

Then I move straight to the special effects department and I whitewash the mutherf*cker with some heavy duty gauzy filter.

In my heavily CGI’d version, I’m so much smarter, prettier, and wittier, I have the most epic ideas, rebuttals and combacks, and my hair looks impossibly, hatefully perfect—even after a nap.

In one version, nothing is my fault. In another everything is. It depends on which chapter you come in on.

In my dreamy, rom-com version,  I get chased by a horrible dragon, captured by a giant cyclops, and saved by a naked, brave and handsome knight (we know he’s a knight by the chainmail codpiece he’s wearing). That scenario is the only way I can introduce all of the magic that permeates my life—otherwise, nothing would make sense and nobody would believe me.

But I can’t justify how I got to where I am any more than you can. Sometimes shit just happens.

Often, when I look back I feel bad for her, for me. She simultaneously appears to be the heroine and the villain of her own story and that is a hard pill to swallow. Sometimes I want to warn her, “Hey, idiot! Watch out for that guy, he’s a …oh, there goes the bra…nevermind.” At other times I try to congratulate her. “You, yeah, you. Ya did…okay. Next time try to suck less.”

Most of the time I want to duck tape her mouth shut and put her in the corner with baby.

All of these years later I realize nothing good comes from looking backward. It’s all water under a rickety bridge guarded by angry trolls. It’s all ancient history, filled with faded Polaroids and lots of bad clothing choices and the worst part of it (besides a stint with eggplant purple hair) is that focusing on my past, however riveting, keeps me distracted from where I’m headed.

Someone once said, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Well, I think quite the opposite is true. Selective amnesia is our friend AND those who look in the rear view mirror MUST be driving in reverse. I know I was. Also, and of this, I’m quite sure—my best times are not back there, behind me. They are ahead of me!

A few things that may be included while I create my future are (In no particular order): chocolate, naked knights, dog kisses, and predominately minding my own business and looking dead ahead because the future I envision for myself doesn’t resemble my past IN. THE. LEAST. (except for maybe the good hair).

What about you?

Carry on,
xox

“Activate in your mind only the things in your past that you want to see in your future.”
~Somebody Wise

I can’t remember who said this, Joseph Campbell? Rumi? Oprah?
Doesn’t matter. I think this is the BEST advice I consistently forget to remember. THE BEST.

Have you ever thought of someone from your past, a friend, an old co-worker or that crazy-ass woman who used to sell seashells down by the seashore? And then, out of the blue, or so it seems—they call you?

“Hello, Janet, this is Lunatica, I’m down here at the shore and I have some really great overpriced seashells to sell—and I thought of YOU.”

Ah, fuck.

I had an old luvah contact me around Christmastime. But first he had his special-needs little sister feel me out on social media.
Can you say, Schmoe?

He is someone who inhabited that very special place in my heart — the place where people go after they take my heart and break it into a thousand tiny pieces, then grind it down with the heel of their shoe into sand and blow it into my face, blinding me into thinking that I lost something special and precious. And this blind-eyed, bullshit belief caused me great suffering. For years and years. Five to be exact.

You know what I’m talking about.

I had a hard time being objective.

I wanted answers.
I wanted closure.
I wanted an apology.
I wanted a time machine to carry me back thirty years so I could ask all of the right questions I didn’t have the sense to ask at the time — and then I wanted to punch him in his squishy man-parts.

He wanted to reminisce, to catch up. After we talked I was like, “OMG, dodged a bullet!” He was like, “This was great! Let’s talk again, soon!”

Ah fuckity, fuck, fuck me running.

How in the name of God has this happened and what am I going to do about it?

Once I stopped running around with my hair on fire, I figured out that since I’d been in the process of jettisoning a ton of excess jetsam from my past that he had somehow received the unspoken, psychic memo on his way to the trash heap and just like Lunatica, he wanted to say, Hey!

I spent days writing about it. Hours of activating all of those old emotions of loss and heartbreak, bringing them out through my arm, onto the page and right back into the present.

Hello, 1986, I’d like you to meet 2016.

All it made me was more confused. Re-opening a thirty-year-old cold case and grieving the loss of a twenty-three-year-old boyfriend does not jive with gray hair. It just doesn’t.

Don’t I get to choose who comes back into my life to torture me?

Then the older, wiser, part of me, the sagging boobs and soft belly part, reminded me that YES! dammit! Yes, I do!

It reminded me of that phrase I always forget (and the fact that I need to get to the gym more often).
“Activate in your mind only the things in your past that you want to see in your future.”

Ah, fuck.

My wise friend Kim saw me spinning, on fire, and had the decency to put it into perspective for me. “Don’t waste one more minute of your time on this guy. Your life is great. Remember what that situation gave you and move on. Pronto. Like right NOW!” then she shoved a piece of chocolate into my face and gave me a slap on the ass.

That night I made the choice of exactly what I wanted to bring into my future.
I had started my spiritual practice in earnest after our break-up due to the complete bankruptcy of my self-esteem. It set me on my life’s path and brought me to where I am today.

Hey, not too shabby. Resilience, self-worth, ability to love, forgiveness, bravery, self-discipline, resolve. That’s the part of my past I’ll carry forward—the rest of it can go to hell!

When I freed up some emotional bandwidth and stopped the angst over what to do — he stopped texting.

Now I just have to set Lunatica straight.

What part of your past, if any, do you want to bring with you into your future?

Carry on,
xox

“What an astonishing thing a book is.

It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

If only Carl had been around for computers, lap tops, the internet, and AMAZON; now that really is magic.

The other day I was trolling the internet for quotes.
Like you do — you guys know I love me some quotes, I have a whole page devoted to the brilliant musings of others.

Anyway, I came across this one by a hero of mine, Carl Sagan, and it stopped my little scrolling hand, and made me think.

I love him and I so admire his big…brain, his expansive, (and ahead-of-his-time) thinking, and his book Contact is still up there as one of my all time favs.

You see, if you know me (which you do) you know that eclipsing my love of writing, and even my love of singing, may be my love of Science fiction. (I’ve actually started writing some.)

I always say: In my next life I’m going to be a singing, Egyptologist – in space — who writes a blog on some crazy, futuristic device, about her adventures.

You know where I developed all these interests? In books.
And that’s why that quote really got to me.

Books are Magic.

Carl is gone, but when I read all his ideas about space and the Universe; his thoughts are suddenly in. my. head.

The Egyptians, with their hieroglyphics, are able to catapult us back to their time, and into their lives.

Napoleon’s letters to Josephine talk of passion and love.

Poetry written over one hundred years ago can move us to tears.

The words of Shakespeare can make us laugh or break our hearts.

The one thing all these works — these WORDS — have in common is the theme of the week — our commonality, the fact that even through the millennia, we are more alike than we are different.

Think about it. Books and words are like a time machine, they can carry us into the future, explain the past in the participants own voice, give us an intimate glimpse into a person’s heart — or let me speak to you from my lap top in LA.

That’s fucking magic you guys.

Carry on,
xox

Welcome to another Jason Silva Sunday!

With all of the cosmic shenanigans happening around us as I write this, portal openings, alignments, energy shifts and new potentialities –– this is true now more than at any other time…the edges of what is real are blurring and boundaries are being dissolved.

xox

Hello my peeps,
I gotta tell ya, I love this recent blog post from Daniele LaPort.
I’m sure you all know how much this resonates with me, being that after five years we’re still paying off the Atik debt,(my business that failed/flooded) and I just can’t hear this enough, and I know I’m not alone.

Take it away Daniele!

“When my first company tanked, I was on the hook for about $150,000. Before I got slammed with that fact, my CEO, who I hired to run the company, thought it best to fire my Founder’s ass. Shortly after they canned me, the whole business fell apart — because you can’t have a personality-driven business without um, the founding personality there. And because, bad karma.

Anywaaaay, I got to sit back and watch them tank without me. Which was only slightly satisfying. Mostly it was sad and crushing. When the castle crumbled, the bank called me for its money. And because I’d co-signed the loan as a “person” and not as a co-founder of the business — I had to pay up, even though I’d been fired months before.

3) I knew that if I actively resented and bitched about those monthly payments, that it would distract me from my own creations. Also, the anger about the whole situation was heavy-duty. And I was done carrying it. So I re-framed paying the debt into a reason to be grateful. Every time that money came out of my bank account I said, “I’m grateful that I have the money to pay this.” And I was. And I let THAT be the lead story.
And then… magically (but not instantly,) on the VERY same day that I FINALLY made my very LAST monthly payment on that bad debt, my company tipped its first million dollar mark — and I did the happy karma moonwalk. Oh ya, oh ya…”

Hey Loves,
What are the ideas you’re putting out into the world?
What are you excited about, posting, hitting “publish” on?
As Jason explains, we are paying it forward, putting it out there and creating the future. you up for that?

I am.

Happy Sunday,
xox

Half of me was wondering: Am I awake? But the other half KNEW it was a dream.

It was vivid and lucid. I could smell the dankness that hung in the air.
I could feel the powered sugar softness of the dirt under my bare feet.
I had entered a cave of some kind.

My hands ran along the cool, damp, uneven walls as I slowly made my way, back, back, back inside, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.

There he stood, at the end of this narrow, winding,descent; a very tall figure in a black hooded robe.

I stopped. And stared. ‘I hope this is a dream, or I’m screwed.’

He put out his hands in a friendly way, beckoning me forward.
I walked toward him slowly.
“Show me your face” I said.
“In time” I heard back.

He started talking to me, telling me this and that about my life at the time. I just stood there, listening intently.

I was 26 years old, freshly divorced and in a new, rambunctious, highly sexualized relationship with a twenty year old boy/man who had saved me from having to think seriously about my future; and then after a summer of love, had left for college.
Deep down I knew what that meant, I was almost twenty seven after all, but I wore denial like an ivory cashmere shawl. It was cozy, and it made me happy.

“This relationship you’re in, is going to end.” he said after lulling me into complacency.
“Nooooooooo” I whined, not wanting to face the truth.
“That is not the direction your life must go. He is not your destiny.”
My heart literally hurt in my chest. “But we’re so happy.”
I swear he said, “Not for long.”

Asshole.

I put my head in my hands and started to cry.
There was so much misplaced sadness there inside me, so many tears I hadn’t given myself the time to cry. I had run away from a seven year marriage without missing a step. I hadn’t looked back, I’d only felt a combination of freedom and elation. I had never shed one tear.
Yet, having to leave the arms of this young lover, who felt so misguidedly right, hurt like hell, and I sobbed like a blubbering, sex crazed idiot.
Tall hooded guy stepped forward and enveloped me in a full body embrace. I barely came up to his neck.

When he did that, it unleashed a torrent of sights and sounds that my brain was having a hard time keeping up with.
I suddenly had ALL KNOWLEDGE. 
Past, present, future.
My life. ALL life.
Earth, our galaxy, the Universe and beyond.
I knew the answer to every question that had ever been asked…and some that hadn’t been asked…yet.
It was all so simple. ‘Why did we make things so difficult?’ I remember thinking in a blurrrrrrr.
I knew the cure for cancer, the end of hunger and I saw lasting peace.
War seemed barbaric, as a matter of fact, so did humanity.
The twentieth century felt like the movie Braveheart, inside those arms.

He was right, I had strayed off destiny’s path. This dalliance had to end, and I had to start going inside to look for love.

It was over in a second. He dropped his arms and the rush subsided.
I came back to my present. To the cave, with this man.
I had no words.
He turned and started to walk away, his work here was done.

He’d broken my heart and then sent me on an amazing journey to explain why he’d come.
“Turn around, show me your face!” I yelled. I was smad (combination of sad and mad)
He was far away, I could barely hear him now, “In time” he said, never turning around.

I woke up to a bright, hot summer morning in my shitty apartment, feeling such gratitude. The phone next to me was ringing.
“Thank God, that was just a dream.” I chanted over and over in my head, still processing my “know everything” moment, as I rolled over to pick up the receiver.
“Hey” my beloved’s sleepy voice said on the other end, “we have to talk.”

My heart sank as tears immediately filled my eyes. They’d been waiting there for a long time.

I knew what was coming next. No more fucking around. 
Somtimetimes, before a big life shakeup, the Universe gives you a head’s up, This was mine.
It was time to start living my destiny.

Xox