Life

I’m not proud of what I’m about to tell you. But I think you’ll thank me. Mostly for admitting that I’m just another deeply flawed human being walking this spinning blue planet—and for telling the truth.
I like to pride myself on being rather unflappable. Emotionally steady and able to find the humor in any situation I’m placed in and yet… some are triggers and can toss me like a piece of trash into a swirling eddy of unhappiness, anger, and even revenge.

Maybe, just maybe dear reader, you know what I’m talking about.

It was 7:00 pm on a balmy Friday night. After a week full of jumbly-stuff, all the two of us could focus on was enjoying a scrumptious meal at one of our favorite local foodie hangouts—and a nice red wine. I had the foresight to make a reservation so getting a coveted table on the patio was no problem.

As we were guided outside past the bar I couldn’t help but notice how packed the place was. It was loud and lively, filled with couples and groups of friends starting off their weekend right. That felt good. The place had recently re-opened after an extensive renovation and I was happy to see the neighborhood showing their support.

After being seated by the hostess we both smiled at each other, exhaled deeply, and held hands across the table. Everything was perfect.

We had been assured that our waitress, Sara, would be with us shortly so we started talking about this and that, catching each other up on our day–you know, your basic pre-dinner chit-chat. Ten minutes later, after running out of small talk, we started looking around. That’s the moment I realized we were invisible. That no one had come by to acknowledge our presence.

If it’s Friday, the end of a long work week, and wine has not been offered to my husband in a timely manner—he gets fidgety.

Enter bad habit number one: I try to ease an uncomfortable situation by justifying it.

“It’s really busy tonight”, I say just to cut the tension that’s building with each moment that goes by wine-free.

“Yeah, but they have a lot of staff”, he replies looking around the restaurant. And he’s right. I can see five waiter/waitresses just servicing the patio. One of them MUST be Sara.

Enter bad habit number two: I’m going to turn my attention away from my partner and make things right by catching the eye of our waitress.

It was then that I caught a glimpse of someone walking toward us with purpose. A girl in her mid-twenties, cute and blonde and wearing an apron, so I assumed she was OUR Sara.

Hallelujah! Wine at last, wine at last, Thank God Almighty, wine at last!

“Here she comes”, I declare just as she walks all of that purpose directly to a table behind us.

He looks at his watch. “It’s been twenty minutes”. Now he’s getting annoyed, looking around with his head on its maximum swivel speed.

My husband has sparkle. He just does, And never is it on display more than with the wait staff at restaurants. But I fear his sparkle is diminished; long gone as Sara finally approaches our table from behind my back.

“I like your hair”, she deadpans, referring to the purple underneath the gray. “I like your earrings”, I spit out immediately, laughing a little too loud, trying to diffuse the tension.

Enter bad habit number three: It’s really just an extension of BH#2. Soothe and diffuse. It can be jokes, laughing, even tap-dancing.

“I’d love some wine and a bottle of San Pellegrino when you get a chance”, he wedges in-between the phoney-baloney compliments.

“Great”, she smiles and disappears and when I say disappears I’m not exaggerating. I swear I saw her walk into a magical cupboard and enter an imaginary realm where she is a princess and not a waitress who is getting slammed on a busy Friday night.

7:38…and counting…and still nothing. No water, no bread. And definitely no wine. Now I’M looking at MY watch. Mama needs some alcohol.

Enter bad habit number four: I absorb all of the mad in the room and take it on. I fight the urge to get all Norma Raye and stand on my chair railing against every social injustice including bad service while dining out. (I thought I had a handle on this but apparently not.)

Things are starting to spiral downward. This is the point when you start looking at the tables around you, taking score. “They came in after we did and they already have their drinks and appetizers”, I found myself saying. I hate doing that. It’s petty and stupid but you just can’t help it when you seem to be seated in NO MANS LAND.

I know what you’re thinking, I really do. Tell somebody that you need some attention!
We start to debate the issue and I have to tell you, without wine, common sense has flown out the window. Who do we tell? The hostess who is running around like a headless chicken? The waitress herself? I’d need to send out a search party to find her and I’m assuming she’ll just get defensive. Maybe the manager?

When did my (our) happiness become so conditional? Why can’t we just chill and enjoy our evening in the midst of sucky service?

Good question!

I don’t want a scene so I haven’t told my famished, wine deprived, crab-ass of a husband that I can see Sara (who has apparently escaped the cupboard), standing and chatting at the bar. I’m assuming she went there over twenty minutes ago with the best intentions of getting us our wine but…I’m suppressing another urge my body has summoned. The one to saunter over to the bar, grab Sara by the ear, take her out back and beat the shit out of her.

I really hate it when things that seem outside of my control hijack a good time. The mood at our table has shifted from buoyantly jovial to passive-aggressively pissed off.

Sara walks toward us with a large tray of drinks balanced on her shoulder. “This has to be us”, he says hopefully, straightening up in his chair as I observe a warm basket of bread being placed two tables over by a waitress worth her weight in gold. Sara walks right past us being sure not to make eye contact. Can we all agree that selective eye contact is a dark art?

He turns in his chair to stare in her direction. Can she feel his laser-like gaze burning a hole in the back of her head? I wonder, will her hair catch fire?

Oh, hello bad habit number five: Wishing bad things on perfectly lovely people who are acting like asshats.

Just then somebody else brings us our drinks. I grab this angel in human form’s arm before he can leave and order two appetizers, It’s not his job to take our order and he looks at me funny but shakes his head okay.

Sara returns with one of our orders and plunks it down in the middle of the table as her eyes scan the room, and leaves without giving us any share plates. It’s after 8 pm and I’m suddenly starving. Mama needs some foodies. Fast. The alcohol is going to her head and things could get ugly so I start eating, making the long traverse with my overloaded fork from the plate—across the table—to my mouth. My husband follows my lead and before we know it we both end up with grits in a bacon coulee all over the front of us. I’m hungrily sucking pieces of bacon off of my sweater. Can this night get any better?

“What should we do?” I ask with earnestness now that I’m buzzed with more food on the front of my outfit than in my stomach. If I had my sense of humor and wasn’t hostile from absorbing all the mad— it would be funny. I usually find everything funny. But four people who sat down a half hour after us are happily finishing their dessert. Satiated and ready to leave.

That’s just not fucking funny.

“We’ve let it go too far. We should have said something to someone an hour ago. Now we just look like a couple of starving idiots who are wasting a perfectly good table in a very busy restaurant.”

My husband gets up, folds his napkin neatly into triangle and walks toward the back.’Oh God, here we go’, I think, ‘he’s going to complain, and they’re going to spit in our food’.

Back in the day, my husband worked his way through college as a waiter in a fancy French restaurant in Beverly Hills, and his stories of cranky customer retribution are stomach turning. Fingers and other body parts jabbed into food and drinks…cigarette ashes in sauces…terrifying but true. But that experience has also made him endlessly patient with waiters. He can recognize hard work and a job well done. He laughs with them, validates them with compliments and tips them well.

While my head is turned searching the place for the enigma called Sara, (I’m afraid he’s going to be the one to take her out back by the scruff of her neck and beat her senseless), the table is cleared, silverware and all. As she whizzes by, I relax a little at the sight of her alive and well, and then I remember that she’s our waitress goddamnit and I yell out our entrees and inquire about the second appetizer. She stops in her tracks and looks at me as if I told her she could never have children and does a thing with her head, like, ‘can’t you see how busy I am?’ —and walks away, back to the bar where she takes root for another ten minutes.

The same lovely gentleman who delivered our first appetizer delivers the second one, (full of ashes or finger pokes, I’m sure), this time with plates. I’m so busy gushing my appreciation that I forget to mention that we have no flatware. When I ask Sara for a fork she looks bewildered like everyone else is eating with their feet or elbows and I—the overdemanding, spoiled woman at table seventeen—wants a FORK!

My husband returns and suddenly things start to look up. The sparkle has returned and I can only imagine why. Some things are better left unsaid. Within a minute, the flatware appears—as if by magic.

It’s amazing how when you are treated like shit, the smallest gesture, like being given utensils, feels like a gift. Like when a restaurant starts to act restautraunty it can make you feel giddy.

Our food arrives in an appropriate amount of time delivered by an effusive upper management looking woman. Then a man in a suit brings us water. Finally, water! After an hour. I wanted to give him a kiss on lips and a standing ovation!

“We are so bad at this!” I lament on the walk to our car. “God! we have such a hard time dealing with bad service”.

And there it is, bad habit number six: I say We when I should say I.

My husband gives me side-eye which is our silent signal that he ‘took care of the situation’ which could mean that Sara has taken up permanent residency inside of the magical cupboard OR he tipped her only ten percent, which in California is practically punishable by law.

So, you guys,
I hope you can see ALL of the places where I went wrong and how my bad habits, just when I think I’ve kicked them, seem to have a recurring role in my life

What do you do in situations like that? I’ve done it all and had mediocre results. The waitress or waiter usually gets defensive, the host couldn’t give a shit and although management wants to hear about poor service, IN THEORY, they have rarely been magnanimous in the moment.

Carry on,
xox

Morning you guys,
I say this ALL THE TIME. That the world is better off and safer than its ever been—and most people look at me like I’m wearing an armadillo hat—on my two heads.

But it’s TRUE! I know it is! Yet…
Why are we so invested in being scared to death? Is this a dangerous world? A bad place?

I believe not.  Are you willing to change your mind?
Take a look at this essay by Pam Grout, take a deep breath and know that there are many of us out here who are trying to drown out the 24/7 cacophony of terror.

Carry on,
xox

“Why it’s time for an intervention from the relentless 24/7 media
by ps grout

“Violence is interesting which makes it a great obstacle to world peace and more thoughtful television programming.” –P.J. O’Rourke

Crisis, conflict, and violence are the prevailing themes of our 24/7 media. If some stranger talked to us the way newscasters do, we’d tell them to go jump in a lake. Likewise, if our boyfriends made us feel the way headlines often do, our friends would line up for an intervention. ‘Toss the jerk out on his head,’ they’d say.”

Living in fear sells products, creates economies, elects politicians and keeps the flying monkeys on the job. But it’s not the truth about the world.

The reality is that the world is safer today than at any time in history. The murder rate has plummeted in the last ten years. School shootings are no more prevalent than they were in “Leave it to Beaver” days. In fact, collaboration, goodness and, yes, love are the norm.

It’s just that the dominant paradigm, the one we’ve blindly bought into is “life sucks.” Any thought to the contrary is sidelined immediately by the 27-inch box in the corner of most of our living rooms (and kitchen and bedrooms). In fact, if you pay attention to the box–and most of us use it to form our view of reality–you have little choice but to conclude that murder, rape, war, and genocide is the human condition.

But if you look at it scientifically, the math just doesn’t work out. For every Koran-burning Terry Jones, there are 335,000 ministers who aren’t burning the Koran, who are espousing peace and love and tolerance. For every Scott Peterson, there’s 58.9 million husbands who didn’t murder their wives.

Every day, we’re spoon-fed “news” about missing children, identity theft, the mild-mannered neighbor who walks into work with an AK-47 and a bomb pack and blows up his boss and 27 co-workers.

Why do we think this is news?

On the same day (February 18, 2008), two-year-old Karissa Jones was abducted from her home in Louisville, Kentucky (by her father, as it turns out), there were 53,298 two-year-olds in Kentucky who didn’t get abducted, who were safe and sound at home, happily sipping apple juice from their Winnie-the-Pooh high chairs. Nearly a million children of all ages in Kentucky also didn’t get abducted that same day.

Why is Karissa the “news?”

News, by definition, is new information that teaches people about the world. Picking out what happened to two-one thousandth of one percent of the state’s two-year-olds is not an accurate picture of the world. If you ask me, what happened to the other 53,298 two-year-olds is a bigger story. Or at least it’s more realistic news.

What you see on the newscasts at night, what you read in the morning newspaper is not a realistic perception of our world. It’s an anomaly, an out-of-character thing that happened at one moment in time. News junkies pride themselves on believing they’re well-informed. Because they know what Ann Curry said about the latest layoffs at Boeing and what Morley Safer reported on the earthquake in New Zealand, they smugly believe they’re up on current events.

But do they know about the African-American postman in Germantown, Tennessee who jumped into a lake to save a couple whose brakes went out of their car when they were coming home from a hospital dialysis treatment? Do they know about the Marysville, Kansas attorney who flew, on his own dime, to Israel to donate a kidney to a 10-year-old he’d never met?

Thinking you’re informed because you watch the news is like thinking you understand a zoo when you’ve only seen the “Z” on the entryway sign. It’s not a complete picture, guys. It’s not even a good picture. I’m not going to argue that you can’t find the letter “Z” at any zoo. But if you try to convince me you’re a zoo expert or even that you have a faint understanding of what a zoo is all about because you’ve seen a “Z,” well, I’m sorry, I have no choice but to argue.

Attention-grabbing headlines and newscasts are nothing more than a sales tool, no more “factual” than “The Simpsons.” Isolated incidences get turned into frightening trends and our own thoughts have become conditioned to leap to the worst.

The mission of this blog is to free readers from the straitjacket of the relentless news media. Instead of asking “What’s wrong?,” a question we hear over and over again, I’d like to pose a simple question with the power to change the world: “What’s right?”

Pam Grout is the author of 18 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the about to be released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy

“Charles finally attained inner peace by ascribing all the world’s ills to the 24/7 news cycle.”

A reader sent this to me. Wtf? And thank you.
This is a woman in hospice care, on her deathbed. At death’s doorstep.
And apparently this is part of her family. Grandsons? Great-grandsons? Who knows.

You’ve gotta love this. Her feisty spirit and ‘game’ is what struck me. Is that a gesture she made often in her life? (‘Come on Nona, flip ‘um the bird like you always did!’).
Or is this for a laugh like when you tell a two-year-old to say ‘fuck it?’

Is she watching the Republican debates? Or flipping off the kid taking the picture? Or is she giving death the finger?
God, I hope it’s death.

She looks as if she’s lived a good long life with her sense of humor intact until the end…

“I imagine you like this at the end”, the reader said when he sent the photo.

What a compliment.
I hope so dear reader.
I aspire.

Carry on,
xox

I lost something very important to me last week. I squirmed. I obsessed. I bargained with God. The very minute I stopped caring…it came back to me.

Pass it along…
xox

After reading my post the other day about our majestic ash tree,
http://www.theobserversvoice.com/2016/05/earthquakes-rings-and-singing-ash-trees/
many of you asked me to reprise this essay about that very same tree—and his pal JAWT—who we murdered.
And just so you know, a year later finds Ash thriving as is our garden with all of the newly available sunshine (my bougainvillea has never looked more beautiful).
Yet…RIP, ‘Just A Weed Tree’, know that you are missed.
Carry on,
xox

We are all connected.
And not just by the proximity and outreach that is available to us via our devices.

It goes way beyond that.

I believe that everything is alive and has a spirit.

There is another web active in our lives besides that World Wide one. It is a web of life, of energy that connects everything and everyone on this earth.

We are all interconnected and anything that suggests the belief that we are separate is an illusion.

Nature is the supreme example of this web of interconnection. The bees need the flowers. The flowers need the bees to bloom.

And I fucked up and cut down a tree in our front yard, apparently upsetting the delicate balance of nature throughout the world, or at least Los Angeles, California.

We are the custodians of a one hundred and fifty-year-old ash tree. And he is our giant, grounded guardian.

Of that I am sure.

I remember a psychic predicting that I would live in a tree house one day, (which at the time seemed absurd), but when I purchased this house a few years later my friends all remarked “I see you got a little house with your tree.”

It is massive, one of the largest trees in Studio City and we are so blessed to live under its majestic canopy, feeling its energy, enjoying its shade.

On the curb, just adjacent to Ash (we’ll call him Ash) was a nondescript tree-thingy.
The arborist that came to the house ten years ago during our remodel educated us, telling us all about Ash, and when asked he informed me that the other tree wasn’t any species that he was familiar with.

“It’s just a weed that someone let grow into a tree a long time ago” he told us.

Just A Weed Tree was a lot of trouble.
His canopy was dense and…ugly, even after the annual haircut we gave him, not light and airy like Ash’s.
He cast too much shade for anything to flourish and the birds loved to congregate inside that dense, dark green foliage and shit all over our cars.

He had the bad attitude of an overgrown weed. He was pushy. And greedy, lifting the sidewalk, and getting into our pipes on a regular basis.

Just A Weed Tree always appeared to be crowding Ash, vying for light; and in the severe drought that we’ve found ourselves under, I feared he was chugalugging at the water table—and I knew Ash was too polite to say anything.

I LOVE trees, I do, ask anyone. I absolutely adore Ash, but I was not fond of JAWT.
He wasn’t a tree. He was a garden variety pest.

So this past Saturday our gardener cut him down. It took two guys and they were fast and thorough, even grinding the stump.

We both forgot that it was happening that day so when we got home the whole look and energy of the front yard had changed dramatically.

There was no sign that Just A Weed Tree had ever been there. But you could feel a HUGE void.
That weed had a presence.

FUCK.

We both stood at the curb, “Wow” was all we could say.

Now you could really see the front our house, there was the added sunlight in our yard that I had craved (for the plants) and with JAWT gone you could fully grasp the wonder of Ash.

“It looks like they trimmed the big tree too,” my husband remarked as I went around picking up leaves still on their branches.
It appeared as if they had been cleanly cut and they were EVERYWHERE.

Except they hadn’t been cut. They had been dropped.
I’d never seen anything like it. They covered the entire front yard, the driveway and even parts of the roof. In the fall, Ash drops single, dead, brown leaves, never bright green leaves still on their small branches.
What was up?

My arms were full, carrying the leaves to piles I had made on the driveway
And it suddenly occurred to me: Ash was showing his shock and disapproval at the death of his friend Just A Weed Tree.

I walked over to him, closed my eyes and rested my hand on the rough bark of his truck—and I could feel his stress and despair.

Oh Fuck.

First of all, I had always felt Ash was a female. Wrong. He has a very pronounced masculine energy.
And he was pissed. And under extreme stress.
Apparently the high pitched whine of a chainsaw has the same visceral effect on trees as a dental drill has on humans (yeah, okay, got it) plus he had known JAWT for over sixty years since he was just a tiny little weed that had somehow been spared. They were buddies.

I could feel his despair and it felt awful. I should have known better. Trees do have feelings and I had callously overlooked that fact.

We had basically murdered his friend right in front of him.

FUCK.

We are all interconnected, residents of this web of life and I needed Ash to know that I could feel his anguish, so I stood with both hands and my forehead on his trunk, apologizing and conveying our sincerest condolences for the loss of JAWT. I also explained the water situation and the fact that his health and stability were of the utmost importance to us. Then I played to his vanity telling him over and over how gorgeous (handsome) we think he is.
“You Mister, are the star of this neighborhood.” I think he was flattered.

Raphael watched from a distance, he could sense what was going on, and he added his sympathies from there. “I hope he’ll be okay,” he said with genuine concern, gazing at the piles of leaves.

“Now that he understands and knows how sorry we are—he’ll be fine.” I replied.

And he is. After our little talk…he never dropped another leaf.

Carry on,
xox

I’m a copy cat. I am.
And I’m not even very good at it. I’m out here in the open admitting to it.
I’m sharing something brilliant that somebody else has shared. It’s like the double-dipping of blogging…but I just had to do it.

My friend Angie Hite has a wonderful blog that I love and the other day she posted this. It has everything; a virtual smorgasbord of yumminess; life and death, poetry, Sue Monk Kidd, curiosity, and the quest for notoriousness. I want to be notorious for something…don’t you?
Take a look and…
Carry on,
xox

http://www.angelahite.com/let-my-epitaph-read/

Take it away Angie…and Mary…and Sue…

Let My Epitaph Read…

Ya know, sometimes what I want to share is what SOMEONE ELSE has written! That is the case here. Not only do I want to share Mary Oliver’s poem “When Death Comes,” but I want to share Sue Monk Kidd’s commentary on it, and an Emily Dickinson quote within the commentary! The only thing I personally have to add, and this will make sense at the end, is: “Me, too!”

Here is an excerpt of Mary Oliver’s poem (please read the whole thing sometime):

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

And here is s Sue Monk Kidd essay from her book Firstlight, reacting to Oliver’s poem:

“Recently on the eve of my birthday a woman said to me with a completely serious face, ‘When I turn fifty, I want to become notorious.’

‘Notorious for what?’ I asked.

This seemed to throw her. ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ she said. “I haven’t gotten that far along with the idea.’

Becoming notorious for the sake of becoming notorious was a peculiar idea to me. Besides that, had she consulted a dictionary for the meaning of notorious? I went home and looked it up. It said, ‘Notorious – widely but infamously known or talked about.’

I couldn’t see the appeal. But after my conversation with the woman, practically against my will, I began to entertain a thought: What would I want to be notorious for at fifty?

I was still secretly working on it when a group of women gathered to help me celebrate my birthday. For our evening’s entertainment, I brought out my book of Mary Oliver’s poems and suggested we take turns reading. As bemused glances were exchanged, it occurred to me if I did ever become notorious, it would not be for bacchanalian parties.

I read last, choosing a poem with the cheery title ‘When Death Comes.’ I read along unsuspecting till I got to a line in which Oliver writes about coming to the end and wanting to say that she has spent her life married to amazement.

Suddenly something unexpected happened to me. My throat tightened. My eyes filled. I don’t mean sad tears, but the kind that leak from something brimming.

I looked at the faces around the room. They seemed beautiful and shining to me. I glanced at a common white lily in a vase and honestly, the sight nearly wiped me out. It was that impertinently gorgeous. Out of nowhere, plain and simple objects were rising up to show off their flame. The divine, unnameable spark. I couldn’t think what to name the feeling except amazement at life. It was as if something fell from my eyes and I saw everything just as it is.

One second I was going along in a jaded marriage with life (because let’s face it, the intimacy can fade after a while if you don’t work on the relationship) when it rode in and swept me off my feet. I learned to be in love with life again. And I didn’t even know the romance had slipped.

‘Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. Somehow I’d begun moving through life on automatic pilot, half-seeing, half-here, abducted by the dreaded small stuff. But the evening of my party, I realized all over again: we will have a true and blissful marriage to life only to the extent we are aware.

So. That’s how I resolved the question about what I wished to become notorious for at fifty. Let it be for nothing more than harboring a wild amazement at life. Let it be for choking up at poetry and the sight of human faces. For falling into easy rapture over lilies and all the other run-of-the-mill marvels that make up life. Let me become notorious for going around with my bridal veil tossed back and my mouth saying I do. Renewing my vows with life. Every day. A hundred times a day.”

Me, too, Mary and Sue and Emily! Me, too! Me, too! Can I get an Amen?

“The world is but a canvas to the imagination.”
~ Henry David Thoreau

“Is that my imagination?… Can I believe in that?… Because I don’t want to create something in my life that’s not real.”
~Me

What is “real” anyway? And what is…not real? Fantasy? Make believe. Hokey pokey? Flim-flam, paddy-wack, and Cracker Jack?

Remember me? Let me introduce myself. I’m the woman with the wild-ass imagination.

“Is that just my imagination?” I used to say that to myself at least twenty times a day. Now it’s down to maybe twice a week, and it makes me laugh every time I think it.

Where the hell do I think the things in my life are first created? Uh, somebody’s imagination…hello?…

My iPhone was the brainchild of Mr. Jobs.

My relationship with my husband started in my imagination and then became more tangible with a list I made of suitable qualities for the man of my dreams.

My house was the bright idea of some developer way back in 1936 when the nearby studios decided they needed housing for all of the workers in the growing movie industry.

The design of my car probably woke some German guy up in the middle of the night who was tasked with thinking up an elegant station wagon design. Well done, Gunnar!

Germs were an unfathomable idea just before the turn of the 20th century. Imagine. Invisible living organisms that can invade your body and make you sick. Well, that’s right out of science fiction!
Who’s sick and twisted imagination thought of THAT?

And what about science fiction? Our present existence would look like something out of science fiction to someone from a century ago. Bluetooth? WiFi? Electric cars? Microwave ovens? Smart phones and personal computers! Oh my!

All of those started in some smart person’s imagination. Because that’s what smart people daydream about. Life changing smart stuff.

Me? I use my imagination to scare myself to death on a regular basis.
Most always at three in the morning. I can vividly imagine and talk my rattled, sleep deprived little mind into a myriad of catastrophes that make me sweaty and weepy. My hall-of-famers are; a motorcycle crash either with me on the back or without, an Armageddon type unavoidable meteor strike, a Trump presidency, or publically failing at something that means the world to me…while naked.

Those become so real in my imagination that I never even bother to step back and question them. They become my virtual reality. Because here comes the science: Your body doesn’t know if it’s real or imagined. What?

But what about all the good stuff? Writing a script? Big money? Wild success? A movie??
Oh, don’t tease me you rascally imagination! Could those things really happen? Are those real?

What a ding-dong I can be! Honestly! If I played you guys the dialogue in my head you’d laugh your asses off it’s so ridiculous…but…wait a minute…I’d venture to guess, so is yours!

What are you unwilling to believe because it seems too good to be true? Why can’t the really good stuff, the far-reaching stirrings that lie deep inside our hearts come true? Why do we poo-poo those? Why aren’t those REAL?

They can be. All we have to do is believe in them as much as we do those awful scenarios that keep us awake at night.

Someone once said: If you can imagine it—you’re most of the way there.

You’ll be happy to know—I’m on this! I’m working on it day and night. I’ve decided to unleash my imagination and let it run rampant (only in a good way) with my life. I’m thinking of keeping a journal about my journey into this new radical reality because I have it on good authority that this next stretch is about to get super juicy!

Wanna come with me?

Carry on,
xox

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

This is what it sounds like when you put tree rings on a record player.

This is an excerpt from the record Years, created by Bartholomäus Traubeck, which features seven recordings from different Austrian trees including Oak, Maple, Walnut, and Beech. What you are hearing is an Ash tree’s year ring data. Every tree sounds vastly unique due to varying characteristics of the rings, such as strength, thickness and rate of growth.

Keep in mind that the tree rings are being translated into the language of music, rather than sounding musical in and of themselves. Traubeck’s one-of-a-kind record player uses a PlayStation Eye Camera and a stepper motor attached to its control arm. It relays the data to a computer with a program called Ableton Live. What you end up with is an incredible piano track and in the case of the Ash, a very eerie one.

Hats off to Traubeck for coming up with the ingenious method to turn a simple slice of wood into a beautiful unique arrangement. It makes you wonder what types of music other parts of nature would play.

I LOVE this so much and for so many reasons that they are almost too numerous to mention, but here are just two of them.

We have a ginormous Ash tree in our front yard and for once I am not exaggerating when I say ginormous. According to our arborist (yes, we have an arborist, when you are entrusted with the custodianship of one of Mother Nature’s wonders, you call in the specialists), it one of, if not THE largest tree in Studio City. As the saying goes “I got a little house with my tree”.

Anyhow, I am an avid appreciator of the Ash tree and now, thanks to this video, to the beautiful songs that are hidden inside.

But I have to tell you, I knew MINE had a beautiful voice right about year one after living under his (if you meet him, he’s has a very masculine, protector energy kind of guy), gigantic canopy that covers nearly 3/4 of my entire house.

One night, being Southern California and all, there was a pretty substantial earthquake. When I say substantial I mean only a couple of things fell over, the power was still on, and it only woke up one of my two cats. I was single at the time so I threw on a robe and some flip flops and surveyed the place for damage. It was my first time as an actual homeowner (as a renter I just went back to sleep and counted on the cats to wake me up if there was a gas leak), so there was a lot of checking pilot lights and looking for new cracks in my quaint little 1936 bungalow.

All was well. Except for the fact that someone was whining a plaintive, high-pitched sigh. Think squeaky old screen door.

When I realised it wasn’t me, I followed the sound outside, half expecting to discover a neighbour’s dog cowering in the driveway. Instead, I found my neighbour himself, Steve, clad in some hastily pulled on shorts (they were inside out), an old Stanford t-shirt and a bad case of bed head. We met under the tree.

“You okay?” he asked, being the gallant neighbor dude sent over by his wife to check on the single woman next door, who was obviously scared shit-less, whining like a little girl.
“Yeah. You guys?”
We were both looking around for the origin of THAT SOUND.
“You hear that?” we asked each other in unison.
“Is that?” I whispered as I walked closer to the tree.
“No…”, he replied with mediocre conviction.
“Shit”, he said in a bewildered tone as we both stood with or hands resting on the behemoth’s trunk.

“It’s the tree!” we both exclaimed in unison again (we needed to take this act on the road), our eyes dilated with amazement. He jumped back and shook his hands as if fifty million volts of electricity had coursed through him. I think I saw the hair on his head stand up even taller.

The majestic Ash tree reverberated, and then, like a giant shiver it transferred the vibrations to our hands, accompanied by that melancholy sigh as it settled back down and into the very space it has been occupying for just shy of two-hundred years. Just like a pro. Just like it has done after so many other earthquakes for years and years before me or my house were even a whisper into someone’s imagination.

It was too much for poor sleepy Steve to fathom. Seeing that I had no intention of letting go of my tree anytime soon, he quickly excused himself and went back to bed. I’m sure he never told another soul that he heard a tree sighing after an earthquake.

But I have—and now you all know.
They make sounds. They whine, and they sigh, and they laugh in a brisk wind.
And sometimes…they even play piano.

Carry on,
xox

https://vimeo.com/traubeck/years

Things are moving extremely fast these days as we continue going through our cycles of cleansing, purging, and re-birth. Right? I mean, I can’t be the only one out here who has been re-inventing herself for the past few years, decades, millennia.

One of my dear friends remarked just the other day, “I’ve changed so much recently, I don’t even know who I am! It’s like someone shook the snow globe I live inside of and everything is falling around me differently”

I agree! We barely resemble our former selves and life can be so freakin’ confusing in the midst of a snow globe shake-up.

Yet, sometimes, no, make that always—we should always ask ourselves the hard questions.

Who are we REALLY? Are we the persona we carefully construct on social media?
Am I the happy-go-lucky, upbeat, person who people meet for the first time—or the whining pile of insecurities I show to a handful of close friends who have earned that (privilege?) by sticking around?

I can be all of those people. But who am I at my core? Because that core personality makes most of my life decisions. It colors the way I handle difficult situations. It choreographs my re-birth. It does, don’t argue, it’s science!

To get my bearings when I’m feeling uncertain about who is running my show, I try not to make any sudden moves (those are always a mistake. It’s better to let the dust or snow settle), and I don’t let the peanut gallery define me (because they will be oh, so, willing to do that for us).

What I do is I take a look around at my life. What clues is it showing me? How has the person that lives deep inside me done so far? You know what? I can tell by how I feel.

Do I feel happy with some great people around me? Is there something on the horizon to look forward to, a relationship, a trip or a creative project? Or am I in a constant state of anger or anxiety, mad at the world? Lost in the endless 24/7 bad-news cycle, feeling depressed and alone?

I’ve been both of those and believe you me, I prefer the first one. But getting there can be a struggle. (Especially if the core you is moody and depressed).

Not sure who you really are at your core? Ask yourself these questions:

Am I lover or a hater? (I immediately yelled LOVER! Then I flipped off the guy next to me in traffic on the 101 Fwy.—so I may need to take a closer look at that).

Am I a peacemaker or a fighter? (Fighters are always fighting someone. The government, their landlord, insurance, family).

Do I appreciate or condemn? (This person can walk into a beautiful room and all they can see is the tiny scratch on the floor. Know anybody like that?)

Do I see possibility or failure? (I am an eternal optimist with an inner asshole/naysayer at my core …good to know).

Do I criticize or encourage? (You can tell by what’s coming back your way. Compliments or nasty critiques?)

Am I hopeful or hopeless?

Do I look forward to the future or live in the past? (People who live in the past feel that their best days are behind them. What kind of future does that make for them?)

Is life (the planet), improving or falling to shit?

Do you live in a benevolent or malevolent Universe? This is a BIG one! Man O man! It will color your beliefs about life. We all know the person who thinks that the world is a horrible place that is out to get them. Is that you?? Look at your life!

These are simple questions but they can really help you get to the bottom of who is running your life. Can you trust that part of you to make the big leap? To turn things around? Or will it betray your trust by being too fearful, pessimist or critical to be of any help?

First, you have to become aware of it, then you can change it.
When my asshole/naysayer starts to dictate the rules I tell it to fuck off. “I don’t need your help here!” I’ll say, “You’ve made some pretty bad decisions in the past that were all based on fear. I don’t trust you with my re-birth! Hit the road, Jack!” But he never leaves for good so I’m content to let him sit and watch. Quietly.

I hope this helps you. It’s one of those great tools that can come in so handy in the middle of a snow globe shake-up. I  made a lot of the same mistakes over and over again until I took the time to see what my core beliefs were, who was running the show, and most of all—could they be trusted with this precious new endeavor?

Carry On,
xox

In the beginning of her book “Eat Pray Love”, Liz Gilbert finds herself in the middle of something she has no control over which is causing her a great deal of angst, worry, anxiety, and despair. In her case, a contested divorce. It has come to the place where it has the potential to consume yet another year of her life by tying her up in court, not to mention wasting every dime of their money on legal fees.

Are you guys with me? Anxiety? Despair? Loss of control? Can you relate?

She feels hopeless and out of control and while on a drive through Kansas with a friend, she expresses her desire to write a Petition to God, you know, to inject some Divine Intervention into a situation which seems beyond repair.

Once she drafts a copy in the car, she and her amazing and very willing friend, add imaginary (energetic), signatures at the bottom. “My parents both signed it!” her friend exclaims. “So did mine! And so did my grandparents!” Liz replies. “St Francis of Assisi just signed it!” her friend yells excitedly, pounding the steering wheel for emphasis; and the exercise continues for well over an hour raising Liz’s spirits and bolstering her resolve.

Later, still in the passenger seat of the car, she grabs a quick nap and is awakened by her ringing phone. “You’ll never guess”, her attorney from New York exclaims without even saying hello, “He just signed the papers!”

God, I love that scene! Because I love magic, and I believe in the Physics of Quests, clues, and signs, and our right to Petition God or the Universe to take the wheel on our behalf, and so it dawned on me that I should write my own Petition, regarding my own crazy brave,crazy, brave, batshit crazy endeavour, and send it to my tiny inner circle—my tribe—so I did last night.

“Just like in the book I’d love it if you could sign it energetically (or literally) and send it out to others in the aether, living or dead, and let me know who we’ve got working on this.
I’ll put mine at the bottom.

I love you all more than words can express.
xoxJ”

And all day the names of the signatories have been pouring in!
Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Kennedy, The Obama’s…
Even the Pope signed it! What??!!

I wasn’t going to share it but then I realised that you guys are my tribe too! Below is what I wrote so you can use it as a template for your own Petition.

Then, I had what I thought was a great idea! I wanted to offer YOU this: If you want to write a short sentence in the comments about something that needs some energetic surrendering—start your own Pettition—I (we) will add our names and the names of others to it and up that juju factor.

How about it? Wanna try it? What do you have to lose?

I love you all more than words can express!
Carry on,
xox

Dear God, Universe, Nora, Nixon and All,
It is now time for you to intervene and facilitate the making of this “darling” screenplay into a movie. I humbly and respectfully acknowledge that I haven’t the faintest idea of what comes next or how to make this happen, and I am well aware of the fact that if I attempt to meddle in matters this far outside my paygrade, well, let’s just say ‘I’ll fuck it up’.

I realize that you may have more pressing things on your agendas like Chinese and North Korean diplomacy, Syria, finding a great karaoke song and looking for other ways to demystify death, and that helping me to ‘mind my own business’ seems like an insurmountable challenge, but we’ve come this far and worked so well together—that I beseech you to try.

Please attract only those to this project who are lifted by its message. Let it easily find its way to the best and the brightest. May the making of the movie be surrounded by as much love, light, fun and magic as the writing of the screenplay has been and may those that lay eyes on it see beyond what was written on the page. May it live to touch hearts and soothe souls.

Thank you for your kind consideration,
Respectfully,
Janet Bertolus

Picasso
Diane Sawyer
Mike Nicols
James Cameron
Elizabeth Gilbert
Oprah
Gayle King
My dad
Tom Hanks
Rob Bell
Erma Bombeck
Dear Abby
Clark Gable
Eva Gardner
Frank Sinatra
Andy Williams
Bob Fosse
Hemingway
Mark Twain
Martha Stewart
Mama Cass
Stevie Nicks
Joni Mitchell
Cameron Crowe
Ron Howard
Bryan Lorde
Rob Lowe
Prince