advice

What in the hell was going on? I had unwittingly been given a front-row seat to a disaster that I’d known was going to happen for a year!

Why the hell was I in Hawaii again? What was my part in this tragedy?

I never wanted to be someone who predicts disasters. Seriously Universe? Give me another job. Anything.
Something else. Something not so fucking scary.

Be careful what you wish for. Now I talk to dead people. But not the scary ones. Funny ones. The bossy but kind ones.
Thank God (Scott) for small favors.

Anyway, the local anchor came back onscreen to inform us that one of the deep ocean buoys had registered a tsunami fifteen feet high and getting larger, with a velocity of over five hundred miles per hour, headed directly toward the Hawaiian Islands.

It would get to us in five hours.
3 a.m.
Of course it was coming in the middle of the night! Fucking three a.m!
The witching hour. The time when nothing good ever happens. Oh, and by-the-way, dark water is one of my biggest fears.
I was petrified.

Ginger was feeling sick and went bed. The guys opened another bottle of wine and started playing cards, remaining lighthearted, partying while waiting for the inevitable.

I went back to our room, shivering with anxiety under the blankets, glued to the TV while the disaster siren wailed in the background.

Right around midnight they got the second buoy reading. The wave was larger and picking up speed as it headed our way.

Suddenly the intercom came on inside the condo. Nobody even knew there was an intercom connected to the main resort which was run by Marriott.

A voice cleared it’s throat.

An extremely nervous young man’s voice, shaky, cracking and squeaking, blared loudly throughout the condo. Haltingly, he instructing everyone in units below the fifth floor to evacuate to the roof. “Bring blankets…pillows…water and, um, your shoes, it’s going to be a long night”. His anxiety was palpable.

Uh, okay Voice of Authority.
Didn’t they have anyone available with a more mature tone? Something deep and fatherly? A voice that could console us and instill calm.
This kid’s voice and delivery were comical to me. In my imagination he was the pimply faced nephew of the lady who fed the stray cats behind the parking garage. One minute he was doing his calculus homework, the next, he was behind a microphone, advising hundreds of tourists during an impending disaster. He was the only one that was expendable in an emergency. Everyone important had a task.
Holy crap, he was the best they had.

Thank God something was funny.

One of trembly, squeaky, scared guy’s announcements advised us all to fill our bathtubs in order to have plenty of drinking water in case the sanitation plant was wiped out.

Intermittently he’d come back on with further instructions,”Anyone with a vehicle in the lower garages, please move them to higher ground behind the main hotel.” he advised, sounding as if he were on the verge of tears.

Not long afterwards I heard voices, car keys, and the front door slam as the guys went to move our cars.

In the dark from our balcony, I watched the groundskeepers running around like headless chickens rushing to clear the sand and pool surround of hundreds chairs. Then they emptied the rental hut with its kayaks, snorkels and fins, inner tubes and dozens of surf and boogie boards.

If you watch the Thailand tsunami videos it is those seemingly innocuous beach toys that become deadly projectiles in fast-moving water. You may not immediately drown, but a surf board or a beach chair coming at you at hundreds of miles an hour will kill you for sure.

It was too much. The destruction in Japan was too much for me to handle.
I watched multi-story buildings get washed away like they were kids toys. We were so close to the water. Could our building withstand the rush of the initial wave? How high up would the water come?
The third floor, the fourth—or higher? What was going to happen?

I turned off the TV, the room was dark and quiet and instantly I felt a drop in my anxiety level. You can get sucked into the endless loop of death and destruction—its like a drug.

I unhooked the CNN IV, grabbed my phone, inserted my ear buds, pulled up a meditation, and started to calm my nervous system down. Slow…deep…breathing. In…and out… after a few minutes I could feel my shoulders drop and my face relax. I’d been unconsciously clenching my jaw for hours.

My mind started to unwind. The siren went way, fading into the distance, the boy’s terrified voice becoming a muffled form of white noise.
I actually relaxed into a half sleep state. Aware of my surroundings, but extremely relaxed.

The meditations came to an end. Silence. I was still okay.
No longer spinning in fear. No longer afraid.
“What’s going to happen, how bad will this be?” I asked no one in particular.
Just a question I needed answered.

Here’s where the magic happened.

A very loving, clear and calm voice answered back:
What do you want to happen? How bad do you want it to be?

What? I get a vote? This answer left me flabbergasted. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this felt extraordinary.

Somehow, instinctively I knew that I couldn’t say make the tsunami go away—there are some things we are powerless to change.
What I could change was MY experience of it. What did I want to happen to me, to us?

Script it the voice said, and that has changed my life.

Okay…I said in my head, remembering the videos from Thailand, you can come up to the palm trees that line our pool area and define the boundary between the beach and our resort. That’s it. To the palm trees only, not into the pool and not into our resort.

No further conversation was needed. No idle chit-chat, no more Q & A.

I fell asleep. A deep sleep rich with meaningful dreams that I can’t remember
Inside one, a muffled voice that felt like it was underwater warned: Stay away from the ocean, Do NOT get near the water, We are on lockdown, stay inside your rooms.

It must be happening crossed my mind, but I was too deep to care.

Only as far as the palm trees…up to the palm trees…

When I finally opened my eyes I could see daylight. Raphael was asleep next to me and I could smell coffee.
Obviously the tsunami had come and gone—and everything seemed…normal.

These are pictures of the waterline the tsunami left behind. It is still waaaaay up the beach at this point, about three hours after it came ashore. It surged forty feet UP the beach, over dry sand, and stopped right at the palm trees that line the pool, and our resort.

Script it. Imagine it. Feel it. Ask for it. Relax.

That proved to me, without a doubt, that we can script our circumstances. There are things we can’t control, but there are so many that we can.

Get calm, and set boundaries. How bad/good do you want it to be? What do you want to happen?

We have control over our immediate circumstances.
Script it.

This changed my life–I hope it changes yours.

Carry on,
xox

IMG_0914 (check it out)

I wrote about this a long time ago, but I’m going to tell it again.
Partly because there are so many new readers, and also because its come up a lot lately—and besides, it’s a fuckin’ great story.

If you’ve heard it before, go make yourself a sandwich. And don’t give away the ending.

In the spring of 2010 I went to Hawaii with my friend Wes to get some clarity about which direction I should take my life after Atik (my store) died.

Oh who am I kidding. We went to drink Mai Tais, eat like escaped death row convicts, sit on the white sands of Waikiki Beach all day gossiping and people watching—and get massages.

All we did was laugh. Well, he laughed, I cried—then he laughed at my crying. Then I cry-laughed. It was wet and sloppy. Lots of running mascara and snot-bubbles.
You get the picture.

About mid-way through our seven-day trip I got the sense there was going to be a tsunami.
You know—like you do…
That evening when Wes met me at the bar for happy hour I voiced my concern. “I want to move to a higher room in our hotel. I think there’s going to be a tsunami and I’m not going to be safe on the second floor.”

“Did you start without me? How many drinks have you had?” he was laughing, flagging down a waiter in order to join this crazy party he figured I’d already started.
“I’m serious. You’re on the third floor, but I’m not even sure that’s high enough. Let’s look into moving.”
All I could see in my mind’s eye were those horrible videos from the tsunami in Thailand.

His eyes said: Have you lost your mind? But in order to calm my fears he immediately whipped out his phone and started to look up Hawaiian tsunami.

“The earliest on record was reported in 1813 or 1814 — and the worst occurred in Hilo in 1946, killing 173 people.” he was reading a Wikipedia page.
“So it happens kind-of-never; and I’m okay with those odds.” He raised his drink for a toast “To surviving that rarest of all disasters—the Hawaiian tsunami” We clinked glasses as he shook his head laughing at my continued squirminess.

“But if it does happen, which it could, ‘cause you’re pretty spooky that way— it will be one hell of a story”.

The first week of March the following year, 2011, our great friends, the ones who ride the world with us on motorcycles, asked if we wanted to join them at their condo in Maui. I was printing our boarding passes before I hung up the phone; you don’t have to ask me twice to drop everything and go to Hawaii.

On the beautiful drive from the airport to Lahaina, the air was warm and thick with just a hint of the fragrance of rain as we wove our way in and out of the clouds that play peek-a-boo with the sun all day on the Hawaiian Islands. With a view of the lush green mountains formed from the ever-present volcanos to the right, and the deep blue Pacific churning wildly to our left, that place really felt like Paradise Lost.

That’s when it hit me. I turned down the radio of the rental car that was blaring some five-year old, Top Forty song.
“We’re going to have a tsunami.” I announced.
It didn’t feel like if — it felt like when. A certainty.
“I think we’re more likely to have a volcanic eruption than a tsunami.” my hubby replied nonchalantly, turning the radio volume back up.

Damn I love my husband. He cohabitates with all the voices in my head without batting an eye. Most men would run for the hills.
He just stays rational. A volcanic eruption in the Hawaiian Islands is…the rational supposition.
God love him.

I had never mentioned my premonition from the trip the previous year—too odd; but I let loose for the remainder of the drive, wondering aloud about what floor their condo was on and worrying if it would it be high enough. Neither of us had any idea and I for one breathed a sigh of relief when the answer came via text. The sixth floor. Their condo was on the sixth floor, overlooking the pool, facing the ocean.

We spent the next week eating and drinking amazing food and wine, snorkeling, swimming, driving around, and whale watching. As a matter of fact the ocean outside of our resort was a veritable whale soup. There is a passage between Maui, Lanai, and Molokai (both which we could see in the distance) that the whales like to use instead of the open ocean, and we could see them breeching from our balcony. They were present in high numbers and especially active. It was extraordinary. The guys on the whale watching boats agreed with our friends—they’d never seen a year like that a one.

Two days before our departure, on the eleventh, it all seemed to come to a screeching halt. The ocean was as passive as a lake. I hiked down the beach to a cove that was supposed to be like “swimming in a tropical fish tank”—nothing. Literally no fish. People kept remarking how odd it seemed. The guys on the whale watching catamarans were perplexed. Suddenly,no whales.

That night after my shower I turned on the TV in our room for the first time the entire trip. I’m still not sure why.
We made dinner in that night and I was just the right amount of sunburned, buzzed, full and sleepy.
As I got dressed and dried my hair I casually flipped around the channels. American Idol, Baywatch re-runs, CNN. Then I saw it.

The bright red BREAKING NEWS banner at the bottom of the screen: Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami.

I screamed something incoherent as I ran out into the family room, half-dressed, knocking things over, becoming hysterical.
“You guys, Turn on the TV! Oh my God! Turn on the TV!” I grabbed the remote, but it looked like something that powers the International Space Station, so I threw it toward my husband.

“Oh, I don’t want to watch TV…” I heard someone say, but Raphael could tell something was wrong. He said later it felt like 911 when everyone was calling and the only thing they could manage to say was: turn on the TV!

“CNN. Find CNN!” I was so freaked out I could barely speak.

When the images came up on that big screen HD TV they were even more terrifying.
It was a helicopter shot, high above the coastline of a small city. There was a wave with a white cap as far as the eye could see. it looked like it spanned almost the entire coastline and it was headed straight for cars, boats, houses…and people.

Now we were all transfixed. Silently glued to the screen with the frantic sounding Japanese commentary running in the background. This was all happening LIVE.

The CNN anchor sounded reassuring, telling us that Japan had one of the most advanced tsunami warning systems on the planet. Sirens had started sounding a few minutes after the large off-shore earthquake, warning the population to make their way to their pre-determined evacuation points on higher ground.

We watched in horror as churning brown water began rushing onshore with a ferocity that was nauseatingly familiar.
It just kept coming and coming. Undeterred by the breakwater…and the thirty foot wall they had built to withstand a tsunami.

“God, I hope they had enough time” I whispered.

Suddenly the CNN picture was minimized as the anchor’s face for the local Maui station took up the entire rest of the screen.
“Good evening”, he read off the cue card, “The entire Hawaiian Islands have been placed on tsunami watch due to the large earthquake off the coast of northern Japan. We will keep you posted as scientists get the readings off of the tsunami buoys that dot the span of the Pacific Ocean from the coast of Japan to the west coast of North America. If it looks like a tsunami is coming our way, the watch will turn into a warning.” He swallowed awkwardly, “Stay with us for further instructions.”

The screen was again filled with the escalating destruction in Japan.

I started to shake uncontrollably, my eyes filling with tears.

I saw him flinch out of the corner of my eye. It got my attention and when I looked his way his face looked as if he’d seen a ghost.
With the remote still in his hand, my husband turned toward me slowly, deliberately.
His mouth dropped open, his eyes were full of…questions.

Then with no sound; his eyes locked on mine; he mouthed my prophesy from earlier that week: We’re going to have a tsunami.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

The shrill wailing of the Disaster Alert Siren brought us both back to reality.
It was official—the tsunami was imminent.

To Be Continued…

IMG_0910 (watch this)

The harvest is always greater than the seed but you have to sow the seed first.
– Tony Gaskins

My garden is insane right now. Even though it’s a hot summer with a historic drought here in California, and it really has no right to be so happy. That’s just how we roll around here.

We are restricted in every way imaginable, and some that aren’t.
The watering days are cut in half and the times allowed are so short that everyone’s lawns are a sad and sorry shade of brown, the urban trees are dying, and the landscaping that Studio City had spent so much of our tax money on this past decade, beautifying the middle of Ventura Boulevard, and other public thoroughfares, looks like a sub-Saharan attempt to grow something green—that has been left to die.

In other words, I live in the land of brown on brown. Los Angeles is slowly reverting back to the desert landscape from whence it came.

But not my yard. Deprivation becomes it.

I have never seen my grass greener or my plants looking better. And the hydrangea. Forget about the hydrangea.
Most years I’ve had a hard time getting them to bloom for me. I see them around the neighborhood, covered with flowers, and mine just looked…anemic. A blossom here, a bloom there, they have been a consistent source of disappointment to me for years.

But not this year.
Their showoffery is so flagrant that I thank God they’re in the backyard so I don’t get arrested
I’m certain our neighborhood lawn police and water patrol would have me fined up the WhoHa. Nobody would believe that I’m adhering to the strict statewide restrictions.
I question it myself. Yet, There they are. Heavy with blooms.

I cut them. Every morning in fear of reprisal. My house is full of pink and blue hydrangea even though I don’t have a lick of pink in my home. And they grow back almost overnight. It’s spooky.

That’s the other thing.
My entire garden is filled with pink. Pink geraniums, pink cyclamens, pink nameless flower on that spiky plant, even pink bougainvillea. Pretty, right? Except for the fact that I planted red. I like red bougainvillea with a Spanish style house and I was extremely careful in my color selection. Same with the goddamn hydrangea. Blue and lavender. NEVER pink. I would never plant a pink flower. They’re simply not my thing.

So the other day while walking across my patio with its numerous pots of flowering plants, standing barefoot in my tall, lush green grass, staring in awe at my six hydrangea bushes laden with pink blooms, hose in hand on watering day, hummingbirds zigging and zagging happily around my head; my heart literally skipped a beat; I had never in the ten years of this garden’s existence seen it look so beautiful. That was precisely the moment when the voice in my head said this:

“That is what abundance looks like Janet, It is everywhere. And if you can notice it around you, you will see it in your bank account. It’s the law.”

Well, is that so?
Huh…I’d never really thought about it like that.
But they had been connected together, hand it hand, by some mystical power greater than myself. The money had started to flow back into my life at almost the exact same time that my garden exploded.

Then my perception changed and I started to notice abundance EVERYWHERE.

Every morning I would stand slack-jawed in my garden, amazed at it’s abundance; and several days a week a check would come in the mail. That has been a rare enough occurrence in my life of late that the word miracle is not an over statement.

Listen, have you walked with fresh eyes through a grocery produce section lately?
What about a farmer’s market? What about a bookstore?
There are twelve movies playing at any given time at my local multiplex and we have nine hundred channels to choose from on our TV.

I live a life awash in abundance—and I bet you do too.

Here’s the thing you guys: You can’t notice the beauty that is all around you when you have your head down, burdened with worry, doubt or despair. You have to be open to seeing it, of letting it astound and delight you.

So which came first? I’d say it was the seed of happiness the garden gave me and the overwhelming feeling of abundance shown to me each morning. Then the money harvest came. Cool huh?

As for pink, I looked it up, it represents caring, compassion and love. Alright, I’ll let it slide.
Hey, who doesn’t need more of that?

Carry on,
xox

Get a load of this library/office! Nigella Lawson amid cook book abundance for sure!

*This is a post from last spring but it still applies. Happy Sunday!
xox

“I had tended to view waiting as mere passivity. When I looked it up in my dictionary, however, I found that the words passive and passion come from the same Latin root, pati, which means “to endure.” Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It’s a vibrant, contemplative work. It means descending into self, into God, into the deeper labyrinths of prayer. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives false. It means struggling with the vision of who we really are in God and molding the courage to live that vision.”
~Sue Monk Kidd~

Sue Monk Kidd was on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday a couple of weeks ago. I’ve loved her for almost 25 years.

Her most famous book is “The Secret Life of Bees”, but I became familiar with her after reading her spiritual memoir “When The Heart Waits” in 1990. That was a time when not too many people were brave enough to write about their spiritual journey of transformation. My copy is water stained from reading in the bath, highlighted with a yellow marker, has my insights written in the margins and is dog-eared almost beyond recognition. I ate it up with a spoon when she wrote that waiting for your purpose is a sacred endeavor.

Waiting is not always passive. It can be a passageway from one way of being to another. She gave me permission to wait for the reveal.

These days, even more so than 25 years ago, waiting, being still, has gotten a bad rap. Inactivity is THE cardinal sin of the 21st century.

She used the analogy of the caterpillar in the chrysalis. If you poke a hole to check on its progress, the butterfly’s wings will be underdeveloped, and it will be unable to fly. The same thing happens if you try to help it break through. Every second, every step of the process is critically important to the transformation…and the survival of the butterfly.

Just let that one sink in……All the way down to your toes.

This quote from “When The Heart Waits” is one of my favorites.
I need to add it to the list.

“When the heart weeps for what it has lost, the Spirit laughs for what it has found” 

That makes my heart stop every time.

When Sue had her chat with O, she relayed an insight she had around 50.
She realized she had been a seeker all of her 20’s, 30’s and 40’s. In that respect we are kindred souls. But recently she’d admonished herself.

Enough seeking, she needed to “find” something.

It was time to become A Finder.

That just about made my head explode. Now I get it.
That’s what happens in your 50’s. The energy you expended as a seeker is replaced with the energy of “finding” and sharing. You’ve sought, delved and explored. You’ve attend countless retreats, seminars, conferences and sweat lodges. You’ve discovered along the way you DID get some answers. You have found nuggets of truth. Things you KNOW FOR SURE. All your seeking has borne fruit. That fruit is deliciously ripe and ready to share.

It’s the reason I write this blog.
I used to spend hour upon hour, day after day reading everything spiritual I could get my hands on. At one time I had over three hundred spiritual and self-help books. I have given half of them away.
Now I spend hours writing what I’ve learned.

I will always be on a journey of asking WHY? I’m hard-wired for it. But I’m also hard-wired to share anything and everything I know.
THAT is the payoff, the pay-it-forward of the seeker. We get to say: Hey, you wanna know what helped me? Have you read this or seen that?

I feel like in our second acts we are now Finders.
Things start to make some sense. Not everything, I still can’t wrap my brain around vows of chastity and silence.
What I HAVE found is that I am much more willing to wait and see how things work out.
I’m not perfect, some days I still want to see the progress inside the chrysalis.
I am forever a work in progress. I will always be asking questions. But I’m embracing my inner Finder.

I feel like she has a lot to share.

Tell me what you know about waiting. How comfortable are you with being passively passionate or passionately passive? Lol.

Xox

Happy Independence Day to all Americans who are reading this far and wide.

Carry on you independent ones,
xox

I was at a meditation the other day at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine Temple.
They hold them at noon on Wednesdays and I happen to think they’re lovely. They are led by a different delightful monk who obviously drew the short straw at breakfast that morning. I say that because even though on any given Wednesday there are only between fifteen to thirty people, that is still a room full of men and women looking and listening to you, and that constitutes public speaking.

Public speaking is terrifying. It is the subject of most people’s nightmares. But when it is done well it is an art, and sadly, not one that these monks possess.

That’s okay, they’re monks for god sakes. Trying to teach an ancient form of focused concentration to twenty-first-century human beings is no picnic. There’s no slide presentation or inspirational music. There is not a lick of wit or charisma.

My guess is that if they had wit or charisma — they may have chosen a different career path.

Nevertheless, this past Wednesday did not disappoint. Our monk was a perfectly nice fellow, and from the sound of his accent, he was born in Germany or somewhere else in Bavaria. At one point in the meditation, just before entering the silent part, he instructed us in the droning tone of his motherland: “Jus bahsk in da peasful praysence of Scott.”

What? Who’s Scott?

My eyes shot open and darted around the room to see if anyone else had heard what I had?

Scott?

His low-toned, semi-melodic droning continued and I heard it again. “Comb baaack to Scott”

Ohhhhhh… God. He’s saying God! It’s his accent that makes it sound like Scott.

Wait, I kinda like that name for God.
I shut my eyes and tried to join the flow, but my mind was reeling.

That name could really work nowadays, you know, from a PR standpoint, and here’s why:

My Three Reasons To Call God Scott—

1) There are so many frickin’ names for the Divine One.
It can be so confusing and extremely politically incorrect. Choose a religion, take your pick. Adonai, Yahweh, Jehovah, The Almighty, the Universe. Scott would tidy things up, unite everybody and keep the zealots from getting all hot under the turban.

2) Scott feels so…current. So…mid 2015. It makes God sound kinda hip; grown-up but accessible. It’s less polarizing than say, Piper, Keanu or River and friendlier than Zoltar.

3) In the Bible, God instructed the Israelites to avoid using his name (kind of like The Artist Formally Known as Prince), in a useless, disrespectful way. Instead, the Israelites were supposed to revere the name of God and use it in a serious, considerate way. Many of the ancient Israelites were so respectful of the name of God that they would not even pronounce it or write it for fear of using it in vain.

(My first name ain’t baby, It’s Janet, Miss Jackson if your nasty). Those who did write it would often throw away the quill they had used, because they thought that any quill that had written God’s name was holy and should not be used for regular words.

Taking this to the most absurdly literal place imaginable, Dr. John Hagee, the founder and senior pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, not only agrees with what the Good Book says, but also takes the faith to a level of fanaticism.

Asked how the situation could be bettered, Hagee replied: “Well, we’d have to start with ourselves, as with everything in life. If you’re asking about my personal opinion, there is no greater sin in terms of wrongly using God’s name than women who use it during sex. That is one of the filthiest, most derogatory and sinful uses of the Lord’s name I can think of. If it were up to me, I would put every single woman or girl (wtf?) who does that in jail.”

I would bet my house on the fact that Reverend Hagee himself has never heard that word used during sex–but he’s heard that it happens and he wants it stopped!

Oh, and by the way, jail is not the place to end that practice. Just sayin’.

So you see, Scott would work beautifully here. All parties would be up to speed when the woman yelled “Oh Scott; go Scott; give it to me Scott!” just before reaching ecstasy. No harm, no foul, nobody’s offended, nobody has to be incarcerated.

Hey, and if the guy’s name was Scott, well, that’s just a synchronistic bonus.

I think you can agree with me, now that I’ve made such a convincing and compelling argument, that we should change God’s name to Scott. So how do we start? Does anyone know who we talk to first?

Carry on,
xox

<This is a recent post from the blog of Seth Godin. I love him for a myriad of reasons, one of them being that he is a fellow daily blogger. We are a rare breed. We need to stick together.
Plus I love the fact that his classmates kicked him off the high school quiz team HE created; and that he didn’t get all pissy about it and TP their lockers…he became the coach.

I know, it’s a motherfucker to put into practice and that it just made your butts pucker, but read on and you’ll see what he means.
Carry on,
xox

Buzzer management

I started the quiz team at my high school. Alas, I didn’t do so well at the tryouts, so I ended up as the coach, but we still made it to the finals.

It took me thirty years to figure out the secret of getting in ahead of the others who also knew the answer (because the right answer is no good if someone else gets the buzz):

You need to press the buzzer before you know the answer.

As soon as you realize that you probably will be able to identify the answer by the time you’re asked, buzz. Between the time you buzz and the time you’re supposed to speak, the answer will come to you. And if it doesn’t, the penalty for being wrong is small compared to the opportunity to get it right.

This feels wrong in so many ways. It feels reckless, careless and selfish. Of course we’re supposed to wait until we’re sure before we buzz. But the waiting leads to a pattern of not buzzing.

No musician is sure her album is going to be a hit. No entrepreneur is certain that every hire is going to be a good one. No parent can know that every decision they make is going to be correct.

What separates this approach from mere recklessness is the experience of discovering (in the right situation) that buzzing makes your work better, that buzzing helps you dig deeper, that buzzing inspires you.

The habit is simple: buzz first, buzz when you’re confident that you’ve got a shot. Buzz, buzz, buzz. If it gets out of hand, we’ll let you know.

The act of buzzing leads to leaping, and leaping leads to great work. Not the other way around.

Seth Godin

SETH GODIN is the author of 18 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip and Purple Cow.

Recently, Godin once again set the book publishing industry on its ear by launching a series of four books via Kickstarter. The campaign reached its goal after three hours and ended up becoming the most successful book project ever done this way.

His newest book, What To Do When It’s Your Turn, is already a bestseller.

http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/default.asp

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 hair cuts 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 chain-saw 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

Judgement alert! There may be some judgment leveled here. Hey, I’m no saint.

How come the crazy one’s never loose any sleep?
Is it their complete lack of a conscience that causes them to appear so slick, smug and impossibly fresh?

Not a hair out of place.
Barely a hint of the devil that lies within.

While those of us that have the misfortune to find ourselves in their orbit are sleep deprived, disheveled, walking disasters.

That will always bother me.

The fact that people who operate outside the constructs of polite society close their eyes at night and sleep the uninterrupted, peaceful sleep of the just.

Why is that?
How can it be?

The night before an arbitration with the attorneys for DWP to discuss the fact that their one hundred year old water main had burst and turned my store into an aquarium; I tossed and turned until the sheets were knotted up around my head and neck, fashioned into an unattractive turban/noose—and I ground my teeth down to nubs. Which left me the next morning gumming my toast, with a foggy brain and pronounced sheet marks on my face that didn’t fade until after lunch.

The team of He, She and It, that represented the water company, entered the room that morning laughing. Uproariously.
Like Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon had driven carpool. I felt at a distinct disadvantage. Out of the loop, like the funniest joke ever told was lost on me. Was that their plan?

They were meticulously coiffed and groomed, cool as the proverbial cucumbers, while I was drenched in flop sweat, permanently wrinkled and frantically struggling to remove a poppy-seed from between my two front teeth with my tongue.

Note to self: Don’t accept half a poppy-seed bagel when you’re out of coffee. And you forgot your water.
You’re going to need something to rinse your mouth with when the big guns enter the room.

If I’d had more sleep I would have remembered that.

They all seemed so nice, so genuinely happy to meet me; that is until the bell rang and we went to our respective corners. Then the gloves came off and the crazy started to show.

They made shit up. Their entire alibi was jack-crap.
With graphs, documents and flow charts. Listen, if you show me a flow chart, I’ll believe anything…almost.
Somehow they double teamed my attorney and me. In the most well crafted, legal babbly, thinly veiled insulting way, they pinned the whole thing on me. They made the accidental, midnight break of their trunk line water main seem like MY fault.

Business was slow, debt was high, it was 2009, and I need out—only I was too stupid to commit arson.

I know, crazy, right?

When we broke for lunch even I wanted to throw the book at me.
The picture they painted of me was that of a sad-sack, loser of a business woman. Which was exactly how I felt at the time.
I think my lawyer drank the Kool-Aid too—they were that convincing. She wouldn’t make eye contact, skulking in the corner on her phone, and then disappearing for the entire lunch break.

But you wanna know what trumps sleep deprivation? Rage. That’s what.
It also instantly removes sheet marks from your face.

It also over-rides all victim-hood.

Crazy and Rage are curious dance partners and they should never be left alone in a room together.
Let me tell you why. Crazy is so put together, so charming, pretty, and unflappable. Crazy looooooves a victim, she gets off on them, they get her panties wet.

Rage is no victim, he’s a gangster. He’s raw, he’s greasy and he talks real dirty. He wears a wife beater t-shirt and too much Aramis; and he has only one thing in his crosshairs—Crazy.

Crazy gets high on Rage and it quickly becomes a street-brawl.

But Rage is better than Sad, which is where I’d pitched my tent for eighteen months. Some say you can get caught in anger and never feel despair. The opposite had been true for me.
Sad victimhood. It’s like chum in the water to Crazy.

So Rage felt better. It felt…empowering. Sadness felt like quick-sand, Rage, like solid ground.

It got my attention and cleared my vision, so I could finally see the truth and it kicked Sad’s ass to the curb.

I locked myself in a public bathroom stall and raged for an hour before taking a walk around the building, coming to my senses, and finding my courage.

I knew my opponent. I was very familiar with Crazy.
You see, I had met her as a teenager in the form of my father’s second wife. I had witnessed her devour her victims and I was smart enough to remember that Rage threw her into a sort of drunken frenzy.

I also remembered that nothing can get to Crazy. Nothing touches their heart. There is no reasoning with Crazy. There is no sympathy, empathy or compassion and absolutely nothing is open for discussion.

They act as your judge, jury and executioner.

And the more they sense is at stake, the faster and louder the accusations come. Their aim is to keep you off-balance, on the ropes.

Remember they are rested, ready and strong after their peaceful nights sleep. How is that fair?
Because they get a buzz off this shit and they don’t care about anything other than winning.

I sure wasn’t feeling sad anymore, Rage had hatched a plan but I knew better than to let it enter that room. I waited outside the double doors of the conference room until I saw my attorney exit the elevator. I could hear the team of Crazy, Crazier and Craziest, whopping it up inside.

“You handle this, I’m leaving” I announced. I had her by the arm and was walking her back down a long hallway of endless doors, out of earshot of the hyenas.

“What?” she looked surprised.

“You don’t need me here. They can smell my fear and sadness, and well, their offer is beyond ridiculous. See what happens when they can’t focus on me. When they have to deal with you and only the facts.” We had walked in a circle making our way back toward the bank of elevators.

“Give me a number you’ll you settle at” she asked as she reached into her bag for paper and a pen. She seemed relieved, like the day could be salvaged. Like it could go back to a language she understood—the law.

I wrote a figure down. She looked and nodded in agreement, folding the paper into a small square and tucking into her suit-jacket pocket.

The elevator chimed, opening right on cue. People were packed like sardines, but as I stepped inside she grabbed my purse strap, making me turn around. “This could end today” she said with a hint of a smile, letting go as the doors closed.

A hairy mystery hand reached around me and pushed the button for LOBBY, getting me the hell out of that DWP building. I know it was Rage. I could smell his Aramis. But I made sure I left him behind, losing him in the crowd.

*I got the call a couple of hours later that they’d settled on the figure I’d written down. “Piece of cake” I remember her saying in a distracted voice, (yeah, once the chum had left the building), she was already on to her next case.

We all slept well that night.

I know some of you guys needed to hear this,
Carry on,
xox

Faces always talk too much. One line and all their plans are revealed.”
― Floriano Martins

When I look at this face of mine, it appears hopeful, tired, lovely and worn — all at once.
Like my puppy gazing into a mirrored surface, I tend to get skittish and look past it.

I often don’t recognize it as my own.

I’ve been attempting an exercise that Louise Hay wrote about recently.
Oh….that rascal—that pusher of buttons.

It has been darting in and out of my experience for a while, like children playing tag.  I’d hear or read about it and I would think: oh, I’ll have to try that.

Then day turns to night, weeks to months, years pass and my life cycles around in that magical way, weaving in and out of different jobs, friends, laughter and tears, and….Here it is again.

TAG. YOUR’E IT.

This time when I read it, I immediately walked into the bathroom and stood before the large mirror that hangs over my sink. No waffling, getting distracted or waiting for a better time.
Luckily I was at home.
That sort of determined resolve could have become uncomfortably embarrassing had I marched into a public restroom at a swanky bistro; or taken a dangerous turn if I had been compelled to stare into my car’s rearview mirror.

So there I stood, on my tiptoes.

My husband is 6’3″ and he built our bathroom to accommodate his height.
I get it.
In most mirrors he can only get a gander of some of his chin and neck. Extremely annoying, SO not helpful, and at our age your neck can be demoralizing.

I am 5’4″ on a day that gravity and my self-esteem are being kind enough to let me hit that mark. So unless I’m on my tiptoes, which, after ten years at that sink, like a ballerina on point, has become my natural stance, I see only my eyes and forehead.

We really are a circus freak show of a couple.

Standing together, side by side, I fit neatly right under his armpit.
He is Paul Bunyan.
I am wee.

Sorry, I digress.

Okay…

Here is the exercise: you stand at a mirror, gazing deeply into your own eyes.

I know. I can feel your resistance. I recognize it because I felt it for years.

Get back to the mirror!
Don’t look away, which will be your first natural reaction because our mothers taught us not to stare.
For women, this is like putting a blank canvas in front of us, we want to get to work.
Just as we’ve done every morning since the first day we were allowed to wear make up, we pluck, shuck, spackle and rouge.

Don’t. Put down the mascara. And those tweezers. Stare only into your eyes.

Now repeat three times: I love you, I love you, I love you.
Without laughing.

I broke into a huge smile and burst into a giant belly laugh during my first attempt.
I’m not sure why.
It just felt like Ashton Kutcher was going to come peeking around the corner with a camera crew and deliver the horrific news that I’d just been “punked”.

But let me tell you what has happened instead. Over the last several weeks I’ve been brought to tears, watched my face morph in front of me, felt gratitude and finally love.

I’m falling in love with my own face The same, unaltered one I’ve worn for fifty-seven years.

In love with each line and imperfection of which I am exceedingly familiar. Tiny scars, thinning lips, the flecks of green, blue and brown that inhabit my irises.

The biggest surprise has been the way those eyes are starting to look back at me.

Full of pain and joy, empathy and understanding.
I’m becoming acquainted with what inhabits the space behind those eyes, to something deeper still.
The observer — my soul.

I suggest you give it a try, but like with me, if it takes a few years, your soul will understand, it’ll wait. It’s not going anywhere.

I love when you talk to me, tell me how this goes. Try it for a couple of weeks and write your results in the comments below.
When you share you really help other people.

Sending love,
Xox