awakening

Let’s be serious here. Since I know we all have a saboteur, this is a really important question to ponder. You’ll get what I mean in a minute.

Who is that person that derails you? Your harshest critic personified? Not necessarily just that voice in your head, but an insecurity that has taken on real flesh and blood to become your saboteur?

Danielle La Porte admitted on a recent podcast with Brene Brown, that in the past, her’s was the Silicon Valley dude sitting in the front row of a talk she’s giving. He’s wearing a $700 hoodie, not giving a rat’s ass about who she is or what she’s saying. “He thinks I’m too woo-woo, too flakey. I can see him and I can tell he can’t wait for me to shut up so he can get the hell outta there.”
Off. The. Rails.
Saboteur 1
Danielle  0

Brene’s saboteur was any academic colleague.
With twenty-something years in academia, she can spot her nemesis in a hot second: Arms crossed with the prerequisite scowl. Academics want hard facts. They want words, no pictures. They don’t trust anything heartfelt as ‘fact’ and vulnerability, Brene’s wheelhouse, is well, it’s better left to Super Soul Sunday — don’t call it hard research.
Big shame happens in that space (another Brene Brown specialty).
Off. The. Rails.
Saboteur 1
Brene      0

Stand-up comedians can tell you exactly where the ONE person who wasn’t laughing was sitting.

Actors on stage have literally stopped the show to confront the guy who’s on his cell phone.

When I’m in the middle of telling a story or reading something I’ve written, and the listener yawns or sees something shiny and changes the subject—that sabotages me — every time.
Clearly I’m a bore! I lament to myself. I take it personally. It can be a stranger or my best friend. It is often my husband — It was ALWAYS my Dad.

We all feel like we’re being judged and not only that — their reaction confirms that somehow — we’re not enough.

Brene Brown had a great suggestion. She says to her critic, “Hey, you can look at me however you want. You can judge me all day long. I know you and I know your story. Everybody has a story that would break your heart.” She goes on, “Even the Silicon Valley dude. They armor it up. What I’ve learned is to never take on a job or a project JUST to win over this critic, this saboteur.”

Amen sister.

That, you guys, is the takeaway. Well, one of them anyway.
Don’t waste one moment of your precious life trying to win over the saboteur.

You ARE good enough. Better than good enough, you’re the best YOU on the planet!

Don’t read your reviews, even on Yelp, especially on Yelp, and DO NOT listen to the haters.
Haters gonna hate.

I want to hear from YOU but I don’t want any comments unless they’re nice and by-the-way, I saw you yawning.
Carry on,
xox

If you like writers, and who doesn’t, you can check out the Beautiful Writers Podcasts on iTunes, they’re awesome!
http://beautifulwriterspodcast.com

I heard a story recently about a woman and a cat. Not the usual story of feminine-feline-obsession. There were no special little kitty-cat outfits or freshly massaged beef flown in daily from Japan. Nope. The cat became this woman’s catalyst for change. Long, long, overdue change. Here’s the story:

A woman lived in an apartment for a long time. Too long. As the landlord aged, his saint of a wife passed, he fell into ill-health, and his temperament changed. And not for the better. He turned from a basically okay guy into a pot-bellied, yellow-toothed rat-bastard.

Meanwhile, as an act of solidarity, the once lovely building began to fall into disrepair as well.
Not all at once mind you, but systematically, in baby steps. First, it was the single elevator which became a hit or miss box-of-terror. The out-of-order sign became a permanent fixture and if you didn’t feel like walking the seventy-eight steps up to the third floor with your groceries, you took your chances. But not without a Valium. And a crowbar.

Everywhere you looked the paint was peeling faster than a bad sunburn. The front buzzer hadn’t worked for years, (friends just shouted up for the keys to the front door from the street below her window), and her oven either made lukewarm everything or charcoal briquets.

Everyone who visited the apartment urged her to move.
But after eighteen years of rent control, she just couldn’t bring herself to leave. And they allowed cats. That is until the fateful morning he came banging on the door to personally deliver a UPS package addressed to her that he claimed was loitering in the front lobby. When she answered the door, her roommate the friendly feline, came over and wove itself in and around her legs, furiously exfoliating its face on her three-day stubble while purring loudly.

Too loudly.

“What’s that?” Her landlord hissed between teeth the color of aged, ivory piano keys.

“Oh, uh…that’s my cat”, she stammered.

“We don’t allow cats in this building!” He bellowed, his fat belly quivering for emphasis.

“But I’ve always had it”, she replied nervously, trying to shoo the cat away with her slippered foot.

But the cat thought it was a fun new game and began tightly hugging her muck-luckity clad foot with its front paws while furiously rabbit-kicking it with its hind legs She grabbed the box from his twisted, cigarette stained fingers and closed the door to just a crack in order to hide the madness happening just below her bathrobe.

He was undeterred.
“The cat goes or YOU go!” he yelled. “You have one week or I’m evicting you.”
With that, he managed to propel his girth away from her door and with enormous momentum practically plummeted down the stairs. She slammed the door leaning against it for support, trembling. The cat strolled away contentedly, convinced it had beaten its opponent into submission. Satisfied, it jumped up onto the large, carpeted, cat tree next to the window, rolled into a ball, and promptly fell asleep in the warm morning sun.

What am I going to do? she wondered.
She had to admit that the place had transformed over the years into a shit-hole and the landlord into a troll; but the thought of moving sent her into a full-blown anxiety attack. She had savings, it wasn’t that.
She wasn’t good with change.
She hated the thought of leaving, of looking for a new place. She was used to it there. Even though she knew her quality of life could be so much better—she was willing to settle. For everything that was wrong with the place, the voice in her head came up with a million reasons why it was so much easier to stay.

Her tolerance for mediocrity, misery, and sub-standard living conditions had reached an all-time high.

Terrified, she hid every sign of the cat.
Late at night, she’d load its dirty cat litter and empty food cans into bags and lug them three flights down, out to the scary-ass alley where she’d walk several buildings over to use their dumpsters. The cat box took up residency in her shower when she wasn’t using it, and she played the radio during the day while she was at work to hide the sounds of any meowing.
One Sunday it took her nearly the entire morning to move the behemoth of a cat tree from its sunny place next to the dining room window into a dark corner of her bedroom, where she made sure to keep the blinds closed on all of the windows—just in case.

One night, laying in bed, she literally made herself sick with worry. She realized that not only was she miserable, she had now seriously diminished her dear cat’s quality of life as well.

And THAT was what turned out to be the last straw!

The next day she begrudgingly mentioned to some friends at work that she needed a new place— a place that took cats.
Not even three weeks later, word came of the most adorable little house-behind-a-house owned by a terrific man, his equally fantastic husband, and their two Siamese cats. It was a fresh start! Fresh in every way. New paint, shiny refinished hardwood floors, even the unfathomable (and something she’d never dared to wish for)—a stackable washer and dryer! Not only that, it was at ground level, the oven worked like a charm, and the front porch was screened with a perfect spot for the cat tree.

Nobody was happier about that than the cat.

Now…you may be wondering, did the cat make this happen? Did it show itself at just the wrong time to get this ball rolling? Perhaps.

But I think the real moral of this story is the habit many of us have of dragging our feet on the way to our own happiness.
I’ve done it and I’m sure my friends that you have too. It’s about self-worth and why our cat’s, friend’s, spouse’s (fill in the blank), everybody else’s happiness is more important than our own.

It’s also a story about how there are great possibilities out there, possibilities we could never have imagined—if we can only just step out of our own complacency and fear.

Take it from this cat story, the very thing you dread could be the best change you’ve ever made.

Carry on,
xox

Throughout the years I’ve run my life through numerous filters. I think we all have. And most of mine have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.

After a nasty break-up, my filter informed me that ‘all men cheat‘. If things went south for me in business, the filter which I ran my life through convinced me that I ‘couldn’t catch a break’.  For a short period of time it even told me that leaving the house without lipstick was ‘bad luck’.

It has become my practice, as of late, to run everything I do through the most recent filter—the shit to value ratio—which is exactly like The Law of Diminishing Returns, except it has to do with shit, and how much we take to get what we want.

It’s not very scientific, and in fact, it flies in the face of most societal norms. But it makes life so much easier, which makes me happy, and at this stage of the game I’ll choose happiness over almost anything else.

If you’ve never heard of it, it goes something like this: How much shit must I endure to get value?

Here are a few examples from my life. I think you’ll see what I mean.
For instance, how long is the drive (i.e. how many hours of my life will I lose sitting in traffic) for that thing I absolutely need to do? (The answer for me is: if it goes beyond 30-40 minutes—I rethink it. But there are some exceptions, I’m not an asshole.)

How much mindless chit-chat is required to get to the authentic, substantive, issues that I’d rather discuss? (My endurance time is getting shorter and shorter. Soon, I’m afraid I’ll stick a fork in my eye at dinner parties after only ten minutes.)

How many horrible, unreadable first drafts come before I can cobble together one good sentence? (The answer is nine.)

How long do you stay in a loveless relationship just for the security, or because you’re too lazy to leave? (The answer for me was seven. And that was four years too many.)

How many hours and dollars will you spend to battle the effects of aging? (I stopped dying my hair blonde which turned out to be the best money I haven’t spent in years!)

How many years will you suffer the whims of a terrible boss? (Twenty. And he wasn’t all bad. Said the woman who stayed too long.)

And how much pain will you endure? THAT is a biggie for me and the answers these days is… NONE.
I won’t suck it up and suffer for anyone anymore.

I won’t continue to hike with oozing blisters.

I won’t get the lip injections on a whim because I met you at the dermo before lunch.

I won’t get micro needling, dermabrasion, or that Hannibal Lector looking peel to promote collagen. Fuck collagen. It’s highly overrated. (But just in case I’ll drink some collagen protein.)

I won’t starve myself to be a size six.

I won’t let the highly recommended, sadistic woman with the indiscernible accent, burn skin tags off my body with a glorified cigarette lighter. (I got up and left when she wanted to look for them around my ass.)

I won’t try to keep my uterus inside my body. I won’t lalalala my way around that fact that it’s let it’s true feelings be known to me FOR OVER A DECADE. It protested in the only way it knew how—pain and bleeding. After I ignored that, it enlisted my bladder as an unwitting accomplice. Apparently, my uterus was going to ride it like a manatee low enough into my body that if I had a good laugh, or a sneezing fit, they could just slide out of me. No big deal.

Last year, I finally ran my loudly protesting lady-bits through this new filter—and had the damn surgery!

I recently read that Lena Dunham relinquished her uterus and while I know she is so much younger than me, it’s the perfect example of shit to value—and it had to go.

Too much shit for not enough value.

I’ve also recently begun running “the revisiting of old emotional wounds” through this filter. Listen, It was all the rage to do this back in the day. I did it. We all did it. We dove head-first into our pain, writhing around in it like pigs in shit.
But now I see my younger friends wanting to go down that road and I’m not sure I think it’s a good idea to go back in time and dig up all the buried bodies. Why?
YOU’RE DIGGING UP SO MUCH SHIT.
SO MUCH! The wounds are old—and they’re DEEP! 

And looking back, if one dollar is the highest return on that emotional investment, I may have gotten, in the end, maybe, forty cents on the dollar of value.

All I’m saying is that perhaps there is another way? A better way? A less painful way?
I suggest that first you run your life though this shit to value filter. I wish someone would have suggested it to me when I was thirty.
Or forty.
Or fifty.

Carry on,
xox

Hello everybody,
This was posted by my dear friend Leslie, on her Facebook page.
Everyone has a dear friend Leslie; someone you haven’t seen in years but manage to feel connected to through the miracle of social media. I met her over a decade ago, and even in those first few moments, as she helped me pick out only the coolest coffee table books to sell in my store—I knew we’d be friends for life.

I’d like to think we have the same taste. We don’t. She’s wayyyy hipper than I could ever dream of being, but that’s beside the point. One day, she told me that I had to have an exhibition of her husband’s art in my store, I did, and it kind of ended up defining the place.
So, now I cyber-stalk her on Instagram.  
When I see her post a particular swatch of fabric she loves, or a throw pillow, charcoal sketch, headboard, or couch she’s just purchased—I think to myself, Yes! Well done Leslie, I love that too!

When I grow up I want to be more like Leslie.
More diverse in my musical tastes (although I’m pretty sure we love all the same artists), more committed to finding small batch, off-the beaten-path, artsy-fartsy-folksy things to prop on a shelf in that very purposely, not-on-purpose way she has. Maybe I’ll even spring for a used-brick, New York lofty, so-good-it-makes-you-want-to-die, office getaway just blocks from Venice beach—only to be near hers.

Leslie is an adult. She’s good at it! But only in the best sense of the word—not in that stilted, 401K watching, void of any fun, kind of way. She’s a mother, a reader, a life-reinventor, a deep thinker, and an even deeper feeler (is that even a thing?). Leslie will know.
And besides all of that, we share the same sense of humor—self-deprecating and a little twisted, which often makes me snort-laugh coffee from my nose.

Anyway, Leslie posted this beautiful piece by Rania Niam the other day and of course, it touched my heart, I LOVED it, and wish I’d written it.  I think you’ll love it too, and Leslie. But you can’t have her. She’s mine. 

Carry on,
xox

You’re allowed to leave any story you don’t find yourself in. You’re allowed to leave any story you don’t love yourself in.

You’re allowed to leave a city that has dimmed your light instead of making you shine brighter, you’re allowed to pack all your bags and start over somewhere else and you’re allowed to redefine the meaning of your life.

You’re allowed to quit the job you hate even if the world tells you not to and you’re allowed to search for something that makes you look forward to tomorrow and to the rest of your life.

You’re allowed to leave someone you love if they’re treating you poorly, you’re allowed to put yourself first if you’re settling and you’re allowed to walk away when you’ve tried over and over again but nothing has changed.

You’re allowed to let toxic friends go, you’re allowed to surround yourself with love, and people who encourage and nurture you. You’re allowed to pick the kind of energy you need in your life.

You’re allowed to forgive yourself for your biggest and smallest mistakes and you’re allowed to be kind to yourself, you’re allowed to look in the mirror and actually like the person you see.

You’re allowed to set yourself free from your own expectations.

We sometimes look at leaving as a bad thing or associate it with giving up or quitting, but sometimes leaving is the best thing you can do for yourself.

Leaving allows you to change directions, to start over, to rediscover yourself and the world. Leaving sometimes saves you from staying stuck in the wrong place with the wrong people.

Leaving opens a new door for change, growth, opportunities and redemption.

You always have the choice to leave until you find where you belong and what makes you happy.

You’re even allowed to leave the old you behind and reinvent yourself.

Author: Rania Niam

https://thoughtcatalog.com/rania-naim/

Exhibit A ^

What’s the deal with Hydrangea?
I’ve learned to live with disappointment but this is too much!

When I cut them to place them in a vases around my house, it turns into a game of Russian Roulette. Some blooms will live a couple of days while a couple of the fucking, pom-pom devils my favoite flowers, will wither and die within minutes. 

There is no rhyme, there is no reason. 

I’ve tried every anecdotal cure to stave off their rapid demise (so don’t text or email them to me) but to no avail.

A squirrel and a hummingbird walk into a bar, look cross-eyed at a hydrangea—and it dies.
~ Ancient proverb.

I only mention those two critters because they were the only living witnesses to the hydrangea-hissy-fit I had this morning.

Question: Do you always express the appropriate emotion at the appropriate time? I’m asking for a friend. Anyway, I digress.

Our extreme temperatures have literally fried every flower and most of the leaves on my previously prolifically blooming bushes to a crisp—and I’m ashamed to report that THIS has ruined my summer. I read somewhere that you can hose them down at mid-day, when the heat reaches surface-of-the-sun degrees, but when I do that (and make no mistake—I do that) I get so overheated, so foamy at the mouth, drenched in sweat overheated, that I need someone to hose me down. My dog Ruby would probably do the honors except I can tell by the look in her eyes that she’d rather waterboard me.

What can I say? She’s going through a phase. 

Anyway, the squirrels are used to my antics but the hummingbird was caught completely by surprise.
It hovered around my face for an inordinate amount of time, sizing me up as I waved the hose around like an out-of-control maniac. (Wait, isn’t that redundant?) Perhaps it was thirsty or it mistook the droplets of sunscreen dripping off my nose for nectar? Maybe it was raised in a less dramatic environment?

Or maybe it was feeling the same level of disappointment that I was? I can’t be sure.

I know what you’re thinking, Get a life! Listen, the hummingbird was way ahead of you with her judgy-as-fuck resting bitch face.

And that’s when it hit me! This feeling goes much deeper than mere disappointment. This boarders on fury.
That’s exactly what it is! Misplaced fury!

I have to come to terms with the fact that my brain has become an addled bowl of green jello due to the sheer volume of shit to be furious about this summer. Take for instance, our fucked-up political system, the fact that our votes in the fall may be hacked, a (how can I say this without my head exploding) “questionable” SECOND Supreme Court pick, the White Supremacists who are crawling out from under their rocks and have the audacity to march—in the streets—in broad daylight, and who can forget the babies in cages at the border! It is killing me to see the effect that losing her mother to Alzheimer’s is having on my BFF, the cancer causing pesticides in our food, a new category at the Academy Awards, or the fact that people still care about what happens on The Bachelor. The Bachelor!

But I only have so much emotional bandwidth. I can only misplace so much emotion at a time. So, today, it’s hydrangeas who have disappointed me and I plan on Edward Scissorhanding them into submission. Today, they will take one for the team.

Tomorrow may be different; stay tuned. (Billy, watch your pony.)

Carry on,
xox

Happier times 🙁

Your beliefs become your thoughts.

Your thoughts become your words.

Your words become your actions.

Your actions become your habits.

Your habits become your values.

Your values become your destiny.

I think Mahatma Gandhi said this…or Oprah. I can’t keep them straight.

That’s big stuff right there. A big concept.

Because most of us, most of the time, myself included, think that all of those things, those actions, words, habits, thoughts—are all separate—disconnected. That they have nothing whatsoever to do with one another.

Wrongo Bongo! We could not be more stupid, misguided, delusional, misinformed, naive, forgetful.

You know this stuff.

I know this stuff.

My freakin’ dog knows this stuff.

So, just a gentle reminder to be mindful of your beliefs, thoughts, words, actions, habits, and values because they are all coalescing to form your destiny.

If you’re sloppy about it like I can get from time to time, you can say and think that you’re eating kale—but the kale is really donuts—and your belief in the destructive power of warm, yeasty goodness is too powerful to overrule the word kale—and just like that—the donuts I ate this weekend go straight to my ass. So…

Not sure of what you’re creating? Look around at your life. It’s a big clue. HUGE.

You like what you see? Fantastic! Keep doing what you’re doing. Not so thrilled with the lump of a chump on the couch? Even better! Because ALL of those things, those thoughts, words, blah, blah, blah—can be changed.
By you.
Right this minute.
Or after you finish your donut.

Isn’t that worth knowing?!

Wait. I think we just created a new belief. Let’s run with it! (Put down the scissors first).

Carry on,
xox

“What has been hidden from you will now be revealed. Pay attention!”
-Moth

My husband thinks I’m nuts. That is not an anomaly. Hardly! It is a rather common occurrence around our house.
You see, I have a tendency to hear voices and see certain things that are just out of the range of most “normal” folks, much to the constant bewilderment of my husband. Most of my pronouncements, which I can admit are…bizarre, are met with a combination of head scratching wonder and abject disbelief. But if asked, I’m sure he would admit that it’s one of the things that makes our life together…interesting.

Case in point: Friday night I heard something flying around our bedroom in the dark, flapping its wings and bouncing off the walls. You know, just another Friday night at the Bertolus’. The next morning I asked him about it.

“Did you hear that thing flying around our bedroom last night?”

“Uh, no,” he said.

“Are you sure? It was loud.” I pressed.

“Loud like how?”

“I dunno. It sounded like wings flapping…”

“Wings flapping?”

“Yeah and then it kept hitting the wall or the ceiling, I guess it could have been both.”

“Like a bird?” He asked.

“Maybe,” I answered. “I’m surprised you and Ruby slept through it.”

Okay, that was a lie. Those two could sleep through the second coming, Gabriel’s horn blaring and all.
Still, I wondered (just for a minute) if I’d imagined it. But I knew I hadn’t. 

“Maybe it was a dream? He said. I knew that tone, he was humoring me, AGAIN.

“I did incorporate it into I dream,” I said. “It had to do with…oh, never mind.”

I knew it wasn’t a dream. Something had spent the better part of the night before flying clumsily around our bedroom, of THAT I was certain.

Cut to: Interior. Our bedroom — Midnight Saturday night.

I got up to do something, I can’t remember what it was, probably pee or put my hair in a ponytail when something caught my attention. As I opened the door, the bathroom light illuminated a moth. But not just any moth. This one was the size of my head with beautiful markings and a confused look on its face. How did it find its way inside our house? I wondered.

Obviously, it was too busy texting to pay attention to its own GPS and made a left turn instead of a right at the fountain.

“I found out what’s been flying around our room!” I exclaimed, flipping on all the overhead lights, of which there are about ten too many. (Keep that in mind when you remodel, don’t over do it. You don’t want them to be able to see your bedroom at night from space).

My husband and our dog both raised their heads and shot me the same exasperated expression.

“It’s a giant moth! Come look!” I squealed. I was doing a little dance. In my nightgown. With no make-up and my hair piled up on top of my head. The poor moth stared back, frozen in fear.

My husband, being the good sport that he is, stumbled out of bed and over to where I was stand/dancing. The dog stayed put. (Now I know who loves me more.)

“Holy Cow!” he said.
Not really. He would never say that. It was something more like Holy Shit! Or it was more likely he didn’t say anything at all, he just made the face of someone who’d had the misfortune of being woken up in the middle of the night to see a moth the size of a salad plate. You know, that face. Then he went back to bed.

Well, if you know me at all (and you know you do) I HAD to look up Moth Energy.
In a nutshell, they represent transformation and psychic abilities to hear and see things others can’t. What?! Well, that is just So me!

Here’s the article if you want to read further:

http://www.shamanicjourney.com/moth-power-animal-symbol-of-transformation

We tried to corral it and guide it outside but that was like herding a cat—with wings—so we just left it alone and went back to bed. Even though I’ve left the bathroom door open to give it a chance to escape, I heard it flapping around again on Sunday night only the flapping was less robust and I can’t find it anymore. It’s gotten stealthier the longer it’s stayed, but I can’t imagine something that large can stay hidden forever. Moths only live a week or two (I Googled it) so depending on its age (I’m guessing teenager) I suppose it’s going to take one last spin around our room tonight—and then die.

Or it could meet an untimely end at the hands of our ceiling fan.

Oh, Christ on a cracker what do you suppose THAT means? It can’t be good.
Never mind.
Carry on,
xox

This is dedicated to my friend Laura F. 

I remember riding on the motorcycle last summer along the continental divide, admiring the groves of beautiful Aspen trees that filled the landscape for mile after mile, as far as the eye could see. At that point in September, their leaves were just turning the color of butter.

They are one of my favorite trees.
I have often marveled at their physical beauty, their mottled white bark and the shimmer of their leaves. But when one of my teachers back in the day, told me their amazing story, and how it related to humanity – well, I developed an entirely different appreciation.

Somehow the roads conspired with the music in my ears (or I’d just gotten better at choosing the tracks) as we would wind in and out of the gently sweeping curves, the edges lined with groves of graceful Aspens. I’ve discovered that I like to match big, full orchestra, sweeping instrumental pieces when we zigzag through the forests.

It provides a perfect soundtrack.
You all have soundtracks that run through your lives – right?

The particular day I’m thinking of, I was listening to Peter Gabriel’s New Blood Special Edition, which is his genius SO album mixed with full, and I mean a FULL orchestra. Many of the instrumental tracks are over seven minutes long and IN YOUR EYES, playing at full volume in my headphones all throughout the mountains of Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, just made me weep.
Perfect temperature, scenery, music, road, and company can often do that to me.
It really is magic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq9ZHVAOZDw

Here’s what’s so unusual and really quite mystical about the Aspens.
They are believed to originate from the root system of Pando, which at an estimated 80,000 years old, is thought to be among the oldest living organisms on the planet.

Aspens are very rarely solitary trees, their roots can lie dormant under the surface for years, for instance after a forest fire, or severe climate change, where they will wait for the optimum conditions for an entire grove, not just a few to flourish.

A tree is actually an above-ground stem that has emerged from a single underground root structure.

In other words, they are a collective, a community, all connected to each other with a strength and durability that remains unseen.

Don’t you love that?

My teacher relayed that story to me (which of course I immediately looked up, because it sounded like a bullshit fairytale) to make the point about the origins of our human souls.
He hated that description: human soul. It would get him all fired up, red in the face.

“The soul is immortal, being human for a brief moment of time,” he’d huff.

“It is ancient, and every soul is connected, like the root system of Pando, Pando representing God or Source or whatever you want to call it. We, humanity, are the like stems or Aspen trees, we think once we’re above ground that we are autonomous, (the trees would NEVER be that stupid) when quite the opposite is true.” He was on a roll now.

He continued, “We get all of our wisdom, strength, and beauty from our unseen connection to each other and God. When one part of the group of Aspens is suffering, it affects the whole, once a certain percentage dies, the whole grove is lost. When it thrives, the same is true.”

He was making the second point about a world community, and about the fact that we should care what goes on not only next door to us, but down the street, in the next county, state and every country of the world. We tend to not pay particular attention to wars and suffering in faraway lands, but if you subscribe to the Aspen analogy, any human suffering affects the whole.

That particular teacher was a citizen of the world and he had a soapbox and wasn’t afraid to use it.

As I rode through the groves of Aspens, beholding all the beauty in front of me for those three weeks at the end of last summer,  I remembered his lecture and I could feel how sacred this planet truly is.

If you EVER doubt that, walk or ride, through nature.
No pulpit necessary.
That my loves is my Church.

Tell me, do you feel the Universal connection in nature? How can we practice more connection in our day-to-day lives? Any thoughts? I LOVE your feedback!

Sending Aspen Connected Love,
Xox

I worked as a supermarket checker until I was thirty. It was mindless work, paid decent money, and had the flexible hours I needed for the other things I cared about like school and acting.

I was a damn fine checker. The best. The kind you’ll wait in the longest line for. I was fast, nice, with a minimum of small talk. Standing and scanning groceries has a zen quality about it. The repetition can send you into a zone of complacency. If you’re lucky, faces blur and time flies.

That was the case for me maybe 10% of the time. The other 90% of the time I was judging the contents of everyone’s carts, making up stories about what they were buying and why.

I know! Your worst nightmare, right?

I was the girl who stifled a giggle when the dude with the greasy hair and the porn mustache who was drowning in Brut cologne came thru the express line EVERY Friday night. With a case of Coors, a carton of Marlboro reds and Maxim condoms (whose tagline was printed on the box: For those who live large) his story was a no-brainer.

“For those who live large!” Can you stand it? I couldn’t. The minute he was ten paces out into the parking lot, racing toward his Trans Am—I’d burst out laughing. Nobody else in line was paying much attention so I’m guessing my outburst appeared a little manic.

Whatever.

There was Ms. Shaw, an ancient, (she was probably in her late forties at the time) spinster/cat lady, who arranged her cat food in neat stacks by flavor in her cart. Anal-retentive doesn’t do her justice. She bagged every red delicious apple in a separate plastic bag and grouped all of the green vegetables together—away from the other colors. And once it was placed on the conveyor belt, none of the food could touch. (Is this making you a bit twitchy?) She also bought bourbon if I remember correctly, which seemed so out-of-character that I made up an imaginary life for her. In my imagination, she still lived at home with an even more ancient (sixty) boozy parent.

Then there was the woman who came in once a week and bought six bottles of Clairol #6 blonde hair dye. She had dark brown hair so I’m not sure what that was all about. Maybe she dyed her kid’s hair? Or her pubes? Who knows? Maybe she was a hairdresser who only liked to use that one color because she believed that blondes had more fun?

Whatever.

There were a lot of women back then that bought douche. Is douche still a thing? I read somewhere that it’s unhealthy for you since your vagina is self-cleaning, like an oven. Anyhow, if it went on sale there’d be a run on douche and these douching women would buy entire baskets of it. Inevitably, we ran out and I had to manually write-up “rain-checks” for Summers Eve douche while they made the entire line wait so they could take advantage of the sale price another time. I had one woman who bought douche and two pints of rocky road ice cream EVERY DAY. Eventually, the store had to put a kibosh on the douche hoarding. They came up with a limit. No more than three boxes at a time. When we tried to enforce that rule I thought there was going to be a riot! Pandemonium broke out. Nothing was going to keep these women from their “fresh feeling!”

I’m curious—Is douching addictive? Does your va-jay-jay forget how to self-clean? Whatever.

Speaking of fresh, I had a man who used to bag his meat and Irish Spring soap together and when I’d try to separate them he’d grab them away from me and reunite them. Finally, I asked him why. “I like the way it tastes”, he replied.
My intuition told me he lived alone. One evening the assistant manager was helping out, bagging groceries for me and when he saw me throw the soap in with the meat he just about lost it. “It’s okay”, I assured him, “he likes the way it makes the steak taste.” He looked back at the customer who was nodding enthusiastically. The guy swore by it.

I never had the courage to try it. It reminded me of menthol cigarettes. Bleck.

I’m going to say this—I can’t help it. The buying habits of the general public are weird. There were people who lived on TV dinners, people who, in my humble opinion drank WAAAAYYY too much diet coke, people who spent all their money on junk food and cigarettes, and the young anorexic girl who only and ever bought celery.

You can tell a lot about a person by what’s in their grocery cart. It’s a snapshot into a life—a peek into some of our most private habits—eating and personal hygiene.

So, I curate my cart when I go to the store. The implication of shame keeps me honest. Lots of fruit and kale, no candy or donuts. I know that no matter how disinterested they look the checker is making up stories about me so when I buy anything remotely embarrassing (like Monistat, lubricant, four boxes of Triscuit, or the second bottle in a month of the sour mix for my whiskey sours) I go thru the self-check-out line because I’m a damn fine checker. The best. Fast, nice, with a minimum of small talk—and most of all—discreet—not at all judgy.

Carry on,
xox

Since we’re all just making this up as we go along, I have a question for ya, because I haven’t been able to figure this one out for myself. What is the deal with women and pain? And do we tolerate more than we should? 

I suppose we can include men in this too. I mean I heard a man, a doctor of psychology, talking today about men tolerating discomfort. He cited having to pee really bad at a movie and not getting up until the “urge” had turned to an “imperative”. If you asked that same man (preferably after he relieved himself) what the movie was about, he’d have a hard time telling you. His discomfort took him out so of the moment it actually disrupted his quality of life.

Gotta go potty – 1
Quality of life – 0

Which brings me back to real suffering…and women. Why are we willing to sacrifice our quality of life even for one minute let alone several months or even years? Maybe it stems from the fact that we are genetically wired to push something the size of a bowling ball out of a hole fit for a marble without a complaint?

I don’t know. What do you think?

I had a friend in high school who suffered excruciating pain during her periods. The cramps were so debilitating she had to plan her activities so they wouldn’t fall close to “that time of the month.” When I told her that wasn’t “normal” and asked if she’d seen a doctor she replied, “Oh, gosh, no. I just figured every woman suffers like this.”
Uh, no. No, we don’t.

Cramps – 1
Quality of life – 0

What about men who cheat and the women who love them?

It seems improbable that any woman in her right mind would stay with a man who cheats and yet history and my contact list are FULL of them! And these are not stupid women. On the contrary, some of the smartest, funniest, most accomplished women out there have had their marriages hacked by the nanny.

And it doesn’t happen just once. Some men are serial cheaters.
And these amazing women look the other way. They settle.

I can understand the rationalization—because I’ve heard it all.
It can be a financial thing. Or a little kid thing. It can even be an “I’m just not ready to leave yet,” thing. Still, if you dig below the surface, just past the cave where the soccer team and their coach were trapped, you know, thousands of feet deep where all of the feelings have been buried. There, in the pitch-blackness, lies an endless stream of tears and rage. Along with a reverberating chorus of bats singing “Why aren’t I enough?”

Infidelity – 1
Quality of life – 0

Every one of these examples speaks to me. What about you?

I’ve had to pee so bad I’ve used a bush on the side of the road because I didn’t speak up when there was a perfectly good bathroom an hour earlier. I toughed it out. I guess I’m so familiar with discomfort, it barely registers…until it’s almost too late.

Same with my lady parts. I had a fibroid, okay make that eleven, that gave me a uterus the size of a sixteen-week pregnancy. It crept up on me slowly, over a decade, but come on!  There was bleeding and pain and there may have even been waddling and some incontinence when I laughed (which means I basically peed a little ALL THE TIME). Why was it okay to tolerate that? 

I have no idea. Like I said, I’m familiar with discomfort. 

I too had a boyfriend who cheated on me. I loved him something awful (which should have been an omen). And I can totally relate to the Why aren’t I good enough for you? syndrome. I was so distraught I thought it was somehow my fault which he LOVED because that meant he was completely and totally off the hook. I did research to fix us. I read every book on relationships and what goes wrong. I laughed at all of his jokes, cooked more of his favorite foods, and waxed off all my pubes.

But we all know that wasn’t the answer. So what is?

I know of two times he strayed and I forgave his lying ass, but I soon found out that was just the tip of the iceberg (the iceberg I wanted to tie around his scrotum to give him a tiny popsicle dick).
But I’m not bitter.  

So…please explain this to me. Why is it okay to settle for less and tolerate pain?

But first, go make yourself a sandwich, and buckle up. I have a feeling we’re in for a long, bumpy conversation.

Carry on,
xox