Tag Archives: gifts

Sep22

Gifting Myself

Posted on by
Standard
Me at the artsy Airbnb in Trastevere, Rome starting my birthday with journaling

Late Birthday Musings

It’s been hard for me to talk about my age & now, the next BIG birthday has finally come. The anxiety around it isn’t just the number itself or appearances. It’s the realization that not only is the list of what I want to do in this lifetime still long, my life has felt on hold, esp. as a homeroom teacher. For 2 years I stopped dancing, writing & submitting for publication. The beginning of the past decade was a flourishing, a blossoming. The end stagnation. Slowly, I’ve been gifting myself:

✨Rereading Emerson, then The Artist’s Way, A Return to Love, Big Magic, Refuse to Choose, & more.

✨ New glasses so I could “see” clearly, back to my signature red. New stones, Mexican matrix opal & sodalite.

✨Sang my heart out with Noam Enbar at his Howl workshops and mystical forest retreat to make my voice heard, shed what no longer serves me, show my true colors.

✨Returned dance to my life with Itay Ganot , a shift of consciousness through movement & Ella Greenbaum , a return home to Gnawa rhythms.

✨Started cello lessons and it feels like I was born to hold this instrument in my hands, feel its strings vibrating in my heart.

✨ Reinstated spiritual practices. I’ve gone to energetic healing: “For all the times I’ve stayed, even when it wasn’t good for me, please forgive me.”

✨شعراء بابل משוררי בבל Poets of Babel Поэты Вавилона has made a comeback this summer and it is just as magical as always.

✨Finally submitted for publication after pining away for a book so many years– like the fable of the man praying to win the lottery without buying a ticket (send me good mojo). I’ve bought a ticket.

✨All of this cumulated with magical Rome, remembering that I always have been a traveler at heart.

✨ The biggest development is, after a rollercoaster of 3 years, I’m no longer continuing at the school. This is one of the hardest closing of chapters in my life. Perhaps my most important lesson will be to show my students what that looks like to choose yourself.

For now, I am in the Divine Unknown and grateful. 🔮🧿📿🌈 All I know is, I promise to heed my inner compass, trust myself, bring my fire.

Thank you, Reflections of Love, for the sparkling blessings, colorful wishes, and shiny vibes. 💚✨🌈

Poet’s of Babel’s Comeback I
Rereading Emerson, then The Artist’s Way, A Return to Love, Big Magic, Refuse to Choose, & more.
New stones: Mexican matrix opal & sodalite.
Poets of Babel Comeback II
Dec29

On “How to Avoid Work: A 1949 Guide to Doing What You Love” & a Response to Mother

Posted on by
Standard

You know you’re in the right place when you just glow from it. Being in the flow, in the zone, it has as many names as the names of god. I have a firm belief in the gifts given to each, in the muses that come and go at their own will, in the art that comes through us but is not of us as our children do and aren’t. Gifts in the world but not of it as some said of their famous savior.

I also have a firm belief in belief.

People succeed or fail, in spite of or especially because of their tawdry circumstances.

It’s in autobiographies everywhere.

The exceptions- I said I don’t believe in exceptions- but the exceptions of arriving to the dais come down to the quality of belief in the possibility of achievement. Suddenly, as distant as I could possibly be from religion, I finally understand faith. All the successful, however defined, are devout. They ignored the demurring cynics parading as realists in akimbo. What is reality? And are there not different versions of it? Just as truth?

“Facts” are always in the end, just someone’s opinion. From the State of Israel to my bickering children to the imagination of a five-year old to the discoveries of science, there is evidence of this. And even evidence is a synonym for fact, which is a perception of truth, which is a component of reality, which are all up for interpretation ultimately, which makes it all a choice.

And yet not a choice, no more than the singer chose to have the voice or the painter chose to mix colors well and draw straighter lines and rounder circles than I could ever dream of. No more than the accountant could choose being practical or the politician choose smooth words, except he thinks he chooses as fastidiously as the green-thumb-blessed chooses his seed and when the fruit is ripe for the picking.

The relationship between choice, and belief or faith, and gifts, circumstance and the 99% of events off of our radar screen is a desultory, polyrhythmic interpretive dance as incomprehensible and as beautiful and as debilitating and as empowering as the meaning of life itself.

Let us be whirling dervishes.

(See: “How to Avoid Work: A 1949 Guide to Doing What You Love” by Maria Popova from Brain Pickings)