A Little Dog Shall Lead Them: Messaging the Universe One Snarl at a Time

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whitedogfacebookMany years ago I had a yellow and white hound dog named Boomer. One morning my husband and I came into the living room to discover Boomer lying on her back, practically upright, propped against the arm of the sofa. She appeared to be sitting up. “My God,” my husband said, eyes wide. “She’s evolving!”  A few weeks later Boomer trotted into the kitchen, howling (her standard greeting). In her mouth was a half-eaten page she had just torn from a magazine. I grabbed it and glanced at it before throwing it away. It was–and here I do not lie–a picture of a yellow and white hound dog. And not long after the magazine incident, my husband and I were sitting in our living room with our three dogs and six friends. We were discussing our respective art careers; the mood of the room was energized and hopeful. As the night wore on and the other dogs slept, Boomer raised her head and assessed the crowd. Suddenly, without provocation or warning, she fixed her gaze on one of the friends and let out a threatening snarl.

I have always believed that messages are everywhere, told by things living, dead, and inanimate, and arriving through intention, accident, providence, coincidence. An evolving dog, a self-portrait ripped from a magazine, a fixed gaze and a snarl–these are like dream images to me, on and around which I am invited to craft what I most need to hear or learn. Boomer was like a personal oracle for me. At the time she was evolving, I was doing a bit of my own, looking into a new career. When she delivered her self-portrait to me, I was living in a veritable dump and needed to take a long, hard look at self. And when she snarled at my friend, I wondered: was there something she knew that I didn’t know?

Carl Jung famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life & you will call it fate.” So tell me: what messages are arriving on your doorstep right now that you aren’t listening to?

 

 

 

Who Deserves to Live Well?

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me and wymaya in San MigYesterday I climbed the steps to my writing garret to face another many hours of working on my book proposal. I’m almost finished with it–well, with the draft that will go to the editor/coach before coming back to me for MORE many hours of work. At any rate, before I could even sit down at my desk, a little yellow Post-it note caught my eye. On it was scribbled, “Who deserves to live well?” Although it was in my handwriting, I didn’t (and still don’t) remember writing it. More importantly, I can’t imagine what inspired me to write it. It’s not even a real question, what with its snarky allusion to haves and have-nots, and the idea that some people have a worth that exceeds others’ and that this somehow makes them more meritorious of living well–whatever that even means. Was this why I wrote it? As a reminder that there can be no judgement when it comes to the question of deserving to live well, and that includes no judgements against the self? As my husband has pointed out to me time and again, I’m of the mind that I must earn what others unquestioningly take: vacations, a helping of pie, the right to watch a movie after dinner instead of returning to my book proposal. Maybe this was truly a “note to self,” a rhetorical question meant to wake me up, remind me what’s what, fend off the usual crushing self-judgment with which I often approach my work, and my play–my life. Who deserves to live well? Maybe the emphasis wasn’t meant to be on  deservingness, but on living well. Maybe the point of the note had nothing to do with passing or not passing judgement, but was instead about embracing the life that is neither earned nor presented, but just is. Here I offer a Mary Oliver poem:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert
repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

 

 

 

 

 

900 Feelings and Five Feelings

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Dive1My husband called me while I was at the grocery store to tell me he had just listened to a podcast of an interview with Danielle Laporte. I was making my way through the Prilosec section, acutely aware of the figure I cast: I use a Bluetooth to talk on the phone because it leaves both hands free for driving, petting the dog, and, in this case, pushing a grocery cart, but I’m also aware that it makes me look slightly crazy, as if I am talking to myself–and answering myself–animatedly. But as I exited the antacids and entered the cereals, I forgot to be self conscious, ironically because my husband was talking about just that: self consciousness. But of another kind.

The Desire Map, LaPorte’s book upon which the interview he heard was based, is about arriving consciously at the doorstep of our lives. It’s about putting considerable thought and intention into how and what we want to feel in our lives. LaPorte talks about gratitude lists (something my life coach has been hammering into me), goal setting, and a letting go of the kind of ambition that blinds you to what you have actually already achieved. We feel 900 feelings in the course of a day, LaPorte says in her podcast (which I ran home and  listened to immediately), but she encourages us to come up with a list of no more than 5 feelings we WANT to feel, and that we are willing to commit to feeling,which we do by consciously showing up in our lives on a day to day, hour by hour basis. Got your list of 5 desired feelings? Now what can you do that will make you feel them? If one of your desired feelings is joy, what can you do today that will bring you joy? If one of your desired feelings is connection with others, what can you do today that will make you feel that? Hour by hour, day by day, we build our lives through conscious intention.

LaPorte is youthful-sounding and accessible and her insights tie directly into the concepts and cornerstones of my life coach training. I’ve downloaded her book on Kindle and I’m reinstating my gratitude lists and I’m going to make a list of “accomplishment” goals and “feeling” goals. Right after I put away the malted milk balls and the Prilosec.

Matzoh Brittle and the Comeback Group

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photo-1Last night was the inaugural meeting of my new writers group. OK, “new” isn’t quite true. Three of the four of us have been in a group together before, for about 5 years. We disbanded in part because my writing coach felt that I was getting too much input on my book-in-progress, none of it consistent. So I went it mostly alone for a few years before the realization that I missed having a writers group set in. Sure, I can talk to my husband Daryl about writing, and because he makes his living as a fine artist, he is perfectly capable of having head-scratchingly important conversations about artistic process, blocks, frustration, and the creating vs. marketing conundrum that every artist, if he or she wants to get his work out into the world, slams into.

But when you are a writer, there is something about connecting to another writer that isn’t the same as connecting to another generically creative person. We’re an odd and sometimes tortured bunch, what with our quirky working hours and our social discomforts, and how it is we can labor over a project for months, years, decades, never knowing if it will make it out of the chamber of our minds and into the world, alive.

And so it was that last night the four of us descended upon a quiet living room in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with essays, chapter summaries, and book overviews in hand, to see what we could forge from the fire of our history and our desire to move forward together again. After a dinner of tortellini soup and salted caramel matzoh brittle (my wan nod to Passover) we commenced to doing what it is we do best, and most passionately: laboring over arc and voice, narrative distance and word choice, reader expectation and marketing strategy, and branding and blogging. Except we did it together. And I’m here to say that it was about damn time.