I am not here to write about the history of Arizona or even of Flagstaff but rather about how changing happens and how at times it can catch you by surprise, off guard even. This move has shifted my mind, my priorities, my behaviors, (remembering that I am on a school ground and should at least try to behave like a caring, kind, mature adult) everything has changed. All this change has in some ways fucked up the functioning of my mind, made me say and do a few things I already regret and have pushed me in ways I would never imagine. It has also left me questioning so much that I thought was solid and secure in my life and now seems to be a shaky piece. If life were a rock wall, I keep finding rocks that don’t fit. I am trying to decide if it’s okay to have these rocks, to let them be and allow my life to grow around them, or if they are causing such instability in that wall that they must be tossed out.

If there is any sort of “coming of age” in your late twenties then I think its here right now staring at me looking me in the face asking me what I will do with it. It seems to almost mock me at times, to laugh at me, other times it feels sort of reassuring. I keep feeling like I am turning around trying to find the “right” path and then getting lost, confused what direction to take. Then of course there are the mistakes that have come along with seeking out a direction, those mistakes you can’t repair, those words you can’t take back and lay heavy on your heart. I wonder will all this pass, it has to right? I keep telling myself its week eight in a new town and a new job, forgive yourself, but it is hard, hard to be gentle with myself.

This relationship to pain is one of the reasons I forwent drinking, and drugs. The affects of how these substances close your world how it can collapse in on itself after just a few drinks or a few hits, was never appealing because it brought me back to surgery and pain. Now my head is spinning slightly after a couple beers, its dull throb isn’t really the same as waking from anesthesia for the 15^th or 20^th time, but it does bring back memories. So did the conversation tonight, going through pieces of my art with new people, telling pieces of my story, it reminds me of my other life. Reminds me of my life of pain, of surgery, of bright lights and white floors. It reminds me why I make art, to tell that story and to one day, maybe, make a difference for the kids and adults residing inside the white walls of a hospital somewhere. It is that, that would make all the difference.

I don’t always do a very good job of taking care of myself. Of taking time off, indulging myself in little things. Partly it is money. I have always hated spending what little we have on myself, but partly it is time too. With school, work, and several projects always going I rarely find the time to take off. This weekend though I forced myself to take just a little time for myself so I could get a badly needed hair cut/trim. It has been probably almost a year since I had had my haircut. Since I don’t blow dry my hair and I use organic shampoo and conditioner it is pretty healthy but still after a year it was time. Aveda has always been my top choice for a salon because of their quality products. So I headed south down the freeway to my favorite little hole in the wall Aveda Salon for a haircut. Afterwards I indulged in a few badly needed products, some lipstick, mascara, and a little tinted moisturizer. It brought a smile to my face, and a bit of lift in my step so I think it was worth it. Sometimes you have to take a moment for yourself, whether it is a short walk, a quick movie, a sing-a-long with your favorite musical artist or something else, I believe its important. As an artist you have to recharge. Taking time for yourself to get pampered is part of recharging your creative energy.

Yesterday I threw a penny into the wishing well.
First clutching tightly to the little piece of copper.
My eyes squeezed closed, trying to envision dreams becoming reality.

Toss, it spirals and with a plump the coin falls through the water.
Ringlets from its entry point expanding.
It gently rests on the bottom of the pool its shinny circle joining hundreds of others.

This morning I think of my friend, how she prays at night when woken with insomnia.
I can imagine her, curled beneath the sheets, softly speaking words of longing.
I can see her dog rise and kiss her face, her prayers interrupted for the moment.

Today I pray palms together.
Breath deep.
Learning to trust in life.

This weekend in the never-ending state of unpacking and organizing I found a box of my old journals, mostly from my last couple years in high school. Many of the entries had me dieing laughing, the way I jumped from one love affliction to the next, the way I wrote, what was important. Then I happened upon a page written in 1998, things I needed to improve on and how I wanted to be different. The scary thing was so many of these things, were the same things I am struggling with now: how to be more confident, how to believe in myself, not care what others think, how to be kinder, gentler. 11 years later and I haven’t managed to conquer any of these qualities, at least not entirely. How long will these things follow me? When will I evolve into that illusive person I so desire to be? At the same time reading these snippets of my past self I found insight into who I wanted to be, repeatedly I said I wanted to write, something that while I want to do know I did not remember I have wanted to write for so long.

The loss of my dog spun me in to depression that I really hadn’t felt for a couple years now. Filling me with a deep bottomless sadness, a feeling of loss, and no motivation to move forward. I feel that I have lost a bit of focus: letting rejection letters take me down, letting life just fill in with out making a purpose or goal for my days. I know I need to bring back small goals, baby steps. With the end of year looming and the finish line for school also fast approaching I feel its time to get things back in to focus. I want to find my creative, artistic voice again. I want to make, produce, and market art again. One of the things that has held me back so much this past year is the cost of it, the cost to produce but most of all the cost of a show, (framing and shipping) has been too huge of a burden for us right now. In fact I had been accepted to be a part of really neat group show this fall in Los Angeles but ended up backing out because I needed to pay for shipping to and from and just couldn’t swing it. Really nothing has gotten better in that respect so I may still be limited as to what I am able to do, but I hope that I can find a couple interesting shows to participate in next year that don’t end up costing a fortune, a place to get published maybe, a couple art sales (fingers crossed), maybe something unexpected.

Another thing lodged deeply in the back of my mind is the goal I set for myself to find new and more challenging work when I graduated or before. Now with the challenging economy and job market I am not sure how this search will turn out, yet I know that I must be able to find more challenging work that better fits my skills. There has to be a place that wants to allow me to put my passion, creativity and experience to use. Putting myself out there again, is scary. I have grown secure in my job, its ups and downs, and its challenges. However, now is the time to embrace my learning and seek out something new. I know if I am persistent, in time I will find and secure the right position.

Hopefully this week off from school will be all I need to get some perspective, begin to refocus and challenge myself again. To move away from these strong feelings of despair and fear that seem to hold me right now.

I am delving deeper into photography exploring more things I can do with it, pushing myself to stretch. I am also thinking about my writing more. With all the papers I have written for school I wonder about academic publication, I wonder about other publication. I want to do more and am also thinking about teaching again. I can feel the Fall forces gathering energy to store throughout Winter and I can feel myself verging on something more as well.

We have both agreed, that no box goes with out being gone through. However still we have different opinions about what should be kept. I am a get rid of girl, he is a keep boy. So somewhere in the middle of these different paths we need to meet, knowing that neither is wrong, just different. This is something I struggle with, I feel like my opinion has to be right, that others need to live like I do, or at least the way I think one should live. I am not really sure where this comes from, but I have a guess that it comes from years of wanting approval from my family. So I cling to others approval and hold on to little ideas that if I can control the person I love (DH) into doing certain things they (my family) will approve of me (and him) more. It is silly really, and in my past trip to Vermont to visit my mom and sister and her family I tried to let that go. I am working to let go of trying to control my DH (and others) to conform to standards that I believe have been set, but really in many cases haven’t.

In this trip, I also caught myself passing judgment, judgment that was ill placed on family and it didn’t need to be there. Why do I think I know so much? That I could even for an instant decide for someone else what would be best for them, why for an instant do I believe I should tell or demand that my DH get rid of something that means something to him, or act a certain way? I think in the latter case that I can convince myself that his keeping something affects me, but really how, how much does it have any bearing on my life? So it’s an extra box, or vase, or book, does it really matter in the grand expanse of life? I don’t somehow become a better person because I have less possessions then someone else, it doesn’t mean that I am freer or happier or better in anyway. Possessions it is true can be negative but they can also be positive and heart warming. A friend recently gave me her hand painted Spirit stick, wood and paint, that’s all, making something both beautiful and meaningful for me. So you see it can be the simple and it also can be the complex that brings joy. Buddhism teaches us to free us from possessions that these attachments tie us down. However, we are tied down, we are on this earth right now, and I hope to be here for a while longer, I am not done. So maybe when I am 100 years old I can get rid of all the things I own, but not just yet. Nor can I easily shed my judgments of others, but I can become aware of them, and take into consideration how they affect others.

My road has been bumpy, it hasn’t been vanilla. I can remember once a teacher that I had a wise, creative and spirited woman told me that she didn’t see my life as ever being vanilla. She expected it to be more of a rainbow sherbet, colorful. And it has been, while part of me longs for a similar plainer life, another part of me knows I excel when challenged, I grow when pushed, I become what I am not because of those things that have been simple and easy but from those things that have been a challenge and a struggle. We do not grow and learn so much from what we have done right but what have done wrong or should I say different since I dislike the term ‘wrong’. Perhaps if we become more sensitive, more in tune with the happenings around us, we can learn from gentler pushes and shoves then if we turn away and become careless of our life.

As we grow old as women, our skin softens and becomes droopy and wrinkled. We become soft not like the softness of a child, whose skin is full of life, but energy begins to fade from our tissue, yet at this time our heart, our mind becomes softer too. We can become gentle, delicate, and sensitive. Of course this is always a choice I have seen many an old woman who has chosen to become hardened, rude, angry because her life wasn’t what she had envision. However those women that grow old gracefully, like my mom, laugh at life, smile easily and in the crinkles around their eyes is love no anger.  These women who choose this may not be perfect always but they strive towards gentleness a sort of softness that more then likely they couldn’t embrace when they were young. I don’t want to wait to be old, to become soft and gentle. I know life can be sour grapes but when you taste a bad grape you throw it a way right? Well I feel like its time do that with life, when the experience is sour like a bad grape its time to throw it out and move on! Here is to moving on, finding sweet grapes and throwing away the sour ones.

I think in part why I am working to hard to lighten the load is because I feel tight inside, cramped. Like I want out. And I know it part its because times are tough, tough for those I love, tough for me and I want this to shift. I am not sure how to get it to shift. I am not sure how to make things better. I take it upon myself to do it all and I just can’t do it. It is like with yoga, it is in part about strength in yoga but a larger part is about grace, and another very important part is about our anatomy or physical structure, sometimes that structure won’t allow us to move into a particular pose, sometimes life won’t give.

I have been slowly trying to reorganize things, cut down on some commitments as I gear up for school to start in a couple weeks. I want to have time do my best and really be present, while not over doing it. Yet as I go through this process I am immediately hit with the idea that school and work alone are not enough, that somehow by cutting things down to just that I am not being accomplished enough, that I may even be being lazy. Sure I know life will fill in any cracks of free time, its not that I will even have free time, but I keep getting this feeling that I am never doing enough. That I am not making a real difference, doing enough good, and so I add things on, more and more until I have to much and I feel crushed under the weight and end up disappointing someone or everyone. How can I get over the idea that going out with friends, have a few hours left in the day to curl up and watch a movie or just cuddle with my husband is good enough and that life can just be empty sometimes.

I read a recent piece in the magazine Real Simple about multi-tasking how this guy did an experiment on doing only one task at a time. The article fascinated me in part because of my chronic multi tasking state. I eat breakfast while checking my e-mail and talking to my mother-in-law. In away multi tasking is a very sad thing, it means no one thing gets your full attention. When I was in Vermont visiting my family I had the wondrous experience of not having to worry, not checking my e-mail, of having a conversation and just that. The best moment I can remember was with my little nephew who is just 6 months old he had been fussing and my mom had taken him outside, my sister (his mom) and husband where going on a run and my mom and husband talked while I lay on a quilt in the grass with this little chunk of sweetness. He pulled up grass and I tickled him with a weed, and hummed softly. We stared at the blue sky and wiggled to the music in our heads. It was wonderful I was just there present and happy. I want to have more moments like this in life. Yet at the same time I continue to have these feelings of inadequacy, I think a lot this comes from not being patient enough, that I want to live my whole life in a day, in a week, in a month. That I have a complete inability to look at what I do over a period of extensive time. I am not patient to see that I can make a difference over a long term, and I have trouble acknowledge that my work in my job is enough, and that on top of this I have added school. I know I need to cut things back so that I can do better a job so I don’t get burnt out and sick this fall and winter, yet I trouble wholly in the efforts to do this. Things can wait, the class I want to teach online can wait, the non-profit I volunteer at will manage without me or with less of me. I don’t need to control everything. I can let life unfold and work on being graceful as it changes around me, and I can be gentle with myself, when I don’t behave the way I want to, or say the words I want or do the best, I can forgive myself. I know I can do this but its hard, and it doesn’t feel like its important enough work, yet some part of me knows this is the most important work I can be doing right now. That a better job, art shows, connections, book writing, a new home of my own, exciting projects etc…will come in time, but that right now I need to become a better person, kinder, softer, more centered so that when these things do come I can embrace them and excel. Do you have any suggestions for me? How do you manage?

I am taking this pause that the earth is taking as a time to pause as well, school is out, and much of my time is my own now in a way that I seem incapable of managing well, but is also exciting. I am bursting with ideas, a little spurts of energy that disipates quickly in to a lazy fatigue. I have a whole list of things I want to do before school starts.

*Trim and load more of my mini watercolors on my Etsy shop
*Go through books and sell ones we don’t want/need anymore
*Upload photos to RedBubble
*Update my Flickr account
*Take a picnic to the White Tanks
*Visit the Japanese Gardens
*Take a day trip to Flagstaff
*Get back into work out routine
*Take a private yoga class
*Make some cards
*Play with my new oil paints
*Listen to music
*Start practicing meditation
*Say a prayer every night
*Read something uplifting every morning
*Print photos
*Put together a blurb book for 2008 and actually pay to get it printed