I’ve been flirting with the idea of how to create balance in my life recently, so I’ve decided to start by buying a new pair of New Balance running shoes and then doing whatever it takes to add a third mile to my walking everyday and push myself to a 20+ mile walkitation week.

I know, seems like a bit of a lame beginning but I’m cool with the symbol and I really like the name of New Balance so why not?

I started thinking about this as I started walking again at the gym and glanced the poster in front of me saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And sure, I’ve felt myself on that journey for the past year, but lately I’ve felt that journey has become unbalanced in me somehow? Maybe I felt it had even stalled? For a bit I had stopped going to the gym altogether and it’s almost like I felt like I’d chosen a treadmill of a different kind, the distraction of time?

So now I seek to find some new balance?

How did I get unbalanced? Honestly, I don’t know? Sometimes I feel I take too much in and allow it to effect me, trying to be all things to all people when all I really need to be is little old me and let others be who they will around me?

I know I do this to myself, kindof like a kid who likes to spin for way to long and ends up yakky, or those whirling dervish dancers in Persia?

The really fascinating thing about those whirling dervishes (is that a word?) is that after a while they become centered in the chaos and the whirling almost helps them enter into this altered state of equilibrium…..they aren’t dizzy? How amazing is that?

I feel that’s where my new balance is in the goddessy dizzy pursuit of myself centered in the chaos?

Within?

Walking my walk ~



article on Sufi whirling

Tabula Rasa

this space is for gulsoma
innocent child bride
this is my white flag waving
peace into her time

because I’m giving up
trying to make sense of it all
and so I’m raining clean today
wiping all the gall of it away…

all of it.

all of the heartache duality brings
in the knowing this is not the way
there is no excuse for this in my cosmos
who knows what omnipotence was thinking
today?

allowing this?
while we suffer that?

these are all my little children suffering
to come onto me ~
so let’s create the kingdom together
in this space ~ this tabula rasa…

this space is for gulsoma.

what I read that made me write this

tabula rasa

I feel I’m entering my second adulthood. I would say second childhood, but I've never left the first? I’m hoping in the game of life I drew the “skip midlife crisis” card and this isn’t just a phase, but rather a shift….a becoming…a new cosmos. This feels like rediscovery of self outside of self.

So what happened during the first adulthood? I think many of us are in competition then, trying to please parents, spouses, bosses, and last but not least ourselves. We don’t know what we want or why we want it, but we feel we deserve it….eventually. And so we defer.

Langston Hughes once asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” My favorite line from that poem is

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load?

Or does it just explode?

I think dreams deferred can weigh us down if we let them? If we refuse to step out of line and focus our intent on them rather than the millions of distractions around us, dreams just fester in us creating that feeling we all know? Futility.

But everything happens for a reason, even the sleepless nights? the self-doubt? the fury? the waiting? the...the...the...the...the...the... that’s all folks?

And so we’ve had enough deferring.

And instead of always looking at tomorrow, we start living in today.

One of my favorite southern cooks is the Savannah-based, Paula Deen. I like her because she loves people through the medium of food, from the Tabasco in her egg battered fried chicken to the cream in her grits cooked s-l-o-w-l-y just like she talks, Paula shares a part of herself. She’s a steel magnolia; and it wasn’t until she let go of her agoraphobia that she found the dream, hit her stride, and started dishing up soul food….passionately.

I was watching her biography last night, and it occurred to me that lots of famous or successful people make it seem so easy because they’re in synch with themselves? We rarely think about what got them there? We miss those tiny pieces of focused accumulated effort….the journey of a thousand miles that got them to where they are in their now.

We just see the results of the focused intent? And because of the magic of t.v. we perceive it to be oh so easy….

I doubt if it rarely is?

When I stopped asking myself, “What do I want to be?” and began feeling instead, “Who am I now?” Well, that’s when I detected momentum.

And so now I’m committed to pursuing myself passionately, honestly with all the intent Paula gives her macaroni and cheese. I am a lifetime of southern comfort. I am on a pilgrimage taking the first steps in my rediscovery of spirit. I do not feel I'll finally meet my soul mate face to face one day, I feel instead we've always known, and NOW are weaving this bond, layer by layer, in synch with the honest, accumulated effort of giving and receiving, of testing trust and ultimately coming to an understanding that we are loved for just being ~ ourselves ~

Simply, we are loved.

And, we are love.

Now pass the biscuits.

And Paula, if you ever read this: …go girl…go.

Paula Deen's Restaurant

Wikipedia article on the Harlem Renaissance

Niagara falls from the American side

In a photo mist
I saw Niagara falls from the
American side.

I saw it glide from the glassy gel,
prismatic energy on the rocks
alive, it stood on its side

and reflected possibility
freed in negative capability,

and I heard America singing

how sweet the sound that saved.

I stood there fragile,
wet with multicultural dew
wishing I knew all the answers?

But dawn fades faster than the night,
and it seems who’s might is right is
greyer than the mist rising from the furies.

So I bury all those ponderings,
the longings of my youth
the worries of the days well spent
in hopeful longing.

I let the water roar in me instead
and I wed myself, in selfish pity,
letting my humanity fill me.

This is a painting that I know too well…
I glance it once last time with no
fond farewell ~

Here I am thinking about time again, not as a line but as experience.

Do you ever do that?

Step out of line?

What happens when we do the unexpected?

I have a theory that we are all the butterfly effect when we assume responsibility for our own consciousness and choose to experience.

Not just live….

experience.

How can you do that? I think that a majority of time as it passes is mostly realized in autopilot, sortof like driving a car and not realizing you’ve reached your destination. Think of all the distractions we’ve created in modern society? Why?

If we do this, I suppose we’ll all end up where we think we’re supposed to be? All in a row.

But what if, just what if we took a different route? What if we saw some sights and wrote a poem along the way? What if that poem was scribbled on a wall and another read it and they started thinking about time differently?

What if we woke up some morning and decided to go to Las Vegas?
Or watch the sun rise and hear the birds wake up?
What if we decided to eat dessert all day?
Or call in well?
What if we decided to only use gestures for a week?

My daughter’s class ordered and is growing its own butterfly farm this month. The ones they ordered are called painted ladies.

I think maybe as she watches the ladies grow, we’ll talk some about time ~

and have a new adventure in this old Cosmos.