You're Invited to a Pity Party! Bring Your Own Whine

If you have been following along with me, you've probably deduced that I'm a pretty optimistic little bunny over here. Throw me some lemons and I will whip up a batch of Splenda-sweetened lemonade with real mint I grew myself. I'm a plucky gal, I always land butter-side up, and my bootstraps get yanked on plenty.

In 2008, I survived the demise of my 16-year marriage, the death of my dear grandmother, a move from the house I'd lived in since 1995, a difficult job search after twelve years of full-time motherhood, and the dissolution of one of my most cherished friendships. (Divorce can be a cruel litmus test.) I handled it all in my customary spiritual way, believing that what will be...will be. And honestly, it is all working out just fine. (The friendship is now under repair and well on its way to recovery.) After all, we co-create the world in which we live. We attract to ourselves the things we want through affirming our goals, meditating for clarity, and following our bliss, our purpose for being here.

But I have a confession to make: I have doubts.

I've been teaching steadily for the last year and a half, making enough on a mostly part-time basis to get by. Barely. I can pay my bills and stay afloat, but I can't save and I am in no way ready for any sort of disaster. I am one busted HVAC unit or car repair away from being in the red. The bumper on my Civic has needed replacement since last Halloween, but I can't justify the expense on my sketchy income. Travel, especially with my kids, has always been very important to me, and it's just not feasible right now. It seems like my life is passing me by, and I am missing out because I can't scrape together enough to cover the price of admission. (And I have already dug through the couch cushions more times than I care to admit.)

Okay, so I'm supposed to "do what I love," and the money will follow, right? That's the kinda stuff I like to write about anyway. What do I love...? Well, I love to write.

Write a novel.

Okay, I did.

It's great, but a bit long for a first-time author, so write a shorter one.

Okay, I did.

This is a tough business. Maybe you should establish a name for yourself by writing some shorter pieces.

Okay, I did. I dropped them off with an editor of a magazine, who called me the next day and said she loved them. Wanted to publish them all. YAY! I should submit them to her publisher; here's the email address. I did.

"Thanks so much, but we don't have a spot for these in an upcoming issue."

What? But, the editor said she was laughing at her desk reading them. She said she never calls writers who submit things in person, but these were really good. She said I had the perfect voice for her magazine. That these didn't even need any editing. Huh? I'm confused.

See, I keep doing what I love, and the Universe keeps slapping me back down. Or at least that's what it feels like sometimes. I know I'm not alone in this feeling, or I wouldn't be sharing it here. I have friends who are better writers than I who keep getting slapped as well. I understand that it's part of the battle to publication, and no one gets there without some scars and wounds to brag about later on at writers' conferences. I don't mind taking my licks. I wanna earn my stripes.

But enough, already! I have two novels, both award-winning, for which I have yet to find an agent. The first one was very well-received at a book club a friend of mine has been doing for eight years. "I loved your book. Why haven't you tried to publish it?" When I explained that I had queried about forty agents who all passed, they didn't understand why it hadn't been picked up, saying it was easily in the top ten books they had read (out of nearly a hundred). What gives, Universe?

I get a request for the manuscript, my hopes go up, and I wait. Rejection. I throw a thirty minute pity party, then give the bootstraps a tug, telling myself that wasn't meant to be my agent. Then I keep looking. This roller coaster never seems to stop, and I'm getting nauseated. I'm beginning to doubt the process. Do my thoughts, intentions, and actions really have an effect on the Universe, on my possibilities for publishing? Will I ever get rewarded for doing what I love? Or do I just get off this ride and give up?

Pardon me while I wax pathetic for a post, but I think you probably know my answer.

No. I won't get off the ride. I might throw up at some point, but I refuse to give up. That will only insure that I definitely won't get published. And I will get published, or die trying. Sure, I may be 41, but I took one of those virtual age tests last week. It told me I was really only 22, and that I would live to be 93. That's over 70 more years of riding this roller coaster!

Woe to the people sitting behind me.

I guess we all have doubts. If we don't, we aren't paying attention. I used to envy those people who just blindly accept dogma and don't feel the need to filter it though their logical brains. Here's the book: read it, believe it, and hit other people over the head with it. Now I realize, I'm lucky to have my doubts. By the time I believe in something (which ain't much, I'll tell ya), I'm pretty solid in that belief. Conversely, there really isn't much that I disbelieve, thanks to a dear friend who pointed out to me that disbelief can be just as dogmatic as blind belief. There are a lot of things that I just don't know about. Still asking the questions, still looking for answers.

But one thing I do know: I love to write. And I'm gonna keep on doing it, even if I never make a penny from it.

So, thanks for coming to my party. Please take some leftover whine home with you. I'm trying to quit.

The Sound of Silence

Since I can't afford an actual spiritual retreat right now, earlier this year I tried to devote an entire weekend to complete silence--no communication of any kind with anyone else. For those of you who know me personally, I will pause now for you to finish your hysterical laughter....

Done? Okay. No, I didn't make it. Mainly because all this "stuff" came up that drew me away from the purpose of the weekend. (A very good friend's birthday party, for example.) I guess maybe I chose a bad weekend. But honestly, I didn't make it even for a few hours before I was talking to my cats about how hard this was. Oops...My daughter has pointed out that I "talk" myself through basic routine activities, like driving, paying bills, cooking, and shopping. I will say things like, "Well, I thought I paid that bill last week." "Why must people get in this lane and go so slowly?" "I guess we're out of Smart Balance, so I'm gonna have to use butter." "Oh my God. If I buy two of these tops WITH my coupon, I'll get them for like, fifteen apiece!"

"Who are you talking to?" she'll ask me.

"Um, I dunno. I guess you," is always my response.

"Well, I'm not listening." She is such a delightful child, really.

Truth is, I'm not entirely sure I AM talking to her. I'm just glad she's present so that I don't look too insane. I have always known I am very verbal, which was awesome when I took the SAT's, but now I wonder if I should learn to drink a nice big cup of Shut the Hell Up and Listen.

I need more silence in my life. Did you ever do this? You're feeling really stressed out, and there seems to be too much noise in the room, too much commotion, so you reach for the remote control and flip off the television, blaring it's obnoxious commercials in the background. Suddenly the room is serenely quiet and you involuntarily sigh with relief.

I need that.

Of course, I don't have television, so I'm speaking metaphorically here. But I need more silence in my life. When I got up this morning, the only sound I could hear was the symphony of birds outside my window. I noticed the little silences between their chirps. Artists would call that the negative space. The part of a painting that isn't subject matter. The visual silence. And those silences are there, in our lives, but we don't notice them. Eckhart Tolle says, "Even during a conversation, become conscious of the gaps between words, the brief silent intervals between sentences. As you do that, the dimension of stillness grows within you."

Deepak Chopra also touts the value of silence in our spiritual vitality. In The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, he writes, "Practicing silence means making a commitment to take a certain amount of time to simply Be." He adds, "If you never give yourself the opportunity to experience silence, this creates turbulence in your internal dialogue."

Perhaps it's that turbulence that keeps me chattering to no one in particular. I know that I process information through verbalization, and that unlike a lot of people who are more spatial than I am, I actually think in sentences. Most of you probably think in terms of images, emotions, memories, or thoughts, I would bet. I have those too, but mostly my head is full of dialogue. And I'm thinking if I don't get it under control, I may end up pushing a shopping cart full of junk through the city and muttering to myself. I mean, I'm already talking to cats in a pinch.

So here's my project for this week. Try it if you like. Every morning, I plan to experience twenty minutes of silence when I first wake up. This is different from meditation, where I sit still, eyes closed, and try to shut up my mind. This is me, walking around and doing whatever, making coffee, staring out the window, washing dishes, taking a walk, whatever. But in silence. No speech at all. Not even to the cats.

This week, let's all calm the turbulence in our inner dialogue. Let's look for the silent intervals between sentences, the gaps between words, the silences between chirps, and let's grow the dimension of stillness within ourselves.

There are already enough crazy cat ladies on the planet.

The Blob

My daughter the atheist is off to Christian Camp with her friends. I warned her that she should probably keep her religious/spiritual questions and doubts to herself while there, but her friends already spread the word that a Godless heathen will be in their midst.

"Why do you want to go to this camp anyway?" I asked her this morning as she rifled through my spiritual books, looking for a bible.

"I'm just going cuz my friends are. And for the blob."

"The what?"

"They have this cool blob out on the lake that we can bounce on and jump into the water. It's fun." She grinned, aware of how utterly shallow it is to attend a religious camp solely for their recreational equipment. I stared at her, and she shrugged, grin widening.

Oh well. As long as there's a blob... Besides, it can't hurt for her to listen to another perspective. And whatever she has to listen to, it can't be much worse than last year's "Rites of Passage Camp."

I thought it would be one of those camps that make the girls do a lot of hiking up mountains, rappelling, making fires, and other character-building activities that build self-esteem by turning the little puffballs into Lara Crofts.

No.

When I went to pick her up, the counselors announced that our girls had "become women" over the last week, and that we might not even recognize them now. I think her exact words were something like, "Your girls have changed. They have grown wings to emerge into women now, and we ask that you let them stretch those wings and learn how to fly. Give them room to keep growing."

At this point Wednesday turned to me and muttered, "Please get me out of this hellhole."

That week, she had endured a sweat lodge (in the Georgia summer heat), slept outside and alone in the woods, participated in numerous hand-holding and feeling-sharing sessions, and listened to lots of spiritual wisdom from the Earth Mother/Counselors. For example, when she cut her knee on a fall while hiking "like, five miles" to see horses that they couldn't even ride, she asked for a band-aid.

"Let me try this first," said one of the Earth Mothers. She closed her eyes and spread her hands over Wednesday's knee.

"Uh, what are you doing?" my daughter asked.

"Reiki."

"Um, it's bleeding. Can't you just give me a freaking band-aid?" Wednesday said.

So, this week at least she will be at a camp with proper first aid, I suppose. In case she falls off the blob and cuts her knee.

When I was a kid, camp was just camp. You went to sleep in cabins, sing cheesy songs by campfire, play pranks on each other, ride horses, shoot arrows, make lanyards, roast marshmallows, swim in natural bodies of water, and get poison ivy. There was no indoctrination of any kind, no one tried to push you outta the cocoon, and I never brought a bible.

And yet I am clearly a spiritual seeker. Maybe we should be letting our kids today figure things out for themselves. Instead of trying to convince them to buy into a ready-made set of ideas, whether it's Christianity or a New Age Spirituality, let them wander around in the wilderness on their own, literally and figuratively. Can't camp just be a place to go to have fun, spend some time away from parents, and grow up a little?

This is another area where I am proud that I have not had any expectations where my kids are concerned. I don't mind that Wednesday has decided she is an atheist. In fact, I'm rather proud that she feels enough acceptance from me to announce such beliefs without fear of reprisal. Especially in the bible belt. The fact that she is inquisitive enough to have doubts at this age and feel secure enough to express them...I'm impressed. Good girl.

Do I think she will hold these beliefs forever? Probably not, but it's fine if she does. I would rather have children that believe what they do because they arrived at it on their own, than children who believe what I do because I told them to, and they obeyed. My goal is to raise little free-thinkers.

So, whatever Wednesday has to listen to this week probably won't kill her. She will either dismiss it, assimilate it into her own thinking, or change her way of thinking to incorporate the new ideas. Either way, she will be thinking.

And my guess is she will be spending a lot of time on the blob. Good girl.