And Here's What The Fuck I'm Gonna Do About It

Writing the Body Retreat with Jen Pastiloff and Lidia Yuknavitch in Ojai, California this past weekend, the title is a prompt given to us by Lidia. An amazing experience unlike any other. Believe it. #womanchurch #gratitude

 

     I will allow Source to carry me, to provide, to guide.  I will do what’s in front of me to do: the next step, and the next and the next AS THEY APPEAR before me.

     I will stand in this gorgeous light of my soul and nothing – including myself and my whiny ego – will get in the way.

     I will write this book.  And the next one. And the one after that.  And on – into infinity.

     I will drop the guilt that wants to suck me into the abyss. I will forgive all my sins – even the worst ones where I harmed another – to write about the way out for all of us, to show the great light that cracked me into this new life of passion, love, and ALL OF ME expressing.

    I will drop my hands, wash my face, and dance*, motherfuckers. If you do not see or recognize me, I will shake the dust from my feet and Let.You.Walk.

     I am here.  I have arrived. The big “I” of me, not the small and I am fucking tall. My heart is HUGE and it is big enough now, big enough for it ALL.

     I will not be small.  I am here to love everything. Don’t be afraid of me. I will release all fear like pebbles into the ocean.

     Look at that Big Water.  It has come for me and I’m going to ride the waves all the way to the tallest peak.  I will ride and go high and then descend as water droplets, as spray, foam on the very edges, god damn it. 

    I am every single piece of sand and I am the water licks at the edges. I am moving with the air and the rivers and the rain and I am Giving It Up.
 
    ALL of it.  I am not wasting a single fucking breath. Watch my fingers.  Moving on the page.

     *Bishop T.D. Jakes Let Them Walk

Seven Poems

 

 

                            for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life

                                                                    ~Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 
     Oh craziness become me.  I feel like an abstract painting, perhaps a Picasso, struggling to pull my displaced parts together.  My writing is not going well but my writing is going well. 
     Something has stopped me in the writing of the book.  In the meantime, it's National Poetry Month and I've written seven poems, one for each day of the month thus far.  I've tweeted stanzas daily.  Like this (from a poem entitled "Selfie"):



I would cut one of those apples, slice it

Wide open before carving my ear

Off completely, just to tell you

I am here.

 

     Writing is my dream life.  And because it is the heart of me, my deepest desire manifest, it is making me crazy.  Following my passion, my bliss, my heart of hearts, has brought my deepest fears, inadequacies, and insecurities out of the closet. 

     I wake up from a dream, to a volcano within, find myself sobbing.

     "I am a failure.  I have always been a failure.  And now I will fail at writing," I say when my husband asks why am I crying? 

     Woah!  Where did THAT come from? I am grateful that Wayne is my best friend, that I can show myself so starkly and raw, that he can just sit there and hold me.

     Wherever it came from was dark and deep, at the very core of me and felt true, seemed so real.  It is not a belief I can brush aside, not my usual delusion. 

     For days, I puzzle over it, the dark ring of truth.  "I am a failure."

     I have failed at many things.  And, dear reader, I know, you have too.

     Synchronicity. A link to an Ann Pachett essay from her book "This Is The Story Of A Happy Marriage" appears on my news feed.  I read:

 "I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers.  Forgiveness, therefore, is key.  I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.  Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself." 

     Thank you, Ann. 

     I may fail. No.  I will fail.  However, life has taught me that it is not the failure that matters.  What matters, is that I do it.  I show up.  I keep writing. 

     I keep writing. 

     I write.  I write against time.  I write against hope.  I can do this.