When the Sun shines...

One of my best friends who has lived regrettably too far away for a few years now continues to urge that despite some of the challenges of relocating, all that beautiful sun shine she's been so greedily soaking up is worth it.

I remember a lot of heart ache in my life that runs across the board. Love, family, work and health problems alike. I remember the devastation of each challenge that has entered in my life. What I cannot remember is the sun ever being present during these terrible, no good, very bad days. It seems that I have just become aware of there always being this grey ominous look about the sky whenever I was struggling through the worst of my desolation. I mean, in all reality it could be that my mood and my recollection of the experience causes me to see the back drop of these dramas as gray and overcast--typical New England winter weather. But nope, I stand by it. It has always, always been shitty out when I was feeling shitty.

The winters here are too long. It's like life gets put on hold once the temperature drops. Frankly, I could even put up with the cold if it weren't for that gray, disheartening, miserable excuse for a sky that hangs above us, heavy with gloom and weighted with the threat of cold showers and slushy brown snow to ruin our daily lives. It's beautiful in the fall, when the leaves are changing and there is a cool crisp wind that makes your cheeks a sweet rosy tint and your hair impossibly glossy and cooperative. But before you can even say "Your hair looks great!" comes that unbearable cold, miserable, rain that somehow, as if not evil enough on its own, turns to snow. And it lingers. Until May.

I used to be a winter lover. I used to wait with baited breath for that first snow fall and even before that the distinct smell of season change. Wet leaves on the ground, gray sky when I woke up for school heavy cable knit sweaters with too-long sleeves and cozy hoods..ahh my paradise.
But some time in the last several years my pleasure has turned to panic. I clung to the warm weather like a woman desperate for the years of her youth. I refused to swap my adorable sandals and open toed heels for sneakers and boots. I wore tights with my sun dresses to keep them from collecting moths in my closet. I am ever more begrudging to this weather.

We've all had loves that impacted our lives and in more ways than we are aware. Did you ever notice that some times your favorite song on the radio was one that was introduced to you by a lover? Or maybe a restaurant that you casually invite friends to was in fact where you had a promising first date long ago. Our senses so heightened when we are in love it must affect how we remember. I say this because when there was a time in my life that winter was magical it was because I had fallen in love on the night of the first snow. It was December 8th and a couple Thousand Years, I was headstrong, strong willed and nobody could tell me what to do or who not to be with. I walked for hours in winter night air to be close to a boy for his warmth. Maybe because I was so young, the cold didn't feel invasive it felt invigorating.

Well, that was a lifetime and a half ago. But I most fondly, and most recently, recall falling in love in the summer. The muggy weather doing wonders for my curls, giving them a dewy glow. I wore summer dresses and shirts and danced until my skin was wet to the touch. I laughed and walked so carefree among friends wishing the night would never end. I was free to let my shoulders relax and enjoy the night sky without my breath getting in the way of the view. I felt warmth for myself for the first time and didn't need it to radiate from anyone else, thank you very much! But I fell in love anyway. With enough comfort to be by myself and be my own glowing, dancing, self and enough desire to let someone press their heated skin up against mine and let our minds meld together and imagine what a lifetime of summers with each other would be like. I crave that heat day in and day out. I wake up and wait for the sun to shine just a little earlier, even if it means giving up that much needed hour of sleep. Such a fulfilling time in life, summer. Now if I could just find a way to live in that eternal summer land, with a strong willed, head strong man who loves New England and it's "seasons" so much. I say New England has only two seasons: Winter and a brief and fleeting thing called summer.

Maybe I'll have the chance in one of these lifetimes to live in such a place. It can't come soon enough. My skin is calling to be tanned and kissed by summer air. My hair wants to be wild and curly! I want to swim in the ocean and not just one time before the air cools the ocean just a few degrees too cold. No, I want to swim every day! I want my babies to play outside and have a real thirst for life, not grow indoors in this time-out we call Winter.

I will always be driven in my lifetime, sometimes it has been for the wrong things and sometimes I was dead on. But I know that I will never be able to surrender my hope and desire to live closer to the sun.

In need of an adventure! In want for something thrilling. How little time we spend feeling alive when we live! I'm making a personal goal to have ATLEAST one amazing experience a day. Well, today is almost over so I'll start tomorrow.

I wonder what it will be?

An Honest Woman's Lie

How honest is everyone with themselves? Honestly? I feel there is a big misconception about honesty and truth. I think this, since we all have personal truths..but maybe they don't include being truthful with ourselves. So long as we keep up appearances and laugh at the appropriate times, and get up and dress ourselves and complete a mundane list of "normal things" one does in their daily life then we don't need to look any deeper into what we're really doing or not doing.

When we blow up at our spouses/family members during a fight we're probably not likely going to look at our fault in the matter. Instead we're irrationally accusatory of the other party for holding ALL the blame. And maybe we even bully them into believing this is really the case. Or cry hard enough to make them feel as though they have fundamentally screwed up when we were nothing but perfect to them. This is obviously a lie we tell ourselves. No one is perfect. So why do people still behave this way? Not looking at our fault in sticky situations allows us to continue believing in our personal "truth" that we are "good" and that other people are "bad".

I've worked with children, and I've seen this happen with them..but now that I'm not working and only surrounded by my own children, I'm starting to notice that adults continue this behavior too. I'll give you a scenario you'll often find at any child care place: two children are arguing over a toy, or a game or a crayon or whatever it is. One child says they were using it first and then came along this mean kid and tried to take it away. So they hit them, and took it right back. Both come screaming crying to you that the other child was mean and selfish (okay maybe they don't say things like selfish- but still) and refuse to accept that anything they did in the matter was wrong.

It's so easy to rewrite that story with two adults fighting over some false sense of territory or sense of entitlement in a matter. Right?

I've done it. I've cried poor me, and how could this happen? And I didn't do anything to deserve this! And then I did the hardest thing I've ever done. I stopped crying and looked at my situation; a seeming betrayal by someone I cared about and decided that maybe I must have had some fault in it. So I wrote them down. And I was honest. Brutally honest. And things that sit quietly in the back of my mind as small, small truths came out. Things like.."I never really wanted any part in helping my friend with their issues." Or.."I wished none of this was real..and continued to act as if it wasn't." Looking back at my own lies and accusations that I wouldn't dare admit to someone else before, nonetheless to myself I realized just how big of a liar I had been all along.

Very rarely is anything "Out of the blue." Often there are telltale signs to any seemingly sudden occurrence, like an out of character move or an illness that creeps into your life. The problem is that we are too busy quieting that too-small voice in the back of our minds so that we can have lives than run smoothly. Once you tell that lie, then it's often a case of lying to yourself so that no one would even think that you could have seen any of these problems coming your way.

Because maybe we're ashamed. Or maybe, we don't want to be found out as such big fat liars of a different variety: lying to ourselves. Sure this story could also be placed in any alcoholic or drug abusers life, but maybe the issues don't have to be as severe. It could just be that we really hate our jobs, or we really wish we were with someone else most of the time; or that we're pretending to be okay with the fact that we never went back to school, or that we're afraid that we don't have the talents to do any of the things we really want to do in life. Whatever it is you're telling yourself or not, it's making a liar out of you.

Time is of the Essence..

I was afraid this blog thing would be doomed like my journals in the past by my tendency to abandon them, usually more empty pages than not. I started thinking of the time in my life when I would make journal entries every day. Looking back on the more successful journals that were filled to the very last page, including a makeshift index for all of my favorite entry dates, it really made me miss that urgency I felt to write down every thing I went through on my daily life.

I used to find it hard to believe that 10 years could just come and go, thinking that if only people kept in touch with themselves and what they were experiencing the way that they keep up with their appearances then time would be a lot more forgiving. I'm starting to realize that when I put off that daily check-in with myself the faster time is passing. It seems to me that since my idea of the beginning of the year is no longer September when the school year starts, I've been losing track of time. Of my time, of the time of day and sometimes I don't even know what day it is!

Timing, timeless, sometimes, one time, no time, any time. So many different ways to describe time! The saddest of these may be 'one time' or worse yet having 'no time.' Does every body stop and think about time passing? I feel as if people begin to realize with less vigor how precious time really is-- when it should be the other way around as we are getting older after all. I can remember a time when 2 weeks until the big dance felt like an eternity. Or when the summer days seemed to last forever, long enough to make you forget what it is like to wake up for a jam-packed school day for 10 whole months.

Have you ever heard a person in their 40s or 50s talking about the days of their youth as if it were the last time they were really alive; as if they themselves were dead and gone already? I'm starting to fear for my life, because the way they tell it, it'll be over in the next 10 years regardless of how much longer I live after that. And what about my children? I hear people tell stories of the glory days of their children's youth, as if now that they are adults the days of making memories are long gone. It must be a lot of work to make every year of your life better than the last or the very least as eventful as those before them because the consensus seems to be that one or two decades of living it up are supposed to be enough to hold you over until you die.Maybe the trick is slowing down long enough so we don't let the good ole days get too far behind.

As painful as it is, we need not to try to rush through heart break, or pain or embarrassment, or anything else unpleasant we wish would just be over with already. it is time after all that we are hurrying along when we wish for those things. And when it is so short and fleeting already we ought to know better.

I wish I knew the secret to banishing the disconnect that comes with living that way...maybe it is living for today, and maybe it is letting go of yesterday or trying not to think fondly back on a time as better days than today. The best I can do is promise to myself to reflect more often on my daily life and if I'm not happy with how I'm spending my precious time to DO something about it. Now is the time.

Love life and loving life: making it one and the same

I am driven. Academically, speaking I want to learn as much as I possibly can and work towards as many degrees as I can. Creatively speaking, I want to explore as many facets of self expression as I have the time alotted. Recreationally, I love love love dancing! And conversing! And laughing!

What else would be the driving force for all of these activities in my life? The answer is simple: love. Yes, we have all read, watched, breathed, love stories . But how many of us consider that your relationship with your own life a love story in and of itself? With ebbs and flows just like the most famous love stories in history. Here's the thing that gets me too about all this, they're only stories. Whose to say they were ever really real? Whose to say that have a love life with another person and loving the life you have with them is not the same or as valuable as being in love with your life?

I can see that my point can start to get a little cloudy the more I try to assert what I really intend to. To be honest maybe I jumped the gun when I decided to tackle this frontier...I for one have not really figured out yet just what it means to have a love for my life the way I know what it means to have a love life. Daunting as it may be, I won't allow myself to continue to not know anything for very long. Life is short, it's shorter than short.

Which lead me to think, that maybe in or out of a relationship it is always possible to have a love life. Think about how much time is invested in falling in love. It's time consuming, it rents space in your head. It demands bodily reactions, some voluntary (come on, you know what I mean) some not. It consumes. It takes on a life of its own. There, right there. That's the point I'm trying to make. Falling in love creates a whole new life to tend to. In my mind then it's fair to say that those of us who are not in a relationship and are allowing their time to be consumed by some other passion or recreation are in fact very much having a love life.

How often do you hear people telling you they love their lives? How less often do you hear people saying they love their wives? For the sake of that rhyme I didn't add any other relationship titles, but the idea applies to all! I do know this though, falling out of love is always painful. Falling out of love with your life is more devastating. Lets resolve then to keep working at it. To keep pushing for only the most fulfilling love lives. That over used expression often heard from the mouths of those who are falling out of love " I don't deserve this!" Lets have that same attitude towards our own lives, refusing to settle in a loveless life on the daily.

In the same way the heart does not actually look like those cute geometric shapes we have all learned it to be, love may actually not be spelled l-o-v-e, maybe it's w-o-r-k or maybe it's e-f-f-o-r-t. Whatever the spelling, the definition is the same. So..how's your love life?

The Here On In

It may be raw, uncut, unrefined and maybe eventually a little unorthodox once I get brave enough- but this is my first meager attempt to reach out and express myself in a too-big-world that I am too unfamiliar with for comfort.

A believer in omens and signs..I was taken aback when I finally resolved to sit down and start this blog to find four fortunes from the sometimes inedible fortune cookies sitting on the computer desk and they each spoke to what I was feeling. The first read: "Ability is not something to be shown off." Well my reaction was OK..so maybe I shouldn't blog after all. I'm just going to be trying to show off and who likes a showoff?? Good thing I kept reading because the second one read: "You're not afraid of storms because you're learning to sail your ship." Believe me I have weathered so many storms in my life already, this hit so close to home. This could been enough to motivate me to claim my rightful space for self expression but it wasn't. I sat here staring at my computer thinking about all the reasons I shouldn't do this..I'm not a good enough writer, I'll be embarrassed if my husband reads it, I'll be embarrassed if my friends read it, God- how frustrating! Why am I concerned with what other people think so often? Its hard for me to admit that because I always thought I strived to be an individual and to set apart and go against the grain but I'm starting to realize that can't be true considering where my actions in the past have lead me on this present day. So I read on.."Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort." The choir sang, a single beam of light shone down on my head, time slowed, a light bulb lit, something in my chest churned and it hit me. So I clicked on the page. I stopped. What the hell am I going to blog about? What could I possibly have to say that's worth posting for millions ( generally speaking) to see?? I gave it a minute or ten just staring at the screen and finally picked up the last fortune.."The true way to soften one's troubles is to solace those of others."

They say God speaks softly. That you have to be really in tuned with what your heart is telling you, and so many people are not. So many people cover their hearts demands with daily demands, with routines and busy schedules and love lives without truly loving themselves. I have been on a quest for as long as I can remember to figure out what makes people tick and to see if there is something universal about how we live our lives however different the lifestyles may be. I've always wanted to see the underpinnings of how people got to be who they are. Now I'm a mom. And I'm 22. And I never thought I would be these things at the same time. But I know that I am not the only one in this world who can say both of those things. Simple as it may be, it's a lifestyle and one that separates me from my peers and it can be lonely to say the least. So maybe that's what's really going on here. I'm reaching out because it's lonely and because I'm hoping that some other types of lonely will appreciate it too, and in finding comfort in our words we will begin to console each other. I'll be speaking from the heart and I hope it shows through.