Take Back Your Life!

I love coming up with new titles for my life shops. Sometimes I teach the same one 2 or 3 times. Usually, I change the title and the content to take it and the folks who trust me enough to sign up for it in a different, more daring direction.

It’s a creative act – this need to sculpt new life shops, to push the boundaries for myself and those who come in contact with me. I do the same thing with my karaoke singing. I constantly learn new songs, psychologically harder ones that take my voice to higher and wider voice mountain ranges. Every time I encourage myself to go further into my own unchartered wilderness, I come out on a different vista, with different views and altered perceptions.

Net result: I feel lighter, more naked, more stripped of society’s weight.

We come into this world loving the lightness of being, finding it bearable. Under the guise of making us human that changes. We get to run around free for a few years, then a variety of folks strap real and metaphorical backpacks on us and start handing us the bricks of heaviness (aka fears).

No more perfect example than the children I see weighted down with backpacks going to and from school. Instead of the ball and chain tied to the foot, it’s lashed onto the back.

If you were visiting from another planet and learned that Earth people forced their children to lug these huge packs to school everyday, what would you think about those people? What adults fears get stuffed into those children’s backpacks? A fear of not learning? A fear of not being successful? A fear of not living the ‘good’ life, whatever that is? A fear of learning off-script?

Unfortunately, these heavy loads just get heavier as we get older until sometimes I, you, we can barely stand up.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but beginning in junior high, I often felt so emotionally heavy I could barely lift my legs up. I’d come out of my class and wade through a hallway of molasses. Every footstep took a Herculean effort. Often, I didn’t think I could make it to class. I wondered if others could see me struggling to move forward.

One of my favorite movies is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The characters struggle with feelings of lightness and heaviness. When they get too light, they reseek heaviness.

Half the battle to regain lightness is to recognize the true weight of fear. How much do yours weigh?

If you want to get more comfortable with lightness and agility, consider Naked Writing: Strip Off Your Fears and Get On Your With Life. I’m also having the first Naked Writing Contest this summer. Prize $20. Participants need to be subscribers of my museletter.

I’m back into essay writing mode. Perhaps, it’s because I have a lot of interests – not sure exactly – but I go through phases where all I want to do is paint or draw, then I enter a new phases were all I want to do is write op-ed pieces, then writing, then savings things.

Well, I’m back in essay writing mode after a 3-month hiatus. Wrote one and am onto a few more. I’ve always wanted to write about the benefits of getting lost. Will script some ideas for the essay here on the blog.

Am not a GPS fan. During our Christmas drive up the Pacific Coast Highway in California, the female voice shouting out of the box mounted on the rental car dashboard while we zoomed around LA got so annoying I had to turn it off. “TAKE A LEFT HERE. TAKE A RIGHT THERE.  1 MILE AHEAD.” Her proclamations kept interrupting our conversation. But even worse, I began to feel like a helpless creature who couldn’t find her way out of a driveway. (more…)

Well, I’ve just spent the last 10 days trying to save one of my town’s two archaeological sites.

Our town decided to build a field complex in an area that contained a beautiful 18th century road and several archaeological sites. One of those sites is Devil’s Den, the only granite solutions cave in Eastern Massachusetts. (It’s a lot bigger than it looks in the picture.)

The fields committee and architect said it would be saved and folks believed them.

Ten days ago I opened the paper to this headline, “Devil’s Den To Be Demolished.” Shocked folks wrote to those in charge.

The next morning we first heard our cave had been demolished. Later that had been revised to “hoe-rammed.” They broke a chunk off the left side.  But the rest of it was still intact.

Then the finger pointing started. Then the throwing folks under the bus started. The the mea culpas started. Then the over compensating started. The BOS got TONS of emails from all sorts of folks.

I visited the cave yesterday. They had to blast through an unbelievable amount of New England Ledge on this hilly site. The cave had blasting paraphernalia all around it. The area around it had been dug up. Yet, it stood so proud up there on the top of its hill.

I wondered who would hurt something so defenseless. It was hard to enough to see 9 acres of trees, hills and dales go.

The cave is in the Images of America series on our town. It’s on cave sites. It’s on historic sites. It’s one of a handful of “Devil’s Den’s in Massachusetts, named by the Puritans.”

And still this happened. It took my husband to point out why.

He said, “Were any of you at the site on a regular basis making sure it was being protected?”

“No,” I said.

“To folks who don’t care about natural history,” he said. “It probably looked like a pile of big rocks.”

Ah, that ole’ perspective.

We had a public hearing last night, where I spoke first. I expressed my municipal motto, “Build community, not resentment. This isn’t the way to do that.” Tens of folks got up to speak about the cave. Eloquent, impassioned speeches about how this happened to our special little cave, our Devil’s Den. They spoke of its importance to our local history.

Some of our leaders appeared to have all ready decided the cave’s fate. Not sure they have the right to do that. The cave belongs to all of us. But the roomful of people who cared about the cave, their speeches, the cave’s historic evidence, it alerted them to the gem they were about to lose forever.

I learned more important life lessons in the past week than I have in the past six months:

a) Don’t assume someone will keep their word.

b) If you care about something, be actively involved in its protection.

c) Make sure the exact care and feeding instructions are outlined in writing.

d) Educate folks about the importance of natural wonders and local history.

e) Understand that it’s never too late to save something.

f) Jump into action and give it your all.

Thanks!

p.s. Please check out my self-discovery writing adventure at story circle on-line.

Grab Life by the Writing Gusto: Finding Your Life Theme

I enjoy reading the blogs of others. Gives me great ideas for posts, essays, programs, life adventures. Yesterday, I visited Judy Clement Wall’s newest site, “It’s A Human Thing,” where she continues her love affair with showing love, especially in her writing. It always feels like she’s hugging the reader with her beautiful words.

J, as she likes to be called, has written a new love manifesto/poem that encourages her readers to choose love. Here are the first four lines:

Choose love.

In your relationships,
in the art you create,
the words you let loose,
the causes you take up, (more…)

The other night, Jimmy and I decided to watch a movie. He flipped through the choices stopping on The Adjustment Bureau (TAB) starring Matt Damon. At first I said, “No way am I watching another film where Matt Damon plays a buff but emotionless character, (usually some kind of assassin or hero), or a character without emotion.

(more…)

So many of us feel powerless over the economy because we’ve given that power away without fully realizing it. Without a Main Street economy we become the pawns of giant corporations and the governments that make them possible.

The start of the economic demise appears to have started back in the late 70′s with the advent of discount stores. Prior to that, they were few and far between. My mother refused to set foot in those stores. Then we got suckered into buying things for less and it became a part of our societal makeup. (I know folks that drive two hours to NH to save $10.)  (more…)

I rewatched the cult classic Billy Jack (1971) about a month ago and it’s been on my mind ever since. Billy Jack, a former Vietnam Vet Green Beret and half Cherokee, returns to the Indian reservation for some quiet. Unfortunately, he finds the opposite.

In the first scene, he stops the illegal rounding up and shooting of a band of beautiful wild horses. I fall in love with him right there. The roundup of horses continues today. Here we’ve got these iconic creatures, the only truly wild and free things without a master left in our country, and we destroy them to put in dog food. They’re also being rounded up because they’re in the way of the various gas and oil pipelines scarring the wild, wild west. (more…)

I’m not sure any of my essays would have been published if I’d given up.

Submissions got lost. Email got deleted. Editors got deluged.

If you care about your writing and want it to be published, then you need to keep sending it out and following up. But don’t follow up with, “I’m following up.” Follow up with more reasons why your essay or story will connect with the publication’s readers or with a new essay.  Sometimes it’s easier to sell the older one by getting your foot in the door with a newer one. (more…)

Hey friends,

Went on a two-week vacation, a cruise on the eastern Mediterranean with shore excursions. Something I’ve never done before. Looking out onto the vast, seemingly endless sea from my balcony reinforced the reality that we have control over nothing and it’s best to just go with it whatever the it is.

That said, I’ve stopped trying to control my bra strap. (more…)

I don’t pretend to be a diehard or even a diesoft Bruins fan. Before the Stanley Cup series, I couldn’t have named one player on the team. That changed when Jimmy started to share the unconventional story of the Bruin’s goalie Tim Thomas.

His contradictions drew me in. (more…)