Burn up the Rubber

July 28, 2014 By

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Most of us live sensible lives.  We drive reliable cars. We ensure our children have green vegetables and eat organic chicken.  We rent bounce houses on birthdays and allow our daughters to be princesses and when Fridays roll around, men grill steaks in their chinos and their wives say “they’re wonderful, dear,” and at night these women take off their make-up.

And the days, they change numbers. The t-shirts turn to sweaters.  But it’s all essentially the same.  Day camp on Monday, spin class on Tuesday.  Pancakes on Saturday and church on Sunday.  And we smile and cook lasagna and say hello to Sheila-and-Bob that come over for a beer because that’s what good neighbors do. We have grown so adept at hiding all the pain that comes from living this bloated American life that we tell ourselves this is it – the life we’ve yearned for.

And then one day, when you are driving home thinking of making crunchy tacos, you hit the familiar turn toward suburbia.  The brick house on the left, third street to the right, named after birds or rivers or wildflowers.  And that stretch of curve comes a bit too fast before it’s upon you like a crosswind, and you have a choice whether to slow down or take it.

And by God, you take it.

Something strange and sinister swirls inside you like a demon. Instead of putting two hands on the wheel of your trusty Lexus and meeting up with Sheila-and-Bob and making tacos and pulling into Braeborn Court to the brick house on the left, you have a feeling akin to flying.  The tires grip the road and you narrow your eyes and you burn that rubber.  You turn that ache into fire and you realize the life you’ve been living is a shadow of the one you’ve imagined.

So you take a right instead of a left and head through the rolling hills without a plan, without a full tank of gas, without a good set of recipes or a dessert for the pot luck.  And it feels good to crank up the music loud and let it pulse with the beat of your chest.  You rip out the hair tie.  You open the sun roof.  You stick your hand out the window like an airplane dancing and you pulse in your seat to the rhythm of the street and you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, shining.  You sing loud, laugh hard, and wave at passersby’s like a damn fool.

And as the sun begins to set upon your sensible life, the one you don’t seem to fit into, you head that Lexus back home to tell your children there are no more tacos. There are only ice cream sundaes, eaten at night by the pool at 10 pm sharp, and one cannot use spoons but must dive face-first into a bowl of strawberry, and everyone laughs with hot fudge dripping down their noses.  There is no longer grilling on Sundays, and spin class on Tuesdays, for you pack up your things and move to the mountains,  where you stand in your underwear on the ridge and raise your hands high – to heaven, to God, and to freedom. And your husband sips tea and kisses your mouth hard, the one he loves more deeply than before.

Sometimes a sensible life is not enough for a dreamer.  Life must be lived with wild abandon, with hands out the window and the sun searing skin and music raging in places that were once nothing and empty.  And you grit your teeth at so many turns, because that’s what wheels are for, really, to burn up the rubber. And it feels good to go fast, and live full, and go out with a flame instead of a whimper.

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photo:

RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYFRIENDS.

Filed Under: Creativity, Inspirational, Love, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

A Heart of Freedom

July 26, 2014 By

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“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?”

-Matthew 5:43-47

It’s hard to define love.  It ranges from simple affection to intense pleasure – it indicates human attachment, can highlight spiritual virtues, serves to facilitate art and war and even the continuation of our very species.  People identify with the concept of “falling in love” because we are all mammals with a basic hunger to mate, not be eaten by predators, and garner safety in companionship and numbers.

But love can take on other forms that require more effort. Sometimes I have conversations with God on my work commute or lying in bed about this form of love, this “decision to love” even when it’s hard and when it hurts and when the other person isn’t the subject of one tiny ounce of desire.

Like Ross, who sues you for negligence when you’re just a small-town physician trying to make it until Friday and it’s not your fault the guy had untreated diabetes.  Or Justine, who is strung out on heroin and watches her son scream and cry with starvation and wallow around in a diaper full of crusty brown remains. It’s Roy, who sits down in his basement with sweaty palms emailing children pretending to be Mackenzie.  And it’s the person who drove home drunk and plowed over the car of your beloved wife, leaving a trail of tears and dust.  There are often no valid explanations, and no reprieves, and when your mother dies a wretched death from stomach cancer and your best friend’s child is killed and bombs are strapped to back of Mohammad and people’s bodies are blown across a railway station like chunks of meat, it is so very hard to love.

For in truth, we do not love these people.  They are impossible to love.  And if we are perfectly honest with ourselves, we want them all to just rot in hell.  I beg all my religious friends to at least acknowledge this basic emotion before preaching against it.  It’s normal to feel outrage.  It’s okay to hurt.  It does no one any good to lack authenticity about the feelings that swirl around inside of our cavernous minds.

But when the dust settles and we scream loud enough for our throats to turn raw, we turn to the teachings of the One Who Created Us. And we learn, like students.  We grow, like children.  And we have the opportunity to make a choice about how we live and feel and act. And we realize that to “love” doesn’t have to be an emotion we give away to those who have earned it.  It’s not just a gift for our friends and neighbors, those who we feel add value to society, or the one to whom we are betrothed.   We have a duty to love the most despicable and foul.  Because the more broken a soul the more lost they are, and what pity to live a life full of addiction and fear.  What a horrible existence with an utter and complete lack of joy.

My dear friends, who I think of and pray for.  You have been given a great gift of life and a freedom to fail and be loved irrespective of your failings.  Every step and sip of coffee and walk around the block and word you speak to the Starbucks guy is an opportunity to love.  This day is yours, and the decisions you make can change someone’s life.  You get to make a choice: love or hate, apathy or empathy.

To Ross, who is hurting and confused.  To Justine, who is buried in her addiction and needs someone to lift her out of the well.  To Roy, whose mind is not his own and is lost inside a spiraling mass of voices.  To cancer and Mohammad and to that bastard who ran over the mother of your children. Yes, to them all. We can, and will, say with confidence “Come.  Sit beside me.  I release this hate in my heart to you because to love is to fully live, and to forgive is the highest form of freedom, and I will let vengeance be the Lord’s and hold hope that this life is not the end.”

This is to love your enemies.  To have a heart of freedom.  Then, when you rise and fall each day, you will smile. The days will be more good than bad, more bright than grey.  And love will finally “melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” ~Khalil Gibran

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photo:

Memories of those days

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,

Pearls of death: a poem

March 24, 2013 By

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The plastic curves, they pant

in tulle and diamonds bright

For kitchens gleaming of soapstone

Buying and baking and wasting.

—

It’s a water-soaked culture

and fear is a droplet of oil

so blend and buy and lust and smile

sail on past the wrinkled lines.

—

Sleep is hard and mean and honest

It forces waking from dreams of white

Drug it where it bleeds clean

Back to fluff and saccharine.

—

Freedom’s not a pinning board

Where all is neat and robin blue

It’s standing under columns wide

with open, dripping hearts

where sprinklers click click back and forth

Soaking the stilettos.

—

We’re all equal, she and I

The one who can’t get off the lines

The one who says she’ll finally get clean

The one who prays to Jesus.

—

In the waiting room of the psyche ward

or in the house of all that’s holy

Money’s no good here, my friends

Ain’t nobody cares about expensive shoes

or breakfast at tiffany’s.

—

Be gone, ye life of privilege

You fool me with your opulence

The rusty tin of jewels

Choking my neck whilst nearest death,

 

Rip off the pearls

—

photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/megyarsh/2873940330/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

Free as a bird

August 15, 2012 By

Last week, my daughter found a dove in the yard.  It had fallen out of its nest and sat there in the grass, looking confused and bewildered.  Of course it’s hard to read the emotions of birds.  It might have been trying to kill itself, inching and pushing and finally managing to throw his distorted body from the tree.  He might have been downright furious at the failed attempt.

Something was clearly wrong with the poor thing.  It was too large to be a baby.  Part of his feathers were grey and thick but his front half was a damp mass of skin and fuzz.  He could hardly open his little beak and looked a little bloated.  I placed him in a box lined with cloth and began to give him drops of warm water with a medicine dispenser.  I set the box in a high place and just hoped he lived. I just couldn’t see him lying there all night in the grass, devoured by dogs or hawks or other preying things.  Leave the guy alone.  Even birds need a place to rest.

I read online that you can mash up egg yolks and wet dog food and feed it to injured birds, so I rushed to the kitchen to make a life-saving paste.  There I was, trying to get the sick little thing to open its beak to take it in.  Once I squeezed too hard and too much came out, his poor eye covered in wet yolky-dog food.  I tried to wash it out but there he sat, wet and dirty, sick and sad.  It was hopeless.

I fretted all night about that bird.  I prayed that it would find a way to live.  That it would fly off and join the other doves, free and glorious and shining with silver radiance. But the next morning it had a fluid pocket jutting out below it’s beak.  I probably choked it to death with a tiny shred of dog food.  Great. My mother-in-law tossed it in the dumpster.  We’ll just tell the kids it flew away, she said. I wish she had at least broken its neck first and put it out of his misery. I hated that neighbors would toss garbage bags on top of him, just another piece of trash like used milk cartons or Frito bags. 

I wish we could all die elegant deaths – not in a movie theatre riddled with stray bullets or driving to Subway in our Subaru to get a ham sandwich.  We should all get to say our piece, kissing the heads of our little ones and quoting Thoreau.  We should all get to make amends and die in our sleep with our best dress on.   It fills me with rage that good people have to go so quickly.  That they are off to the market for strawberries one day and the next they are pinned under a car or lying in a hospital where all the zig-zag lines go flat.  I don’t like to think of living things contorted or bloated or twisted up in bullets. No one should die in the bottom of a dumpster.

But in the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter how we exit.  It’s a temporary holding place, this life, where we muddle through and say our prayers and eat our broccoli.  Someday, if I die a gruesome horrible death, falling out of my nest and landing in unfamiliar territory, no one needs to save me.  No one needs to worry about feeding me mashed up food or dropping water in my parched throat. For I’m off to fly – my elegant wings spread before me, soaring through the air and breathing in the fresh smell of freedom.  Like a bird.  Back home.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/charlestilford/732688216/

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

new beginnings

March 8, 2012 By

I quit my job.

Well, that’s a bit of a lie.  I walked out of my job as General Counsel for a large and wonderful company to stay home more.  To bake and volunteer and write.  And take the occasional calls from my former company that might crop up that they find useful to ask a lawyer.  But working from home in an oversized t-shirt billing by the hour, taking occasional phone calls from doctors that have questions, isn’t the same as really working.  I’ve always worked.  I went to law school to earn a great salary and feed my brain and wear heels.  I love heels.

But finally, I admitted to myself that I couldn’t keep up. There were select toilets in our home that even our dog wouldn’t drink from.  I was forgetting to pay bills and couldn’t seem to pack lunches and was always screaming at my daughter to get her shoes on.  I almost cried when I tried to bake homemade bread one weekend and the dough wouldn’t even rise.  My life was starting to spin out of control.  With two small children and a brain that never shuts off and writing that was finished inside my head but not yet recorded on paper, something had to give.  I was tired of running.  I was tired of yelling.  I was just flat-out tired.

So I stopped.

It’s been exactly four days since my newfound freedom.  I sent my son to day care every single day, which perhaps I should feel guilty about.  But I don’t.  I did heaps of laundry and sent off thank-you notes and made some tea.  I read some articles I’d been meaning to read and unpacked boxes of law books I schlepped home from my office.   I took a nap and read to my daughter and opened my eyes to what I’d been missing all this time.   Peace, really.  And clean toilets.

So here I sit.  I can feel a dozen years of legal experience begin the slow process of atrophy.  I can see that hanging on to my old world will not last forever, although billing by the hour is nice.  I feel God tugging on my sweater and tapping me on the shoulder, like something is just around the corner – up ahead.  I just can’t quite make it out with all the fog around me.  I’m defogging.  And praying.  And trying to learn how to bake bread.  For real.  Someone needs to send me a better recipe.

It’s a huge leap to quit a career.  It’s easy to tell people it’s for the kids.  So you can be a better mother.  But I didn’t think I was a horrible mother before.  I think it’s more about finding your footing.  Making sure the place that you stand is the place you really want to be.  Right now, in this moment, I know I’m heading in the right direction.  That’s something.  Even though it might not involve heels.

So here’s to freedom, wherever it takes me.  Probably to the grocery store.  And the bathroom, to clean more toilets.

Filed Under: Career, Motherhood, Religion, Writing Tagged With: , , ,

Ah, Writing

July 27, 2011 By

I think there’s some mystique about writing in the general public, like authors have golden keys to secret cabins in the woods where they can brew hot tea at ten in the morning if they darn well feel like it.   Being an author is carefree.  It means independence and wild frizzy hair, where writer’s block lasts minutes, not hours, and words flow like warm maple syrup over porous paper pancakes, soaking in sentences with gratitude.  It’s a free life, not being chained to corporate America and doing your own thing.  Ah, to be a writer. I have a book idea in my head, people say.  I’ve started a few pages.  How hard can it be?

I’d guess running a marathon backward is hard.  Or cooking a soufflé on a yacht with a hand beater.  Getting the president on the phone is probably a challenge.  Scaling a mountain.  Singing an aria.   Living with your mother-in-law. All tough, I imagine. But writing a book – a really good one at least – is much harder than these things.   There is a reason people give up too easy.  It’s easy to give up.

In my mind, no one chooses to be a writer.  No one longs to work a day job and cook supper and put two exhausted kids to bed, only to trudge upstairs and write.  At least not me.  I’d rather be watching television or eating ice cream.  Going for a walk or laughing with my husband.  Anything but writing.  Or worse, editing words that you’ve seen so many times before.  Cutting out hundreds of pages.  Re-writing entire chapters.  Reworking and rethinking and getting no feedback but your own self-doubt.  You’ll never make it.  You’re a failure.

But there’s a voice, way back in my head in some dusty place, that won’t shut up until my fingers start clicking on the keyboard.  Only then, when I’m unleashing the characters from their prison, does it cease screaming at me.  Finally, at 2 am when tears are pouring down my cheeks – big fat ones that come from grinding out my heart on paper -do I feel somewhat normal.  When I’m finished, exhausted and dehydrated, I can finally rest in peace.  The voice is stilled.

Being a writer is not something I necessarily wanted to do.  I think it chose me, like love or static cling.   Stories nag at me until I listen.  Sometimes characters appear in dreams or situations pop out their ugly faces at me in the shower. Often, plot ideas dangle in my view of traffic like little spiders as I’m driving to work.  I hate spiders.

I occasionally hang out with other writers so I don’t feel so crazy.   Even though deep down, I know I am.  I was talking to a writer friend the other day about how stupid we are for going down this road of writing and editing and rejections.  She got a rejection letter at 6:00 am on a holiday.  I mean really.  Can’t agents at least wait until we drink our morning coffee?

And yet despite it all, I go back.  My secret love.  Sometimes I lie and tell my husband I’m just checking my email when I’m really going upstairs to work on a paragraph.  A sentence here, a chapter there.  After all, it doesn’t edit itself.

I went to a writer’s conference a few weeks ago, which did nothing but fill me with dread and fear.  Agents get so many manuscripts – hundreds a week – that they are forced to be competitive.  “Start off your book with fireworks,” one agent said, “because if the writing doesn’t capture us in the first few pages, it’s going to be rejected. “ I went to Barnes & Noble after work the following week and leafed through the first two pages of every women’s fiction piece I laid my eyes on.  I was a crazy woman, opening and reading the first two pages and then throwing one down and picking up another.

“Can I help you find something?” a saleslady asked. She looked at me like I was off my medication.

“No,” I said.  “Just looking.”  I tried to giggle but it just came out like a squeaky crazy-person grunt. I forced myself to set the books down more gently.  I told myself not to sigh and mutter things like “damn you Brunonia Barry!” and “well sure, start off with a cigarette burn why don’t you, Kristin freaking Hannah.”  My hair was wild and tangled, my hands shaking from the large amount of ingested caffeine.  An empty Starbucks cup was balanced precariously in my purse and I noticed later I had a pair of reading glasses perched on my head as well as balanced on my nose.  I think I took my shoes off at the end of the NYT Bestseller rack and hadn’t noticed that I was barefoot.  Whoops.

I got up the next day and furiously re-wrote the first two pages of my book six times.  “How about this version?” I asked one friend.  “What about that?” I screamed at another.  I was like a gopher, popping up out of holes with a new novel version every time.  Finally, when I was reduced to a ball of tears, feeling like I wasted three years of my life that could never be regained, I went home early from work.  I was so focused that I didn’t even turn on the air conditioning, and in an eighty-degree house, I marched upstairs with a firm resolve.

I can’t live like this, I thought to myself.  I barely had the patience to wait until my computer booted up before firing my book off to ten more agents, sweating and cursing.  Screw the consequences.  So the intro doesn’t have firecrackers or start off with a death or the baking of a lemon pie. I’ll just get rejected anyway.  Why does it matter so much?

It’s not always romantic, this writing thing.  I just have to keep listening to the voice, the one who tells me to keep on writing.  To keep remembering the stories, and the dreams, and the visions.  I have to tell myself that there’s a reason this chose me.  That God put this burden on my heart.  Someday, an agent will say yes.  Hell yes! Absolutely yes!

Then, and only then, I’ll fall down in tears of joy and realize the voice is not a crazy hallucination, but a blessing.  Until then, bear with me.  I’m the one in the corner typing. Without shoes.  With two pairs of glasses and shaking, medication-seeking hands.

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: , , , ,