Reflections

Where You Came From, Little Anabel...

If I breathe you in,

Will it help me remember what it was like not so very long ago?

I recognize you as more like me than these large people.

But I am still bigger than you and can protect you.  And in this way find a powerful, peaceful part of me come forth.

For this moment

We are with each other

I like the me I am here.

* * * * *

When we, all ten of us, were in Mexico this past January, I took these photos of Cainan and his little cousin Anabel, 4 months.  The same age Cainan was when we hauled him around Portugal and Spain.

Cainan has been of many moods lately, frequently a sort of general outrage at not being in control of his environment.

During this time he was interacting with Anabel, I saw what looked to me like a deep peace come over him, a gentleness and stewardship of this little being, whose personality is just starting to really emerge (he was scared of her when she first came out, and didn't relate to her at all).

Anabel seemed to respond to his presence, too.

I've noticed a quality of connection that comes from having spent uncomplicated childhood time together.

I once had a special friend, a most beautiful gay man named Scott (Scotty if you are reading this please get back in touch!), and we both had a feeling about one another that we had been special playmates as children.  I found a photograph of me with a little boy, sitting in chairs side-by-side and staring up with four identical saucer eyes and round faces. I decided it was him.  He also found a picture of himself with a little girl, two heads sticking up out of a pile of leaves. An astrologer told us we both had Venus and Mars in Cancer, so run with that if it means anything to ya.

Sometimes people can take us back to a slice of our own innocence.  To a part of ourselves we haven't met in a long time.

I wonder if Cainan and Anabel as adults will connect to a slice of what it looks like transpired in these photos.

 

How to Love Yourself

First, decide to love yourself. It isn't always something that "just happens."

Next, realize self-love is a practice--sometimes a "fake it 'til you make it" practice. You can get better at it with time and dedication.

Drop any investigation into whether you"are worthy" of your own love. A tiny child in the care of a loving adult doesn't get grilled thusly. Maybe you are a grimy, crusty, piece of shit.  So what? (Big secret: you aren't). Do you think denying yourself love will help you grow into a sequoia?

Start by noticing your breath. This is a simple way we nourish ourselves every day that's both voluntary and involuntary.  Notice more of the bazillion other ways our body loves itself without us even telling it to.  We lubricate our joints, moisten our eyes, eliminate toxins, bring nourishment to cells, every single moment.

We are a love machine.

Thank your body.  Thank the force in the universe, in whatever way you conceptualize it, for fueling these loving processes.

Decide to join that force by choosing to love yourself.

Loving yourself is a choice, followed by acts of furtherance.

With me so far?  Decided to love yourself?

Good.

Now.

Tune into yourself.

What do you need right now?

Hmm.  I'm stopping for water right here, myself!

Give yourself what your body needs right now, even if it's just a shift in position in your office chair.

What do you need to eat, drink, touch, smell, hear, to love yourself?

Who do you need to go to? Who reflects back to you an image you can love? Go to them. Listen to them. Love them hard and they will help you love yourself! Court the self you can love through others who reflect that self back to you.

Yes, we love ourselves alone, and yes, we do it through others.  No being is an island.

Now DO LOVE. Commit loving actions unto yourself. Eat nourishing food. Acquire something that makes you happy.  It could be a flower, or a leaf. When I was in Mexico last month, we stopped by the side of the road because Cainan needed to pee. On the ground was a rusty, bent hanger. I saw a piece of art (pictured above). It now hangs on my wall.

Expect to find love everywhere.

You'll be a lot more likely to.

The point is, DON'T WAIT until you "feel like" loving yourself, or convince yourself you aren't a piece of shit.

Decide to love yourself. Decide to tell yourself a loving story about your inherent goodness and beauty.

Somewhere you learned how to treat yourself, and what to believe about yourself, probably from people who themselves were hurt and not fully in love.

Today you can choose differently.

Realize you may need to release pain as part of loving yourself. Let it happen, let it be what it is, just as a river overflows. Just as we release our sweat and pee, let your tears come where they will. Embrace them.

Realize it is your brokenness that allows love to nourish you deeply. It is into those deepest cracks that love most wants to flow and quench your parchedness. And it is your brokenness that can help you open--if you let it.

What happens when you work out a long-dormant muscle?  That's right--pain.

Decide to love yourself.

Even if it hurts.

Looking at this image again, I see a person on their back, with a little homonculus climbing out of their hearta and whispering into their ear...I can almost hear the sweet nothings...

Illusionate

How we look back and impose where we are
On the lush green expanse of what would be!
And how lack of light
Can slice through a body    knifeshadows

Fragmenting our flesh
From the wholeness we touch
But do not always see

Do not trust light
Nor dark
They will cut you from yourself into illusions
Feed you back in pieces
You may love, rebuff, hate, desire

Trust where breath comes from.
Ruach ha'olam
Believe what skin knows
And muscles hold
And bone makes
Possible.

Word on the street

A text message from Alex:

Hey, there's a wifi network somewhere nearby called "hookers and blow"! And word on the the street is that it's a big dyke hangout.

This is why I love this very unusual 6'3" hairy lesbian.

A Cainanism

The other night, I was reading Cainan his kids nature magazine, and we opened to a centerfold of an unusual marine bird.

Me (reading the caption): Blue-footed Booby.

Cainan: A different kind of booby!

My Multiple Problem, Goodbye to Three Friends

Two topics, a tenuous connector.

First, my multiple problem. Yes, I said problem, singular.  I have a problem of multiplicity.

I am too many people. I write in many of these voices and don't always know how to relate them to one another.

I am a scrappy, ironic East Coast Jew full of edges. I'm a New Age peacemaker. I'm a philosopher of consciousness and human evolution. I'm a witty, naked pornographer. I'm child-centered parenting teacher and advocate. I'm a loyal member of family and community. I'm a sex party host. I'm a patented inventor. I'm a dessert creator. A copywriter. A diversity trainer. A queer activist. A screenwriter. A "cougar." A lesbian. A sugar baby. A dancer. A yogini. A tantrika. A barber. A caricaturist. A coach. A fantastic friend. An absent lover. A great dad. A daughter-in-love. I'm single. I'm together. I'm sleeping alone in my own room for the first time in eight years. I'm still married. And not married. I write my own scripts. Create my own relationships, families, societies, religions. Get praised with words. Occasionally lambasted. Had a young woman say, "Whores and Other Feminists changed my life," with tears in her eyes. Got called a "handmaiden of the patriarchy" on amazon. Too feminist. Not feminist enough. A white-skinned person who identifies with color. A Jew who used to be Christian who now wears Buddhist veils. An average-sized woman who thinks fat women rock and takes up more than my share of psychic space. A catalyst around whom people start changing without me opening my mouth, for years. A quiet witness. A medium-low femme who for years IDed as a fag and who feels inside deeply genderless. Got accused of being a man undercover on an online forum. Give too much information. Go years without saying things central to who I am to people I love. My mother left when I was six. My dad and stepmom don't talk to me. I teach parenting classes. Huh? I think I built myself on a string. I think I am really strong. But too much of my strength is brittle. It's breaking. My softness is calling me into itself. I bought a feminine shirt that didn't feel like me, and things started opening up. I am now even more people. A girlier version of myself. It's too exhausting fighting all the time. It's too hard maintaining this big fat hulking ego. The messy bruised unkempt wrinkled spotted faded me needs to turn herself inside out and say, Good enough for now and always.

It's time to say goodbye to three friends I'm very attached to: Machismo, Impatience, and Knowledge. Yes, there are those who would heartily agree that despite my conciliatory mien and cultivated ear, I'm actually an arrogant know-it-all who wants it all yesterday.  So easy to contact that part of myself. Yet I want to be in choice about when I call that stuff forward, not have it run me.

Hence, my goodbye party, a la Ruth Gendler's Book of Qualities.

Let me then say, farewell, Machismo. So handsome, buff and smooth, you have served me well. I've worn you on my arm like shiny charm, and wielded you instead of being real, so much so that you became real. You've huffed and puffed through my body so I didn't need to breathe, didn't need to just feel myself being here, on the planet, quaking with whatever terror had me in its grip.  Without you, I might have felt a lot more scared a lot of the time. Thank you for being my bodyguard. I'm happy to say, I don't need you anymore--you are free to go.  I'll be cozying up to my new chum, Vulnerability. She and I go way back, and it's feeling really good to trust how much she has to offer.

Oh, Impatience! You've been such a great carrier for my anxiety for so long, convincing me that time is always of the essence, and speediness next to godliness. You're like the needle in my vein to keep me going: when everyone else moves at their own pace, you kick in to make sure I'm there to kick them up a notch. You place a veil over my eyes so the world--especially the Northern California world--appears to be caught in a haze of thick gelatin.  You make it impossible to relax and slow down.  Thank you. You've gotten me more places on time--or shortly thereafter--than I could ever hope to properly repay you for. But I have another friend who I want to rely on from now on, and that's Groundedness--a feeling of being in sync with what's needed, and a trust that there is plenty of time for life.

And finally, Knowledge. As Dorothy said to Scarecrow, I think I'll miss you most of all. It's been so comforting to think I know things, most especially about other people. To assume the truth based on scant perception, and order the universe by those scraps of thought. I'll still see you walk by everyday, wave, refer to you as is convenient, oh for sure. But I now want to remember to live in much closer proximity to Curiosity and Observation. In humble obeisance to all that I do not know, and in clear relation to what I see, hear, and feel. My senses perceive. My ego knows. I feel the difference. 

Saying goodbye to friends doesn't necessarily mean they'll go away.  In fact, sometimes friends linger because, well, they know you better than you know yourself. Or, they think they do. So they hang out and try to relate to you as the person you were, and can't see that you've grown beyond them.

So you firebomb them, starve them out, or maybe cook them bad food in hopes they'll get tired of your schtick and move on.  But in any case, the power of intention already has them burning off in flakes of dust and ash.  Goodbye and good luck, Machismo, Impatience and Knowledge. You've gotten me this far, and left indelible imprints.  And if you ask those close to me six months from now if I'm still an arrogant know-it-all who wants it all yesterday, my hope is that they'll say, "Well...she has gotten a little softer." Now where's that sweet little blouse?

Rewrite Day

Never has the laundry so desperately needed folding.  Those appliances that have been sitting on the counter for days suddenly need to be put away RIGHT NOW. The phone!  That class I was going to sign up for!  Everything's humming with urgency.

Of course it is.  I've got a big, fat rewrite looming.

Last night S & M (those really are their initials, and yes the entire experience was consensual) did not spare words.  They were not "nice" though they were eventually forthcoming about what they did like about First Crack.  I listened with gratitude and awe. They said that the protagonist's arc (emotional trajectory) and the thriller arc (how the suspense ratchets up) carved two very different paths.  The protagonist accelerates right away, but the thriller plot is kind of pokey to get going.  So I need to slow down the big guy, and start feeding in the creepy, conspiratorial elements earlier on.

Fair enough.  More than fair, in fact.  This is the kind of thing I am terrible at--perceiving a larger pattern, and seeing things in sequence.  In some ways it felt like a lucky guess that I was able to order it as logically as it was.

So today I will be cleaning house, baking cookies for the read-through on the 21st, making banana muffins for Cainan's lunches, returning extremely important phone calls fending off the urge to do unrelated things while I burn through this rewrite.

Please--call me today and cash in on any old favors I owe you, offer to take me to a fancy restaurant, promise searing pleasures of mind and body in great detail.

Just you see how strong I am.

Screenplay News

It's done.

My first-ever, first-of-many, ten-years-in-the-making screenplay.  And, I'm having my awesome, wonderful screenwriter's group review it tonight.  After polishing up the draft based on their comments, I'll have my writer and movie-buff friends review it again on the 21st, bribing them with homemade treats...mmmm....

This latter reading will be "staged," i.e, actors, or "actors" will read the parts aloud so we can see how it all shakes down auditorily.

What's it about, you ask?  Here's a log line-plus, and some further explanation:

First Crack

Log Line-plus: Just as Robert Coleman, a hesitant rookie journalist fresh out of the tech world may be about to lose his job, he gets thrust into investigating a psychotherapy cult guru with a taste for his young female acolytes. Robert poses as a leader and masters the group's methods--a little too well for journalistic objectivity. But he's a changed man now. Can he finish the story and save his new career? Or will his credibility vanish as he enters the group's sweet, sticky embrace? Or, will he finally put the errant guru in his place, and risk losing his job, his new community and maybe even life and limb? Or is it already too late?

= = = = =

First Crack is based on an actual peer counseling group, which is still in existence. The main character and his situation are fictional. The drama of the plot centers around Robert’s struggle to keep a reporter's objectivity while awkwardly wielding a new and powerful self-confidence, which comes almost immediately once he starts using the group's methods. This chutzpah in turn leads him to try to be the first to confront the leader and help him heal using the leader’s own methods, which apparently legions before have failed to do. In a tender subplot, the protagonist's mother, also empowered by the group's methods, heals from a long drug haze and PTSD from years of abuse by Robert’s father. Witnessing this invests Robert further in the group.

Meanwhile, Robert's new journalism career is at stake if he does not produce a saleable story, so he hides his involvement and vigilantism, even as it looks like someone from inside the group may be trying to silence him for good. Tapping into the depths of Robert’s psyche, the group pulls him in ever deeper. This feeds his lust for taking down the wayward leader, and rescuing the members, particularly the younger ones. Family, career, a sense of justice, physical safety, and his own self-esteem compete vigorously for the protagonist's commitment as this psychological thriller ratchets its way up to a multiply twisted climax.

= = = = =

I can't wait to hear what my cohorts have to say on this.  They've been waiting a long time. We've been meeting for over a year, and they've seen dribs and drabs, fifteen pages here, twenty pages there.  This is the first time they're reading the script in its entirety.

I have lots more to say on screenwriting, and the writer's strike, but it's gonna have to wait.  This underemployed writer needs to go catch the bus!