Friends are your sturdy life raft on rough waters

And I have definitely been sailing some rough waters this past year, I had to hold on sometimes to keep from capsizing, but with the support of some wonderful women, I am more than ok. Bless you beautiful, wonderful friends everywhere, I love you!

Doing and Changing

Well, I've been dormant on content creation for a few weeks -- a blogging no no. But one does need to occasionally go out and create some content, otherwise known as living, periodically.

I had tivod a show called CBS sunday morning and the moderator interviewed several so called remarkable 80 plus year olds. The one who struck me most was Norman Lear. He still had a lot of the fire and purposefulness in him that often seems absent in the older. The interviewer asked him his secret for staying so engaged. He replied, ''well I take every day as thought it were a production - so I would say, write - but then to write, you need to do. Just do.''

I kept hearing that in my mind, ''do.'' Live.

I can spend (waste) considerable time on activities that may be momentarily distracting and pleasurable, but are of little consequence. Then today, in lovely piece of synchronicity, I came across a book in a used bookstore here in town on ''soft addictions'', such web surfing, tv, gossip, overgrooming, shopping, etc, and what those are really standing in for ( a need to be seen, heard, loved, touched, have community, primal human needs that so often go begging in our culture).

Nice. Just the cosmic smack on the rear I needed at this time, when I was considering cutting off my directv.

My ears are always pricked up for older people who can show me this aging thing can be done in some kind of way that is semi palatable.

I don't want to be one of the ridiculous women here in overly juvenile clothing, puffed up lips and looking so clearly like someone who can't accept the obvious (I know I know -- I probably DO like that sometimes now and then!).

I heard Julia Roberts once say something so apt when she was asked about her very young costars Julia Stiles et al in one of her movies, how that made her feel as the ''older woman'' in the cast. "You can't outkitten a kitten.'' She replied bemusedly. I loved that.


There's so much to let go of as we get older, a series of dropping offs, letting gos, and transformations, that all began at the beginning. It feels so solid and permanent in young adulthood, then rapidly rapidly after 40, it changes, the sense of being in a rapidly running river.





A good time to let the size of one's ego diminish while the expanse of one's consciousness expands.

Paul Bowles Quote from Literature Monthly

"We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
- Paul Bowles (American Author

Orphaned Hedgehogs Adopt Cleaning Brush as Their Mother

Poignant

Do I have my toe in the Zeitgeist or what...

A couple of my posts recently are so timely with the Larry Craig news (the bathroom incident of the Idaho senator).



There was a story in today's New York Times, a controversy, about whether journalists had an obligation to report on Larry Craig, or others like him, where apparently there had been talk for years on their secret lives. The existence of the Internet and the blogosphere had really forced their hand and it was pushed to the surface.

The article said there was a kind of ''gentlemens' agreement'' not to report on these kind of things, unless something extreme happened. That was pretty shocking. Shows you what an anachronism the mainstream media has become.

How could they not report on a senator who railed against gays, voted against gay legislation, was one of the most energetic in going after Clinton, and preached family values from one of the most conservative states in the country? And there is 25 years worth (according to the publisher of the Idaho paper and other sources), of information that he led a secret life. How is this not newsworthy?

Larry King had a panel discussing Craig, and had Robert Weiss





on, an expert on sex addiction. Weiss had some very insightful observations on sex addiction, the compulsive nature of it, the compartmentalization that goes on within the addict, and the frequent arrogance (that was heard on the tape with the arresting cop) that accompanies it.

Being or seeming. It was and is, about seeming. I think his wife is still in denial, from the expression I saw in recent photos. Oh how I feel for her when she realizes the lie her life has been. The former Mrs McGreevey (closeted new jersey governor), was on and said there are 2 million women in the same position, most of them not aware their spouses are leading secret lives.

To have one's exposure be so public, be the subject of ridicule and conjecture (as here!), what a high high cost for the luxury of seeming, of the mantle of power and privilege, material comfort and social acceptance.

What is the alternative?

If he really were who he is, what would that be? Who would she be? Poor Mrs Craig seems to have a hobbling walk, as though she is in some physical pain already...

It is fascinating, because most of us of hide, just in varying degrees. This is just on such a grand scale.

I wonder

/

What's it all about? I wonder.....

Being or Seeming

One of the Diggs I enjoyed today was (see list below from my Digg feed), the Importance of Being Yourself. This hit home for me yesterday in a wonderful workshop I attended at an art retreat here in Encinitas.

The theme was body acceptance, a teacher of West African Dance facilitated. We danced to the drums, did sculpture in clay and wrote and shared poems about our experience, all in am amazing setting on a hillside going down into a canyon, with beautiful plantings, art, a labyrinth, studio, and whimsical things to look at everywhere.


So you can try to look good doing things, be concerned more with form, with the delusion of perfection, with the abstract, with memories that hold you hostage, with stories someone told you about who you are and how things should be, or you can choose to dive in, let go, get wet, in the the juicy, unpredictable, sometimes messy experience called being alive.

Who we are is unique, and yet nothing human is unique. None of our secrets or skeletons are as unusual as we imagine they are.

Our pain is always evident to others, no matter how well we think we have it locked down and packed away. It leaks out, inevitably, through our tightly clenched jaws, our impassive expressions, the discordance in our words and expression.

So why not let it out? However works for you, talk, dance, cry, paint, scream to the heavens...find a good someone to hold you if you can...just don't leave it in there to damage your organs, corrode the walls of your blood vessels, twist your bowels, strain your relationships, dilute your life force.

So we can spend our life Seeming, or choose Being, albeit with responsibility and balance, and let the chips fall where they may.