When I get ready to unveil anything in a public way — whether it’s an editorial in our magazine, a blog post, my Pecha Kucha presentation — I get cold feet, and behind the stage fright is the middle-school fear that people will laugh. At me. Maybe they do, but it’s never happened to my face so I don’t know why the fear is so intense. Evidently the reaction is not all that uncommon when people try something new. In Brainwashed: 7 Ways to Reinvent Yourself, Seth Godin attributes this to our lizard brain, that prehistoric part of our brain responsible for fear and rage, the part that resists change, urges us to stick to what we know, warns us not to stray off the well-traveled AAA route. Every bold thing I’ve ever done in life has always been accompanied by the lizard brain refrain that I’m bound to fail, fall on my ass or get laughed at for being presumptious or pretentious or just plain pitiful. I do have an inner redhead, but it takes an awful lot of coaxing to get her safely past that fear-breathing dragon. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

I saw this cryptic message painted on the back of a road sign today when I was coming back from a walk to the island near my house. I guess it’s an official warning because of the phone number, and it’s near the same spot that the Tsunami Evacuation Route sign used to be, except that one was facing the direction from which a tsunami would presumably appear so it was hard to take it seriously. I felt there was something I should be watching for that I didn’t know about. The end of the world (always in the back of my mind)? Earthquakes? We’re on a fault, but how can you prepare?  Or was it a more general existential message about the nature of being alive and the risk of letting life pass us by? That life is both fatal and beautiful and we have to move toward the darkness that we know waits at the end of our journey and yet we pretend we have all the time in the world?  That we need to wake up and be alert to routine things in a new way? The dun-colored marsh grass, the ugly condos on the waterway, the flock of white birds taking flight in the distance in a kind of spiral formation–all of which I take for granted and none of which will be exactly the same tomorrow. Stay alert.

So far in life, I’ve managed to order from an a la carte menu of spirituality, but it’s not all that filling. Even my mood board has a little identity crisis with its Madonnas, Fridas and Holy Elvis sharing space and reflecting my ongoing search for enlightenment. I’m a little bit hell-fire Methodist with a splash of Whiskeypalion and a dash of Buddhism  thrown in for variety. Wait, I’m also a faux follower of Kabbalah so I can get the red string bracelet and the daily Kabbalah emails, and lately I’ve been reading about mystical  Sufism because I love Hafiz and I’m fascinated by ecstatic whirling dervishes. My Methodist grandmother would spin in her grave at the thought I might start whirling, but after all her husband was a jack-leg (self-taught) preacher until he suddenly refused to set foot in church again for some mysterious reason. Maybe he woke up one day and decided it was all baloney.  I lack the discipline to give myself wholeheartedly to any of these faiths. I don’t want to go back to the cheerless church of gloomy God I grew up in, and although the Book of Common Prayer is historically interesting, I just can’t buy into the Nicene Creed (made up by a bunch of mere men). Some of my friends have personal chefs to stock their freezers with dinners or personal trainers to get them into physical shape, but I really, really need a personal trainer for my soul. Not a life coach or a purpose-driven pastor or a Freudian therapist, but a spiritual sherpa who would take me deeper into the Mysteries. I’m looking for a rigorous philos0pher with angel tendencies, and I’m shocked there is no one offering that service to my generation of starved-for-meaning Baby Boomers. In the tradition of my grandfather, maybe I should hang out my own jack-leg shingle:

Meaning of life debated here!

No answers, only questions.

Bring your doubts, fears, wildest conjectures and a bottle of  good red wine.

I was hungry for poetry when I woke up this morning, like having a jones for Starbucks Pumpkin Loaf, which I am so addicted to I only allow myself to have one slice on Sunday. I drove to Barnes & Noble to get me a big old helping of Antonio Machado, but none to be found, so I settled for Caramel Macchiato and ordered the book online. In an audio book I’ve been listening to on the way to work (more about that in a future Postcard from Fridaville), the author says that when you read a poem every day or even part of a poem, you have, as Blake wrote, “a moment in the day that Satan cannot find you.” Because we are always striving and striding toward our next big success or accomplishment or chore. Poetry requires silence and a slowing or stopping of time. But I find it hard not to be on the move, trying to outrace my demons, so I packed up my computer, iPhone, cords, books, notebooks, pens (right now I have to have Varsity disposable fountain pens in aqua and green ink) and went to a new coffee shop  (with the exact color of walls and floors and the right flowers on the table to induce writing). So far I’ve spent 35 minutes preparing to write, which leaves me 85 minutes in which to actually write. This place is called Hope and Union and the logo is a sheep suspended from a balloon. I’m not hip enough to know what it means, but I hope my thoughts will form a union with my words and pour like milk and honey into my computer. Until then, here is a poem to keep the Devil at bay for you and me. It’s by Czeslaw Milosz, one of my favorite poets, and it has haunted me ever since I first read it years ago:

Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Moving into a newly designed web site is daunting…my words seem to rattle around and disappear in so much white space. I’m used  to the happy shack above, all neon-soul and prayer flags and twinkle lights. And that’s the Fridaville I want to preserve because that’s where my imagination rents a room. In the color of the cherry blossoms in spring, the smell of the rosemary bush by the gate and the songs of the wind chimes on a blow-your-house-down winter night. A Fridaville Friday means latching the gate behind me, going through the mail, pouring a glass of wine, putting on the softest rattiest pajamas I can find, reading poetry or People magazine, eating cheese toast with fig jam for dinner and watching a cheesy true crime TV show. In Fridaville, Friday night is a holy  threshold between work time and rest time…the best time of the week.

I’m thoroughly hibernated now. Sure, I’ll grudgingly crawl out of my nest of  flannel sheets and Barefoot Dreams blankets to go to work, but I can’t wait to get home at night to a book in bed. This morning, I hit a new low, going to Starbucks with my pajamas on under my long winter coat and my hair looking like it had been brushed with a wooden spoon. Ugh and Uggs. Even Wendy, the barista, did a double-take. On the way there, I noticed that despite the cold and nasty weather that seems to drag on like a Russian winter, things are on the brink of blooming. Are the cherry tree and jessamine vine crazy? Don’t they know they’re in for shivering in the wind for awhile, with the added chance of ice storms and freak freezes? But blooming, whether it’s a flower or an idea, comes on its own schedule. In fact, the work is being done all through the winter of our souls, just aching to burst forth in some spectacular display of color, symmetry and dazzling artistry.  At least, that’s what I tell myself as I struggle to birth new projects that don’t even have names yet, that won’t be safe from cold spells and high winds that test them  and try to shake them loose from their tenuous hold on life.

Do you ever get tired of the morning routine of wake up, shower, shampoo, brush teeth, dry hair, moisturize and maybe makeup?  Sometimes I wonder how to be more awake to life when I walk through the same monotonous steps over and over every morning. There’s one morning ritual that I almost look forward to though — using the squeegee on the glass shower doors. I love being enveloped in hot steam and water and then wiping the slate clean before I step back into the world. While I’m in the shower my wanders lazily and daydreams furiously about projects I’ve started or want to start. From the inside looking out, the room, the day ahead is a blur, a mirage. Taking time to clear the shower doors with the rubber blade prepares me to cross the threshhold into the day, to take those ideas and dreams out into the world where they might gather shape and form and color. A tiny meditative practice that adds a bit of meaning to my morning. Do you  have a ritual that prepares you to meet the day?

I love the blog called 5 Rules for Life and decided to make up my own. What would yours be?

1. Don’t confuse your soul with your ego. We’re not the press coverage that our minds are always producing about us. We’re not the impression we’re trying to make on strangers. We’re not the center of the universe.

2. Test your behavior by trying to see it though another person’s eyes. We get locked into automatic reactions to situations (I’m hurt, I’m mad, I’m right and you’re wrong), but sometimes it’s illuminating to hear ourselves through other’s ears or imagine how someone else views our behavior. Doing this has pulled me up short at times and made me reconsider knee-jerk reactions that I tend to have about certain topics.

3. Just because you forgive someone doesn’t mean you have to love them or even be friends with them. It just means you release both of you from an embrace that has become a death-grip.

4. It’s okay to love beautiful things. An expensive purse can make you feel better, especially when it’s a rare and special treat and not part of a string of endless self-indulgence.

5. Meditation really works miracles. It’s really hard, but it really works. It still amazes me that you don’t need equipment, classes or special accessories to learn how to do it. And you can do it anywhere. But I have to remind myself of that at least once a day.

I went to an amazing workshop led by the poet David Whyte this weekend, and when I came home after the last session today, I pulled out this print by Olivia Jeffries that I bought on Etsy a year or so ago and decided to use it again but in a totally different context this time. It was on my mind because I realized I’ve been asking myself for months now, “What am I looking for?” and trying to push my way through to an answer right now. And for months, I’ve come no closer to finding it, becoming more agitated and frustrated as time went by. But at some point during this retreat, my question changed to, “What is looking for me?” That is a huge shift for me, because it suggests that there is a calling waiting for me that I need to spend time preparing the ground for, but not trying to force into bloom like paperwhite bulbs in the dead of winter. I’m only two months into this Year of Change that I’ve declared for myself, but just making it an official pilgrimage, if only to myself, has made me attentive to all sorts of messages coming to me from seemingly random sources that I might have ignored a year ago. A year ago I wouldn’t have signed up for, didn’t sign up for, this transformative workshop when it was offered. A year ago the poems that were read might not have lighted up the darkness for me in the way they did this time. A year ago I might not have been ready. But looking back, I can see that all the while, the field was being prepared in the darkness, the seeds being planted. The search that I’m on, the big decisions and change that I’m aiming myself toward, seem a bit less arduous and maddening knowing that while I have work to do on my part, something is looking for me as intently as I am looking for it.

I’m slowly making my way back into keeping a regular journal, working at it from different directions. The gluebooky way above in which I slap on some gesso and glue down things that seem to want to go there. I’m also keeping a journal of my year of change, trying to figure out if synchronicity is working in my life, if what seems to be chance is really a harbinger or messenger of change. I’m thinking about what happens in my life every day to see if I can find instances of change at work or if I’m taking steps myself to prepare for change in this transitional phase of my life. The other journal I’m keeping is the one-sentence-a-day diary proposed by Gretchen Rubin in The Happiness Project. I’m writing that one in the little 5 Year Diary by Tamara Shopsin. Oops and I forgot…Fridaville is being redesigned with some fun things planned like weekly “Postcards from Fridaville” sent out to people who sign up for them, so I’m keeping a journal of ideas on that. All in addition to my day job, for which I have a Skirt! Magazine notebook to keep me focused on coming issues. Just writing all of that down makes me feel unfocused and crazy — should I just have one notebook that all of this goes into? The separate ones seem to help me keep my different roles and goals separate, but I don’t know…maybe I’m just spinning my wheels. And I don’t want one of those 5-subject spiral notebooks from school because they make me think of warm cafeteria milk and math assignments I never finished. Big shiver down my spine just imagining it. How do you keep track of all your projects?