I’m afraid of water, can barely stay afloat and can’t bear to be in over my head. And yet, I’m in love with mermaids, surfing movies, and the big beautiful terrifying Pacific Ocean. Coming home to a four-foot mermaid in my living room is always being reminded of hidden depths. Being pulled into the ocean in Hawaii and tossed back up on shore like mere flotsam or jetsam was something I feared and craved at the same time. Does our psyche know the medicine we need even when the conscious mind rejects it? I want to be at home in the water and in the world, but I shy away from what lurks below. And yet, that is what’s always truly calling us — the things we stuff under the bed, the regions we refuse to explore, the glorious sea monsters that are not of this world. The siren song of the soul.

Yugen (u-gen), Japanese: an awareness of the world that triggers feelings too profound and mysterious for words. When that happens to me, it’s usually the result of letting the natural world in past my big giant head, which is always over-thinking, planning, posing, supposing. One of my best memories — which I have to approach sideways in order not to wear it out or lose it — is of standing in front of a huge overgrown wall of purple morning glories on a walk and suddenly having a fleeting insight into how small I was in the vastness of being. It only lasted for seconds and yet years later I remember it as being a long stop-time in which I was completely open and permeable to existence. It was mystical and completely out of character. The only times that come close are when I sometimes make eye contact with a stranger and feel overwhelmed by tenderness for their suffering, enduring, surviving, persisting humanness. When something like that makes it through my tough, 21st century hide, I kind of swoon inside like a Victorian lady. As I took this photo out the window of my third-floor office (my personal laboratory for cloud and shadow study), I was lifted out of myself for a second into a melancholy, unnameable yearning upward. Yugen.

…why I need someone to show up at my home or office and force march me to spinning class or weight lifting or just power walking. Why am I so lazy when most of the people I know are exercise junkies with zero body fat? They don’t even need to be self-disciplined because they actually love to exercise.

…why I always sit behind the person on the plane who has to have his/her seat reclined all the way into my lap for the whole flight even while eating. It gives me Row Rage to the point that I want to slam a water bottle into their head as I struggle to slither out of my seat as if I’m doing the limbo in order to get to the restroom. Or bounce my knees against the back of their seat like an unruly two year old. Or open and slam shut my lap tray until they start to bleed from their ears.

…why I still haven’t learned not to start the Monday morning commute listening to any Karen Carpenter song. By the time I get to work, I need Thorazine.

…if I would want to date myself if someone set me up on a blind date with Me? Makes you think.

…when my funny bone got osteoporosis. Realizing that I’ve laughed more in the past two weeks than I have in a long time, especially in therapy which you would think is no laughing matter.

…where I lost my favorite bracelet with Chinese characters painted on the beads. Still looking for it even though it seems hopeless. As does so much of life, but still we have to keep believing in delightful surprises.

(00ps–should have mentioned that the photo was taken at the V&A in London by my talented friend Claire Kramer MacKinnon)

Although I fell in love with this mural in Shoreditch a couple of weeks ago, I think it would be very hard to either adore or endure me right now. Ever since I got back from London with a fractured ankle, I have been a proper bitch. The cast on my leg feels like a log, and all the Velcro strips holding it together want to snarl up together in one big clump when I’m trying to put it on or remove it. Nevertheless, I decided that a cracked ankle would not keep me from the gym, so yesterday I Velcro-ed up and stumped around the workout room being mad at my trainer and everyone there who had two good feet. Then I came home, un-Velcroed, showered and re-Velcroed, and by the time I got to work I was so fucking irritated I wanted to bite someone. I mean really bite. It’s ridiculous to be this maddened by a mere cast considering the disabilities and problems experienced by so many people I know, but I suspect it illuminates why I’m not very good at relationships. I want to be adored and I’m not good at enduring the daily aggravations and compromises required of living with a guy. If the Universe meant to teach me patience and humility by cracking my ankle bone, it’s just not working. Instead, I am becoming frighteningly feral.

The world still has the ability to take my breath away, especially when I think I’ve become immune to hope or expectation or enlightenment. Not just by throwing out sights like this one, but also in revealing gaspy insights long after I thought I’d learned all there is to know about myself. Like lessons in letting go. At the same time the sun was disappearing in a last golden gush over the marsh, a giant pink moon was rising like a hot-air balloon above the tree line on the other side of the road. The world gives and it takes, sometimes in the same instant or the same event or the same love. I’ve just never been quite able to trust that if I open my hand and release what I’m holding so tightly, the world will have other gifts to offer as fine. Not replacements, but replenishments.

]]> http://fridaville.com/surprise-package/feed/ 4 http://fridaville.com/the-eternal-return/ http://fridaville.com/the-eternal-return/#comments Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:49:00 +0000 nikki http://fridaville.com/?p=726

Even though I know my old love is truly dead, I have a hard time accepting it in the back of my brain. Every morning when I open my email, I halfway expect a message from him, even though we never emailed, only wrote stacks of love letters on paper. It’s absurd, I know. Still–I think I’m secretly looking for signs that he’s here somewhere nearby. As if there’s an internet cafe in the afterlife where he could tap out a quick hello/I still love you. (Surely they’ve upgraded from Ouija boards by now.) In Starbucks last weekend, I was sitting on the window sill, patiently waiting for my coffee, watching couples snog in line and reminding myself that, “I’ll never walk down a street in a strange city and run into him, I’ll never have a chance to say I’m sorry, I’ll never know for sure if he ever thought of us.” Trying to grind down hope and spread the ashes. When I walked up to get my latte, there was a display of cups I’d never seen before, all imprinted with the word, REINCARNATE.  The rational, enlightened part of me knows it was just a clever way to market cups made of recycled material, but the part of me that wants to believe in magic and miracles hopes it’s a sign that we are all recycled material and we’ll mix and mingle again another day, in another time and place, in a most unexpected way.

This is part of the American family panorama that greets you when you walk in our local Old Navy. There was an archetypal dog too, but I couldn’t fit it in the photo. I think the mannequins are supposed to represent a NAFTA version of “It’s a Small World,” but it seemed instead just a creepy, plastic paean to outsourced crap clothing, which of course I purchased. It’s such an eerie contrast to the book I’m reading now–A Blue Fire by James Hillman–which is soaked in soul and the poetic basis of mind. Given that I have Saturn (earthbound, hard reality) and Neptune (mystical, imaginative dreamer) in my natal sign, it’s no wonder that I’m sometimes on the front lines of the war between the material world and the life of the soul–tying myself down with Stuff instead of flying with angels. Often in the past few years, I’ve felt as ossified and imprisoned as these plastiques, but I’m fascinated that at a time when I’m trying to break that mold, I was confronted with such a literal interpretation of it. There are messages everywhere we look, if we only look.

Working at home this week has turned my house into a little cloister. I listen to music while I write, no television, very few telephone conversations, housebound except to go out for food or coffee, reading in bed by 8pm, a return to the feeling of childhood when the sheets and blankets seemed to embrace me and my body is not fretting and tense about tomorrow morning. I’m free of the usual quotidian diversions — traffic, office telephone, office conversation, filling the tank, shopping, chatting, puttering, hunting and gathering. With all of that gone, what’s left is a stillness that is sometimes like warm oil on raw spots in my soul, but sometimes leaves room for all the troubling thoughts I usually shove away in a drawer in my brain. I’m so aware of how I fill up the empty spaces in my heart with trivia and trinkets that I don’t know how I’ll return to the world and pick up where I left off. And is it possible to live in the world and not do that? I’m reading The Soul’s Code again and realizing how demythologized my daily life has become. All material, no spiritual. All shopping, no angels. All rationality, no daimons. Just Whole Foods, Glee and and a new purse, 401Ks and the 411 on Housewives. It’s ironic that I love reading mysteries, but I don’t have much mystery to sustain the life of my soul. I want all of that mundane to be mixed up with crazy wild supernatural miracles, blessings, visitations from beyond and the music of the spheres. I want to believe in magic again…is that too much to ask?

“In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors.”

William Blake

As you might have guessed from other posts, I’m a bit obsessed with William Blake and Jack Kerouac. I found this quote on a web site today and copied it down on the nearest scrap of paper. The feeling of being caught between those two states of being is so familiar to me. As if there is something waiting for me to know if I could only find the door and walk through it to the other side.  Yesterday, I told a friend that one of my deepest wishes is to know how to be in a relationship fully. That was hard for me to admit because I’ve done the opposite for so many years. Listening to Matt Dillon read Kerouac’s On the Road again recently, I realized that if there are 500 men in a room, I will unerringly pick out the Dean Moriarty in the bunch and make him my cross. Because it hurts so good as John Mellencamp wrote! So it’s like taking my clothes off in a public place to admit that I know how to fall in love but not how to hang on to love. Or like putting one foot on the threshold of the unknown and wondering if I’ll walk across it.

Screening is too easy, and I don’t mean just screening calls. It’s screening the unspoken messages that you aren’t good enough or cool enough or just enough. My doctor, who I love and who is so incredibly human and humane and innovative, always asks me if I’m seeing “someone.” I’m glad he does, because he’s just keeping tabs on my social life to make sure that I  have one, that I’m not isolated or hermiting. How many docs bother? But when other people ask me that and the answer is “no,” I always feel somehow that it’s my fault. Why don’t I meet any men, why aren’t I on match.com, what’s wrong with me?  So I’m trying to look at it from a different point of view: How great it is that my friends and acquaintances believe I’m capable of attracting a “someone.” So many things in life benefit from standing on the other side of the window and looking outside in, instead of always from the inside out.