I realized this weekend that my mood board is so clogged with old clippings, ephemera and photos that it’s like an archeological artifact. Part of the problem is that I’m so attached to all those poems, drawings, trinkets and other bits and pieces that I can’t bear to take them down or figure out what to do with them. But more troubling is that the board has become a kind of decorative element and has ceased to be really inspiring. And even more upsetting is that my entire home “office” has become just as nonfunctional. It’s never been where I write — I do that on my laptop in bed or in coffee shops or on the couch — but it’s become a playroom that’s never played in anymore. How do you keep your mood board fresh and your work room functional? Can’t decide if I need a life coach or a room coach.

I have all my appointments on my iPhone, with Alerts and Second Alerts and Alarms and Birthdays and it makes me feel quite nuts because it’s all so kind of Invisible. Everything seems to be happening at once in a very overwhelming way. Is it because I’m too old to keep a digital calendar, too structured to have my dates floating in the ether? I know that time is not linear, that all kinds of things from the past invade the present, blur the lines between Was and Is, that we cycle around and around, committing the same sins, hitting the same sensitive spots over and over in the great return. But when it comes to “Dentist–Nov 10″ or “Logan’s Bday, Dec 28″ I have to see it all laid out before me like hopscotch time. I crave the white space of open days when nothing is required of me except to dawdle, dream or wander. I need to cross off accomplishments, cancel activities on a day that is too full, put a star sticker by exercise, draw a heart around special events or anniversaries of the heart, doodle a yellow sun on a day I’m really happy, glue oddments and ephemera to the page. That’s the calendar I tape to the inside of my front door so that I can see it first thing in the morning when I leave for work and last thing when I’m locking the door at night.  A little roadmap that gives me the illusion of control, order, security and writes a shorthand short story about my life.

]]> http://fridaville.com/time-lines/feed/ 2 http://fridaville.com/just-ahead/ http://fridaville.com/just-ahead/#comments Sun, 31 Oct 2010 01:23:55 +0000 nikki http://fridaville.com/?p=747

Are you where you belong? If so, you’re lucky, because I’ve never lived anywhere I didn’t consider temporary. Even if I was there for decades. One of the favorite paintings I own shows an open road stretching into the horizon and pretty much sums up my ambivalence about home. I long for it but never feel I’m quite rooted anywhere, that there is always somewhere “out there” that’s my real home. My search is complicated by ruling out places that are haunted by my past, certain locations that constitute holy ground for me, where intense emotions are seared into the atmosphere, where I loved or lost, where emotional vibrations disturb the air like the silence after music. A graveyard in Kentucky, a certain quality of light on a street in San Diego, the townhouse where my marriage died, the university quad where I fell in love at first sight. Places whose soundtrack could only be Chopin’s Prelude, Opus 28 No 4 in E Minor. If I moved anywhere near those spots, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, wouldn’t be able to stop myself from revisiting the past, couldn’t not haunt them like a living ghost. So my soul is always on the road, always looking for rest, for rescue, for a place that strikes the missing chord.

With the darkness closing in earlier now, I always turn on the white twinkle lights and made-by-a-friend  tin can lights on my porch when I go out in the evening. I love coming home late, driving down my street and seeing from a block away my house welcome me back like a fiesta for one. And I like the idea of  sending out peace and love via prayer flags and party lights to anyone passing by. Porch lights are signs of hope and rescue and respite in a dark sea of night and trouble and losing our way. We all need to have one turned on for us for us somewhere in the world, to guide us home by the  heart strings.

I came back from the “wilderness,” a week in and around Yosemite, to find an email that my mailbox was too full, my mortgage payments for the last two months somehow hadn’t been recorded and a cryptic letter from the IRS that I owe the government $3,000 plus for some reason that remains mysterious no matter how often I read the message. To compound my misery, I stepped on the scale to find that after a week’s worth of grueling hikes, I literally had not lost an ounce of weight. I cried for about 10 minutes (I’m a failure at everything!), went back and read my post about the 5-Year-Perspective (applying, applying, applying) and restrained myself from rushing out to buy a Frosty at Wendy’s (don’t do it!). I know all of this is fixable, and even the weight has its up-side — at least I didn’t gain any. Seems I’m just getting a larger post-vacation slap of reality than usual. Being disconnected from television, work and any responsibility other than getting to the top of the next oxygen-sucking trail meant living moment to moment instead of fake crisis to fake crisis. The real uphill slog comes when I’m home. I hope that when I wade into all this bureaucratic mess next week, I remember sitting with my feet in a clean ice-cold, snow-fed river, the color of sun-bleached grass on the hillside, a coyote pausing by the road to give me a look, the mountain half in shade, half in light — just like life.

I’ve been having a completely nonproductive, unintellectual weekend and loving it. Friday after work, I went to the restaurant across the street from the office and had 1 1/2 glasses of Chardonnay, talk to the bartender (who I love because he warned me to stay away from a guy I met there), and write in my journal. I can’t say that anything memorable comes out of those writing sessions but the stress of a week of work gradually fades away as I brainstorm with myself, draw, and make to-do lists for the next week. I had dinner with friends and came home and read a poorly written historical novel. Thank god for the bad historical novel writers who keep me company in my insomnia. Today, I again did nothing useful except go to the post office and take vitamins. I brushed my teeth and put on a bra before leaving the house, so I think I get some points for that. Then I spent several hours playing MahJong online, reading Vanity Fair and listening to the rain. So here’s the thing — given that “our ground time here is limited,” as Maxine Kumin noted in a poem, shouldn’t I be making stuff, thinking big thoughts or taking flying lessons? Yes, I think I should, and I wish I’d spent more time doing that over the course of my life instead of reading People and going to T.J. Maxx. But I love the “wasting” of time, too, so I’m caught up in a familiar existential dilemma. And now that I’ve finished reading VF, I’ll get right back to Buddha’s Brain…soon. After all,tomorrow is another day, as Scarlett said to Sartre.

I have little pop-up altars all over my house. Some are shelves with family photos and candles, others are impromptu gatherings of  numinous images or objects. This one is in my bedroom, and the flowers have been exchanged for a little vase of fresh rosemary to remind me of people in my life who are gone or far away. I don’t go to church, and I’m never quite sure what I’m doing in this life, much less whether there’s an afterlife.  Maybe my hodgepodge of icons and altars (Shiva cheek to jowl with the Virgin of Guadalupe who is next to Frida) is just another hipster decorating pretension, or maybe my altars are spiritual lightning rods, designed to attract what I’m seeking in the way of peace, enlightenment, creativity, clarity, belonging, believing. Mostly, though, I think they’re visual prayers, the only kind I know h0w to make right now.

Do you ever get driven to distraction by your inability to follow though on anything? Distraction is the water I swim in lately, but in one of the many books on writing, resistance and change that I’ve been reading, I found a good piece of advice: Pick one thing and do it. Doesn’t it sound simple verging on simpleton? Not for me. I obsess about everything, which keeps me in a constant spin. The spare room is still a mess, my bedroom doesn’t induce calm or serenity, and I keep accumulating piles of things that don’t  get put away, dealt with or thrown away. So yesterday I picked one thing that needed to be done in my life and did it. My books have been making me crazy, with stacks of them covering the coffee table, spilling out of the bedside table, rising in teetery towers up available walls. I spent most of the day filling bags with books I want to give away and then shelving what was left. Just getting them off the floor and every other available surface made me feel I’d take a small step toward clarity. I know there are even more titles I need to let go of, but I’ve made a good beginning. The key for me was not getting diverted by a postcard I might find in an old book or siting down to read a page I’d marked with a sticky note. I’m easily diverted and tend to leave projects midway through. Admittedly, I did I hare off to try and replace a bathroom faucet at one point in this literary mayhem, but luckily I didn’t have the right screwdriver and was forced back to my main task. “Do one thing” is my new Zen-ish mantra.

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.

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?

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