I’ve probably written before about how much I live in my head and fail to pay enough attention to my surroundings, but something ragged and imperfect and gorgeous about these leaves caught my eye. The wabi-sabi-ness of them allures, like the tattered petals of peonies or chipped nail polish or the crackled glaze on an old plate. I’ve always been so intent on polishing my presentation, covering up my flaws, revising my past that I exhaust myself trying to be A Better Me. I shared some background about my bleak family life and childhood with a friend recently and admitted that I was tired of trying to wrangle my life history into a tidier narrative. One with quirky relatives and appealing redneckiness told with an eye-rolling shrug and wry tone of voice. It’s a relief to admit to myself that I’m chipped china and wind-blown leaves and crumbling stucco and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Remember how I said I wanted to go back to Mojo Graduate School? Today I took the first step. Sunday morning when I usually lie in bed til late afternoon, I got up, got dressed and took my books and journal to Starbucks. I had some external motivation because I was meeting a friend for lunch, but for almost three hours I read about alchemy, wrote in my journal and made notes in a new tablet, drank coffee, plugged in my headphones and pretended I was in Paris. Listening to Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert transported me back to actual graduate school at University of Virginia, having dinner at my T.A.’s house, hearing this album for the first time while fighting him off as he tried to pull off my pantyhose (!). And when I resisted (I thought he loved my mind, not my ass!), he snubbed me the rest of the semester because I didn’t put out (why didn’t I?) and made me feel like the bumpkin I was. But he gave me the lasting gift of introducing me to that cd, one of my Desert Island Discs, and life gave me the gift of a year at a university where I was able to delve, unfold, investigate, explore and gobble up things I had never dreamed of in my little life in Kentucky or my battered life as a wife. It was a year of sadness and confusion and failure but also one of growing up, growing out, growing forward. Maybe it’s impossible to recapture that particular fresh, fertile mind, but today glows because what I was learning took over my Self consciousness and let me soar for a little while. I’m looking forward to back-to-school Sundays.

I’d love to be reborn as a lush full-blown amaryllis, bursting into the world with a personality as big as a shiny new 18-wheeler. Ready for days soaking up the sun and nights making love with the moon. With a mouth made for kissing and kissing again, I wouldn’t know the meaning of guilt, shame or regret. I’d never hold back, instead throwing myself into being with all the red in my veins, betting everything I owned on one explosive entrance — wearing my best dress, quivering with green and gold perfumed sap, batting my pollen tipped lashes. A beautiful broad who was born to bloom.

I try to choose a word each January to guide or inspire me for the coming year, and I feel a great pressure for it to be a brave or uplifting  or inspiring word. A word that tells the world I’m a kickass kind of woman. But sometimes I feel like I’m faking it. Yes, I would like to say that my word for 2012 would be FORWARD or YES or MORE, but I have to admit that many days I just feel small, stuck and confused. I want to be a Joan of Arc/Gloria Steinem/Frida Kahlo woman, but I am so often scared, little and insignificant even though I want to see more, feel more, do more, make more, be more. This year, I might take a step downward, go deeper into the darkness of little me instead of pretending to be superwoman. My word might be OPEN — scary in itself, because when you leave a door open, you don’t know what will come in or leave. A liminal space, a threshold, a place of ambiguity that ‘s difficult for someone like me who wants things to be black and white, clearcut, certain.

I dread grocery shopping, even when it’s someplace as seductive as Whole Foods, but the other day I took home more than a pricey pomegranate, politically correct bison burger or out of season heirloom tomatoes. When I was stowing the bags in my car, the setting sun lit up the sky in the parking lot for a minute or two, giving the clouds a rosy blush as it kissed the day goodbye. Just a tiny earth movie that I happened to witness. I’m sure they’re playing all over town, every day, all day, but I’m usually too caught up in the soundtrack playing in my head to take notice.

I love my bed. I love reading in my bed, staying up late in my bed, resetting the alarm to give me more time in my bed. But I watched a TEDx San Francisco video tonight by a woman named Mel Robbins, who is probably one of those people who would really annoy me and tire me out in real life, but whose talk woke up part of me that has been sleeping for the past year, especially when she explained her theory about “hitting the inner snooze button.” You know, those times when you have an intriguing and possibly original idea but you immediately dismiss it, turn it off, turn your back on it, turn the juice off. Because that idea will never fly, someone’s already thought of it and who really cares? I do it constantly. It’s so predictable it’s embarrassing. I hit my inner snooze button instead of getting up and following that idea like a dog in heat. I do the same thing in the morning … resist getting out of bed, resist being awake to the world, resist the mystery of the day ahead. Because it is a big, fucking mystery in which as the Robert Bly poem goes, “someone may bring a bear to your door.” If you find yourself also hitting the inner snooze button, have a look at the video and think about following her 5-second rule for a few days and see what happens.

For the last year I’ve been pissing and moaning about moving, getting away, running away. I’ve felt as if  I was through with this city, bored, boring and chafing at the bit. Never mind that I didn’t have any other place I wanted to be, no other place to call “home.” I mentally rehearsed living in Hawaii (too expensive), London (too expensive), going back home to Kentucky (too emotionally expensive), anywhere but here. I can’t say that it’s been a bad year in the sense that so many people are having a bad year by losing jobs and homes and hope, but it’s been a bad year in the sense of being lost, wandering, wondering, wishing I could get out of my skin and be someone better, fiercer, happier, less invested in loss. I’ve been working hard at understanding why I feel this way, so flat and foreign. I went through years when I lost my inner ear for music; I just didn’t feel it or hear it or want it. I was like those people who  suddenly lose their ability to taste because of some sort of illness, and when my craving for music returned, I realized what a big hole its absence had left in my life. Now I can’t get through the day without a soundtrack. Rock anthems on the way to work, jazz to rock me to sleep. Just as recently I’ve been able to see again, really see the beauty that I swim in daily. The moon riding high and pale in a blue morning sky, the russet autumn marsh grass, the ruffled water of the harbor, a hidden pond on my drive to work where an egret lives, the in-your-face sunsets that winter bring. Leaving work as the days grow shorter, I suddenly notice the neon theater sign that has always been just across the street, clouds stained candy-cotton pink at twilight, ordinary buildings made mysterious by the coming night, the small but intense satisfaction of plugging in my strings of porch lights when I come home. I’m not ready to say I’ve made peace with where I am, that I’ll never leave, that I don’t long for some nameless More, but like my ability to hear music again, my eyes are opening to what is exquisite all around me. And that is enough for now.

Walking on Hampstead Heath on a quiet weekday morning, we passed this pond so still and beautiful that it could have been the legendary resting place of King Arthur’s Excalibur or the secret center of the universe. Whenever I look at this photo, I can feel my breathing slow down and my attention wanders far away from computers and spreadsheets and workout classes. I wish I could create a place like that in my mind, my soul, a still center that exists outside fickle time.  I always hope it will happen for me during meditation (when I can be bothered to actually sit down and do it), but instead my head buzzes like a hive of behind-schedule bees or I start to fall asleep. A friend of mine recently took Transcendental Meditation training and now practices 20 minutes every morning and evening. It’s a huge commitment in terms of both time and money, but she swears by it (especially now that’s she’s no longer using the mantra she borrowed from her father!). I guess a mantra is just a way to trick your mind into sitting up and taking notice, or just sitting up and being awake and aware. I always feel like I’m missing the point of meditation and have to be reminded again and again why I should bother,  but this photo makes me wonder if it isn’t just another one of those deep ponds of being that we are desperately seeking beneath all the magic tricks and cheap baubles the world carnival uses to distract us.

I wish I could write that I say “yes” more often than “no,” but I’d be lying to myself if I did. Most often, I say “maybe,” or “doubt it,” or just “whatever.” That’s when I’m not berating myself for not being taller, younger, thinner, smarter or simply not enough. I’m embarrassed to admit that Simply Not Enough is my default setting. I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in my life that I stopped and admired something I’d accomplished without a nagging inner voice saying it could have been better, bigger, bolder. Or looked in a mirror and wholeheartedly liked what I saw. Or made a decision and not second-guessed myself. And yet Yes is so simple. Yes, I want to devour that double dip ice cream cone sensually and soulfully without feeling guilty five minutes later. Yes, I will stay in bed all weekend and forget about being an adult with chores to do. Yes, I will kiss your mouth off your face. Yes, I will never stop believing in love no matter how many times it kicks me in the ass. Maybe some lucky people are welcomed into the world on the breath of a “yes” while others, like me, take a lifetime to learn the language. Yes. It’s never too late.

A Hollywood sunset and a pink moon, no matter how often they happen, simply blow me away. Watching the sun go down behind the dunes on the beach near my home is so goose-pimply that I don’t know why I don’t do it more often. It reminds me of how small I am. How magical and comforting the tides are, pushed and pulled by the charismatic, sexy moon. How fleeting beauty is. How we take it for granted. As if there are so many sunsets and moon rises we can afford to miss a few. Because we have bank accounts to balance, laundry to do, groceries to buy. I’m so often guilty of forgetting what I was put here to be and see.