It's not you, it's me

A woman I love dearly has been having a hard time. A man whom she thought she loved has unceremoniously and in fact, meanly, dumped her. And by dumped I mean the ugly, cruel, horrible way. This man said things to her to intentionally undermine her self concept, her femininity, her attractiveness and her self-esteem. He just went after her, balls to the wall, attacked her for no reason other than a personal outpouring of his own exit-strategy hostility.

Well first of all, this was completely classless and lacked any compassion and kindness and anything I could call "having a soul." It was an extreme example of the universe showing someone to be a complete asshole. The thing I have to wonder is, why? Why do people do things like this? Why are people so fooled about each other, and if they aren't fooled and there really was some context of love and good feeling there, why does a break up give anyone this sense of free reign to attack? The whole thing was like watching this woman slam into a brick wall of pain--except she didn't do it to herself, she just trusted someone who brutalized her. It was horrible to watch and we have all been there--I certainly have.

As humans we get terribly attached to each other. In love relationships we allow our partner to define us in some way. We let them into the most intimate parts of our being. We reveal ourselves on every level, and we put it all out there for them to (hopefully) love. In the case of doing this with someone compassionate and kind, even an ending has the potential for dignity and love and basic decency. But when someone misjudges their partner as being kind and then comes to find too late in the day that they were simply being "nice" while they were involved in the chase, the potential for disaster seems imminent and horrifying.

Watching my girlfriend go through this, I remembered the times this has happened to me. It is impossible for people involved in romantic love relationships to not have a yin and yang sort of give and take whereby they impact each other. Women especially create some level of their physical and sexual and feminine selves for and based on the reaction of the men they love. Women try to look good for the men they love. Men do this too. Everyone wants to be wanted by the person they adore--and wanted in every way. Victoria's Secret makes a billion dollar industry out of this need to be not only loved but physically adored by one's romantic partner.

So, as I sat and listened to my friend tell me of the hostility and brutality of her recent breakup, I offered to her that he didn't have control over her self concept and that her beauty was not defined by him. This is one hundred percent true, except it isn't. People in love, people who are in love and intimate are in a complicated give and take where they both affirm and embrace each other, where they adore and are adored, where they allow their partner to have an impact on their emotions--and thus, they give that person an intense power. The power to "complete" them and the power to wound them too. Is it wrong? No. Can it be incredibly destructive? Oh, yes.

I have been thinking about this a lot since we met for coffee the other day. I have been thinking about how it kills me to see my dear friend in so much pain and that all my platitudes (while true) about self-concept and personal power are not the whole picture. We give that special someone power over us. Power when they are given the key and let inside the Secret Garden. There is always a chance that the person whom we give a key uses their power unwisely. And that is when we must as individuals take back our power.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't that one special person who will never misuse their power (and it doesn't mean that lovers can't wound each other and recover and continue to love, perhaps even more deeply). But when people say they are looking for that "one true love" I believe they are saying they are looking someone they can trust completely inside their soul. There isn't a woman on the planet who isn't moved by the Carly Simon song lyric: "Hold me in your hands like a bunch of flowers." There isn't a woman on the planet who doesn't truly hope that this is the way she feels when she finally opens her soul to another being.

Whether a love relationship or not, we all have to be careful who we let in. The emotional lines between two individuals in relationship are always drawn in pencil.

I hope with all my heart that my friend will be alright. I have seen depression and I know it is nothing to mess with, and that a good friend can't assume their dear friends are okay, no matter what. That assumption is fraught with risk. People who care for each other need to be aware of each other's emotional health and safety. We need to watch our friends to make sure they are okay, we need to be aware of the pain of our loved ones. We must never assume people survive their break ups and flourish without loving hands and hearts helping them up.

Certainly to this man I would say he has done something truly evil. Sure, most people pass it off as an angry break up, but at what point are people responsible for how they hurt those who love them, or how they hurt anyone at all? I believe at every point. Compassion and kindness are part of everything to be valued in human interaction--beginnings, the long and sometimes troubled road of day-to-day existence and yes, even endings. We must always take care of each other. No matter what.

 

The Right Thing to Do- c. Carly Simon--all rights reserved

To my friend I wish an understanding of her own preciousness. I wish that for us all.

Assumptions, anger, bullies, anger, guns, anger, fear, anger and the wisdom of the Brady Bunch

People have the general notion that you shouldn't make assumptions. I remember I had a high school teacher who used to stand in front of the class and say, "You shouldn't assume, it makes an ass out of you and me." (Get it? U and ME?) Well, anyway, this same teacher had a daily nervous breakdown and sometimes when we were particularly awful as high school kids can be if they sense a weaker animal, he would take his thermos and take some sort of pill--I imagined these were his heart pills or his downers (AKA Mother's little helpers) and that his complete disgust with us coupled by his pain about being stuck with us rendered him unable to cope without medical assistance. At the ripe old age of 15, I had very little pity for this man. And granted, he was a pompous, unyielding, unhappy jerk, but still. Today I have more pity for him. I know the feeling of just absolutely feeling stuck and stressed and like I just can't take it and I admit I have reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out something to make myself feel better a time or two (or 500). So even though today I see eye-to-eye with the man on his Xanax usage, I don't see eye-to-eye with him on his rigid, annoyed, self-righteous attitude. If he would have taken himself and the situation a little less seriously, if he would have seen it for what it was--a class of basically okay, probably a little bored, over-energetic high school kids in a pretty mellow time in the history of high school, maybe, just maybe, he wouldn't have needed those pretty white pills. Remember, what Alice said, "Feed your head," isn't necessarily the answer, but I digress.

This saint of a man's biggest problem in my never-to-be-humble opinion was that he was wrong. You can and should be able to make a whole helluva lot of assumptions* about life, your friends, your family, your school, the place you work, the people at the grocery store and the person walking behind you in the parking structure. Your assumption is and should be that all of these people are for the most part operating with good and harmless intent. They aren't trying to screw you over or hurt your feelings, they aren't trying to make you feel bad about yourself or insult you, they aren't trying to cheat you or lie to you or hurt you. More likely than not they don't have a wish to kill you or maim you or even cut you off in traffic. The probable worst they are doing is being stressed themselves, or preoccupied with their own stuff, or at the very worst, self-centered. At their best, they are opportunities for you to have positive and happy interactions, at their worst they are just not paying much attention to you. You can and should assume some basic things about most people most of the time.

If you know someone well, if you love them and they love you, you can be reasonably sure that they are not sitting around in their quiet moments planning rude and insulting things to say to you to push your buttons. You can assume that if someone loves you they are not trying to hurt you. If they are, they don't love you. Even if they don't love you in most cases they still won't try to hurt you because they have that special thing I like to call basic human decency. Most of us have this and use it with everyone--the loves of our lives and strangers. It's basic. It's common. It's a no brainer. If you are reacting, you better check out your own heavy load of emotional baggage first. Is it you? Is it me?  Take a moment and own it if it's you. No one cares and the world will be saner if everyone has an actual fuse.

Example:
Person who loves me: Random statement. (I jump at this assuming they are trying to destroy me forgetting the entire context and history of our interactions, who I know this person to be, and how I actually know that they probably meant nothing by whatever random thing they said at all.)
Me: WTF? How can you be like this to me????? You suck. (bla bla bla bla bla bla)
Fight ensues.

Possible new example:
Person who loves me: Random statement. (I jump at this assuming they are trying to destroy me forgetting the entire context and history of our interactions, who I know this person to be and how I actually know that they probably meant nothing by whatever random thing they said at all. However, before I speak I take a moment and breathe. In. Out. In. Out.)
Me: Want a pizza?
Person who loves me: Sure!
Smiles and kissing, and whatever. Fade out.

So, personal and loving connections cured, let's move on to the rest of the world. Take technology, for instance:

Why do you suppose, in this instantaneous technological input age when nothing happens without everyone knowing in about five minutes, do we feel so attacked and at risk and afraid? My theory is we know too many bad things. In the long-ago day (any day, you pick, dawn of time to 1979), people just didn't have access to things as quickly. There were printed newspapers if you lived in a metro area twice a day. There was the evening news. People didn't walk around with a device in their hand that pinged them anytime there was a possibility of a problem. WARNING WARNING WARNING--something may happen. Look out Alice, look out, look out!

WARNING DANGER WILL ROBINSON~~~~~~~~

No, we went outside, we went places sans our parents, and in fact, here is just how crazy stuff was in our day: The other night I was watching a Brady Bunch rerun (please don't lie to me, you watch it too) and in this episode Mr. Brady told Cindy she could wait for Santa alone in the mall while he went to run an errand. She was six and she told him, "Get lost dude, I got this." And she did. My Brady Bunch watching companion exclaimed, as did I, about how totally bizarre this is today. Well, news flash people, she was perfectly safe (yeah, I know it was a TV show) but, still, she WAS perfectly safe, as were you when you went outside alone and rode your bike and played in the vacant lot and all the other stuff you did where you emerged unscathed--or maybe even scathed, but scathed is part of it, remember?  Cindy Brady is a representation of the collective attitudes we used to feel in this country not so very long ago. Kids were safe. That's what we thought and they mostly were.

A couple of other things for you to consider about this reality. Things just have not changed that much. Kids are still mostly safe, we just think they aren't. And guess what? All our fear and assumptions that we have to arm ourselves and prepare to protect ourselves from pillage and murder or worse are just trumped up, jacked up, scary emotions in overdrive from just plain hearing about too much bad stuff all the time. The reality is and will always be sometimes bad stuff happens to people. Kids have been occasionally mistreated at the hands of strangers since the world began.
Mostly strangers will help a kid not try to string him up from the nearest tree. So all this fear is rendering life a very unhappy place for all these kids that we scare the crap out of every day. Life was bad enough as children, don't you remember? (Just coping with the emotional chore of finding a place in the world being a kid in ideal circumstances is hard for kids.) And our parents were mostly calm about our safety. Mostly unconcerned. "Look both ways" was about as scary as it got.

My Brady Bunch watching companion and I decided that Nancy Reagan invented the notion of kids being unsafe. She invented "stranger danger" programs and DARE. She made scaring kids about their potential for sudden attack, addiction, STDs and the idea that their parents should be watched to see if they are trying to slip them a Sudafed, a government-mandated program. She made it curriculum. I personally like Mister Brady's approach. Look both ways and wait for Santa. You will be okay.

Additional theory: I took my child out of many of the DARE program activities claiming religious issues. Yes indeedy, I had a religion and it was: not to guilt and shame and scare the crap out of my child every single day at school. I taught her to not do drugs, I taught her to drink responsibly and socially. I taught her about sex and her responsibility to protect herself not only physically but emotionally. It's called parenting. I don't think it has to be curriculum.

Kids today don't have a chance. They are strung out about what can happen to them. They are sitting in front of their computers 24/7 where they have instant access to all the horrible things that are happening around the world and their parents are either scared out of their minds and overreacting by following their children around scheduling every single second of their lives or joining hands together at we-need-our-guns-so-we-can-kill-potential-murders rallys.

Additional theory: No wonder all our kids across the nation are stressed out freaks killing one another. You can't cyberbully someone if you aren't on the Internet all day. Real life bullies in real life have a far better chance of being caught because they are seen.

Remember when you didn't have something scheduled every single second? Kids like that. And no they don't get the Anarchist's Cookbook and make bombs when they find themselves without a karate class or a chess tournament to go to. They can't even get that book without the FBI tracing it and arriving at their door because of the Patriot Act anyway. (In fact, using those words in this blog in this moment probably has me on a "no fly" list. For real.) Kids chill in their unscheduled time or they play or they read or they sit in trees or they imagine stuff or they draw or they bug their sisters or they spill things or they watch TV. We did, right? What was wrong with our childhoods? I can't think of a thing really. So why all these reactionary parents derived from kids who experienced blissful peaceful, relaxing childhoods? Nancy Reagan. She is my fall guy. However, not to give Nancy a way out of this, but we all had to drink her Koolaid. We drank the Koolaid. Every time we give in to the incorrect notion that the world isn't mostly safe we are drinking more of it. A wise person once told me that statistically speaking the most ordinary outcome will be the most likely. That is just mathematics. You will be okay today and so will junior.

So here's some anarchy for you: Let's give junior some time off for good behavior. Let's assume rightly that if our kids (and grandkids) aren't in a bazillion groups and play experiences, and organized events and bla bla bla they will live and probably thank you for it. They need down time, so do we. We had relaxing childhoods. Now many of us have kids who are having kids. How did we treat our kids? What did we assume about their safety? In this case, let me tell you something, my poor old teacher was right. Sometimes assumptions do make an ass out of you and me.

Additional theory: Down time in a house with guns? You do the math. How good  are your locks and how excellent is your memory and when did you last leave the iron on or the stove or forget the location of your keys? Well, then you can't possibly guarantee the safety of your kids in your house with your guns. Oh, and for all you who are gonna give me the "home invasion" diatribe, I have lived through one, yes, I talked my way out of it using my wits and someone named Jesus (universal power, whatever you are naming it). I am pretty sure Jesus was happy I didn't open up with my assault weapon even in the midst of my own assault. Did I get emotionally scarred? Yes, of course. Was it better than murdering someone and the emotional ramification of that? Ask a (insert your favorite)war vet next time you pass him on the street begging you for money you won't give him because you are too self righteous. (Answer for those who don't get the sarcasm: Yes.)

For God's sake, do something peaceful. I'm tired of yelling for peace. It's counter intuitive. So don't go to the gun rally and don't be so damn worried about yourself, your kids, or your grandkids. I think it's time to get off the reality shows and back to a reality that is more like my favorite fantasy. Mister Brady will thank you. And look both ways, hold hands when crossing and don't overuse your Xanax. Good advice in any world.



Love--

Beauty

* Assumptions are like affirmations. what we think about expands. If you think it's all good, then a lot of it will be good, if you think it's all bad, well then, you know.

The Face You Deserve

Mirrors are amazing instruments. The ultimate instrument of self-reflection. Through them we see ourselves, our faces. We see our expressions, we see what life is doing to us, what the elements are doing to us, what our health is doing to us, and what our souls are trying to tell us.

At 20 we have the faces that God granted us. Just the beginning of mood and personality leaving permanent expressions. Just the beginning of too much smoking or too much booze. Just the beginning of seeing our faces as maps, road maps of how we live our lives. At 20 a couple of nights sleep, a little sun, a little hydration and we are back in shape. We all have lineless, faultless faces.

But at 50? What do we have then? We have the faces we have earned. The battle scars, the abuse, the care, and what we have thought about, are all there to be reflected on our faces. The look in our eyes, the lines. The continual moods have begun to leave road maps that can't be erased. How have we lived? What have we thought? Who are we? It's right there to see. The world sees your face everyday. Every exchange you have, every person you meet, everyone you know, knows you by your face.

Put your best face forward. FaceBook. Face the world. Your face.



Have you looked at the standard face of plastic surgery recently? The other night I saw a commercial for Nutrisystems with a celebrity I have really always liked, Marie Osmond--but now she has purchased the every-scared-woman face. Plastic surgeons are all making the same woman, over and over again. And now Marie has the face. She gave her face away, she threw it away. Every woman who was afraid to let her own face tell the story of her life has joined her in her quest to do what? To appear young and beautiful--but at the cost of losing something that should have been precious to her--her own face.

So what is the story of my life? My face will tell you. Have I been mostly kind? Have I laughed? Have I slept? Have I let go of anger? Have I lived my life with an understanding that the cup is half full or half empty? Who am I? What sort of personal habits have I had? Have I smoked or drank a lot? Have I worshipped the sun? Have I lived with moderation? What have I done to myself? What thoughts have I concentrated on? How have I treated others? How do I feel? 

What of aging gracefully? We aren't meant to remain 18. We aren't meant to look forever 29. We are meant to age gracefully and until society will allow anyone over 30 to be beautiful we will forever have rich plastic surgeons and women who trade in their very own faces for pretend masks that someone, somewhere, calls the "in" young face.

We are meant to get smarter as we get older. We are meant to get wiser. With that wisdom we are meant to get kinder and calmer and hopefully happier. We are meant to embrace ourselves as beautifully aged. Lovely, wise and kind.

Who sold us this bill of goods (especially in the United States) that there was only one way to look? How did we decide a young perfect face and an entirely too thin body was was the ultimate goal? I find it hard to believe that the advertising and fashion industries could dictate to the people of the world what defines feminine beauty.

I am constantly amazed at what people in the world find interesting and valuable. Case in point: I have been writing this blog for almost two years, during this time I have written 47 articles. Some have been enjoyed by multiple readers around the world, others have been widely received because of content (The Good Man for Kirk Knipp, for example), but no one article has had even close to the hits that the photo gallery of obese women has had. This one article has thousands of hits and my other articles hundreds. The search words have amazed me--"funny fat women", "no fat chicks", "fat humor". The reason I don't pull this photo gallery, which I obviously posted for far different reasons than it is used for, is that I live with the hope that one in every thousand people will read another post, or read my captions for that gallery. It is hard to not be discouraged with these numbers and what I believe they mean about who visits this blog. Is enlightenment so dear? Is human kindness so lost? Every time I look at all those hits I have a hard time not losing faith in humanity.

There is a snobby, elitist joke I have always found amusing: "When your IQ gets to a hundred, Sell!" The fascination that these some 12,000 people have at the pictures of grossly obese woman on my blog make me think of this joke. Who are these people? Who educated them?  What can they be thinking?

So this blog continues to be my candle. My one candle in what I am hoping isn't a dark digital night. I urge you to share my blog with people who would appreciate it and even more, I urge you to be that light in your own life, to be the light and to reach out.

We have to keep trying. We have to keep striving. We have to let kindness rule us and we have to drive out the darkness. I don't care who you are or what God's church you have joined. Kindness is my God. Loving kindness.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?

YOU are beautiful. Be YOU.

Beautiful--Chistina Aguilera, all rights reserved, c. 2004

Reflect goodness. Be the light.

God bless,

Beauty

The Wax

Disclaimer: The following article is written expressly for my woman readers. This is going to get intense, guys, so if you secretly read on, you have only yourself to blame. BnB ;)

 



Ritual is a lovely thing. It implies that survival is under control enough to indulge in something a bit higher on Maslow's hierarchy. Beauty ritual is that for me. It is a way to state to myself and to the world that I have handled the emergencies well enough and effectively enough in my life to be at a place where I can  think about adornment. It's not a superficial thing, no. It's a way of acknowledging distance from personal emergency.

Case in point: I recently had some dental surgery with what has turned out to be, yet again, another dentist I absolutely will not want to work with again. After feeling for several days after like I had been taken out in a back alley and beaten within an inch of my life, I went to the emergency hospital. A series of blood work ensuring I am not dying of a staph infection resulting in an uncovered 350.00 even though I have the "best" insurance on the planet, leaves me rethinking surrendering to any emergency short of flat lining. I am sick of problems, frankly. As people approaching midlife we are experiencing human frailty. We are seeing that we should have taken better care of our teeth, that we should have flossed. Or we are seeing that inactivity and sitting behind a desk has caught up with us, or that the human animal's original life expectancy has not evolved enough on an evolutionary scale to include parts that last. Illness in all of its forms just simply sucks. It is the ultimate time waster, I resent it. I resent giving my time and energy to it. I resent having it as focus.

So when it has to be a focus for us--whether my allergies or asthma, or dental work, or your ulcer or diabetes or anything else, it occurs to me that we are giving away the precious seconds to it. We are trading moment by moment our lives away. How will we focus? I would far rather focus on something beautiful, something above survival, just for the sanity it brings.

And who is to say that a positive focus doesn't change reality? I think it does. "That which we think about expands." I refuse to think about things I don't want in my life. That includes illness. So enough said, onto the WAX.

For about a billion years women have been adorning themselves. Cleopatra was no stranger to the henna rinse of the rings of eyeliner, Marie Antoinette had some pretty serious dos. Women have always wanted to gild the lily. I am all for it. Maybe it's spa mentality, maybe its just knowing that if I can take a moment to get a massage or do my hair, or fix my make up or buy perfume I am enjoying living in my body and enjoying the pleasure it gives me. It means I have some pride in myself, I have some healthy ability to indulge myself.

Now obviously this can be taken to an extreme. I just reread a recent news story that pops up occasionally about some twisted woman who has had multiple plastic surgeries in an effort to look like Barbie. In spite of the awesome shoes, Barbie, you are seriously plastic. However, I do commend her attempts to run a veterinary clinic, teach underprivileged children, pilot an airplane and keep up a dream house, all while working some serious damn "f-me" pumps. You go, Barbie. Now Barbie's real-life twisted sister with all the plastic surgery, naw. This girl is messed up and I have about a million different better uses for her money like first a great shrink and failing that a very large donation to a soup kitchen. So, while I am not about to get cut into pieces for a beauty ritual I might get dyed and plucked and sprayed a bit for the joy of enjoying my own skin.

Enter the WAX. (This is your last chance to leave, gentlemen, I suggest you do.)

I have been in recent years someone who has given up the eyebrow pluck. It is just a huge pain and as all of us ladies know in recent years it's a very tricky thing to see the reflected and offending eyebrow hair in a mirror clearly. So I have taken to eyebrow waxing. It's relatively inexpensive, its quick and easy, unless your stylist has some sort of DTs they can't mess it up too much (Ha, more later on this one!) In short, it's a great fix to an annoying problem. And Voilà! I am suddenly five years younger looking with these great big baby greens all open and wide-eyed.

So being a fan of the eyebrow wax it has occurred to me that being an animal I have lots of other interesting places I can wax. This alarmed me and embarrassed me. I had all sorts of preconceived notions about "who" did this and how they must look and that they were probably all porn stars or at the very least extremely young in un-lived in (but adult) bodies. I see everyone who has ever had anything other than an eyebrow wax as about 27 and a supermodel. Even though, I still really wanted to give it a go. I thought it would be a perfect bathing suit solution. I just had it in my mind that I wanted to do it. A friend of mine (younger, thinner, not sporting a post-baby body) did it and raved about the results. I thought I would do it when I reached some perfect pinnacle of perfection. I had some magic number in my head about weight, I had some ideal number of months of workouts being consistent in my life that would render me worthy of this beauty ritual.

And then I went to California on a trip and happened to see the waxing studio near my Massage Envy and I thought I could do this in an out of town location and if something horrible happened it would be like the ultimate in Vegas slogans--what happened there, stayed there. So I booked an appointment.

Now it is true that when I had the eyebrow portion of the treatment done an out of control wax brush dripped wax on my beautiful haircut and the technician was actually forced to give me a manicure scissors so I could cut the wax-covered wisp of hair near my forehead off myself. I am sure she was mortified and frankly I'm no snob--I have taken a manicure scissors to my shining glory for far less. I assured her it was no big deal.

The other part. Well, let me tell you. If you are going to get a bikini wax, a full or even the ultimate Brazilian, do not, for the love of God, watch people doing it or reacting to their first time on YouTube. There is such a thing as too much information. Do what I did. Take a number of Ibuprofen. Have a cocktail or if you object to drinking and driving take a half a Valium. And go. Don't judge yourself. These people do this for a living. They expect you to patronize their establishment. They don't think you are walking in to have your cards read, they know you want hair ripped off your body with hot wax. Live a little.

So how do I feel? I think it has been some combination of a silky mermaid swimming lithely through the ocean feeling the water move against my skin in some sort of natural whole-body embrace and a female superhero. Or maybe I feel like you do when you have incredibly sexy lingerie under your business suit. You know and they don't know, but the secret energizes you. It adds some subtle power to your movements; you are self aware in a luxurious, almost decadent, way. If I was candy, I would be Godiva. I feel seriously pleased with myself.

But more than the thing I did itself is the realization that I reached some sort of level of self acceptance where I suddenly felt I didn't need to hide, where I could revel in my body for itself with its flaws and its history and its own special tattoos of life experience.

Do  I suggest you do it? Not necessarily, but I do suggest you do that one thing you have put off that you would really like to do for yourself, for your indulgence, for your body--and I suggest you do it today.

Love--
Beauty

Being Lost

There are times in life when you feel lost. The things you valued before seem to slip away and the things you are currently focusing on don't seem to have the personal gratification they once did. Life seems to lose focus and days slip away. Something captures your attention, whether trivia or minutia, whether stress or illness, whether time-wasters or even focusing on others to the exclusion of yourself--and suddenly the direction and the motivation you once had seems to slip from your fingers. You don't even have the wherewithal to regroup and figure out what it is that draining your energy.

This lack of direction and loss of time flies directly in the face of something terribly important. Time is short.  Jim Croce said it best when he said, "There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them." He was far too right about that sentiment. I imagine him spending the last moments of his life reciting the lyrics to Time in a Bottle and thinking, "Damn, I really have got to learn not to take everything so literally."

One of my favorite movies is Harold and Maude. I love over-the-top humor, especially if it's eccentric with an underpinning of sentiment and kindness and joy. Harold and Maude has all sorts of things for me. Harold is bizarre and creative and plays with his death and mocks his own and everyone else's life while taking everything incredibly seriously and with earnest amazement. Maude is a young/old soul in an ancient body who manages to be incredibly beautiful and sexy and earthy and insane and innocent and wise and loving and realistic at once. It's a love story full of breaking rules and the union of two lost souls, two quirky and should-have-never-met people who some how, some way find each other. We should all be so lucky to find that one-in-a-million love, that soul mate who reaches into the very depth of us and validates who we are, who sees us and with whom we share precious instances of pure joy. Gallows humor and joy and innocence and love and irony all go together in life. Harold and Maude fall in love and express it physically, making a taboo age difference irrelevant. What other people think about them becomes as ridiculous as forgetting your own name or that the sun rises or the smell of a rose.

I probably relate more to Harold than Maude today. I see something wildly amusing in pretending to hang one's self while sporting a Hello badge" with the message, "HELLO MY NAME IS: Goodbye Cruel World. He is all farce and yet deadly earnest as he doles out macabre punishments to his mother on a daily basis, punishing her for not seeing him, for not recognizing him and for having such detailed and exacting expectations about who he should be.

Add to that a Cat Stevens, pre-terrorist [!], score and suddenly the movie is filled with a radiant joy and some sort of supernatural understanding that seems only to happen in darkened theaters making you feel, if for an instant, that you have some perfect knowledge of How Things Should Be. It usually ends about the time the credits roll, but before they do there is an unmistakable and glorious sense of rightness with the world that just never lingers when the lights go on.

So back to being lost. Harold is lost, I think. I think he finds himself through Maude; a wise and loving friend who loves him completely and then leaves. She leaves to die. And even though, for some, this might be the ultimate betrayal, she knows something that Harold senses. She knows that life is eternal and simply floats away like a weary and beautiful butterfly. The lesson is that we all take responsibility for coming and going as we please in this life and that true compassion and love aren't about attachment but about loving while letting people live in your life with an open door policy of being invited to stay, but not your prisoner.

Maybe being found is really just taking the time to pay attention to yourself. In a world of stupid demands and really tedious circumstances it's easy to stop listening to your own decreasingly loud cries for help. Your frustration and pain and anguish and bitchiness are more often than not, just your own cries for your own attention. No one can hear you but yourself and if you aren't listening you are the architect of your own abandonment. The first place to get seen, to get heard, to get acknowledged and to get forgiveness, love, acceptance, and a friend is the mirror. It's not an act of narcissism, it's an act of self-preservation. We spend our lives shouting, "See me!" When really all we need to do is see our selves.

In this high-tech interweb world that I still think is the single most amazing thing to happen in my lifetime, we have a tendency to social media ourselves into personal submission. I think I simply ceased to be in my quest to be heard. I have gone away now to listen to myself. I have spent years trying to bang pots and pans together loudly and consistently enough to never, ever hear my own soul's pleading.

And so in closing, maybe something from Cat Stevens who I still think is a great tragedy of some sort that I can't quite put my finger on. If anything, just the fact that he stepped away from his music to focus on his religion seems confused and unnecessary. After all, music is a form of God in expression. I miss him. But this isn't the time or place to lose focus again and go off on poor Cat. Let him seek his own voice while we take a moment to listen to his heart:

 



Oh very young what will you leave us this time.

You're only dancing on this earth for a short while.

And though your dreams may toss and turn you now.

They will vanish away like your Daddy's best jeans, denim blue, fading up to the sky.

And though you want him to last forever you know he never will, you know he never will.

And the patches make the good bye harder still.

Oh Very Young, c. Cat Stevens, all rights reserved, Earth Tour, 1976

 

 

The short dance to me means it's high time to get my tutu on.

 

 

Love--

 

Beauty



Dreaming of Yoga

They say dreams are symbols. That may be true. I certainly remember some of my dreams, and have throughout my life. Some are fraught with fear and make my pulse quicken with a sickening feeling of dread when I think of them even now. Others are funny and strange, or so symbolic it's actually laughable.

I remember once I dreamed I had a leaf-shaped key chain lying on the center console of my car, and with great dreaming awareness I turned it over. (Yes, that's right, turning over a new leaf.) I never have interesting dreams, not me. They are either terrifying or distorted—or so lame I cringe. I have dreams I remember since childhood that are vivid and horrible. I remember not only each dream, but also the resulting horrifyingly wakeful night, the rush into my mother's bed and my wide-eyed exhaustion. I remember my fearful focus on the bedroom window, wearily outlasting sleep to see the first muted colors of sunrise; the soft reassuring coo of doves outside signaling a safe moment to finally close my eyes.

I have sort of a running debate with my daughter about dreams. It's a family legacy for the daughter in any mother/daughter duo through the history of our family to be very into her dreams and for the mother to be resistant. The resulting debate: my daughter recites her dreams in detail while I remain steadfast in my position of uncomfortably advising her not to focus on dreaming at all. I wonder what the matriarchal dream aversion is in my family? Maybe it's just too many years of disturbing dreams. Maybe too many women in my family have suffered through years of prophetic dreaming and overly vivid imaginations. My dreams often seem like a forced acid trip might seem to a person in recovery.

For many years I have had what people call prophetic dreams. I have seen the face of someone in a dream unknown to me who I then meet the next day. I have dreamed that I would have a flat tire and the following morning, sure enough, yes. (My mother used to refer to this as my "psychic bullshit.") We matriarchs are also fairly circumspect about the psychic ability in this family as well. In my previous incarnation as a would-be actress in 1980s Hollywood, I even used to dream that my agent called and I needed to get in touch as soon as possible, and then the next morning would call only to find I did, indeed, have an audition.

Oh, yes, and then there are the recurring dreams. Do I dream that I am being followed through a labyrinth only to find a different way out each time? Of course not. I dream of floating trash. That's right, I am viewing trash as it is windblown through a car window. It's a recurring silent movie of floating trash. Fellini would have loved it. Ha.

So with all this preamble into the nether regions of my psyche, then why did I dream last night that I was doing yoga? Well, besides the fact that I have gotten out of my practice and need it, I am also screaming out for balance. You don't have to be a silent trash-viewing, leaf-turning matriarch of a great psychic-experience-denying family to get that one, baby. You only need the basics. Sometimes we dream about what we need. Sometimes we do in dreams what we wish we were doing in real life. (I can hear those three special friends who consistently read my blog filling in the words "Joe Manganiello" after the words "wish we were doing"—and shame on you.)

I wish I were in the balance and peace of yoga.

So where has yoga gone in my life in the last months? Yoga can fall away. I think for me it fell away through a long bout of bronchitis and then stayed away because of a feeling that I didn't have the strength to begin again. But I am forgetting an important aspect of yoga that many of us forget. Yoga is a personal journey. And I don't care how many “fitties” in your health club class sneer at you because you can't keep up or you’re clearly a novice. (They probably aren't actually sneering; they are probably victims of your own "self-hate-colored glasses.")

Yoga is personal. In the best yoga classes I have seen people who have been at all different levels, happily, comfortably, and peacefully. The best yoga teacher of my life started class by having us all turn around and face the back windows. No mirrors. She felt (and rightly) that yoga is not about judging. Yoga is about embracing where and who you are—right then, in that moment.

I remember when I got this. There is a lot of bending and twisting (writhing) in yoga. You get to see the parts of your body that you don't spend a lot of time contemplating. For example, it was in yoga that I first became very up close and personal with my toes. Not my greatest feature, and a source of consistent judgment and unhappiness in the litany of my-messed-up-body-parts song and dance.

So, one day while I was there bent in a position to very closely commune with my toes, and my teacher (guru) said:

“Let go,
 Accept where you are,
 Love and appreciate your body for being the vehicle that gets you here to yoga."

Suddenly, I got it, and I was filled with an embracing love for my previously considered flawed appendages. My amusing little toes and my 52-year-old live-in-them legs were quite frankly a miracle in getting my soul around. Amazingly useful, incredibly wonderful, particularly blessed toes. They stood me up, they made me walk, or run, or dance, or climb, or anything else I wanted to do. They rubbed the fur of my dog as she sat under the table, they squished sand in between them on a hot summer beach and they got me to yoga—in that moment.

A lady who can embrace her toes can embrace herself—warts and all. Our bodies are blessed amazing instruments and they are incredibly necessary. And hating them and hurting them and avoiding them and disregarding them can only stop at the moment we embrace ourselves and say, "Bless this little toe."

So here I am today with my bag of issues, my sack of problems, my hat full of worries and my pocketful of miracles. Loving ourselves enough to open the way to greater self-care starts small. It's loving the flaws first. It's just perspective.

Maybe we can all turn over this new leaf (sorry) and give it a try. Today my toes, tomorrow the world!

With all the love there is,

Beauty

The Summer of (Self) Love

Photo Credit,  Joni Mitchell, For the Roses

I am not sure how many of my readers were around to experience the real Summer of Love. As a child in the late 60s I remember it, however, I certainly did not have any of the awareness of a teenager or young adult deeply moved by that moment in history. I think this photo of Joni Mitchell symbolizes what I imagine personal physical freedom to be; what I imagine self-love to be in photo expression--a complete relaxation of self, unadorned, free, naked--feeling at home in one's body and soul and in harmony with one's surroundings. At its best the Summer of Love seems to have been a time of love consciousness. The concept is interesting to me as I think about what I would like the rest of this summer to be for me.

When I look at this picture of Joni Mitchell I can imagine what it would be like to be transported. On a rock experiencing the spray of the Pacific ocean and the heat of the sun immersed in a private and personal joy. I see someone who feels well and serene. Health is directly related to how we feel emotionally. Stress or sadness, emotional turmoil, or even negativity play a part in overall health. Why this is seems fairly simple when you think about it. Emotional pain is exhausting--whether it's the pain brought on by loss or just daily and unrelenting stress. Emotional pain can be about how we feel about ourselves. People live lives that are out of sync with their values. People often don't see themselves as worthy; they see themselves as flawed instead of as children of God. There are many reasons we can get stuck in emotional pain. Once we are stuck it seems like physical issues follow.

So, how to deal with this? The logical and easy answer is get over the pain, get over the exhaustion, move forward into a good attitude and healthy habits.  For people in pain or experiencing stress that seems like a huge mouthful. Like someone saying, "Hey, just change your whole life and you will be able to get it together. Oh, and do it now. Oh, and I have no idea how. Gotta go."

But any task can be completed by simply breaking it into doable pieces. By making it underwhelming and manageable. When things are manageable they seem less stressful, when stress is reduced happiness increases. It's just a matter of giving ourselves the same rational and calm help we would give our child or a cherished friend. How do we treat ourselves with love while at the same time nudge ourselves into a workable, reasonable plan?

To metaphorically drop one's burdens of ill health and emotional baggage and stand before the ocean naked on a rock. This summer is about getting naked on that rock. (Yes, I am laughing, but it does have value.) How do we get to be our best selves, our healthiest selves, and how do we do it this summer? I am excited to see how. I am open to the new experience. Willingness is the first step.

Enjoy a Joni classic and have an amazing, sun drenched day--and a summer that makes you remember the peace of the Pacific Ocean and the paradise of California.

Love--
Beauty