Another Coffee Musing on a Monday Morning and a Poem

Another Coffee Musing on a Monday Morning and a Poem

This week I happened upon two outstanding cups of coffee, the sun cleaved breaks through days of rain, and the solstice declared it summertime, finally. Besides a good kiss and an intoxicating conversation—what else is there? Until that sweet spot in autumn—or the elusive golden hour of evening where everyone is cast in that enchanting movie glow—this is it. The now. I often write about being in the present because it’s something I have to practice. I close my eyes for the ohm, and a minute or two in I hear ohm-ma-God—I have to do this today and that today and it takes work to bring it back to center. I love the improvisational acting mantra of “Yes…and.”, where you accept what has been given to you—or what is—and then decide how to proceed from there. So I am gentle in acknowledging my laundry list of to-dos and telling myself I will get to them later—but first I need to free my mind. I know that I will never achieve perfect Zen (mostly because I have already decided that!)—but I am grateful for the quiet moments. I am after all, a Type A personality (notice the Bold and Capital “A”). I don’t love labels for anything—but I know who I am. I am strung tight and a mile-a-minute. I solve problems before they occur—thereby sometimes creating them! Ha! But I’m learning how to shut it down in lotus position and in 20-minute increments, and that has given me handfuls of peace here and there. On that, I’ll share a poem about being.

I am Not a Runner

I am not a runner.

There is nowhere I need to be

That quickly

I don’t need to twist my knees

and pound my sneakers on the asphalt

Keeping time in huffs and puffs

Watching the world in a smear in my peripheral

Engrossed with the noisy buds in my ears

instead of the bud in the garden—

the one with the circling bee

I like to take my time. Take it slow. Take it easy.

Flow.

I like to close my eyes when I move

and inhale silence

and exhale “peace”.

When I move…

I am the tree.

And all the things

I would see in a smear

from the corner of my eye

If I were a runner.

Coffee Musings on a Monday Morning

Coffee Musings on a Monday Morning.

My Life in a Picture

I have always wanted support for being alive. Yes–for existing on this planet I want a catch-all person to guide me through this journey. Does anyone else feel like they are navigating a cave, tripping over stalagmites, reaching out in the space in front of them–the way we do when we are walking in the dark? I am not needy. I am quite self-sufficient, but if it were up to me and I had the means: I would have a personal assistant, a nanny (no–for me–not the kids), a therapist, a fairy-godmother; someone to tell me what to do and to keep me in line. I have always felt this way.

This morning in the shower, I wiped a sliver of soap into my right eye. The pain was so–that instead of flushing the eye–I was inclined to rub it, cursing, while comparing it to any other pain I may have previously endured. I contemplated the go to: This hurts worse than giving birth. Yes, I would rather give birth 3 more times than to experience the hell-fire that has befallen my retina. But that was unoriginal. My right eye still burning, and now my left eye watering and protesting to open, out of sympathy, I decided: I would rather give birth…out of my butt…3 times…than to be suffering this Irish Spring assault.

And I wanted my mom.

Or a mom. Or some kind of handler like the celebrities have–to hustle them in and out of events and in out of ruts and conundrums. I wanted someone to fix me up, hustle me out of the shower, and for a publicist to call my job and tell them I can’t come in today because I’m headed to rehab for an undisclosed reason or maybe for exhaustion. I have, after all, always felt that this is not my real life but that I am just playing a role. But I digress.

The reality was that I had 15 minutes to be ready and out the door; to have my kids ready and out the door, and to get to my job where I am at the helm of the bright minds and the future of America.

Then I lost the rest of the slice of soap.

It doesn’t matter how my morning goes (and mostly they go like this one had); I greet my students everyday, at the door, plucky and with a thing to say that will hopefully caffeinate their mornings and start a momentum that is conducive to a positive school day. But on this day I fooled no one. Smiling and with my red eye, I bid a boy good morning. His reply, ” Are you ok?”, I told him I was fine and thanks for asking and no I haven’t been crying; it was an incident with a sliver of soap. I didn’t bother explain how I ran out of time to get ready and I how I did the thing I do to my hair where I spritz this and that, add a dime-size of cream, and pray that it dries right (apparently it hadn’t). Or that as I was walking out the door, my daughter asked me what was peeking out from the back of my hair and when I went to check– it was the elusive slice of soap, trapped within a tangle. Instead, I showed him the picture of my life.

Congratulations! It’s a BLOG!

I am starting with a blog. I’m not starting it because I find myself so fascinating that I think you might also find me fascinating. I am writing because words come to me…and I don’t know what to do with them. They are sometimes ordinary words; sometimes profound nuggets (rarely), and sometimes they just need to be remembered. So I write them down. I write these words down and promise I will do something with them, develop them. Or something. I have collected words with this intention for years; for my poems, that screenplay I swear to God I will write, the short piece of fiction and nonfiction…and yes…the Great American Novel. But mostly, if I don’t write these words down, then they go away, or worse: they live in my head and get moldy, then crumble but they don’t dissipate. They haunt me. Why does this bother me? I’m not sure. Maybe because I know I am supposed to be writing, but I do everything but write. I teach it. I read it. I study it. I wish upon it. But I don’t write. Oh sure, I churn out the occasional half-baked poem on a piece of yellow legal pad paper; I draw a plot chart; fill out a character sheet; slap down some dialogue between people who live nowhere –yes I mostly plan to write—(I’m even doing it now!) but eventually I orphan all of these darlings– and they have finally come to me, tugging on my skirt, appealing to me that I should raise and foster them into something more. Something more. It is the something more that keeps me from something more. I can slap down a “shitty first draft” (yes, there is a technical name for it) like nobody’s business. But then that is all I do with it. A perfectionist, they say. They are right. It would drive me mad, and I don’t think I even possess the skills, to rework and rework and rework and rework a piece, until it is…something more. So a blog. A place to start. The idea both terrifies and excites me. On the first account, I am exposing myself. What if you hate what you see? On the second account…what if you don’t? And I am not writing for you after all. I am writing to put the words that come to me down on the page. I am more afraid of what will happen if I don’t. And I am of an age and of the present mindset that what you think of me matters less than what I think of me. This has, and I promise you, never been the case in my life. And what I will think of me if I don’t write? Not much. So this blog. It won’t be reworked to death. It will be a shitty first draft. And it will be the contents of what falls upon in me in those moments, sometimes hours, before falling asleep; in the lucid dreams where I am fortunate to have conjured something worthwhile, and in the most fertile–that first hour after waking, where whole and thorough musings land, begging for me to put them somewhere besides the drawer where they have all been sent to sulk for eternity. It will be a conduit to something more. So, it is then…a blog.