It's Time to Piss on the Fire

Today is a new beginning.  I am closing chapters in my life and it feels very, odd.  Change of address, shipping boxes to a new home, tying up loose ends,  shipping out all of the last items that I sold, downgrading my seller store on eBay.  I am no longer doing any of that anymore.  The semi bohemian-gypsy life that I have been living for the last year is coming to an end and the florescent lights of the corporate world beckon me like a 7-11 on a long, dark stretch of lonely highway.  As Jackie Gleason once said, “It’s time to piss on the fire”. 

It has been an interesting year. I created an amazing collection of bags that were loved, and are now all over the world from Alaska to Japan.  I have seen so much of the rest of America.  From the flat farmland in the Midwest to Amish country , the historic city of Philadelphia to the green rolling landscape of Virginia.

And just when I thought it was time to settle in, I get a call. Well, an email. And it’s too good to pass up.

After 6 months of a long, cold winter that gave way to a beautiful, enchanting spring, it’s on to another city for a whole new adventure.  Well, kind of.  The city is familiar, but the lifestyle will be exceptionally different than when I lived there before.  Yep, Dallas.  That old, comfortable shoe that my feet always seem to return to.  It seems as though my life for the last three years has been somewhat of a game of Monopoly, and here I am about to pass Go and collect my $200. We start from point A, only to find ourselves arriving right back where we began.  The best part of it all is when you leave and experience the rest of the country, or the world, you discover that your own backyard wasn’t so bad after all.  That maybe it wasn’t the city or the area that needed changing; perhaps it was you that needed to see it differently.  Perception is everything. And our creative force is with us anywhere we go, we just have to realize that and be confident enough to create a space wherever we are, even if it seems there is no “space” to create it. 

 I think about the journey.   I think about everything I have experienced.  The hard times, the great times.  The things that were beautiful, the things that were painful, but also beautiful -even if they didn’t seem so beautiful at the time.  I think of everyone who  I have met along the way.  The story that their life and my life wrote when they collided. I think of all the moments I missed out on while I was away from family, and then all of the moments going forward that I won’t be missing.  It makes me smile. 
This has been hard but it feels like the end of a hard road.  There was a moment three years ago when moving just felt like I was force feeding myself a healthy bowl of sticky, tasteless oatmeal.  This time, moving feels good.    

No more sticky oatmeal.    

New Year, new.. me?

I am finally back in Denver. I feel like I have been traveling for months, really. I am here, I am there. Sometimes I feel like I'm nowhere. Being all over the map has been by my design, perhaps. I guess I felt that as long as I was always moving, coming, going, away, busy, I would have less time inside my head.  LA was mostly a great escape for me. It usually is, but this time it felt a little less liberating than it has in the past. Maybe because no matter where we go, we can't silence the thoughts that don't want to be silenced. No matter what we do to distract, the natural human desire inside of us wants to heal.

I am in a weird place in my life.  Not entirely powerless, but not exactly empowered. I'm not even sure how to describe it.  I'm glad the year is over and a new year is here. I don't know what that means, really. Maybe I just like the symbolism that a new year means there's a fresh beginning.  Everyone gets a chance to reinvent themselves, make changes, discard.  New Year to me means a renewed sense of self and clarity for all of the things I want (or don't want).

I have had an incredible year. I don't want to say it was all negative because I believe there is so much power and growth in adversity.  So with that perspective, I am thankful. More than anything, I want to feel OK, trust myself a lot more than I ever have before and let go of everything I have been so attached to.

New Years Day was an adventure over icy roads with no detour and no shoulder to pull off on for about 100 miles or more.  I thought I had planned my route out and everything was safe, right? In the moments where we really don't know if we're going to make it out of a scary situation unscathed or not, we have to just let go and trust.  And we can't always plan ahead for the unexpected.  During the drive when I was sliding all over the roads and a clear blacktop wasn't in sight anywhere, I had to just keep moving forward, I had to surrender, trust myself, trust my abilities, trust the drivers of the 18-wheelers on the road, and trust that soon enough, that road was going to clear and everything would be fine. And it did. What an amazing metaphor for life and what an incredible lesson that was for me on my first day of the new year!

Thanksgiving

Tonight is the eve of Thanksgiving.  I am baking an apple pie at 9:30 at night and wondering what the rest of the world is doing.  Maybe some people are with family, maybe some are alone.  Maybe some are praying for the things I already have. I'm thankful for so many things in my life.  Even in the middle of what feels like a storm, there is silence and peace in the center of it.
I find myself there.

Grandpa

It has been a little while since I've written.  On one hand, there is so much to say. So much to be grateful for. So many wonderful irons in the fire, so much to look forward to.  But on the other, there is little I am able to say about the last two months. Perhaps all of it too painful and I'm doing my best to not sink into a place that takes me away from all of the good going on in my life. It is now November.  The entire month of October seemed to just fly by like it never happened.  

I spent almost a month in Texas, visiting with family and trying my best to relax. It was a long and tiresome adventure in a lot of ways.  Many emotions surfaced after laying dormant for a lot of years. I visited the house where I grew up. It was the first time since my Grandfather passed away in 2009 that I had been back. I looked around the place and it was familiar, yet so far in the distance that I was unable to relate to it anymore.  I imagined myself growing up there and in the conditions in which I did.  I was amazed at how much the house had stayed the same but had also deteriorated. I think a home, left unoccupied for a period of time, just shuts down. As if abandoned and cut off from the life forces that once loved and occupied it's walls, just causes it to lose its will to live.

After wandering around a bit, I stayed mostly in my Grandfathers room, sifting through his chest of drawers and hoping to find some old cards and drawings that I made for him when I was a child. When I reached the second drawer, I found all of his hankies.  For whatever reason, seeing these brought me to tears almost immediately. His bandanna handkerchiefs were always, always something he carried.  The only day in his life that I know of where he didn't have one, was on Sundays when he went to church. My Aunt found me, sobbing, crouched down next to his dresser.  She offered her bit of condolences but I realized at that moment, that while the rest of my family stayed there and grieved after the funeral, I left the next day and never went through all of the stages of grief that they did. My heart was in a place that they had already worked through, and I felt a little alone. I felt like 5-year-old me, sitting there in the same spot where he used to play his accordion. 

I never did find the old cards and drawings I made for him.  But I did find some old letters that he had written to his mother while he was in basic training for the Army. I took as many as I could find, all neatly wrapped in plastic bags, tied firmly with used bread ties. He owned an awful lot of junk, and collected a lot of things but somehow, he always managed to keep all of that chaos neatly organized, even if it was in his own special ways.  

I read a few of the letters when I went back home and I felt connected to his spirit again.  But this was another time and another place. Here he was, writing letters and sending money back home in 1948, long before he had met my Grandmother, had my Mother and then later found himself raising me until I was 9. And here I was, his Granddaughter all grown up, reading his thoughts in 2012.  I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that those letters hadn't be re-read by anyone else but him and my Great Grandma since 1948.

Now I'm back in Denver, and the dust from a place I used to be able to call home is settling back in Texas. 

Charles Chaplin in "The Great Dictator"

I’m sorry

But I don't want to be an Emperor

That's not my business

I don't want to rule or conquer anyone

I should like to help everyone if possible

Jew, Gentile

Black, White

We all want to help one another

Human beings are like that

We want to live by each other's happiness

Not by each other's misery

We don't want to hate and despise one another

In this world there’s room for everyone and the good earth is rich

And can provide for everyone

The way of life can be free and beautiful

But we have lost the way

Greed has poisoned men's souls

Has barricaded the world with hate

Has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed

We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in

Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want

Our knowledge has made us cynical

Our cleverness hard and unkind

We think too much, and feel too little

More than machinery, we need humanity

More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness

Without these qualities life will be violent

And all will be lost

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together

The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men

Cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all

Even now, my voice is reaching millions throughout the world

Millions of despairing men, women, and little children

Victims of a system that makes men torture

And imprison innocent people

To those who can hear me I say“Do not despair”

The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed

The bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress

The hate of men will pass

And dictators die

And the power they took from the people

Will return to the people

And so long as men die

Liberty will never perish

Soldiers, don't give yourselves to brutes

Men who despise you, enslave you

Who regiment your lives

Tell you what to do, what to think, and what to feel

Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men

Machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts

You are not machines

You are not cattle

You are men

You have the love of humanity in your hearts

You don't hate

Only the unloved hate

The unloved and the unnatural

Soldiers, don't fight for slavery

Fight for liberty

In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written“The kingdom of God is within man”

Not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men

In you, you the people

You the people have the power

The power to create machines

The power to create happiness

You the people have the power to make life free and beautiful

To make this life a wonderful adventure

Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power

Let us all unite

Let us fight for a new world, a decent world

That will give men a chance to work

That will give youth a future

And old age a security

By the promise of these things brutes have risen to power

But they lie, they do not fulfill their promise

They never will

Dictators free themselves

But they enslave the people

Now let us fight to fulfill that promise

Let us fight to free the world

To do away with national barriers

Do away with greedWith hate and intolerance

Let us fight for a world of reason

A world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness

Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!

Look up! Look up!

The clouds are lifting, the sun is breaking through

We are coming out of the darkness into the light

We are coming into a new world

A kind new world where men will rise above their hate and brutality

The soul of man has been given wings, and at last, he is beginning to fly

He is flying into the rainbow, into the light of hope, into the future

That glorious future that belongs to you, to me and to all of us

Look up. Look up

-Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin ("The Great Dictator, 1940")