a KnuCkLe SaNdWiCH KiNdA dAy...

The last three days were so hot I wanted to punch the sun's lights out, give it a knuckle sandwich, drown it in the bathtub. A lot of the windows in the house, unbeknownst to me at the time of purchase, are painted shut so it was truly a mini Dante's inferno in here. The air itself became snarled and thick.I was helplessly cranky. Even the haven for global warming refugees-Barnes & Noble-wasn't air conditioned properly. But at last the heat wave has broken and I can go back to doing...

NoThInG! My last day at work was yesterday and as much as I will truly miss my wonderful colleagues, I am really excited about starting this next chapter of my life even though I don't totally have a clear idea on what I want it to look like. I know I need to get a position working with children and families so that I can finish up my last hours for my license, study and take my board exams, possibly move back to California to be closer to my family, maybe sell the house, all big stuff. But the biggest is making more time to write and finish my current project. I really feel like I am ready to retire the more I think about it. I know I'm only thirty-four years old but I really dig my parents' lifestyle they have going. They were just visiting me for ten days and their way of life really appeals to me- springtime in Italy, ten days in Portland walking in parks, browsing shops, reading in the living room, sushi dinners. Sure I don't have any actual money in the bank to support such an early retirement, but thats where you, my beloved bloggers, come in. If each of you are willing to begin diverting a generous portion of your paycheck-say, maybe one quarter- directly into my checking account, anything is possible! Since I am thinking this is likely unlikely to happen immediately, I'm finding myself getting restless again. I always recognize its onset because I call Laini and tell her I'm planning to have a garage sale soon and may be giving her some of my things like my silky purple pillows from India that I know she loves.

Another sign is that I start eyeballing my tent and daydreaming about moving into it after selling or giving away almost everything I own. I have a magnet on my fridge that reads, "Barn's burnt down... now I can see the moon." I have discovered a previously unknown love of nesting, but this other part of me still elbows for room within my soul, feels smothered by stuff. This part is tortured by books like Radical Simplicity by Dan Price. When I read this quote below, I want to jump inside it.

"If someone asked me what I really wanted in this life, I'd have to say freedom. Just plain old fashioned, homemade, living in a tent, fishing lots, one meal a day, big walk abouts, healthy, happy, book reading, scribbling crazy notes about this wild world, wondering about stuff, playing in the mud, shooting marbles, drawing all the 10,000 things, cat petting, sleeping in, freedom...yeh!"
- Dan Price

I want to move into the scene that Laini painted for me about a character I wrote, Boubelina, The Cherry Tree Babushka. She sleeps in a four poster bed right under her cherry trees! When I shared with my parents while they were here that sometimes I fantasize about renting out the house and setting up a tent inside my garage just so that I can have my days free again from sunrise to sunset, they looked at each other worrisomely. Then my mom gently said, "Well, thats not really what we were intending when we helped you out with the house!" My poor parents! They just want me to settle down conventionally, only my toes keep trying to wiggle away from anything too grounded to the earth! (My toes especially seem to despise partitioned cubicles, overhead office flourescent lighting, and staff meeting singalongs.)

I'm not sure where this post is going so I think I will close for now with a question. I love Dan Price's definition of what freedom means to him. If you feel like it, I am curious what freedom means to you, what a day of perfect freedom sculpted from head to toe looks like in your view. Where do your toes most like to be?

CooKiE PimP

When I was twenty-three, I was living in Seattle, and fruitfully employed as a live-in canine nanny for an extraordinarily wealthy Bijan-Friese by the name of Poopsie-Marie Maxwell. Her owner was a very successful chiropractor whom had never married nor had children so Poopsie filled this role spectacularly. You have never seen such a spoiled, indulged pooch! With lush chenille beds on every floor, toys galore, weekly jaunts to the salon, my only job was to keep her company while her owner worked long hours. I had taken this job as it left me with ample time to pursue creative endeavors. While Poopsie napped, I wrote. Daydreamed. Wrote. Pondered. Wrote. Explored. Wrote. Healed. Wrote. Played. Wrote. Those were my days. It was wonderful. I'd pop Poopsie in my knapsack, and off we'd go to the zoo, Madison Park waterfront, strolls across the University of Washington campus, Elliott Bay bookstore, Gasworks Park. As long as I fed Poopsie all the cookies her pup heart desired, she didn't even bark much. After awhile though, I felt like this probably wasn't what my parents had in mind when they forked over thousands of dollars to put me through college. It was an incredibly relaxing and delightful period, but it was time to move on.

As I slid out of my canine-nanny days I leaped into what I look back on as my "SuperJew" phase. For a quick spurt, I became very interested in all things Jewish, and before I knew it, I was living in Israel on a scholarship through the WUJS Institute in the Negev Desert near the Jordanian border. My parents were incredibly psyched. I was returning to the fold! But then my second Saturday there, I managed to fall in love with the one non-Jewish, non American man in my neighborhood block ( the man who would eight years later become my husband!), and my parents hearts sank again. (Well, once they actually met him, they loved him, but back then it was like "nooooooo! nonono!") During those years, I never went anywhere without my writing journals and I look back on that time as this magical time when I never doubted that I would make my dreams come true. Dreams were possibilities that simply hadn't taken a tangible, physical shape yet, but I felt certain that they were secretly being weaved just out of my sight.

I feel like I have lost that sense of certainty as of late.*sigh* Even while I am working on two new writing projects that excite me so very much and I definitely plan to send my last one out again soon, its starting to feel harder at times than I know what to do with. One of the things that I think is so easy to do is to invest more time in one's "back-up" career than the ones that truly makes one's heart leap, and then, before you know it, your back-up career is your life! (eek!) Sometimes I envy people who don't have just one track that lights their soul on fire, but for me, there really only is one. Its sitting in my dear sweet honey brown leather chair, legs up on the ottoman, and writing and reading, surrounded by my plants, books, art, & fresh flowers. I never realized what a true homebody I am and how simple my needs truly are. I get a momentum going on the weekend, but then its time to go back to work and start all over from scratch.

So right now I am tossing over what my next best step is to get my dreams back in balance and make sure my back-up plan does not just become my sole career, meaningful as it often is. I have a potential offer related to my writing projects that is just too, too good to not follow through on & I know I would hate myself if I didn't pursue it as much as I possibly can so I have a self-imposed deadline of September 1st to have my current writing project finished and submitted there, and I'm resending out my last one-not giving up as I had temporarily. I want to write here about the two projects I have been working on because I am finding them so amazingly fulfilling to work on but then I remember something my mom's rabbi, who is also a wonderful author, once said. He said that he learned early on to spend his time actually writing his writing projects rather than talking about writing his writing projects. I can understand how easily that happens because once you actually get to work on giving an idea legs and nostrils, fingertips and elbows, suddenly it can feel not a smidgeon as fascinating as it looked moments before when it was just dallying about sparkles and all in the brain! Stinks that way, doesn't it? Work is work is work. Guess it will always be that way. Sigh.

"In the delicious night,
In privacy, where no one saw me,
Nor did I see one thing,
I had no light or guide
But the fire that burned inside my chest."
Rumi

PoEtRy ThURsDaY

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
From bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
Faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
Elect an honest man; decide they care
Enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they are born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
Amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
That seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

-Sheenagh Pugh

I keep telling myself I will keep a handwritten copy of this in my purse for those days I feel most broken by my life. I think I'd like to keep extra copies in there too, to pass out like blessings to those I may pass with downtrodden eyes and shivering souls.