Ask For a Sign and You'll Get One

Turns out, I'm not going to live forever. It also happens that if I want children, my childless days will be coming to a rapid halt in the very near future. I'll be 37 in July, guys. Which gives me a rather short span of time to do everything I want to do ever before kids muck it all up. So in the next year or two, I need to have many amazing adventures, spend a month in Bali and France, learn how to earn a lot of money while also having plenty of time to hang out with babies, and, I dunno, buy a house or something. It's a hefty to-do list. What does a person do when they suddenly realize they don't have forever to do all the things they want in life? If you're me, you decide to devote yourself wholeheartedly to writing animal stories, and pretending you have answers on youtube. Because animal stories are obviously the way to get to Bali and also have plenty of money to pay for babies. Cough.

I'm forging a path that doesn't necessarily make good, common sense. Do I believe it's possible to have what I truly want in life? Absolutely. Do I have any idea how to do it? Nope. But to build the life you want, one that doesn't necessarily look like everyone else's, you have to listen to yourself. You have to get really clear on what you truly want to do, what you truly have to offer, and offer it up in the best way you can in that moment. 

I have anywhere from one to three years to make a lot of things happen for myself before it's baby go-time. It feels more possible than ever, but only if I follow my intuition. Because that's the only thing that can tell me how to get where I really want to go. 

I literally wrote the book on freelance writing (fine, one of the many books on freelance writing), but I've started to realize that freelance writing isn't actually what I want to do. I don't want to write for other publications, I don't want to hustle, I don't want to pitch. It exhausts and drains me and it's taken me fifteen years to admit that. In Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield talks about shadow careers, about career paths that resemble what you want to do but are really just a form of resistance. I've been resisting what I actually want to do for a decade and a half now. In many ways, I do love freelance writing. I love talking to people about their jobs and their passions and their businesses and I love writing about burlesque dancers and chefs and mountain climbers and canny CEOS. And I will happily continue to do it until what I actually want to do begins to make sense in the real world.

Here's the paradox: In order for writing animal stories to make sense as a career choice in the real world, I have to abandon the real world. I have to allow myself to dream in a way that felt foreign even just a few months ago. Because I want to be an artist - yes, a writer, but not a writer in any of its more professional, practical forms. I want to write ridiculous stories about talking raccoons who wear cravats and go on adventures. I want to channel for people, something that I still have trouble saying out loud because what?

Owning what you really want isn't always easy, especially when what you really want wouldn't make sense to most people you pass on the street. But that just makes it even more essential that you do it. We need the strange and unconventional and creative in this world now more than ever. Because if we keep doing it the way we've always done, we'll keep getting what we've always gotten.

Last week, we drove along the coast of California until we hit Esalen in Big Sur. When we pulled up to the gate, they handed us a key that sent us here:

photo-6

Sometimes the universe sends you a literal and unmissable sign, and that sign says, "Go right ahead and be an artist, you irrepressible hippie, you." And so I shall.

What Dreams May Come

I've been thinking about dreams lately. Where they come from, how we interact with them, how we can allow or block them, depending on what we need at the time. Even the grandest of dreams are simple at their core, stemming from a desire for connection, creation, love, healing, impact. Most dreams, when you tunnel down to their essence, land on this Venn diagram.

Dreams can get blocked. For a long time, I thought I could wrench myself into productivity. But I'm learning that when things aren't flowing or my energy is low - that's a message. I can try to blast through the message, placate my brain's need to make things happen with new systems or schedules. But that never works for long - a few days, or a few weeks at the most. In the end, if I want to get where I'm going, I have to listen to what's coming to me.

My body gives me information. It's a brilliant tuning fork for my emotional and spiritual state. If there's some feeling I'm trying to repress, my body won't let me go anywhere until I figure it out and process it. If there's a lesson I need, everything will conspire to take me down until I learn it. It's a marvelous and deeply annoying system. It's marvelous how profound it is, when you peer into it. Marvelous that doing what my body and spirit needs has been prioritized over impressive achievements or success or any of the other things my ego finds desperately important.

But when I look at it from a larger perspective - one that doesn't pay any mind to my own admittedly arbitrary goals or schedules - it's a beautiful, shifting network guiding me where I ultimately want to go, passing up things I thought I needed or wanted so it can take me toward what will truly fill me up. The world is a brilliant system of information and if you trust the random influx of messages that come to you, they can lead you like fireflies in the dark toward what you most want. But you have to trust what comes and, most of all, you have to trust yourself.

voice of a wild thing

Last week, a woman on Twitter wanted a book. I read her tweet and thought, "I can afford that. Should I do it? I should." So I did. I got this in the mail from the author of the book a few days later. Twitter is its own brand of magic.

Dreams will reshuffle and reform. My dreams center most around love and creation. If I try to force those dreams, they skitter away.  But if I sink into the messages that my body and my soul and the world around me send, I am pulled onto a path I didn't expect but feels bigger and lighter than any path I could have dreamed on my own.

On Fear and Its Uncanny Effect on Your Solar Plexus

Fear is the emotional equivalent of termites. Find a tiny sliver of fear stashed away somewhere and suddenly your house is full of it. When I talk to people who fear things I used to fear - spiders, economic collapse, glitter eyeshadow - I start to get worried. Fear breeds quickly and discussions of Terrible Things That Should Make Any Sensible Person Very Scared kick up my dread of being sucked back into that sticky black mire. Like being sent back to stormy Kansas after tromping through the Emerald City. I'd prefer to avoid tornadoes, thank you.

Fear itself doesn't scare me much - it's mostly visceral. It feels like a blow to the solar plexus that shortens the breath. So if you just remember to breathe, it will pass.

Oddly enough, that's also what excitement feels like.

Maybe it's possible that fear is really excitement. Maybe it's possible to rewrite fear as opportunity. I have to look at what I fear and what that fear is calling me toward. More action? Less action? Rather than just breathing through the fear, rather than just surviving it, transform it. What wonderful things are waiting beyond the sticky black mire?

When I look at today's episode of fear, I realize that I fear not following my own self-knowledge. I fear letting other people's beliefs sway me. I fear that the world will prove to be as grim as all the news outlets are yelling it is. But if I allow myself to trust my response and my knowledge and my choices, then I can start to see the opportunities. Opportunities to let go of old stories that came from a father who would rather bury his money in the woods than trust it to a bank. Opportunities to allow myself the space to do what's right for me, opportunities to recognize that there is no right or wrong, there's only what feels right in the moment. Opportunities to follow what makes me feel good and inspired, because feeling good and inspired is the only way I can hope to affect the world for the better.

When I do this, the weight in my solar plexus starts to resemble a bird - a bird with strong wings that can pull me up out of the tornado.

Unexpected Things That Make My Life 100% Better

The more I take care of myself, the more I see that self-care is the golden ticket. On June 11, I declared it Be Nice To Amber month. Because I enjoy making grand pronouncements that don't mean anything to anyone but me. I encourage you to try it - bonus points awarded for grand proclamations made while wearing a paper crown and wielding a scepter made out of a broom and tin foil.

In the past, these types of pronouncements have required massive lists of things I probably wasn't going to do, so that I could feel good and terrible when half of it didn't happen. This time, I just set the intention. I was going to be kind to myself, deeply kind, in a way I've rarely been - whatever that ended up meaning.

Here's What That Ended Up Meaning

Listed here because one of my favorite things on the internet is reading about what other people do and how it works for them - and maybe you like reading about that too. 

Not Dating: Dating stopped making me happy, so I stopped dating. Easy. When I stopped dating the way we date these days - constantly prodding my dating apps and spending my days in a daze of hopeful despair over some random guy or another - I started feeling good again. Like all the pieces of my power and self-worth that went on vacation with Hot Guys #1-27 could come back to me. Like I could go about my life feeling whole and happy and not wondering if Hot Guy #16 - that day's favorite - was going to text me back. The energy that brand of dating sucked away from my work and my life and what truly makes me happy was immeasurable. I'm becoming very aware of the energy leaks in my life, and dating is a leach (and a leech - hi, fellow word nerds!) that's simply not worth it. Besides, the internet isn't the only delivery system for a mate. Certainly not when you're poking at it like a cocaine-addled lab rat in search of its next hit.

Stopping with the List Making: My lists expand into any media on which you can write words. I have lists on my phone, lists on my computer, lists on paper, lists on post-it notes, lists in my head. My lists have lists. This is exhausting. Draining. Lists are the Dementors of my life. So I gave them up - trusting myself to know what I had to do and trusting myself to actually do it. My happiness quotient jumped by a factor of a zillion. I would nap when I needed to nap, write when I had something to write about, work when it was time to work. Easy.

(Note: I started panicking and making lists again a few days ago. The lists are far lighter and more realistic than they used to be, but I can still feel them pulsing in the corner of the room, ready to suck out my soul at the first misstep. I'm thinking about walking over and ripping them up. Obviously, my relationship with lists is still in process.)

13 Minutes a Day Toward a Personal Project: Just enough time to get something done, but not so much time that you stress out about it. I always feel better when I'm working on the thing that's been squatting in the back of my brain for a year, throwing a bottle at my skull every so often to remind me that it exists. Not ignoring projects > ignoring projects.

Real Food: This one isn't so unexpected - I've known for years that if I eat more veggies and fruit and 90% less processed stuff, I feel better. More energy, more mental clarity, no worry about stuffing my thighs into denim tubes. But sometimes life happens and suddenly you're eating pancakes made with chocolate milk three times a week. When I started taking care of myself - looking at what truly makes me feel good and give me energy and what doesn't - the shift back to eating things that grow in the ground was effortless.

Bye, Bye Black Beans: Giving up coffee, yo. In all the dietary changes I've made over the last four years, in all their rises and falls, coffee is the one thing I could never bear to abandon. But suddenly I just didn't want it any more. When I experimented a bit, I realized that it fuzzes me out in a way that stunts my creativity and my connection. Nope.

Yoga with Candles: God, I'm such a girl. But Lanny told me about the Yoga Download app and instead of watching episodes of Frasier until I fall I asleep, I've been doing 20 minutes of yoga before I go to bed and when I wake up in the morning. My spine sounds less like bubble wrap being stepped on and my rest is better. 

No Glowing Boxes Before Bed: Yeah, yeah. Everyone tells you this and I've always meant to do it. Really, I have. But there's something so comforting about sleeping with your phone right next to your head, isn't there? But then I wake up in the morning and instead of getting up to be a productive, happy human, I start jabbing at my phone with my index finger and then I've been in bed an extra hour for no good reason. Yoga cured me of sleeping with my phone like a teddy bear. After I'm all stretchy and glowing, the last thing I want to do is turn on the blare of a screen.

One Decadent Thing a Week: Massage. New running clothes to replace the hand-me-downs and ancient t-shirts. Reading Harry Potter on the deck with a peach. Decadent doesn't have to mean expensive - though in the case of the running clothes that's precisely what it means. (Being adorable during exercise does not come cheap, it seems.) It just means something I wouldn't ordinarily do for myself. Something I really, really like.

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With every passing day, I feel better and more whole and like I am worthy of the fundamentals that I believe everyone deserves: work they adore, enough money to live the life they want (it's just lucky that I don't want a tiger on a gold leash*), a home that nurtures them, and to feel and radiate love every damn day. It all rolled out naturally, born of a desire to be good to myself in a real way. Deeply kind, not "I want to do this thing so now I'm going to do it because that's being nice to myself, right?"

* On second thought, A TIGER ON A GOLD LEASH SOUNDS AMAZING. Sign me up for that too.

My Be Nice To Amber month ends on July 11. Which also happens to be my birthday, if you happen to have a baby giraffe to unload. (Please note: Now accepting deliveries of baby giraffes.) All of this has changed the way I feel so significantly that I'm going to keep right on doing it. Especially that part about the massages.

I've taken care of parts of myself in the past. But I've rarely taken care of all of me - mind, body, spirit, emotions - all at the same time. This month, I've been happier, I've gotten more and better work done, the brain hamsters are all asleep in their hammocks, and I feel energized and peaceful. Well, okay then.

The day Be Nice To Amber Month ended. I felt good, I was happy, great experiment, the end. 

Your Turn

What's the nicest, most deeply kind thing you could do for yourself right now?

You don't have to answer here - although I'd love to know what your answer is - but give it a few minutes of thought. It's shifted so much for me in just one month that I want to walk up to people on the street and shake them and yell, "ARE YOU BEING NICE TO YOURSELF? IT HELPS! IT REALLY, REALLY HELPS!" Maybe while wearing a tin foil crown and riding a baby giraffe.

Talking To The Universe Like a Crazy Person

I really don't know how to talk about this in a way that doesn't sound insane. Or California fruity to the nth degree. Maybe it's that East Coast education, but I generally try to keep my severe Church of Hippie leanings under wraps. That said, there's this thing I do. I really don't know how to explain it, but if I'm going to write a blog post about it, I guess I have to try. When I have a question or more emotions than I know how to manage, I'll sit down at my computer. Sometimes my questions are profound, sometimes they have to do with my to-do list. Then I'll just start typing. When I read it back, it doesn't quite sound like it came from me. It's smarter and wiser and kinder, but has worse grammar and often misspells things. It feels like whatever this is has a better sense of the truth, a better understanding, more love, more wisdom, just more than I could possibly have with my limited senses and smallish, underused cerebellum. I remove myself and my brain from the process and just allow the information to flow through my fingers. Some of my favorite things have been written this way. I'm learning to tap into that and the more I practice, the easier it comes.

Sometimes when I start typing, this flow of information causes an emotional or physical reaction. There's an energy to it. My nose will tingle or tears will start running down my face. It's like all my senses get involved and something shifts energetically. It's not even so much about the words, it's more about the feeling.

When this happens, it really starts to feel like it's coming from somewhere other than me. I know how that sounds. Because, what - am I channeling spirits? Aliens? The universe? If you google this type of writing, it sounds desperately flaky at best and charlatan-infested at worst. The cited wikipedia example is a woman who translates Martian messages into French. Which, let's be real, would be amazing and I definitely want to see that.

But I'm learning to guide my life by what feels good - because we're all just making it up as we go, so why not go toward what feels good? I've tried following the things that make me feel bad and I never end up in a place I want to be. And this feels good. It feels powerful, it feels energetic, it feels useful, and it feels loving. So I ask my questions. Because sometimes that's all you can do: ask and trust that the answer that boomerangs back to you is the right one.

Recently, I started doing this writing for friends. Doing this on a bigger scale feels a little scary, a little vulnerable. But that's what I'm trying to play with right now. Opening up to who I really am and trusting that the people who need this and who think it makes some sort of sense will find it and everyone else will just click away to the next thing on this infinite internet of ours.

But still, I think I'd rather take my clothes off in public than say I type messages from the universe. SEE? THAT'S WEIRD.

Calling All Guinea Pigs

Want to help me find out if this is really a thing?

If you're game to be a guinea pig, email me with a question. (Click the "Send me a pandagram" box in the sidebar.) Or leave it in the comments. I would love to do this for you. I honestly don't know what I need or what works. So far I've done it just with people's names, but these are friends and I have some background knowledge of them. You can try sending me any burning questions you have. Or your first name and a little about your life and where you want some clarity. I'll sit down with whatever I get and see what comes. Obviously, I have zero training and am not a coach or a doctor or anyone with any respectable letters after her name. All I know is that what I've written has been useful for me and seems to be useful for the people I've done it for.

If you're willing to let me publish your question and answer here, let me know. (If you'd rather keep it private, that's okay too.)I'd love to do this once a week on the blog for awhile, just to see how it lands. Maybe I'll even give it a snappy name, although I am admittedly terrible at coming up with snappy names.

Have a question? Need some clarity? Let me know and I'll apply my weird voodoo to it and see what I come up with for you. It may or may not give you any answers, but it will probably make you feel better.

What Lies In the Beyond

In December, I was dating someone I really liked. The night we met, there was a ring around the moon. We gazed up at it, the water behind us, and it felt like that might mean something, something good. And it did. But not the way we thought it might. Instead of marking the beginning of an us, that ring marked the beginning of a me. A me who can walk away for the right reasons, something I'd never done before. I would swallow what I wanted in order to not be alone. Or give him what he wanted and push aside what was best for me because I thought that's what love meant. But the more you give yourself you, the less you can give up for another. So on New Year's Day, I walked away. As I drove home, it didn't necessarily feel good, but it felt right.

That ring around the moon did mark something special - but for me rather than for us. I want the us, but I won't take the us without it being right for the me.

Walking away is scary, because you don't know what lies beyond. So far, what I've found in the beyond has been better. But it doesn't matter, really. Because whatever I get - whether it's a me or it's an us - will be exactly what I need.