When the blue sky calls. When love notes need writing. When summer sun beckons. When something else sounds like more fun. When your favorite person lights up your phone. When night is falling and eyes are drooping. When you know that you already have everything you need. When you realize, finally, that it's not about doing - it's about being.
Listen To Your Body
What doesn't feel right is an opportunity for investigation. All too often, we don't listen to our feelings, our gut instincts, the sensations in our body. Sometimes those physical sensations are subtle - a slight pressure on the chest, a warmth in the belly, a tingle in the hands. Sometimes those physical sensations are a spiritual approximation of a mallet to the head. Sometimes it actually is a mallet to the head. (Try to avoid those.) But our feelings and sensations are information. Not information that tells you, "If it feels bad, don't do it." For that is not always the truth. Sometimes it feels bad because you have emotion or circumstances to process to move forward. Sometimes it feels bad because there is resistance that you must conquer before you can continue. Everything you feel is an opportunity to know yourself better, know yourself on a deeper level, to develop a new relationship with yourself.
For example, if you feel something pressing against your chest, give that feeling permission to leave. If it doesn't leave, ask it for its message. Allow yourself to hear the answer, whether it appears immediately or takes a bit of time.
Feelings and physical sensations are a way to glean information that can't quite penetrate the walls of our brain. Our brains can only repeat what they already know, so if new knowledge needs to find you, it won't always choose your brain as its best point of entry. Your brain may ignore something, but your body never can.
Because Money Freak Outs Happen
What is money? How does it come to you? Money is just like everything else - a flow. We've assigned it great importance because in this world we've made money mean security. Money to most of us means a roof over our head, food in the fridge, and a sure future. But money is no different than anything else. Money begins in your mind. Money shows you the truth about yourself, about what you've made the flow of your life mean, where you are and aren't allowing yourself to receive.
Love flows to you when you let yourself feel love for what's around you. Peace flows to you when you decide it's okay to feel peace. Money flows to you when you've decided that you can allow yourself to have what you need, what you want, what you truly desire. Money heightens these lessons because we've attached so much importance and so much of our wellbeing on the amount of money we have. We choose the amount that makes us feel safe. Some feel safe with ten dollars, some feel safe with ten thousand or ten million dollars. It is arbitrary. Money is arbitrary.
Money is not our security or our savior. Money is only a means, a means to know ourselves better, a means to get what we want. But money is not the gatekeeper to love or security or freedom. We can have these things with or without money.
Money works best when we share something we value - our art, our time, our knowledge - and receive in return. Money is simply an idea, an idea that works best when it feels fun, when it feels like simply another way to accept in the flow. You send out, you accept back, in an infinitely looping figure eight.
Care for it, love it, share it, send it back into the world for things you love and value - that's when money can truly do its job. Money doesn't need to be a receptacle for our shame and our fear and our disappointment. It can be, if that's what you require to learn what you've decided to learn. But money can simply be another tool that allows you to play in the world.
No moral value or judgment is attached to money. Receiving what feels like a large amount of money for value you put into the world does not carry the weight of "good" or "bad" - it's simply the product of a decision you've made. But the decision can't simply be made on the surface. The decision of what you're worth must be made within your deepest, darkest depths. By accepting and loving those deep, dark depths you can integrate them into the wholeness of your life, your soul, and your experience. When you do not judge yourself or others, you will not judge money. When you do not judge money, you have removed enormous blocks to allowing yourself to have it.
Money is like love - it comes to you when you allow it, when you welcome it, when you prepare yourself for it. Preparing yourself for it does not need to take time, it does not need to be another barrier. Preparation is simply something you have previously assigned yourself.
If you don't have the money you think you need or want, rejoice. You have just been accepted into the PhD program of your choice and you are about to learn how to conquer the world. As you go through the process of learning how to accept and have the money you would like, trust that you won't be abandoned, you won't be left, you won't be assigned to suffer. Allow yourself to have what you need without money and trust that as you step forward, one step after another, you will learn all you need about money - that it was never about money and it was always about yourself.
There's No Need To Hide
Hi. Hello. I see you in there. Whether you're fully in the world or a moss-lined hermit, there may be some aspect of yourself that you're hiding. Because you're afraid, because you feel it should be different, because you're ashamed of it. Maybe it's your financial situation, maybe it's your relationship, maybe it's that you aren't doing what you truly feel called to be doing with your life. Maybe you haven't found a calling, maybe you have more money than you need but you spend it in ways that don't feel peaceful.
Come out of hiding. When you do you will see that there are so many others who are hiding that precise thing that you've tucked away and guarded so closely. Maybe you can help each other. Maybe you can begin to see yourself as whole, even though you aren't perfect, even though you aren't who you thought you should be, even though your life isn't where you thought it would be by this moment in time.
Emerge from the bushes, shine a flashlight into the shadow, talk about the thing that you're most afraid of. When you open your vulnerability up to the world, you will be surprised by the love and support and acceptance that flood back to you. For we are all afraid, we are all hiding some part of ourselves. We all have something that we wish would just die off already and leave us in peace. But peace is found in fully accepting that piece of ourselves. Building a relationship with it. Allowing it to provide us with more connection, rather than less.
If each of us pull out the monster hiding in our rib cage or our solar plexus or the back of our skull, we will lift each other up and the world will shift in indefinable but measurably great ways.
Show us your monster. We will love it, and we will love you. For you are one of the greats, monsters and all.
How To Get Bigger
Expansion is simple. It begins with thinking about what you love most about your life, what you most appreciate. As you notice what's good right now, feel what arises - in your chest, in your stomach, in your hands. Let the thoughts slip away and allow the feelings to expand. Let the sensation fill your body. Now send it beyond the boundaries your body to fill the room, to fill the house. Let those sensations expand to encompass the city, the state, the country. Imagine those sensations wrapping around the world and filling it up.
Feel how big you are?
For You Are Bigger Than You Know
Don't fear the unknown. Walking through the unknown will show you to yourself. It will show you where you are strong and where you need help. It will show you how to ask for help. It will show you where you must have faith in yourself, faith in others, and faith in the road you've chosen. But all you fear is that lack of knowledge, and the only way to know the road is to walk the road. Don't fear the untrod path, whether it's one you missed or one you hope to take one day. All paths are leading you precisely where you need to go. Yes, you can choose the rocky side path rather than the scenic high road. Yes, that path might trip you with unseen branches and fling you into the mud. Another path might take you the long way, through the fields and past a desolate lake. But you will always get where you've chosen to go. It may take so long that you forgot where you were aiming. It might take far less time than you dreamed was possible. But you will get there. Just keep walking.
Don't fear change. Change signifies growth. Change signifies a tearing down for a more stable rebuild. Change is at the very heart of the human experience and it pumps the blood that keeps it healthy. Don't fear the things you can't see, don't fear the untapped future or the pained past.
Expand yourself to hold all of it - the fear, the unknown, the future, the past, the trust, the long winding road, and those who will help you along the way. You are greater than you can know, and you can hold everything that has or will come. Embrace what's coming now. And know that you can hold it, for you can hold the world.
Homework For a New Age
We are all here for a reason. We all want to help. We all want to be seen and heard. But not everyone has the tools. Those who do have the tools can share them. Those who have felt seen and heard can open up to hearing and seeing others. Those who have been helped can help others. But those who have received little and can open up to others and see in them what they would like to see in themselves are to be admired. To see without feeling seen is to evolve. To hear without feeling heard is to step into something greater. To show others the way we have found without believing it’s the only way is an act of courage.
Finding your reason, finding your way to help, finding your way to see and hear and feel for those who are like you and who are not at all like you - on the surface - is the best way you can spend your time.
Here is the value of stories - of books, of television, of radio, of any means that humans can begin to understand one another. We understand the other as we understand ourselves - because very little separates us.
All that separates us is our belief that we are separate. We see others as we see ourselves, we hear others as we hear ourselves. That’s why the greatest job any human has is to listen to their own quiet voice, their own deep desires, the space where they have pain. To investigate where they lock that pain away - with walls, with substances, with fear.
The farther we can each dive into our own pain, our own fear, and realize that it does not own us, that it is not us, that it is only one piece of this experience - a piece that can lead us to other experiences - that is how we can begin to shift everyone forward.
As you shift, everyone shifts. As you move, everyone moves. As you evolve, everyone evolves. Because as you begin to see yourself as the bright flame that you are, you begin to see others the same way. As you begin to see your own potential, you begin to see the potential in others. As you see your own value and beauty, you see the beauty and value in others.
See yourself. Hear yourself. Know yourself. You have complete power over the being that you are. Realizing your own evolution and potential will help us all rise into something greater.
When Bad Days Strike
When bad days hit, it's easy to wish them away. To wish them into oblivion, into the nearest deep cave, to any place but the one you're currently occupying. But bad days are part of the wholeness of life. When we're in the wholeness of life, we experience everything fully - the good, the bad, the indifferent, the annoying.
Bad days can show us where we judge. Where we judge one situation as better than another, that person as better than this one, this aspect of ourselves as better than another - judgments that rarely serve us.
Days are sometimes seen as bad because we need to process something painful to move forward. Maybe we need clarity around a certain situation, maybe we need a blow up to clear the air. Maybe we need a bad day to show us where we aren't taking care of ourselves. Maybe a bad day is precisely what we need, even if we can't yet see it.
When a bad day shows up out of the blue, ask it what it needs. Ask yourself what you need. Ask those in your life what they need. Taking care of needs - first your needs, then the needs of others - is one of the best ways to realign with what you truly want. If that feels too daunting, ask what the house needs. Sometimes doing the dishes or tidying clutter will bring the answers to you.
Don't worry about the bad days. Don't let your cunning little brain use it as proof that you're doing things wrong. You're doing nothing wrong. Don't let yourself veer into the dark and tangled weeds. Or if you do, sit in the weeds for awhile. Revel in it. Roll around. Wonder about it. Ask yourself why you're in the weeds, ask yourself what you need to get out of them, ask yourself why you like it there and why you're staying.
Curiosity is the first step. Finding the joy in the situation is the second.
Maybe if you're in the weeds for awhile, you can get some time to yourself. Maybe if you stay in the weeds when your brain is telling you that you need to fix this toilet and finish that work spreadsheet, you'll emerge from those weeds with better ways of solving and doing and being.
Trust yourself in the bad days. Trust yourself to keep putting one foot in front of the other, trust yourself to keep moving forward. Or trust yourself to sit quietly, let the bad day flow around you, and stop labeling it as better or worse than any other day. Sometimes the worst days are what is needed to get us where we want to go. Sometimes the worst days draw us closer together. Sometimes the worst days point you toward what you've been longing for.
Sometimes a bad day is just a bad day. And that's okay.
What To Do With Worry
Some days, worries creep in to tug at you. Some days, worries bop you insistently over the head from the moment you awake. Some days, worries feel easy to blow up and send away.
If today is the former, remember that you always have the power to offer up your worries and let them be taken from you. You always have the option to expand those worries out like a great bubble so that the still exist but they aren’t knocking around inside your skull. (Sometimes, letting go of worries completely doesn’t feel like a good idea so you resist it. But you can always push out the boundaries so that they don’t impede the joy of your day.)
Worry is something we feel we need to cling to for protection. We all know that worries do nothing but ruin an otherwise lovely rainy morning, but our hearts and our soft animal innards are not so easily convinced. So play with worry. Approach it like a friend. A friend who sometimes annoys you, but only has your best interests at heart. (But, like most friends, worry doesn’t know you the way you know yourself. So its version of your best interest may be understandably skewed.)
Play with worry. Collect all your worries into a ball and hurl them into the atmosphere. Approach each worry separately and light it up like a firework and let it surprise you with the great exploding dragons and balls of colorful flame in the sky. Imagine a great church, thousands of years old, where you can walk through the vestry under that high arching ceiling and lay your worries down on the altar, knowing that when you walk back out the door, your worries will be cared for and won’t follow you.
Worry is simply a protective mechanism designed to keep us safe and then left running in the background long after our software has been upgraded and what was designed in the past is no longer necessary. Now it’s just eating up space and memory.
Delete the program, play with it in new ways, allow it space and give it love. Worry can be another way to know yourself in a deeper and more intuitive way, if you approach it like something that can be loved rather than a dark monster intent on ruining your day.
Sensation Is Information
We are all here. Here. Right now. Here.
Where are you? What does the room you're in look like? What does it smell like? What's over there to the left? What are you sitting on? What do you feel in your body? Does the air feel cool on your skin? What does it feel like to breathe it in? Are there any sensations in your chest, in your stomach, in your throat? Do you feel any constrictions or blocks?
If so, what do they feel like? Does an image or a memory float to the surface when you investigate? Is there a message for you in that block, in that constriction?
Sensation is information. If you feel something and it feels like it's asking to be noticed, put your focus on that place. Don't judge it or wish it away, simply give it attention. Ask for what it wants. Often, it just wants acknowledgement or a little love. If you no longer need it, imagine wrapping it up in light and sending it home. If there's something you need to know, imagine that message unscrolling in front of you. If it's simply a call to be kinder to yourself, heed that call.
Heed yourself. Heed the messages you are being given every day. Bring yourself and your body and your surroundings into focus and allow that focus to guide you. Feel your way through whatever is presented to you. If an emotion arises, feel it until it floats away. If an idea surfaces and keeps bumping at your edges, acknowledge it. Follow it, if that feels right. If you feel something in your body, simply allow it to be, without judgment or wishing it to be other than what it is. If it persists, ask for its message.
Our bodies are our best guidance system. Aligning yourself to its wisdom will help you more than any thoughts or plans or goals. Instead of thinking your way through a problem, ask your body what guidance it has for you. The more you attend to your body, the faster you'll realize that there are no problems, there are only fresh opportunities to make a new choice.
From My Seat Today
Life stretches out, empty. But maybe life’s not a forever silent house and a perpetually pristine rug. Maybe it’s a bucket waiting to be filled. Joy bursts with noise. Resounds in silence. Echoes color refracted from light. It’s always there, for it relies on nothing.
Leaves tap the window in a boundless cycle of growth, death, renewal. Hard to despair, if your eyes remember to seek out the green.
Releasing the illusion of control isn’t giving up so much as abandoning the fraught tension of worry that felt ever-present.
Purple blooms in a white enamel pot. The pot is labeled “Flowers.” A declaration, without irony, of what is and what will be. If given proper care.
Storytime. This one tugs on an ear, that one flops over in rapture. Another tries to climb inside the book, as if he could live inside what’s being told.
A stack of books tells me I eat too much meat and my sugar intake is questionable. I weigh it down with calendars and lists and a dish of rosy paper hearts.
Rocks glow near iron birds eternally perched. Shades of crimson because feng shui says that red near the bed invites love. It worked.
Goats on Hills & Other Dreams
One day, I want to be the eccentric woman on the hill with a menagerie. I've already scouted out the hill - there's a perfect one right near my hobbit cottage, marked by a sign urging dog owners to keep hold of their pets so they don't terrify the goats. I want a hill with goats and giraffes maybe a water park for a baby porpoise and a few adventurous hippos. I almost started my menagerie on Sunday morning when we were walking through the town square for coffee. A man had four puppies on a leash and he was parked in a spot where people would stop to play with the dogs, which we promptly did. I know myself well enough to give puppies a wide berth but the manfriend was playing with them before I could coax him to a safer spot, one far away from puppies who need homes. Inevitably, one of the puppies crawled over to me and started to lick my hand until I was about thirty seconds from breaking my lease and smuggling a dog into my house. I might have even done it, if housing wasn't so desperately hard to find in the Bay Area.
We hadn't made it out of the town square before I started crying because I wanted a puppy. Not just a puppy, that puppy. We had to spend the rest of the day comforting me with discussion about how puppies pee on favorite rugs and chew on hot pink ballet flats.
Yesterday, I started crying in a diner when I saw an empty baby carrier sitting on the ground.
One could chalk this up to hormones - and I usually do - but it feels like a symptom of something bigger.
My life is very quiet. I have a lot of time and space alone. I know that friends with pets and kids and jobs would kill for the life I lead, or at least they would for a week or so, before they started missing their children and pets. But at some point, a few years in, the quiet begins to echo. It's not emptiness precisely, but it is solitary. And I don't believe we're meant to be solitary creatures.
I've had people tell me not to wait too long before having children - but it's not a question of waiting. It's a question of timing. I've been knocking myself out, believing that I have complete control over what happens in my life and when. But the more I abandon the idea of control and just allow things to happen as they will, the easier everything gets.
But I will continue to dream of a time when there are kids and animals tumbling over hills. Even if the giraffe remains a bit of a stretch.
Confessions of a Sugar Beast
I'm a hormonal, sugar-fueled mess this week. I find these labels empowering. Because they give me reasons and solutions for the way I feel. You're cranky, hungry, tired, and head-achey because being a female is terrible sometimes. To feel better, wait.
You're cranky, hungry, tired and head-achey because you've been eating a lot of things that you know are bad for you. To feel better, stop eating sugar.
Unfortunately, the blithe "stop eating sugar" mandate is tough sell right now.
Sugar is my achilles heel. My mouth loves it, my body hates it. If I eat sugar, I feel tired and cranky and my brain goes foggy and my skin breaks out and I have cravings for a week.
In the past, simply acknowledging the cycle and recognizing how much worse my life is when I'm eating sugar has been enough to pop me out of the dreaded cycle.
Making good food choices is an experiential process. Quitting certain foods to lose weight or because it's healthier isn't enough of an incentive for me, because the concepts are too vague. Vague does not hold up well when confronted with butterscotch pudding on a sunny patio. But experimenting with alterations - over the past five years, I've experimented with raw, vegan, and no sugar - for long enough to learn how I feel and how my life shifts without those things provides amazing incentives. Like, stop eating that thing and life gets 100% better and you know this to be a fact. Now, that's an incentive.
When I'm off sugar, I don't have food cravings, I sleep well, my energy is high, creative work feels easy, my moods are cheerful, my skin is clear and my jeans fit.
But sugar is in everything. It’s in your curry chicken when you go out for Indian food, it’s in bread you buy at the grocery store, it’s in basically any food that comes in a box or from a restaurant. It also craftily hides under innocuously healthy sounding names, like honey and brown rice syrup. Alcohol reacts in your body the same way sugar does. So do potatoes.
Sugar is also in pancakes and oh my stars, how I love pancakes. Green juice is so terribly uninspiring when what you really want is a stack of buttery blueberry pancakes.
But pancakes make me feel terrible and green juice makes me feel like I’m flying through the sky on a friendly dragon.
I’ve been dabbling in sugar again, because I've been going out to eat a lot more often than in past years and I'm in a relationship now so my exercise routine is all thrown off and also the demon of over-confidence started to whisper in my ear about how "sugar doesn't affect you that much!" and "you're fine!" and "mmm, buttercream-frosted cupcakes!"
I’ve given up sugar four or five times now. Sometimes it lasts for a year, sometimes it lasts for six months, last week it lasted for about three days. Usually, I have to hit some point of pain - like watching the sugar cycle of crankiness and depression roller coaster me up and down for awhile until I decide it’s absolutely 100% not worth it. Then everything clicks in and abandoning sugar feels easy for green juice feels easy. But I just haven't hit that point yet. And I'm a little mad at myself because I need that point.
Willpower isn't really a thing for me. I have no interest in torturing myself, even for the sake of health or feeling better. Self-control and discipline have never made me jump for joy. So I wait until eating sugar is actually a more painful prospect than not eating sugar and everything gets easy.
Nobody Likes Big Rats
Viola learned one harsh, inviolable, life-defining truth the hard way: Baby possums are adorable.
Adolescent possums...not so much.
She had been adored as a child. Revered, even. People stopped to coo at her in the streets and she was given treats by anyone who had a treat to give. Her parents fussed, her grandparents doted, and her aunts spoiled. A nice life, if you can get it.
But as her fuzzily sweet baby self grew into an ungainly rat-like creature whose whippy rodent tail dragged behind her, reaction to her person became far less enjoyable. It seemed that the other animals responded not to her sparkling personality, not to her ability to soothe fussy infants, not to the fact that she could recite every flower that grew within two miles of the village - alphabetically by name and genus, thankyouverymuch - but to her appearance.
People loved her when she was adorable, but were decidedly less interested when she grew into her tail.
Viola pushed her spectacles up her nose and glared at her fellow classmates. Her sharp eyes scanned the room. She was definitely the ugliest one between these - and let’s be honest, most - four walls. She wished she didn’t care so much. But it’s hard to go from toast-of-the-town to ignored-in-the-corner in just a few short years.
Noticing that her left lens was smudged, Viola whipped off her spectacles and polished them on her gingham dress. When she put them back on and the classroom swam back into focus, she saw a perfect pale face right in front of her, a little too close for comfort. Especially when that face was Fern’s, the prettiest bunny in the county. Viola’s eyes crossed as she tried to focus on the diminutive pink bunny nose two inches from her face.
Viola hated Fern. She hated her pink leather satchel, she hated the way her shiny whiskers floated and her silky ears lay down her back. She hated that Basin the badger was always sitting next to her in school. She hated that Fern was now sitting right in front of her, nose twitching expectantly, impossible to ignore.
“Will you help me with our spelling list, Viola?” Fern asked, rather anxiously. Viola was surprised. She just assumed that Fern had deigned to join her in order to mock her lank gray fur or perhaps the long, unattractive tail she kept curled under her seat. Just because Fern had never shown any penchant for being unkind didn’t mean today wasn’t the day.
Viola looked down at her own list, accurately spelled in her beautiful round hand. Viola spent hours perfecting her penmanship. Just because her face couldn’t be pretty didn’t mean she couldn’t make her homework so.
Fern took this as an invitation and sat in the empty seat beside her. “Flowers are so dreadfully hard to spell,” she said miserably, plopping her fuzzy chin in her paw. “Chrysanthawhat? Basin doesn’t know how to spell any of these either,” she said, as Viola’s entire frame tightened. “He sits next to me to help me with my sums because I’m hopeless at them, but he isn’t good at spelling and we’re both lost.” She gazed despondently down at her long bunny feet. “Can you help? You’re so good at school.” Fern looked up at Viola earnestly, her entire body quivering in hope.
Viola had her suspicions, but decided she was in no position to be choosy.
So she sat with Fern and Basin by the river every day after school, teaching them how to spell. By the day of the test, Viola had both Fern and Basin accurately spelling everything from anemone to quibble - and she had two new friends.
Fern and Basin didn’t care what she looked like. In fact, they were jealous of her tail and its ability to hit a croquet ball through the farthest wicket. In turn, Viola didn’t mind that Fern was hopeless with fractions or that Basin was late to everything. It meant she was useful - it’s nice to be useful - and that she and Fern could eat all the cake before Basin arrived.
True friends are in charge of loving what you don’t like about yourself, Viola thought, holding it for you until you learn to see it as they do.
---
This is the fourth in a collection of stories about animals who talk and drink tea and get themselves in trouble. The first story, about a fastidiously dressed raccoon named Randall, is here. The second, about a world-weary lemur named Mortimer, is here. The third, about mischievous wombat twins with terrible names, is here. These stories have become some of my favorite things in life, so I hope you enjoy them.
One of the very best things to do when there are feelings.
Why Crying Is The Best Thing Ever and We Should All Do More of It
Who's been crying a lot lately? ME TOO.
After years of desperately wishing I had been born with an instruction manual because I really don't understand how I operate and am prone to pulling the wrong levers, I'm finally noticing how deeply my emotions can help or inhibit me.
If I observe and express them - usually by sobbing like my heart's about to shatter like glass on concrete - they help me.
If I ignore them or decide I don't have time for them right now because I have to watch TV or because whatever's on my to-do list is infinitely more pressing, they inhibit me.
When I let myself carry around unexpressed emotion, it totally blocks me up. To the point where I can't function. Getting client work done is like pushing a two-story house up a cliff using only my thumbs and writing anything creative is impossible. My brain spends all its energy coughing up all the reasons my relationships don't work and why everything is terrible and why that won't ever change.
But when I let myself cry - sob, really, in the most dramatic fashion possible - in an hour or so, everything feels better.
My therapist told me I needed to cry more and I thought that was silly. "I cry the perfect amount," I thought. But then I'd go for a week or two without giving much attention to my emotional state and everything would begin to pile on top of me like layers of fog and dust and rubbish until my entire life felt like a toxic waste site. Crying is like washing away the acres of sludge with a convenient tsunami that leaves everything clear and ready for whatever's next.
I feel like someone just handed me that instruction manual. 437 pages on How Amber Works, complete with diagrams. Now every time I feel incapable of getting anything done, it's not because I'm lazy or unmotivated or undisciplined or in the wrong career or a complete waste of space. It just means that I need to go outside and stick my bare feet in the grass and cry for awhile. Or go make a list of everything I'm feeling sad and angry about. The signs have been pointing me in this direction for a long time, I was just too caught up in telling myself I was a bad human to see what was really going on.
Crying is incredibly freeing. It releases whatever has piled up on top of you and wipes your outlook on life clean. Crying makes you happier, smarter, more productive, and less prone to guilt trips. Crying takes the mess your three-year-old inner self has made on the etch-a-sketch of your life and shakes it clear.
I think we should all spend some time crying today. Maybe even every day.
Better Than Here
Death cracks you open. Watching someone you love take that final journey leaves you flattened and groundless. We don’t know what’s next for them. We can’t follow. We can’t understand how it feels to face the end of your life or the mental, emotional, and physical territory that comes with it. I don’t believe that those who die are lost. I don't believe that we're purely biological lights that flicker out when bodies give up. I believe we have an essence. A soul, if you will, that soldiers on after our body gives up. But it's a very human thing to want proof and science still doesn't know quite what to make of death. So each of us has to choose what we believe - and then, more importantly, choose what to do with that belief.
Sitting in the car with my father and talking about god is one of my earliest memories. I told him I didn't believe in any religion that taught us to fear god, because I didn't think god worked that way. His reply didn't survive my precarious and sieve-like memory bank, but I remember feeling like he was proud of me.
He's also proud of me for this - deep, life-long commitment to Calvin and Hobbes, his favorite comic.
The idea of god as a judgmental white-bearded dude in the sky never seemed quite right. One night when I was young, seven or eight maybe, I decided that god was made of people - the best parts of people, what we are at our purest and most loving. I saw each person as a bright pinprick of light, like a star. I remember deciding that we’re our own individual sparks here in this body, in this life. But when we die, our light gathers and joins that of everyone else in a much larger light, bright and vast. God as a separate entity doesn’t exist, because we are all god.
I’m not sure where this came from - maybe I absorbed this idea from the metaphysical books that lined the shelves of our living room when I was growing up, maybe it was a burst of intuition that came through before my brain and ego began to shut me down, maybe I invented it because it seemed like a nice idea. But I remember feeling comforted by the idea of a great light to return to as I lived my relatively average but not exempt from pain life.
But when your father is dying, all you can do is feed him ice cream when he asks for it and play John Coltrane you’re not sure he can hear and then send him off into the deep unknown and trust that whatever comes next is better than where he was.
Crazy Wombats Pack Terrible Lunches
“Why, why, why?” A small wombat banged his head steadily against the flat surface supporting his lunch, as if blunt trauma to the forehead via wooden picnic table would give him answers.
His twin brother rolled his eyes and dug into his lunch pail. When his paw emerged with a handful of wriggling worms rather than the anticipated peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich, his mouth dropped open and he considered joining his brother’s woeful genuflection.
It was generally acknowledged that the twins' mother was insane. For one thing, she named her boys Scanket and Blarf, an unholy homage to her two favorite knitting projects, a blanket and a scarf. That she turned around and gave the blanket and scarf the stolidly respectable names of Wilbur and Whitby was only insult to injury.
“Even her knitting has better names than we do,” Blarf grumbled to his brother after their mother proudly introduced them to her newest sweater, which she had named Charlotte. “I’d take Charlotte over Scanket any day,” his brother whispered back - a telling statement given the swaggering machismo he’d recently adopted. Thankfully, his swagger quickly disappeared the second they needed to make a quick getaway.
“But what can one expect from wombats named Scanket and Blarf?” the townspeople would say to each other, shaking their heads ruefully after the twins had filched yet another box of chocolate bars or bottle of raspberry cordial. When caught, the brothers would be reprimanded and put to work to pay off their misdeeds. But this only served to make them craftier, not more honest.
Despite their unfortunate names, Scanket and Blarf cut quite a swath at the village school, bestowing sweet treats on the lucky animals in favor that day and smirking at everyone else. Everyone wanted to be on the good side of the wombat twins and not just because they had access to all the best desserts.
“Why worms?” Blarf moaned. “She promised us peanut butter and jam today.” Scanket shook his head at his naivete. Sure, their mother may have promised a normal noon meal while snuggled up by the fire, knitting needles clacking away between her paws, but inevitably she would wake in the deep of night, caught by a feverish notion that told her earthworms would be far healthier for growing wombats. In her mad haze, she’d rush out into the dew-laden, moonlit garden, dig some up some unsuspecting garden pests, drag them back into the kitchen, and label them a meal.
“She’s daft, Blarf,” his twin said prosaically, before wandering over to the nearest picnic table and confiscating a tuna fish sandwich and an onion tart from two classmates who had fallen from favor. Blarf still longed for a normal mother, one who didn’t name her knitting and baked cookies instead of kale. Scanket simply adapted, creatively augmenting their meals and choosing to find their mother's lunacy amusing. He knew she loved them, she just had odd ideas about how to show that love, he thought as he emptied his pail of worms into the schoolyard garden.
After the usual round of afternoon admonishments from the teacher, the animals streamed out the school house doors. Blarf veered off to the side and began pulling things out of his knapsack. “Knitting needles, two sets,” he mumbled. “Red blankets and safety pins, check.” After watching his twin blankly, Scanket asked for instructions. Blarf had terrible and wonderful ideas and Scanket was always on board.
Tugging the requested wagon behind him - he didn't even have to steal it, it had been abandoned in the lane three days ago - he saw that Blarf had donned a uniform for mischief. Knitting needles poked out of his hat like bug antenna and a red blanket was swirled around his neck. He handed Scanket a set of knitting needles and another blanket, this one a cheery yellow.
Snapping on his goggles, Blarf climbed into the wagon and demanded that Scanket push him to the top of the lane, where the red brick curved downward in a steep trajectory to the town square. Poised over the precipice, Scanket gave the wagon a mighty shove and jumped in behind his brother.
Red and yellow capes flew out behind them as the wind whistled through their antenna. The village was reduced to a blur of color and sound and Blarf laughed for the first time in a week, the sound pealing out behind them as they ricocheted around corners and narrowly missed a shopkeeper sweeping his stoop. Scanket gave a mighty whoop and a cluster of chattering magpies quickly dispersed as they slammed to a halt at the bottom.
Hopping out and grinning at the open mouths of the animals in the square, Blarf started pulling the wagon up the hill for another ride. Until Scanket saw the curious faces of the schoolmates who gathered around, and a fully formed scheme jumped into his head as if sent down from above.
The twins made one pound, three shillings, and five pence - enough to keep them in jam and peanut butter for weeks - before a wagon carrying two caped rabbits and a young vole brandishing knitting needles crashed into Randall and the raccoon, proving himself terribly fussy about bruises and knocked-askew scarves, shut the operation down.
---
This is the third in a collection of stories about animals who talk and drink tea and get themselves in trouble. The first story, about a fastidiously dressed raccoon named Randall, is here. The second, about a world-weary lemur named Mortimer, is here. These stories have become some of my favorite things in life, so I hope you enjoy them.
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.
Mortimer Makes a Mistake
“Never send a moose to do a lemur’s job,” Mortimer grumbled to himself, picking wood chips off his flannel shirt. His breakfast bourbon was chilling in his belly but still flowing through his bloodstream, if the toadstool in a lemony-yellow dress was any indication. He blinked his black-rimmed eyes and glared at the toadstool until it reverted to its usual red-and-white cap perched on an ordinary white stump.
He jangled the coins in his pocket contemplatively, staring into the stream. Burbling over stones and twisting through the field, the water eventually poured into the mill pond, where it became very handy when the mill exploded into flames yesterday evening. Smoke was still rising from the now-skeletal structure.
“Why it exploded is anyone’s guess,” Mortimer told the council when all six members called on him at six in the morning, before he’d even taken his first slug of bourbon. “Nothing in this town has caught fire in over sixty years, unless you count Willa burning the scones at the tea shop.” The council grumbled and eyed him suspiciously. Mortimer sighed. His last episode of hooliganism was over half a century ago, but memories were long, and Bertie the Rat’s whiskers had never been the same. He groomed them carefully, but they remained sparse and obviously plagued his sanctimonious little soul. Bertie was always the first to point a finger in Mortimer’s direction.
He strolled to the mill pond and gazed out over the burnt shell across the water. It was confusing. There was no earthly reason it should have accidentally gone up in flames, but Mortimer couldn’t fathom that one of the town folk had done it on purpose. Kids, maybe. A joke gone awry. A prank that got out of hand. But the younger members of the town tended to confine their mischief making to places with sweets. Mrs. Catchpole’s tea shop was being constantly plagued by sacks of dried cherries gone missing and cooling pies snatched. But given its utter lack of chocolate, none of the kids in town would have been interested in the mill.
Mortimer scratched his chin and began sifting through the rubble. Ernie the moose had been there first and tromped all over the wreckage, leaving the imprint of enormous hooves over everything. Rolling his eyes, Mortimer tried not to think too harshly of the dim but well-meaning moose. Why the council asked him to investigate anything was a complete mystery.
“Not that much of a mystery,” he muttered. “Short-sighted Bertie.” Yes, the elderly rat needed thick spectacles, but his sight was clogged more by his prejudice than by his corneas.
There. Near the once-gaily-dressed-now-entirely-normal-toadstool. Mortimer squat down and put his nose as close to the dirt as he could manage without tipping over. A bit of pink satin ribbon peeked out from a large foot print, unmistakably moose.
Since the mothers of the town were far to sensible to dress their girls in frills and furbelows - they always went missing or got filthy - Mortimer determined that an older girl must have been here in the past few days. Before the fire but after the rains. An older girl who wore pink ribbons.
“Not Willa,” Mortimer mumbled. He had a soft spot for her, as did everyone in town, and not just because she delivered their scones and jam. But she was the only one who both wore pink ribbons and had a bit of a history with fire. Plus, she’d been pulled out of the mill pond not long ago, sodden and coughing.
Mortimer straightened and, using the toe of his boot, buried the ribbon in the mud.
---
This is the second in a collection of stories about animals who talk and drink tea and get themselves in trouble. The first story, about a fastidiously dressed raccoon named Randall, is here. These stories have become some of my favorite things in life, so I hope you enjoy them.
Because When You Stop Being Utterly Fascinated By Your Own Life You Have To Find Some Other Way To Occupy Your Time
The more interesting my life gets, the less compelled I feel to write about it. This is new for me, because writing about my life used to be my favorite thing. Mostly because it was how I figured out myself and my world. Either I've gotten speedier at diagnosing the misalignment of my internal cogs or I've stopped caring. But since I love writing, when I stopped being super intrigued by myself, I had to write about something else. So my inner world spit forth a tiny British town full of nattily-dressed raccoons, scone-baking dormice, world-weary lemurs, and not-so-clever foxes. Since I also love this blog and wanted to share, I posted my first raccoon story with zero explanation or introduction, which led one person to wonder if it was some extended animal metaphor for my life. (It was not, though I dearly wish it was.) I presume it lead everyone else who read more than a paragraph to scratch their heads and wonder what sort of illegal substances I've gotten into this time. (None, surprisingly.)
I've written about nine of these animal stories and don't seem to be stopping, so I may keep sharing them here. Or I may not. For everything is subject to my whim and that's the way I like it. It seems to be shaping into a series of stories for kids in the six to ten range, so if you have one of those and think they might like reading/hearing about raccoons and displaced giraffes, let me know and I will send you chapters as I finish them.
My other project has been creating a youtube series with my friend Ben. He's an official licensed-in-the-state-of-California therapist. I'm not licensed to do anything in the state of California except drive and even that seems a bit questionable at times. But if you spend a great deal of your life trying to figure yourself and the world out, you end up with a lot of opinions. So we turned on the camera and started talking about things like making friends and rejection and finding your life purpose.
Someone called it Car Talk for Therapists, which tickled the hell out of me because I always loved Car Talk. I couldn't care less about cars, but they always sounded like they were having so much fun. That's sort of what we're hoping will happen with this - we find ourselves very entertaining, thank you - but we're still experimenting. The videos are here, if you're interested. Now that we've made a bunch of them, we're looking for ways to make them as fun and useful as possible. Suggestions and heckling welcome.