Thursday 8:39pm
I was on my lunch sitting outside the tower, eating my yellow peppers and mini carrots and drinking my beet juice. I've been reading Marianne Williamson's book a Return to Love. I'm sitting there quite enjoying the greyness of the day with the nice cool breeze. I was also enjoying the book.
I'd read a little and think about what I'd just read... "if you go deeply enough into your mind, and deeply enough into mine, we have the same mind. The concept of a divine, or "Christ" mind, is the idea that, at our core, we are not just identical, but actually the same being. 'There is only one begotten Son' doesn't mean that someone else was it, and we're not. It means we're all it. There's only one of us here."
I sat and thought about that. Imagine that person that just walked by is me. Imagine that my co worker who works my last nerve is me. It's not like it's something new, I've heard this before but how, if I chose to, could I inhabit that with acceptance?
I read some more: "I accept the Christ within" means, "I accept the beauty within me as who I really am. I am not my weakness. I am not my anger. I am not my small mindedness. I am much, much more. And I am willing to be reminded of who I really am."
And
"our entire network of fearful perceptions, all stemming from that first false belief in our separation from God and one another, is called the ego."
And finally
"remember, there's only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of Paradise. To the extent that we abandon love, to that extent we will feel it has abandoned us."
I sat and thought about that. How might I put these ideas into practice? How might I make use of them in one of my novels?
I got to the section on the Holy Spirit and read this wee quote, "The Holy Spirit is the call to awaken and be glad."
I looked across the street, then looked between the buildings across the north side of the street at the air and saw water droplets falling. I couldn't really process it. I looked up at one of the buildings insisting that it must be window washers but couldn't see a swingstage. Hmm? I look east and see people running and I can't figure out why they are running. The people all around me are calm and smoking or talking or eating their street meat or whatever. Finally I see that the sidewalk across the street is getting wet. Then On my side of the street but east of me people are running. I look at my clothing to reassure myself that yes I'm really dry, nothing is coming down. Then I lift my head up to the sky directly above me and I think, "Am I having a religious experience? It's raining everywhere except for on me."
No sooner did I think that one of three women says out loud, "Oh My God! It's raining everywhere except over here!"
I burst out laughing, turn and say to her and her friends, "Oh You see that too? I thought I was having a religious experience!"
ha ha.
Then we all screamed, "It's coming!" and ran under the buildings awning.
I stood with them and told them what I was reading about how it's about Christ and God and Love and then this freaky rain thing happens and I'm thinking I'm getting some message from God. I had them in hysterics.
If the rain had stayed off me just long enough, I might be a devout monk now.
EY
05 July 2007
04 July 2007
Jane Fonda
Note: previous entries mentioned in this entry are on my writing2live blog.
Wednesday 5:34pm
Have I said this about a hundred times? I'm slowly going through my tapes and when I get to Inside the Actor's Studio there is always someone who I think, 'I don't have to watch this one. How interesting will so and so be?' Then I catch the beginning and am engrossed in the whole interview.
Of course that just happened with Jane Fonda. But even better, I watched it this morning and it was so good I rewound the tape to watch it again this afternoon and write notes.
You know so many questions are popping up and out of me lately. Between the Pisces kiss and the subsequent revelations and what made me so mad about it all. I can recall hearing someone saying something along the lines regarding depression that she wanted to make her life less about not being depressed and more about living an intentional life. I can't remember who said it and I never wrote it down because some things that are said just resonate so wholly within my being that I know I don't need to write them down. It's like it inhabits my subconscious in a magnetic sort of way and the right ideas start to stick to me. That's where my idea for embracing my singleness came from.
I don't know if I've expressed embracing my singleness well enough. It's not that I don't want to be with anyone or that I've been overly unhappy alone. I basically said to myself, "what if this is the last time, for the rest of my life, that I will be fully alone? How can I make good use of this time and be able to look back with fondness?"
When I was in constant survival mode and I was between jobs I was always so stressed about finding another job that I never enjoyed the time off work. Then when all worked out and I got a new job I'd always wished that I just relaxed enough to enjoy the time. That's what I'm trying to do now with being single and not having a group of friends to hang out with. Enjoy this time. Discover the things that I really like to do whether I have company or not. Live and enjoy my life despite not having a closet full of money.
Smoking to some extent falls in line with that. There's something that I feel is missing that smoking fills. It's something to focus on to take me away from discovering what that void is that needs to be filled. Jane Fonda talks about addiction and the space that is left when you give up an addiction(s).
My early notes from the first viewing were about her discussing, 'entering my truth'. I had to ask, "what is my truth?" A big question that may take me years to discover a full answer to. Maybe starting off with What do I really feel?
Yesterday morning I caught some police drama on A&E and Anthony LaPaglia's brother is in it and he's trying to get his woman to come in but she won't. I asked out loud, "Why did she bother going there then?" and I felt this ache. I had to ask, What is my ache regarding love? I have one, obviously, but how do I get to the meat of it and past the stories of, "I saw the kind of men my mother was with and what men can do to women" I guess the question is, 'How do I live MY life now with all the love I have to give and actually give it?'
My madness toward the man and his kiss is that I am coming to realize that I feel good enough about myself that I know that what he is offering is bullshit and that he would think it's okay to only offer me scraps that you give a dog. And because I can see different points of view, I'm even madder about the fact that he is with a woman who may or may not know that he is giving HER dog scraps. There's nothing wrong with being a dog but be a single dog and give women the opportunity to say yes or no.
Jane Fonda talked about her first marriage to a man who regularly brought other women into their bed with them. I wrote quickly, "not feeling good enough about yourself enought that you would allow a man to bring another woman into bed with the two of you. Feeling that the only way she could keep this man was to accept that she wasn't enough for him."
It's funny, it always brings me back to what I've always said since I was a kid watching my mother, "I'd rather be alone than suffer through that shit for the sake of having a man."
Jane also said, "It's in relationships where a loss of voice manifests."
Ahh! A loss of voice. I write to give myself voice, even if it's only my eyes that see the words...for now anyway. I leave men when I feel that I can't express my true voice, what I need, what I want, what I feel is missing. I've always wanted to have a relationship, it just so happens, that I've needed to be able to hear my voice more than be in a relationship.
With all my insecurities and feelings that I am so fucked up (I'm not denying that I'm not fucked up) I am discovering that I am more than enough. I do not need to be with someone who convinces me that I'm not enough for his own gains. And isn't there a piece of fiction following a man and a woman through that all? Where the man really sees what he has done to his woman because he could, because she let him, because she didn't think she was enough to keep him.
It takes me back to that question I blogged several weeks ago, "Can I trust you with my heart?" It's not that I can't commit. I can't commit to feeling not good enough and so I don't.
More quotes from Jane Fonda's interview, whose book I want to read, by the way:
"He would bring other women into our bed and it never occurred to me that I could say no. I assumed that it was that I wasn't enough and I didn't want him to leave me and being with him is what validated me. "
"I've come from a place where I would silence my voice, shut down my heart, betray my body because if he left me I would be nothing and fall down into a dark hole."
"I couldn't say to my husband. 'I don't want to anymore.' I couldn't say who I really was because I was scared of being alone."
"the need to please, the disease to please, the need to be perfect, is so pervasive in our society for women... usher perfection out the door and strive for completion."
"I don't want to die without giving voice to my wholeness with the man I love."
"What is more important to me is my authenticity. Being intentional about how I live."
"I don't want to have regrets at the end of my life. What will I have to do now so that I won't have regrets and then it's about being intentional about how you live, the way you live. It's painful but it's the right thing to do."
She was amazing and can I just say that when ever the camera panned the audience the women were wiping away tears.
And she said it, she is a privileged white woman and she still felt that she wasn't good enough. That's pretty powerful when you really think about that.
EY
Wednesday 5:34pm
Have I said this about a hundred times? I'm slowly going through my tapes and when I get to Inside the Actor's Studio there is always someone who I think, 'I don't have to watch this one. How interesting will so and so be?' Then I catch the beginning and am engrossed in the whole interview.
Of course that just happened with Jane Fonda. But even better, I watched it this morning and it was so good I rewound the tape to watch it again this afternoon and write notes.
You know so many questions are popping up and out of me lately. Between the Pisces kiss and the subsequent revelations and what made me so mad about it all. I can recall hearing someone saying something along the lines regarding depression that she wanted to make her life less about not being depressed and more about living an intentional life. I can't remember who said it and I never wrote it down because some things that are said just resonate so wholly within my being that I know I don't need to write them down. It's like it inhabits my subconscious in a magnetic sort of way and the right ideas start to stick to me. That's where my idea for embracing my singleness came from.
I don't know if I've expressed embracing my singleness well enough. It's not that I don't want to be with anyone or that I've been overly unhappy alone. I basically said to myself, "what if this is the last time, for the rest of my life, that I will be fully alone? How can I make good use of this time and be able to look back with fondness?"
When I was in constant survival mode and I was between jobs I was always so stressed about finding another job that I never enjoyed the time off work. Then when all worked out and I got a new job I'd always wished that I just relaxed enough to enjoy the time. That's what I'm trying to do now with being single and not having a group of friends to hang out with. Enjoy this time. Discover the things that I really like to do whether I have company or not. Live and enjoy my life despite not having a closet full of money.
Smoking to some extent falls in line with that. There's something that I feel is missing that smoking fills. It's something to focus on to take me away from discovering what that void is that needs to be filled. Jane Fonda talks about addiction and the space that is left when you give up an addiction(s).
My early notes from the first viewing were about her discussing, 'entering my truth'. I had to ask, "what is my truth?" A big question that may take me years to discover a full answer to. Maybe starting off with What do I really feel?
Yesterday morning I caught some police drama on A&E and Anthony LaPaglia's brother is in it and he's trying to get his woman to come in but she won't. I asked out loud, "Why did she bother going there then?" and I felt this ache. I had to ask, What is my ache regarding love? I have one, obviously, but how do I get to the meat of it and past the stories of, "I saw the kind of men my mother was with and what men can do to women" I guess the question is, 'How do I live MY life now with all the love I have to give and actually give it?'
My madness toward the man and his kiss is that I am coming to realize that I feel good enough about myself that I know that what he is offering is bullshit and that he would think it's okay to only offer me scraps that you give a dog. And because I can see different points of view, I'm even madder about the fact that he is with a woman who may or may not know that he is giving HER dog scraps. There's nothing wrong with being a dog but be a single dog and give women the opportunity to say yes or no.
Jane Fonda talked about her first marriage to a man who regularly brought other women into their bed with them. I wrote quickly, "not feeling good enough about yourself enought that you would allow a man to bring another woman into bed with the two of you. Feeling that the only way she could keep this man was to accept that she wasn't enough for him."
It's funny, it always brings me back to what I've always said since I was a kid watching my mother, "I'd rather be alone than suffer through that shit for the sake of having a man."
Jane also said, "It's in relationships where a loss of voice manifests."
Ahh! A loss of voice. I write to give myself voice, even if it's only my eyes that see the words...for now anyway. I leave men when I feel that I can't express my true voice, what I need, what I want, what I feel is missing. I've always wanted to have a relationship, it just so happens, that I've needed to be able to hear my voice more than be in a relationship.
With all my insecurities and feelings that I am so fucked up (I'm not denying that I'm not fucked up) I am discovering that I am more than enough. I do not need to be with someone who convinces me that I'm not enough for his own gains. And isn't there a piece of fiction following a man and a woman through that all? Where the man really sees what he has done to his woman because he could, because she let him, because she didn't think she was enough to keep him.
It takes me back to that question I blogged several weeks ago, "Can I trust you with my heart?" It's not that I can't commit. I can't commit to feeling not good enough and so I don't.
More quotes from Jane Fonda's interview, whose book I want to read, by the way:
"He would bring other women into our bed and it never occurred to me that I could say no. I assumed that it was that I wasn't enough and I didn't want him to leave me and being with him is what validated me. "
"I've come from a place where I would silence my voice, shut down my heart, betray my body because if he left me I would be nothing and fall down into a dark hole."
"I couldn't say to my husband. 'I don't want to anymore.' I couldn't say who I really was because I was scared of being alone."
"the need to please, the disease to please, the need to be perfect, is so pervasive in our society for women... usher perfection out the door and strive for completion."
"I don't want to die without giving voice to my wholeness with the man I love."
"What is more important to me is my authenticity. Being intentional about how I live."
"I don't want to have regrets at the end of my life. What will I have to do now so that I won't have regrets and then it's about being intentional about how you live, the way you live. It's painful but it's the right thing to do."
She was amazing and can I just say that when ever the camera panned the audience the women were wiping away tears.
And she said it, she is a privileged white woman and she still felt that she wasn't good enough. That's pretty powerful when you really think about that.
EY
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