counting down the minutes to my birthday

Sometimes when I'm in a mood I can feel- for a split second- everyone I've ever loved move inside of me.

Maybe like grass sinking under a foot.

Or like a pile of worms.

Or like water that is getting bigger and bigger.

Once, at yoga school, we did an exercise in Phoenix Rising yoga therapy, where our partner held us, supine, in an intense hip opener.  At some point, I realized, maybe because of the overwhelming number of memories and emotions: my life has been infinite.

I am told most people never have that feeling, that it's usually the opposite.  I don't feel done, or fully expanded.  I have a lot of experiences on my list of things to do before I die that I've yet to check off.  

But for a short moment, I felt all the lifetimes worth of living I've already done.  It wasn't a connection with past lives or anything like that, either.  I just felt how far I have traveled, and it seemed endless.

Maybe take a moment to remember your endlessness.  There is someone you used to be.

It's a little funny writing this because Alex was telling me about the Buddhist concept of no self last night.  How there is no core, only fluctuation and accrued patterns.  But that's a copy of a copy of an explanation.

Armageddon

I just watched that movie again tonight.  A few thoughts:

1) Re the space ship taking off:  this is how I feel every time I get on a plane.  Like it's the bounciest, most frightening and bad-ass event of my lifetime. 

Since I have become a VBA (very brave adult), I no longer take Xanex for flights.  I do, however, have a bittersweet strategy.  I quickly befriend my single-serving seat-mate with inquiries of his/her corporate job and tales of my fecund, burgeoning young professional career to come.  That way, during takeoff, I can direct my "what's that sound?", "is that normal?", and "this is fine, right?" questions at my new sympathetic friend.  He or she, having flown a million times for business in the past, will assure me that everything is totally normal.  Some have even offered me in-depth knowledge about how planes work and use the anatomically correct names of plane parts to explain what's going on.  The problem with this strategy is that once we level off and I want to read or sleep, my new friend keeps on yammering, presumably because he or she is just so thrilled to be engaged in conversation at the intensity level of my life-fearing desperation.  I feel a little bad leading them on, treating them like the most interesting and important person I've ever met for the first fifteen minutes, but after all, I'm not that interesting to talk to myself, and they probably have a great book waiting in their briefcase.

2) I almost cried only once, during a scene of thousands of people praying in front of some sort of Oriental temple.  It was the most beautiful and poignant part of the movie.  I generally don't have many experiences of huge masses of people coming together to commune with the divine, but I imagine it is an experience worth having.

3) I don't want this to come off the wrong way, so I'll keep my environmental alarmism as low as possible.  We are not facing an enormous asteroid hurtling toward the earth that will, as Billy Bob assures us, destroy all life, even bacteria.  However, we are currently experiencing the highest extinction rate since the dinosaurs, or actually ever, I'm pretty sure ever.  We're definitely destroying the planet as it currently exists.  It will recover after us, but still, what I'm saying is that we don't see movies about huge numbers of people mobilizing and praying to fix it.  And if NASA spent billions of dollars, it would help, right?  Maybe.  The thing is, it's not a problem we can just blow up; the problem is an attitude that if we have enough machines and gas to power them, we're gonna pull through.  What scares me most about the problems of my generation is that:

a)all the geniuses working on it can't find an easy fix

b)the fixes that have been found are being thwarted by corporations

c)the problem is too slow and subtle for the world to treat it like the emergency it is

Ok, in retrospect, the environmental alarmism of this post is about an 8.5 out of 10.  Sorry.

4) Something that felt really nice about this movie was that it made me feel super proud to be an American, because in the movie we had all the best equipment and the best experts and we joined with other nations to cooperate and save the world.  And we were space cowboys and our go-for-the-gold-come-hell-or-high-water attitude was what saved it.  So for about 90 minutes, I could forget about imperialism and just feel really great about the US.  

This is the joy and the danger of the movies.

I don't know I can say all that much more about America tonight, except that each of us is part of it.  We each, by being a a citizen, are helping to define it.  So in some way, by each becoming the best person we can be, we're improving it a little, right?

Sometimes in a democracy, it can be hard not to feel really bossy, which, in my case, then leads to feeling really stupid and really powerless.  And like I don't know how to best effect the changes I think need to happen.  And like I don't even know what needs to happen.

I'm going to go drink a cup of tea and read a book.  After I put the uneaten cookie dough and jello jigglers in the fridge.  Strawberry, in case you're asking.  Duh.

colgado

is the spanish word for suspension.  so, I am colgado entre muchas vidas, hung between many lives.  

I am living in two parents' houses right now, my mother's new house and the one I grew up in, which my father is living in until it sells.  

I left school about two weeks ago, but it feels like forever already.  I moved out of the housing coop I've lived in for two years.  I will miss it very much (it's truly one of the best things that has ever happened to me), but next year I will be living with 3 magnificent friends, and will have many homes away from home on campus.

I recently returned from a week of living in a yurt with Alley at a spiritual spring gathering in the mountains.  We were blessed with a lot of sun.  I don't want to get very into it, but pretty much right from the start one thing bled into the next and steered me in some very good directions for my life.  I felt a lot of frustration, but it led me to be in the right place at the right time with the right people and making choices to move my life forward toward where I want it.

I leave for Ecuador on Monday.

Alley just pulled in from returning the yurt to its owners; we're going on errands.

More later.

Spring

The natural state of the heart is to be bursting with love.  

Paradoxically, all "negative" emotions are also our human responses to the world.

We are all trying to find more numerous and intrinsic ways of letting ourselves be who we are.