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This is what I’m thankful for

Happy almost-Thanksgiving! It’s a time when the internet is flooded with musings about two things: turkey and gratitude. And since this isn’t going to be a post about turkey, I thought I’d better make it about gratitude — enjoy!

This is what I’m thankful for

Ten toes tighten in cold sand and I feel the grit scrape against my skin as I’m chilled. A gloomy November sky glowers overhead and the cold Pacific ocean swirls about my toes and sweeps me out to sea and I’m freezing but my heart soars because it knows that this means I’ve come home.

Fingers hover over smooth plastic keys and the cursor blinks at me in a way that should be disconcerting — my wordlessness made comical as the cursor counts the seconds ticking by, each a moment wasted without the writing of a single word. But instead of anger there is stillness because the words are stirring and somewhere deep inside me I know they’re waiting — waiting for the moment I find quiet enough to finally hear their whispers.

The house is cold and I’ve not felt my toes in hours but the water is piping hot and the steam curls up from the mug, dampens as it condenses on cold fingers cupped over the warmth of rising water vapor. I hold the cup in the palms of my hands, raise it to my lips, and sip. I taste the essence of a smile.

Two arms wrap around me strong and warm and I burrow myself into the press of body-upon-body and bask in the rhythm of a heartbeat I know almost like it was my very own. I close my eyes and tighten my grip on the family I hold so very dear.

The first flakes fall and I know it’s winter because the ground goes white and frosted and perfect. The sky opens up and buries old hurts under a fresh new blanket — scrubbed clean and whitewashed, we are made-up and re-created in this moment. The season of imagination looms near, when snow and darkness wrap each house in muffled quiet and dreams of sugarplums come dancing near.

The dawn breaks and night’s grip weakens as the sky is brushed back from black to ever-lightening grey. When I woke the stars still shone, marching ever westward in their dance across the sky. Each light winking out now, as the sun rises to greet the turning of the Earth. A new day dawns and I yet live to see it.

The fragile strength of lungs expands my ribcage, bends soft bones outward until I am larger than the me I was half a breath ago. The poetry of a breath lies in the stillness that awaits — pounding like a heartbeat into the silent passage of air, whispering through the body.

Now, I’d love to hear from you. Let me know what you’re thankful for in the comments below!

Wanted: Two legs, possibly stocky.

I’ve got something a bit different to share this week: Chuck Wendig has issued a flash fiction challenge using these hilarious and bizarre stock photos as prompts.

Since I’m a naturally indecisive person, I used a random number generator and drew this image:

Getty Images/iStockphoto dreamerve via buzzfeed.com

And here is my resulting fiction.

Wanted: Two legs, possibly stocky

The problem was that it is nearly impossible to find a pair of legs divorced from their associated brains. For one thing, such legs are naturally found only rarely — most legs being rather firmly affixed to their proper brains by way of a torso and spine. And, even in such rare cases of leg-brain separation, it is particularly difficult to track the brainless pair.

After all, without brains, the legs are forced to wander — mindlessly.

And frankly, she was fed up with the search. Her missing legs were worse than a two-year-old.

She resented her legs for wandering off so spitefully after a particularly disdainful comment she’d made about the proportions of their thighs and the build of their calves.

She resented the bruising of her elbows from where she had been forced to drag herself about — reduced to something less than a crawl in the absence of her recalcitrant legs.

And most of all, she resented the absence of her seat.

She longed once more to stand tall — to look others in the eye as equals. She longed never again to hear someone jokingly refer to her as a shoegazer.

She longed, once again, to roam free.

Free once more to wander, free to run and chase, free to feel the tug of the wind in her mousey brown hair.

And for this she was willing at last to pay the price of two legs, imperfectly muscled and stocky.

–

A week went by, a month, and then two. She enlisted the help of friends and social media. She made phone calls to the local police department and placed wanted ads. She even called around to local department stores to see if anyone had found an extra pair of legs, perhaps discovered standing in the window display.

It was all to no avail.

The police informed her that as legs were not a whole person, no missing persons report could be filed for an absent set of bipedal appendages. The department stores assured her that all legs were present and accounted for and that no extra pairs were to be found.

Her friends set out and scoured the city — but always returned empty-handed.

And her pleas on social media had made her temporarily Twitter-famous — but still it was for naught.

Her legs were utterly vanished.

–

It was a Tuesday.

It was a Tuesday in November and her friends had demanded she quit moping about the house and get on with her life. They had insisted she join them after work for a drink.

And so she had dragged her self on weary elbows down the block to the local bar and she had looked about grudgingly for her friends’ familiar sneakers.

She didn’t see them. She couldn’t see them through the forest of feet that filled the bar and she knew instinctively that this had been a mistake.

Any moment now she would be tripped upon or stumbled over and then she would be trampled like so much dirt beneath an unfriendly shoe.

Sighing in resignation she made her way reluctantly toward the bar, unsure how she might ever hope to mount a stool and be seen by the bartender – perhaps she would just hide in the shadows beneath its dark paneled surface, safe from the general hubbub and ever so many feet.

She reached the bar at last and found her self eye-to-foot with a pair of handsome ankle boots, brown leather and with a three-inch heel. How she longed to wear such shoes once more and she found her thoughts wandering to her own favorite pair, now reduced to languishing forlornly in the back of her closet.

Her gaze traveled further upward… past shapely calves and well-toned thighs and lingered with envy upon the elegant swell of derriere…

And it was then she realized that these legs were missing their torso and brain–

“Legs!” she exclaimed, “I’ve found you! You’re mine!”

If my bones could speak

If my bones could speak they would tell you about how I wore them into battle like a cage and how I quivered on their insides as my heart shivered in my chest and my blood was sent thump-thumping out into the corners of my body.

If my bones could speak they would tell you of their aches and how they hurt in the mornings when I close my eyes against the cheerful chirp of my alarm clock and I brace myself. Because I know that in motion lies pain.

If my bones could speak they would tell you of a hundred thousand minutes spent dancing, and of how the music lingers in them even now and how my bones sing to me at night if I’m very still and very quiet.

If my bones could speak they would tell you that we used to be invincible and unbreakable and when the little kids played at taunting, when they sang about sticks and stones hurting their bodies — my bones knew that words were still more dangerous.

And they whispered to me their fears.

If my bones could speak they would tell you of all the times we fell or walked our growing hips into counter corners and door knobs. They would tell you of the times we forgot how tall we were and bumped our head. They would tell you of the moments when we ached with fever and curled up in pain.

If my bones could speak they would tell you about they way the vertebrae of my spine jostle together when we run and how this prevented us from fleeing the feelings of isolation that grew inside of us, blooming into those strange and shifting years that linger between childhood and self-actualization.

But most of all if my bones could speak they would tell you about the day I failed to hear them for the first time, and about how their voices grew louder until my bones clamoured in my body and I felt them shake me to my core but still I could not hear their voices, had forgotten the timbre of their tones.

If my bones could speak they would tell you of the day they woke up alone.

Author’s note: If you’d like to hear this piece in my own voice, check out the video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V0ahdXdPvM

As always, I’d love to hear from you… what do your bones have to say? Let me know in the comments below! (And if you liked this poem, please share!)

Are you saying No enough?

Saying NOWhen I graduated from college, five years and two degrees later, I entered the workforce. A temporary summer internship obtained through my Master’s thesis advisor turned into a full-time position and more than a year and half later I’ve found myself inexplicably and unexpectedly a cog in the nation’s corporate wheel. And while I’ve come to really like not being in school, it has honestly been the biggest adjustment I’ve ever had to make. Much bigger and harder than the adjustment required after leaving home and moving from California to Boston to attend college in the first place.

While moving across the country and starting college is often portrayed as the defining transition of a young life, what I’ve learned in retrospect is that school is still school. College was not so different from high school except that my parents were no longer a daily presence in my life — and the math was harder. In college your every move is scripted and choreographed, your every moment booked. Sure, you defined the context of your motions in picking your major and deciding which (if any) extra-curricular clubs or sports you will participate in. But after those few decision are made each semester, the next three months unfold largely beyond your own control. Assignments are due not when you decide to finally finish them, but rather when your professors decided they should be due.

College was an exercise in discovering how much Yes I could handle.

Yes, I can study for this test in 12 hours. Yes, I can write this essay in 7. Yes, I can write three sections of my thesis (amounting to some 40 pages) in less than a day. Yes, I will do these things even if I must drink so much tea that I make myself sick.

And, yes, today I still don’t think I have any regrets. College was a time of learning my boundaries, of measuring the length of my ability to stretch beyond the limits of my expectations.

But when I graduated I had to learn how to start saying No.

It was a tricky lesson because I had un-learned how to sit still and I had un-learned how to manage my time and I had learned how to fill my few free moments with hollow comforts (yes, I will watch that latest episode of White Collar now).

I needed to re-learn how to excise the habits from my life that were no longer serving me. I needed to re-learn how to say No to all the things that I had spent that last five years so happily saying Yes to. I needed to re-learn what it could mean to have free time.

I’d spent 5 years of my life being too-busy for the things that really mattered to me: for writing, for taking walks, for exercising, for cooking really good food. And because I was too-busy for the important things, the only things I felt I had time for were the really unimportant things: time for TV, and for surfing the internet, and an infinite array of other possible ways to kill 3 minutes here and 14 minutes there. Each of these activities helping to ease the resentment of having yet another assignment that I didn’t really want to do by providing the illusion of freedom.

I suffered from learned busyness.

The way out meant learning some hard lessons in saying No. And perhaps the worst thing was that I didn’t have to learn to say No to other people. It wasn’t like my life had become a dizzying array of commitments from which I desperately needed to disengage. Instead, I had fashioned a cage of my own making: a web of behaviors that helped me to forget how bored and alone and tired and empty I felt.

And learning to say No to myself, to break the chains of the time-wasting, soul-sucking habits I had so gleefully acquired during the years in which those same habits had felt like giddy misbehavior was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

In the past year I’ve finally managed to turn things around

I’ve given up a lot: I’ve said goodbye to pretty much every TV show I used to follow religiously, I’ve cancelled my Netflix account, I’ve drastically pared down the number of blogs in my RSS feed, and I’ve even starting doing my cooking all at once on Sundays to free up hours on weeknights.

These new-found hours were difficult to manage at first: I traded TV for online learning through EdX and then for online teleclasses, but with each trade I’ve moved one step closer to spending those hours on the things that really matter to me.

So that I can say today that I don’t think there’s all that much that’s still in need of pruning.

Today, I can say with absolute honesty that I’ve written each of the last six nights and I that fully intend to make that number seven.

I don’t remember the last time I managed that.

Now, I’d love to hear from you! Are there places in your life where you should be saying No more? Is saying too much Yes impacting your ability to achieve your dreams? Let me know in the comments below.

October 2014 Book Reviews

October: when the trees are still lovely and the weather is not so cold.

Welcome to (almost!) November… the greyest and gloomiest month of Autumn. The month when all the leaves have lost the will to cling those self-same tree branches from which they so recently sprung. The month when the leaves clump in damp drifts beneath the boots of countlessly many pedestrians, no longer crisp and crunching but damp and slick and putrid. The month when— but I digress! It’s time for my monthly round up of October’s reading list!

On the reading front this month I’ve clearly returned to a non-fiction spree after my rather lengthy bout with fiction. The page count for this month comes to 1369. (Yay for multiples of 3?)

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This does not affect your price.

Cooked by Michael Pollan

Confession: I’d actually been reading Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation for several months (since July or August!), and while such a long reading time would seem like a bad sign for a book, the real reason it took me so long to finish is that I couldn’t get it from the library on Kindle…. This means I had to read it on my computer and as someone who already feels like most of my life is spent on a computer, it was hard to muster enthusiasm for any prolonged reading (which means I mostly read this book breakfast). So really it’s a sign of merit that I bothered to persevere all the way to the end of this one.

Which is why I’m here to tell you that you need to read Cooked if you have any interest at all in food and cooking. I’m an unabashed fan of Michael Pollan’s work generally, but independent of your feelings on his food politics, this book is a fascinating read. Couched in the guise of the four elemental transformations (fire, water, air, and earth) Pollan explores the natural history of cooking reaching back to the earliest memory of ancient civilization and exploring how and why we cook the foods we do. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it!

 

Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson

Up next on my reading list for the month was Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat, which makes an fantastic follow up to Michael Pollan’s Cooked (I was clearly on a roll with the cooking theme…). Whereas Cooked presented a history of cooking from the perspective of the natural sciences and transformations, Consider the Fork takes a look at the history of cooking from the perspective of technological innovation. Both are equally fascinating; however, Bee Wilson’s book is a much lighter and easier read than Pollan’s most recent tome. Covering changes in kitchen technology from the clay pot to the sous vide machine, Consider the Fork is a quick and entertaining read for any culinary enthusiast.

 

Finding Your Way in a Wild New World by Martha Beck

Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want is Martha Beck’s most recent contribution to the sea of self-help and life-coaching books on shelves these days. In it, Beck teaches what she terms the four “technologies of magic”, Wordlessness, Oneness, Imagination, and Forming (and yes, it’s about as out there as it sounds…). But if you’re willing to look a little beyond the surface layer of “this sounds crazy!”, there’s a lot about this book that rings deeply and profoundly true. (My only real quibble is with her mystical appropriation of quantum physics in an attempt to lend credence to her beliefs in magic and miracles… As a scientist trained in these things (at least more-so than Beck) I found my skepticism hard to stomach.)

If you’ve been keeping up with me for the last couple of years you’ll know I’ve been doing some pretty serious soul-searching with regard to what I want to do with my life. And if starting this blog felt like taking the first step in the right direction, then reading Finding Your Way in a Wild New World has undoubtedly been another.

If you’re fed up with feeling trapped in a situation that sucks but don’t quite know if you’re brave enough to break free, if you’ve found yourself feeling a little lost, a little lonely, and not quite sure where you’re supposed to be heading, then I highly recommend you give Finding Your Way in a Wild New World a try!

 

The Unconquered by Scott Wallace

Last on my list for October is just about the nearest one can get to a modern day adventure story. The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon’s Last Uncontacted Tribes is the story of an expedition of men and indigenous tribesmen led by Brazilian official and activist Sydney Possuelo. The tale is narrated by Scott Wallace, a journalist with National Geographic who accompanied the expedition. The book narrates the trials and tribulations encountered by the explorers as they search for evidence of the well-being of the uncontacted tribe of flecheiros or “Arrow People” with the goal of leaving the tribesmen uncontacted and undisturbed.

One part adventure story, one part political treatise, and one part history of indigenous relations in the Amazon jungle, The Unconquered is a surprisingly compelling read that I’m glad I stumbled upon. My only tentative complaint is with Wallace’s apparent adoration for unnecessarily abstruse verbiage… 😉

 

Now, I’d love to hear from you! Let me know what you’re reading in the comments below.

 

Tired of waiting for my monthly wrap-ups? I talk about what I’m reading each week in my email newsletter.