New York City in 4 Nights

I arrived on Canal Street in NYC after 10 hours sitting on a bus from Bangor, Maine. I was tired. But as soon as I met my friend, Debbie and her friend, Charlie, at a bar near Union Square, a second wave of energy from the city itself arrived. Afterwards, we went back to Debbie's Brooklyn Apt. near Prospect Park and talked and talked and she gave us Tarrot card readings. Uncannily, even after shuffling, Charlie and I were delt nearly an identical hand, but all my cards were upside down and his were rightside up. Whatever that means.


Tuesday, it rained. I worked on some contract graphic design work and took it easy, processing, writing, meditating, reading. When Debbie got home, she, Charlie and I went to a really neat Slavic Soul music show at a venue called Barbe in Brooklyn. So many young, artsy people. The place was packed and the music was great. We walked home through Prospect Park.


Wednesday dawned sunny and I took the free ferry to Staten Island to see what that was like. Beautiful views, good to be on the ocean. When Debbie got home that night, I read her a poem I'd written and she said she had to read me something. She read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.  I need to keep reading that book. I fell asleep feeling truly blessed.


Thursday, I walked and walked and loved every minute of it. Through Central Park, along Lexington Ave, to Columbus Circle and concluded in a cafe waiting for my friend Katie. When she arrived, we braved the insane crowds to catch a glimpse of Rockefeller Center and Times Square. The line for Madeleine's famous bakery where we ate last time I saw her here, was just too long. So we went to a donut plant instead and then on to Pho Grand for delicious pho and spring rolls. Such a nice, cozy atmosphere. It was so good catching up with Katie!


My last morning in NYC this time around, I got to see the matinee showing of Hansel & Gretal at the MET Opera for free because Katie had a ticket and couldn't go. The set design alone was steller and so was the show. I sat outside in the sun watching the pigeons and the people, soaking up the sun and the atmosphere for an hour afterwards before making my way to the airport.


I arrived back in NM at 11pm and spent the night at a friends so I wouldn't have to drive back to Santa Fe so late. The book beside my friends bed, where I slept, was called Writing Down Your Soul. Interesting, I thought. So I opened it up. The quote on the page I opened to read:


"Things are not happening to you, they are happening for you. If you want to ask, 'Why is this happening to me?' ask instead: 'Why did my soul call this forth?'"


An incredibly meaningful and fitting note to go to sleep with. And to begin the New Year with!

Listen

Who am I? I am that place of stillness and love at the center. I am not the careless comments. I am not the expectations and images placed on me. I am not the chatter in my head. I am not the negative feelings or the positive feelings that sway back and forth like seaweed with the high and low tides of the day. I am not the books I have read, the tests I have taken, the degrees I have undertaken. I am not the good poem I wrote or the bad poem I wrote. I am not the stylish clothes people may notice me for sometimes and I am not the reserved, self-absorbed bad-hair-day person people may judge me for at other times. I am not any of those things although I can identify and be identified by them. I am deeper than all of those projections and reflections, as are we all. We are the stillness, presence and love simply being underneath, always, steady, grounding.

Listen
NYC is not the hustle and bustle,
The Honking horns and clamor,
Raised voices across street corners,
Glitz and glamor, skyline, poverty,
No-sleep-heart-beat.
New York is not even
The statue of liberty,
The big apple, the place to be,
Although we identify New York
As all of these things.
What is New York then?
New York, like you and me,
is the serene presence,
steady love, simple stillness,
Underneath that surface-sense.

Guided

I flew to Maine for Christmas. My brother came too, from Bellingham, WA. My sister is already at home, since she goes to College an hour away from my parent's house anyway. This is the first Christmas in 3 years that the whole family is together and it is wonderful. There are great meals galore - hungarian mushroom soup and polenta made by my sister yesterday, romatoff chicken and vegetables, Buffalo meatball stew, French Toast, brussel sprouts and kale from my parent's garden, and we are still a few days from Christmas.

It is snowing today. We were supposed to visit my grand-mother an hour away, but we will go tomorrow instead when the weather is better. It looks like we will have a white Christmas!

Today is Friday. I spent Sunday night in Albuquerque at Teresa's the morning before flying to Maine. I am grateful to live near one of the interns from my 11-week spiritual retreat this summer. I went to dinner with Teresa, and Andee - another friend who works at The Center for Action and Contemplation where the retreat/internship happened. We ate at Baily's on the Beach, my new favorite restaurant, voted 2011 best new restaurant in Albuquerque. The food is eclectic and affordable and the coconut cream pie is so delicious. Despite all of this goodness, I couldn't quite summon my normal, cheery happy self to the table because of a very recent and kind of unexpectedly quick ending to a relationship I was more hopeful about than any other I have been in. There is a saying though, "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." I've had relatively little experience with relationships and I have suffered from them less than most people my age. There is a certain flatness that permeates life for a while after a disappointed ending like that, maybe its due from chemical withdrawal in addition to the severing of emotional and spiritual chords that have been formed invisibly between two people.

I know that the best and most dependable healer is time and the ability, with time, to willingly give all those negative emotions: disappointment, anger, sadness, self-sabotage, confusion, pain, all over to whoever you relate to as your spirit guide. It just seems to take time to relinquish all of that, realizing in the process of letting it go, the clarity and resolution that were invisible when you were still attached and clinging and trying to explain it all to yourself, the other-no-longer-half, or friends.

The plane ride, I knew, could either be a time of peace or a time of obsession and the choice was mine. I chose peace, meditated, read healing books and wrote poetry. I love traveling and it has always made me remember and feel that I have no control, that control is an illusion, and that my life is in the care of larger hands than my own.

Monday night, my oldest friend from my first year of kindergarten, Jenni, picked me up from the Portland airport. It was wonderful to see Jenni in a really great, happy, stable place in her life. We still have such a soul connection after knowing each other a good 23 years. She is a counselor now, so it was especially helpful to process things with her. On Tuesday, we went shopping together in Freeport and Portland. I am pleased a Trader Joe's came to Portland this past year! Then, Jenni took me to the Concord Trailways bus station and I took the bus from Portland to Bangor, ME. Mom picked me up in Bangor and drove me the final leg to Mariaville, to the same house I grew up in. Pop, Vivian and the dogs welcomed me. My brother, Joe, and his girlfriend Lauren, arrived the next day, Wednesday.

Last night, Thursday, I met up with six friends from high school in Bangor. I see a few of the friends once or twice a year, but a few of them I hadn't seen since high school. We concluded the evening at a cute and cozy piano bar downtown called Nocturnum where they serve pear cider and coffee mead. It was very good to see everyone and to feel the kindness and bond we still have for each other. And it was good to get out and be refreshed with different perspectives of living and looking at the world.

Lately, I've been feeling, for the first time in my life, the desire to put down roots instead of wander. I will always love to travel and I know I will do it throughout the rest of my life, but it has ceased to be the priority and motivation for my journey. Something else is taking shape and I can feel my life being redirected. I am open and excited for the redirection and I believe that, as John O'Donohue says, "There is an unseen life that dreams us. It knows our true direction and destiny. We can trust ourselves more than we realize and we need have no fear of change."

I woke up today feeling the abundance of good friendships and loving, wise family in my life. The world looks bright again. Last year, I didn't have a word starting the year, but looking back, the word could have been "Experience." My word for 2012 is "Guided."

Out of My Hands

PART I

To write through this haze,

It is winter, the darkest days,

The soltice in three, then brightening,

To stay with any object, thing,

That reminds me, charged with emotion

Until it holds no charge over me.

The book lent, in my hands,

The keys still in purse pocket,

The couple kissing in line,

I choose peace on this plane.

There is only engine hum sound.

We are above cloud-compressed ground.

PART II

I hold it gently, lightly

In the palm of my hand,

Maybe if I make a wish,

And blow my will like an eyelash,

Love will land somewhere quietly

And sprout into reality,

Feathers taking roots,

And growing down,

And roots taking feathers,

And flying forth unbound.

- Jeanne, on the plane home

Tributaries

To see, really, reality.
Snap. Bolt. Thunderclap.
To ask authentically,
Not only to notice the gaps,

About ourselves, our thoughts,
But with equal intensity,
To find where we are caught,
In our minds, justifying,

Denying. Lying. Asleep.
Regarding the exterior goings on.
A world view we cling to keep,
A structure we don't believe gone,

As if truth were a thing we could mold,
Or dreams were a body we could hold.

Remember, the dynamic
Of sunrays on a child,
Playfully dancing, frantic,
Lit-up eyes, delighted, wild?

The shadows on the wall have shifted
From potted plant to silhouetted window blind
My mind has wandered, drifted,
Restless imaginings uncollected, unwind

Down the roots of trees,
Along streams and veins,
Into Earth and memory,
Through untested terrain.

Transitioning to repetition,
And habits of being,
Yet longing for vision,
Of what is there, but unseen.

Navigating the solitary,
Necessary, tundra inside,
Arriving at a tributary,
Fed by something greatly alive.

Extending a toe toward the moon,
And finding the stars applauding,
This gesture, intention to move,
The wildflowers gently nodding.

From stationary stance,
To gusty, liberating slide,
Down those dramatic glances,
Into honey comb and hive,

And nonsense and fragments,
Strung together like lies,
Revealing the butterfly of descent,
To be in the rise.

The Way of Jellyfish

A raft of trust,
In a sea of unsettlement,
In the gusts of thought,
What, if anything, is meant
By the turbulence of words unsent?
All of the unheard jellyfish,
A floating pink array,
Wishing with their tentacles,
For her to find her way,
Not to somewhere safe, respectable,
Not to shore as you might guess,
Not to any certain place, in fact,
But, gracefully, with lightness,
toward steadying her craft.

Wonderings

I am re-remembering, again, the extreme importance of being excited with life. Of being thrilled for the possibilities. Life has soooo much to offer. The surprises and discoveries, the harder things to learn, even, the limitless wonders and unexpected simple pleasures, the weaknesses that are also the strengths - they are enough to keep us humming inside and out all day if we only knew and re-remembered them more!

I opened up a book about poetry this morning and a quote jumped out at me:
"What is to give light must endure burning" - Viktor Frankle (author of Man's Search for Meaning)