Wiggly Diva Lessons

I recently started teaching voice to an adorably driven first grader.  This girl has plans.  She is going to be a singer.  She wants it with every fiber of her little being.  She is also six.  This week our lesson fell on a gloriously sunny day.  It was warm, the air smelled like flowers, and her friends were playing right outside the building.  We could HEAR them.  We were plugging along with scale warm ups and pitch matching exercises, and I could see the slight sway of her body intensifying, her little hands moving like trapped birds at her sides. 

“Miss Shannon, I can’t!” she finally bursts.  “I’m too wiggly!” 

I bit my lip to keep from laughing, and sent her out to check in with her mama.  I listened at the door as her mother gently and firmly told her that she didn’t have to finish her lesson, but that if she wanted to continue with lessons, she needed to stick to it.  Plus, she only had a few minutes left, and then she could go out to play.  Little Miss trudged back in and stood solemnly by the keyboard.  Wanting to reassure her, I pulled out some teacher-y wisdom.

“Sometimes it is hard to work on stuff, even when it is something that you want to do very much.” I tell her.  “That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important to you, just that it can be hard.”

Looking for a way to make our last five minutes more engaging, I made up a simple tune and asked her to help me write lyrics for it.  We ended up with a sweet little song about spring, and she left our lesson smiling.  I, on the other hand, was feeling a bit sad. 

I saw so much of myself in her wiggly, six year old struggle to stay the course when sunshine and friends were calling.  Listening to her mother’s loving insistence, and watching myself find a way to make our work a celebration of sun and spring that honored her desire for play, I was deeply stricken.  I couldn’t help but compare it to the way I talk to  myself when my mind has the wiggles, when I want to do pretty much anything other than set pen to paper and keep my promise to myself.  Let's just say it wasn't a pretty comparison.  I would never treat one of my students the way I treat myself, and that made me wonder. What would it look like if I was gentle, but firmly insistent?  What would it feel like if I told myself that YES, this is hard, and that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to me?  What might happen if I found a way to make my wiggles a strength, to make my work a celebration of the shiny things that pull at my thoughts?  At the very least, I will have been kind to myself.  I might also find it easier to get through the minutes required to stay faithful to myself.  I might even create something worthwhile from my struggle.

Celebrational Awareness

16 days ago I committed to recording on facebook at least 3 moments of joy each day for 30 days.  By "moments of joy", I mean those times when you feel that tingly surge of happy neurotransmitters bubble up.  Noticing, remembering and really savoring moments of joy is a practice that I learned years ago in a therapy group.  Like most practices, I followed it daily for a while.  Eventually I missed a day and from there my faithfulness slowly dwindled until one day I'm struggling and thinking, "What was that thing I used to do? It really helped."  That is were I found myself a couple of weeks ago.  Hard, sad things were happening all around me.  Many people whom I love were really struggling, and I was recovering from a fairly major surgery.  I desperately needed some balance, and what better way to get it than to seek out and savor joy. 

I'm a little more than halfway through.  So, what have I learned?  What things and experiences really give me that little shot of joy and help me get through the day in better balance?  I've noticed a few patterns:

1)The number of joy moments I experience is often inversely proportionate to how tightly scheduled I am.  When I feel busy and frantic, I just don't notice the joy that may be there for me to experience.  I don't always have a choice about tight my schedule is, but there are ways that I can make my busy days feel less frantic.

2)People.  Better than 75% of the joy moments that I've reported have been while connecting with people.  Sure, some of them have been huge moments of love and intimate connection, but most are a simple as a smile, or moving beyond chit chat with a new acquaintance.  When I am stressed and sad, my instinct says to withdraw to my room like a hermit to the desert, and I usually give in.  I'm going to reconsider that in the light of this observation.

3)I get a lot of joy from my hilariously large collection of dresses and jewelry.  I've spent a fair amount of time feeling guilty or just shallow about my passion for fripperies, but putting together beautiful outfits really does increase my joy.  To expand beyond things sartorial, beauty brings me joy.  From the color and scent of my bathwater to the grandeur of nature, I am happier when I experience beauty.

It feels important to say that the quality of events in my life has not changed.  The quality of my experience of life, on the other hand, has changed dramatically. There is still a lot of really hard stuff.   There is a lot of amazing stuff too.  There always was.  I was just forgetting to notice.

Ghosts

It feels a bit like autumn today.  It isn't just the rain, or the spiders busily spinning in every corner.  Every once in a while there is a hint of that crisp, fall smell on the breeze.  I've always loved autumn.  It has always felt so full of  possibility, like a beautiful new notebook with nothing in it but potential.  A fresh start.  It still does, but, as I've grown older, I find that with the fall comes a sense of loss, a hint of squirming discomfort, an inchoate longing for possibilities unexplored and potential unfulfilled.  I long for books unread, intellectual paths not followed, and passions unexplored.  I wish for words I never wrote and for songs I never sang.  I ache for the children I never had and the loves I've lost or never pursued at all.  It's almost pleasant, this pain. It's a sharp, sweet ache, a tightness in my throat and a fullness behind my eyes.  It's the prickle of unshed tears, the tingling sense of something that is not quite there.  It's the memory of things that never were.

Dear Shannon,

You are but a speck.  Tremble before my vastness.

Complete neutrality,

The Universe


Had an exhausting and surreal weekend camping at the Table Mountain Star Party.  Wednesday and Thursday nights were spent gazing up at the kind of sky you see in movies, deep blue velvet thick with stars and embellished with an arc of Milky Way so thick you could almost reach up and scoop it with a spoon.  The telescope viewing was amazing, globular clusters, nebulae, open clusters, Saturn with rings and moon, but my favorite part was lying on a sleeping bag looking up, catching early Perseids and ISS passes, and losing myself in the vastness.  Somewhere along the way, I started singing, and wrote these words for a new verse of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. The tune is the embellished variation that I like to sing, so unfortunately it won't scan to the simple melody that everyone knows.

Blazing giant in the night,
But so very far away you look small to my sight.
Hydrogen and helium you burn to make much more,
It's the very stuff of life that swirls within your core.
Twinkle Twinkle  Little Star,
I'm made of the very same stuff that you are.

The next two nights were a less pleasant reminder of nature's power, though no less awesome.  Friday night brought a thunderstorm of a magnitude we never see on this side of the Cascades.  The lightning strikes were numerous and close enough to require that we seek more substantial shelter than our tent.  The sky opened up and rain fell so heavily that we couldn't hear over it.  Morning came with sun and clear skies, and washed out roads and flooded tents. Saturday night the winds came and blew for hours.  Winds so strong that our canopy was blown over our tent and across the fields.  Our tent was being lifted off the ground even with over 500 lbs of humans in it.  Morning came, again with sun and clear skies, and the discovery that most of our tent stakes had been pulled up, and the rain fly had torn.  Still, our tent was there, and we were safe.   Safe and utterly insignificant on a universal scale.

I am a speck.  I am utterly insignificant in this endless expanding Universe, a mere dot of life, on a mere dot of a continent, on a mere dot of a planet, in a mere dot of a solar system, in a mere dot of a galaxy.  We live on such a small scale.  Isn't that beautiful?

Jumping in with Both Feet

I haven't written in over three months.  I'd been on a roll, the best of my life, actually.  I was writing almost daily.  I had a story to tell and it was flowing out of me and onto the paper like snow melt in the spring.  It felt like magic.  It WAS magic.  Then it stopped.

Why did it stop? That's easy.  Life blew up as it is sometimes wont to do.  I stopped writing to focus on a crisis, a very worthy crisis.

Why haven't I started again?  That's a little trickier.  There are all kinds of simple, logistical reasons.  I no longer had a routine with scheduled time away from schooling my daughter. I had taken on new responsibilities.  I was exhausted.  I was coming to terms with some medical issues.  All entirely reasonable justifications, but I know they don't tell the whole story.

Can I get closer to the truth?  Maybe.  I was emotionally exhausted.  There.  That's a little closer.  I was tired. I couldn't make myself do it.

Make myself?   Shouldn't something I want be easy to fall into?  Shouldn't it be like a comforting embrace?  Do I want to write?  YES! I want it.  Some days I ache for it, and still can't manage to summon the force of will to sit down and do it.

Why is it hard?  Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that writing is work, and work can be hard, why is it hard for me to start doing it?  There.  I think that is the central question, the tough, seedy core of my dilemma. Why is it hard for me to start writing?  Because it feels like something I am not allowed to do. Writing feels transgressive.  Stories are something that other people tell.

Can I transgress?  Let's find out.