When the world turns gray

I would keep you in my heart

Just to make the bay a brighter blue

Though you’ve never been here to see it in summer

You make it novel

simply because when I see it

I want to see it for you

I would let you keep my heart

Just so I can appreciate the church by the bridge

Though those steeples will never be your school

And the bridge isn't red in texts

And you’ve never seen it on a clear day

You make me giddy about this beauty

At the possibilities

I would wait months to see you

Just to make these parties fun

Though you’ll never know my friends

Or drink with them and eat a meal in the park

With the light growing deep and dark

Over the Painted Ladies

You make it matter

Because my life is full and

fuller with you in the back of my mind

I would break down all the walls

-In fact I did

Just to talk to you

At the end of the day

To make the morning light

Yellow and bright

Because you’ve never been close

And you never will be

But that’s just physicality

It still sort of feels like you became

My best friend

Book wisdom

I read in a book I read a while ago something about abundance creating abundance. "Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world" Right now I don't feel any energy for my work. I don't feel any motivation or drive or focus. I feel tired every morning on my way to work. I must be withholding energy from my work. But why?

In a more recent book I am reading, it says we all have a source of energy that is infinite and requires no outside input such as food or sleep. The reason some people are more energetic is because they are accessing the energy in their heart, whereas others are living in fear- closing off all the energy in their heart, with constant blockages from anxieties and past problems that make the energy cycle around and around instead of being let out. The book said we are always opening and closing our heart. We get hurt so we close our heart. If we kept our heart open all the time we would be able to access that infinite energy.

I am vowing to myself to keep my heart open every minute. It may be scary. The person I am falling in love with might break my heart, or it might not work simply because of distance. I could lose my job; I could do a bad job. I could lose all this. But as the daily ups and downs come and go and make me fearful, I refuse to close my heart. I am hoping for renewed energy. I am hoping to love correctly and live correctly.

Orcas

Speaking of blogging, if you ever have an interest, and maybe you don't and I won't be offended because orcas are my thing, not yours, and if you wrote about the plight of small fisted tree frogs I maybe wouldn't read about it... 

BUT just putting it out there....I am a contributing blogger on Orcasphere.net and have timidly debuted my first article after many draft articles on subjects that never made the "Publish" button stage. 

http://www.orcasphere.net/

Saturday in Santa Cruz

Yesterday I went to Santa Cruz to attend a symposium called “Awakening the Dreamer.” An organization called the Pachamama Alliance hosts symposiums all over the world to help raise awareness and inspiration to change the world as it pertains to sustainable living, social justice and spiritual awakening. Pachamama is a concept that in the language of the Ecuador natives who started the alliance to save the rainforests, means the earth, the sky, the stars, the universe- a big concept for everything that is life.

 

None of the information was new, yet it reaffirmed how much is wrong with the world right this very moment that cannot wait for us to solve. The videos gave me a visceral feeling of overwhelming sadness and a desire to stop adding to all that is wrong with the world, and start contributing something positive before it’s too late. 50% of all species have been extinct. 90% of all Africa’s lions are gone. 80% of the world’s elephants are gone, 90% of the world’s fish. If you have a roof over your head, food to eat and clothes in the closet, you are better off than 83% of the world’s population.

 

I really liked that the symposium brought together the ideas of sustainability and social justice because so often the work that’s done is separate. The environments we are destroying first are those in the third world, and the places we dump our waste and hazards are again in the third world. Of course none of this is new information, but I was thinking about how odd it is to have money to buy clothes and plane tickets and anything I want to live my life, and that I don’t have to know my neighbors, don’t have to rely on a damn person in my community for anything. All I have to rely on is the money I make to buy anything I need to “rely on myself” and live independently. It’s interesting to think how new that concept is; that for most of human history we needed each other to live. And we still do, it’s just hidden by the global world we live in. The community I rely upon to survive is not the people who live next door to me or across the street, they live in China, making cheap plastics, in Ecuador cutting down rainforest for my paper, in the marine life that bears the brunt of the pollution from tankers taking these goods to the stores I shop in. I can buy a finished product that I “need” for seven dollars when the real cost, the human cost in cheap labor and denigrated habitat, in population and transportation and destruction, is immeasurable.

 

If we saw the extent to which we relied on our global community for the goods we bought, if we saw that destruction right in front of us in our neighbors suffering, in our own soil and food rotting from oil mining, we wouldn’t be driven to consume always more more.

 

I’ve gotten good at ignoring the things that drive me insane in the world around me. I’ve told myself to stop being self-righteous, that this is the world and that we do what we can. That it’s enough to recycle and eat organic and local, drink tap water and shop minimally and work for an advertising agency that at least brings sustainable programs to Starbucks and works for Team Earth, Conservation International and Goodwill. But it’s not enough. It’s the opposite of enough. The people I work with drink bottled water day after day, they drink out of paper cups-sometimes three times a day. They go to Vegas as many weekends as they can. I am no better. My old apartment had no compost. I took 13 plane flights last year and I eat industrially produced meat. And perhaps I’m worse because I know better.

 

And yet watching this video, it made me furious to think I live among people who see nothing wrong with Las Vegas; see no connection between the utter waste of water, electricity and materials, which causes suffering and shortages all over the world, just for our sport. It makes me seethe to think they think my concern is a cute habit, a quirky passion for the earth. That they think eating farmed fish is saving wild fish when really farmed fish is half the reason wild Pacific salmon are disappearing, from competition, from catching farmed fish diseases, from having their critical habitats turned to fish farms for sickly, artificially colored fish.

 

There was a comic they put on the board that perfectly illustrated our situation. It was a picture of a small boat sinking on one end in a violent ocean. Two people were trying to bail out the bow of the boat, which low in the water.  Two people were sitting at the top of the boat, which was high in the air as the boat sank and they were smiling, saying to each other “Boy I’m glad I don’t have to bail out the boat!”

 

Anyway, my desire to start a new chapter of my life has been growing very strong since Christmas. The more I’ve been studying orcas and writing about them, the harder it’s been for me to work hard selling casinos, zoos, wine, soymilk even. Shit we don’t need. The symposium reaffirmed that I need to do something to help. I need to be a part of the change, not the person at the top of the boat, not helping bail as we sink.

 

I went down to Santa Cruz with Zack. He makes me laugh more frequently and harder than anyone in my immediate vicinity. We didn’t listen to music, just laughed and talked and ate bagels and cupcakes that he got us for breakfast. Yes that’s right cupcakes for breakfast. Chocolate ones. Santa Cruz looks exactly like the California cliché you see in movies. The boardwalk has huge breaking waves, a beach with volley ball nets and bikinis clad girls and boys in board shorts playing around. Palm trees line the sidewalks and every other shop is a taco joint. We parked far up the beach where gorgeous, funky, brightly colored houses face the surf and people were gathered in the mid morning sun on front porches. It would be such a different life. People carried their surf boards from their porches to the water, others sat on the stony ledge high above the waves. The waves were enormous, breaking against the rocks and spraying into the air. One was so big it came over the ledge and soaked a couple sitting out enjoy the sunny morning. We walked down the steps of a pier to get some sea spray and watch the waves, then went to eat tacos. It was a warm day, almost felt like spring. I could live in Santa Cruz… 

Happy Anniversary San Francisco

Yesterday was the first day of my third year in San Francisco.

Two years in the city and I'm on to my fifth move. I've got to try out all the neighborhoods I suppose.

Here is my current rooftop, taken on my last weekend at the bottom of Nob Hill, during a full moon at around 2 am, with plenty of prosecco in my champagne flute (that I broke later in the night) and my belly. The picture is taken while I'm wearing my bright pink velour suit, sitting on rainy pebbles next to the boy I've liked for a year. It's been pouring rain for weeks. It poured on us while we romped in the ocean, but then the sky cleared and the stars came out right above the sky line. Amazing to see stars and city lights all together.

And here is a picture Robert tagged of me on facebook titled "Right at home playing in the ocean" that no one can see because it's set to "private".

Anyway...feels like lots of big changes for year three in San Francisco, but really they are small changes....I think.

2010

It's been a while and I'm not sure I have an audience any more. But here I am, back in blogger-land in case anyone trips upon it.

2009 was the most peaceful year of my life. It's hard to believe because I live in this big, busy city, I went on a dozen horrendous dates, struggled up and down the corporate ladder, argued with my bosses, walked through bustling China town to work every day, worked crazy hours and went on 13 trips by plane and more by car. But it was. It was the most serene and harmonious year I've ever had. And because of that it was one of the best years I've ever had. 2003 and 2004 were the rivals. With all the madness in my exterior life, I was the calmest and most resilient and most satisfied I've ever been. So that was the theme of the year. This year I need a new theme and a new chapter. I don't expect this year to be quite so peaceful. I'll be 25 and hailing in a quarter century calls for a new chapter in life. I may still be in the city, in advertising by then, but I want to have a plan and I want it to involve writing. I've done the city thing that I so disdained, that I thought I could never do. Same goes for the corporate thing. But I don't need to keep doing it. I'm content and happy, so it's hard to make a change, but it will soon be time.

So the theme of 2010 is productive. Prolific writing. I don't want to be one of those anguished "writers" who doesn't actually write. So I'm going to write and keep writing and not stop..it's 2011 and I can look back and say, NOW I'm a writer, just as I can look back at 2009 and say NOW I'm happy.

Telling

I wrote this months ago but it appears blank on my blog so here it is again...

I went to a strategic planning conference on Friday and Saturday and one of the speakers was from the California chapter of Organizing for America, the organization that campaigned for Obama starting all the way back in 2004, and continues to campaign for his issues. Their lecture or workshop was about the importance of telling your story. They said telling the story of who you are is how you connect to one another, how you show others that you share similar values, and is how Obama connected with the American people. We had to tell a story of our own life, some challenge we faced and how we chose to deal with it and what the outcome was.

This was interesting in light of a recent spiritual book I read that said we have to learn to let go of “my story” and that this idea is a construct of the ego.  It says you are not “your story”, that none of the stories of your life belong to you, nor are they who you are.  When we continue to tell our stories we are building up and acting upon our egoic nature instead of living in the moment and being who we are at that moment. Our stories inevitably pit us as the victim or the hero, so by telling and retelling our stories we are identifying with a construct of how we think we relate to the world.

This resonated with me because I tend to retell the stories in which I am the victim. I had this surgery, I had this friend die,  I had this friend commit suicide, I have this health issue etc etc. And yet, do those stories really have to do with who I am now? I am not a victim in this moment and in this life, so letting go of those stories of self is letting go of my own ego, my own sense of how the world acts upon me etc.

            In The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera says, “While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs…but if they meet when they are older…their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different for each of them.”

            When do we reach that age?  Already, I am weary of dating strangers. I love hearing other people's stories and I love telling my friends stories, as you all know. But I don’t want to tell anyone new anything about me. This is partly why I want to date someone I’ve known my whole life; why I’ve switched form the desire for the exotic unknown stranger that I have yet to meet, to wanting the person whose history is my history; whose family knows mine, who was raised in the same town, with the same ideals, the same basic look at the world. Then there is much getting to knowing of each other, yet it can be of here and now, and can skip over the stories of the past, and how we shape the truths in infinite ways, so that no one truth is really true, but nor is it a lie. Maybe this is narrowminded, I’m not sure.