Last Day of NaNoWriMo 2011

This has been a strange November. After the hugely-social party NaNo’s in 2009 and 2010, this one has seemed solitary and low-key. And frankly, that’s been just what I wanted.

I’ve been doing this since 2006, and it hasn’t become old yet at all. But each year has to be different. Each year has its own special character, and each year’s NaNo is the same. And this year has been about getting back to the basics of why I do this.

It’s not the write-ins, though they’re a great way to meet fun people. It’s not the forums, though they’re amazing, and it’s a comfort to know I’ve got friends on the NaNo boards that will give me a pat or a push as necessary. It’s not the wordcount widgets, or the t-shirts, or the glowsicks, or the coffee, though they make it supremely possible.

No, it’s about one thing at the core:

The story.

And this year has been a celebration of me and the story, our relationship. All the rest is confetti and glitter and icing: lovely, but extra.

I could miss the “event” feeling of the past couple of NaNos this year, or I could celebrate what’s actually in front of me. This year, I’ve poured my love into a story, protected my focus like a candle flame in a storm, and built an intimacy with my words that the previous two years have lacked.

And that’s as much a celebration of what NaNoWriMo is about, as all the bells-and-whistles years.

Rest In Peace, Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,” Jobs said. “Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

-Wired

Obama on Steve Jobs: “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.”

-BBC

“I want to put a ding in the universe.”

-Buzzfeed

Come On, Irene

So we move up to Washington, D.C., and within the first week I’ve had my first earthquake and my fifth hurricane. It seems that every time I try to move anywhere, a hurricane or tropical storm hits. I moved to Richmond in 2004, and Gaston caved in my ceiling with rainwater, while Ivan pounded the hell out of my hometown. Katrina was the big hallmark of my harried move to Europe in 2005, stamping my first days in Paris with grief and worry. And now Irene, the historic storm that’s currently skirting the Mid-Atlantic region, aimed for New York. At least I’ve already got the car unpacked.

There’s something so majestic about hurricanes, though. Their size (graspable only with radar and space shots), their unstoppable strength, their ominous and inexorable creep, all form the impression of a living creature. No wonder we give them names.

The fast-moving bands of deep gray clouds have been rushing over Odenton all morning, and now the rain has begun. It’s a certain kind of rain that folks who have been through tropical weather can recognize–a heavy, spitting, erratic kind of rain, blown-about and chaotic. We’ve finished zip-tying and securing the back deck furniture, and are finishing all the chores that require electricity or water. Now there’s just the waiting. Just us and the storm.

Aside from the obvious wrath of God, D.C. is beautiful and amazing.

Osama bin Laden is dead.

September 11, 2001: I had recently turned 23. That morning, I had a poetry writing class at Pensacola Junior College. Halfway through, I had to leave class and go home because of terrible cramps. And when I woke from my aspirin-induced nap that afternoon, the world had changed.

My mother called me and asked how I was. Ignorant of the political situation, my first thought was to wonder how she knew that I’d had to leave school. Then I learned.

While she told me about the terrible destruction, my eyes rested on two printouts stuck into my bedroom mirror. One was a plane schedule to New York City. The other was a brochure about the World Trade Center. My uncle and I had been planning to stay there in the beginning of November that year, while he gave a conference. And behind my eyes, explosions.

Ten years.

I was never for the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. I was protesting before they were even begun. And I’d be the first to admit that I hold George W. Bush responsible for allowing 9-11 to happen. It served a political purpose—as had been discussed by his associates, prior to the attack. It happened on his watch, and he is to blame.

And yet. I am glad of the news today.

I’m glad we now have a president with the right priorities. Serve justice, no matter how long it takes…then turn aside and move forward.

What’s in My Bag: Hospital Version

There’s no greater perspective check than seeing a loved one laying in a hospital bed.

I was lucky. They were able to fix him. He was able to leave. He’s now sitting in the living room, reading the graphic novel Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, drinking tea.

Life turned me over and dumped me out last week. All the clutter in my heart, baggage I no longer needed to carry, is simply gone. The rest is who I really am. It’s scary, in a way, to realize what you genuinely feel, without the shield of fear surrounding it.

We all seem to secretly dread that the core holds something rotten. Emergency peeled everything away from me, and I was left with the terrible truth—I love him, we’re amazing, we’re one.

This Is What a Good Attitude Looks Like

From the vantage point of February, 2011:

My past looks like an amazing, ambrosial junk shop, piled high with beloved toys and delicious trinkets.

My present looks like a heart-stopping, breathtaking challenge that loves me back.

My future looks like a to-do list that is actually beginning to scroll forward, each action I take adding to a sense of increasing agency.

I’m not trying to feel like this. These aren’t affirmations, but honest depictions of the inside of my brain. After so many years of struggle and hell, something’s finally clicked. Where to go from here?

Lover Of Life

In her blog Whitehot Truth, Danielle Laporte discusses her answers to Eckhart Tolle’s big question: “What is your relationship…to LIFE?”

Most people don’t write about the questions they haven’t answered. Danielle’s no exception, and neither am I. Putting the question to myself, the answer was immediate: I pictured life as a force and myself alongside it, and I knew I was its lover.

Like the topic of sex in general, the lover-of-life relationship is fraught with cliches. It’s as if, in our uneasily-erotic world, we feel relief at the trite phrases and cynical jokes that enable us to mediate sex, to talk around it, without actually delving into it. The same is true with our talk about the ecstasy of life.

Look how often the conversation about joy veers into safe language: bliss, faith, spirit, belief. One of the reasons I avoid self-help and life-coaching is a tendency for that scene to whitewash the goal…to sanitize happiness, to make joy into this wholesome, pristine emotion. It’s downright religious in its studious transcendence.

I want to be life’s lover. It’s my greatest calling. To overcome, to release, to progress—screw that! It’s like saying parts of life are not worth loving, are to be dealt with, disfavored. And if life’s my lover, how can I selectively reject the parts of it that don’t measure up?

I don’t want to overcome anything. I want to drink life in, until it and I are one.

What does it mean to be a lover of life? Does it mean shoving things into yourself—food, drink, experiences? Does it mean doing things to other people—changing their insides, their minds, their behavior? Or are those things pale substitutes or uneasy mediations?

What does it mean to be a lover, of people or life itself? We all know. We just don’t think of ourselves as one of those individuals, the lucky few who are picked up by the Universe, bandied about, and turned out. Truth is, life desires us back. But like a shy admirer, it wants us to declare ourselves first.

It’s not about finding out what the lover supposedly wants, and doing it automatically; to be either martyr or machine allows nothing inside you. And it’s also not about finding out what you want, asking for it, receiving it, and giving thanks. That’s sure to bore both of you after awhile.

To many things are turned into a performance checklist. Or, in rebellion against that, they’re touted as the next arena in which blissful “self-fulfillment” is the yardstick of success. To be life’s lover is to exist in a state of ready receptivity, of attentive action. To hold life, as you’d hold a lover, in the deepest attention. To cradle it, even as it surrounds you. To adore and worship it. Life has so many things begged of it, so much raised to it in supplication. Maybe it just wants to be seen. To be wanted. To be lusted after. To be chased.

I’m the opposite of zen. It’s the opposite of detachment. I wouldn’t have chosen to be born, if I wanted to rise above this world. Instead, I want to sink into it, to let it envelop me. I want to swallow it until it swallows me, dissolves me from the inside. Only then will that radiant violet flame inside me be free to shine.