Tag: Julia Cameron

Artist Date 71: An Ice Cream Kind of Day

LesleyPearl1 Comment
First Stop.
First Stop.

It is 70-something and breezy. The kind of day all of Chicago has been waiting for. The kind that should have me grinning ear to ear. But it doesn’t.

I am walking and I figure if I am out here long enough, I will end up somewhere I’ve never been before – which is the point of the Artist Date, Number 71. New input.

I point my feet towards Andersonville – an old Swedish neighborhood on the north side that became popular some 15-plus years ago, yet somehow still retains a whisper of its original feeling.

I have the overwhelming urge to call someone to meet me for ice cream. Because, it is an ice cream kind of day.

I consider my date from last Saturday. Or the man I ran into Friday night. The one who told me he had been feeling lonely.

I seem hell-bent on getting away from myself. I’m not sure why. I try to observe this but not over think it.

I walk into Pars – the Persian store I have passed so many times – instead.

There are hookahs and flavored tobacco. Stacks of soap made from laurel. Rows and rows of loose tea in jars.

Packages of frankincense and sumac. Pots for making Turkish coffee. Halavah. Mildly gritty. Somewhat sweet. Made from ground sesame seeds, it is an acquired taste. I’m pretty sure only Jews and Arabs eat it.

The store is sort of sad and sparse. I leave after 20 minutes of so, no more filled than when I arrived.

I land at Roost. Overpriced, salvaged items line the sidewalk out front.  The kind one gets for a song at estate sales in the country, out-of-the way places where those left behind have little to no idea of the value of what they hold.

Inside are candles with man-ish names and smells like “tobacco and oak.” There are mugs with the Lipton Cup-a-Soup logo on them. Cardboard produce boxes that read, “Glass Grown Brand Greenhouse Tomatoes” and “Michigan Zucchini.”

Stop Two. Typewriter at Roost, the one that connected me back to people, and to myself.
Stop Two. Typewriter at Roost, the one that connected me back to people, and to myself.

A vintage typewriter.

Two older men giggle. “Where is the screen?”

I tell them I learned to write on an IBM Selectric in journalism school. One recalls saving his birthday money to buy his first typewriter – because his handwriting was so terrible. The other received his as a high-school graduation gift.

We press the keys. They are clunky and heavy. I show them my tattoos, “write” and “left,” in typewriter font. The “f” and “i” raised for effect.

I feel a smile curl on my lips and realize I no longer have a desire to call a boy and get ice cream.  At least right now. Even though it is still an ice cream kind of day.

Walking towards home, I cut down Balmoral – a street I never walk down. I am summoned by Greensky.

I hear the shopkeeper mention to customers that most everything is sourced from “Up North” – a term only Michiganders understand – referring to the northwest part of the Lower Peninsula.

I spent my childhood summers Up North. It is a magical place. When I returned to it some 30 years later, I found it was just as I had remembered.

I finger through the Positively Green cards and buy two to send to myself. One is yellow with sunflowers. It reads “Some people are so much sunshine to the square inch. – Walt Whitman.” The other, “As no love is the same, no loss is. – Alla Renee Bozarth.”

Stop Three. Where I found compassion for myself.
Stop Three. Where I found compassion for myself.

I think about the man who walked out of my life without a word exactly one month ago. My friends pointed out all the red flags, but I still don’t really see them. All I know is he touched my heart deeply. And that I am still sad.

I think about what I will write. What I tell myself. What I will tell the child that resides inside of me, the one who once said out loud, “I thought he loved us.”

I respond to her with compassion I can never muster for myself.

“He did love us. As best as he knew how.”

She is filter-less, honest and wise.  A little bit younger than I those summers Up North.

I will tell her I am sorry she is hurting. That time takes time.  That I love her.  Then I will address it, stamp it, and pop it in the mailbox.

I know I will feel differently one day. I just don’t yet. Like I know that today is still an ice cream kind of day.

Universal truths.

And later I will have some. Brown butter and salted peanut. I will eat it with a boy, my friend. And together we will share our lonely.

Artist Date 70: I Am Not Thinking

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The Grand Budapest Hotel
Photo: The Grand Budapest Hotel

I have just finished a blog about my friend Clover and the birth of her daughter, Juniper Maya.  She was born nearly 10 days ago, but only now am I at a point where I am able to give words to the experience and my role in it.

I’d been noodling on it for a couple of days and now it is done. I print it out. Set a timer. And read out loud.

Doors open for Story Club in a little more than an hour.  I’ve already penciled it in my book – Artist Date 70.

Story Club meets the first Thursday of the month at the Holiday Club – a bar on the north side of Chicago. Three featured writers read essays on a theme. And three audience members, called at random from a sign-up sheet, read their musings for up to eight minutes.

I’ve been called up just once before, a couple of months ago. My gut tells me I will make it onstage tonight…if I can get there.

My piece is too long. I cross out some sections and set the timer again. Still too long. Then I try again, just reading a portion of it. Up to the words, “The miracle emerges.” This could work.

And I hear it. “Slow the fuck down.” I don’t want to. But I do anyway.

I call Clover to tell her the blog is finished and to ask if she would like to read it before I hit “publish.” She says she would.

I do not usually do this. However, this is not just my story. It is her story too.

I have not given her a clever moniker like the Southern Svengali or Mr. 700 Miles. She is not anonymous. And so I offer my words to her first.

I mention I am on my way to Story Club and ask if she would prefer that I use her initials, as opposed to her real name, as she has not yet read the piece. She says “yes” again.

And it hits me – how much gyrating I am doing to “make this happen.”

To get out the door.   To get on stage. It feels like a push. An awful lot like “my will.” “If this, then that.”

grand budapest hotelI recognize that the words are still fresh to me. That, in some ways, I have just re-lived the birth. That I feel tired and vulnerable, and the idea of sitting in a bar, by myself, in hopes of reading onstage feels neither joyous nor fun. It feels like me trying to make good on my word – as if to make up for all the times when my word meant nothing.

I realize I have nothing to prove, and I give myself a pass.

I put down my papers. I pull on my coat, walk a handful of blocks to the Davis Theatre and purchase a ticket for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I know nothing about this movie other than my friend Matt invited me to see it with him a few weeks ago. I declined, taking myself to the Art Institute for Artist Date 68 instead.

The theater is about a quarter full. I take comfort in seeing the number of people here alone – even though alone is my preferred way to watch movies.

The previews are dreadful. Even the one with Johnny Depp – who I love.

And especially the one for Transformers. Although it makes me giggle a little as I have a date this weekend with a man 12 years my junior, and he recently posted something about the movie on his Facebook page.

But the featured film is a story for storytellers, told by a storyteller. I am enchanted.

By the glory of the Grand Budapest Hotel in its heyday. And by the quirky outpost for eccentrics that it has become.

By the concierge, at once both straight and gay, tending to the elder, insecure, wealthy – and always blonde – female patrons.

trailer-for-wes-andersons-the-grand-budapest-hotel-4
Photo: The Grand Budapest Hotel

By the refugee hotel boy with a penciled-on moustache. By the love affair between him and the girl who decorates pastry and wears braids – whose birthmark covers half of her face.

It is eye candy. Swaths of bright orange and purple. Handsome stars in less-than-handsome roles. Ralph Fiennes. Adrien Brody. Jeff Goldblum.

I am grinning. I am not thinking about what I will write. Even though I am always thinking about what I will write. The world around me a blog waiting to happen.

I am not thinking that this is a story about family. About status. About love.

About corruption. Courage. Change.

I am not thinking about my own experiences – of family, status, and love. Courage and change.

I am caught up in someone else’s story. I am not thinking. It is a joy.

Artist Date 69: Spicy. Trouble.

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It smells warm inside Savory Spice Shop on Lincoln Avenue. Artist Date 69. And while I know intellectually that warm is not a smell, it feels like it. Spicy. BBQ rubs. One is called Pearl Street Plank. I take a photograph of it.

I am afraid I am going to get into trouble.

I am often afraid of getting into trouble. Like the time Julie and I smoked cigarettes inside the multiplex at a midnight showing of The Crying Game.

The movie had been out for a while and we were the only ones in the theatre. Julie lit up. I was aghast. “What? Are you afraid we are going to get into trouble?” she asked. A little bit mocking. Well, yes…I was. Just like when we smoked cigarettes in seventh grade on Shabbat.

Julie was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. On Saturdays, my mother would drop me there for the day. Sometimes we watched movies on the Betamax (Meatballs was our favorite.) – her father’s concession.

Irv was a wise man who understood that raising his girls in an observant home, but not in an observant neighborhood, was tricky. Their customs were “other” than those of the secular Jews surrounding them. So while Julie could not go to movies and dances on Friday night and Saturday, she was allowed to watch movies, regardless of the prohibition against using electronics on the Sabbath. And also to go for long walks. Walks that often involved McDonalds’ French fries and Virginia Slims Menthol 100s.

Julie was brazen. I was convinced we were going to get caught and get into trouble. We didn’t. But that sense that I might have to explain myself has never entirely left me. Even today at the Savory Spice Shop.

I know some stores prohibit photography. I know I could ask if it is ok. But I don’t. Instead I snap and hope no one will question me. It is this sort of internal gyration that causes me anxiety. The kind I could easily avoid.

2014-03-23 14.14.42An employee says to let her know if I have any questions, and invites me to sample and to brush any excess onto the floor. She adds that my boots are “magnificent,” and we talk for a solid five minutes about the quest to merge fashion and function. I am reminded, part of the joy of a funky aesthetic is people want to talk to you. Want to talk to me.

She makes no comment about my photography.

I finger baking spices and books on pickling. But the spices from far away call me like a siren. Exotic. Other. Like I always wanted to be. I try to conjure up the smells of the market in Kigali, in Argles, in Jerusalem, but I cannot. I only know I was there.

I smell red peppercorns from the Szechuan Province. Green ones from Mysore. Dried Kaffir Lime Leaves. Asafetida from Iran, also known as Devil’s Dung and Stinking Gum. The label says it smells like garlic gone bad. To me, it smells like sulfur. Eggs.

There are Grains of Paradise from West Africa and Pinchito from Southern Spain. Preserved Lemon and Pomegranate Molasses. Marrakech Moroccan Spice and Berbere Ethiopian Seasoning.

2014-03-23 14.19.28I think about cooking and wonder what I would make. My repertoire has become small as a single woman. Often times, it just doesn’t seem worth it. So I stick to egg-white omelets, soups and salads. Black beans, kale and squash. An occasional piece of fish roasted with fennel and oranges and olives.

I think about travel. The recent loud and incessant call to go away – somewhere big. Somewhere sexy. Sometime this year – my 45th come October. Italy or India.

Today I do not have to decide.

Instead, I allow myself the pleasure of revisiting Africa. Spain. And France.

Israel. Germany. Amsterdam.

Ireland and Mexico.

To return to each marketplace I visited – photographing beans drying in the sun. Salted fish. Unskinned rabbit hanging from a hook.

To the suburban movie theatre and the safety of Julie’s home. To her basement where her papa fed us Oreo cookies with a finger pressed to his lips as if to say, “shh…don’t tell.”

I think about the real trouble I caused in my travels.  The kind I should have been worried about but wasn’t. In Berlin.  Avignon.  Puerto Vallarta.  Today I know better.

Today there are no secrets. Nothing to hide. Nothing to get me into trouble.

Artist Date 68: Power Cords

LesleyPearl2 Comments

I have given my power away.

Valley, by Nilima Sheikh
Valley, by Nilima Sheikh

I feel vulnerable.  Ashamed.  I am “that woman,” wringing her hands about “that man.”

Disgusting.

I gave my power away when I said, “I can’t do this.”  Telling him I needed more.  And that he didn’t seem capable of giving it to me.  And did it anyway, becoming more and more deeply entwined in our long-distance intimacy.

I did it when I told him I could not Skype with him.  That it was too hard to look into his green eyes.  To see him look back at me in a way I can’t ever recall being seen.  And did it anyway.

I did it when I promised myself I wouldn’t reach out to him for 30 days.  Not as a game or a test.  But to find out how he shows up.  And reached out anyway.

I did it every time he mentioned bad timing, money or miles between us, and chose not to listen.  Only paying attention to the part where he changed his mind, usually about 10 minutes later, saying he did want to “find out about us.”

I made the rules and I couldn’t keep them.  Just like when I used to drink.  And it left me feeling the exact same way – anxious, obsess-y, over-thinking.  Knowing in my heart that something isn’t right, and trying to make it work anyway.  Somehow believing “this time will be different.”  Powerless.

***************

I am standing in my bedroom in front of a batik wall hanging of Ganesh — Hindu boy with an elephant head, Remover of Obstacles – like I do every morning.

I kick my meditation cushion to the side, put my hands in prayer, in front of my third eye, and inhale deeply.

“Lord Ganesh, give me back my power.”

I feel a surge through my body, a response, and am flooded with words of direction.

Ganesh batik in my bedroom.
Ganesh batik in my bedroom.

Carry Ganesh with you.  Visit India.  See Nilima Sheikh’s “Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams” at the Art Institute.  Artist Date 68.

***************

It is the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day.  The train headed downtown is filled with drunk twenty-somethings in oversized green, foam hats, green socks and beads.  I put on my sunglasses and turn up Nina Simone and try to forget that he did not show up last night.

That he has not responded to my text.

That I am the one with the problem.

I get off several stops earlier than necessary and walk.  It is cool and sunny and I feel happy in my grey wool coat, knit hat and red ankle boots.  I make note of the galleries on Superior Street.  Future Artist Dates.  I feel my power growing.

***************

I step inside the Special Exhibit Gallery.  It is quiet.  Still behind glass doors.  I stand in front of a painted scroll titled “Valley.”  The canvas is green.  Lush and gentle.  A verdant map.  I begin to cry.

“That really affected you, huh?”

It is the museum guard –a woman named Denise.  She wears long braids gathered together.  I nod.  She says a few more things but I cannot take them in.  I am lost.  I politely tell her I need to be alone in my quiet.  She nods.  I feel my power growing.

I approach the canvas, “Farewell.”  Red, with two entwined figures – one holding open his robe, displaying a map of Kashmir where his heart should be.

Farewell, by Nilima Sheikh
Farewell, by Nilima Sheikh

“If only somehow you could have been mine.  What would not have been possible in the world?”  The words stenciled in gold at the top of the canvas.  “We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,” on the back.

I feel like I have been punched in the gut.

The tears return.  I am breathless.

I return to “Valley.”  “…And though the guards searched for him with the sun in one hand and the moon in the other the demon baffled them.”  Stenciled on the back.

He sought me.  I am baffled, wondering where he is now.  But knowing I must continue to seek myself.  I feel my power growing.

***************

I share a bench and a cup of tea with a couple in the member’s lounge.  We talk about shoes.  About art.  About recovery and vibrators and relationships.  They tell me I need a man who is here.  I know they are right.  I feel my power growing.

***************

In some ways I feel like I have been waiting all of my life for this man.  And I am “Dying Dreaming.” (The words, like all those in quotes, names of Sheikh’s canvases.)

But I also know that his life is still a “Construction Site,” while I am “Gathering Threads” — stringing together the people, places and pleasures that bring me joy, that make me whole.  Power cords.

Artist Date 66: Risk It. Sell It. Consider It.

LesleyPearl9 Comments

I recently entered a Weight Watchers-sponsored contest called, “You Only Live Once,” where I described a bucket-list dream, one that is possible only now that I am a healthy weight.

I had two.  One, to dance in Senegal with my instructor Idy Ciss.  The other, to dance Alvin Ailey Workshop classes in New York.

Before Class. "I am here!"
Before Class. “I am here!”

I didn’t win.  But clearly the universe heard my desire as I am about to walk into a 90-minute Master Class with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater – Artist Date 66.

I feel a little bit like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.  A self-identified outsider taking another step inside the sometimes seemingly-closed world of dance.

I notice the opportunity a few weeks ago while purchasing tickets for the Ailey shows.  The class lists as intermediate, and I hope my six years of West African instruction will qualify me.

Three days before the workshop I get a call from the Auditorium Theatre requesting payment.  I am in.

I am over the moon.

And now, standing at the studio doorway, I feel I should be more nervous than I am.  But as I told my dear friend the night before, “The worst that happens is they say, ‘You suck.  Please sit down.’ ”

I can live with that.

Inside I meet Kristen.  She recognizes me from the Ailey shows earlier in the week – seeing me pin a slip of paper to a board in the lobby reading, “How Does Alvin Ailey inspire you?”

“To Dance.  No matter how badly.”  I scrawl.

Today I will get my opportunity.

There are about a dozen of us here.  I am the oldest by at least 15 years.   Surprisingly, this lends me a sense of calm and confidence, which I do not question.

We are joined by company member, Antonio Douthit-Boyd.  He appears to be wearing slippers on his feet – quilted booties.  I wonder where he is coming from as it is snowing outside.

He moves quickly through the warm up.  Much more quickly than I am used to.  I breathe and do what I can.  So far so good.

He moves across the floor, making adjustments to each dancer’s movements and posture.  “Widen your legs.  Go lower now.  Keep your balance.  See.”  “Jut your hip first.  Muuuch more movement.  Excellent.”

He comes to me.  I do not avert my eyes, hoping he will not notice me, in case I am doing it wrong.  I smile at him.

“Beautiful flat back,” he says, touching the space between my wings.  I lower into the squat – legs wide, and come up on to my toes.  Antonio meets my outstretched arms with his own, our fingertips touching.   My legs are shaking.  I struggle to balance.  “Good,” he says.

Before class begins.
Before class. One of the “significantly more trained” dancers.

The other dancers have had significantly more training than I.  It is clear.  Ballet.  Jazz.  Modern.  They nod knowingly to the terms Antonio throws out.  And more importantly, they can execute them.  I am in over my head.  Kind of.  But I just keep moving.  Smiling.  Trying to mimic the other dancers.

I notice that I am not frustrated.  I am not angry.  I do not stop.

I do not ask Antonio to slow down and bring the class to my level.  I do not burst into tears.

I have done all of these things previously.

I am not jealous or envious.  I notice the beauty of the dancers.  Their bodies.  What they can do.

I am amazed by my response.

I am equally amazed that I occasionally “nail it.”

Moving across the floor – a quick, leg-cross-over-leg, jazz step.  Hips wagging.  I think of Harry Detry, another of my teachers at the Old Town School, calling out over the drums, “Shake your babaloo!”  “Sell it!”

I am “selling it.”  And I know it.  Antonio does too, clapping, “Yes! Yes!  That’s it.”

But the final movement has me stymied.  Leap, cross over, lift the other leg, turn, lift the other leg, jump.  Or something like that.

I am not even close.

No one cares.  No one is watching me.   They are watching themselves.  I am free.

And in that freedom, I see the pattern that will keep my body in constant motion.  Give me my momentum.  Right leg back, left leg back, right leg back, left leg back.

After class. All smiles, with Antonio Douthit-Boyd.
After class. All smiles, with Antonio Douthit-Boyd.

“Yes, better.”

It is.  But I still don’t have it.

A couple more times across the floor and I might.  But it doesn’t matter.  I risked being “the worst.”  And by all accounts, I was.  But I don’t feel like it.  Not even close.  Just less trained.

Pulling on my jeans, my body feels different.  My pelvis is open.  Open – I could drop a baby out of me with a single squat – open.  I like it.

It is the ballet, I am certain of it.  The one type of dance I never consider.

I do not have a ballet body, I tell myself.  I don’t even know what that is.  It is an excuse.

And I am out of excuses.

I consider it.

Artist Date 65: A Revelation

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I just “shhh…d” the women next to me.

I feel like somebody’s cranky grandmother, but I can’t help myself.

From Revelations. Photo: Paul Kolnik
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. From Revelations. Photo: Paul Kolnik

This is my religion.  The dancers and choreographers, my gods.  And it requires my complete attention.

It feels like blasphemy as I type the words, but it is true.  The stirring between my legs.  It rises up my spine like Kundalini energy uncoiling, to my heart – which leaps, and spreads as a flush across my chest and face.  What is usually reserved for sexual liaison – either alone or with a partner – comes to me in dance.  Really good dance.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is really good dance.

This is my seventh time seeing the company, which may sound like a lot –until compared to Sheila, who I met during the pre-performance cocktail reception.  She and her husband have seen Ailey every year since the company’s inception in 1958.  It is, perhaps, their religion too.

The first time I saw Ailey I was 24.  I watched, rapt.  My former lover — the sexiest man I had ever known – at my side.  We spent a month together.  Twenty-nine days more than I expected.  This was our only “real date.”

The second time I saw Ailey I was in the middle of an alcoholic relapse, although I didn’t know it at the time.  Following yet another month-long stint without drinking, an effort to prove myself “not alcoholic,” I conveniently forgot all the reasons I had put down the drink and picked it up again that night.

I saw the company three more times.  Each of them sober.  In Chicago.  Once, with my then-husband, the other two with girlfriends.

This is my first time seeing Ailey alone – Artist Date 65.

It feels significant.

Significant because I have treated myself to good seats.  Dress Circle.  Row AA.

I have learned I cannot watch dance from the cheap seats – looking down on it from up above.  I have to see it straight on.  As I do most things.

I’ve admittedly been spoiled.  Much like the first time I flew overseas, when the German Consulate paid for my Business Class ticket on Lufthansa.  It is hard to go back.

It is the same with men.

With my dance instructor, Idy.
With my dance instructor, Idy.

Significant because there is a cocktail reception before the show and I don’t drink, have a wing man, or a purpose for mingling other than “just because.”

Ever fiber in my body says arrive late, skip the schmooze and head straight for my seat.  But I resist.  I have been taught courage is not a lack of fear.  It is feeling it and moving forward anyway.  I am strangely curious to see what will happen.

I meet a gaggle of girls in their 30s.  They have never seen Ailey.

We talk about their work.  City politics.  Chicago neighborhoods.

We talk about my Artist Date.  My blog.   Boys.

I meet the “since-1958 Ailey fans,” and their daughter – a dancer.

I navigate the plush stairs and the too-small type on my ticket on my way to my seat.  My dance instructor calls out my name.  We embrace and all at once, Chicago feels like a town.  My sense of connectedness expands.

The theatre darkens.  The dancers emerge.

“Night Creature.”  From 1974.  I have seen it before.  Like “Revelations,” Ailey’s signature piece that closes every show.   I remember the polka-dot light patterns on the floor.

It is both familiar and fresh.  I feel the leap in my heart.  And a knot in my stomach.

The women to my left are whispering – non-stop.

I pray for patience.  For tolerance.  I pray they will stop.  Useless.  I turn and put my finger to my lips.  “Shhh.”  It is quiet.

At intermission, I feel a hand on my shoulder.  It is one of the women I “shhh-d.”  She offers apologies, which I quickly and easily accept.

Two Dancers -- Khara and I.
Two Dancers — Khara and I.

“Do you dance?” she asks.

I tell her I do.  She says that she used to, and everything melts between us.  We are connected.  We are the same.

Until she tells me about her dance history.

Although not a dance major, she danced seven days a week as an undergraduate student at Washington University, filling her free hours with courses in ballet, modern, and jazz.  I reflect on my four years at Michigan State University – smoking pot and drinking with the big boys.

I do not feel like a dancer.

My five-plus years in West African dance classes – beginning at the age of 39 – feel small in comparison.  Amateurish.  Perhaps they are.

I ask her to take a picture with me for my blog.  “Two dancers,” she announces, as if reading my mind.

I choose to believe her.  To allow my status to be independent of her experience.  Of Sheila’s.

It is a “Revelation.”

Artist Date 64: Not Too Much

LesleyPearl4 Comments

I do not do yoga.

As a massage therapist, I know it is kind of part of the gig.  But I can’t.

chakrasystem_282_It freaks me out.  Holding poses for an extended period makes me panic.  Whether I am in a big anonymous class or in a tiny studio with just three other students and the most gentle instructor imaginable, it is always the same.  Open heart.  Teary eyes.  And a small voice crying out in the silence, “Are we done yet?  Are we done yet?”  I ignore her and…panic.  More tears.

People tell me this is good.  That it means I should do more yoga.  That I am working something out.  I ignore them and make a mental note never to discuss this topic.

Until now.  In a yoga studio.  Artist Date 64.

My friend, and clairvoyant genius, Debbie Taitel, is conducting a post-Valentine’s exploration of the 4th Chakra, the energy center of the heart.

I think I am safe because it is a meditation workshop and not yoga.  And I meditate.  I have for 12 years.

But I am wrong.  The panic is there almost immediately.  Stifling.

Debbie first mentioned the workshop to me a couple of weeks ago, during one of our clairvoyant sessions.  As I watched my heart tentatively open to hope and the possibility of love for the first time in what seemed like a very long time – for an almost bachelor, a man from my childhood, living nearly 700 miles away. (Artist Date 62)

Last week I told him I “couldn’t do it.”  (Artist Date 63) Whatever “it” was.  Seemingly falling head over heels over head for one another.  He asked how realistic it was.  I didn’t care.  I wanted to find out about us.  He said he did too.  But when I sensed his wavering, come-here-go-away, and when the excitement in my stomach turned into a knot, I said “no.”  And we somewhat sadly settled on friendship.  At least for now.

I thought that with this grand gesture of self-love and adult decision-making, my feelings would go away.  I was mistaken.

He has been dancing in my head for a good portion of the day and I am surprised.

So it is a relief when Debbie asks us to invite anyone “grounding” through us to please leave for the duration of the workshop.  I ask, but he remains.  Or I keep him near.  I am not certain.  It is the pink elephant in the room I have been told to pay no attention to.

I am embarrassed.  Ashamed.  I assume the shift is easy for him.  But I do not know this.

I am consumed by the thought that I do not want to write about this.  Especially as he regularly reads my blog.  I feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.  I want to run.  Just like in yoga.

Debbie asks us to ground ourselves and I see a climber’s rope shoot out from my 1st Chakra into the earth, its metal claws digging into clay and dirt.  Debbie saw me do this once before – during one of our sessions.  She found it clever.  A good way to shake off the too many grounding through me.

But today it feels unstable.  I want an oak tree growing out of my ass, downward into the earth.   But this is what I have.

(c) 2004. Andrew Hall, PortlandBridges.com
(c) 2004. Andrew Hall, PortlandBridges.com

She asks us to create roses in our mind.  To fill them with past hurts.  Unrequited loves.  Loves we either did not or could not return.  And to destroy them.

I see the International Rose Test Garden in Portland.  My ex and I visited here one winter when he was interviewing for jobs.  The bushes are clipped.  Dead.

My eyes get teary and my nose flares.  I feel like I am on the verge of big, heaving sobs.  I see my ex husband.  My mother.  My father.  The first boy I took my clothes off with.

I see my first real boyfriend.  And J – perhaps the love of my life, me with a dick.  Mr. 700 Miles.

I feel Debbie lay a box of tissues on my thigh.  I am afraid to move.  That I will come totally unglued if I do and land on the floor, a throbbing puddle.  I feel white energy leave through my heart and it is over.

I destroy the rose, stripping it naked, petal by petal, while those around me engage in more violent scenarios – skeet shooting or blowing them up.

In the final meditation, safely shrouded in golden light, I loop my own energy over and over through my 4th Chakra, my heart.  I feel nauseated.  A wave slams into my gut and through me.  If I were standing it would knock me over.

Debbie smiles.  This is the energy I put into the universe, she explains.  The kind that makes people “run for the hills.”  I nod, as do most of those around me.  It is the love energy, meant for me, mistakenly turned out and overwhelming others.

I think about the old idea I still carry around sometimes, that I am “too much.”   It is quickly displaced by the realization that I no longer feel like running.  Not from here.  This place or this pose.

Not from this love.  Not from myself.

Not too much.

Artist Date 63: True Blue

LesleyPearl4 Comments
2014-02-21 15.24.31
TRBL by Christopher Wool

TRBL.

Christopher Wool’s iconographic piece.  The words stenciled in red enamel.   TR.  Drop a line.  BL.

Trouble.  Yes.

“Or True Blue,” he offers from the stage at the Art Institute of Chicago.  Artist Date 63.

Yes.  And that is trouble too.

I have decided to do something I’ve done just once in my life.  Leave first.

The one other time I did this, the relationship had turned abusive.  I felt I had no choice.

I always have a choice, I am reminded.

There is no abuse here.  Not even a relationship really.  Not yet.  An exploration.  A friendship ripe with feelings and confessed crazy attraction for one another.  And 700 miles between us.

He once commented it was 400 miles between us and I didn’t correct him.  When he later said 700, I knew he had looked it up.  “You’ve been thinking about this (visiting),” I said.  “I haven’t stopped thinking about it,” he replied.  We were on Skype.  I saw myself bat my eyelashes coquettishly like a shy giraffe, without even thinking.

But 700 miles aren’t really the problem.  It’s the every thing else.  We are in decidedly different places in our lives.  I am in the clearing, coming out of the forest.  He is, appropriately so, tied up in the weeds.  Almost available.  Like the tables I would hover over at the bar in college, waiting to settle into.  Almost.

Lately, there is more time between our communications.  I find myself in knots.  Wide open.  Vulnerable.  Uncertain of where I stand.

I wonder when I will talk to him.  What is going on in his head.  In his life.  I don’t like it.  I don’t like how I feel.  This poor use of precious psychic energy.

2014-02-21 15.20.40
SEX. LUV by Christopher Wool

I woke up Friday morning.  As my knees hit the floor, I began crying.  “I can’t do this,” I said, to no one in particular.  “I need more.”  Tears.  Shock.  Relief.

In the past, I would wedge my way into “almost available” anyway – finding an opening in a man’s attraction and desire for me.  But untrue to myself and to him.  Acting breezy, when I felt anything but.  And soon pissed off when I didn’t get what I really needed.  And lying to myself and to him about needing it at all.

This time feels different.  I like him too much to ask that of him.  I like me too much to ask it of myself.

All of this is running through my head, as I sit in a somewhat broken chair, listening to Wool speak.  Everything he says reminds me of this relationship.  My heart.  What I have to do.  Am afraid to do.  Am afraid I won’t get the chance to do because I will either lose my nerve or he will somehow slip away without me having had the chance to speak my truth.

TRBL.  Trouble.  True Blue.  Wool says art is most successful when it does what it says.

Does he do what he says?  Do I?

I think about my vision board hanging from a wire on the wall in my apartment.  Mr. 700 Miles asked about it the last time we Skyped.  I brought the computer to it, showing him the words and images I’d torn from magazines on impulse and pasted on a large piece of cardboard.  “Power of the Pen.”  “Happiness is not for Sale.”  “Effortlessly Simple.”

“In Full Bloom.”  “Yourself.”  ““Make love.”

2014-01-01 21.34.47“Find your true blue.”  The words are small compared to all the others.  In typewriter font like my tattoos that read, “left” and “write” and overlaid on a couple standing nose to nose.  I pointed to the picture and the words and he just smiled.

More slides.  SEX. LUV.  He Said, She Said.

Wool talks about process.  Creating images through loss.  Drawing and erasing.  Drawing and erasing.  And sometimes even scraping.  The tearing away became “the most interesting part.”

But he insists process isn’t that important.  That the work should stand on its own.

It all seems a metaphor for my romantic life.  My willingness to tear away from this man romantically to see what the universe has in store for me.  For the first time – perhaps ever – truly believing I deserve more.

I wander through the exhibit after the lecture.  FO.  Drop line.  OL.  I laugh out loud.  Yes.  FOOL.  TRBL.  SEX.  LUV.  I am all of it.

Post Script: Later that day, I did say the words I first uttered on my knees, “I can’t do this.  I need more.”  To him.  I felt sad and strong and sad again.  But ultimately, I felt LUV.  For him.  For myself.  True Blue.

Artist Date 62: Standing On…? Wondering Where I Am.

LesleyPearl10 Comments
"Love is Pain." Artist, Judith Hladik-Voss.
“Love is Pain.” Artist, Judith Hladik-Voss.

Love is pain.

That is what the quilt says.  Right in the center on a big red heart.  All around it are stages, stops – like on a game board.  Candy Land or Risk.  Yeah, Risk.

Love.  Joy.  Desire.

Trust.  Faith.  Intimacy.

Jealousy.  Anger.  Betrayal.

Heartbreak.  Wound.

Anxiety.  Disillusion.  Despair.

Loss.  Grief.

It is Valentine’s Day.  I am at the Greenleaf Art Center for the exhibit – Be Mine.  I am meeting my girlfriends here, but they are stuck in traffic.  So I am alone.  Impromptu Artist Date 62.  My second this week.

I step back and look at the quilt that greets me as I walk in the door, wondering where I am on it.

Joy.  Desire.

I met a man.  Or perhaps I should say, re-met.  We knew each other once upon a time.  Kind of.   We are getting to know one another – not quite again – but now, for the very first time.

He is smart and funny, creative, sensitive and sexy.  I’m pretty sure he feels the same way about me.  We can talk for hours about anything and everything.  We laugh a lot.  And I find myself smiling a lot.  Friends have noticed this.

There are about a thousand reasons why this will likely not work out and I will land on the square marked Heartbreak.  I occasionally visit Anxiety already.  I hate uncertainty.  But I can’t not see this through.  I want to find out about us.

Trust.  Faith.  I am trying to practice both in my life.  Not so much with him, but with the universe, my higher power.  Intimacy.  Yes.  We are building that — slowly.  He lives several states away, so we are forced to go at this pace.  Although the recent addition of Skype dates – we have one tonight – have added a heat to the flame.

I have not told him every single thing about me – emotionally vomiting, as if to say, “So can you handle that?”  And, obviously, I have not slept with him.  I haven’t led with my sexuality – my one-time calling card – either.  Refraining from saying things like, “I think about you bending me over the butcher block and hiking up my dress around my waist.”  I think them instead.

"Ungentlemanly Behavior." Artist, Cathi Schwalbe.
“Ungentlemanly Behavior.” Artist, Cathi Schwalbe.

Loss.  Grief.  I still find myself here sometimes too.  Not as deeply entrenched as I once was.  I am no longer up to my knees in it.  I am standing in the sun, my feet wet, in a puddle left from the storm.

Post-divorce, grieving the loss of the fantasy, that that one person will be there no matter what.  Always.  That this love will quiet that part of me that silently screams “Don’t leave me.”  It is a lie.

Day one of my life on the planet.  Separated from my mother.  I do not recall a second of it.  Yet I know a part of my work here is to heal it.

I watch it get kicked up and manifest in unconscious, desperate attempts for control and certainty.  As if that will heal me.  But it doesn’t.  Neither did a husband.  Nor meeting my biological parents.  The work is mine alone.

I move on to a series of men’s shirt collars embroidered with real messages from the artist’s experiences with online dating.  “What kind of underwear girl are u?”  “Every young man want to get laid by a gray hair lady.” “You want a naughty pic?”  It reminds me I have not finished my Match.com profile.  And that I probably won’t.

There are maps covered with pins and handwritten notes.  Heart-shaped boxes filled with broken glass and newspaper clippings. A video of a woman covered in striped fabric dancing with a bee.

I return for a third time to a piece titled, “Love Letter.”  It is long and tall, like a body.  With hair at the top, words winding down the center, like buttons, and rocks circling the bottom.  The artist, Sherry Antonini writes, “Love Letter is a meditation on listening inward and noticing outward; on persistence and on beginning again with what is left over.”

I read the poem running down her torso again.  It is still too much to take in.  So I photograph it – in pieces.

“Keep time.  But throw away most other things, including reasons to worry…Watch for signs, however small.  Push through with ideas, envisioning them as even bigger than you think they deserve to be.  Do this until you can once again see yourself shine…

"Love Letter." Artist, Sherry Antonini.
“Love Letter.” Artist, Sherry Antonini.

“Make a list of the things you hold at core.  Those essences nearly forgotten, cast aside for too long…Months or years it is that you have been bound tight and stilled, silenced in some darkness.  But the beauty of light is insistent…

“First, you fill up a room, then you empty it, one piece at a time and all in its right time.  No one can tell you not to.  Or that you can’t.  That you never will.  Or won’t ever again.

“When you rotate the stones point them in line with your heart’s desire, you put your hands once again on your own gleam of power and touch possibility.”

I head toward the front door as my friends are entering.  Unplanned.  Serendipity.  I meet them, filled, spilling over.  Love.  Joy.  And later, this man who makes me smile big, on Skype.  He notices my grin and tells me he likes it.  I read him the poem, still trying to sort my way through it.  Intimacy.  Faith.  Desire.

Artist Date 60: It’s In The Genes

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The first thing my birth father told me was that we attended the same university.  The second thing was that he wouldn’t have gone there if timing were different.

It was the late 1960s.  The United States was fighting in Vietnam.  School kept him out of the draft.

Given his druthers he would have gone to New York to be a dancer.

I gasped.  My secret-private-fantasy-if-I-could-do-it-all-over career was to be a choreographer.

“It’s in the genes,” he said.

I am walking down Lincoln Avenue to the Old Town School of Music for First Friday – a monthly event of music, dance and community.  Tonight’s feature is a series of dance performances by students and instructors – tap, modern, Go-Go, Bhangra.  Artist Date 60.

I dance here every Sunday at noon.  Josh, Don and a couple of musicians whose names I can’t recall drum us through Idy Ciss’ nearly 90-minute West African class.  My church.  My masochistic joy.

I have been a consistent presence here for more than five years, and yet, I am nervous tonight.  Sixty solo dates consciously chosen, and, at times, I still feel conspicuously alone.

This is one of those times – coupled with self-conscious questioning if I’ve earned my seat at the table, or, on the waxed wood floor, as it were.  If I really am a dancer.  My musings seem self-absorbed and displaced as I am not performing today, only watching.  And yet, something is stirred in me.

My first dance performance.
My first dance performance.

A boy and a girl, about 9 or so, tap their way across the stage.  They are dressed to match in grey trousers and lavender shirts.  The boy is skinny and awkward and sweet.  One day he will know how to swing a woman around the floor, showing her who’s boss.  Quite possibly the sexiest gesture ever.  But not yet.

A group of tween girls perform a Bollywood dance, waving colored scarves.  The tiniest one slides into the splits.  Like when I was a cheerleader – too small to be on the bottom of the mount, too big to be on the top.  Kind of.  She is completely present and at ease in her body.  Each move seems effortless.  I am certain I neither looked nor felt that way.

I think about my single year of ballet lessons, taken in first grade with Mrs. Gantz, Who Likes To Dance.  That is what she called herself.  I don’t know why I didn’t continue.  Perhaps I didn’t like it.  It wasn’t easy.  Or I wasn’t that good.  Maybe I got bored.  I quit, setting in motion a pattern – with me opting out of piano, gymnastics and cheerleading later.

No one told me that only a few are truly, naturally brilliant.  Geniuses.  That the savant is rare.  That most of us mere mortals toil toward mastery.

The girls remind me of “the popular girls” I knew in junior high – the ones that took jazz and tap with a woman named Miss Barbara.  Strangely, I was talking about them last week.  About the time they invited me to the movies.  Just once.  In seventh grade.

I still remember the film – Young Doctors in Love.  A spoof on soap operas.  It was rated R.  And my mother didn’t allow me to go to R-rated movies.

Except this time she did.

Post-run, swing dancing. Another cool moment with my mother.
Post-run, swing dancing with my mother.

I am fond of saying my mother’s “coolest moment ever” was when she took me to see Prince, The Time and Vanity 6.  It was pre-Purple Rain, when Prince was still dirty.  And I was in the sixth grade.

But the movie exception was pretty cool too.

I find myself thinking about nurture over nature.

About swing dancing in the kitchen with my mother.  And her jumping rope to the Pointer Sisters Jump!  About me wearing a pill-box hat with a feather and a veil to high school and her asking if I think that I am one of the Pointer Sisters.

I think about her childhood in Saginaw, Michigan, raised essentially by her maid, Mother Flora Hill.  About her Sunday mornings spent at Mount Olive Baptist Church – where she was almost baptized – and her summers at the congregation’s camp.  There is a photograph of her and my uncle – two toe-headed Jewish kids – in a sea of dark-skinned, smiling faces.  My mother loves sweet potato pie and knows all the words to Leaning on Jesus.

With my dance "partner" in Rwanda.
With my dance “partner” in Rwanda.

I think about her taking me to see Saturday Night Fever when I was in fourth grade because she wanted me to see the dancing.  (Her no R-rated movie rule conveniently overlooked.)  And about skating with my parents to Peaches and Herb on Tuesday nights at Bonaventure Roller Rink while most of my friends were tucked in at home.

I think about dancing with a troupe in Rwanda a few summers ago and their recognition that I could dance.  About the beautiful, bald man who gave me the eye that said, “Follow me.”  And I did.

Maybe the dance is in the genes.  Maybe it is inside a 1977 Thunderbird with an FM converter box – my mother’s car for as many years as I can remember.  It doesn’t really matter.  What does is, at the end of First Friday, when the brass band calls the audience up to dance, I go.  I quit quitting.  So I claim my space on the waxed wood floor.