Soy means “I am”

Cooking calms me; all its ingredients and sensual gratification organize me back into making sense, when, somehow, I’ve stopped making it. Last week, I was reading a new cook book when I remembered what I learned on the yoga mat: sometimes it’s bliss, sometimes it blows. If you can be equally as present when it blows, the bliss will find you right there and carry you.

I’d been in a surly mood for a couple of days running. Hungry for dinner, radio playing, I flipped through the book, reading snippets, and landed on a page about soy. As I began to read it, the radio announcer introduced a story about soy.

Tiny synchronicities

I love when that happens. Randomly reading about soy while just as randomly hearing it on the radio? I read a bit more till I realized there was an opportunity here. The translation of “soy” popped into my head. “I am,” I heard myself say. In Spanish, “soy” means “I am.”

I let my eyes hover over the page, its content no longer the point. “What about ‘I am’ in this moment?” I think. And immediately it reminds me that I am a part of the relationship that has been pissing me off for two days. If I materialize into it, commit to it even if it pains me (I think they call this “getting accountable”), just like on the yoga mat, then there’ll be a state change. What blows will turn blissful. I’ll be let off the hook of my anger. By seeing myself as part of the problem, part of the whole, I’m no longer out of synch. I’m flowing, stretching, seeing where I can adjust my posture, my point of view, my compassion.

Writing is listening

That was the end of the mood, and a perfect example of “Writing Is Listening.” Writing is the exercise of listening to our lives, our characters, the worlds we’re building in our stories, and assembling them into words. But if you’re tuned into the muse and listening, it’s inevitable you’ll get as much advice for your life as you do your story.

She shows up in the most curious of places. Stuck on something? Be present with the irritation, the anger, the overwhelm. Hang out with it for a while and feel it, knowing the bliss is out there in the shape of a muse who leaves answers where you least expect them.

–

Speaking of muses…

Our recent Story Telling Party ended with a wild and beautiful story about synchronicities between nature and death and life and magic and fear and expectation. Everyone’s stories had us perked up and listening, and settling deep into understanding of ourselves and each other in new ways. Sign up on the sidebar to receive an invite to the next Story Charming Party this February in Portland.

It’s a pink summer evening. We’re up in the sky, levitating above the city in a high rise. The room is quiet except for one person’s voice and the suspense of riveted listening…

to the English businessman trying to negotiate swimming naked at a business gathering,

the American woman, hated in a developing country by her housekeeper,

the teenager whose name made him invisible,

the soft spoken intuitive finding his voice in a singing class full of tears.

So many combinations of humanity

That was our first Story Telling Party. It was so magical, we’re doing it again.

The Story Telling Party’s sole motive is to sit in a room together and tell and listen to stories. It’s in hearing each other’s stories our worlds open up, or collide, or get smaller. Stories, it occurs to me as I write this, are like lungs. They breathe us in, they breathe us out, nourished. Informed. Curious. Sated. Connected.

Please come!

The Story Telling Party is Friday, Jan 13, at 6:30pm in Portland.

SPACE IS LIMITED. In order to manage headcount, you must have an invitation to come.

To get yours, click here to sign up for the invite list. And once the invites go out, RSVP early to reserve your spot.

Please join us! The way the stories get told, each party is a different experience.

It won’t be the same without you.

Write something
list
alphabet
in fog on the window

See that you exist.
Blood magic heartbeat
longing
are beginning middle end

Now while you’re breathing
Now, while persecuting
potential unreached
spoilt sperm

a finish line
deserted with dusk
You exist.
Write something.

Your name
its letters
in sand in song
speak it through the dark

the light will find you.

by Pema Teeter

*

Bridget Pilloud, over at Intuitive Bridge, is hosting “Pick Your Color of the Year –  2012!” for the New Year.

Rosy pink. My color for 2012.

Pantone does it for the designing crowd. Why not those who look forward to designing their lives for the year? And those who revel in the design of a story?

Have you ever thought of it that way? The stories you tell are designed. Like, every story. Describing your day or talking about your passion for helping people. The way your audience receives the account is key to getting the response you’re going for.

Colorful character

My dad lives to tell a good story. The man plans the punctuation in the telling of a tuna melt he had for lunch, “like nothing you’ve had in your life, BELIEVE me.” He drives home that taste with such description, you’re suddenly feeling a little full, yourself.

Bridget’s “Pick Your Color of the Year — 2012!” catches my attention because, like a picture paints 1,000 words, a color expresses a feeling or a condition without using words at all. It expresses a character and a mood.

Your story, whatever it is, has all of those. How will you describe it?

The hue of a mood

Try starting with a color…Let your color be a way into the description. How does your color make you feel? What colors do the characters inspire? In what color would you describe the mood of the whole story?

Pick your story’s color, then add to it. In the same way you’d add to your color in a room, with accents, open windows, and accessories, build on your story’s mood with details: character traits, settings, suspense.

A story flows. A story stops. It starts up again. If you’re stuck behind the telling, pick its color. Let its mood and character tell you where it wants to go.

Know the color of your story’s mood? Tell us about it. Share it in the comments (and come back to tell us where we can read it when it’s done…)

P.S. Thanks to Bridget for the inspiration. Pick your color for 2012 at her very cool blog.

It’s 1998

…and I’m headed to Italy, my first time out of the country alone. In the spirit of my trip, I change my floating-phrase screen saver to Italian: Tutto ciò che cerco è già dentro di me. “All that I seek is already within me.”

I don’t know how it can be true. I’m greener than green behind the ears. Someone said it to me once and I became mesmerized by it. All I can do is repeat it in the sing-song of my newly acquired language, and wait for it to be true.

It’s 2011

If I know anything in the world, I know this:

“All that you seek is already within you.” Every answer, every mystery, every big adventure to prepare for, every story to tell. The elements are all inside. I know this from the uncountable numbers of people I have met on untold numbers of travels. I know it from the hundreds of interviews in which people have told me their issues and together we have sliced through them with one mighty sword: their stories.

It’s the stories. THAT’s what’s inside of us. And inside our stories is the code of our lives. Why? Because we can’t help but to do one thing the way we do everything. And when I listen to you tell me about THE THING you’re working on—creative opus, business copy, marketing plan, acting role, writing project—and then I listen to your stories, I hear what makes you thrill, what makes you special, what makes you afraid, and what makes you grow.

Break through writers block.

Understand your offer.

Find the deeper appeal in your pitch.

Express what you mean.

Organize the fragments of what feels like chaos into your electrified, true-to-heart, true-to-you voice.

You are one whole entity, made up of a million experiences, one big continuous story made up of a million smaller ones, and counting. In an interview, I help you see how the stories align. I help you apply your stories’ relevance to what you’re working on, to magnify, magnetize and fill with heart and life your content.

THE INTERVIEW

…is the forum for our conversation. People get into a Story Charming interview and forget they are sorting information or solving a problem. Their imaginations take flight, emotions bloom and dim corners of dreams light up.

It usually costs $150.

Through Dec 24 only, it’s $100.

Buy now, calendar through April 2012.

You press the button, I email you to confirm and calendar. You or yours gets the gift of creativity, flow…and the answers only she or he has inside. For $50 off.

It’s a lovely gift for the thinker, creator, renegade in your life, who wants clarity where there are cobwebs, or even collaboration where there is a really great idea that needs help executing. For the gifters, I’ll include a personalized gift certificate you can give.

From the Happily Charmed:

You’re a brilliant interviewer! I just ADORE YOU. Thank you for your words. Thank you for SEEING me. Your work is helping me discover myself personally as well as professionally. Thank you for being so open!

Padma Maxwell
www.artofthriving.com

You’re able to abstract meaning from a pile of confusion. You take that pile, remove the nonsense, and bring a sense of clarity to what is so desperately trying to be said. You create simplicity out of conundrum. More importantly though, you find the real meaning and help me pursue those thoughts in a much more substantial and clear way. It’s a pretty incredible gift. I’ve never met someone who can do that quite like you.

Matt Harding
VP Marketing, MasterPlans.com

Pema has an amazing way to translate what’s in your heart into killer marketing words.

Michelle Rodriguez
The Paid Stylist Program

All that you seek is already within you. Get Story Charmed for $100, till Dec 24 only, and let it out.

Buy now, calendar through April 2012.

Ready to find it?

The best and worst Christmas I ever had was the year after my brother died. I was 17. The grief was palpable. My family couldn’t speak to each other. It’s possible it was just me who couldn’t speak. However it happened, I remember the silence.

My step-mom was the hub of a PTA program that provided clothes and shoes to kids who came to school in need, so she was well connected to both families in need, and streams of donations. This Christmas Eve, my house was busy and quiet. My mom had found three families who would not have Christmas that year because they were broke. No dinner, no gifts.

Humble Gratitude

So, two of my high school friends came over and helped me gift-wrap toys and clothes in my room, while my mom and dad and little brother sorted food cans and turkeys and household goods in the kitchen and living room. We had these big long boxes that came with the food we ourselves received on some kind of assistance every month. That night we filled those boxes with presents and food for people we had never seen, three families we imagined in our heads as we prepared for them a Christmas they would not have had otherwise.

Being 17, I was embarrassed, a teenager after all. Would we be robbing these people of their dignity to show up on their doorstep and give them boxes of food and gifts the night before Christmas? Would they hate us because we saw their vulnerability and sadness, and even shame at not being able to provide for themselves?

But we packed into the station wagon with the boxes, and drove to one house, then the next. Three houses, my mom knocked on the door, light poured onto the porch, my dad shook the other dad’s hand. The big awkward boxes went from our hands to theirs. I glimpsed the kids in their living rooms looking out the door at strangers. The moment was short. The mom would hug my mom, all would nod and then we ducked out. No ceremony, just humble gratitude. Deep thanks. And a feeling of riches none of us would have dreamed on the night before Christmas in a poor part of town like ours.

Big as a broken heart

It was over. We drove home. Went to bed. Woke up to Christmas in our house. But our celebrating had already been done. Quietly, diligently, the night before. We were satisfied and filled as full as our broken hearts were going to fill that year. There was something bigger than us, almost as big as the loss of my brother. Receiving through giving. Surviving loss by giving. Giving when we knew there was nothing we could give but a hand to a few families we had never met, but who had fallen on hard times. We had been getting to know about hard times.

I’m here to tell you that even when you think you have nothing, you have something to give. Right now, when the world is gasping in fear at financial doom, right now is the time to give. So, take a breath. Open up. And give. Expand. Radiate.

What will you give?

(Thanks, Mom and Dad for the gift of that experience. It continues to give to this day. Love you.)

–

A longer version of this post was first published on CarrieandDanielle.com in 2008. But I love it so much that it might not be the first time I bring it back.

Life as Art

Ever notice that travel has the double sided quality of making new memories while stirring up others? I’m traveling again. Today I walked through an intersection where I learned one of my most favorites lessons: Don’t leave the house with your pants off.

It was 1991 and I wore a mid-80s hangover of an outfit—oversized blazer and leggings, leather lace up booties. I was excited when I got dressed that morning, if a little over-confident in my wardrobe’s resources. The leggings were, in actuality, tights—thin, nylon, not exactly opaque black. But the blazer covered my bum; the look was nearly perfect. It was fashion. You take risks when you want to look good, and sometimes you win, sometimes you wonder who let you out of the house. You have to be able to risk the latter to achieve the former. I looked cute. That propelled me out the door.

Expressionist pants

A forty minute drive to school later, I got out of the car in gray fog and realized, once again, that late summer in California does not translate into sunshine in San Francisco. People in parkas walked by me. Boots and scarves. Suddenly I wasn’t just dressed wrong for the weather, *I* was wrong altogether. My big blazer with it’s rolled up sleeves no longer reached the “miniskirt” length it looked before my long drive. The color of skin peeked through the stretched parts of my tights, and I was very blatantly freezing. What elements comprised a fashion coup when the morning began became my 19-year-old demise the minute I went public. People stared. I tucked into a desk in the back corner of class and resolved to beeline immediately afterward to the denim wall at the Gap, before my shift began.

It’s funny how trying to be invisible reveals you with the brightest of lights. The semester had worn on for weeks and not once did our French teacher give me a second look. But this day, she called me out of my seat to conjugate verbs on the chalk board in front of class. “What? Now? I can’t lift my arm to write without hiking my blazer even higher,” I thought. Though there would be students to follow me, I started the verbs in the middle of the board as the class watched my strange shapes. As I wrote, I leaned upward with half my body, moving the chalk along while squeezing my upper arm against my side. All that could be heard in the silence was the scratch of the chalk and the crackle of my humiliation.

Worst critic

It was done. I slinked, wordless, back to my desk and set about burying myself in embarrassment. When class ended, I speed-walked as fast as I could, in my tights and big blazer, pressing my legs together as if the more I looked like a mermaid, the less people would wonder why I wasn’t wearing pants.

In the car, I cranked up the heat and lead-footed it toward my salvation: the denim wall. I had at most ten minutes to pick out a pair of jeans, try them on and buy them. And I had to figure out how I was going to slip into the store without my co-workers noticing me.

I watched it all play in my head. I’d park, mermaid-speed-walk to the store, slip in against the wall and be three-quarters of the way to the jeans before anyone spotted me. By that time, my bottom half would be hidden by the racks. All I had to do was get there in time.

Gallery quality

Have I mentioned I was a cop-magnet at 19? Lights, freakout, pull over the to curb. Total embarrassment, but maybe he won’t look at my practically naked lap.

“Hi,” I breathed, barely. I was cranking down the window.

“License and registration.”

I didn’t know how I was going to lean for it without flashing him my back side. At 19, I hadn’t yet figured out that could have worked in my favor.

He said I had run a red light.

“What red light?” I asked. He looked at me like I was an idiot, and pointed.

“I don’t see it,” I persevered. I was looking up at a light in front of me that I hadn’t yet crossed. How could I run it if I wasn’t there yet?

“It’s behind you.”

I’m shaking my head. “It’s right there! I didn’t run it.”

“Look, if you want to get out of the car and see for yourself–”

“No! No.” I held onto the steering wheel, stared down at my tights, and didn’t move. He watched me.

He looked at my license. “You’re new here.”

“Yes!”

He watched me quizzically a little longer. “Okay. There’s two lights,” he said. “Watch it next time.”

He gave me gave me my license and I drove away swearing I’d never leave the house again without pants.

Muscle and flow

It’s been two months since my grief project ended. Since then, I have been watching, listening, wondering at my absence from my blog, shifting from shoulder to shoulder the guilt for leaving a gap after 31 days creating, and at letting the community I invited recede into their own Septembers.

I’ve been watching a vacuous silence in me. Letting it take over while I wonder when I’ll get the muscle and write again, correspond, participate in a conversation.

The grief project grew for 10 years before it came out last summer. Then, 31 days of commitment to its creation unfurled it, unruly at times, jagged with emotion, and rewarding. It was relief, to share it, to converse about it, to feel it all and read others’ stories on the same theme.

And then I slept. Or watched, unmoving, from under the weight of exhaustion. It was free of me, I was free of it, and I was spent.

From Hip Hop to Limbo

In the weeks that have followed, I’ve explored the concept of creative rhythm, and while the weather has changed and transition has been rife…everywhere…I’ve kept watching for the message of fallow.

We create. We put everything into a story, a piece of art, gestating a child. And then we deliver it. And then we dip. We’re farmers. We let the field lay fallow, to replenish its soil to sow the next seeds, grow the next roots, share the next harvest.

I figured this out in September, when I would drag myself to the laptop and nothing would come out. If I had something to say, I had no energy to compose it. My organizer was off. It was all ping pong balls in a bingo blaster.

Instead of trying to fight it and say SOMETHING, I let it sit. I watched for movement, but mostly saw stillness. I listened to my thoughts, and mostly heard a lack of them. I let myself be calmed by the dip in my cycle.

It’s hard out there for a muse

The fallow season. It’s helped me to understand something about myself and the way I create. I turn it on, turn it up, let it flow. Then I recede, let the creation stand on its own, join the world on its own feet. I watch from a distance. I rest. In the rest I start to see and hear new ideas. Then, rested, I come back to plant again.

Facing a deadline, I do the dance and deliver. But I’ve been learning about recognizing my creative rhythm to the benefit of everything I create. The muse gets very prolific when I recognize her flow and go with it. I argue with her: People will leave if I don’t stay constant. She responds by slowing down when I don’t, and turning it on full force when I do.

So here we sit, my muse and me, stretching after the big sleep, and counting the sprouts in the new soil bed, listening for which to tend.

What’s your creative rhythm? When do you do your best work and benefit from your best rest?

It took a lifetime, but I just learned something from my Grandma.

“Gramcracker” helped raise me. I think of her when I cook, when I crack jokes, when I do something selfless, when I’m bossy. My repertoire is full of what I learned from her in life. But last week, I understood something that didn’t occur to me till after she died (at 100). I learned that I did something right. Something really good and big and important. Something worthy of a life’s recognition: I succeeded.

Gain

On September 11, with you, my readers’, help and presence, I finished 31 days of stories about grief. I felt, every day, a feeling related to death and loss and grief. But you know whose death didn’t register as loss, in all of those 31 days? Gramcracker’s. My grandma’s full full life, and my full full experience in her presence, registered as support, fulfillment, completion.

We lived through traumas together. We made hilarious memories together, and challenging ones. I don’t have regrets with her. No grievances unaired. There’s nothing I wish I would have told her before she died. There’s no degree of love I held back from her, or love I refused to receive from her.

As a result, my grief for her death was a ritual of her passing. I cried for the loss, for the transition. Cried at realizing I wouldn’t have my friend to call up and listen to and laugh with anymore. But I also celebrated. When my dad called to tell me she was gone, I said, “Oh. This is the call. The one I always wondered what would it be like.” And then there was a silence from us both. And then I celebrated for her, almost under my breath, “She did it. She let go.”

A lifelong project

A hundred is a lot of years. At her age 80, I had easily 20 years to face the reality of her eventual passing, and in those 20 years, when it would come up and I would allow myself to feel, I grieved the loss of her before she was gone. I cried when I imagined losing her. Between us, over that time, I told her every last thing I’d ever want her to know. I made space for her to tell me whatever she would be willing to share. And she knew that I loved her without a doubt.

I am someone who has lived in too many cities to stop and count. That makes for adventure and exploration, but also doubt on dark days for the relationships that could have been. I have lost people without time to say “I love you” or “goodbye.”  I have left when I could have stayed. But my relationship with my grandma was a lifelong project. Completed. With commitment, faithfulness, and good. I can see what success looks like. That’s a pretty great thing to get right.