I can faintly hear a man singing The Star Spangled Banner. It’s coming from the middle school across the street. I find myself crying. I’ve been doing that a lot these last few days. I’m torn and suffused by the truth that absolutely nothing stays the same, pierced by the truth that everything is constantly changing and that nothing is fixed. There are days when this truth gives me comfort and helps me see that being lost is just an illusion too, but today is not one of them. The fall air tickles the hair on my arms and I wonder how my daughter is doing on her first day of high school. I want summer back, and the first vacation Bob and I took together. I want to be dropping Lilly off at kindergarten at the Waldorf school in Santa Barbara again. I want to do my life over, not because I want to do it differently (although, okay, there might be one or two things I tweak but just a tad) but because I want to savor it more.

At the Writer’s Spa this year, one of the participants, Annelle, had just lost her best friend. Annelle’s intention for the spa was “Savor.” It’s my life lesson. To savor. Even the sadness, even being lost. Actually, especially being lost, especially being sad.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Out of the corner of my eye

I catch

The red blush of my neighbor’s Japanese maple

I want to turn away from it’s dying beauty

Dig my heels in, demand that summer stay put, that the kids don’t grow up, that my father’s voice greets me when I walk in the door of the house they don’t live in anymore

I want to act petulant that fall has arrived, as if it’s so unexpected, such a surprise.

But isn’t that the trick of life, the wonder and the ache: that the expected arrives and leaves us gaping

I was upstairs this morning making some various art messes and as I was painting pages in my art journal because I thought that might get me into the creative flow (which feels tantalizing close these days but I’m not quite immersed in it yet) and as I was painting I watched thoughts go by that sounded somewhat like this: “You should be working. What are you going to call the retreats you want to lead? Where are you going to hold them? What about your new speaking topics? This art stuff is a waste of time, you have no idea what you are doing. Why are you even doing this? You should be out making a difference like Michele Obama or raising money to help New Orleans if it gets smashed again.”

Whew, I know that was toxic to read! It was toxic to hear.  I don’t let these thoughts stop me and they sure do get old. My inner critic is of the productivity save-the-world variety which I suspect is part of what keeps me from kindly finding my next step. It’s better to stay lost when nothing is good enough.

But I kept painting and letting my thoughts go, not getting attached, and then after a bit, I came downstairs to my office to check my mail and Facebook page (I joined to see what my daughter was experiencing but found it’s very cool for grown-ups too - want to be friends?) and found this email from Pamela:

The artwork on the site and in the newsletter is so beautiful!! Will you ever offer T-shirts and other items, perhaps a calendar with “Jen-isms” and the artwork together, etc?
It would really be wonderful!

Thanks and many blessings-
Pamela H.

I love you Pamela, not because you made me feel talented or that what I was doing in the studio was worthwhile but because it reminded me that our story (in this case, the one from my pushy inner productivity bitch) is just one story. It is not the truth. As I was feeling conflicted and doubtful in my mess making, Pamela was deriving energy or delight from my messes. That doesn’t mean I’m signing up for art school tomorrow - that would be dumb but fun - but that I (we) can trust our desires and let them lead us more than we ever can our stories about what those desires mean or don’t mean. Or we’re being mean to ourselves.

Do you have an inner productivity bitch? Do you think being satisfied is one of the keys to kindly find yourself?

I read the most beautiful poem in LIFE IS A VERB by Patti Digh last night. I love this book - Patti has taken what could be a hackneyed subject — how would you live if you had 37 days left? - and made it sing through her deep heart and generously wonderful writing. The poem that moved me so is at the beginning of the first chapter and my favorite lines are:

“Being lost only has meaning

When contrasted with

Knowing where you are

A presumption that slipped out of my life

As quietly as smoke up a chimney

For now I live in a less anchored place

Where being lost is irrelevant”

I found the poem strangely comforting as if being lost was not such a bad thing once you got used to it and what is lost and what is found anyway? Then Patti reveals that the poem was written by a man in the early stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Hmmm… still, I felt comforted. So many people tell me they feel lost and bewildered; does that make bewildered the new black and does it look good on everybody? I mean, if so many of us are feeling lost, at least in some parts of our lives, could it mean we are looking for a new found, a new territory that we can’t even imagine but we certainly can’t find the way we found our way the last time?

I’m getting lost writing this post.

Which leads me to all that I know today for sure about being lost and found which is: we have to accept being lost before we even think about being found and we have to accept that being found may never feel or look the way it did before we got lost this time. We have to let go of the story that being found or “knowing what we are doing” is better than where we are right now.

What does lost and found mean to you these days?

That's the tag line for this blog/website - Kindly Find Yourself - and it's a phrase I'm sweetly resonating with right now. It is becoming my little creative beacon.

My friend Eric wrote this in response to me talking to him about Kindly Find Yourself as a retreat/class title:

Kindly - Do this with loving kindness.

Kindly - This is my gentle request that you turn around and find yourself.

Kindly - (with a little more edge in your voice) Stop tying yourself up in the knots of your stories. Find yourself.

For me, the first step in kindly finding myself is letting myself be lost. I feel so ashamed that I don't know what I'm doing or who I am at 45, almost 46. I like to keep stopping and saying, "It's okay to feel lost right now because that is how I feel right now. It's okay to feel bad about feeling lost right now because that's how I feel. It's not necessary to beat myself up for feeling lost nor do I feel lost in all domains of my life. This feeling of being lost in my creative work won't last and even if it does, it's okay because I am not what I do."

Speaking of "I am not what I do" am I the only one who wants to run away from the Internet and all social media because it feels so overwhelming? It's like a demon named Do Everything and Do It Big and Do it Now is biting at my heels ((I just joined FaceBook so that might be part of it). I want to run away . Okay, going to stop and welcome that feeling Demon too... "It's okay to feel overwhelmed because that's how I feel. But god, I hate feeling this way. It's okay I hate feeling this way, I can still feel the feeling." It really helps if I do this welcoming while relaxing my body or going for a walk or doing some art journaling. Also reading Rumi helps:

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

The second thing that helps is reading other people's journals and blogs and talking to my friend Ann and my beloved Bob so I feel/ see/ know I am not alone in feeling lost, and that most of us do — especially at mid life. I have to remember to reach out and get some of this support when I need it most instead of telling myself I AM THE ONLY ONE FEELING THIS WAY and then not spend all day reading blogs and talking on the phone so that I don’t actually do any creative work because doesn’t feel good.

The third thing that helps is watching happy movies that are smart like Miss Pettigrew Lives for Day and reading books like What It Is by Lynda Barry

Okay, back to kindly finding myself and designing a class and retreats so we can do it together. Love to hear what you are doing to kindly find yourself today!

Have you ever come home from a trip — or several trips back to back — and you’re in the midst of a ginormous life change which caused you to break into heaving sobs in the middle of your new love’s family reunion (although not in front of the actual family) and you are in must-hold-hands-or-otherwise-always-be-touching love and you keep pinching yourself because you can’t believe you found this relationship and you’re navigating about a million new creative ideas and you’ve started coaching again and holding these wonderful souls tenderly is so thrilling and it’s huge too and your arms are flapping every time you move them because you’ve barely exercised in three weeks and let’s not forget all that pie-chocolate-wine that has made you plump overnight where before you were svelte (or sveltish) and you’re really really tired and you walk in the door after the last of these adventures and there are two dead mice in the traps you set and the smell is shall we say rather strong? And you miss your 14-year-old daughter who didn’t go on the last trip at the last minute but you are also dreading seeing her because her father has not said no to her about getting a third dog (yes, that would be the number 3) even though he cannot have pets at his apartment and he travels a lot and you can feel your arms flapping as you clean up the dead mice but then the love of your life comes in and says, “I’ll do that” and you feel so grateful and tired and then you think what a good chapter for a new comfort book this would make, returning from trips and retreats and adventures and family reunions and feeling really, really OVERWHELMED and like someone put you in a blender on high and.. What could you do at times like these?

Go outside and breathe.

Feel your feet on the floor and your connection to the ground; feel connected to something that is not your own spinning to-do list.

Do a brain dump on Omnifocus or on a big sheet of paper everything you think you have to do.

Do the one thing that is lurking behind you that you don’t want to even admit you need to deal with - for me, right now, it’s the flapping arms.

Color in your art journal for a minute or two; keep it quick and simple.

Start and finish one small task as in sweep the mudroom or empty the dishwasher.

Drink a big glass of water and say to yourself as you do, “I have come home before from trips/vacations/retreats/family reunions and survived and I can choose to push myself relentlessly right now and get myself and everybody around me into a dither and a lather or I can proceed at the pace of loving kindness and put one foot gently in front of the other. It is my choice.”

Call a very helpful friend to talk you down.

Put on uplifting music (I’m a big Krishna Das fan) and declare you will unpack, clean, answer email, etc. until one song is over (or no more than two) and then take a break and do something brief and fun like call a helpful friend to talk you down.

Avoid multi-tasking like you would avoid the guy in the Portland airport who stopped me to tell me how much I looked like LAURA BUSH. Aside from politics, do I really look that old? Did someone dress me in a pant suit when I wasn’t looking?

I’m now going to go do some of the things on this nice list and talk myself back into my life. It’s wild to ride the waves of so much emotion and change, just wild, and I’m glad to be back at this blog, settling into a fruitful loving conversation with each of you - I so treasure your comments. I feel so much hope and anticipation for a creative, stable, and love filled fall.

What do you do to comfort yourself, especially when faced with dead mice?

Welcome to my long OVERDUE new website. The original Comfortqueen.com launched in May 2000 and although we made changes along the way, for the last three years, it was dated, riddled with broken links, and no longer reflected me. People would report broken links and ask where the e-cards went or that they missed the Daily Dollop and I’d say, “Soon. Soon I’ll know what to do.”

I kept telling myself it wasn’t the right time to do a redesign because I didn’t know what was next for me and I didn’t know what look I wanted for my “brand” and I didn’t know my target audience or my USP.

Then, one day, I realized I would never know if all I kept doing was thinking and mulling. I realized the only way I would ever know what I was doing next was to do something. To be in motion.

There are times when we get stuck because we have forgotten how to create. We believe we have to know exactly what we are doing before we can do anything — we have to know our brand mission, our ideal customer, have a snazzy logo; We have to know our big life vision, our soul purpose, have a cute tag line; We especially have to know where we will end up before we can begin.

When we notice that we are talking to ourselves in sentences that begin with “First I have to…” or “When the kids are…” or “When I know what I want to say then I will” before we sign up for the class or go for the interview or start the book, we’ve gone beyond listening and fruitful waiting and discernment and we’re stuck in a dead end story that is all about safety and fear and wanting guarantees in a life that never gives them.

The antidote? Action. Motion. Creation.

But not big long-term commitment kind of action. Not launching a company with fifty employees, not starting a book, not signing a year’s contract. Instead, start with something finite, easy, and yes, fun. Start with something that lights your heart up (or at least makes you faintly smile) and that has a clear beginning and ending. If you take a job after being home with the kids for ten years, take a job that you can leave easily but that interests you, challenges you or at least gets you into action. If you want to write, start an article or a blog post, not an historical epic. If you need to redo your website but you have no idea where your business is going next year, do something simple, with as few pages as possible and Word Press based so you can change it easily.

(Note: if you are somebody who gets into action easily but quits often, this advice is all wrong for you. You may need a big long hairy epic commitment. Or not. What do I know?)

Be in motion, build in change, and let it be easy.

Or think about it this way:

When the Shoe Fits
by Chuang Tzu
Translated by Thomas Merton
( a longish poem from: Roger Housden’s collection Risking Everything that ends:)

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.

The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

Welcome to my ever-changing motion-filled ease-inspired new website.

The New York Times Sunday magazine did a cover piece this weekend on the falling birth rate in Europe. While my reaction was mostly, “Isn’t this basically good news? Isn’t overpopulation still one of the main strains on our human survival?” the part that made me chortle and sigh was the broad and deeper reason for Europe and Japan and Greece and Thailand’s falling birthrate is… women are fed up. No more second shift, buddy. No more being chained to the house while you have all the fun in the world, no thanks. In countries where women are educated yet society doesn’t support their working after they become mothers, the birth rate is falling — far and fast.

“…women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and child care are less likely to want to have another child than women whose husbands or partners share the load. Put differently, Dutch fathers change more diapers, pick up more kids after soccer practice and clean up the living room more often than Italian fathers; therefore, relative to the population, there are more Dutch babies than Italian babies being born. As Mencarini said, ‘It’s about how much the man participates in child care.’”

This is a personal “glass ceiling” being played out in bedrooms across the world. We’re voting with our wombs — voting for quality of our lives, refusing to give in to a double standard

“rooted in the tradition where the husband earned all the money. Things have changed, not only in Italy and Spain but also in Japan and Korea, but those societies have not yet adjusted. The relationships within households have not adjusted yet.”

We will remake the world to be more gender equal — what the outcome will be may surprise us all.

In this week’s newsletter, I posed the questions:

• Darling, sweetie, honey baby, what one habit would feel really delightful this week?
• What one habit or practice or choice would feel as supportive as a personal chef, assistant, and massage therapist all rolled into one?
• What do I want to do to support myself?

Now what in the heck are my answers? Hmmm… taking a moment to check in with my self……………..

Here’s what feels right: Every time I feel a surge of anxiety, instead of taking it as a sign I’m utterly lost and headed for creative dead end and that I have completely forgotten how to create anything at all, I will gently replace that ugly noise with the remembrance, learned from my great friend Micheal, that what I choose to do is both overwhelmingly meaningful and overwhelmingly
insignificant or to put it another way, I will get over my hand wringing little self via a dose of lightness.

I’ll also cultivate the habit of watching Saturday Night Live reruns and maybe even a few Monty Python oldies to help this lightness bubble along.

I want to commit to more new supportive habits but that’s a fantastic way to pull the self-flagellating knot even tighter so I’ll stop right here. Stopping now.

How about you? Love to hear what you’ll be choosing to do.

I’m afraid to blog. I know, that’s sounds a bit absurd but I have been missing writing in this format for months and although I’ve told myself, “Wait until your sabbatical is officially over June 1st” and “Wait until the new blog is up at Comfortqueen.com so you don’t have to import any more text” I know that’s bull hockey.

I’m afraid to write. I’m afraid to create. I have never been so afraid to create, I don’t think, in my life. I’ve become the queen of busy work and I’m pissed at myself.

What am I afraid of?

Do I really care? Naming what I’m afraid of feels so boring and so besides the point. Because the point is: I need to create to live and life doesn’t feel good when I’m not. But one night, when I wasn’t looking, even in the midst of my retreat (more on that later but not this post or I will never push publish) my old nemesis “BE PRODUCTIVE” latched on to me and has been riding me raw ever since.

Developmental psychology posits that when we are destabilized, we regress to the level of development where we last felt stable. Because all development happens in waves, we surge forward or upward into more complex ways of being (think of learning a musical instrument) and then when life presses on us (in positive and negative ways), we fall back (you suddenly can’t remember that chord progression for the life of you). My stress has been overwhelming miraculously positive (I’ve fallen madly in love) . I’m feeling so much joy and letting go in my body and heart — you might think that would translate to wild abandon with pen and paper and ideas and you know what, you be wrong! Feeling so much joy has destabilized me and sent me back to a former, more stable, but much less satisfying way of being creative: be productive, get things done, worry about money, no time to play, etc.

So here I am, writing this to create something. I’ve also been art journaling and making weird messy paintings.

Off to exercise and then family night - yes, blended family dates are happening, he has a 11 year old, the sweetest coolest boy in the universe.

Ah… Breathe, Jen, it’s all going to be okay.

I’m a Frito Bandito…

Just had to write that. I’m dating myself!

I needed to write to CONNECT. I miss our conversations and yet I feel our connection, us creative thinking heart women webbed around the world, opening and closing with the tide of life.

I’M STILL ALIVE and I’m actually, well, great. And good. Certainly stronger. More even-keeled. Learning heaps. Playing more! As the sun returns to the misty NorthWest, so does my life force.
Being divorced is becoming part of me, it’s truth is being metabolized. For example, when I talked to my neighbor on the ferry Tuesday about my new life without Chris, I felt (mostly) like I was talking about myself and not some alien life force. I’m beginning to feel less like divorce is inconceivable. Oh sure, there are moments when, out of the blue, I wondered who socked me in the solar plexus. I look around but there isn’t nobody there, just the realization that my other half is no longer connected to me. But that’s not true. Our connection, in some very important ways, is richer and clearer than ever. Sitting on either side of our daughter a few weeks ago at her student conference,, we shared one of those parenting looks that said, “Oh my god, she’s such a miracle, don’t you want to eat her up?” and although that look was followed by one of those sad looks, it was not followed by a “I’d be so much happier if you would just…” look. It was not followed by our heart’s shutting down. My friend Ann Cheng said this morning on our walk, “What would it be like to live without any expectations?” (which is probably what enlightenment feels like) and that’s part of the gift of not being married anymore: we can love each other without expectations. No expectation of connection or being on time or getting the taxes done… It’s odd and lonely and freeing. It brings up the question in me, over and over, what do I want or need from another person? Why do I believe a relationship has to look a certain way?

On the creative front, after being dead to even the most remote creative impulse, I can feel the creative heat building in me. It feels exciting and a little scary. All I know right now is that my next creative leg must be:

More collaborative - I want someone(s) to work with in person at least part of the time
More fun - play! Be a voice and conduct for play!
More focused - I want to articulate what self-care is and be an international stand for it; what is the “there there” of my work?
Better supported - asking for and creating systems so I can do all I want to do.

I’ve been considering performance as part of my future. I know I want to become a better speaker and speak more. I may want to do more weekend workshops. I’ve fantasied how much fun it would be to do a TV show — some thing for the new Oprah network! I’m edging toward my novel. I’ve made some art again… Did I mention focus must be part of my new life?

And I’ve been struggling with my days getting eaten up with “stuff,” like today, Lilly is home from school, it’s a holiday and yesterday it was meet a friend for tea. I’m feeling the need to get away for a longer retreat in silence, away from home again. Not sure when that came happen but feeling the need!

So far my retreat looks like nothing I ever thought it would, certainly it doesn’t look particularly special or “sacred,” but I keep reminding myself, “What should it look like?” and “Why should it look any different than it does?” In other words, I’m accepting reality, digging into the rich and sticky and lovely dirt of me, and living the sacred line from Rilke:

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back