AANNND SHES BACK!!!

After a long and unexplained absence, which I choose not to go into, and without further adieu, this blog is officially back in action....for now.
Ezra and I left Boise Idaho for LA about two weeks ago at the beginning of December. We spent three action packed days with some awesome friends who made it pretty damn seamless and stress free, so we could get expedited passports. That's right folks. My passport had not been used for FAR to long, and the fact that Ezra didn't even have one yet, is a shame in my book. BUT within two days we both had our passports and we were on our way...off on a new adventure. Thanks Mike and Michell, Jamie Boots Wilson and Charu and Martin for your support along that leg of the journey. Seriously, Mike picked us up at the airport, took us out for California famous In and Out Burgers, brought us home to his lovely family, let us stay there. GAVE me his GPS equipped car the next day so I easily made it to the passport office and was even able to go and have lunch with Martin and Charu... some of my beautiful friends from Eden Unplugged. Not kidding. What a great guy. Then my sweet, hilarious friend Jamie came and picked us up and kept us for a night and a day. She drove us all over, hooked us up with a lovely stay near the beach, took us to the beach, took us to Santa Monica, helped me shop (which I HATE) for a few cold climate clothing items and delivered us back to Mike and Michelle.
I won't tell you all the details about what precluded this adventure...some amazing and beautiful and some heartrending, soul wrenching, gut stomping. But I will say, it was a decision not made lightly or easily, despite how smoothly it has unfolded. I even had some amazing friends that donated money to me so we could afford our passports. My heart is full.
Anyway, Mike delivered us to the airport by 8:00am and we spent the day making our way through Canadian customs, airports, flights, layovers and landed in Montreal at just about midnight. We were picked up by the lovely and soulful Tera Warner (see www.terawarner.com) and her two fantastic kids Mika and Sebastian.
We have spent the last two weeks in their mountain home in Morin Heights, about an hour outside Montreal. The home we live in is beautiful. Right on a snowy icy lake in a quaint little mountain town. Tera runs several very successful internet businesses, is a single mom, and homeschools her kids. Needless to say, she was ready for me to roll up my sleeves, jump in and help in any way I could. I have done endless loads of laundry, juicing, composting, food preparation, petcare, helping her purchase her first car, cleaning, driving back and forth to Montreal, entertaining and disciplining kids, packing lunches, monitoring school work and computer time etc...whatever looked like it needed to be done, I was doing it. We have gotten to go into Montreal nearly everyday for one thing or another and I and proud to say I have done a freaking awesome job finding my way around a huge metropolitan french city. I have driven everywhere imaginable, just letting myself (and three kids) get lost and then find our way again. I got one fatty parking ticket for accidentally parking in a public transit lane when I took the kids to the Grande Bibliotheque, OOPS! And I've turned down one or two one way streets going the wrong way, but thankfully can report that all major crises have so far been averted.
Montreal is a huge, beautiful, artsy, bustling city. It is like NYC but classier, cleaner, friendlier and with a more European feel, oh yeah...and everything is in french (which partially explains how I didn't realize I parked in a public transit lane).
Tera has asked me to stay until the spring. I agreed and we decided Ezra and I needed our own place in the city. So along with all the above mentioned things I was doing. I also managed to find us a place to sublet for the next three months! I looked at multiple places until I found the one that was just right for us. It is in the plateau district, which is supposedly the best part of town to live in, if you are a creative. Which I finally realized in this life, I can claim!
So, we are subletting from an artist/yoga teacher that is going to Costa Rica for the winter...and she also happens to be a new EFT practitioner :). I will post pictures of this funky cool place we will be living as soon as we get settled in and write again soon about our adventures in Canadaland!

Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)-- Must Read!

Nearly all the women I know are stressing themselves sick over the pathological fear that they simply aren't doing enough with their lives. Which is crazy—absolutely flat-out bananas—because the women I know do a lot, and they do it well. My cousin Sarah, for instance, is earning her master's degree in international relations, while simultaneously working for a nonprofit that builds playgrounds at woefully underfunded public schools. Kate is staying home and raising the two most enchanting children I've ever met—while also working on a cookbook. Donna is producing Hollywood blockbusters; Stacy is running a London bank; Polly just launched an artisanal bakery...

By all rights, every one of these clever, inventive women should be radiant with self-satisfaction. Instead, they twitch with near-constant doubt, somehow worrying that they are failing at life. Sarah worries that she should be traveling around the world instead of committing to a master's degree. Kate worries that she's wasting her education by staying home with her kids. Donna worries that she's endangering her marriage by working such long hours. Stacy worries that the capitalistic world of banking is murdering her creativity. Polly worries that her artisanal bakery might not be quite capitalistic enough. All of them worry that they need to lose 10 pounds.

It's terribly frustrating for me to witness this endless second-guessing. The problem is, I do it, too. Despite having written five books, I worry that I have not written the right kinds of books, or that perhaps I have dedicated too much of my life to writing, and have therefore neglected other aspects of my being. (Like, I could really stand to lose 10 pounds.)

So here's what I want to know: Can we lighten up a little?

As we head into this next decade, can we draft a joint resolution to drop the crazy-making expectation that we must all be perfect friends and perfect mothers and perfect workers and perfect lovers with perfect bodies who dedicate ourselves to charity and grow our own organic vegetables, at the same time that we run corporations and stand on our heads while playing the guitar with our feet?

When I look at my life and the lives of my female friends these days—with our dizzying number of opportunities and talents—I sometimes feel as though we are all mice in a giant experimental maze, scurrying around frantically, trying to find our way through. But maybe there's a good historical reason for all this overwhelming confusion. We don't have centuries of educated, autonomous female role models to imitate here (there were no women quite like us until very recently), so nobody has given us a map. As a result, we each race forth blindly into this new maze of limitless options. And the risks are steep. We make mistakes. We take sharp turns, hoping to stumble on an open path, only to bump into dead-end walls and have to back up and start all over again. We push mysterious levers, hoping to earn a reward, only to learn—whoops, that was a suffering button!

To make matters even more stressful, we constantly measure ourselves against each other's progress, which is a truly dreadful habit. My sister, Catherine, told me recently about a conversation she'd had with a sweet neighbor who—after watching Catherine spend an afternoon organizing a scavenger hunt for all the local kids—said sadly, "You're such a better mother than I will ever be." At which point, my sister grabbed her friend's hands and said, "Please. Let's not do this to each other, okay?"

No, seriously—please. Let's not.

Because it breaks my heart to know that so many amazing women are waking up at 3 o'clock in the morning and abusing themselves for not having gone to art school, or for not having learned to speak French, or for not having organized the neighborhood scavenger hunt. I fear that—if we continue this mad quest for perfection—we will all end up as stressed-out and jumpy as those stray cats who live in Dumpsters behind Chinese restaurants, forever scavenging for scraps of survival while pulling out their own hair in hypervigilant anxiety.

So let's drop it, maybe?
Let's just anticipate that we (all of us) will disappoint ourselves somehow in the decade to come. Go ahead and let it happen. Let somebody else be a better mother than you for one afternoon. Let somebody else go to art school. Let somebody else have a happy marriage, while you foolishly pick the wrong guy. (Hell, I've done it; it's survivable.) While you're at it, take the wrong job. Move to the wrong city. Lose your temper in front of the boss, quit training for that marathon, wolf down a truckload of cupcakes the day after you start your diet. Blow it all catastrophically, in fact, and then start over with good cheer. This is what we all must learn to do, for this is how maps get charted—by taking wrong turns that lead to surprising passageways that open into spectacularly unexpected new worlds. So just march on. Future generations will thank you—trust me—for showing the way, for beating brave new footpaths out of wonky old mistakes.

Fall flat on your face if you must, but please, for the sake of us all, do not stop.

Map your own life.

Do not feel guilty. Forgive yourself for past ‘failures’ and choose to act

correctly next time. But avoid guilt, as it is one of the biggest destroyers of focus

and confidence. Do not dwell on the past. Forgive others also. You are not doing

them a favor when you forgive them – you are doing yourself the favor. They will

still have their cause and effect (karmic) debt for all their actions, whether you

forgive them or not. But when you forgive them, you release yourself from a

negative karmic cycle and release your energy for other positive things as well.

David Cameron

Quotes for the day

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” — Maria Robinson "Real beauty isn't about symmetry or weight or makeup; it's about looking life right in the face and seeing all its magnificence reflected in your own." —Valerie Monroe, writer "Every challenge offers the opportunity to think a new flavor of thought and feel a new flavor of emotion. The more varied the flavors of life you get to taste, the more interesting, layered, educated and world-experienced you'll be." — Karen Salmansohn

Love

We should interpret all behavior in one of two ways:

1) as love

or

2) as a call for love

from A Course in Miracles

as quoted by Marianne Williamson in Everyday Grace

I am thinking about this. It is actually requiring me to think pretty deeply.

I have gotten some understanding of it when I am in my quietest moments, separated from my ego and connected to something much higher-- because my ego mind can easily think of lots of scenarios that it does not want to believe fit in either of these two categories.

How can I think of the guy who flips me off in traffic as someone who is acting in love, or asking for love?

The truth is, unless I am looking at him with spiritual eyes, I can't.

But when I am connected to my source-- I can almost see him flashing through my mind at 3 or 5 or17 or 22. I can all of the sudden see and know that he has been through some stuff. Things that may have hardened him in some ways. Things that made him feel protective of himself-- even to the point of violence maybe. I can also see him in kinder moments, maybe when he stopped to let someone cross in front of him, or picked up a child and held them, or pulled a sliver out of their finger.

And then almost in the same instant I can see me, yelling at someone, or being the "flipper offer." And then me, yielding to the need of someone else.

Then I can again appreciate that I am both. I am him and he is me. We are one. We are the grace and the shadow side of the grace all at once. He and I.

and so I return to a prayer that I once learned.

God, please forgive me for judging others for sinning differently than (or the same as) I do.

Bursting forth into the world

I've split open the chrysalis and crawled out--

I felt my wings burst open this morning.

Am drying them gently in the sun and wind.