F.L.O.W.

Flow. Go with it. Like a lot of good ideas, it came to me in the shower. In the 21st Century costume of a Facebook status update. Sarah is … yes, that is what I would write. Flow. Go with it – my digital smoke signal to the connected world. I could even incorporate the word ‘Flow’ into that imaginary tattoo, the one with the infinity symbol I wouldn’t put on the back of my neck, the one I’d been thinking about not getting since that day in Brazil last year, whilst enjoying fresh fish and caipirinhas at a restaurant you can only get to by boat.

Some things are best left undone, untattooed. You can always change your mind about an imaginary tattoo, because you’ll never need to have it removed. It’s permanent in pure thought form, and that’s as close as I may ever get to ink on skin.

Why flow? Four letters. There is something snappy about four-letter words. No, that’s not it. Flow because that’s what water does, and water melts rocks down to sand, which is a lot more than I can say about rocks. A rock may temporarily block water from its destined flow, but water, being patient, will eventually find a way through. Because part of its persistence is wrapped up in knowing when and how to wait it out. Not as a torture or strategy, but as a natural state of affairs. So, flow.

Flow is about being here, right now, as the moment is flowing, it is not static, and it does not wear pointy shoes. It is round and generous and carries a basket of fruit on its head. Flow does not target or manipulate or try to fit a square peg into any other hole. It is accepting and grateful for God’s gifts, and can recognize them as such.

Flow looks forward but lives fully in the present. Flow is happy, because it doesn’t know any other way to be, unlocking the chakra energy channels of the body, allowing breath to enter fully, freely, rejuvenating and creating a safe space for movement and love to come on through. Flow is definitely love. A love with open hands and complete trust.

Flow is boundless and abundant. It knows no limits. It’s answer is always yes. Yes! everything is possible. Transformation is its daily rite. And we know that we are one with the Flow when we smile, when we feel good, when things are going our way. Because flow wants things to go our way. Every day, it presents us with opportunities to let us in, to embrace it, to let it carry us. Flow is letting life carry us where it wants to take us, because it knows better. It’s been here before.

Flow is ancient and timeless and newborn. In the same instant. And the very fact that we can’t wrap our beginner’s minds around that is proof enough that we should just go with it. And get carried away. Flow wrote this post. I was just the lucky scribe. And when I am in Flow, I am lucky in everything.

Love is holding a balloon in the park on Sunday.

Hand holding string holding balloon flowing in the wind.

Easy Does It

I need a massage. But I’m happy. My life is in constant evolution, transformation, full flowering. I’m putting the pieces together, and making an effort to keep the lessons when things go apparently ‘wrong’. There is a separation between needs and wants. I have the thought, or feeling, rather, in the body, my back in particular, that I need a massage. Fact is, I probably won’t get one. And it will probably be okay. No, it will definitely be okay.

I think about this search for a partner. Which is bogus, and doesn’t lead to its target, in fact it leads away from it. I’m tired. Not in my life, but in my head, in my heart, of hitting the same wall. Instead, I’m going to stay where I am, in this space of love that I have created inside, and radiate that, not as a means to an end but as a state of being, a directive and a state of grace, because I owe that to myself, and because it feels good. Easier written than done, but certainly possible, if not necessary to well being and inner peace. That means looking at my life and thinking, feeling rather, as that is more essential and immediate, that what I have is enough. That who I am is enough.

I accept fully and totally what today may bring, with the apparently ‘good’ and ‘bad’, without labels wherever possible, with a dose of serenity. The serenity to walk through my life and know that as Bob Marley said, ‘every little thing is gonna be alright’. And when I have that thought, it makes me mushy and sentimental inside, and I feel the fragility of my heart, the tenderness of my soul, and I start to melt.

The computer that I am too much of the time, the blonde-haired machine as the wise sage, Jean, told me once, is draining. The image projected is tiring and inauthentic. I am so much more than this desperate 30-something girl trying too hard at everything and ending up alone, only to feed her own story of helplessness and victimization. It’s an old and worn-out idea, and I set it free, as it doesn’t belong to me, and I don’t belong to it. I let it go, let myself go, and rise and fall and rise again.

There is an unrelenting strength inside, beyond the façade, beyond what is usually shown to the world, beyond the endless pleasing rituals and poses. As crude as it sounds, as a friend said, I can feel free to ‘rock out with my cock out’. I know, that is beyond vulgar, but you get the point. I do not have a male member, nor do I want one. But until society stops using masculine genitalia to illustrate strength – to have brass balls, et cetera, I can show my real self, in the true intention behind these expressions.

I have had an experience recently, with a guy, who first became a good friend and then turned into the possibility of something more. Like the Romanian woman in the winery said, ‘things happen according to you’. She was referring to a German enologist who was very uptight and cold, and when she worked at the vineyard, the bottling machine was always breaking down and they lost a lot of time repairing it. Instead, the current enologist is down to earth and relaxed, and the machine for the most part works like a charm.

Her simple comment, along with the typical question and answer ‘are you married?’, ‘no’, and ‘you have plenty of time’ (am I a ticking bomb, excuse me?!), sent me into the bathroom crying. Certainly they were tears that needed to be come out, and she offered me the occasion to pierce the balloon inside.

I had the realization that I had put too much pressure on the guy, and that was why things were apparently falling apart. To be fair, it takes two to tango, and I was not alone in the story, but I want to own my half of the dance. It was a slowly flowering situation (and still is) with someone who I’m not 100% convinced is ready for a relationship, and therefore all the more delicate. I had walked on eggshells, to be fair, and didn’t communicate how I really felt, a part I thought I had to play, because I didn’t know how to authentically be myself without losing him. That is the crux of it, right there, fear of being left, which manifested itself ultimately, as it always does in these situations.

There it is, I didn’t allow myself to be authentic from the get-go. And so that downward spiraled into confusion and miscommunication and an eventual blow-up, specifically I got annoyed at him for being indecisive and wishy-washy about whether he was going to come visit, after he told me that he would, which of course backfired and made him run away. He has since come back into my sphere, don’t’ think he ever left really, he just took a few days out, which in my state was more than enough to consider him ‘gone fishing’.

To not digress into mental masturbation, I was afraid to lose him before we even established a relationship. How crazy is that! I was afraid of losing something I didn’t even have. That is insanity. So I lost it, temporarily, but long enough to feel that deep abandonment labor pain.

Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. But the lesson here, to be learned at all costs, once and for all, imprinted in my head and heart, is that life is not a pressure cooker, but a flow. There is an expression in Italian: se sono rose, fioriranno. If they are roses, they will bloom. Seeing as I can feel my life in full flowering, and that is happening organically, and destiny and free will play equal parts, I resolve to view love and relationships with the same lens.

If they are roses, they will bloom. Roses bloom because it is in their nature, in their DNA. They need water, but not too much, sunlight, but not too much. Even the things we see as positive work exclusively in moderation. Everything functions in moderation. Otherwise it’s suffocating, in every context of life. I vote for freedom, for flow and peace.

Taking Back the Light

Time marches on while I dance in the garden, dressed in garlands of bougainvillea and ripe yellow roses. I am not a soldier, and I do not march. I will not act my age, or be dictated by a calculation between the year I was born and today’s date. You, all of you, can continue to play your games, bien sur, just don’t deal me in.

I am on a train to Monaco, past the rocky precipice of the blue French Med. I am on a beach in Rio, shouting back at the coconut man in Portuguese. I’m sitting on my stoop in Brooklyn, watching the hipsters pass by. That’s how I roll.

Wine school? Hell, yeah, and I’m doing it in Colorno, in the province of Parma. What about the international TV business? Sure. I happen to be an expert.

So, form an orderly queue. I’m not taking numbers. And I’m not giving mine. Who said soft couldn’t be hard? Who said sweet-looking blonde girls have to behave like fluffy little bunny rabbits? I do not come when called. I come when I want to. And seeing as I can come on my own, you better bring something more to the table.

Surprise me. But don’t expect me to be waiting at home for you to show up with your token of ‘wow’. I might just be dancing in the garden. Garden, whose garden? Hmmm, that would be too easy, now wouldn’t it?

And now, for some decoding:

Right, I have been lectured left and right, from a New Yorker to a Paulista (Brazilian from Sao Paulo), about not being too available, about keeping my cards close to my chest, about having it my way. A bender, pleaser, organizer, pacifier, this does not come natural for me. Should we assume that all of our natural instincts are for the best, that there is no room for improvement? I beg to differ.

It is fundamental to recognize, value and respect one’s own achievements, because if we can’t shine a light on ourselves, we must always wait for others to come round and do it for us. Which doesn’t really work in the end. And so, I’m shining my own light. Which means I might stop listening so much, waiting to be validated.

It’s kind of like coming off drugs, the realization that one can and must have a ‘good time’ without substances. Compliments, positive reinforcement and attention are all drugs. They feed us from the outside, and don’t last very long. They can often take us lower than where we started from. If I know my own worth, that is indivisible, independent from situation and circumstance, and is really the ultimate freedom.

The only person I need to please is myself. Why would I want to please anyone else? The very action presupposes that what I bring to the table isn’t good enough. Well, there will be no spectacle this evening, or any other evening. What you see is what you get. If it don’t jive, it ain’t jazz. And everything I’ve gone through to get to this place is a blessing. It is my journey.

Whole

Seeking is one of the stages of being. When a child attempts to crawl for the first time, or reaches for something, or reaches for everything that is just beyond its grasp … this instinct comes from our curious nature, which gets elevated to spiritual ends, in our search for God or the universe within or higher power or whatever/whomever we may call it - that which some believe gives life, for those who believe.

It can happen that one realizes there is no actual seeking to do, or rather that there is nothing to find. However, it is hard to ‘arrive’ here (if it is an actual arriving) without having first done some seeking … and this is a bit of a puzzle. Why do we need to seek to stop seeking, or to realize that our seeking wasn’t necessary? It’s like we have to look until we get to the place of not-looking, because there is nothing to be found but ourselves, and we are the seeker, and we are already there/here. There is not a finding but a re-discovering that one is already whole and complete, that one is not missing anything.

Speaking to the separation from the greater energy, the longing or loneliness of feeling oneself cut off from the universe, may ebb and flow as one feels more or less connected to the All. But it does not take away from ones’ essential wholeness, ones’ essential completeness, the true state of being into which we were all born, with nothing to add, nothing to take away, that we all had at birth and will carry to death and perhaps beyond. Whether this wholeness points to being part of the Universe and sensing that as a stronger force is irrelevant.

Intellectualizing that any further is unnecessary. Wholeness is enough at the moment. Whether in enlightenment terms, that realization is seen as first base and not a home run, that might just be where I am personally ‘at’, developmentally, and there is more to ‘get’.

For now, as someone who has suffered the falseness of a supposed missing piece, and that something or someone could fill that gap, knowing that I am already full just as I am and don’t need anything else is already such a state of grace and relief that I’m happy to float here for awhile and see what else comes up, whenever it does or doesn’t choose to come up. But this kind of thinking can be dangerous, because then enlightenment becomes something to ‘get’, and that is not at all the case. The spiritual mountain may in itself be a trick of the mind, the concept that we must climb and actively be doing something, when actually we are already at the top, because there is no mountain.

The typical pointer to love and especially romantic love as a way to feel whole without any climbing is tempting. If wholeness can be triggered through the love of another person, our work is done for us. But essentially that just proves our incompleteness all over again, putting us back to where we started.

Idealized love means we can just go bumbling through life and then this outside thing happens to us, and bam, we are complete. It is as if our incompleteness was a necessary waiting game, and then poof, we are fixed. This is the stuff of fiction, and not at all true. If two people who don’t understand their intrinsic wholeness then come together, hoping to fill their emptiness with each other, it is just a recipe for more experiences of incompleteness, now with extra fuel to the fire, in the form of expectation that the other person will make up the difference, which can of course never be fulfilled. And yet, we’ve based much of arts and literature and music on this fallacy. It is very dangerous. I am the first to champion love, but fear I’ve been doing it for all the wrong reasons. I really thought it could replace everything, and most of all, replace the bit that I thought was missing in myself. Which isn’t missing.

The idea of romantic love as a path to enlightenment or wholeness is just one of many false spiritual cure-alls, and it happens to be an extremely strong and pervading myth of our times. The concept of twin souls or soul mates and the implied separation and reconnection in that has caused a great deal of suffering, for those that have not ‘found’ that person, and believe that to be the meaning of life, and for those who have ‘found’ that person, the slippery slope of a pedestal with a very high place to fall from.

If belief is seen as married to doubt, then the following of a faith or doctrine as a thing outside of oneself which will bring wholeness is just as dangerous. If God is seen as something intrinsically separate, it only serves to reinforce our separation. Faith is then seen as a life-preserver that we must hold onto to not drown in the sea of life, and in that we are not relying on ourselves to do the navigating. I do not posit that there is no God, or we are alone, quite the contrary, that in our wholeness we are absolutely connected to everything, which means that God is neither inside us nor outside us, and with our very being, faith or trust is not necessary because life is the proof of everything. We are here, and that is enough. When we point to God in church, we are actually pointing to ourselves, to our own existence.

On a personal note, having found my own wholeness, I can share that with others, and help them to recognize at least intellectually that such a thing exists, and has existed all along. If we remove the sense that any one person can complete another – which assumes falsely that one is born incomplete, then we must also look at the notion of complementing, for to compliment is to supply something with the other lacks, and essentially implies the same meaning. What are we left with, then? Relating is a start, to have or establish reciprocal relationships, of separate and whole beings coming together.

I do not attempt to project this singular moment in which I understood my own wholeness onto the whole of human nature. Just like the animals on one island who started to use a rudimentary tool to open a nut or fruit, others followed suit on another island, and that happens with human experience as well, so I am making the assumption that if this has happened to me, it has happened to others as well.

“The richness of not wanting wrote these poems” – Kabir, Love Poems from God

Waiting is resistance hard at work. Because it implies a state of not having, and the drudgery of patience while one is in that place of lack. It is resistance to the most simple of truths – wholeness. It is not sexy or exciting in itself, although the initial moments of release from the pain and exhaustion of looking can feel like ecstasy, if momentarily. Separation collapses, and it can’t really be put back together again, because it wasn’t real to begin with. It is the illusion that collapses, the yearning that has itself as the object beings to fall apart – the wanting to want loses its power. This is a surge for the one no longer seeking, because all of that power had been given away in the search. There is so much more energy to tap into once the searching is deemed unnecessary. With nothing to do but give it away, nothing to do but share it, to be in the wholeness and enjoy it, because it is a gift that we’ve all been given. It is our birthright - wholeness, completeness, just as we are, nothing to add or take away.