Category: Self

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You Get The Tiara When You’re Ready For The Tiara

Last Saturday was my birthday.

Friday night our local community store had an artisan night — we have small monthly parties, and local artists show their work, gain exposure, and there is plenty of free food, wine, and margaritas, all donated.  Artisan nights are a  reason for people to get together, mingle, spend time together, and local artists are stars for an evening.

A friend who lives down the street showed up to the gathering with a pretty teal blue and white gift bag for me.  Inside were two elegant boxes, “You can open them both now, or you can open one, and open the other on Sunday.”

I chose to open only one gift as this same friend, her daughter, and I had plans for a special brunch date on Sunday.

“Just one gift,” I said.  “I want to open the other when we’re all together on Sunday.”

She told me which box to open.  Inside was a tiara.  Not a plastic tiara, but a sterling plated tiara with quality rhinestones, with a well made hair comb for placing on my head.  Not a toss-away-toy, but the real deal.

Now, I’ve always disliked tiaras.  They seem to me to scream privilege, and a princess mentality that I have looked down on in quiet contempt.  I would never say, “I think those things are ridiculous,” rather, I held my self-righteous smug superiority to myself.  I would see pictures of women in tiaras, and turn my nose up.  “Why,” I would think, “would any self-respecting woman want to wear a tiara?”

I found out Friday evening.

I wore the tiara all night at the artisan party, and I made sure everyone saw it.  “See my tiara,” I said with a childish pride.   (Recent Harvard studies show that thinking young — age is an attitude — has positive effects on aging.  I turned the clock back 20 years Friday.)

There’s magic in putting a tiara on, in owning one’s specialness and saying, “I celebrate myself.  I sing about myself.  I shine.  I sparkle.  I glow.  I am wonderful.  I am royal and proud of it.”  Amanda plugged into was something deep and precious, and I was ready.

I pulled her aside, and told her that two years ago, I never would have dreamed of wearing a tiara.  “You get the tiara,” I told her, “when you’re ready for the tiara.”

I wore my tiara all night at the party, and I wore my tiara during our elegant brunch on Sunday.

So here is what I think about the metaphysics of tiaras, because I do believe there’s a metaphysics involved.

It’s not about personal superiority.  It’s about not shying away from the magnificence that we are all born with.  Being royal is our birthright, it’s an attitude of grace and confidence, not the birthright of a select few, and it’s something more profound than Disney princesses and beauty pageants.

The metaphysics of the tiara is best expressed by Marianne Williamson in A Return To Love:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.  Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.  It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us.  We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’  Who are you not to be?  You are a child of God.  Your playing small does not serve the world.  There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people don’t feel insecure around you.  We are all meant to shine, as children do.  It’s not just in some of us, but in all of us; it’s in everyone.   And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give people permission to do the same.  As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Yes, there is a metaphysics to the tiara, and Marianne Williamson sums it up.

I spoke with another friend on my birthday, and told her about my tiara, how I felt, and how I thought there was something deep and karmic about this gift, how much fun I had, how light and wonderful the world seemed when I wore it.

“There’s magic in it, you can feel it when you put a tiara on,” she said to me, “in the practice of magic, the tiara has power in it.”  She went on to explain something about magic and head wreathes and their relationship to power and the tiara — the specifics eluded me, but it sounded like the metaphysics of the tiara.

A sparkling magnificence worn on one’s head that says, “I don’t play small.”

It’s a powerful life choice seen in a play of brilliant reflection, beauty, and confidence effortlessly worn.

You get the tiara when you’re ready for the tiara.

I was ready.

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A Few Words On Gratitude

(Please note:  I wrote this entry in two hours.  It may show that investment.  I hope it offers something useful.)

Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your destiny.  —  Gandhi

 

Since moving to the outskirts of civilization, I’ve done a lot of “spiritual work.”  I don’t know what else to call it.  I’ve experienced a shift in consciousness, how I see myself, and how I see the world.  Stuff that I thought that I knew, I now understand better as a way of (B)eing.  I previously posted a piece on loving myself, “A Love Story,” but there’s a bigger picture that’s unfolded: understanding myself as part of life’s beautiful play is finally sinking in.

The myth of separation dissolves.  For today, I’m simply throwing that out there, do as you will with it, for brevity’s sake.  Perhaps by the entry’s end, it will be clearer.

The past year, I’ve worked through many conscious and unconscious stories that governed my beliefs, and I’ve left the worst of them behind.  And, yes, I do believe that these things can happen that quickly, when one is ready.  Therapy wasn’t my answer, but committing to my creativity and spiritual path has unleashed insight after insight, in remarkable and demonstrable ways.  Friends tell me of the changes they see.  I smile.  Nature is instrumental.  I’ve come into myself by realizing how simple and magical life is without trying.  Spring arrives, flowers bloom, tress grow.  All this will pass, there will be a deep sleep, and the spring will come again.

I am one with the forces I see in the seasons, and I’ve merged with life and (B)eing, because life exists everywhere, here.

Education, for its many gifts, really fucks up life’s simplicity, on a fundamental level.  We’re taught wonderful ideas, learn to ask better questions, and learn to answer with more sophistication, but self-love, awareness, and (B)eing are conspicuously missing from the curriculum funded by the incredulous student loan debt that I incurred and have since given to the Powers That Be to worry about.  I am unlearning not only my stories, and my family’s stories, but the intellect’s hubris for its works and artifacts.

Last week, during an early morning walk, the world grabbed my shoulder, and got my attention.  The sun hung low, a glowing ball shining through a perfectly clear blue sky, surreal in its clarity and depth.  The valley and hills exploded with life, innumerable greens, birds, butterflies, insects, all the critters that remained invisible to my eyes.  “I am the sky,” I heard myself think, “when light passes through me, life grows as it should, it happens without question or worry, and it will happen with or without my attention.”

God is a label.  Gratitude another label, a way that language limits lived beauty and power and grace, the ineffable experience of being alive, and being part of life’s magnificence.  “Gratitude” is how the mind places its attention, a practice that we can submerge ourselves in.  It then becomes a loop, the more we do it, the better life gets.  Beauty, joy, nature, poetry, the body’s strength, a good meal, a glass of clean water, a bird, whatever meaningfully grabs the mind and heart, no matter the circumstances, whatever feeds the soul and makes it feel alive, that’s where life presents itself.

I admit, it’s easier here and now.  But during my psychotic break while living in Manhattan, I remember focusing on a pigeon nest across from my window, as I lost my mind, my family,  faced eviction, had no food, and feared that I had entered mental nether regions from which I would never return.  The wall between myself and the forgotten homeless living on the streets was a rent controlled building that I hadn’t paid rent on in months.  For hours, I simply watched pigeons cooing and caring for each other, because I could do little else.  They gave me serenity and a connection to living.  Those hours in which I watched cooing gray birds, their nest tucked in between concrete slabs, affirmed life.  And, therefore, myself.

I’m blessed with good friends, many who have had charmed lives.  Truly charmed lives.  Money, travel, life experience, prestige.  Prestige with a capital P.  While I was cleaning houses, they were traveling the world, making medical breakthroughs, starting NASDAQ companies, the list goes on.  Yet, their lives are full of problems.  Whenever we talk, I hear of some new crisis, some new problem, some melodrama occupying the most precious real estate on the planet, their mind.  Relationships and circumstances always resolve, but you wouldn’t believe it from the way they talk.

Materially, they have more than 99 percent of the world’s population, but they believe they have nothing, believe themselves broken, believe something is wrong with them, see problems that don’t exist everywhere, and therefore create problems that do.  They scream this reality with every-other-sentence out of their mouth, in their judgements of themselves, and of others.  Instead of allowing a sunset to sink into their skin, or water’s music to slowly connect them to themselves, they fully inhabit their perceptions of the world’s failures.  To look at, touch, and smell a flower, and radically experience it for a moment, eludes them, or leaves them far too quickly.  Instead, they allow somebody’s annoying behavior or some situation rental space in their sacred mind, where we make and create the world we wish to live in.  Nothing happens in the world, without it happening in the mind, first.  I see them give away their life sentence by sentence, unconscious of where and what their attention is doing, at that moment.

This is the voice of experience writing, not the voice of judgement.

In the middle of nowhere, without a car, with a bazillion dollars owed in back taxes, student loan debt, and living, by some folks standards, a terribly uncertain future, I find myself the wealthy one, grounded and flourishing.

If I could give them gratitude, I would.  But we have to find it inside ourselves, for ourselves, if that’s what we want.  We’re free to do so, it’s all in front of us, with or without our attention.  When my friends get tired of slamming their heads against that wall, when they realize that the pain they’re living isn’t worth the prices they are paying, they will come around.  For those of us who know the talk, but struggle with the walk, it looks something like, “yes, I am grateful for x, y, z . . . but, [insert problem or complaint or whatever horrible thing that is happening far away, over which have very limited or no control over],” followed by more emotional engagement.

Most of this is fear.  Fear that life will abandon them, fear that they can’t do it themselves, fear that they’re not worth what they say they want, which is presumably peace and happiness, which costs nothing.

It’s impossible to talk about accomplishing and doing wonderful things, then dive into melodrama.  Most of us say we want all of life’s great things because we want peace and happiness, but the peace and happiness are already there.  I finally get the platitude, “there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.”  I also believe it’s the quickest way to stop violence and hate, because when you’re really connected to radical love and happiness, you do less dumb shit.  I didn’t write, “no dumb shit,” just a lot less.   At some point, some of the dear souls in my life will realize that love does it’s job, and surrender to it, because they know they deserve to.  That’s it.  That’s why we’re here.

That’s when gratitude, no matter life’s heart breaks, disappointments, and setbacks, becomes a way of life, for those who want to live as fully as possible, and not practice gratitude as a period at the end of sentence filled with anxiety and doubt.

You don’t do it all at once, but you can get better at it.

This is how it looks to me, today.

 

*******

Video:  Children’s Orchestra Plays Mozart On Instruments Made From Trash

“Impoverished” children whose homes are built on a garbage dump see the world different, and create a better one.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiYFcuIkBjU]

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Thank You, Maya Angelou

“I believe the most important single thing beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.”  —  Maya Angelou

I never met Maya Angelou, never hugged her, never kissed each cheek, never told her “thank you” in person.  I hoped that I would someday, but knew that I would not, given her fragile health these past years.

Though I never met her, I considered her a mentor.  More than a mentor, through her unique love and hope and creativity, she’s helped me believe in myself and my choices.

There was an interview with her that I found on YouTube many years ago, and in it she tells a story.  The interviewer asks Angelou about her days working as a prostitute.  The interview seems to have been deleted from YouTube, because I haven’t been able to find it for sometime.  In lieu of posting that now lost interview, I am liberally paraphrasing Angelou in the following, but the story’s heart and main details remain intact:

“I was at a book signing for [her latest book] and there was a long line, going nearly around the block.  It was during the day, and I noticed a girl in the line.  She was obviously a working girl.  Her nails were long and painted brightly, she had the false eyelashes, bright lipstick, her clothes were a working girl’s clothes, but there she was standing in line, probably after working most of the night, to have me sign her book.  I smiled to her when she came to the front of the line.  She handed me her book and said softly, ‘you give me hope.’  That’s it, right there.  That’s the whole of life.  If I gave this one girl hope, I knew I had done well during my life.”

Angelou’s voice broke as she recounted the story, and her eyes teared.

Angelou brightly shone her faith in life and love through selflessness, and, from what I have read and seen, she never buried the working woman’s narrative under shame, or lied about it.  Of all the tales she could have told about her years as a prostitute, she chose this simple story of hope.  I believe that some of Angelou’s strongest moments as a writer and a human confident in her creativity may have come specifically from her work experience, in which her originality, sexuality, and ability to love deeply were expressed.

Her poem “Phenomenal Woman” seems to me to have emerged from those years, for it is a singularly redemptive expression of self-worth, and the radiant power of the creative self in the world, no matter the world.  Though the poem can be read as a black woman’s affirmation of herself against a white class system, I believe the poem touches on deeper themes and realities, and it seems more akin to Whitman’s “Song of Myself” in its spiritual orientation and celebratory grandeur.  Whereas Whitman locates his epiphany’s source in nature (“The Leaves Of Grass”), Angelou boldly locates her epiphany in her own being and body.  In its deceptively simple swagger, Angelou fearlessly seizes self-splendor, the shining self that we bring to the world, when we’re connected to the mystery in ourselves, the transcended self beyond limits, the self beyond the “I”.  Her life’s wounds dictated that Angelou dive into a profound center of love and spiritual luminosity, and spiritual beauty exudes from the poem’s seductive details, a work of singular grace and inimitable style.

Angelou will teach for decades to come, her courage echoing as a celebratory song to those finding their own voices.  This past week, bemoaning my proofreading shortcomings in ‘Simplify, Simplify, Simplify,’ Angelou encouraged me to love my writing, embrace it wholeheartedly, and continue confidently, without second guessing myself.  For a few hours after my posting my entry, I remembered the following line:  “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

Thank you, Maya Angelou.  Two kisses, and a hug.

And thank you.
 

[http://youtu.be/VeFfhH83_RE]