My Hobbit Hole

I've become the Goldilocks of trashcans. Two weeks ago, I moved into my new home. It's a little cottage in Mill Valley, just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. After years of being in and out of cities and in and out of storage units, finally settling down means everything must be perfect, including the garbage cans. It's strangely hard to find just the right trash receptacle - you want it to do its job and fit in its corner. But I don't want to buy something just to fill the space. I'm willing to wait for the right one. The right garbage can is important, you know.

When I first signed the lease and posted a picture on Facebook, Zach said, "I didn't know they were still selling real estate in heaven." Tracking down your own spot of heaven is a bit of a holy calling for most of us. My heaven apparently comes with skunks plotting on the deck and squirrels tap-dancing on the roof. The floor tilts a bit to the left. Spiders fall from the ceiling. Sun lights the deck in the afternoon. When I open the sliding glass doors, I can hear water rushing past rocks in the creek bed. My storage space rests under a treehouse. It's like camping, but with my own mattress and internet access. It doesn't have everything I was looking for - there's no laundry or bath tub - but I'm learning to accept gifts as they come, without being too persnickety about checking off every box I concocted while dreaming of what I want next. So far, I've learned that I own too many books and that it is possible to coexist peacefully with many-legged insects. I see animals loving my home as much as I do as a good sign, even as I lose any and all remorse over killing ants.*

* All god's creatures, my ass. Get out of my sink, ants.

I've always treated my apartments like way stations between me and whatever was next. For the first time, I want to build a home. A home with a trashcan that suits me perfectly, yellow rugs and mugs, a home with the few pieces of furniture I've collected and the books I love. I don't know what my future looks like. Any wisdom I've gained over the years falls smack into the "give up on knowing what's coming because life will surprise the hell out of you" category. I don't know if I'll be here for five months or five years. I do want to get married and have kids and, since I'm turning 36 in a few months, it would be nice if that was sooner rather than later. But I want to build my home as though I'll be here for years - choosing things carefully, creating a space for myself, the kind of space that nurtures who I am and who I want to be, and looks pretty doing it. If I do up and move again soon, it will still be time well spent. Because this is a way of taking care of myself, of reminding myself that I'm worth the effort, even if it is just me. Especially if it's just me.

Maybe this will be the last time I can create a home that's all my own. If you have a family, apparently you sometimes have to let them choose things and, I don't know, take their needs into account on occasion. So maybe this is the last time I get to enjoy being psycho perfectionist about trashcans and having everything precisely the way I want it. Maybe this is practice for building a beautiful, useful space for me and my family. Maybe this is creating the space that will nurture and support me for years to come. I just don't know. So I will build it and trust that things will work out exactly as they should.

For now, home is a hobbit hole surrounded by redwoods and tucked into the curve of a babbling creek. Maybe it will be mine for mere months, maybe for years. But now is all we ever know for sure. So I will love it and care for it until it's time to love and care for something else.

Talking To The Universe Like a Crazy Person

I really don't know how to talk about this in a way that doesn't sound insane. Or California fruity to the nth degree. Maybe it's that East Coast education, but I generally try to keep my severe Church of Hippie leanings under wraps. That said, there's this thing I do. I really don't know how to explain it, but if I'm going to write a blog post about it, I guess I have to try. When I have a question or more emotions than I know how to manage, I'll sit down at my computer. Sometimes my questions are profound, sometimes they have to do with my to-do list. Then I'll just start typing. When I read it back, it doesn't quite sound like it came from me. It's smarter and wiser and kinder, but has worse grammar and often misspells things. It feels like whatever this is has a better sense of the truth, a better understanding, more love, more wisdom, just more than I could possibly have with my limited senses and smallish, underused cerebellum. I remove myself and my brain from the process and just allow the information to flow through my fingers. Some of my favorite things have been written this way. I'm learning to tap into that and the more I practice, the easier it comes.

Sometimes when I start typing, this flow of information causes an emotional or physical reaction. There's an energy to it. My nose will tingle or tears will start running down my face. It's like all my senses get involved and something shifts energetically. It's not even so much about the words, it's more about the feeling.

When this happens, it really starts to feel like it's coming from somewhere other than me. I know how that sounds. Because, what - am I channeling spirits? Aliens? The universe? If you google this type of writing, it sounds desperately flaky at best and charlatan-infested at worst. The cited wikipedia example is a woman who translates Martian messages into French. Which, let's be real, would be amazing and I definitely want to see that.

But I'm learning to guide my life by what feels good - because we're all just making it up as we go, so why not go toward what feels good? I've tried following the things that make me feel bad and I never end up in a place I want to be. And this feels good. It feels powerful, it feels energetic, it feels useful, and it feels loving. So I ask my questions. Because sometimes that's all you can do: ask and trust that the answer that boomerangs back to you is the right one.

Recently, I started doing this writing for friends. Doing this on a bigger scale feels a little scary, a little vulnerable. But that's what I'm trying to play with right now. Opening up to who I really am and trusting that the people who need this and who think it makes some sort of sense will find it and everyone else will just click away to the next thing on this infinite internet of ours.

But still, I think I'd rather take my clothes off in public than say I type messages from the universe. SEE? THAT'S WEIRD.

Calling All Guinea Pigs

Want to help me find out if this is really a thing?

If you're game to be a guinea pig, email me with a question. (Click the "Send me a pandagram" box in the sidebar.) Or leave it in the comments. I would love to do this for you. I honestly don't know what I need or what works. So far I've done it just with people's names, but these are friends and I have some background knowledge of them. You can try sending me any burning questions you have. Or your first name and a little about your life and where you want some clarity. I'll sit down with whatever I get and see what comes. Obviously, I have zero training and am not a coach or a doctor or anyone with any respectable letters after her name. All I know is that what I've written has been useful for me and seems to be useful for the people I've done it for.

If you're willing to let me publish your question and answer here, let me know. (If you'd rather keep it private, that's okay too.)I'd love to do this once a week on the blog for awhile, just to see how it lands. Maybe I'll even give it a snappy name, although I am admittedly terrible at coming up with snappy names.

Have a question? Need some clarity? Let me know and I'll apply my weird voodoo to it and see what I come up with for you. It may or may not give you any answers, but it will probably make you feel better.

Fork in the Road

My dad’s sister got a reading from a psychic in San Francisco a few months after he died. Because that’s what we do in my family.

Dad showed up, as a spirit or a ghost or whatever you get to be after you're dead, and the psychic said he was wearing jogging shorts. As far as I know, my father never owned a pair of jogging shorts in his life. He was fond of joking that running was the worst way to be healthy. “Sure you live longer,” he’d say, “but you have to spend all that extra time jogging.” Now that I spend a lot of time circling trails, I wonder how much longer he would have lived, and how much more peaceful he would have felt, if he had been a runner.

As she told me this, writing off dad's curious post-death jogging shorts as psychic dissonance, I remembered a thought I had months before he passed away. Dad lived in Swall Meadows, right next to Inyo National Park. After spending the day in the care center with him, I would run in the shadows of the sunset-tipped mountains. This thought came to me in the middle of one of my afternoon runs, feeling weirdly like a vision - an idea I’m really not comfortable with, minus Peyote and a Native American chieftain or two. So I wrote it off as the product of mild heat stroke and my new and strange obsession with running. At the time, Dad had already started to talk about dying, but we wouldn’t accept it for months yet. But as I was running through the desert, I saw two paths for my father.

One, the widest and bleakest, the path he eventually chose, was of him spiralling down into the worst the human experience can offer - a broken body and a mind that can’t heal because both are so separated from their own processes and emotions that they can’t find their way back.

The second path, much fainter, showed my father running. Conquering what ailed him until he was healthy enough to become one of those sun-leathered old dudes pounding the pavement in running shoes with wet bandanas tied around their grizzled heads.

Knowing now how badly off he was by the time he fell, I don’t know if that was possible. Maybe what I was seeing was a path that had forked off many years previous and was no longer an option. Maybe it was a path he could have chosen. I don’t know. But I saw him running. I saw him healthy. I saw him beating back the demons with sweat and salt and endless miles of asphalt.

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I'm writing a book about my father's death. I'll be sharing pieces of the Dead Dad Book as I work on it, because writing here and on Twitter led me to this book in the first place.

Adventure Project #30: Busting Through Self-Spackled Walls

I started doing these videos and then I stopped doing them and then I started again and that's mostly the process of doing something new and intimidating. You start, you ride the high, the high drops to a plateau, the plateau feels flat because that's how plateaus work, and you wander off in search of higher ground. Or you invent drama to give yourself an excuse to wander off, which is what I did. Boy drama, specifically, because that's my favorite kind. You can excuse yourself for a lot of things when boy drama is happening. But you know what doesn't help the drama? Excusing yourself. Because that makes you less you. Because doing the things you love keeps your engagement with life at a steady burn and being engaged with life makes everything better, especially drama you invented because you wanted to give yourself some faux high ground. Or maybe you invent drama because you hit your upper limit of excitement and feel a subconscious yearning to drag yourself back down to a more understandable level.

When I find a foolproof formula for raising the excitement ceiling and squishing the drama, I'll let you know. For now, it seems to boil down to "do your shit and let yourself feel as good as you can as much of the time as possible."

So here I am, back to talking with my face about my process of doing scary things like becoming the person and the writer I want to be and, yes, that is scary. I'm also putting them here now, because that's a bit more commitment than just throwing them up on youtube and hoping nobody notices.

Sometimes I doubt the value of the writing I do here under the juggling panda and the face talking I do on youtube. Because my external notion of what's "valuable" doesn't always match up with what my insides tell me is worthwhile.

But I do believe there's value in sharing experiences. Because if you share, you and whoever's feeling reflected in that experience both get to feel less alone. Because emotions and the wrangling thereof aren't discussed nearly enough in our culture. Because if I feel it, someone else out there feels it too. Maybe that someone is you. I am not nearly the special feelings snowflake I thought I was. If I feel scared and lonely and joyful and overwhelmed and stuffed with love for things, you probably do as well. And the more we talk about who we want to be and what we love, the more connected we are. In the end, that's all any of us want: to feel love, to feel connected, to just plain feel.

Making Space For All The Feelings

You only have so much room in your brain and your heart and your body. When your body gets clogged with emotion like fear and anger, it seeps into your heart and your head, leaving less space for things you actually want. I spend a lot of my time clearing space. I cry at least three times a week. I do that free write thing where you sit down for ten or twenty minutes and keep your fingers typing constantly, so that whatever is choking your brain can be laid out on paper for you to delete or burn. If something is pressing on my throat or my chest, I determine what it is and what it's trying to tell me.

In my younger days, the manic pixie dust of the mantra made me scoff, but I'm learning how deeply valuable a good mantra can be for reframing situations and popping my brain out of its habitual negativity. Like when I catch myself worrying about some new relationship possibility and why he hasn't called, I've trained my brain to call up what I want instead, using a phrase that reminds me that he doesn't need to call, that's not where we are now, and all I need to do is hold a light, curious space for both of us to discover what this is. Usually, when I dissolve whatever is knotting up in my chest, he calls. Or I call and he picks right up and says he was just thinking about me.

Using whatever causes pain - often a thought your brain is convinced is the most deeply true thing in the universe but has no real truth in anyone's world but your own - as a trigger for investigation rather than a trigger to shut down can change your life.

Investigation allows you to instill new habits. New habits can shift the Pavlovian response of your brain so it tips toward positive thoughts rather than negative. In the end, your brain just isn't that smart. It's a tape recorder that only knows what has gone before. In order to expand and create and experience new things, you need to move out of your brain and into your body. Because your body registers emotion in a very physical way and that emotion is where change happens. When you dive into an emotion and feel it until it shifts and dissolves, space opens. When you track a negative thought and reprogram your brain to shift toward how you want to think about a situation rather than how you've thought about it in the past, space opens.

When you create that space, you get to decide how to fill it. Love and joy and progress need room. You can't try to paste good stuff on top of bad and hope it all works out okay. Sometimes it does. Sometimes the good stuff dissolves the bad. But keeping it good requires cleaning. Your emotional life needs just as much attention as your career and your relationships and your home. At first, this pissed me off - the last thing anyone needs is one more place to tend. But when you tend your emotions, everything else gets exponentially easier.

The more space I create, the less cynical and more creative I become. When I'm not so bogged down in fear, there's more room for wonder and awe. When I'm not constantly dodging how I feel, I have the space to notice that it truly is an amazing world, full of tilting giraffes and ballet dancers and people who strap wooden boards to their legs and go spinning off cliffs. Humans flying through the air on wings made by hands. Music that can touch the emotion you didn't know you had. Words strung together in just the right way. Actors who reflect feelings you recognize and offer them up from a different place, a place of story, so that maybe you can understand yourself in a new way.

Our favorite things - movies, music, books - often evoke our own emotion. Because they're a safe space where our feelings can be reflected back to us and maybe begin to heal.

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This post came from watching this video. My favorite part is at minute six where everyone starts dancing. My least favorite part is where the dude at 6:41 punches a stuffed giraffe.