Such Great Heights

Lately, I've been suffering from vertigo. For real. No joke.
The sensation? Spinning when I am still.

Reminiscent of? Childhood games, binge drinking in college, standing at top of a tall building.
It's an interesting combination of memories - excess linked through feeling dizzy.
Standing on top of a tall building is the association I've connected most with lately.

Why? Because on the way to San Francisco and back recently, I was editing the copy editors version of the book we are about to release. Because at the Karuna Training program I was attending, we spent the entire time exploring egolessness, aka: Who am I? Do I even exist?

Because during the program, I had a conversation that lead to the fortune in the photo above. It reiterated a reckoning I've been feeling getting urgent lately: that I need to leap into a deep end, begin telling The World I am available for things I've been offering so far in beta mode. For instance: creativity coaching, one on one instruction, and more. 

Finally, because I read all three Tara Gentile's titles on the way home and answered some big, hard questions for myself about my business.

I was very happy with all this hard work and thinking, but arrived home exhausted. And I crashed, physically, mentally, from pushing too hard.

The end result, vertigo. Doc says its from an inner ear infection.
My intuition says it's more than that. Both/and.

The Postal Service has a track called Such Great Heights that's been in my head the last couple of days. Ilana often sings the part about freckles in our eyes to me, but the part I've been thinking about is the heights. Queasiness, unsteadiness to go where I need to go. Fear of failing, of falling. I've know ever since turning the corner of the Western New Year that I am so terrified of this book getting out and that I have delayed it some out of that fear. Now that Losar, the Tibetan New Year has also passed, I realize it needs to happen. Now. And I also can't push myself. And it will happen whether I like it or not.

My trying to control it, what comes out of all this change, is causing the vertigo.

It's a paradox. And yet, it's not. It only seems contradictory to me - the idea of getting something done and also being kind to myself. My story is they are incompatible. And yet, this is how I've gotten here so far. I haven't gotten here on self abuse. I've gotten here on self care, on letting go, on being kind. And I'll need even more where I am going, my vertigo seems to know better than I do.

My fear of heights is not telling me not to go. It simply knows these are big heights. While the rest of me pretends it's no biggie to keep her cool, my vertigo knows the truth. I try to listen to it without panic, simply noticing the spinning sensation. Also noticing that some part of me knows that while there will be some falling, some failing, I will not die. This will not kill me.

Part of me knows I will fly. But the step that it takes to get to that point? Seems impossible.

Here it comes. Here I go. Here I come. Ready or not.

 

New Year's Intention

A few years ago, friends of ours introduced us to, or co-invented with us (none of us can seem to recall which happened) a practice of coming up with a single word for the upcoming year, on New Year's Eve. The word, we decided, should have many possible meanings, and not be stated as any kind of affirmation (I will play more in the coming year/I am playing more in the coming year) or resolution (I need to play more in the upcoming year). Instead, it would allow for word play - for exploration, for change in meaning, throughout the year.

The first one Dylan and I chose, and we chose the same, was "consume." We tried to gently explore our food consumption (going on a diet, eventually, but really focusing more on watching/noticing consumption than losing weight, which was a helpful change in perspective), and also financial consumption, consumption of goods, of energy, of social interactions.

Luckily, neither of us developed consumption.

Moving Math

The first song I run into in my iTunes this morning as I sit down to write about
coincidence and intuition?

"Synchronicity" by the Police, of course.
All the lyrics are worthwhile, so here they are:

"Synchronicity I" by the Police
With one breath, with one flow You will know Synchronicity A sleep trance, a dream dance A shaped romance Synchronicity A connecting principle Linked to the invisible Almost imperceptible Something inexpressible Science insusceptible Logic so inflexible Causally connectable Yet nothing is invincible If we share this nightmare Then we can dream Spiritus mundi If you act as you think The missing link Synchronicity We know you, they know me Extrasensory Synchronicity A star fall, a phone call It joins all Synchronicity It's so deep, it's so wide You're inside Synchronicity Effect without cause Sub-atomic laws, scientific pause Synchronicity

It's been a week full of it. I began reading Letters to Vanessa by Jeremy Hayward to take a break from Liar's Club by Mary Karr (great book but pretty heavy). In my first class of the week, a student asked about intuition and how it fit into writing practice, which lead to a conversation about coincidence and synchronicity. I continued to read Letters only to go deeper and deeper into these questions (I had read his more "academic" books before, but not this one) and of course began to notice it all over, as is usually the case.

I also noted myself behaving in some old rusty patterns I hadn't done in awhile. Eating in binges, not exercising at all, shutting down and disconnecting. I attributed it to winter, to, well, I don't know what. You know how it can be. You start acting all shitty towards yourself and no explanations are necessary. The part that believes you suck just puts it forward without justification and you stop asking.

Then, last night in the last class of the week, it hit me. Last night was the 20th and there was so much focus on it being a year since Obama's inauguration, on Dylan at the credit union with students returning, that I had missed the warning signs. The 19th is the anniversary of my mother's death. Clearly my body caught the signals and protected my mind from them, or tried to amplify the messages with abusive behaviors.

I wrote about it, so painful to feel the connections between self-hate and grief, how my mother taught me those behaviors and somehow by doing them I feel closer to her. Later, in bed, I told Dylan that the older I get, the less real my parents seem, the less I actually remember, while the more I actually sympathize, understand and am curious about them. Very sad stuff.

In bed, crying after processing, I also realized a moving chunk of math. As of March 15, my father will have been dead 20 years. My mother died when I was almost 20. This is the 13 year after my mother died; my dad died when I was about to turn 13. I had a mother as long as I haven't had a father, and vice-versa. Wow.

Coincidence, synchronicity, we tend to use these for blessings, for good outcomes. Fate gets the bad rap for the "negatives." This is a mixed realization, but I am giving it to synchronicity. As the Police point out, all of it works toward the same ends, and who am I to say which it is?

RIP Tricia Leanna Reilly Hall