on being right

Sometimes I feel like I’m not enough.

Not smart enough.

Not fun enough.

Not cute enough.

Not worthy of anything better.

And so, sometimes, during those times when I feel I’m not enough, I sabotage myself from ever doing any better. The subconscious rationale is this: If I don’t amount to what I could amount to, then I am right about not being enough.  And being right somehow feels better to my silly head than being enough. I guess it’s a guarantee at being something.

everyone could see her if they wanted

The thing about it is: when she's left alone for too long, she only gets bigger. She gets louder and brighter and imagines more. It is as if she has no boundaries, for there is nothing but nothing to push out against and nothing pushes against her. So she expands and expands. Building songs, writing worlds, and visioning the impossibles as possible.

Although there are many who can't hear her footsteps, they gain volume as her gentle sway absorbs the shock of being ignored. The brightness of her reflections and imperfections add light to even the most hidden corners and bust through the least transparent surfaces.

from the lungs

I have no idea why sometimes I tighten and only slightly release when she breathes. It's a stuck feeling that moves into her eyebrows when I try to figure it out. I think she's scared. I think the world feels too big and she things that she can fit it in her arms. When will she ever figure it out?

You'd think breathing would make it easier. But sometimes it only gets harder, tighter, more complex.
Is it that I hold it all for her? That instead of releasing and letting go, I pull in?

She ate steak wheels last night. They were wrappings of hammered, flattened meat stuffed with spinach and garlicky butter. Some things are better all wrapped up in flattened, hammered meat, but spinach is not one of those things.  It gets soggy and grainy. Slimy even. The garlic and sodium infusions only mask the ickiness. The flavor infusions do not enhance the overall taste and instead become associated with slimy, icky spinach.

I wonder if that's how the fear works inside her heart?
It gets rolled and pummeled into the red flesh only to become a slimy mess.
The flavor-mocking achievement and keep-it-all-togetherness, like the garlic and sodium of the beef wrapped spinach,  are only associated with the terror.

benign vigilance

“When I was learning to drive,” says Gay Hendricks in his book The Big Leap, “I remember my instructor telling me that driving was more an art than a science. The key to the art, he said, was what he called ‘benign vigilance,’ or paying keen but relaxed attention to what your car and the other cars were doing in every moment.”

He uses this to describe the process of paying attention to one’s own personal process.  He is speaking specifically of attention to the ways we sabotage our own success, but I think we could use this “keen but relaxed attention” in all areas of our personal growth.  It sure is more fun than fixating, obsessing, and inflating the process. Or ignoring anything true about ourselves altogether.

what IS luck exactly?

Is it something really good that happens to us for no reason whatsoever?

Or, is it our ability to connect to the larger picture and find the opportunity - to engage with the universal super-highway and jump on board?

Or perhaps it is simply that we do the work to realize our goals?

It's out there.

There's enough to go around for all of us.

complete [moving]

Acrylic on 10x13 canvas.

An excerpt about being a human:

So, I had to make some agreements with myself in order to always be in agreement with myself. Meaning, in order to be the complete me all the time, I had to start talking about it and making it really clear to others what I am about so that I get to be me all the time. If they are the ones who can’t ‘come to terms’ with it or ‘question’ it, then that’s their process to deal with, not mine. I’m already complete. They are going to have to catch up whether they like it or not.