Covid Coming Out Party

Interestingly, I didn’t get to this post about Social Awkwardness until today…because I was too busy:

Getting Out There
Talking and Listening and
Taking Time (gasp) to get to know people!

Of course it started out as an assignment from good friend and counsel, but since I was already all dressed up with nowhere to go, I had one foot out the door.

It’s quite a miraculous thing to go on a hike or walk these days, and quite a few people are noticing the magic of simple encounters with another human being. With mask or without, it doesn’t seem to matter to folks who are more focused on regaining connections.

There was the earnest Gen Z-er who made the distinction for me that her peers were interested in changing the world unlike Millennials more interested in posting pictures of avocado toast. Her throw-down, not mine.

Then the forensics accountant who worked for Customs, a G-girl with a wry sense of humor and deeper soulful side.

And Sherree Patrice, wearing the most fabulous Elton John-esque specs and Minding Her Own Mission mask.

The very kindred spirit who had spent much of her life raising two young adult girls, dis-entangling from a Force of Nature mom, and learning to live with a fearfulness that really wasn’t hers but her husband’s.

And then the Iranian gentleman who responded two years ago to the oncologists’ dire predictions with “I’m not dead yet.” He keeps walking instead of waiting.

The pool of people willing to risk a get-together was growing! So Movie Night it was, with:

an “old-fashioned” British bloke I dare not pigeonhole with description;
a hairdresser who has discovered and loves the 11% British-ness among her African roots;
a ginger girl who self-identifies “bi” and is happily expecting Baby with new boyfriend from Romania via Australia;
an intuitive coach born and raised in Cape Town whose home may actually be in a galaxy far, far away; and
a German woman passionate about motorcycles, scuba diving, cats, and good “sex and snuggling.”

That we watched Car Wash, that early Seventies’ Blaxploitation film, before finishing the night with talk of other realms, Oneness and “individuated oneness blobs”…may say it all, or that I just have to leave it there… or here.

All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go

I started this entry way before Lockdown, noticing that I was very happy to not have any social obligations and get “all dressed up” just for myself. You know…to do that Self-Care stuff like:

Getting out of my pajamas and putting on Big Girl pants
Then “putting my face on” without checking, “Am I actually going to see anyone today?”
Taking time for that Siesta without first railing that it should be “mandated.”

As you may notice, my bar is pretty low. Pedicures, retail shopping therapy and massage weren’t even on the main menu, waiting for an upgrade from Frivolity to Need. That’s why my nose wrinkles at my Mind’s insistence that I don’t feel a wee bit pathetic about the resolution.

Self-Care? Really?! my Body says. You wouldn’t know it if it bit you in the ass.

Yes, it’s another new buzz phrase that the Mind has comes up with, like Mindfulness.

It’s a little bait-and-switch game that my brain is still running, teasing my Body into believing I’ll figure out what the rules to put it into my regimen to make things all better. Shoulds like:

Scheduling a break or nap into my day
Going to the ocean to soak my feet (Damn, forgot to do that today)
Being “gentle” with myself and going with the flow

The beta version of this game was a disaster. I felt like Chicken Little with the sky falling all the time. Like I just wasn’t getting it.

Turns out what my Body wanted was a more human structure for my life…instead of a steel rod, a skeleton with joints and mobility and fine motor skills. Now that’s a concept. And then instead of allowing my spine to stiffen into itself, to keep noticing and allowing myself to go with the flow. Backbone and then all those subtle things my Body felt and my Mind couldn’t wrap its brain around. So I brain-hacked Descartes: I feel therefore I am.

I didn’t even get to the social retardation piece but I’m done for now. “That,” a good friend had the habit of saying, “is for another piece of paper.”

Journalistic Throw-down #1

Why do we write? To be heard, seen, read…

I submitted the following interview / op-ed to dozens of papers. What does it say about me, about them that I needed to post this as a challenge?

Paul Harrison’s wife Rita was only 55 when she died on March 12, shortly before Californians were ordered to Shelter in Place. Although it wasn’t Covid-19 but the other big C that claimed her life, Paul’s friends wondered if Rita wasn’t a “smart lady who knew when to take off.”

“If it weren’t for the lockdown,” he said, “I would have been at the bars every night getting ‘stinking drunk’.” That or anything else to dull the pain of losing the woman who embodied it all for him – brilliance, friendship and eternal love.

So it was truly a silver lining that the world changed in the thick of his grieving and before he could plan a memorial.

Paul had promised Rita before she passed that he would “be all right” and in the four months after her death, he had no opportunity to do anything else but figure out what that meant. Although it hurt every day and in every way to get up out of bed and put on his “big-boy pants,” he did it in fulfillment of his oath.

Today he speaks with both a calm and passion in describing the Rita Harrison River Deep Mountain High Memorial Retreat to be held in Arizona in late October.

To connect the dots of meaning in his life, he explained how the week-long celebration of her life will also be “to honor all the people who changed our world because they had to… because they were there.”

During this pandemic, he says, “all of us have become unlikely heroes,” noting that “people found ways to make a massive statement: This is my life and I choose to live it.”

He mentions the people who have already been acknowledged in the media – those who lost their lives, the ones who were front-line heroes, especially all the clerks and delivery persons who made minimum wage and that we never gave much thought to before.

“And teachers!” he exclaims. Parents have a renewed gratitude for teachers for “being with their children so that they can have time to work… and think… and eat… and sleep!”

From his British perspective, Paul noticed that in every single country when Big Government told people to “stay home,” that was acknowledgment that leaders didn’t really know what to do or how to protect its citizens.

“Politicians passed the buck from the federal level down to state, county and community,” he says without rancor, “and we had to step up and we did.”

“Parents stood up with their kids and loved them every day. Spouses didn’t kill each other! Seniors learned to use their computers and Zoom with their families. Millennials looked up from their phones and said, ‘I can do something,’ Stars stopped being stars and gave concerts and raised money. Friends. Strangers. We changed the face of the earth.”

“I lost the love of my life and her clients thought they lost their therapist, healer and guru,” he went on to say. That she never thought of herself as any of those came from a genuine humility and respect for every individual’s unique way of living out their life. Rita Harrison said often that every person deserves dignity and esteem simply as a human being… which doesn’t mean perfection… but goodness, blind spots and resources of all kinds.

“That’s why I believe that this memorial is the perfect place to celebrate how the People, the Folk, common and not-so-common, mobilized themselves. Nobody should be able to take that away from them… that They Got It Done. And they should remember to pass this on to their children. They must tell them.”

“Even though everyone was isolated, people built this with solidarity. For all the diversity in this country, everyone pulled together, and trouble only arose when differences were stressed again. Despite what the cynics are saying, people are changing the world quietly and for no credit.”

“We grinned and beared it – hating the masks but wearing them – because it taught us about respect, respect for each other’s autonomy.”

My Police State

“Unprecedented,” was my friend’s word. An ex-policeman sworn to protect, his 4″ high text included stats on infections and number of deaths as sufficient justification for closing beaches, requiring all to wear masks, and sending patrol cops and cruisers to warn away anyone thinking of coming out on a ‘warm’ Southern California weekend. “Realize we are one or two steps from martial law,” he texted, although I don’t know whether he meant this as statement of fact, warning or prediction.

Another good friend Paul has a longer view and mostly sees history repeating itself in the most dire way. Whether you might have characterized the So Cal scene as It’s All About Me or We Just Wanna Have Fun covidiocy, it’s gone. It’s not exactly the proverbial ghost town since an empty beach volleyball court is still the seashore and an inviting place to wander and pick up stuff out of the sand.

Joggers and walkers are mostly lone, some daring to make eye contact, others who sport masks generally not. Daddys with children scan the parking lot before unloading bicycles or wandering onto the seaside path. Feels like the time of the Brownshirts in Germany, Paul says, taking a drag on his cigarette as we overlook the new beach scene. “I feel sorry for them,” he adds. I think he means all the frightened citizenry, and then he adds, “They’re just doing their job.”

I realize at that moment he’s talking about the police and that they’re just another chess piece in this game.

That’s the perspective that keeps me dropping in every morning for our Conversations on the Balcony. Consequent. He makes the distinction that if you are consistent, logical and just plain “make sense,” you needn’t strive for authenticity. The listener will decide that you are for them…or not.

I invite you to sit with that awhile. It threw me, although I sensed it was the why and how of his ability to be principled, non-judgmental and not a bit wishy-washy about either. So much argument, defense and ferocity over how one should feel about the mandate to Shelter in Place. I realized that instead of feeling frustration over The Man, it might serve me more to look at my own personal police state and free myself from being a prisoner of old mindsets and habits.

Funnily – although never coincidentally – I have recently pulled the Squirrel animal medicine card, its ‘magic’ the gathering. In this time of staying at home, I imagine that we are all looking at what we have gathered in our space, be it gadgets and broken things waiting to be fixed, worries or stress. As for me, I’ve pulled out the papers and endless jottings and shredded all chronicling and preservation of the past that doesn’t serve me any longer. And made room for an “untroubled heart and mind” instead. From prison cell to nest.

http://www.valjoy.com

I Will Survive

More about positivity. That, by the way, was step #1. I wanted to start with “More about negativity,” and the fact that I love this version of Gloria’s fabulous anthem says mountains about where my head is usually at. Waiting for the disco ball or other shoe to drop.

Step #2, I’ve decided to change my responses to “…so how ya doin?” Instead of the hesitant, “Uh, ok or the word vomit that accompanies, “I’m a hot mess,” I might just burst into singing, “I Will Survive” instead!

That’s why my life has been all about Chakracise and AYM lately and since D Day. (That’s D as in Divorce from he whom I still have trouble naming lest I call up the Devil.) It was one of the life preservers that got me back to solid ground and then learning how to be happy again. Because what’s better for shaking off the blues than dancing (especially when it’s through those fabulous things called chakras) and what’s better for finding the road map to happiness than meditating while you move.

I’m a woman. If I’m in my feminine energy flow, I can multi-task and dance and meditate the night away. So lose the nagging ID that I’m scatterbrained and disorganized. We have both flows within us, so I can do that man-glue thing of focusing and fixing as well.

But don’t get me wrong. In Chakracise, there’s both meditation in movement and in stillness because in this day of Covid-19 and age of Aquarius, we are being called on to integrate the feminine and masculine instead of continuing to let them war. So come and Access Your Moment through Movement and Stillness. Zoom ID 771 765 222.

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