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.”

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.

For more information, visit:

Smell What Roses?

I know…these aren’t roses. I don’t much like them actually. Too stiff and formal for my taste. And these – whatever they may be – just sung to me.

So let me get back to Roses. Growing up I had been told that I liked to smell them “too much.” Of course our memories are funny things, so my mind has been set to wondering whether I’ve been holding the wrong message in my head about those dang flowers. My friend Paul started by asking “Why do you think you were told that story?”

Did Dad really say “too much” as gentle prodding …to achieve at a higher level? Or was it his realization that I preferred wandering instead of powering through life? And was it just statement of fact and if so, where did I find the Un to transform the happy thought of noticing and smelling flowers into a stick to beat myself over the head?

All those questions were not as important as the one Paul then posed, “How do you turn it – the negative – around?”

So here: I saw the flowers and noticed them at all. That was the gift to cherish.

Any of you remember this ditty? Love Ella’s version:

…You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between
You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium’s
Liable to walk upon the scene…

Removing Money Blockages

It is a never-ending story, isn’t it? All the issues we wrestle with around $$$$. Note that I’ve used four dollar signs, because why go through all the work to bring in a $ (one-dollar-sign-) abundant life?

But how about if I dispense with going into the stories? I don’t imagine that you’d like to stick around to hear the ‘Woe is Me’, and even if you are a ‘Misery-Loves-Company’ reader, I’m not going to indulge you. Besides, recounting or reading them again is the quickest way to get pitched into and stuck in that old money pit again.

Three reasons:

It doesn’t take much for our energy to drop, way less to fall down stars as opposed to huffing and puffing up them. This highlights, by the way, that ‘easy’ doesn’t always equal ‘better’.

Two, if we focus on the problem, that’s all we’ll see – the problem – while somewhere else, waiting to be noticed, are the solutions, with arms flailing, “Pick me! Pick me!”

Three, hmmm, we would be approaching the whole subject as if it were a mind game, talking about it, dissecting it, planning a way forward…blah, blah, blah. Even if we focused on positive instead of negative thoughts, it’s all in our head, and what if the secret to outsmarting the money demons is to smoke them out body, mind and soul?

These tips are included in a free online class which I had the privilege of assisting with last week. I’ve taken many of Rita Harrison’s seminars before, but it was a reminder, pick-me-up, and a jump-start to a new (and too money-focused if I let it) chapter in my life.

It shifted me out of the I Can’t Afford and prompted me to get in the car, drive to Santa Monica, and explore with an absolutely certainty this was the place I couldn’t afford not to be.