The time is (still) Now

Posted: Tue 06, Jul 2010

Creativity seems to demand flexible and measured tension…All we do here is invent games to pass the time. -John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

So today, July 6, is my 29th birthday and the deadline I initially set for completing my book proposal.

In a post on May 19 I made a specific pledge around completing it. Here’s how I measure up to that pledge today, seven weeks later:

write for four hours a day five days a week: After the first few weeks I stopped keeping track of hours. Writing a memoir is not like having a 9-5 job. Too often I forget that. Some days I wrote all day, some days I just had an hour. I did my best. I put in consistent effort each week.

do whatever I want during those four hours as long as it has some connection to completing the proposal: An unabashed “Yes!” here. My most helpful tool in this category was keeping a log of my feelings, thoughts around what I was working on. I can’t tell you how many times I noted the existence of “doubt” and kept writing anyway. There’s something about naming what is that helps me to keep moving forward.

do what needs to be done to finalize the proposal no later than 5:21 a.m. on July 6, 2010, my 29th birthday: here I’m an unabashed “No!” While I have a great first draft of the proposal done, it’s not ready to go out yet. So technically speaking, I get an “F” here.

As I look back on this pledge now, I see a dance between the ego and the soul. The ego cares about meeting deadlines and follow-through and worries about being criticized for falling short. The soul says, “Darling, it’s been 7 years you’ve been working on this book, are you really going to get stuck on this deadline? Look at what you were able to do! Take all the time you need.” I like the rush of energy that flew through me seven weeks ago when I started this mad dash towards finishing. I feel proud of what I have accomplished, of what I have learned.

I am celebrating that I have a solid first draft of the proposal, parts of which are currently being read by others for feedback. The most important thing that has happened is that a clearer sense than ever of the book that I want to write has emerged along with a growing belief that I can in fact write it. Again and again I am finding that in showing up regularly and doing the work, progress happens naturally. One of the greatest gifts of my upbringing is stubbornness – the most stubborn people on the planet raised me – and this quality is serving me well in this process. I can see how my nonlinear process over the last 7 years in working on this memoir has lead me here to this moment.

So the time is still now. Now is the time for patience, gentleness, and saying to the unkempt parts of myself that don’t operate according to linear time: “Take all the time you need.”

The body opens in gentleness. So too does the burgeoning author within me. So I will keep dancing with ego and soul, gentleness and form. Creativity demands flexible and measured tension. All we do here is invent games to pass the time. I will keep putting my butt in the seat. I will let you know when it’s done.

ps: I am trying out affiliate links for the first time through amazon.com. To buy one of the most soulful books I have read in a long time, click here: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom I receive a small commission on the sale. The funds go back into the sustenance of this blog.

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Getting used to vastness

Posted: Thu 10, Jun 2010

On Monday mornings I walk to the U.S. Congressional Cemetery. When I walk somewhere I enter a vortex of energy that is larger than me. I enter a path, a stream. When I set out to walk two Mondays ago, I heard a voice that sounded like the wind. It said, “Just let go. Just let go. Just let go.”

I think of letting go as a blank slate, a deep breath, an opening to something larger than me and mine. I get it intellectually, but how in practical terms with hands and feet and heart do I let go? What is this dance of doing and being?

Cynthia Winton-Henry led us in a ritual during her Friday morning InterPlay class. InterPlay is about noticing grace and playing around with it. She told us she wanted to feel letting go in her cells.

The closest I get to letting go is saying to myself “What’s happening right now is good enough for me. I trust what’s here.” Even though I suspect things will be better in the future, right now they are just as good as they can be.

It’s like the beautiful film Garden State I watched recently. I worried about when the starring couple would have their first on-screen kiss and then three-fourths of the way through the movie, they did and it was the most perfect moment.

Perhaps letting go is those fractions of a second in life when I know that at any given moment something I didn’t think was possible is in fact happening in a way I never imagined.

Letting go is whenever I’m supposed to come to clarity or closure with something, I will. Whenever I’m supposed to move to Reunion or Djibouti or Greece, I will. Whenever I’m supposed to get this book proposal done, I will (see ‘p.s.’ below for an update). What will be will be.

Choice and destiny are friends, not enemies. In fact, they are frenemies whose taut relationship keeps us curious and relentless in pursuit of something more.

So how do you let go? You start by simply acknowledging that our every step, our bodies, and our lives exist inside a vortex of energy that is way bigger than we can ever hope to grasp. Maybe letting go is simply getting used to this – getting used to vastness. I let go with each breath, with each Monday morning walk to the cemetery where my body flows between ease and contraction. This is what is means to play around with grace. This is what it means to trust what’s here.

p.s. Take a look at InterPlay’s new website ! So pretty…

p.s.s. Book proposal update…

Although it’s happening a lot more slowly than my ego would like, I am daily making progress on the writing of my book proposal since I declared this in my last blog post.. I’ve clarified the arc of the book significantly in working through Eric Maisel’s The Art of the Nonfiction Book Proposal. I’ve researched complimentary titles, and it seems like there is currently no book on the market that is just like the one I intend to write, which is good news in publishing.

The past two weeks I’ve struggled a lot to polish my sample chapter, the hardest part of the proposal to write and, not surprisingly, the most important to agents and editors receiving memoir submissions. I am under constant attack by inner critics who have some pretty big fangs. It feels like trying to run through water.

A wise woman I know wrote to me yesterday: “I hope you are balancing patience with yourself and challenging yourself.” This is a reminder I really need to hear.

Thanks so much to all of you who wrote with your well wishes. Your affirmation helps me so much to keep at it.

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The time is Now

Posted: Wed 19, May 2010

I suspect you’re going to feel a bit constrained in the coming weeks, Cancerian — maybe even imprisoned… Regard this “incarceration” as a chance to start work on a masterpiece. Believe it or not, your “deprivation” could be one of the best things that has happened to you in a while. -Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

So this is it.

The finish line is drawn.

I have exhausted all possible productive activities to justify procrastinating about putting my memoir Good Enough For God in to the world.

I have a place to live. I have proofreading work for the next 8 weeks that will enable me to get by. Today I quit one of my part-time jobs; I didn’t like it and kept trying to convince myself that there was something wrong with me that I didn’t like it, not to mention it sucked dry all my writing energy.

There are no InterPlay or NVC groups I want to go to in D.C. There are no black and white photography shows to hang. I get few calls. Yesterday my one friend in D.C. texted me to say she has no time to hangout until September.

There is this Thing inside me that compels me to write, to put forth my story into the world.

The time is Now.

This morning I sat at the kitchen table with a teeming bowl of pears, mangoes, bananas, and lemons and Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg. In the memoir about her early spiritual awakening as a Zen practitioner, she describes a walk in nature where she heard an inner voice:

You’ve got to finish that book. I don’t care if you’re afraid. Finish it.

Several months had passed since she’d worked on Writing Down the Bones, her famous book on writing practice. After that experience she wrote seven days a week for 7 weeks and finished the manuscript.

As I sat there staring at the bowl of summer’s harvest, it occurred to me that my birthday, July 6, is exactly 7 weeks from today and that on my birthday last year I said I wanted to put my memoir out into the world this year.

I’ve worked on it some. Several events leading up to this Now have spurred me on:

Wanting to keep my word the people who gave me money to spend 6 weeks at a writing retreat in Paris in 2006, where I wrote the preliminary manuscript that now forms the skeleton of the book proposal I’m endeavoring to complete.

I gained confidence after attending a book writing and publishing workshop that dymystified and made concrete what I needed to do to get my book published.

I attended a writing retreat co-taught by Natalie Goldberg that reminded me what I most love doing in the world is writing.

Today I am spurred on my own version of the voice that spoke to Natalie, the one that speaks to every artist with something inside that longs to be born. I am spurred on by action, by letting go, and the ceaseless flow between them.

So hear ye hear ye, I declare on this wednesdayeth day of mayest in the two-thousandeth of ten-ye in thou fairest capitale Washingtonian, that I Beandrea Terese am spending the next 7 weeks completing my nonfiction book proposal for the forthcoming memoir Good Enough for God.

I agree to:

- write for four hours a day five days a week (aka in a 7 day period, I will complete at least 20 hours of work on the GEFG project for the next seven weeks starting today, May 19).
bq. – do whatever I want during those four hours as long as it has some connection to completing the proposal (pumping out the worst junk in America by hand and at the computer, reading book proposal guide book, facing some emotional trigger that’s been stirred by the content in the memoir, taking walks…)
bq. – do what needs to be done to finalize the proposal no later than 5:21 a.m. on July 6, 2010, my 29th birthday.
bq. – take a picture of the completed draft and post it to this blog for readers to see.

So here I am writing in the Science and Technology Room on the fifth floor of Library of Congress. I’ve just typed up new pages from my writing notebook to include within my book’s chapters. My fingers feel hot on the keyboard. Kojo Antwii, the Ghanaian singer vamps through my earphones.

Who knows what will happen in these next weeks really? I’ve made the declaration public. All I can do now is show up and do the work. Who will like it, whether it will make it to market, and what any of this has to do with me making a decent living – for right now these questions are none of my business. I agree to do my part, and to let the voice within that compels me to write do its.

To keep this agreement means I’ll have to make choices. I’ll need to let sit various other projects I’ve been working on, like building my bodywork practice for women in D.C. and building my joyfullybea.com inspiration empire. I will have time to do my temp proofreading job, do what it takes to care for a human body and soul, and probably little else. I will need to minimize distractions and center my life around writing even as I expect to be routinely plagued by doubt, fear, and sloth.

So if you contact me and I don’t get back to you, picture me cozied up in the stacks of the Library of Congress somewhere between bliss and ripping out my hair (which I won’t be able do anyway since I am virtually bald :)

See me finally giving birth to this memoir I’ve long dreamed about writing.

See me launching this longtime dream of being an author, not a moment too soon, not a moment too late.

Text and images by Beandrea Terese and made available under Creative Commons Licensing. Copyright 2010.

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I get to be me

Posted: Thu 29, Apr 2010

I am wearing a long-sleeved orange shirt I bought at the Gap Outlet in Davis, California two years ago. I spent my last 100 bucks on it and a few other shirts and some pants, my yearly shopping effort.

I stayed overnight in Davis with my sister, who shops almost weekly, and who was visiting from North Carolina for a conference on Minorities in the Sciences.

I drove the 60 miles to see her even though I was strapped for cash and stressed out. She didn’t feel comfortable navigating her way to Oakland on the train, a familiar story I’d heard my sister tell many times about many places.

Growing up I learned to get along by suppressing my feelings and presenting myself as “flexible.” But I’m not flexible. I’m stubborn, unforgiving, short with people, and self-absorbed.

To be yourself is its own reward. No one comes up to you and says “Wow thanks for being yourself at all costs!” (Well actually, someone sent me an email once saying this.)

People tell me all the time they appreciate my “authenticity.” It’s the number one piece of feedback I receive, especially from people whom I have just met. I see how it is admired and also how it is feared.

Like the woman I thought I had made a nice connection with at a writing workshop, who complimented me on my honesty in front of the group and has never confirmed the Facebook friend request I made a few days later.

What is the payoff for “finding” one’s self, for embracing life as an inner journey, for taking responsibility for one’s life?

“The gift of consciousness is consciousness,” says Miki Kashtan, a trainer in Nonviolent Communication with whom I have studied.

That’s it?

Yes, that’s it.

The payoff is being able to say, “I know myself. This is my shadow. This is my light. My life is about becoming more and more accepting of all that I am, all that is.”

I think there should be a warning on the door to yoga classes, just like for cigarettes:

Warning: this is not just exercise. This is a very old consciousness-raising activity, which if followed over time will change your life and you will never be able to go back to being unconscious. Proceed with caution.

I notice now that even if I wanted to go back to sleep, I could not. I’ve spent the past 8 years intentionally cultivating awareness and raising energy.

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only redistributed. That’s the one thing I remember from science class.

If I don’t meditate, if I don’t move (yoga, dance, walking are my favorites), if I don’t write, I begin a slow descent into a gremlin kind of crazy, where paranoia and sloth become my life.

To have a spiritual practice of any kind that helps a person to become more conscious of one’s behavior, to wake up, is a really, really big deal.

There is no turning back, so proceed with caution, and choose with eyes wide open. Sure there are slumps and backsliding, but these are just unconscious attempts to suppress what has already been awakened, that which will not be lulled back to sleep by addictions or obsessions of any velocity.

I last talked to my sister on the New Year. I sent her a handmade birthday card in February. She texted me to say “Thanks.”

Last week my mother told me she is enjoying her recent move to Pittsburg for a research job in her field of Bioinformatics.

“She’s coming up here to visit in May. You’re welcome here too you know if you ever want to see your parents sometime.”

“Oh that’s nice. I’m glad she likes her job.”

“Yeah, but it’s temporary.”

“Well I’ll be up there definitely sometime this Spring.”

My family is so used to me being a certain way, and now they tell me I’ve changed. I have. I have found myself. I have found the will to live.

To live my life the way I want to live it. I am no longer willing to contort myself inside vicarious expectations and half-life dreams long drugged with sleep, ice cream, and watching television.

Finally I get to be a full-fledged human being with a shadow and a light.

What after all is the point of being so renowned for my authenticity if I won’t allow myself to receive its fruit: radical acceptance of what is, radical acceptance of me. Finally. Finally. I get to be me.

Text and images from Beandrea Terese and made available under Creative Commons Licensing. Copyright 2010.

If you feel inspired by this post, I would love to hear what moves you! If you have suggestions for future blog post topics, I welcome that too.

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50,000 thoughts per day

Posted: Thu 08, Apr 2010

Humans think anywhere from 15,000 to 50,000 thoughts per day, scientists estimate.

Any of these sound familiar?:

It needs to be perfect
I don’t know how
I’m right/I’m wrong
I am not enough
I don’t have a choice/I have to/I must
I am in control
I’m not ready
It’s too hard
I will look foolish
It’s too late
I haven’t paid my dues yet
The thoughts I think are undeniably true. I should believe them forever and ever. Amen.

Over the past 42 days as I’ve taken on a practice of daily affirmations. To make it fun, I put words to improvised melodies, creating simple chants that I can easily recite throughout the day.

I have noticed that many of my 50,000 thoughts are just plain junk (see above list for examples). I don’t need to get sucked in to believing, debating, and avoiding them. Instead I’m noticing them, doing my best not to take them too seriously, and focus on thoughts that make me feel good.

For example:

I love my home.

I love my neighborhood.

I love and accept myself.

I love the people in my life.

My relationships are satisfying.

I love the work I do in the world. I love my income.

I love the way my body looks and feels.

I am having so much fun and enjoying the ride.

I am powerful.

I am loved.

I am appreciated.

I am seen and heard.

I belong.

My life is valuable. I matter.

Add yours here:

Text by Beandrea Terese and made available under Creative Commons Licensing. Copyright 2010.

If you feel inspired by this post, I would love to hear what moves you! If you have suggestions for future blog post topics, I welcome that too.

Feeling generous? ::

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