Powers of Perception

Power animal—Chameleon

by Amy Katz, MA— www.schooloflivingdreams.com

The power animal for September is the chameleon....Subtle shifts in physiology, emotions, climate and camouflage-needs can cause the cells of this sensitive-skinned reptilian to alter pigmentation. It is both a joy and an amazement to see them turn from brown to green, yellow to blue and back again...he proves that our bodies are inextricably bound to our emotions and environment...

Chameleons are also extraordinary seers: their cone-shaped eyes glance in different directions at the same time. This gives them...the ability to know what is coming at them from all directions, and to “see out the back of their heads." As Animal Guide, Chameleons leads us to accept our own abilities to track the movements of others intuitively, and teaches us to improve our own vast but usually untapped powers of perception.

Dinner of Champions

Course 1: Chocolate pudding
Course 2: Corn chips and salsa
Course 3: Corn chips and hummus

Bachelor(ette) living.

Life is good

Homemade chicken soup.
Night music from KCRW.com.
And patience.
A whole hell of a lot of it, asking me to have perspective, because who knows what's to come?
Ever?
Healthy.
Sane.
Housed.
Employed.
Fed.
Loved.
Life is good.
And Pollyanna grew up to be my Grandma. That shit is genetic.

Quiet pulse

While u hear silence, I hear my ears ringing and traffic out my window on the 405. It doesn't stop. Nor does the ringing. Indiscretions in tact and one more thing in my ears: Your silence will not protect you. -Adrienne Rich

Grand

I'm at a bar.
After indiscretions have been made.
Not by me.
Tally ho, motherfucker.

Home. Ish.

Coming up on a year here in Portland. I arrived Sept 7 last year.

I'm finally feeling inklings of settling in, feeling like everything is not new anymore...even the ways that I think. When I've felt anxious about being new here, still unsettled, I have remembered people saying it takes a year to get used to a place. To feel at home.

A different friend said otherwise yesterday. He said, "Three-and-a-half years."

I almost fell over. "Whyyy????"

"Because cells in the body regenerate completely every seven years. So at 3 1/2, you are more of the place where you are than where you came from."

I love him.

I'm happy the year is up. I came from so many different places in the many past years, my cells may be scrambled. But I live here. Here is where I live. I'm one-seventh home.

I am (hardly) the very definition of discipline.

8:09am and so far a few distractions.
The beeping outside my window at 7am. What the? I went outside for a walk to check it out and discovered it is temporary. Two guys on an airlift, prepping the building next door for paint. In parts of my neighborhood, there are garage doors that sound off a nerve-wracking beeping every time a car goes through. Imagine living above that? I had to go scout the my hood to see if it was coming to such calamity.

8:11
Then a little peek at, email. But only a little peek. Then a peek at the Bench. Don't I have to move this over to Wordpress? I'll look into...no! Stop! Get back to the plan. Meditate. Breakfast. Write. Yeah, I'm going to, but I should just post something before I get into...oh, that's a cute entry. I'll just do something quick. Who knows how long it will take to convert/transfer all that content...the Bench might be unavailable a long time...

8:14 and coffee is getting cold because I was going to drink it after meditating. It's wiggling in its paper cup from my tapping on the table. I'm still typing text that wants to be typed but that cut into line and is now giggling and sneering at me, wiggling its tail. If text had tails.

8:17
Stop.

8:18
The whole reason I opened the damn laptop to begin with was to start the music from iTunes I like to hear while I'm meditating. Curse that shiny pretty thing. And that one. And that! Oo!...

Thursday Already?

How does that happen? Yesterday was the first day in the week I had any energy, and it was busy enough to feel like a Monday.

I have been toying with creative work hours, feeling guilty about the relaxed nature of mine, even though they usually extend into the wee hours of moon in midheaven. But guilty nonetheless about how much more productive I would be waking up at 6, rushing around to get fed and clothed, cramming my feets into heels and clacking out the door to be slave-driven till 5, or 6, or 7 or 8 depending on what drama lay behind the desk at the office. Someone else's vision.

More productive? I've been freelancing full time for a year now. No dry-cleaning. Spare heels. Equally voluminous to-do lists but less pressure to please. I'm going for fewer pats on the head and more strokes for the work. More strokes in the bank account for the pleasure of practicing what I love. Difference: it's my bum on the bottom line. Scary! And thrilling adventure.

A Bench & So Much More

If Picture Paints A Thousand Texts

Queen of Denial

PEMA: My boyfriend is a real sweetheart.

GRANDMA: You better hold onto him.

We eat a few bites and stare off into space.

GRANDMA: Good friends are good to have.

- - - - -

On nature's monthly arriving the day of my 20 year HS reunion...

GRANDMA: I'm sorry that had to happen to you today.

PEMA: I'm glad it happened at all.

GRANDMA: Well, you weren't expecting it not to, were you?

PEMA: No. But I'm always glad to see it.

GRANDMA changes subject.

Names Changed

Some of the reunion people were perplexed at my name change.

Name changes on the weird-o-meter are relative. My grandma thinks "Pema" is the strangest thing she's ever heard. Newer friends think my given name, "Heather," misses the mark. I think "Pema" is nothing compared to the judge's son I once met who changed his name to "Fire Penguin Disco Panda."

Facepaint, Fires & Footstamping

I've decided high school reunions are an important tribal ritual. Last weekend, hundreds of us walked into the reunion oo-ing and awe-ing, greeting after 20 years and laughing over how so many of us looks exactly the same.

Then, someone turned on the reunion video, which was a video that was taken our senior year, for the purpose of playing at the reunion.

Oh my God. We were 17. A bunch of those former 17 year olds now have kids that age. We were children. And we most certainly did not look the same. Or feel the same.

The reunion ritual. Gets us all together to make us see how much time has passed, how much life has accumulated, and to push the go button, the fly, be free of any regret you left back in high school button. The you were a child and now you're an adult button. You're free!

I like the reunion ritual. I got to apologize to Rick Daynes for being such a bitch on the night of our Winter Formal. Before the dance, Jennifer Strauss told me he broke it off with Laura Nero and asked me instead because he heard he could score. Don't know where he got his intel, because that night. My shoulder. Ice.

In years that followed I felt bad I didn't check with the source before putting my Jerky McSourpuss in a party dress. Two decades later, I'm apologizing in front of his wife.

He said, Really? I don't remember that. His pretty wife smiled prettily.

Ah. It's nice to not be 17 anymore.

:)

WC

Rob's my brother. Sue's his wife. Last visit I made, they were building a 2-story addition to the back of their little bungalow. Garage on the bottom, bedroom on the top. Three months later, the single finished feature is the upstairs toilet, which they have lovingly given two names:
The Think Tank
and
The Poop Tower.

Tonight's Gem

On the toilet, on the phone, head in hand, trying to express in words how long the day has been. It's apparent I'm finding better success peeing than talking:

"My eyes are so...dry they're like...sandkittens in my...forehead."


*

Showing Up

Can you believe I'm still deciding whether or not to go to my 20 year high school reunion? It requires a two-day drive there and a two-day drive back. Which requires I decide by Tuesday, as my departure day would be Wed.

My reservation? All that. Plus the cash it would take to do it all and the time away from work.
My compulsion? To show up. I was so shy and isolated for so long in my life, I think that I am missing everyone in every place I've ever been because I am coming into myself in a way that is closer to whole, not so eclipsed by fear or embarrassment or harsh judgment on myself. So I want to go back and see the people I knew before, with the fuller parts of me showing, and with the expanded capacity of taking them in without my self-consciousness getting in the way.

I was visible in high school because I was the girl whose brother died the summer between sophomore and junior years. Then I was that girl, plus the one that cut her hair short, fell in love with the best friend she idolized, and became a lesbian. (Not that I had any idea what that meant at the time.) So when I looked at kids looking at me, who knows what they were thinking, but I was seeing them see me as THAT girl, and that's it. They still were nice. Still said hello and included me. But I was so incredibly withdrawn. My best friend is the only person who got much from me after all that. And when others would try, I wouldn't notice, or I would think it wasn't for real. I would wonder why they were talking to me. Not wondering in a snotty, I'm-too-good-for-you kind of way, but a why-are-you-talking-to-ME kind of way. I just didn't get it.

I think this is related to the emotional hangovers I had when I was in my 20s. I'd go out, have a great time. Wake up the next morning feeling like a terrible dork for how expressive I was the night before. Like I was several people, and the one that wakes up in the morning is a Catholic nun shaming me for dancing and laughing and sitting on a party couch interacting with peers.

In any case, I have this idea that showing up for the reunion would be a great exercise in showing up. All of me, which is so much more than I brought to the party before. Seems like it would be a nice way to mend the past to the present, and make friends with the friends that may have been back then. I'm romanticizing. Who knows such a thing. It just feels like showing up would be a good idea.

To go, or not to go.