Wednesday, April 28, 2010

April 28, 2010 Morning Pages

Dare I begin? I put my fingers to the keyboard and there is no turning back, there is only writing forward for the next 750 words without stopping although today, I am working to be conscious – to neither rush nor push, to simply write. Consciously.

Love. Consciously.

I need to settle into intuition (if that is possible) steep in the awarenesses that have happened to and with me. I thought, first and second, of the intuition on steroids, those moments when there wasn’t a soft light bulb moment, there was clanging gongs and a chorus line of angelic type forces shouting, cavorting and pushing my hunched shoulders up and weaving my thoughts toward a bunch of “YES!” bouquets. There push was so predominant, my ego had no space to roam so… it didn’t feel driven by choice as much as divine force, life-force which is, perhaps something of Intuition’s army.

I remember when I was on a phone call, a conference call, about becoming a life coach. It took me three tries to get there because I was going through such a difficult time emotionally, psychically and spiritually. I remember one conference call I missed at the height of my depression. It was one of the times when my depression was so bad I couldn’t speak because I thought God would find my voice offensive. It was that time in my depression when it was so bad, I contemplated suicide but didn’t believe I was worthy of it.

Perhaps that time intuition’s army knew they had to intervene to give me an activity to match my reason – something outside of my children or my community. Sometime outside of the obvious, the guilt-laden purgatory I was strapped inside. (I meant to say something not sometime.)

I listened, I remember, and the chorus-girls were high kicking and shaking their collective boas and shimmying and I was waffling in the “I don’t know if I want to train to be a life coach, I mean…. I am on stress leave from work, remember… I can’t focus at work so I don’t see how I can focus on training… or anything” and then… kablooey, the damn opened up in a chant of “Do it!” “Say Yes!” and “This is it, Julie! Don’t be stupid!” so I said YES and my life changed forever.

A few weeks later I went to see a shrink who was basically a county hired prostitute whose job it was to determine it wasn’t my job that made me crazy, it was something else. I drove to Santa Monica on my own to do this appointment which was supposed to last all afternoon long. I didn’t believe it would last that long, but I was willing to do whatever it took. Somehow, on that day, it no longer mattered to me what anyone thought about my depression or my situation or anything, I knew then I wouldn’t want to go back to work for the county and I couldn’t go back to work for the county. I loved my clients but it was the bureaucracy that was threatening my life. They never saw me and never would see me. They would never value me, they would never come in my corner, they would never appreciate the hours I worked or the dedication to my craft. I sat on the park, the one overlooking the ocean in Santa Monica – the one you see in movies where people roller skate and skateboard and occasionally they show art stuff there and I read Gregg Levoy’s book, “Callings”... I talked to a homeless woman and “Now Begin” downloaded itself onto the page.

I still need to write that book. My project? My project that keeps coming back.

The other time the Intuition army landed in my yard was with acting. I was taking an acting class as a default because singing wasn’t available but I think my appointment to sing came from my desire to act, in musicals and beyond. I think, now, it was my desire to be truthful and to know truth because I have known truth more purely on stage than anywhere else. Transcendence happens on stage for me. It happens during performance of my own work through poetry or the words of others. It happened even the other night when Gabe got “murdered” in his blood curdling scream and my involuntary reaching toward him. Surreal and wonderful.

But when Hal gave me that assignment, that “Your job is to say no” improv, I leaped into the void and never looked back, the army was too busy kicking me over the side, leaping on streams of rope. Nudging, budging, shushing my fear.

Intuition is like that, always.

Nudging, budging, shushing my fear and making it impossible for me to do anything except the exactly right thing.

No comments:

Post a Comment