I have NEVER been the girly girl. I feel like I did not get the proper training from my own mother for that task, and I was not one who got the gene that helps you to know how to just look fab, chic and perfectly put together. I was a tom boy, who grew up in the 70s with counter-culture parents. So,when I was invited to a small and casual gathering at the pool at Shutters for a friend's bridal shower, I was a bit worried. I was told it would be very mellow and laid back, no big deal. Great, that fits my style. No, not great, because there is nothing involving me in a bathing suit and the pool at Shutter's that could possibly be mellow or laid back. When I realized that I would potentially need to expose my white, doughy body to the "Beautiful People" of the Shutter's pool, I went into a Def-con IV alert mode.

Now I generally consider myself a rather grounded, down to earth sort who doesn't bother with most of the bullshit that goes on in this town around image, fashion, fitness, all the things that The Beautiful People seem to live for. So I was rather shocked to find myself in quite a miasmic tailspin the day before this shindig. I realized that I was in deep shit because there was no way that a. I could lose 25 pound b. cram six months of Pilates, Tai Bo and aerobic training and c. buy new sun glasses, bathing suit, hair color and $30,000 worth of lipo suction in the next 24 hours. I had only what I had, and I was not going to transform myself into Demi Moore by 12 noon tomorrow. The fact that I was having these obsessive thoughts shocked me a bit because I was suddeenly seeing and feeling the severity and harshness of the nature of my fear and struggle with all of this. I didn't think I really had this amount of "body" issues. Because I am the bohemian laid back, down to earth one and not the exercise addicted, bulimic, Botoxed kind, I assumed I was in the healthy zone of body/self image stuff. But no. Can't say that now. I have clearly found myself out.

So what did I do? Well, when I was with my husband and my guy friends (god forbid I might talk to women in this moment who I suddenly saw as only perfectly waxed, groomed and weighted in my mind and therefore not even wanting to be in the same room with me), I mentioned that I was dreadeing the whole bathing suit thing and was just going to wear a cute dress and a great hat. All the boys grunted and nodded that this sounded like a great plan - God bless all my male friends who really do love me and get me - and so I breathed a sigh of relief because my plan seemed good and grounded in reality. I don't need to be like all the rest, I thought. I still get to just be me and I will be fine.

So the next morning, I get up and begin to prep. I wash, shave, pluck and paint every square inch of my body that needs such treatment. I am in a whirlwind of fear that I will be seen as the most unkempt, ratty, unladylike women who has ever walked the earth. If I can't show up in a string bikini, I will at least have clean hair, smooth legs and color on all my toes and fingers. I will make my mother proud (not that she for even a minute would have given a shit about any of this crap). Once I am done primping, I decide to try on my most ambitious outfit - an actual two piece bathing suit. I figure, I'll start there, and move my way through the outfits until I feel good. So the two piece was a good try, but not something I would want others to have to endure. And so I moved to the black one piece, and lo and behold, it hid the right stuff and showed off the goods enough that I know that I would not make too many heads turn, but I know that no one would turn away in disgust either. And so I donned my newwest cutest skirt and peasant's blouse, and my fab new hat, and off I went to Shutters.

I make my way through the lobby, to the elevator, up to the pool. I look around looking for the ladies, and see them in the distance. They wave and I move through the gate toward them in the far corner. And as I approach, I see that six out of the eight ladies there are all wearing shorts, skirts and t shirts, and clearly are not interested in taking any of these layers off. Almost all are thin, fit and firm, and yet here they are hiding a body that I know I would be showing off if I had it. And yet, here they were ashamed and unsure and uncomfortable needing to hide what ever flaws they deemed unworthy. And suddenly, instead of feeling like the odd girl, the one who doesn't do the feminine girly thing so well, I was suddenly just one of the gals, one of the neurotically body-obsessed self-loathing girls, but God damn it, I was one of the girls none the less.

Last night I nestled into my couch to turn on the TV to one of my favorite films, Like Water for Chocolate. Here is a moment that made me sit up and really listen. It is when Tita has gone crazy from the death of her nephew, and Doctor John Brown has taken her into his home to give her time and space to heal. He is working with some kind of experiment and says to Tita,
"In 1669, Brandt a chemist from Hamburg, while searching for the 'Philosopher's Stone,' discovered phosphorous. My grandmother, Morning Star, she was a Kikapu indian, she used to say we are all born with a box of matches inside. We can't light them by ourselves. Just like in this experiment we need oxygen and the help of a candle, except in our case the oxygen has to come, for example, from a lover's breath. The candle can be anything: a melody, a word, a caress, a sound. Anything that pulls the trigger and sets off one of the matches. Every person has to discover what will pull his trigger to enable him to live. Because it the explsive flare of the match that fees our souls. If there's nothing to trigger the explosion, our box of matches becomes damp, and then we'll never be able to light any of them. There are many ways to dry a damp matchbox. You can rest assured there is a cure."

I believe it is each of our jobs to discover what is the trigger that enables us to live, enables our match to light, and to connect with it daily.

And on another note, here is a quote from my dad that just makes me smile: "I knew a transsexual guy whose only ambition is to eat, drink, and be Mary." - GC

Ah the joys of the polymind.

I realize now that I have been pouting in the corner about finishing the Elizabeth Gilbert Book Eat, Pray, Love, because I well I just haven't felt like writing since then. Her voice inspired my voice. I have been strugging with and searching for that feeling I had those few weeks ever since, and I realize now that all this struggle and all this searching for THAT thing just is not the point. I see that there is a possibility that I am allowed to show up in the world how ever I am in THIS moment. NOW. And now again. And yes even now. I have put my experience on a pedestal, and worshipped it for all the love and glow I was feeling, and the power of my voice coming through. So I ask myself now, what was inspiring me? And it was her impeccable commitment to showing up with all of herself, no matter how it looked. And so when the book was over, and my inner voice felt like it had lost its GPS system, I was afraid to show up here. I felt vulnerable, and messy and like I wasnt' on my best game. And God knows, one thing I must do at any cost is protect my precious fucking reputation. And then I hear the voice in my head say, "What reputation dahling, no one knows who you are." Yeah, that is the rub. I am protecting a reputation I do not have, and I am protecting one that does not even reflect really how others see me - as the gal who is willing to show up real and without make up on.

So I am really tired of feeling like I have to be brilliant to show up in the world. And I am daring to show up unkempt, without make up and let my heart break in front of you. I can hear Rumi now, "Sell your cleverness, purchase wonder." God all of this is hard.

What I really wanted to write about was how all my bitter, droopy, and very unshiny parts have come out to play the last week, and how I don’t want any one to see them, so I am hiding them. So many things precipitated all of this, and most don’t matter, but the one I want to whine about the most is being finished with that damn Eat, Pray,Love. When I was reading it, a part of me had been given full access to myself. And it is a part that I love frolicking in. It is real, true and easy to be with. It knows who I am, and is not afraid of anything. It just shows up no matter how it is dressed, and becomes the life of the party.

When I put down that book, it felt like I didn’t have a daily dose of something to invite that in. And so I bought a small early book by Annie Dillard hoping that it might do it for me. Her book The Writing Life, had done it for me in the past, but this new one did not. I began to panic. Where will I find my muse? Do I order another Elizabeth Gilbert book? No, I couldn’t do that. I felt like a desperate teenager chasing after the guy who keeps rebuffing her. No. I don’t want to look that desperate. So, I picked up Eat, Pray, Love and began reading it again. But it’s not working for me. None of the surprise and discovery is there. Yes, EG is still there, and the freshness of her words and her openness and her true and her real are all still there, but alas, no magic. And thus, my magic feels gone too.

Then add on top of that uber-stress about my dad’s mortality (oh, it comes and goes now that he is 70), and a critique about some work I did a few weeks ago, and some kind of mid-cycle hormonal shit, and well, I don’t know where to get my magic from. So I went for a bike ride today. I haven’t done that in like, well, never. And it was great. I moved my legs, I traveled at the speed of human propulsion, and what was great was that I had an urge to do it, and so I just did it. I could have, and almost did, talk myself out of it ten times. But I stuck with it, and now I can say to myself – I went for a bike ride today. Of course, I had a glass of wine and a cookie this evening, so any caloric benefit I might have gotten, I quickly found a way to undo. But God damn it, I did it, and looking back on it now, well it seems a bit magical to me.

shame shame shame

That is what my mind kept circling around these four days because I did not connect to this space. Instead of owning this space as mine, I turned it over to the largest nun in the world who has the biggest stick in the world, and all she wants to do is use it on me. Her name is Helga. She has been a resident of my psyche for decades and she is all about keeping me small. But even though she occasionally moves back into my inner world, I no longer let her unpack. I have asked her to leave.

Hopefully, there will me more tomorrow.

So it is 7-7-07 today. Never will it be this again. That sounds a bit dramatic, but there is something to say about really acknowledging the weight of any one moment. I don’t know if I could sustain doing that 24/7, but as a slightly regular practice it could be a good thing.

I remember being around 7 or 8 years old and standing in front of a full-length mirror looking at myself, and the something in the moment just washed over me and hit me. I stood there looking, really looking at myself, and a voice inside me said, “This is really it. This is not a dream. This is really my life, and it is real, I am real, and I am living it.” A whoosh of a breeze moved through the inside of me, a hard reality settled in, yet I was suddenly free of something that had confined me before. I was at the same moment both more outside and inside my own life.

I still have moments like this every once and a while. But I must admit, I fear them on some level because when I have them, there is some kind of harsh reality that does blow through me, and my ego/persona/personality gets exposed as the mask it is, and I see into the bigger reality of what is and what could be if I just let go of it. I am both attracted and repelled by this reality. I know ultimately it is what I really am, and yet, here I am, living this life, the life of Kelly Carlin-McCall. Both are true, and yet both are not.

So today, with this one day that is here and now, I am going to live it as present as I can be. I will stay connected to the BIG Reality while I watch hours of Live Earth concerts coming into my living room from seven continents, and celebrate the beginning of the Tour de France’s 94th start .

So, enjoy this 7-7-07, and remember, never will it be this again. Think green and go Discovery Team!

I thought on this day of Independence I would evoke a conversation about what it all means. This is an excerpt from The American Soul by Jacob Needleman.

“The Declaration of Independence

‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds, which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station, to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the Opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness (The Declaration of Independence).’

Again, we are searching for the philosophical assumptions of our form of democracy. Whenever we see the idea of rights, we must realize that something is also being said about the structure and makeup of the self. We are being told by Jefferson that we human beings have within us, as part of our intrinsic makeup, the capacity to intuit the good and the power to will the good. We are capable of guiding our own lives toward an authentic and purposive end. Such assumptions about the intrinsic capacities of human nature contradict the basic thrust of the Calvinistic Protestantism that played such a dominant role in the settling of the New England colonies. The Jeffersonian view of human nature is diametrically opposed to the Calvinistic doctrine of man’s essential corruption and incapacity, and accords great powers and capacities to the human soul. Since every right implies a power, to grant man so many rights can only be based on an exalted vision of human powers. And to say this is to come directly in front of the question of whether democracy is based on an accurate assessment of our actual capacities. We are confronted with the age-old but eternally challenging question of what man is as opposed to what he can become. What may have seemed questions of only external, political relevance – questions that one can safely think about without reference to deep metaphysical or psycho-spiritual issues – now draw us irrevocably into the heart of spiritual philosophy (pp.144-145).”

So here are my Polymind questions:
What is it to declare independence in your life?
Who and what are you declaring this to?
What are you becoming independent of?
What is the relationship of independence and interdependence?
What is it about rights, power and responsibility that comes with declaring this for yourself in your life and as a citizen of this country.

Happy 4th and eat a hot dog for me.

Been gone a few days, and finding it hard to reconnect to my words. I spent the weekend preparing for, unrolling and recovering from a workshop that I lead (not alone but with my fabulous partner Ginny), and now I am feeling far away from myself. It’s like my psyche put its sites on something out there, and now I am having a hard time, coming home, regrouping and finding myself, my voice. This is not a new experience for me. Transitions are challenging. Moving from role to role, no actually moving from a more public, leadership role – workshop leader – back to me as vulnerable, questioning human – THAT is the challenge. It is like once I am in a position for people to see me, interpret me as strong, smart and wise (which happens the minute you stand in front of people and hold your power), I start to believe that this is how I must always show up. I feel like that if I don’t show up as that “enlightened being”, then I will disappoint or even worse, I will damage. How fucking sick and arrogant is that? And how fucking sick and tired of this bullshit I do!

I am amused by this whole scenario because I desperately want to be able to do both, and yet it is quite uncomfortable for me to do just that. Maybe I want the impossible. Is it impossible to become a person who stands in front of others and inspire them while at the very same time being human and vulnerable? No, of course not. But for me, it feels strange, dangerous and wrong. Clearly, I have made some BIG shit up about all of this. And yet I know that this is my life’s work. I am fascinated by collapsing hierarchies, and clearly I have one to collapse over and over again within myself.

More to come later. Oh, and BTW, I have begun Eat, Pray, Love again to help me regroup and reconnect to me. Crazy - maybe.