Monthly Archives: December 2014

Dec31

A Poem to help you change for the better; 2014 In the Rearview

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

Hi all, thanks for your support and friendship this year. This has been another year of growtzzzzgngngngnzzzzngn ngggggnnnnnnnnzzzzngnggggnan.

I can’t add myself to the litany of retrospective posts; I do enough of that in my own time, I will be damned if I do that to you in The Last Post Of The Year.

I typically don’t really give a toot about New Year’s Eve / Day culture. To me, we have every breath to look at how we are living and to use the next one to change our behavior if we are aware enough to know we need it.

And most of us need it.

2014 is over. It’s about 2 hours away from being toast. Dust. Ashes. Yesterday. It doesn’t matter how we feel about 2014. Many people suffered and many people triumphed. It doesn’t matter because it’s in the past. So if you or me or your neighbor or your best friend or your worst enemy spends one moment but one laced with gratitude thinking about 2014, it’s a waste.

Here’s my instruction: Have a safe and empowering final hours of 2014. I hope that when we look back on it, we can learn something and then apply it for a fantastic ’15. Just for clarification: I’m all for retrospectives if they put you in a good frame of mind and remind you of how far you’ve come. It’s when they loop and repeat and grind you and your beloved listener into a silent submission or prayer for it to end, that they are useless.

Here’s my plea: If you’re One of Those People Who Knows Your Faults But Does Nothing About Them And Continues To Hurt People, please … please … please: stop. If you’re feeling hot in the face or your stomach hurts or you feel like someone is watching you right now, you know it’s you I’m talking to. Stop hurting people. Start changing your behavior. As I say to my sons and the kids I teach creative writing, “Stop apologizing. Change your behavior.” If an elementary school kid can get it, you can too.

And if you’re a victim or a martyr or you feel like you’re in a rut, in a loop or other haze thinking about something you can’t change because you blew it, here’s a poem I didn’t write which can help you move in another direction:

There’s A Hole In My Sidewalk: An Autobiography In Five Short Chapters

By Portia Nelson

Chapter I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost … I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

Chapter II

I walked on the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place, but it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

Chapter III

I walked down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in… it’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

Chapter IV

I walked down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

Chapter V

I walk down another street.

That’s a simple, elegant, witty and To The *#^&%@)! Point reminder that we are in charge of our own lives and its direction. It’s both liberating and daunting because it’s so much easier to blame other people for our stuff. Anyway… Food for thought.

Here’s a pic of me and my team on our singular sunny day on Hilton Head Island, SC.

Here’s a pic of me and my husband and oldest son after we did the Polar Bear Plunge on New Year’s Eve … The water was 53˚ and this was my first and definitely not my last PBP. I am a beast now… bring on the plunges!

May you ~~all~~ both have fantastic and healthy remaining hours tonight and abundant spiritual, mental and physical health in 2015.

Thanks for sticking around. It’s been fun. 2015 is gonna rock; just like 2014 did.

Thank you.

Dec29

Hilton Head – Departure — Neil Simon May As Well Have Written This

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

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We arrived after almost 11 hours in the car.

The event started out hilariously after my middle son and I had an epic battle, hopefully our final for the year, about the inexplicable disappearance and sudden miraculous reappearance of a $5 bill I’d left on a bookshelf.

It’s not so much the funds. It’s the entire thing. A pattern of behavior and performance we are working hard and with reasonable success, to remedy. But that was over and we’d resolved it, or I had and so after storming out to the car, I sat in my seat and waited to get going.

My youngest son decided he had to use the bathroom. We gave the grave reminder to “pee your last!” and he decided he’d best go.

As he walked back to the car, my husband said, “Close the door!” and with that, the keys. Not in the car. Not with my husband. Not where they needed to be.

A text came in from a cousin, wishing us a memorable trip and love. I started to laugh at it all, in some amazing way, as my mother would have at the sheer irony of all this “SHIT” we’d apparently done to make this event happen.

There were hems and haws and moans and groans and whatarewegonnado and thisisastupididea and goingtothebeachinthewintersucks and financial wrangling and then a sense of purpose, of repose and gifts from nowhere which aligned to create a sense of “hellyeahwearegoingtothebeachinthewinterandyouregoingtoloveit” that was grounded, rooted and firmly planted in our auric hearts.

We were locked out of the house and we had all this shit in the car ready to go. We had no keys. We were packed to the gills with nothing but venom and blame and hissing to spew but …

We didn’t.

We rallied. In some crazy almost “fuckyouuniversewehavehadahardweek!” conscious shift, we were resolved. We would forge ahead. My husband considered breaking in.

Middle son decided to help. God only knows what that meant, but he couldn’t bear to see his father suffer, like Randy’s Dad in “A Christmas Story” my husband was on the verge of an apoplectic yet feckless cursing spree. (The man is a saint and we are all crazy people; I am sure in some quiet moments in his ephemeral solitude, he looks up, with red-rimmed eyes, to the heavens beyond the ceiling in our bedroom and asks, “WHAT DO DID I DID DO HOW WHO WHY?”)

Middle son charged around back. Maybe Glinda the Good Witch of the North (East?) was there in her magic transport sphere with help.

Nothing.

Husband is at the window trying to break into our house.

This is never good.

I start howling again. My mother, someone (egad could it just be me? it’s entirely possible), was helping me laugh my ass off at this entire experience. Like some crazy Neil Simon play, that has all the elements: strife, sarcasm, loathing, drama, wit, redemption and loss. I remember witnessing my mother at moments like these laughing at it all, and wondering, “what the hell is the matter with you?” during what to my father seemed like a death-crisis.

Men… marriage and family are not for the weak.

The middle son darts around again. Like a human squirrel in swishy pants. Youngest son is silently weeping yet marveling at my ability to laugh at this moment. Oldest son is churlish; headphones in and staring intently at his iDevice.

The next I know, the front door is open. No shattered glass. No torn out windows.

The keys were in the lock.

I scream with laughter. “THIS IS RICH! THIS IS SO RICH!” Giving my cousin, via text, a play-by-play of the entire thing. “THE KEYS WERE IN THE DOOR!” She’s probably horrified by my insouciance.

We motor on. It took a long time.

I’d like to thank CitiBank rewards / thank you points for the Bose headphones I wore. They helped me not lose my mind during several of the moments we traveled at a neck-breaking 1.2 miles per hour on the flat, boring I-95 corridor. I’d like to thank Google Maps for really trying to keep us updated. Apple Maps is worthless. Google’s ETA times went from 85 minutes to fourteen days and then back to a horrific 146 minutes, which was what it ended up being in the thick of it. I’d like to thank Thom Yorke for his mesmerizing “Atoms for Peace — Four Tet Remix” (I’m very late to the party, it’s from 2008) and the sun for rising this morning.

My sons broke out into their own rendition of “No Sleep ‘Til [Brooklyn] Hilton” when the traffic got hairy. We saw a freshly dead coyote on the shoulder and miles of break lights.

When we finally made it to Coosawatchie the release was kind. I’d like to say it was as though a pin pierced a taut balloon, without explosion, but as I look back on it, it was more gentle than that. It was as if the knot had been untied and the air pfft’d out on its own. No massive boom or transformation into kindness for we were already kind people; we’d just been in the car for a long time.

It took another half hour, to make it to our parking space. The meantime was glorious though. I had left Neil Simon and arrived at Pat Conroy. I stuck my head out my window as we traversed a bridge in the dark. My stomach felt all roller coaster-y. Our Southern escort along the Spanish Moss-dangled willows flanking route 462 was a half moon. She was hanging amidst a sea of lacy clouds, eventually thickening to greet us this morning with 64 degrees and a demure sun.

We unpacked our gear and watched Harry Potter fight a dragon. My youngest clambered into our bedroom shortly after midnight to tell his his brother snored and he wanted to sleep on our floor. A crow greeted me (or more likely my huevos rancheros) this morning on our patio. The sea is 200 yards away. I can hear her and see her.

If we don’t meet in the meantime, I hope you have a glorious final two days of 2014.

I’ll be back.

Thank you.

Dec21

Super Fast: Projection is Like Barfing

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

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My youngest son came to me this morning, complaining about a disagreement he had with his older brother. He was upset about it because the things his older brother said to him about him were mean and hurtful.

It bothered me also to hear that one son could be like that toward another son, but I also know that in my household that my boys hold this mentality about their siblings, regardless of birth order or pecking order: “No one kicks my brother but me.” I smile at that sentiment a little because it’s funny and it’s true.

Nevertheless, my youngest was injured emotionally and I have to agree that the things his brother said were ugly.

So I set my youngest down and talked to him about projection.

“I have said some really unkind things about other people. I have believed them. I have even said those things to the people. Sometimes, I’ve hid behind a symbol or an event to say those things and yet try to blame it on the context, the ‘where I was’ or the ‘what I was doing’ or my state of mind. Like if I had a headache or was busy, but the reality is that I was like a stereo speaker, or a movie projector of that thought, image, opinion, sentiment or belief that I HAD ABOUT MYSELF that I hurled on to that other person, my target.” I said to my youngest, who was doing his best to pay attention. It was a lot of words.

He rubbed his eyes and sighed.

“Because I felt that way about myself first.” I added.

Then it started to make sense.

“You know when I say, ‘you can’t give what you don’t have?'” I asked.

He nodded.

“It’s the same with projection. If you don’t have love or kindness, then you can’t project, like a speaker projects sound, that love or kindness.”

I started to lose him again.

“How’s this? When you feel good about yourself or what you’re experiencing, you share nice thoughts. You share thoughts or behaviors that are like copies, or the song in the speaker with a person…”

He brightened.

“So, when you feel bad about yourself or what you’re experiencing, you share not-nice thoughts. You share the copies of your bad feelings in the form of bad behaviors or a bad song coming out of the speakers, or bad pictures coming out of the movie projector. It’s like you blame your bad behavior on that person when you’re the one with the bad mood… the bad feelings are inside to begin with…”

He nodded and stared a little blankly and said, “So when you’re tired and you say mean things or are super fast and not nice about things, it’s not at me, even though it feels like it, but it’s because you don’t feel nice inside?”

“YES!” I shouted and surprised him. “Yes. Let’s stay on the idea that it’s me, because sometimes it is. It’s because I don’t feel nice inside. Sometimes you can be with me and I’m tired, or stressed, or sick, or that I feel really angry about something else … What I sometimes don’t do, when I project, is separate my feelings inside — whatever they are — from the person I project onto, in this example, you.”

“So projecting is like vomiting. That’s where ‘projectile vomiting’ comes from?”

“Yes. Projecting is like vomiting. Great analogy. It’s like the feelings are so bad inside that person, your brother in this case, that he vomited his emotions all over you.”

“Yup. It is. So … then what?”

I liked where this was going.

“Well, if you’re a target of projection, like if you were barfed on, you can stay there and get stinky, cold and crusty and feel bad, probably worse that the person who barfed on you, because …”

“Because when you barf, you always feel better…” he said. “But it can get other people sick, because it’s contagious… and I usually feel really empty inside after I barf, like I hurt in a different way…”

My son’s a genius.

“Right! You likely feel worse than the barfer, and are stinky. You can stay there and be angry at the person who barfed on you, and like you said, spread the barf and be mean to another person, or… you can get up and change your clothes and feel a bit sorry for the person who’s feeling so bad, they had to project their bad feelings on to you. Or you don’t have to feel sorry. And that new pain? That’s because after barfing, or projecting, that person is still sick or weak. The “yuck” is still there. But, if you feel sorry for them, chances are you might end up feeling bad with them, which is their point usually. It’s like they feel so ugly, they want you to feel ugly too, so they’re not alone…”

I started to lose him again.

“But they don’t want you around … why would they want you around? You said ‘so they’re not alone?‘ So when my brother does this to me again, I can get up and walk away…”

“That ‘so they’re not alone’ is a figure of speech and it’s confusing. Yes. You can get up and walk away. But will you? Sometimes people want to get back and do something nasty to the person who made them feel bad. That’s a natural feeling, revenge, and it reminds me of the different pain we have after we barf, but … one of the things I like to say to myself, when I’m feeling very vengeful, is that I’m lucky I’m not her… the person who barfed on me…”

And that’s the truth.

He didn’t answer me, about whether he’d get back at his brother, or take the high road. He’s eleven. I don’t have huge aspirations for him in that vein, but I hope to plant a seed.

Eleven?! It can be hard to practice this level of self-awareness at 47!

So much of our pain and its projections comes from a place very deep inside, very old, very real so much so that one confrontation with Truth (a rejection, a situation where you perceive a comment as a threat because maybe it’s close to Truth…?) can feel like an actual threat; as though everything is riding on our survival (read: fight to the death) of that moment.

Viktor Frankl said,

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Man’s Search for Meaning

I like to call that space, a breath. A breath that slows things down and lets us come to a place of calm and acceptance that things ARE NOT life and death. Rather that breath can mean the difference between having a life and living a life.

I’ve used my blog as a platform to have my say about things that bug me, and I will absolutely submit that I’ve projected my pain on it. It’s my catharsis. In those instances, my use of my blog is emblematic of the fact that I feel I’ve run into a brick wall, that I’m just at a point where I feel as though my message has run into a cognitive dissonance machine and that I need to process it. The funny part (to me) is that there is SO MUCH I don’t share here. However, I will also submit that I can meditate more on the point of my blog, that it needn’t be a platform because I feel unheard or worse, voiceless. If people think what I write is about them, or they don’t like what I’ve shared, that’s … well, their ego; it’s tickled a notion in them and…that’s not my problem. My dad has a saying, “If people react to what you’ve said, that means you got to them. Either way, it’s about them.” My distant relative, a priest, had a saying for that, “You’re not mad at what you’re mad at.”

So my son turned to me and he said, “You’re a great mom. I think I get it. It’s like now, I feel good inside for talking about this and I want to share it with you. Will you be my date to Starbucks today? I would like to buy you a coffee and a scone with my birthday money.”

How to refuse that?!

So we went. Here’s our “us-ie” from the date:

one of the best dates i’ve ever had. we talked about minecraft and Christmas and legos and Little Big Planet and sugar cookies.

So try to not see your moments of hurt and frustrations as things or places where you have no choice but to fire an invective at someone OR a thing where you have to wear the stinky wet barfy clothes.

Try to see them as lessons, teachers, messengers from your deeper, inner self to address a feeling of __________ from long ago. And then, try to “listen” to it; try to hear its lesson. Try to be OK with it. Feelings are just sensations. There is no threat.

Thank you.

Dec18

Grief: One Breath at a Time

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Grass Oil by Molly Field

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Today in yoga, when I got to have svasana, I meditated on compassion and the only word that came to me in response was “unfolding.”

Being on the web, with a blog, assures a certain vulnerability. My words are here for anyone to denigrate and yet I find myself buoyed by the kindnesses and trust of strangers.

Christmas is in a week and I miss the idea of wondering what my mother would give me as a gift. Would it be something I’d want? Would it be something she liked and she gave to me? Would it be something she’d give to everyone else or my sisters-in-law too?

I sit here, just a bit more than a year after her death and I feel emotions ranging from pure confusion about death to sadness that people, all of us, die; from deep guilt that I wasn’t a better daughter, to pure anger that she wasn’t a better mother; from a proud awareness that we are each others’ teachers to a sheepish allowance that we are each others’ pupils.

The human ego is such an odd, strange thing. It’s there to protect us from emotional harm, but for me, in the end all it does is delay the eventual pain when it protects too much. It elevates us, falsely, above and beyond our threshold of “value” so that we are uneven with that which hurts us. When we come down, to the reality that we are all connected, that we all breathe the same way, that we all eat with a mouth and chew with our teeth and fart and cry and poop and sneeze … it can be a lot to bear.

Yeah.

It’s a cold reality sometimes.

When I was a child, I held my parents to a godlike status. As I’ve aged, they did / are too and I see their humanity. I use the present tense with Mom, even today, because my perception of her humanity is ever emerging even though she has moved on.

I shared a dream, the only one, I had of Mom after she died with my father yesterday and it made me weep to share it. Not because she’s dead, but because it’s really a gorgeous message.

She was on a shoreline on a familiar Canadian beach on Lake Erie where we swam often. Her sylvan hair was in a chin-length bob. She was wearing a navy blue knit cashmere suit, her red cashmere sweater, a cashmere black, white, red and navy plaid scarf and these little blue leather loafers she loved but I hated for the same reason: because they were so shapeless. She was in her healthy early 70s. She was about one hundred feet from me, walking along the shore, just at the point where a receding wave leaves the sand still slick and wet and shiny. She stopped and looked over some tiny spiral shells on the shore. Her hands were clasped behind her back and her hair would sweep down over her face, I couldn’t see it perfectly, but it was her. The lake’s tiny waves were lapping at her shoes. She didn’t care. She bent over and inspected closer. Her fingers were glancing along the sand, turning over a little shell here, or a rounded, ancient pebble there. The sun had set behind me, behind the trees bunkering the white tent where a festive party was going on behind me, and I called out to her, “Mom! Mom! C’mon! You’re missing the party!” and she turned to me, and she said nothing. Her hair was clear off her face now. Stars were starting to show in the periwinkle sky. She beamed at me, this gorgeous wide smile she had. Her lips were red with our favorite lipstick she bought because I loved it so much. She swept up her arms as the wind swept up her scarf and her hair around her cheeks and she turned to the water. Her face looked up to the heavens and she looked back at me and shook her head “no” and instead lovingly and theatrically gesturing at all the glory of things I’d never understand in this lifetime as if to say, “No. You’re missing the party.”

I turned back to the party, to reference it, to say, “NO! It’s happening here! Mom!” and I turned back to her, and she was gone.

This is the Mom I never allowed. The one who bucked the system yet wore cashmere anyway. The one who I wanted fiercely to somehow morph into a rule-follower. The one who I wanted to tell me when to be home and to punish me when I wasn’t. The one who I needed to help me with my homework when I lied and said there wasn’t any. That one wasn’t there.

It’s hard to have so many conflicting emotions about the woman who brought me into this world. I loved her the only way I could, the way she let me. She used to say to me, “Maaaally, you’re conflicted. You’re ambivalent. You can’t ‘hate‘ me without loving me first.”

I hated it when she said that.

Snort.

Because even though I used to tell her she was full of crap, she was so right. I loved her like … a child loves its mother; with a fierce, fearful, perfect and abiding love. She could do no wrong when I was young. It wasn’t until I was much older, that I saw her humanity … and I hated it. It broke me apart; her fragility broke me apart. She lived on a different plane; where there were no rules and that all of them could be broken. I was brought here to learn that.

I was going to make it with or without her; I laugh at that now. She was instrumental in hardening me for this world I inhabit now. So at this moment, while I miss her, and I miss the idea of wondering whether I would feel rejected or loved by the Christmas gift she would give me, I realize that the gift she gave me, all along, is life. With all its ups and downs, my mom gave me life.

If your mom is around in your life still, and you are in communication with her, tell her thanks from me for giving us you. And if you’re not in communication with her, well … say something nice about yourself because she helped make you.

We do not live one day at a time; we live one breath at a time. This is the ‘unfolding.’ This is the message from svasana. When we are still, things change.

Thank you.