Heel to Toe, Heel to Toe

Quote of the Day: 

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of it's sorrows, 

it only empties today of it's strength.

~Charles Spurgeon~

Current Local Weather: 

60 MPH winds followed by

120 BPM pulse ripping my veins apart.

Currently on my iPod: 

"Human Nature"

Solo

Vijay Iyer

Dear Friends, Family and my Family of Friends, 

If you had a choice in the life you were granted, do you think you would have chosen the one you're currently living? What if there had been someone standing over you, like a detective or IRS agent, waiting for a flinch or extra out-of-character blink as you stood over bodies, surveying them for potential good or bad traits...would you have wanted them for who they look like instead of who they were or are or will be? Would you still have thought to pick yourself? 

hmmm..

Do you even know yourself well enough to know which body would have best represented you? Would your instincts, as a human, have kicked in? 

I don't think they would have. I don't even know if the saying, Trust Your Instincts, is enough to go off of in any situation. Sure, sure, I understand the fight or flight syndrome thingamajig, but it doesn't mean it's always right unless Steve Carell is coming after you with a trident in a backlot of a news station...

Seriously though, do you think you would have really wanted to be anyone other than yourself? I hear all the time...if only I were this person...or that person…honestly, I hear it all the time from my own mouth, subconscious and whatnot. Especially when I've been very sick, I think…if only I could be someone…anyone other than me, stuck in my body, dying on the inside to have someone on the outside listen. 

Inevitably, after I say it, I regret it. 

It's at this stage, that I feel we're all going wrong. There's this want of something that isn't real or true or even anywhere near half-true and I feel, more now than ever, that this is devouring our drive to be better people. If we're always focused on being someone we're not, we'll never be who the world needs us to be. 

Besides, there's no way to know what it's like to be anyone else. Walking a mile in someone else' shoes is quite literally, impossible. 

We all know how to walk. We all know what walking looks and feels like. Heel toe, heel, toe. We all know that there are some people who can't walk but know how to get around. But this doesn't mean that we all walk the same. This only means that we have a common denominator. It's like we're all versions of the same equation that eventually come to the same conclusion. Yet there's no easy way to figure out what that conclusion is or will be. It's just best if we keep our own shoes on and respect the fact that not everyone wears Nikes or Clarks or Jimmy Choo. Some of us are barefoot. Some of us don't mind the calluses and think they add character. Some of us wear the same shoes year after year regardless of what's in or out of style.  

So who is it that chooses dystopia when we're all taught that utopia is just a first kiss/new car and/or undergrad degree away…? Evil Dictators? Hardly. I think they start out the same way we all do. Wishing for a better world…however warped their world is, a better world, nonetheless. 

Dystopia isn't an advantage unless you look at it as something that can afford you considerable perspective. Same can be said for Utopia. If you were that other person living a life unlike the only one you know, what would be the thing that makes you happy? Would the life you live now seem despotic? Or would it be great? 

Would the happiness that stems off of your new life cause bloating of the ego? Would it simplify your life? Choices wouldn't have to be made. It would be so perfect that no other life would ever be good enough. However, when pressure begins within, the repercussions are often deadly. Egos get bruised, expectations are lost and the drive to be anyone at all, has landed you in a foreign land without a map, a friend or even vegetation to feed off of. 

I wish I had a different kind of different life. One in which the poor in spirit are treated just as well as those that are poor in the wallet. There's charities for those that are homeless. There's government institutions that will pay for you to get a better life if this is the situation you're in. But if all you want is to be someone you're not, you've got to find your own way either forward or back to where you started. 

Anne Lamott, during a reading in Denver at the LoDo Tattered Cover store this past week, said that the biggest fight she's ever been through was that of learning how to fall in love with herself. How everything she had done before this love affair had been accomplished through the pain of being everything but true to her soul. How hard is it to see the lesson in this? 

Learning these lessons aren't easy. I can't even say that I'm 100% there but I do know, in my heart, that I'm working on it day and night. It won't be long until this project is due and the next one begins. Being good to yourself is of the essence. Letting anyone down for any reason, just isn't ok by social standards. So why does letting yourself down seem like an acceptable practice of the human race. 

I hope you'll all fall back in love with your lives. Moving on and up and lending a hand to those that have yet to learn to walk, run or jump over to their purpose... 

Yours in Love, Lessons yet to be Learned and Listening to Reason, 

Cicily 

I Should Have Waxed My Brows & Other Thoughts On Re-Entering the Asylum

I should have waxed my brows
And paid more attention to my lips
as there is nothing more of me, but a pair of sagging hips.

I should have said hello
to those I didn't know

Or said goodbye to those that
didn't take the chance to say, Hi.

I should have known that God would smile
knowing that this took a while
and would say, you have no worries, my child. 

I should have known to finish my work
before I opened my mouth
and looked like a jerk.

I should have wished more love to my world
but it doesn't matter to them, the things I cared for,
like, if my hair was straight, gone or curled.

I should have taken the trash out
before the diapers soured
and the oranges began to pout.

I should have known that the first
would hurt the most
the last, wouldn't kill me,
or be the worst.

For I should have listened
to those that said, I love you
and you're my friend.

I should have done more for those I know,
I should have done...more to say
I love you...you're my life, my love, my end. 


Okay, enough is enough. Hope you get the message...loud and clear. As they say, whoever THEY are, see ya on the flipside.

Yours in Cutting, Curing and Courting Loves Lost and Found,

Cicily

Chasing Pavements

Quote of the Day: 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. 

But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.

~Robert Frost~

Current Local Weather: 

Cold. Dark. Loud

Currently on my iTunes: 

"Cryin'"

Big Ones

~Aerosmith~

Dear Friends, Family and My Family of Friends, 

This morning finds me awake. VERY awake. Trouble is that it's only 330am MST. I wish it wasn't. There isn't anything more in this world that I want more than a night of sleep that lasts ALL NIGHT LONG. This whole affair my biological clock is having with the digital clock of the world that happens at 230-730am every single day is getting old. I have to ask my body, why in the hell do you think this is ok? When did I ever give you permission to cheat on me with this early morning mistress of insomnia characterized by bladder fullness, fits of discombobulated creativity and worry for the better half of mankind...

Blech. 

Double Blech. 

I am more tired than I have been in eons. This is rivaling the absurdity of the culture of nonsleeping infants...This cavity of sleep deprivation is about to cause death to my roots. I'm about to need a root canal of my mind. And I know it's going to hurt and I hope my subconscious numbs me up for it before hand. I'm reminded of the great Aerosmith tune, Love in an Elevator...living it up while I'm going down. 

 

I'm pretty sure that what I'm doing wasn't the point of Tyler's magical lyrics. I've had people say...well, at least you're getting work done...That's NOT my idea of living it up. So what am I doing? 

What I'm doing is trying to make the best of this situation. There's lots of situations in my life at this moment that need a positive spin. Sometimes, when life throws a mass amount of smashed lemons right at your retinas, it's hard to see that there is ever going to be a positive spin on anything you do, ever again! But lemon juice, especially rotten lemon juice with shards of your past, will only cause temporary blindness. Painful temporary blindness, but temporary nonetheless. 

Unless you add rock salt to the lemons. Then it can necessitate some doc or other digging out your eyeballs of the poison that pains you. Surgery is never the best option. Unless it's your appendix. 

But thinking that just the elimination of something that is less than ideal, like this insomnia, isn't going to cure the root cause. Eliminating this time of the morning for me, as in sleeping through it, would mean that most of the latest blogs would be silent and some of the better book ideas I've had would be amiss in the universe. 

So, there's the bright side. 

Uh. huh. 

Sure. 

The downside is that I'm beginning to look like this chic: 

I'm sure she's very pretty when she gets a full night sleep. Inside and out. But living a dream or living through a dream isn't always the best option nor is it a given that your conscious thoughts will allow you to recall whatever dreams you've previously laid out for yourself.

Some small talk with your inner being while you're suffering through anything can also help cure your issues. The best way to get someone to open up to you is to make them feel comfortable within a few seconds, yes, not minutes, SECONDS, of meeting you or speaking with you. I learned this the hard way during the interview process for The New Face of Jazz. I tried to get it right, especially at first when I was literally winging it, but then I realized that I had to forget the notion of greatness right out of the gate and listen to what the subject was telling me and saying without words. Body language. Radio silence on the other end of the phone...could I engage a complete stranger in a conversation that would eventually translate to mean something on the page? Can I now do this with myself? Despite my excuses of insomnia, circumstantial depression or situational weirdness? I don't know. 

But I have to, and I know this to be true of everyone I know that has gone through this or something similar, pick up my arse and get my head out of the crack running down the middle of it. No excuses. I'm not the only one with more issues than National Geographic. (Thanks Suellen!)

I know it's true. Sometimes words and walls are there just to be run into at the least opportune moment. Such as this one...at 3am. Oh well. Chasing pavements won't afford you opportunity, it will, instead, give you skinned knee and eat your elbows.

I hope all of you reading this, right at this moment, went to bed earlier than I did. Or passed out from too much beer at a Super Bowl Party. Seize the opportunity to make the most of your day, regardless of the weight sitting on your shoulders. It can ALWAYS be worse. Mostly. 

Yours in Skinned Knees, Skirting through the Middle of the Night and Sailing through Today to Get to Tomorrow, 

Cicily

Third Person Dreams

Quote of the Day: 

You have to believe that love will be there when you need it. 

~Claire Danes~ 

Current Local Weather: 

 Snow. Slate-Cleansing snow.

Currently on my iPod: 

"What Might Have Been"
Little Texas

Dear Friends, Family and My Family of Friends...

I love the anticipation of a good snow storm. 

Growing up in GA meant I had an unusual sense of the awesomeness known as snow. While growing up it didn't take much. The mere thought of snow meant we (my generation and younger) began, almost immediately, to hold out for our biggest hope of all hopes that school would cease to exist. It's not that we didn't care about learning or bettering ourselves, it was because flaky white goodness was the end all be all of seasonal rewards. We could stay up late and watch HBO, we didn't have to study! We could sleep in! Or better yet we could go into the ice, dressed in our once a year winter jacket and learn the ups and downs of frostbite. 

Snow days ranked up there with waiting for Jesus/Guffman or the next Zombie Apocalypse. It just HAS to happen, right? 

Snow is THE Jabberwocky of all things weather related in the South. It HAS to be real, right? 

Just because we lived in the South didn't mean we didn't deserve days off of school for snow! But they were rare, hardly seen, hardly felt, feared by the adults and loved by kids. Snow...ah, the snow. The silent beauty.

Ah...memories...I'm reminded, while keeping one eye anxiously on the window, two ears plugged into Fleetwood Mac and my fingers moving to spin a yarn for you all, of those days and those third person dreams. Dreams of this type tend to appear as crazy or unfounded by those that believe dreaming is frivolous and hard work is the only bedfellow a person should have. I suppose those of us that do dream need to hold tight to our third person dreams for those that don't. It's our duty. There are those of us that weren't born to dream, we were born dreaming. Of course we lose our way and forget how we got where we are. Reminders of this life are sometimes blind, blunt and bewildering. This is when we must allow our peers to hold their third person dreams out there for us to borrow, enhance and send back for the next. 

This isn't always easy. As I get older and the snow storms become more of an expected nuisance, dreaming of a clean white slate of a day seems frivolous and boring, a waste of space in my mind. But it isn't. If we're not careful, as adults, we will soon be left with only a reflection of ourselves in those snow covered hills. By the time this happens we honestly risk our lives staring at that snow-covered hill. We will have forgotten to play in the snow and become a paranoid of avalanches, dreamless person.

I love the Fleetwood Mac song,  

Landslide.  

***And the link is to the best version out there.***

And I saw my reflection in the snow covered hills 

until the landslide brought me down...

oh mirror in the sky, what is love..

can the child within my heart, rise above.

Can I sail through the changing ocean tide, 

can I handle the seasons of my life...

Well, I've been afraid of changing, cause I built my life around you.

But time makes you bolder, even children get older, and I'm getting older too.

Oh I'm getting older too...so... 

Take this love, take it down. 

If you climb a mountain and you turn around. 

and if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills

well the landslide will bring you down...down...

and if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills....

well maybe, the landslide will bring you down...

well, well, the landslide will bring you down.

Nothing like a good Stevie Nicks set of lyrics to bring the tears on...and you back to your dreaming self. 

So, what's the point? I have to confess. I'm amidst something I think could be great, honestly so. And no, it's not my medical crap. I've recently experienced something I'd rather keep to myself for now. It started as a hope/fear of the unknown and became this unexpected, wonderful and worrisome thing all at once. Turns out, I'm smack dab in the middle of a third person dream. Someone from an unknown constellation is lending this to me and they knew right when I needed it. This isn't my dream. It's, at least not from where I stand, always a good thing but looks like it might get there. 

It's a landslide. 

It's ok. I'll either die trying to find a safe place for myself in it or I will live to see what the land beneath it looks like. Either way, I can't complain. I don't know what I haven't seen. I don't understand what I can't hear or feel and like most, I fear all of it. The good and bad, the known and unknown. We're bred to live in a life where we address those that are part of our current known dream in the second person and find it ridiculous to live in the third and observe our lives from the outside in. Even if only for a moment. 

My third person life kinda goes like this: Cicily likes to dream in color. She finds the best people she possibly can and attaches herself to them like one of those sticky octopuses that walk on walls that she used to collect from Happy meals...She thinks Salt-Water Taffy was invented by dentists, slips in & out of conscious thought all day long and truly believes that snow is the best of all known distractions. Cicily is currently dreaming. Please don't disturb her. Just trust it will get better, just like she does.

Yours in Dreams, Drifts and Delivering a Delirious Draft,

Cicily

 

Another Day...Another...Uh...Dollar? Hell no. It's ANOTHER DAY!

Quote of the Day:

*apologies ahead of time for the length of this*

The future used to be such an abstract idea...but then it has the nerve to show up

and it's like it's expecting us to do something without 
the slightest intention of giving us a lending hand.

~Kurt...Glee~ 

Current Local Weather: 

Shit. Followed by a well-intentioned feeling of 

reluctance and sunshine...for now.

Currently on my iPod: 
*Most beautiful version available. Promise. Buy it.*

"Moonlight in Vermont"  
State of Art
Ben Williams

Dear Friends, Family and My Family of Friends, and one particular friend...

Last year, right around that horrid day known as Valentines Day, I wrote a letter more to myself and my daughters about the love I didn't need and the one I did need and one year, almost to the date...kinda, I'm finding myself writing a love note to someone who's been in my life for a while. And no, it isn't THAT kind of love note. I'm not getting hitched, or even asking for a hitched ride to nowhere'sville of love villas. This is something that is coming from the heart. And it is for one of my dearest friends. And yes, the latest episode of Glee was about that four letter word...you know...starts with an L and often ends with heartbreak...the big one..."Love"...was killer. It took care to show that love is messy, sucks ass sometimes and is often not what you thought it was or what other people had you believe it should be or could be and often, if you get it right before you die, you realize that the love you had, was often what you always wanted it to be. 

Ok, for those that know me, I will quit with the teenagey TV melocomedrama talk...enough Gleeage.


Yes this is public. But this is for all dozen or so readers to take in but not to digest in the way I am writing it. This is being written as a public declaration to someone who's name will be never-ever be mentioned...but I need to push a little. He's been down on his "A-game" and he needs a boost. I feel he's thinking he may be or very well is probably losing his coveted monopoly piece in this game of messy, often costly life and is trying desperately to win it back on Ebay...A friend. It seems like an eternity of a life has passed since I met this friend, But it's not a life I know or one I don't think I've had the privilege to live in the flesh...or at the very least, it's one I've lost the source codes for.

So, This is for you. And yes, it really is. 


Tomorrrow is always a new day. How frolickin'' cliche' of me. But just because you're roaming without or at-best, sketchy coverage, doesn't mean a thing in this modern day and age. I'm pretty sure that your smart-phone and brain is wired to change GPS coordinates with the turn of the breeze that says all the things you don't need to hear and even better those sayings come from one of those satellites that everyone knows exist but will never see.  Or maybe you will. I have the feeling that neither of us will know what that satellite looks like until we've found the flip-side. But we both know that the B-side, the flip-side as they say in the industry, is always the better one. It's the one that the musicians and artists let their true lights shine on and on and on.

And I felt a dire need to make this public, because I too, need to hear it, even after it came out of my own brain. 

But really, I have to ask, what was this "L" word invented for if not for our own edification? It's time for you to get with that program. I hear they meet 24/7, it's on every radio, every bandwidth of existence that's ever existed and is now visible on every inch of this planet. Believe it or not. But yes, Hallmark has actually found a new CEO and is busy covering the  world as we know it with an invisible cloak disguised as that taste, texture, sight and sound of love. Is it red velvet? I suppose it would be if you weren't blind or color-disabled.  

But this isn't romantic love. This is truly easy to be a part of. There's no fee to join. There's no commercial with the gorgeous Jennifer Hudson telling you how even though she looks "thinner" on the outside, she's fuller on the inside and the light she shines has always been there...This is a simple find at your local hardware store of life. They sell goggles of reality there in every size, shape and color. 

Just say the word and it changes. Life does. Love does. The greens turn to fields and the blues turn to endless sky and that azure dream you had while on the last plane you drifted to sleep on, is suddenly the color you see when you stare in the mirror and try to find the person behind the retinas that beg you, daily, for a clearer vision. 

You're a whole...beautiful soul. You have given your life to making sure that what was in front of you, that block known as your world is ok and where you are, whatever shape that takes on whatever day and time you're in, will be surefooted, heart wrenchingly meaningful, even if that meaning doesn't come to you while you're on this side of the vinyl tracks. 

And I say all of this with every single bit of life, love, blood, sweat and tears left inside me. And this doesn't just mean that I want that square foot you're standing on to smile...it is quite the opposite...I dream of a day, that you, one of my dearest friends, one who knows my head sometimes better than I, will take a look at the place that was rented out on your behalf on the very moment you entered the world...you were there...it was the day your mother and father rented you your first apartment, the one you've resided in since, that spacious, high ceiling loft with the view that goes beyond that vast footage in your heart, will be repaired beyond repair, beyond your wildest dreams and the repairman won't be the one with a grayed out mullet and a crack deeper than the river of Jordan, but by that one that has your number on speed dial and a magnet on your fridge...he's the only ONE that you need. He's got an eternal resume with a reference list that goes beyond every name ever invented. You're in need of repair, minor by comparison to some, major by comparison to those watching over you. Your heart, the love it shows to everyone else watching you, will return, maybe now, maybe ten years from now, but it WILL get there...to that most beautiful, original, made just for you...your size, shape and color (and that goes for your hair too)


Yours in Love, Lightening the Load and Listening when Words Aren't Present, 

C