fear

“At times the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough, and what might seem a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.” ~ Lemoney Snicket

Sunday morning dawned not with its usual slothful inertia, but with the same flurry of activity that had swarmed around me since he’d been admitted to Cedars Sinai late Saturday night. An endless stream of texts and phone calls double-teamed me, rendering me all at once distracted, informed, comforted, and overwhelmed. 

In a nutshell, after a week of spiking fevers, some as high as 102.6 degrees, at the urging of our indispensable doctor friend, Jeff, Raphael had finally agreed to stop under-reacting, and “Just go to the damn emergency room!” Thursday he’d been put on a pretty gnarly antibiotic but not much had improved. Come to find out, the bacteria that had spent the week ravaging his immune system was antibiotic-resistant. Cue the BIG GUNS. A drug so strong it took seven doctors to reach consensus to even prescribe it. It had to be given as an IV drip and his blood and urine had to be monitored. Around the clock. For at least the first three days of the nine-day treatment.

So much for the quickie emergency room visit we both believed would chew up maybe two hours of his Saturday afternoon. 

Clearly, we are two of the most clueless Pollyanna’s you’d ever have the misfortune to know. We also believe ice cream is good for you, dogs understand English, and the truth will always prevail. When you look up the word naive in the dictionary you see a picture of the two us, accompanied by the sound of uproarious laughter. 

Anyhow, it was all so unexpected and laden with fuckery that by Sunday morning I was feeling a bit…unmoored. So, you ask, what do I do when I feel like that?

Buy donuts.

Into Ralph’s I marched, wallet and keys in hand. Laser focused as I strode down the aisle, past the produce, past the dairy section, looking for…what was I looking for? Head down, reading a text that was attempting to explain something unexplainable to anyone without a medical degree, I suddenly remembered why I was there—donuts. Pivoting in place, I swung a hasty 180— promptly knocking over a free standing display of Peet’s coffee that only a few seconds before had been loitering there, minding its own business. Shit, shit, shit, shit! Laying on its side, its guts spilled everywhere, it shamed me as I bent over to pick up all the bags of Peet’s.

Get your head in the game, Janet! It sneered.
Get off your phone!
Slow down!
Pay attention!
You’re acting like the sky is falling, Chicken Little.
He’s fine!

That’s when I noticed the additional set of hands helping me pick up the mess on aisle five.

“Oh, thank you, I’m so clumsy,” I said, just assuming the hands belonged to a store employee. 

I could not have been more wrong.

Down on my knees, my hands filled with Peet’s, I looked up and smiled directly into the face of—a scary clown.
SERIOUSLY! A SCARY CLOWN!

There we were, ten thirty on a Sunday morning, and a woman over six feet tall, wearing a bright orange wig, her face painted like the joker, was helping me pick up coffee!
Me: dropping the coffee—Holy shit! You’re a scary clown!
SC: I am.
Me: Well, thank you…scary clown…for…wait…how are you a scary clown?
SC: smiling through painted black tears— Because sometimes scary clowns are there when you need ‘em.

MIC DROP

Scooping up the remaining bags of coffee, my brain surged into overdrive. How…why…what…huh?

Satisfied that the Peet’s coffee display would live to sell another bag, I brushed myself off and looked around only to watch the back of scary clown leave aisle five. “Thanks again!” I yelled, muttering the rest under my breath, “…freakin’ Sunday morning scary clown.

I think we can all agree, my life is absurd.

A random series of magical realities strung together like gumdrops, embellishing the Christmas tree that masquerades as my life.

Super deep universal truths delivered by scary clowns in supermarkets are absurd.

An antibiotic resistant bacteria that plays hide and seek for a week is absurd!

So is hospital food and compression socks and showers with non-existent water pressure. 

So is fear. Fear is absurd.

It’s all a fucking clown show my friends—but it’s my life.

Carry on,
Xox JB

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” ~ William Shakespeare

I took a bunch of improv classes back in the day and lemme just validate what you probably already know—improv isn’t easy.
If it were, everybody would be doing it—and they’re not. Most of my acting friends at the time said they would rather do stand- up, or sing a song at an open mic night than be stuck on stage for one hot second doing improv.
Reasons Given: There’s no set story, no plan. There are no parameters, no written lines to rehearse. To be any good you have to (gulp) surrender to the moment. And, you have to listen with your whole body.

Fuck no! They yelled as they ran toward serious drama. That shit’s too scary!

Me being me, I thought it looked fun. You just make shit up and everyone has to go along with it? Cool!  So I decided to try it. And just like you do when you find yourself committed to trying something completely terrifying for no rational reason and no money, I puked like a rockstar backstage before I stepped one fearful foot into the lights.

How bad can it be? — famous last words.

“You’re hard candy at the bottom of a grandmother’s purse!” Someone yelled. Oh hell no!  I thought, frozen in place. I’m not candy…candy can’t talk…what am I doing?…why am I here?…Jesus H. Christ, I feel naked…am I naked?…am I dreaming?…have I died?…where’s the exit?

The other actor on stage, the good one, really got into it. His candy had a backstory, a history. Separated from our wrappers and passed over by the grandkids, it was just the two of us, he insisted. Left to our own devices among the stray Kleenex, tiny envelopes of artificial sweetener, and our arch-enemies, THE COUGH DROPS — we had a shared destiny to fulfill!

I could barely hear the guy over the voice of my ego screaming inside my head. There must be an easier, less mortifying way to spend your time! It railed. Then fear took over.
My legs grew roots.
Paralyzed, I couldn’t move a muscle.
I tried to swallow but my saliva had turned to dust.
I’d also gone mute.
I’m sure this only lasted a minute or five, but it felt more like an hour as I stood on stage in a stupor, listening to this guy yammer on about his imaginary life as a purse candy.

Once the blood found its way back to my brain, I remembered the number one rule of improv: Say Yes. Always agree and SAY YES.

Finally, my hard candy comrade ran out of things to say. Having finished an impromptu five-minute monologue, he stood there glaring at me, every minty molecule of his being willing me to die play along. Rule number two: Don’t Deny. Denial is the number one reason things go south. Taking a deep breath, I attempted to override my ego whose pernicious idea it was to stand like an idiot deer in the headlights.
Like that wasn’t weird at all.
Like it was the lesser of two evils.
Like nobody would notice.

Epiphany #1 — What my ego was advising me to do was no less humiliating than acting like a candy!

There was somebody on the stage who was begging me to join him and it would be impossible to look any worse than I did right that minute. I went for it. Putting my hands on my head I teased my big eighties hair into a cotton candy frenzy. “Can I ask you a question?” I said, “How do you keep all of this purse lint from sticking to you?” Off we went…I can’t tell you what we did after that, or what was said, all I know is that was the moment the suffering stopped. That was the moment it got fun!

People laughed.
I didn’t die.
I learned a TON.
And in the future (yes, I kept at it) every time I overrode my ego’s impulse to make me hurl or bolt for the exit, improv got… easier.

Epiphany #2 — As I studied spirituality, meditation, and being in the moment— as I read all the Ekart Tolle books and Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment, I realized that most suffering comes from wanting things to be different than they are, instead of saying yes to what the universe, AKA the best improv partner ever, has put in front of you.

But it takes practice! I constantly have to remind my ego: Say YES. Let go of your agenda (don’t deny). Listen to what you receive and build on it. You can’t be wrong. Make your partner(s) look brilliant. Keep moving forward. Surrender, surrender, surrender.

Epiphany #3 — Life is one long improv sketch! You can listen to your ego and do everything in your power to keep from looking weird or making a mistake, which I have found is the quickest route to dullsville OR in a world full of choices— you can be the hard candy!

Epiphany #4 — Always agree with Stephen Colbert.

Carry on,
xox J

Training starts this week, triggering epic levels of FFT, and I gotta tell ya, it has surprised me. 

I may be the queen of improvising, of high-wire walking, of seat-of-the-pants flight, but y’all—I don’t love being new at things. I don’t love being clunky and awkward and shitty at new skills. And don’t tell me to appreciate the vulnerability, because I don’t.

Case in point, the navigation video. Let’s just talk about the damn pre-training navigation video, shall we?  With all of its compass calculations and longitude and latituding. It was so mathy (my kryptonite) that I literally got nauseous—stopped it halfway through—and took a nap. 

4 times, people. I watched it (and walked out on it) FOUR incomprehensible, I just don’t get it and they will need a search party to find our sad, dead bodies, me, with my map in my cold, dead, hand because I may suck but I’m tenacious—times!

Fucking

First

Time

This training has me all effed up and I’ve ridden the world for weeks at a time on a motorcycle!

https://www.rebellerally.com

Like Brene says: Embrace the suck. And in case you’re wondering, here are her three tips for doing that:

Name it — The abject terror of sucking. Like becoming the face of gold-medal-level-suck. 

Normalize it — This is temporary, it’s how new feels and I don’t suck at everything, I make reservations really well.

Get Realistic Expectations — Lower the bar, it’s all new. All of it. The map navigation, racing a Jeep through the desert. Sleeping in a tent on top of our rig (gulp).

“Embracing our cringyness, is the secret sauce to leading a brave life.” — Also Brene and now I want to hurt her. So, here I go, into the abyss of suck. Wish me luck as I recite my new mantra.

I WILL suck. 

At ALL of it!

Until I don’t. 

Please pray for my partner.

Stay tuned. 

XOX Carry on, J

@rebellerally #wecandohardthings

The before picture — Lindsey, all smiles on top of our rig.

Hello friends,

Pardon the interruption, but I couldn’t help but share this. If you’re one of my tens of Instagram followers you can go make yourself a sandwich because this is a repost from today, but if you don’t social media (good for you by-the-way) and you want to feel lucky take a look at this!

In the midst of this pandemic, I realize it’s easy to be infected with fear & fuckery.

But one thing I know for sure is that it’s just as easy to catch the good stuff and I truly believe magic is contagious. I believe that sharing it, talking and writing about it transmits it like a goddamn super-spreader!

So consider yourselves infected! Happy Friday you beautiful humans.

Sent with an embarrassing amount of giddy love,
Carry on,
xox

“0h look, a dollar!”

I shrieked inside my head so as not to scare the dog. 

I’d gotten the “hit” to walk an hour earlier than normal. And since it had been drizzling all night I also received the idea to take the road less traveled. 

A paved path with only a slight chance of mud, it was a bit more out of our way, but I listened just the same. 

Let me admit this right upfront—I’m someone who LOVES to find money. In coat pockets, crumpled up inside the car, but most especially—out in the wild. 

That’s why I’ve maintained the practice of leaving wads of dollar bills on neighborhood sidewalks, next to the trash can at my local car wash, and on the floor of the produce department at Trader Joe’s. 

I do it when I’m feeling “broke”. 

It may not make sense to you but it shifts my perspective. 

A lot. 

I mean, you must have an unending supply of money if you can just throw it away like that! Right?

Besides that, I love how it feels to find money. It makes me feel lucky, like someone’s looking out for me. 

Like I’m a magnet for blessings. 

So you can imagine my glee when, after I took this picture, I realized it wasn’t a dollar bill after all, but a FIFTY!!

Y’all, all I can say is Follow your “hits”.

No matter how counterintuitive. 

No matter how out of the way they seem to be taking you. 

And feel lucky as often as you can. I swear this shit is magic. 💫✨💫✨💫

Carry on,
xox Janet

I love eleven-year-old girls. They smell like freshly opened boxes of crayons and cupcakes. The kind with sprinkles on top.
I love it when they’re named mid-twentieth-century names. The names our grandmothers, aunts, and librarians carried.

Helen lives on the route I walk with Ruby each morning. I’ve estimated her age and that of her little sister Abigail, by their smell and zest for life. Abigail smells like baby powder so she’s eight. I can’t explain how I know that——I just do.

Since quarantine began I don’t see them out and about anymore. But the signs of their zesty, lifieness, well, that’s EVERYWHERE. At some point in the past few days, the sisters, apparently armed with chalk, got out. And instead of the usual flowers and twirly-que-grafitti they usually leave, they jotted down a bunch of their most inspirational thoughts.

How did they know it was just what I, what we ALL needed?  

Because eleven-year-olds and their little sisters are wise. Like scary wise. It’s that time just before conformity and perfectionism kicks in, when sheer grace can shine through unobstructed. Lately, due to circumstances beyond my control, my own eleven-year-old self has started to show up more and more.

She’s named Janet, a fifties name if I’ve ever heard one, and she’s zesty, and feisty, and smells like hope.

I love my husband.
He is doing all the hard stuff. We’re all doing the hard stuff, but I’m watching him do the stuff that’s hard and well, that’s hard too—so I stopped. I stopped watching him and starting paying attention to my own hard stuff, which I’m sad to report didn’t make his stuff any easier but I felt better.

Even when his circus of hard visits itself upon me, I do my best to look away.

I have to.
I have my own hard stuff to attend to.
This morning, when I was in our bedroom meditating and he was already out in his office, having coffee and looking at his empty calender, I heard something unusual in our backyard. Naturally, I texted him to go and investigate because I’m just that lazy and husbands are made for that kind of hard stuff. They relish it. It isn’t even hard for them. It’s fun and who doesn’t need a little fun these days?

BTW: It was nothing. But I know it was something. Something was lurking. So there’s that to add to my hard stuff pile. Backyard lurking.

I love my friends. All of them. They are the reason I am who I am. so you can blame them. 

My BFF and I laugh our guts inside out on a daily basis and it SAVES me.
We’re doing big work in the world these days. Work we were born to do. Work I know I’ve trained for my whole life. Yet, some days the “hard” wins and I just want to disappear into a pile of marshmallow cream— or donuts.

This morning I went to the grocery store which used to be such a non-event but has now become a scene out of The Hunger Games. Masked and gloved and ready for some dystopian warfare, I walked the aisles of Trader Joe’s like a tribute. “May the odds be ever in your favor” I wanted to say to the hollow-eyed man lunging for the last ripe avocado.

When I got home, my husband left the hard stuff he was doing at his desk and helped me set up a grocery triage/sanitation station in the kitchen. After that, I took a Silkwood shower and began the rest of my day. But even my eleven-year-old has no zest left in her. And you know what? That’s okay. Because it has to be.

And last but never least, I love this community.

I see you and I FEEL you all sequestered in your homes, your big hearts beating in tandem. Wondering and waiting for the day when the world looks less scary. When we can leave our homes and hug a friend. And never take “normal” for granted again.

Carry on,
xox

I wrote about this a long time ago, but I’m going to post it again because I’ve told this story more in the past week than I have since it happened. 

We have a choice. The future, your future, the future of the entire world—it isn’t written yet. So…regarding this virus, how bad do you want it to be FOR. YOU. Your future is fluid right now and it’s asking for direction.

If you’ve heard it before, go make yourself a sandwich. And please, don’t give away the ending.

In the spring of 2010, I went to Hawaii with my dear friend Wes to get some clarity about which direction I should take my life after the death of my store, Atik. Sudden loss can strip a person of their trust in life—and themselves, and I was not lucky enough to escape that unspoken step of the grieving process. Besides, misery loves company.

Oh, who am I kidding? We went to drink Mai Tais, eat like escaped death row convicts, sit on the white sands of Waikiki Beach all day gossiping and people watching—and get massages.

All we did was laugh. Well, he laughed, I cried—then he laughed at my crying. Then I cry-laughed. It was wet and sloppy. Lots of running mascara and snot-bubbles.
You get the picture.

About mid-way through our seven-day trip, I got the sense there was going to be a tsunami.
You know—like you do…
That evening when Wes met me at the bar for happy hour I voiced my concern. “I want to move to a higher room in our hotel,”  I said, stirring my drink. “I think there’s going to be a tsunami and I’m not going to be safe on the second floor.”

“Did you start without me? How many drinks have you had?” he was laughing, flagging down a waiter in order to join this crazy party he figured I’d already started.
“I’m serious. You’re on the third floor, but I’m not even sure that’s high enough. Let’s look into moving.”

All I could see in my mind’s eye were those horrible images from the tsunami in Sumatra the day after Christmas, 2004.

His eyes said: Have you lost your mind? But in order to calm my fears, he immediately whipped out his phone and started to look up ‘Hawaiian tsunami’.

“The earliest on record was reported in 1813 or 1814 — and the worst occurred in Hilo in 1946, killing 173 people.” he recited, reading a Wikipedia page.
“So it happens kind-of-never, and I’m okay with those odds.” He raised his drink to toast “To surviving that rarest of all disasters—the Hawaiian tsunami!” We clinked glasses as he shook his head laughing at my continued squirminess.

Still laughing, he mumbled under his breath, “But if it does happen, which it could, ‘cause you’re pretty spooky that way— it will be one hell of a story.”

The first week of March the following year, 2011, our great friends, the ones who ride the world with us on motorcycles, asked if we wanted to join them at their condo in Maui. You don’t have to ask me twice to drop everything and go to Hawaii. I was printing our boarding passes before I hung up the phone.

On the beautiful drive from the airport to Lahaina, the air was warm and thick with just a hint of the fragrance of tropical rain as we wove our way in and out of the clouds that play peek-a-boo with the sun all day on the Hawaiian Islands. With a view of the lush green mountains formed from the ever-present volcanoes to the right, and the deep blue Pacific churning wildly to our left, that place really felt like Paradise Lost.

That’s when it hit me. I turned down the radio of the rental car that was blaring some five-year-old, Top Forty song.
“We’re going to have a tsunami,”  I announced.
It didn’t feel like if — it felt like when. A certainty.
“I think we’re more likely to have a volcanic eruption than a tsunami,” my hubby replied nonchalantly, turning the radio volume back up just in time to sing along with the chorus.

Damn, I love my husband. There he is, happily cohabitating with all the voices in my head without batting an eye. Most men would run for the hills. He just stays rational. A volcanic eruption in the Hawaiian Islands is the rational supposition.
God love him.

I had never mentioned my premonition from the trip the previous year—too odd; but I let loose for the remainder of the drive, wondering aloud about what floor their condo was on and worrying if it would it be high enough. Having never been there before, neither of us had any idea and I’ve gotta tell ya,  I breathed a sigh of relief when the answer came via text. The sixth floor. Their condo was on the sixth floor, overlooking the pool, facing the ocean.

We spent the next week eating and drinking amazing food and wine, snorkeling, swimming, driving around, and whale watching. As a matter of fact, the ocean outside of our resort was a veritable whale soup.

There is a passage between Maui, Lanai, and Molokai (both which we could see in the distance), that the whales like to use instead of the open ocean, and we could see them breaching from our balcony. They were present in high numbers and especially active. “It was extraordinary!” The guys on the whale watching boats agreed with our friends—they’d never seen a year like that one!

Two days before our departure, on the eleventh, it all seemed to come to a screeching halt.

The ocean was as passive as a lake. I hiked down the beach to a little cove that was supposed to be like “swimming in a tropical fish tank”—nothing. Literally no fish. People kept remarking how odd it seemed. The guys on the whale watching catamarans were perplexed. Suddenly, there were no whales.

That night after my shower I turned on the TV in our room for the first time the entire trip to catch the results of American Idol.
We made dinner at home that night and I was just the right amount of sunburned, buzzed, full and sleepy.
As I got dressed and dried my hair I casually flipped around the channels. American Idol, Baywatch re-runs, CNN. Then I saw it.

The bright red BREAKING NEWS banner at the bottom of the screen screamed: JAPAN HIT BY 9.0 EARTHQUAKE—TSUNAMI IMMINENT!

I screamed something incoherent as I ran out into the family room, half-dressed, knocking things over, becoming hysterical.
“You guys, Turn on the TV! Oh my God! Turn on the TV!” I grabbed the remote, but it looked like something that powers the International Space Station, so I threw it toward my husband.

“Oh, I don’t want to watch TV…” I heard someone say, but Raphael could tell something was wrong. He said later that it felt a lot like 9/11 when everyone was calling and the only thing they could manage to say was, turn on the TV!

“CNN. Find CNN!” I was so freaked out I could barely speak.

When the images came up on that big screen HD TV they were even more terrifying.
It was a helicopter shot, high above the coastline of a small city. There was a wave with a white cap as far as the eye could see. it looked like it spanned almost the entire coastline and it was headed straight for cars, boats, houses…and people.

Now we were all transfixed. Silently glued to the screen with the frantic sounding Japanese commentary running in the background. This was all happening LIVE.

The CNN anchor sounded reassuring, telling us that Japan had one of the most advanced tsunami warning systems on the planet. Sirens had started sounding a few minutes after the large off-shore earthquake, warning the population to make their way to their pre-determined evacuation points up on higher ground.

We watched in horror as churning brown water began rushing onshore with a ferocity that was nauseatingly familiar.
It just kept coming and coming. Undeterred by the breakwater…and the thirty-foot wall they had built to withstand a tsunami.

“God, I hope they had enough time,” I whispered.

Suddenly the CNN picture was minimized as the face of a local anchor at the Maui station took up the entire rest of the screen.
“Good evening,” he read off the cue card, “The entire Hawaiian Islands have been placed on tsunami watch due to the large earthquake off the coast of northern Japan. We will keep you posted as scientists get the readings off of the tsunami buoys that dot the span of the Pacific Ocean from the coast of Japan to the west coast of North America. If it looks like a tsunami is coming our way, the watch will turn into a warning.” He swallowed awkwardly, I saw his Adam’s apple quiver.
“Stay with us for further instructions.”

The screen was filled again with the escalating destruction in Japan.

I started to shake uncontrollably, my eyes filling with tears.

Then I saw him flinch out of the corner of my eye. It got my attention and when I looked his way his face looked as if he’d seen a ghost. With the remote still in his hand, my husband turned toward me slowly, deliberately.
His mouth dropped open, his eyes were full of…questions.

Then with no sound; his eyes locked on mine as he mouthed my prophecy from earlier that week: We’re going to have a tsunami.

As an aside, I cannot explain to the wives reading this, the satisfaction I felt when the look on his face telegraphed to me that my tsunami prediction had been real and not the result of some questionable tuna salad at the airport.  

Then I snapped back to reality. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Really, the hair on my entire body. Even my chin hairs stood at attention.

The shrill wailing of the Disaster Alert Siren brought us both back to reality.
It was official—the tsunami was imminent.

To Be Continued…

LESSONS FROM A TSUNAMI ~ THE CONCLUSION
(It’s a throwback, I’m not gonna make you wait!)

What in the hell was going on? I had unwittingly been given a front-row seat to a disaster that I’d known was going to happen—for a year!

Why in the hell was I in Hawaii again? What was my part in this tragedy?

I never wanted to be someone who predicts disasters. Seriously Universe? Give me another job. Anything.
Something else. Something not so fucking scary.

Be careful what you wish for. Now I talk to dead people. But not the scary ones. Funny ones. The bossy but kind ones.
Thank God.

Anyway, the local anchor came back onscreen to inform us that one of the deep ocean buoys had registered a tsunami fifteen feet high and getting larger, with a velocity of over five hundred miles per hour, and it was headed directly towards the Hawaiian Islands.

It would get to us in five hours.
3 a.m.
Fucking three a.m! Of course, it was coming in the middle of the night!
The witching hour. The time when nothing good ever happens. Oh, and by-the-way, dark water is one of my biggest fears.
I was petrified!

Ginger was feeling sick and went to bed. The guys opened another bottle of wine and started playing cards, remaining lighthearted, partying while waiting for the inevitable. Just like they did on the deck of the Titanic.

I went back to our room, shivering under the blankets with anxiety, glued to the TV while the disaster siren wailed in the background. Right around midnight, they announced the second buoy reading. The wave was larger and picking up speed as it headed our way. Suddenly the intercom came on inside the condo. Nobody even knew there was an intercom connected to the main resort which was run by Marriott.

A voice cleared its throat.

A barely pubescent boy’s man’s voice, extremely nervous, shaky, cracking and squeaking, blared loudly throughout the condo. Haltingly, he instructed everyone in units below the fifth floor to evacuate to the roof. “Bring blankets…pillows…water and, um, your shoes, it’s going to be a long night.” His anxiety was palpable.

Uh, okay Voice of Authority.

Didn’t they have anyone available with a more mature tone? Something deep and fatherly? A voice that could console us and instill calm. Maybe Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones?
This kid’s voice and delivery were comical to me. In my imagination, he was the pimply-faced nephew of the lady who fed the stray cats behind the parking garage. One minute he was doing his calculus homework, the next, he was behind a microphone, advising hundreds of tourists what to do during an impending disaster. He was the only one that was expendable in an emergency. Everyone important had a task.
Holy crap, he was the best they had!

Thank God something was funny.

One of trembly, squeaky, scared guy’s announcements advised us all to fill our bathtubs in order to have plenty of drinking water in case the sanitation plant was wiped out. Intermittently he’d come back on with further instructions, Anyone with a vehicle in the lower garages, please move them to higher ground behind the main hotel, he advised, sounding as if he were on the verge of tears.

Not long afterward, I heard voices, car keys, and the front door slam as the guys went to move our cars.

In the dark from our balcony, I watched the groundskeepers running around like headless chickens rushing to clear the sand and pool surround of hundreds of lounge chairs. Then they emptied the rental hut with its kayaks, snorkels and fins, inner tubes and dozens of surf and boogie boards.

If you watch the Thailand tsunami videos it is those seemingly innocuous beach toys that become deadly projectiles in fast-moving water. You may not immediately drown, but a surfboard or a beach chair coming at you at hundreds of miles an hour will kill you for sure.

It was too much. The destruction in Japan was too much for me to handle.
I watched multi-story buildings get washed away like they were kids toys. We were so close to the water. Could our building withstand the rush of the initial wave? How high would the water come?
The third floor, the fourth—or higher? What was going to happen?

I finally turned off the TV plunging the room into darkness. Once it was quiet I instantly felt a drop in my anxiety level. Say what you will, cable TV can suck you into an endless loop of death and destruction—it’s like a drug. Unhooking the CNN IV, I grabbed my phone, inserted my earbuds, pulled up a meditation, and started to calm my nervous system down. Slow…deep…breathing. In…and out… after a few minutes, I could feel my shoulders drop and my face relax. I’d been unconsciously clenching my jaw for hours.

Slowly, my mind started to unwind. The siren went way, fading into the distance, the boy’s terrified voice becoming a muffled form of white noise.
I actually slipped into a half-sleep state. Aware of my surroundings, but extremely relaxed.

The meditations came to an end. Silence. I was still okay.
No longer spinning in fear. No longer afraid.
“What’s going to happen, how bad will this be?” I asked no one in particular.
Just a question I needed answered.

Here’s where the magic happened.

A very loving, clear and calm voice answered back:
What do you want to happen? How bad do you want it to be?

What? I get a vote? This answer left me flabbergasted. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this felt extraordinary. Somehow, instinctively, I knew that I couldn’t say make the tsunami go away—there are some things we are powerless to change.
What I could change was MY experience of it. What did I want to happen to me—to us?

Script it the voice said, and that has changed my life.

Okay…I said in my head, remembering the videos from Sumatra, You can come up to the palm trees that line our pool area and define the boundary between the beach and our resort. That’s it! To the palm trees only—NOT into the pool—and NOT into our resort.

No further conversation was needed. No idle chit-chat, no more Q & A.

I fell asleep. A deep sleep rich with meaningful dreams that I can’t remember
Inside one, a muffled voice that felt like it was underwater warned: Stay away from the ocean, Do NOT get near the water. We are on lockdown, stay inside your rooms.

It must be happening, crossed my mind, but I was too deep to care.

Only as far as the palm trees… you can go up to the palm trees…

When I finally opened my eyes I could see daylight. Raphael was asleep next to me and I could smell coffee.
Obviously, the tsunami had come and gone—and everything seemed…normal.

These are pictures of the waterline the tsunami left behind. It may not look like much but it is still waaaaay up the beach at this point, about three hours after it came ashore. It surged forty feet UP the beach, over dry sand, and stopped right at the palm trees that line the pool of our resort.

Script it. Imagine it. Feel it. Ask for it. Relax.

That proved to me, without a doubt, that we can script our circumstances. There are things we can’t control, but there are so many that we can.

Get calm, and set boundaries. How bad/good do you want it to be? What do you want to happen?

We have control over our immediate circumstances.
Script it.

This changed my life–I hope it changes yours.

Carry on,
xox

“Pain is real, and sometimes it can’t be avoided, but suffering is a choice.”

I don’t think I have to explain why I’m writing this. Unless someone, a thousand years from now digs this up and wonders. So I’ll just let a single word be the explanation: Pandemic.

Scary, huh? I mean, seriously, 2020—can we have a do-over?

Anyway, until they figure out how to do that, here’s an hour-long chant/meditation that I adore that you can fall asleep to or have playing softly in the background while you build that puzzle or cuddle your cat.

Because that’s what we’re all gonna do now. We’re going to hit pause, be smart, chill, and get to the end of this, this, shit show—together. 

You can fight the restrictions, steep in worry, and run around town like a headless chicken looking for that last bottle of hand-sanitizer, OR, you can take this time to reintroduce yourself to your family, read a book, binge on every episode of EVERYTHING you’ve missed, and check on your neighbors. I’ve been exchanging contact info with mine (from six feet away of course) just in case the shit hits the fan and we’re forced to isolate. Isolation can be lonely and scary and I always have extra butter in case anyone runs out. And AAA batteries and so many boxes that I’m embarrassed to say how many, of Kraft Mac n cheese, you know, real zombie apocalypse type stuff.

Humor. Humor will get us through this. I’ve already tried screaming and it doesn’t work.

Stay healthy & carry on,
xox

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Hi Loves,
Feeling anxious? Fearful of the dystopian, pandemic induced World War Z future being predicted by the talking heads on cable news? 

Please, I’m asking you to stop. And by that I mean, get prepared but try not to get crazy. Take common-sense precautions, which don’t include hoarding toilet paper, hand sanitizer, or gummy worms (you know who you are) and maybe don’t fly in poorly ventilated metal tubes for the next little while—but don’t get hysterical. 

Take a deep breath…and feel safe. You are safe. All is well. Well-being abounds. And fear is choice.
I should know. Well, me and Dita my dog.
Carry on,
xox

Late one night last week, our dog, a nine-year-old boxer, startled us all awake…

The puppy heard it before anyone. She brought it to our attention by running around the bed, her nails tapping out a sort of Morse code S.O.S. on the wooden floor. I had to hand it to her, she may be young, but she’s resourceful.

It was 3 am. My husband got up and went to look into the old girl’s cubby in the wall, her virtual cave of a bed, to see what was what.

Querida, (Dita for short) was thrashing around on her back, legs in the air, doing the cartoon run for her life. You know, the one that gets you nowhere.

I could hear her wild breathing, the snorts coupled with rapid, hoarse, panting. It sounded like she was in the fight of her life with an invisible foe. Come to find out she was battling her own demons.

It appeared (as reported by a somewhat reliable source, my husband) that Dita had somehow become wedged between the wall and her down-filled, hotel bed quality, better than any dog deserves—princess cushion. Apparently, a crevice had opened during the night, and while she lay unaware, peacefully dreaming her sweet doggie dreams, it swallowed her whole.

He reported that she looked like a bug on it’s back, struggling to right itself, the only problem was, she was literally wedged upside down until he was able to free her.

When he pulled her out of what I’m sure to her seemed like an eternity inside a deep, dark, Grand Canyon sized chasm, my sweet pup tried to shake it off. She paced, wandering around our dark house, going in and out of every room as if searching for her lost car keys. Several minutes later I heard her, in her adrenaline-infused stupor, take herself outside to pee.

I thought that was a good idea. At a certain point when I’m in crisis, I just need a few deep breaths of some cool, fresh air to start the reboot. And as I watched my dog use the ancient instinct she was born with to navigate the terror inside that dark and twisted place that was her mind—I had a realization.

Through some fluke of nature, some law of weird science, Dita really IS my daughter, because here it is 3 am and she is having a panic attack!

Boy, could I relate. Panic attacks used to be my wheelhouse so I know them well.

Curiously, our attacks were identical, the reactions the same. An instinctive, primal, repetitive dance of self-preservation.

I too have woken up flailing like a bug on my back, my brain convincing me of my imminent demise after falling into an invisible abyss. I too have walked the halls, alone, searching for comfort, my hands feeling their way in the dark, touching old wood in the hopes of soaking up its familiarity. Admittedly, I have not gone outside to pee, (there but for the grace of God), but I have spent the hours just before dawn shaking in the bathroom; waiting for my heart to stop racing.

And it is ALWAYS, without FAIL, 3 am(ish). WTF?!

Have you ever had an anxiety or panic attack? If you have you know what I’m talking about. I would not wish them on my worst enemy. On those unfortunate souls, I wish a bad perm and severely chapped lips. Anxiety attacks, in my opinion, are somewhere along the lines of emotional waterboarding.

They are torture. Self-imposed torture—but torture just the same.

Mine felt like a cross between a heart attack, losing my mind, and being chased through the streets by a Velociraptor. My heart would beat out of my chest, while an elephant or two pulled up a seat right there and got comfy.
I would obsess on my breathing and start sweating and gasping for air. It was fight-or-flight in all it’s glory.
The sky appeared to be hung too low, making me feel like Chicken Little.
My sanity seemed elusive and my thoughts raced like a wild animal escaped from its cage.

I have actually looked at myself in the mirror during an attack and not recognized the person behind my own eyes.

Sometimes it would be preceded by a stressful situation, but, and here’s the thing— often times it was not. Hence, waking up in a full panic for no apparent reason; which just added confusion to the already fear infused emotional cocktail that was messing with my head.

These three questions ran on a loop inside my rattled brain: Why me? Why now? When will it end?

So, I watched my poor pork chop of a boxer (she’s not fat, just thick in the middle from age – again like her mother) try to navigate her fear, struggling to maintain her sanity. She had believed the story her mind was telling her, and THAT’S when the terror took hold.

She believed she was trapped ( huge anxiety trigger) and it caused her to hyperventilate (classic step-two of panic attacks) which then convinced her she was going to die.

Dita did what you do in that situation. You flee, you run, you take a walk, you look for someplace that holds comfort for you—you do whatever it takes to gather your wits.

Once we figured out what was happening, which took us a while because we were all so groggy (except for the puppy, who thought being up in the middle of the night warranted popcorn, an hour of bad late-night TV, and a pillow fight) we brought our disoriented and frantic old girl up onto the bed with us.

Because isn’t that the final solution you come to after you’ve worn out all the other options? That you must eventually find your way back to bed?

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about just that in Eat, Pray, Love.
After spending hours crying on the bathroom floor, begging for mercy from her emotional pain; a voice in her head answered her prayer for guidance, “Go back to bed Liz” was its simple directive.

Since Dita was too scared to go back to her own bed (hey, can you blame her? It had tried to eat her alive!) I knew the next step – she had to come up with us. (I would have crawled in bed with my parents during my attacks—if I’d lived at home and wasn’t 25, 35, 40.)

With one hand on her head, I lay there deep in thought, realizing that her fear had been as baseless as my own all those years ago.
She was fine. It was self-invented.
Easy for me to say from where I sit NOW, but it’s true.

Her mind presented False Evidence that Appeared Real. FEAR. It made up a story. A really, really scary one based on what seemed to be happening in. the. moment. Minds are fucking assholes that way. It’s their job to gather data but then they take it upon themselves to knit it together into a freaking horror show!
With hindsight, I could see that mine had been just as ridiculous.

After another fifteen minutes, she took a deep, calming breath, settled down, and fell asleep. My husband and I then took a turn, each taking our own relief-filled deep breath.

I continued to stroke her graying, velvet ears, listening to her softly snore.

I’m happy we could help her.
Because of my (our) familiarity with this kind of behavior, we had kept the room dark and stayed calm, talking to her softly, petting and kissing her face. We hadn’t shadowed her, nervously following her from room to room, asking her what was wrong. That would have made her feel more anxious.

Animals can sense energy, they can feel your fear.

No, we did all the things I’ve learned in order to calm myself when I’m in the midst of an anxiety attack. Slow, deep breathing to calm the nervous system, remaining calm and finding any place to feel safe. Apparently, that works for people and dogs.

If I can tell you one thing, it’s that she is fortunate to be a dog. With a minimum of backstory and tons of good canine instinct, she was able to calm herself in a little less than an hour. I only wish I’d been that adept.

Yep, she’s my fearful, furry daughter and clearly, I’m her mom.

Hello Tribe,

If you take this post from a few years ago and substitute Corona virus for Jihad, the message is the same! My god, unless you’re living under a rock, the media has us going!

“The world is such a dangerous place!” they’d have us think. Uh, no. To put this in perspective, there have been around 3000 deaths worldwide, and with a population of over 7.5 BILLION—the odds of you dying from this is pretty darn low.

I mean, be smart, be diligent, wash your hands for 30 seconds and try not to touch your face but otherwise, don’t sacrifice yourself to the side effects of mass hysteria. Live that wild life of yours as best you can while this plays itself out and please, try not to catch the fear.

xox

Hello, fear. (Said with sneering disdain, like “Hello Newman” on Seinfeld).

Fear reared his ugly head again on Tuesday.
Like me, you probably woke up to the report of yet another terrorist attack on innocent civilians in Brussels. And again if you’re like me your first response was to gird your loins.

To hunker down, plant your feet, cross your arms, and label the world a dangerous place.

And along with me you probably felt a nauseous gut pit, which turned into sadness, then empathy and finally anger. Oh, yeah, and all of that with a fear chaser.

But you guys, it reminds me of those pharmaceutical ads on TV and their heinous side effects. You know the ones I mean. They’re laughable.

“For chronic chapped lips try *Chaplipocine. Taken regularly, it reduces the symptoms of chapped lips in only three days!
Side effects may include (and this is said at the speed of a professional auctioneer), flatulence, headaches, amnesia, seizures, constipation, swelling of the tongue and testicles, facial hair in women and babies, eventual loss of consciousness — and death.”

And it’s making billions because people are willing to suffer those consequences to get chapped lip relief!
Wtf?

But just as ridiculous and shoved down our throats even more aggressively, are the side effects of fear. They consist of paranoia, anxiety, uncontrollable security cravings, unwillingness to travel, suspicion, inability to turn off CNN, intolerance, giving away your privacy, dis-empowerment, not living your life — and death.

Seriously?

I for one, feel that’s unacceptable.

We all have a choice of how to respond.
I can eyeball the hipster next to me suspiciously while he sits there on his computer with his luxurious man-beard, and wonder if he’s crafting his jihadist manifesto (or if he coughed).  And I can cancel my trip to Europe that I saved years for.
Because I could die. We could ALL die.
Because it’s all too dangerous. The airports. Subways. Cafes. Sidewalks. Everything.

These are some of the side effects I’m not willing to suffer. How about you?

Listen, we have to be aware. We can’t and we shouldn’t walk with our faces buried in our phones or our head in the clouds. But there’s a difference between awareness and suspicion.

Don’t shake hands with fear. Please.(Or anybody right now for that matter.)

Girded loins never did anyone any good,

And chapped lips go away in three days regardless of the medicine you take.

So don’t endure the heinous side effects just for the illusion of being saved.

Anyhow, carry on,

xox

*you know this product doesn’t really exist, right?

“I Have Fear.

There’s a common mistranslation that causes us trouble.

We say, “I am afraid,” as if the fear is us, forever. We don’t say, “I am a fever” or “I am a sore foot.” No, in those cases, we acknowledge that it’s a temporary condition, something we have, at least for now, but won’t have forever.

“Right now, I have fear about launching this project,” is quite different from, “I’m afraid.”
-Seth Godin

Fuckity, fuck, fuck, fuck. Seth nailed me on this!

And it got me to thinking. What other feelings am I forever-izing?

The first one that comes to mind is this. “Gawd, I’m an idiot.”

(Which, sadly, I would never say to another human being other than myself.)
But I must admit, I say it to myself All. The. Time. Especially when I put periods after single words for emphasis.
I must make a concerted effort to follow Seth’s advice and acknowledge that my chronic idiocy is in reality only a temporary condition. (Monday thru Friday 8-5. Weekends my idiocy turns to slothiness which is somehow infinitely more acceptable.)

I have an idiot temporarily making all of my decisions, will be my new mantra.

“I am hungry.”

This is another one of my greatest hits. The only time it feels temporary is while I am actively eating. Once I put my fork down, all bets are off. In a cruel twist of suckiness, once it enters my body, pasta or even a steak and baked potato have the ability to disguise itself as Chinese food leaving me starving again in half an hour. I’ve always filed this under the heading of Life’s Not Fair, but now, when I’m famished I’ll tweak my thinking and say: “I feel like eating my foot” —because I only have two, so…temporary.

“I am horny.”

In my twenties and thirties and maybe even half of my forties, and three weeks in my mid-fifties, I would have fought Seth on the temporary nature of this condition. With the sexual appetite of a man, it felt like a 24-7 forever kind of thing to me. I was horniness with arms and legs. But now that sixty is breathing down my neck, yeah, I get it. With my fifteen minutes of randiness every other month, now “I am horny” feels like a lot like over-committing. Maybe “Rollover honey, because right this minute I’m thinking about sex!” is more like it.

Hey, I showed you mine—what are yours? What do you own that is in reality only a temporary condition?

Carry on,
xox