The London After-Party

I'm hyper-sensitive to space and locales.  (Like, ever read any of my poetry?)

There were parts of East London - certain little pockets - that spooked me.  That got under my skin is funny, crawly ways.  Like I could feel a tainted history.  Or the souls trying to come back.  Today,  I walked by Bethnal Green Tube Station, where they are erecting a memorial to those killed in the disaster there in 1943.  I wondered if this tragedy held some of what I felt when in that area.

Yesterday, walking up across the canal on Roman Road, I could see the Olympic Park in the distance!  How amazing!

And I felt like I always do after I've had a party.  Sometimes, your house is too much your house - energies get trapped, ideas get fixed, things stop moving.  Then, you invite friends over.  First you clean, then you cook, everything smells good and looks good.  Then your amazing friends show up with food and drink and laughter and joy and conversation.

When they leave, it's as if your house is new again.  As if they took all the energy that was stuck and shook it up like a snow globe - all that's left is sparkly and and floaty.

Maybe that's what the Olympics did for London.  All that cleaning and preparing.  Then the tens of thousands - no, millions - of new people coming in with their excitement and wonder and awe.

They've left, but London feels good.  Newer.  Not so dowdy or frightened in places.  Not so heavy.  As if the people who visited left their happinesses and took away some of the lingering traces of what had gone before.

Even with the cold approaching, things feel good.  People feel good.  Like the oldest new place in the world.

Quote of the Week - Question of the Day Book

"What always keeps happening even though you thought you had it figured out?" 

-Question of the Day book

Yes - new season and we needed a change up.  You are wise.  You don't need other people telling you what to do all the time.  How bout a question designed to bring out your wisdom this week instead?  Question of the Day book (and app) is the brainchild of my friend Al Katkowsky.  I've been hanging with this book a while now, and highly recomment it.

If you want, go ahead and leave your answer to this question in the comments section!

So what's my answer to the question?  Hmmm...think I'll do a free write on it (oh yeah, this book is great for writing prompts!).  Meantime, I'd say it has to do with letting in too much chaos.

Carry love with you this week.

New Interview Up on Write Life!

Special thanks to Susan Marque for including me in her profiles on her Write Life blog!  I met Susan through our Wednesday creativity group - she'll be posting profiles with lots of the women in the group!  Check out the earlier blogs on Adrienne Harris and our fearless (really) leader Susan Johnston!

Are You Wasting Your Time?

This blog by Laurie Gerber on The Daily Love is totally worth reposting.

I am sporadically guilty of #3, #4, and even, occasionally, #5.  (It's only a list of 5, so that's not really so good, is it?)

Many people close to me are plagued by several of these, as well - I can see it dragging their days down.  (It's not always so easy to see when you're doing it to yourself.)

Fess up and change up.

Quote of the Week - Cohen

How can you not love this man?

"Sometimes, when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise... somehow we're, especially the privileged ones that we are, we somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears, that it's perfectable, that you're going to get it all straight. I've found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win." 

-Leonard Cohen

That's some bodhisattva talk right there.  Was super lucky to get to see Mr. Cohen a couple of weeks ago.  Kinda sat in awe for 3 hours.  I think what impacted me most was his full embrace of the broken.  This is so hard for me!  I hate broken!  I keep wanting to fix everything.  But his wisdom, his profound simplicity, his connection, it all comes from carefully cradling the imperfect.

I'm not going to try to fix anything (or anyone!) this week.

Happy Monday!  Happy New Year!

The Other 50% - Follow Up

If I'm gonna get mad when they mess up - I gotta give some props when tables turn.  So....thanks to the 6th Industry Insider Screenwriting Competition for getting a female-centric log line and a female judge (Susannah Grant) for their current competition.

"A New England matriarch with a week left to live pledges her fortune to whomever in her small town fulfills her dying wish."

Of course, this log line doesn't speak to me at all - sounds so...old-fashioned.  But at least it's chick-centric.  At least, there might be a chance for somebody to get in on this.

Go enter!

Quote of the Week - Hafiz/Ladinsky

THE HEART IS RIGHT

The

Heart is right to cry 

Even when the smallest drop of light,

of love,

is taken away.

Perhaps you may kick, moan, scream

In a dignified

Silence. 

But you are so right

To do so in any fashion

Until God returns

To 

You.

- Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

I asked Hafiz this morning. This was the answer.

New Anthology - Alternate Lanes

Thanks to Marie Lecrivain and Deborah Warner for including 2 of my poems in this new anthology about alternate forms of transportation.  Alternate Lanes is an eco-friendly publication exploring the world of not driving your own car!

Check it out!

The Lime Polenta Cake Choice

When things cascade from bad to worse, when random vibrates into chaos, you start looking for some kind of styptic pencil to stem the universal flow and shift its tide.

According to my new friend J, this came in the form of lime polenta cake.

After a long conversation and meeting through friends, we ran off to get half-price salads before closing at a vegetarian place.  When they were out of salads, we floundered and wandered around the hipster foodiehood looking for something for him and his partner to have for dinner.  We ended up in a kind of posh market and both sort of fixated on the lime polenta cake.  J had resolved to have only salads after his long holiday of overeating.  Cake for dinner seemed wrong.  We left with nothing but confusion.  Walked out of the place, onto the road, stopped, looked at each other.

 Lime polenta cake?  Yeah.

We walked back in.  Bought a piece to share before dinner and a pre-dinner piece of cheesecake for our friend.  J decided to note the importance of the moment.  He said the lime polenta cake was the turning point.  Making a choice for no reason other than that's the choice you want to make.  Not caring about it being wrong or full of sugar, or not dinner.  Going with the epicurean call, just being spontaneous.

I'm hopeful that the lime polenta cake moment was defining.  That it will stem the flow of bad juju and turn it into powerful mojo.  A kind of karmic changing of seasons.  Yeah, that'd be good.


P.S.
This recipe looks a lot like the one we ate...it wasn't perfect, but it was worth it, still!

P.P.S.
Since I prematurely need a new laptop (part of the whole chaos issue), I'm pushing my new little Kindle book hard!  $1.99 for poems and pix from Morocco.  It'd be happy if you bought it.  : )

P.P.P.S.
No quote this week.  Became obsessed with finding this quote I saw, then couldn't locate it and now no quote is good enough.  Take the lime polenta cake story as your quote of the week instead?