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lookit the monkey driving the bus!

After finally curing myself of my compulsion to argue with reality (pausing while ya’ll laugh your asses off at that…) I have discovered I’ve just transferred this habit to arguing with people about whether or not THEY are arguing with reality. …yes, I know what that sounds like when I say it out loud, but at least I know I’m doing it. Ever since I came back from my retreat my groovy peaceful has been tested as I get caught up in these debates with people being irrational. Inside my head I am shouting OH MY GOD I AM NOT A TREE I AM NOT A TREE, and while this gets me some points for self awareness, it’s really not going well in the outside world.

But I had a great insight during meditation; a paradigm shift that has cured me of arguing with others about their arguing with reality

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Ask Me if I am a Tree

Hey I'm a tree“Ask me if I am a tree…” in my teen years this was my best friend’s favourite riddle. The answer is: “no.”

Yeah… I still don’t get it either; but when you’re hopped up on slurpies and skittles things are funny even if you don’t know why. Questionable humour aside, this may be my new prayer to self centering. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

I don’t know when or how I lost that sense of connection and groundedness I used to have, but I know when I really started to notice it. This summer started a game I have come to call: Pass the Crazy. Everyone in my sphere has been going through some flavour of crazy-making stress, or doing some fine self-generated crazy for internal reasons, or some combination thereof. Including myself, as per being flooded out of my home. Traditionally how things work with my friends is a trading of support, when you’re in the crazy tree you reach out to somebody on the ground. Trouble was, NOBODY was on the ground. It was really just a matter of who was on a lower branch of the crazy tree. So there we sat, just passing the crazy from one branch to another.

I found being a support to whoever was most crazy when I was feeling my least crazy was frustrating and exhausting,Read More »Ask Me if I am a Tree

Celebrating My Failure!!!

Right, so while I was there to watch my friend’s desperate (and successful) eleventh hour crunch to get his 50,000 words in before the midnight deadline–fuelled and inspired by truly awful ninja movies (I think perhaps other people’s bizarre and reckless storywriting gives you permission let go on your own giant brain dump) I was surprisingly happy with my own abysmal failure in the matter.

I didn’t even come close to the 50k mark, but hey! I doubled my wordcount from the five thousand I started with. Considering that first bit took me two years, and doubling it took me under two weeks I have gained a better understand of my capacity and what a bit of push and focus can do.

However, what I’m really happy about are all the things I learned about myself while I was not even remotely succeedingRead More »Celebrating My Failure!!!

Where’s Valerie?

In answer to that inevitable online question for the month of November: WRITING!!!

More specifically,  picking up the gauntlet thrown down by a friend in the NaNoWriMo challenge (National Novel Writing Month = write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days). I’ll be using this time to FINALLY finish the MUCH ANTICIPATED (by me as much as anyone) Love of the Living Dead serial cum novella cum novel Read More »Where’s Valerie?

A Solitude That Leaves You Less Lonely

The worst is over now, I think. It’s been a rough summer (for many of you out there too!). A rainstorm washed out my living room, left me uprooted and homeless for a couple months while it got cleaned up and put back together again. It’s funny, before this disaster I was getting restless, felt the need for a shift, contemplated moving. This house and this life is the longest I’d been in one place since childhood.

Well careful what you wish for, moved I was. And though I’m back in my home, it feels different, I’m different. Like a house plant, root bound and quasi-dormant, I think I needed shaking up at bit so roots could grow in a new direction. God I hate being uprooted, Read More »A Solitude That Leaves You Less Lonely