The Vulnerability of Happiness

Posted on October 20, 2015 by Heloise Jones

It’s vulnerable to be happy. It’s naked and raw sometimes. It’s not easy to choose beauty and love day after day. The world does not provide a lot of support for this. I think that being happy, having joy is a much deeper experience than people think, and that there’s a lot to be learned in it.
People believe we only learn from pain.
We learn from everything.
~ Nancy Peacock
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cottonwood-iii Cottonwoods in Fall. Nothing like them.
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I extended an extended trip today. My husband wasn’t happy about it, at all. I tried to explain I needed this extra time of rejuvenation, pleasure, and work all mixed into a stew that feeds me, in a place that’s always been home. That I feel a sense of space and time just mine, dissolve into a balance I’d lost. That I’m rebuilding myself from the inside out. Because days here fill effortlessly with connection, surprises and delight, good memories as in doing something I haven’t done in a long time. All so abundant it’s like being in the middle of a school of colorful fish. That without going anywhere, plump birds hop on the back porch, a flicker flies to the window, taps on the glass, twice, right after I open the blinds. Two big-racked mule deer walk through the front yard, majestic and absolutely huge. That when I look up from the kitchen sink, a spectacular hawk on the shepherd’s hook holding the bird feeders makes me think I’m truly in conversation with the Universe. That perhaps the ‘sparkly happy’ for no particular reason I feel at times in my Florida life are simply reminders this sort of fullness is possible. Argue we must bloom where we’re planted. I’ll agree sometimes that’s true. And sometimes, when we have a choice, we must go where we regenerate.

I used to write in a circle every Thursday afternoon. Two hours each week I walked through a door, turned off the stresses and stuff gobbling my life. At times so exhausted I’d nod off. Always amazed me how some of my best writing showed up when I felt so down. I was positive it rose from my pain. After reading Nancy’s comment, I’m sure it rose from the ‘happy’ I felt sitting in circle, writing, claiming my time. Because when we’re happy our hearts expand and our minds awaken. Our tunnel vision dissolves so we see more, imagine more, allow more. We open up, experience more deeply. Dive where the true stories are.

I claimed this time in Santa Fe because I needed to. I know my husband was disappointed. But when I leave here, I’ll have more to give back. It will surely be worth it. Think of it as a mental hospital, I told him, where I get work done, too.

Tell me. . .how many ways do you reclaim your time, your happy, yourself?

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I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.
I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had
an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet. . .
~ Oliver Sacks
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Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life

A favorite: Driving through broad expanses of uninhabited landscapes. Like in NM.
A secret: This extension took courage.

Better Angels of Our Natures

Posted on October 13, 2015 by Heloise Jones

The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be,
by the better angels of our nature.
~ Abraham Lincoln

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I love ravens.
Crow with orange ‘Strange Fruit’ by Eric Hynynen
We have a different meaning for strange fruit in this country, don’t we.
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Saturday a friend said all her spiritual teachers say everything’s perfect as it is. What about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, I said, they didn’t see a perfect world. Do you see yourself as Gandhi, she asked. I should’ve said I don’t know, who knows.

It’s all perfect, we’re all perfect. How many contexts have I heard this. This is what I think – the only perfection in the violence, hate, fear, cruelty, abuse, inhumanity to all things human and otherwise, is it pushes us into being our better selves. Into remembering we are essentially one and the same when we come out of the womb. All wanting connection, sustenance, comfort. Love. And it shows us the extreme of the choices, forces us to grow into our choices.

As a college student in my late 30’s, I learned the word patriarchy for the first time. How it shapes societies. I remembered my frustration five years earlier working in a fine-dining restaurant where women were not allowed to wait tables at night, earn the big money. It was a domaine reserved for men. In school I listened to young women students accept date rape as part of their culture. Found no official university statement against rape. I was outraged. I spoke out, centered all my independent studies on a goal to provide a space and forum for women, a Women’s Center. They said it wouldn’t happen. I didn’t have to put my life on the line, but something huge did indeed happen for thousands of woman students that I can almost call Gandhi-like. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I remembered I once did the impossible, wanted to do it again, change policy. What I learned is sometimes we have other work to do before we can save what we love most.

I’ve been married 29+ years. During this time I’ve managed every aspect of our lives together – finances, household, investments, travel, home creating-breaking down-moving-creating x6, all things physical-world. Four single spaced pages of roles. The work I’ve done outside always secondary to my husband’s job which brought in the bacon. It allowed me freedom to explore, delve into work I may not choose if money was the primary factor. Allowed me to develop my craft as a writer, be an author, imagine a life writing novels, traveling, doing authorly things like readings, conferences, teaching. Then the job market shifted, our income dwindled. And I got pushed out from my vision into preparing for a different, more public life as an author-entrepreneur. Creating things I never intended to create. Holding a vision for bettering others’ lives in a way I hadn’t imagined. In the process strengthening and developing myself for the hard stuff standing at my edge. Seeing myself as a person of influence. Recognizing I always have been.

We are all persons of influence. Every one of us. We start close to home, and if we think about it, trust the ripples. It takes strong feelings and impulses to see ourselves with power in a wider arena, prick us into action. Like I felt when I held that vision for the Women’s Center. But we hear about everyday people doing great things in the world all the time. I personally know people who are. It’s in all of us. I let myself see me as small. I can’t anymore. Because I feel strongly we can see differently, be touched by the better angels of our natures. And I wanna help. It’s what I can do. I’m good at it. + Anything big and snarly that’s changed, whether close to home or in the world, has come from vision and dogged persistence. Dogged, don’t let go, keep on going and going and going persistence. I’ve got that, too.

Tell me. . .how can you see something or someone differently, even for a moment? shift to the better angel of your nature?

You can start here. . .
Upon waking, notice the negative space around you.
See how many places you see the sky, besides through the windows.
Look at the shadows.

Now tell me. . .What do you see differently?

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

A favorite: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood.
A secret: I try hard every day to be kind.

Angels on the Highway

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Heloise Jones

When you’re on the highway of intuition,
you’re going to be picking up angels who are hitch-hiking there.
~ Matthew Fox

SF cloud w:eye First dawn here. Sun at my back. Moon in a crystal blue sky.
Eye in the cloud.
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When I was a tiny girl we lived in a 100-yr. old house in northern New Jersey. A tall two- story four square covered in blond, most likely asbestos shingles. It had a giant living room the full depth of the house. An open hall without railings on the second floor encircling a wide stairwell. I remember hearing how broken down the house was when my parents bought it. The warnings it could never be leveled on the side with the collapsed foundation. How my father used levers, jacked the house a little at a time, let the old boards settle. Find their true before he wracked them again. My mother often said you’d never guess how fine it was on the inside by the looks of the outside. I remember listening to songs on a record player at the back of the living room, loving my first Alice in Wonderland, the Disney version. Peeking over the sofa at kids in the street on the first ever trick-or-treat. And snakes – on the front path, traveling from the woods to under the side deck, once under the dining room table.

My intuition showed up there first, too. I walked the house at night, never fell off the edge into the stairwell despite no lights from outside or inside. They called me ‘cat eyes’ for seeing in the dark. My father said he’d look up, see me in the window watching him leave for work at dawn. Never a peep before that moment, as if I felt him, he said.

We moved when I was five. Intuition showed up as I got older, too. But I felt no more than a brief notice or unusual recognition of something-someone-someplace. Until recently, when I claimed it.

This is my twentieth trip back to Santa Fe since moving away. The only year I didn’t return I grabbed it as a tonic for my depression, made reservations for January. A time usually brutally frigid in the high desert. But that January the weather softened, warmed as if it was fall, after all. Only once has Santa Fe pushed me away. When I schemed to return for more than an extended visit. And I got the message. This is my place to remember who I am when life scrambles me up. A place where I open, feel expansive, leave different than when I arrived. Like the cave to the monk.

A few years ago I noticed themes in my sojourn, each determined by where I was in my life. A full social calendar the year I craved friendships after a difficult move and a new lifestyle. Nurturing and healthcare the year my heart and mind needed clearing. This year it’s about the work I’m creating. And I’m definitely on the intuition highway. Angels at my elbows.

I could tell a half dozen stories of seemingly magical ways people and things manifest from the moment I step out and about here. I think the best, tho, is one day when I walked with purpose toward a destination and glanced across the street, noticed a store. I stopped to look, not knowing why. Scrunched my eyes to see the clothes in the windows. If that was it. Twice I continued forward, and stopped. Turned and stared at the store. Before I crossed over. I don’t know how the gal who worked there and I dove so quickly into personal conversation. Why our connection was so perfect I felt sparkly. All before I learned she lived in San Miguel de Allende, a city I considered moving to. Had created a writers conference there, led it for years. That she had a similar vision for Santa Fe, was building a business of online courses, ones I could teach. We talked for twenty minutes, not another customer in the store. After we exchanged cards, they poured in.

I think synchronicity and coincidence are simply the Universe showing up to meet us. Always with something wanted or needed, often with answers to questions. And tho I stumble, I finally know not to dismiss random thoughts that make no sense. Because the fruit of the follow-thru usually does. I call it Presence. And it’s fun. Like magic.

Tell me. . .what synchronicities and random coincidence have you had?

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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A favorite: Yellow-gold cottonwoods against that special saturated blue of a Northern New Mexico sky.
A secret: I think it’s time I move back. No scheming. It’s just time for a magical, expansive life.

Look Over the Wall

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Heloise Jones

“Faith grows when it is lived and shaped by love.”
~ Pope Francis, (USA 2015)

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The Beginning is near.

Over the Wall

My ladder is off to the side, out of the frame.
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I stood on our street corner. Felt happy and special that the overcast sky opened so I could see the Super Blood Moon eclipse to full shadow before the clouds closed back in. A neighbor stood with me. She commented she felt small after seeing it. I’m the opposite. Whenever I see phenomena like this, or see a large ‘star’ at the horizon I know is really Jupiter, a pink small twinkling ‘star’ that’s Mars, a helicopter bright star that’s Venus, I feel huge. Connected to something grand. And I see big, round, colorful planets. Feel on the edge of some great story, part of it my story, turning with the Solstice and season, all surety stripped except knowing I’m okay.

A hint of the turning arrived on a flash of inexplicable happiness the other day. Sparkly Happy swimming through for no particular reason I could discern. Lasting long enough to notice and sit with, and share on facebook because that’s what you do with the good stuff. I thought perhaps decisions made had sparked it. Climbing toward Santa Fe a week from that exact moment perhaps (since all time is simultaneous, right?). Maybe seeing a few intentions realized. A friend called it Joy. Said a Jesuit priest defined Joy as “the infallible presence of God.” I’ve never really understood Joy. For something touted everywhere, the word has always confused me. I could grasp inexplicable happiness is probably right on, though. In any case, the feeling comforted me. And the association with God seemed an affirmation, because I needed it that very moment. I’ve been climbing my ladder at the wall in that picture since announcing no small happy life for me. It’s a tall wall.

Today on the radio I heard details of slaughters in Sudan – children hanged, entire villages wiped out except the 15 yr. old girls taken as slave brides, women & children in the river up to their chins, hiding all night as soldiers shoot into the dark water. The ones who escape, devastated by malaria epidemics in refugee camps. Listening, I thought of all the people, millions, who live in hell on earth. How privileged I am, what I must do with that privilege. Later I walked by a newspaper headline, “Pope Leaves a Message of Love.” He’s my sign of what’s over the wall. The head of a huge staid religious institution I might have prejudice toward. But he’s using his influence with Love. Stepping up as a progressive for how to live in the modern world while holding the basic tenets of his faith. Saying flat outright the planet must thrive for humanity to thrive, we are connected. And he tempers his statements with conditions (ie. ‘unfettered’ capitalism) vs. absolutes, because by golly, things are complicated. I’ve listened to the media, their ongoing dialogue about his cloaked references to Catholic doctrine. How he’s gathered support from people like me, hinting perhaps we don’t get it he’s Catholic (I really do have a hard time seeing him as religious) I want to shout, of course he’s Catholic. It’s his container. So what?! This is HUGE. And in the secular world, Bernie Sanders saying out loud the same thing with different words.

In the mid-eighties I wanted to know how to hold the concept of God. The usual words never feeling as present as the connection to that inexplicable something I feel. A metaphysical video passed into my hands. God is in the spaces between the molecules, it said. A spark of recognition – the Universe. We use the word Love a lot. I’m not sure most know what it means. But I’m confident a focus on it as a choice, looking up with that focus to see another for just a twinkling the same way ripples, can have tsunami effect. Faith grows, as the Pope says. My faith in humanity, that Hell won’t win. My offerings to the world will be driven by Kindness and Love. I can do that. Let’s do it, okay?

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
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A favorite: Anything celestial.
A secret: The super power I would choose – flying.

Reclaiming: Queen of the Dance!

Posted on September 22, 2015 by Heloise Jones

The feet remember the dance. . .
The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,
Everything it lost and found again, and everyone
it loved, the heart cannot forget.
~ Joyce Sutphen (from What the Heart Cannot Forget)
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These are my hands.

Hands
See that thumb, the woman in pink dancing?
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Bone tired after two 4-hour sleep nights, I plopped on the sofa. Art was upstairs. Sheryl Crow on TV. I melted. When Sheryl lit into Everyday is a Winding Road (I get a little bit closer), I drifted to driving across the desert in 1995. Santa Fe to Anaheim for a rendezvous with someone important to me I’d lost track of 20 yrs. before. Sheryl’s album on loop. Me feeling wide open like the landscape and sky I drove thru. I rose from the sofa, and danced.

Oh, my, I used to dance. I’d close the halls down. Beg, even argue, for one more song. I’d set the car rocking car-dancing, goad others to chair-dance. I danced in my living room, danced at concerts, danced where-ever African drums sang. I danced to chase demons. Danced to invite angels in. I once danced eight straight hours at a party. Movement without prescribed form. Without right or wrong. Nothing but my soul showing, body moving, blood churning. I don’t know exactly when I stopped.

I remember incidents. Discomfort hearing a remark how I didn’t act my age as I danced around a pool. Feeling my increasingly soft belly move on its own. Another time disappointment following shocked realization I tired at three minutes. The happy random resurgence over the six years I worked-out in the gym. When I quit drinking, I thought perhaps scotch or wine drove my blood coursing for hours. And at some point I crossed to no longer puzzling how I lost it. I accepted with wistfulness something gone. My soft belly wrapped in self-consciousness, as if others could see through my clothes. As if I looked ridiculous.

What I know is when I was a dancer, my guiding word in life was Experience. I pushed myself past shyness to attend parties. Stretched myself to travel alone. Took any invitation for something new. That by the time I stopped I’d achieved what I thought was important to have – marriage to a stable person, a house we owned in a sweet, historic neighborhood, friends with good jobs, membership and acceptance into an association of respected professionals, furniture I picked out myself and paid for, a straight A college transcript, a budget and the reasonableness to fit within it. I was legit the way I was supposed to be. And in the midst to getting there, the dancing stopped.

Looking back, I see I started a new dance inside myself when my outsides settled. I dove headlong into my artist self – beads, clay sculpture, mixed media, pastels. I listened to silence with an awakened spiritual nature. Studied relationally based psychologies, attuned to nature and mythologies. I know I could’ve done both, dance outwardly while I dove inwardly, but I didn’t. And the richness of awareness I have now I can’t imagine life without.

In that time I also become a walker. My body calling when my energy lags. My better Self beside me in my strides, helping me face worries and frets, reframe if I listen. I say my Gratitudes, feel them in my body with my paces. I return clearer, more present in the world afterwards. One morning just past Christmas last year, on my walk long before any hint of dawn, I noted how some houses stood dark that only the day before shown beautifully with holiday lights. I thought how I’d miss terribly the magic when they were all gone. And a joy rose inside me so that I spontaneously sprung into song, singing over and over in full voice as I walked, Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains, and the mountains in reply, echoing their joyous strains, Glor-ooooor-ooooor-oooooria, in excelsis Deo. Not caring one bit who heard me.

I’ve seen the video of the dancing Nana often. The last time I saw it I realized I’ve started chair dancing openly in restaurants, again. Thru entire songs. And lately while working, I’ll let a song rip on the computer, jump up and dance. I think it’s time I reclaim the dance. I think it just may save my life.

Tell me. . .What have you reclaimed, lately?

Another journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life
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A favorite: David Byrne
A secret: Nana could be me one day.