I wish I had a
better camera since god knows, I already have a camera. Perhaps I even meant, I wish I were a better
photographer so that I could get better
pictures out of my camera.
Anyway. You still got the gist, I'm sure. (See post below.) And here, apparently, is a true "epiphany" (a Christmas star).

My own non-stellar epiphanies come in the wee small hours of the morning, when I've been asleep for hours, apparently having some type of breakthrough dreams that I'm not consciously aware of. Then my eyes open in the dark, there's usually a song playing in my head and everything makes sense again: my life, my mind, my hopes, my goals, my passions suddenly feel back in synch and then some sort of amazing THOUGHT comes to me and suddenly I am able to reclaim myself. Those are my epiphanies and I had one this morning at 5 AM.
Last night, I was pretty much up to my eyeballs on Tylenol Severe Sinus (my favorite over-the-counter medication, even when I don't have a cold -- I can see why they make you sing (or SIGN, as the case may be) for this stuff at the pharmacy now; even without cooking it up in your meth lab, it gives you a really interesting high). Anyway, I've had a cold for the last several days b/c I was really falling out of synch with myself. At the risk of boring you to tears, I was battling depression again and this time, rather than waging war on the same old tape loops that play endlessly in my fucking head, I decided to surrender to a mild cold instead. And then take Tylenol and lay low and think about life until I could work it through and come out the other side.
So last night... I collapsed on the chair in the living room and I only meant to say one or two things to Jay about the insanity in my head, but we wound up discussing it for 2 hours. He is such an incredibly patient & encouraging & thoughtful & insightful partner. He always helps steer me clear of the minefield of my insanity. It's mostly my continued angst over career-related stuff. I pile too many goals on my plate at once, I tend not to ever acknowledge my accomplishments, and I always seem to just struggle ever-onward in search of fruition while not stopping to notice it all around me.
I do make a habit of being grateful -- of outright counting my blessings pretty much every day. But I do not tend to look at what I've already achieved every day, so I create this false sense that nothing in my life comes to fruition and that I'm crazy for always so constantly expecting it.
Sort of like I'm going down a giant, never-ending grocery store aisle. And I put this in my cart, and this, and this, and this, and on & on, wondering,
When is this aisle ever going to end? When am I ever going to be able to enjoy all this stuff I keep putting in my cart?
Thanks to Jay, I went to bed last night feeling very hopeful about everything; about getting my projects done in a way that can be of service to other people, whether those people are my readers or my peers. And then when I awoke this morning, I got this crystal clear image of the last ten years of my life and I suddenly had the sense that they were profound. (They were profoundly difficult, yes, but they also were just plain profound.)
Loyal readers of this lofty blog will no doubt recall that the early part of the past decade saw my career, and my life in general, cresting to an all-time high. Then in the course of one afternoon in May, in 2007, 4 of my publishers went out of business at the same time. I had seen it coming, thank god, and had already retreated to sort of re-think my career but it hasn't made the last couple of years any easier to navigate. I also got another divorce during the past decade, went through menopause -- which was really, REALLY not fun. And then a man that I loved more than life itself became incredibly & terrifyingly abusive to me and I was suddenly caught up in that hire wire act of terror & confusion & guilt & shame & despair.
I know it sounds corny, but I have learned so much about the power of love. The power of having rock bottom faith in the Universe when you are facing down something that scares the shit out of you & choosing love anyway. It tore my heart to pieces but I somehow managed to do what I had to do to end that relationship without winding up in a hospital or dead, AND somehow managed to shift the balance of that relationship to one where we can now have a mutually supportive and respectful understanding of each other without "being in love" anymore. That was no small feat, I have to say. That alone was worth a decade of learning & growing (&, yes, occasionally shrieking).
And I know I've said this before, but on top of that, I wrote 5 novels, 4 novellas, 4 essays, god knows how many dozens of short stories, and I edited 7 anthologies over the course of the past 10 years alone. So somehow stuff was actually coming to fruition, wasn't it?
I'm bringing all this up b/c maybe you, too, have trouble getting a real grip on how great things really are for you -- whoever you are, you know? I have had nearly 40 thousand visitors to this humble little blog just in the last month. I have no idea who you people are but I just love you. It astounds me, gang; it truly does. Since all I really do is babble on about myself, my yard, my angst, my love life & my INDESCRIBABLE sex life (yippee) as I reach my 50th year on planet Earth.... (We actually
broke the bed Friday night; can you believe that? Isn't that hysterical?? That's one fucking solid, sturdy king-sized bed up there in our bedroom. It was too funny. BOOM, boom boom boom boom boom -- as each of the center supporting legs under the bed gave way. And of course I was smashed on martinis yet again, so trying to help him fix the ridiculously heavy bed was another laugh riot. We laugh all the fucking time.)
Anyway. I woke with this epiphany of hope & survival & joy & meaning & the wide open NOW that can be whatever you wish to create it as. And a voice told me to post it to the blog in case someone else needed to hear about it. Hope & joy & finding all the good stuff. Just look at things in a different way, or maybe just
look at things, and you'll see that all you'll ever need is really just right there with you and inside you. You're inalienable. You're pure, you're energy. We all transcend.
Okay. Gotta run. Thanks for visiting, gang. See ya!