Behold the humble and somehow magnificent common daylily. Seen proliferating along roadside banks, the daylily is one of those overlooked gems often maligned for their steadfastness and reliability, yet entirely capable of putting on an exotic show. If these were as rare or delicate as a bird of paradise, especially in these wintry parts, they would be celebrated just as grandly. Alas, we do not reward or appreciate the steadfast and reliable, only the problematic and difficult. It goes against reason or what’s righteous, and illustrates the impossible fickleness of a world designed to cause as much hurt as possible.
Refusing to extoll or praise such noble traits is sadly the way of this world right now, but as long as I have voice and space in which to use it, I’ll keep on plugging the magnificence in something as common as the daylily, even if the blooms lasts but a day. Beauty is as eternal as it is ephemeral, and nothing proves that more than a flower that lives its entire life in a single day. We should all endeavor to live like that.
It may be time to start normalizing letting coleus go to flower, at least if we are being blessed with this almost-blue shade of brilliance. I’m the first one to espouse pinching coleus back hard in the beginning – it creates for a bushier plant with a stronger multi-branching infrastructure, and way more leaves – but by this time of the year, let the plant have its full life-cycle before the first hard frost of fall finishes it off. Some people continue fertilizing and pruning and insisting on the show going on full-throttle until the last possible moment. I find comfort in seeing the natural die-back of the garden starting about now. We need the rest, we need the respite, and we need the winter.
My dear, precious, darling friend Chris sent me this candle for my 50th, which is hilarious given that he is older than me. It’s the sentiment that counts, and I do love a candle. Andy and I just spent and savored a long birthday weekend in Boston, and I’m still in a bit of withdrawal. Boston has always been a place of enchantment, and these past few days lived up to such a myth. Those stories will be written a bit later – right now it’s almost 10 PM on Monday night, and the Sunday scaries are in full effect before a return to work tomorrow, but it will be Tuesday, moving things quickly – the way time begins speeding up for this second act of life.
This is my first blog post as a fifty-year-old – how fitting that it’s a recap so I don’t need to do much work in my advanced age. Enjoy this weekly recap as I figure out how to limp into the next stage of living…
“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don’t try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
Fifty years ago today I came out of my mother and into this world. It’s been a bit of a calamity ever since. I’ve left some marks, made a ruckus – made you remember some things and forget some others. Perhaps I made you feel something; perhaps I made you feel nothing. In the end, it was usually the ones I wanted most to reach who wanted nothing to do with me, and maybe that will be the greatest lesson of this half-century of living.
Fifty finally feels like the perfect moment for definitively not giving a fuck. Some might say I’ve been here for a while, and that’s fine for them to think, but the truth is I was hanging onto a fuck or two with the foolish hope of… something. That hope has happily flown out the window with the arrival of fifty. There are, at long last, no more fucks to give – and that feels like freedom. That feels like fifty. And that feels just fine.
“To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply not to allow yourself to get lost in regrets about the past or worries about the future. If you are firmly grounded in the present moment, the past can be an object of inquiry, the object of your mindfulness and concentration. You can attain many insights by looking into the past. But you are still grounded in the present moment.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Considering all my supposed vanity, how strange that this should be the first letter I’ve written to myself. For all the self-help techniques espoused by new-age writers, somehow I’ve managed to avoid the vain indulgence of such an exercise, because it always felt pointless to put down in words the silly things I voice to myself internally. That inner-dialogue is persistently consistent, pausing only for meditation and sleep, so there never seemed a need to translate it into written form. Strange for someone who purports to love writing…
I think I’ve also left you alone for all these years because I sort of assumed you could take care of yourself. You always have, even as a young child. When left to your own devices you would find ways of mentally entertaining and surviving various difficult predicaments – the typical pratfalls of childhood – through wit and whimsy and make-believe. Your imagination ran wild from your earliest days, and it remains one of the most potent exit strategies for an increasingly-worrisome world. I reserve my deepest pity and sympathy for those young creatures who have bartered their imagination for a cel phone and screen time. How sad to be so disconnected from the world! On your 50th birthday, I think you deserve a small pat on the back for maintaining your connection to nature – to plants and animals and the wonder and beauty of any given day. May it prove as reliable for comfort for the next fifty years as it has for the first…
I know you didn’t want to celebrate fifty in any grand or bombastic way – too typical, too predictable, too much like too many others – but you need to hear what I’m saying.
Do you hear what I’m saying?
Do you know what I’m saying?
Those words once rang in your head during your first year of college, when you thought you were going crazy, when you thought you might not last. That’s partly why I insist upon you honoring this day: because there were moments – several of them – when you almost chose not to be here. You came close to snuffing out all the goodness and awfulness and sweetness and sadness of these wonderfully wickedly woefully wildly winsomely few decades that followed the darkness. That choice – that option to be or not to be – has occasionally reared its head, and thus far whatever angel or spirit or sliver of self-worth that perches on your shoulder has guided you right on all your ways. You cannot take reaching this age for granted, because I know all of the struggles that sometimes barely brought you to this point.
Perhaps I should have written to you sooner. There were so many moments when you needed someone – anyone – so badly, and I let you do it all on your own. I thought it would make you stronger. I thought it would help you survive. And maybe all it did was come close to killing you. I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry I left you to fend for yourself all these years, I’m sorry I wasn’t there… even when I was.
Despite my absence and despite my silence, or perhaps because of them, my faith in you never wavered, and you turned out all right. I know you don’t always think that. You’re still too hard on yourself, but you’re getting better about it. That’s difficult, because I also know there were pivotal moments when you should have had unconditional, unwavering, and unquestionable love, and it simply wasn’t there. When you lack that at certain key steps, it’s almost impossible to make up for it on your own. There’s only one word that matters in that sentence though: almost.
And so, in however many years that may follow this half-century demarcation point, I want you to remember all the possibility and opportunity that ‘almost’ affords, remember all the hope and power that reside in a ‘maybe’, and remember all the love that lives within your ‘self’. Going forward, that’s all you’ll ever need.
Happy birthday my friend. ~ A.
“I have lost my smile, but don’t worry. The dandelion has it.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
I thought I was prepared to let go of the first half-century of my life, as if there is any promise or likelihood that there will be a second half-century. How many people do you know who live to be a hundred? And who would want that?
Knowing what little I now know of second acts, and the second half of one’s life, I am not quite ready to say goodbye to the best of my days.
I’ve never had such feelings before, never entertained, not seriously at least, the fear and terror of leaving it all behind. It was as if there was always the hope and possibility of turning back, like I could, if things got really bad or unbearable, get back to the places of youth and beauty and promise, even if it was all in my head. There’s something irrevocable about 50 that I didn’t feel at 30 or 40 or even 49. And part of me finally feels a little afraid, a little regret, a little hopeless… at all that came before, and all that never came at all – the dreams and plans and aspirations, the wishes and wants and wonderings, the way I thought it would have all played out by now.
I’m sorry. I do apologize for this post. I don’t like to be this vulnerable, and for almost five decades I’ve pretended not to be. The truth is that this world has knocked me about a bit. It’s left its bruises, its dents, its scars – it’s left its hurt on and within me. It’s impressed its betrayals and abandonments, its cruelty and wickedness, upon my heart. It hasn’t been as wonderful as these posts have often portrayed it to be – and I haven’t been as powerful or sure as I’ve pretended to be.
“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being, he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense – he is “collective man,” a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind. That is his office, and it is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.” ~ C.G. Jung
“Therein lies the social significance of art: It is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is more lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious, which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes on this image and, in raising it from deepest unconsciousness, he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.” ~ C.G. Jung
“The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him; on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life and on the other, a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire… there are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.” ~ C.G. Jung
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully & as carefully as you can – in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal – but then you need to do that – then you are freed from the power of them…. Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church – your cathedral – the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them – then you will lose your soul – for in that book is your soul.” ~ C.G. Jung
An impossibly-high life spinning wildly out of control,
a life that gave in to desperation and depression,
a life that burned of its own blood and toil.
A rage released.
He had tried so hard for so long, and eventually it proved to be too much.
He was lost again, given over to the dark forces of greed and corruption and the glitzy trappings of a decadent world.
Stumbling wildly along a path of destruction, tumbling down a steep hill of depravity, and fumbling fabulously toward a blazing finish, he will go down in glorious ruin.
“Having taken the child on a trip into a wondrous world, at its end the tale returns the child to reality, in a most reassuring manner. This teaches the child what he needs most to know at this stage of his development: that permitting one’s fantasy to take hold of oneself for a while is not detrimental, provided one does not remain permanently caught up in it. At the story’s end the hero returns to reality ~ a happy reality, but one devoid of magic.” ~ Bruno Bettelheim
At this turn of The Divine Diva Tour: A Fairy’s Tale, we dive deeper into the darkness, featuring the first hints of the old ultra violence, and a nightmarish in-and-out of reality. The tortures we inflict upon ourselves when we choose the way of art, the transformations in which we indulge when fueling our creative fire – these are the demons that start rearing their heads as we encroach upon the final harrowing stretch of this fairy’s journey.
Back when I did this project in 2005, the demons that swirled in my head were largely of my own making, and as such entirely manageable and easy manipulated. This was all creative play. True, it had its roots in real trauma and buried memories, but I wasn’t quite ready to give real voice or expression to any of that without a proper mask or veil. These characters stood in for the real me, and in some aspects they took the blows of the real world.
While I can see that now, with the 20/20 hindsight of twenty years of lived experience, back then I don’t think I did. At that time it all felt real, and it all felt terrifying. What a luxurious stance of privilege and power, even if I didn’t realize it.
Because of that, posting this project now feels slightly quaint and innocent, which takes away from some of the drama and trauma that informed it. Distance does lend enchantment, and blunts the sharpest edges. And though there was no real danger of being cut then, somehow I still have scars.
The murkiness is the true terror – the not knowing what might have happened, the possibility of blocking it all out; there may not have been anything of danger or harm in the pool of inky water that blocks all light, but the idea of not seeing the safety is enough to remove it. And a child devoid of safety or security is a child deprived of love.
“Style is a shield; style is a sword; style is a crown; and style is also an automatic invitation card to the party at the end of the world.” ~ Quentin Crisp
Summer’s seduction is approaching its final turn. Cloaked in pastels, it still might trick you into thinking it’s endless, or that it’s harmless, when it is neither of those things. If a pretty flower is poisonous, its prettiness doesn’t remove the poison, it parades it. Fuck with it at your own peril.
Whenever my birthday approaches, I feel the end of summer is near, which makes it all the more dangerous. When there is nothing left to lose, when summer approaches its last stand, the thorns and knives begin to cut. Don’t be fooled by the pretty pastels, don’t think we are soft because of our silence.
