Imaginal Journal
Imagination is Medicine
Open Hearted Aliveness
Slice of life: Feeling in harmony with urbanite nature, kind folks, and matching with Echo Park Lake and its lilies. My pup loving the paleta man's cart bell. Proudly sat across from my beloved before he jets to Brazil as I read to him from my earth medicine book.
Phone Call by Tony Hoagland
Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight exaggeration,
an immoderate description of the person
who at the moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.
What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what I meant behind that
was that my father was split
into two people, one of them
living deep inside of me
like a bad king or an incurable disease—
blighting my crops,
striking down my herds,
poisoning my wells—the other
standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming
with bad knees and white hair spouting from his ears.
I don’t want to scream forever,
I don’t want to live without proportion
Like some kind of infection from the past,
so I have to remember the second father,
the one whose TV dinner is getting cold
while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window
where just now the sun is going down
and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills
they once touched like a child.
~ from What Narcissism Means To Me (Greywolf Press, 2003)
Taking a Chance
“You know, love is a very strange thing. The way I see it, love is a willingness to take a chance on the other person. It’s not really a feeling; it’s not really some kind of conviction that the relationship is going to be around tomorrow; it’s not some sort of mutual guarantee on both sides that things are going to be a certain way. What I think love is, is that we’re more and more willing to take a chance on each others realities.”
Begin by Simply
“ When the body is frozen in the midst of strangulated affect, when there is no palpable heart or mind or spirit, begin by simply going through the motions. Lift your feet and dance or a lift your arms, even when each limb me feel as if it weighs 1000 pounds. The living moving spirit may awaken, spreading itself throughout your body until it reaches the mind and heart, infusing every cell in your body and every body part and eventually everybody in the room.”
Summer
Love at the start of summer is a full English breakfast, learning to play chess with the eleven year old inner child in my husband, a film that lights your imagination, diving into the depths on dreams and meaning with friends over guacamole, listening to great music driving up HWY 1, eating local farm food on the ocean pier, cracking open summer reads, napping on the beach, running along the coastline with my pup and seeing my beloved smile fully satisfied at the end of the day.
Upheavals
“Judgmental creatures that we are, we don’t often think well of our upheavals, but freak outs are really good news because it means the ego is losing its ground. And the reason we judge things — situations, people, our own experience — is because we are trying to regain control; the ego is trying desperately to maneuver back into the driver’s seat.”