It’s been an exhausting few weeks, and it’s not going to get any less so anytime soon. Book promotion is just starting, and over the last week or so I’ve been busting my arse to get all of the existing Scarleteen site plugged into the new system, which I’ll continue to race to do over the next week or two, because it needs be finished before I leave for Minneapolis mid-month, and I’d like the new system in place before the official release date for the book. And on top of those brain and energy drains, I’m also a bit emotionally sapped, for no real reason at all.
(Though today I had one of those days where all day, my mind kept wandering to crushy thoughts about Mr. Price, and he wasn’t even home. This happens often enough, and usually quite inexplicably, not because he did anything in particular, though we did have two late nights this week of joy: one, collaborating to make a new logo for his production company, and two, collaborating to deliver delicious orgasms after a fine meal and an hour at one of the last remaining dive bars in Ballard. It often feels a bit silly, to be working on something that is The Serious Work, and have my mind invaded by drippy, adolescent “He’s so DREAMY!” thoughts, but what the hell. It’s not like I got that many chances to be an adolescent the first time round, so I may as well enjoy it now.)
But as spring starts to erupt, my solace, as ever, is out of doors. My birthday present to me, from me, this year was to swing by the nursery with Fish and to allow myself a bit of a small splurge in terms of getting some new plants for my garden this year.
Sparing an existing plan to grab a handful of small tomato plants (big tomatoes here just don’t seem to get as firm and crisp as I like, but the cherries do fine), when I choose plants, I go solely by my gut, unless it seems like a given thing just won’t grow well in my space or this climate. Every time I have a garden, for every year that I have one, I tend to find my intuitive, impulse choices quite telling in hindsight.
As I mentioned before, there is something about the nature, shape and color of the plants I have been choosing this year that is almost dangerous. And yet, as everything is beginning to bud and bloom, what I’m noticing more is that it seems pretty clear to me that I was doing some unconscious chakra emphasis and balancing that makes all the sense in the world (even if you think I’m a werido with things like this sometimes) when I look at it.
Because speaking primarily about color, everything I have chosen — the green of it all taken into account — has been shades of red, orange and violet.
In other words, has been about the root, sacrum, heart/lung and crown chakras: about instinct and survival, about sexuality and creativity, about compassion and healing, and connection to the divine and universal. About my life’s work, in short, and what I aim for and have always intended with it. This year, for obvious reasons, that all is coming into hyperfocus.
There’s something about having the book finished, in print, and sitting here with me — and en route to many others — that says, “Well, lady, I hope this is who you wanted to be for a while, because this is who you are and will be seen as.” That feeling is always a bit frightening to me: while I am highly committed in the moment — and generally wind up being deeply committed to and sustaining things for years and years — I can sometimes be a bit skittish about making long-term commitments for the future.
I was talking to my father on the phone yesterday, who, for whatever reason, was seriously fixated on how much I work and how hard I work and who said to me, in regard to this, “You’re your mother.”
What he meant by this was that, like my mother, I’m a workaholic. But I corrected him, because, in fact, that is not all of who I am. I am also my father: it was my father who reared me to do all I could to be an activist, to do work of social value, and to have my whole heart in what I do. I explained this, and that what I am in this regard is myself, but also quite clearly a precise equation of what happens when the both of them are added up.
He said he felt bad for me. Yipes! He mused if I might be happier if I didn’t work so much or so hard, and all I could think or say was that I’m happy just as I am — which still sometimes comes as a shock to me — and that it’s impossible for me to imagine being any other way because for as long as I can remember, this is who I have been in this respect: I was all but born with a petition in my hands, with a fire in my belly, and with a very strong drive to choose challenging work that others often pass by.
It’s tough though, to explain to either parent I have, that this is all so different when what you’re doing both isn’t a day job, nor something you feel important, but likely fruitless. This is my life’s work: and in it, everything so often seamlessly unionizes for me (I suspect it does not for others, and that includes some of the discord I expect to see when the book gets more visible in terms of what I do at Scarleteen and what I do and have done with visual art and adult sexuality) and makes sense, and if there were more hours in a day to do it, I’d probably spend most of them doing it. Doing one’s life’s work, doing the work one not only needs to do, but wants to do, cultivates love, cultivates growth, and is just the rightest thing in the world. Right now, there are little to no aspects of any part of my life that don’t add to and enhance my work, or don’t stem from it, and add to and enhance my self.
That isn’t to say I’m not worn out a lot, especially this year: I am. Nor is it to say I manage it all expertly: often, I do not. It’s also certainly often stressful, always challenging, and it’s also often heartbreaking.
But hard as it can be, it is exactly what I want to be doing, and I know all too well that we aren’t always afforded to do our life’s work full-time, and many people will never have that opportunity: I’m exceptionally lucky in that right now, and lucky that I’ve had more than one opportunity in my life to do that. Certainly, you pay for those opportunities, and in some respects, unless you’re REALLY lucky, you make sacrifices to do so, you go without certain things. But no matter, it’s still an incredible blessing.
So, when I sit in my little garden right now, and I look at what I intuitively planted and chose, I can’t help but feel an extra affirmation that I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing and that right now, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
I don’t feel that all the time (or don’t let myself feel that?), and you know, I really should.
May 5th, 2007 at 10:05 am
It’s a very long journal.
I appreciate you selfconfidence. I too am where I am supposed to be.
Best of luck for you book’s success.
May 6th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
I’m very much not doing my life’s work right now. I’m not even sure what it is, really. But there were a couple of moments this winter where I felt as if I were where I needed to be, doing what I needed to do, and there was nothing that could possibly make me happier. Each time it was when I was teaching my buddy’s daughter to ski, even when we weren’t making progress. I wasn’t expecting that.
It was an amazing feeling and I’m happy you feel it.