Happy Valentine's Day!

Groundhog Day!

With the return of February 2nd, we once again "celebrate" Ground Hog Day, that time when we all wait to find out if that big rodent in Pennsylvania saw his shadow. This morning, evidently, he did, while also declaring the Pittsburgh Steelers to be world champions. I guess Punxatawny Phil keeps a tv down there in his hole.

My favorite part of Groundhog Day is the annual reminder of the film of the same name with Bill Murray and Andie McDowell. It's a classic early 90s goofball comedy, but better than most of that particular genre because it serves to remind us of the fact that we make our lives by the way we pay attention... or don't. In the film, Bill Murray repeats Groundhog Day over and over, until he first begins to realize what's happening and then finally learns the lesson he most needs to understand.

This also plugs into my return to a new 40 day plan. After bailing on my last plan, just before the new year, I've been floating along in search of focus and direction. The simple fact is that I do better when I have a plan. My various natural tendencies to distraction, and my perpetual flirtation with new ideas and intriguing projects, are all more creatively and productively channeled when I set myself up a structure to channel my flailing imagination.


So, here we go again. With Phil's prediction of 6 more weeks of winter, I am choosing to take on my own Groundhog Day discipline with a new six weeks of attention to the details of my life. My own sort of repeat it until you get it right discipline, running from now to the Ides of March.

In the meantime, just remember... Don't Drive Angry!!!

5 Years & 6 Beginnings... Part Six

Just after midnight January 1, 2009: Sitting on the couch at Karen's with a bottle of champagne. We had just gotten back from "up the hill" where we attended a party with some old friends, some new friends, and a few people new to us both. We left shortly before midnight intending to spend the strike of midnight together and alone.

A rather uneventful evening if you look at the surface elements.

But it's the river flowing underneath that image that reveals the most about where my life stands five years on from that night of 03/04, alone in the living room of the little house on Dana, just a short 5 blocks from where Karen and I were standing with champagne under mistletoe at midnight.

The biggest difference is probably the smallest leap. I LIVE here now!

That simple reality is something that I never thought I would accept and/or admit to, but here I am living enthusiastically and more or less contentedly in my own little loft apartment (a long and wonderful story in and of itself) above a garage next to a beautiful garden with buddha statues and a magnificent live oak tree. We live (myself, the tree, and my terrific landlords) at the corner of B and Fair, and that is becoming, as the former owner of the house - Petaluma's first woman mayor, Helen Putnam - used to say, "my motto."

My life has indeed become (and is becoming) fair, not in the sense of mediocre, but in the sense of soft and lovely and delightful.

I fell in love with my new residence the first time I walked into the garden, and I waited in homeless limbo (on friend's couches, at Karen's place, and in "The Little House") for several months for the apartment to become ready to live in (I am it's first actual resident). I moved in during the first week of April, just days before my DDD got married in San Francisco, and between these two nearly simultaneous events, I experienced a deep and engaging sense of life beginning anew.

My growing collection of old and new friends threw me a fabulous house warming party that was organized by Karen, who commiserated with Joe to fool me more completely than I had ever been fooled before.

I also began a lot of new work, much of it in the writing that I have worked hard for much of my adult life to turn into gainful employment. I engaged my new presence in Petaluma by volunteering to co-chair the city's renewed Riverfest Celebration (and I have recently proven what a glutton for punishment I am by volunteering to chair the event for this year!), and by joining the unlikely amalgamation of people that make up Moose Lodge #475. Almost daily, I continue seeking to find ways to involve myself on the ground, in the place where I live.

And then there was the election. This amazing year of challenge and struggle and ultimate triumph when we as a country and a people, individually and collectively, discovered that... truly... WE are the ones we've been waiting for.

I also seem to have discovered that, I am the one I've been waiting for.

On top of it all... through the kindness, patience, insight, creativity and beauty of this surprising person who has come to share my life these days - in ups and downs and back and forths, with soft kisses and deep hugs, through lots of laughter and a few difficult arguments - I found my way back to love.

Indeed... There Is No Fifth Destination.

Still Speechless... Most Hopeful... Completely Committed!

I really don't have anything to say that can equal this photo. I spent the entirety of yesterday staring at the TV, afraid that if I turned it off, I would wake up and it would all have been a dream.

I'm better today... and I just made a new volunteer commitment that I've been pondering for months. Time to get to work.

More tomorrow.

Happy New Year!

This is a video that documents and commemorates the New Year's morning murder of Oscar Grant by BART police.

I have been simply speechless since I first heard about this, but getting this from the CAPE Blog, I had to put it up.

You can sign a petition to California AG Jerry Brown, or you can join a rally on Wednesday, but somehow... there's only one response.

You must DO SOMETHING.