My Morning Poo: Opening Up Space for a New Day

Experiences need help working their way out of the space where we hold them. Whole Foods doesn't sell a canister of gentle, daily Emotional Cleanse that parallels their trusty Colon Cleanse. We must find other means of release.

I'm trying to write my toxins out.

Maybe I just needed carnal knowledge.
Maybe it had nothing to do with honoring or dishonoring myself.

But isn’t every act an act of honoring or dishonoring yourself? I say yes, whether we like it or not. The way I moved through the experience – did I, yet again, abandon a part of me that needed to be honored?

"But some day it's gonna be me, me and only me. Oh oh oh oh wild one I'll make you settle down," plays through Starbucks right now, as if my higher self is singing to the little wild-haired gypsy.

I'm slowly finding issues hidden in comfortable corners. They're asking to be integrated into my living room, taken out of Grandma's china cabinet. It's tough to say how willing I am to feel really groundless with guttural truth, to get honest about the stuff I haven't even spoken out loud in my mind. But those are the seeds waiting for petals. I can sketch an orchid or I can water one.

Sex,
vulnerability - beyond just saying or writing the word,
exposure
and
unmet expectations
and
illusions
and
reaction
and
repetition

Here comes the afterthought of the countless people I’ve exposed and abandoned.

“I knew a girl, her name was truth. She was a horrible liar. She made herself a bed of nails and she’s planning on putting them to use. She had diamonds on the inside...”
Ben Harper now softens me through the speakers.
“Make sure the fortune that you seek is the fortune that you need…
Diamonds on the inside…
Like a soldier standing long under fire, any change comes as a relief.
Let the giver's name remain unspoken, for she is just a generous thief.”

I feel compelled to text Antonio, who's been trying to catch up with me for a few years, just to chat. “Thinking of you as I sit in Starbucks in Venice, CA, Ben Harper singing through the speakers…Sweet memories of us listening to him in my apartment in 1999… Can’t believe that was 10 years ago. Makes me nearly cry- life so beautifully fleeting.”

Nostalgia swells pregnant in my chest with a gentle pain that lets me know I’m living it the way I should, if shoulds should exist, which they shouldn’t. I feel all of it right now.

I want to go to Brazil and work on a boat. When winter comes here in LA, is it still warm in Brazil? I imagine yes. Shouldn’t I know the answer to that question? Another should added to the long list that doesn’t serve me.

I am watching my thoughts and patterns. I see an old yellow VW bus drive by. It’s covered in stickers. And now I think maybe I want to live in a van, maybe in Hawaii. Leah’s there. A van, an ocean and amazing friend. Isn’t that all I really need? When I hurt, I survive through fantastic exit plans. Brazil, boats, India, ashrams, Buddhist abbeys full of self-chosen restraint. How self-chosen is it, I wonder. I think of Pema Chodron, the magnificent Buddhist nun and author whose husband cheated and left her standing in their happy yard in New Mexico. Don’t we have to be hurt so deeply that we want nothing more to do with interaction? We seek lasting solace; want to believe that loyalty exists. But our desires are ever-changing, and sometimes they just don’t gel with promises.

I can promise to try to let you know if my feelings substantially shift. That might be the only promise worth making.