Ego, Take Notice. 2013 is the Year of Intuition. Part One.

Back in October, I vowed to run a half marathon in February. For me, and perhaps you, coalescing fitness into a goal gives the entire prospect a little more steam. They are some of the best gifts we can give ourselves, fitness goals. We eat better, sleep better, and feel better with them in our lives. If we’re lucky, fitness canaries emerge in the form of bigger playlists and grocery bills. They both get longer (and more fulfilling) the more dedicated we become.

On New Year’s Day, a coffee shop in Cottonwood, Arizona’s rediscovered downtown drag became the site of a rare “Aha!” moment. A big one, in my world. My resolution this year is to listen to that inner voice, and not care how that appears on the outside. It’s a difficult resolution to track. The gut I’m talking about doesn’t lose weight, save money, or become more organized. Or does it do all of those things, just, differently?

The second true test this year of this “go with my gut” resolution happened this morning. (The first is Part Two of this post, going up later this week.) Last week, I signed up for a 5k race, which happened today. I told people about it and worked in a couple extra speed workouts to get my slow half-marathon legs familiar with a fast race. Yesterday was carbo-load and hydration day. Last night, I set out all my clothes, prepared warm outer layers to shed, wrote my name with permanent marker on my bag for the bag check, and went to bed early.

This morning, I got dressed, readied my bag, grabbed keys, opened the front door and got all the way to the car. Outside…

I didn’t go. Flat-out reversed course. Went back inside, dropped the bag, crawled back into bed and slept until 9am. Hardcore runners out there felt an unidentified disturbance in the universe, like one of their own had fallen. But, it’s not that I’m a wimp. That’s ego talking. I didn’t go because my goal is to bring my intuition along for a pleasant ride this year, and I decided this morning wasn’t part of the journey. Two weeks ago over the holiday break, I went on an invigorating, mind-clearing six-mile run in the foothills of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the temperature was 18 degrees F and the ground was covered with snow and ice. Because it felt right. I am not a wimp.

Instead of running the road race this morning, after breakfast, I went to the warm gym, and just to piss the ego off, ran 6.2 miles (twice a 5k) on a cushy treadmill, with a great playlist.

So, Ego. You have been warned. This is the Year of Intuition.

There are big, exciting changes coming up this year, on this blog and in other parts of my life. Please join my newsletter for all the updates! Part Two of Ego, Take Notice posts later this week.

Winter run, Santa Fe, NM

Grrr

Last night, as I was wrapping a day on set, I took a tray of leftover craft services burritos home with me. I drove to downtown Santa Monica and walked around in the alleys looking for people to hand them out to. I walked by a scraggly guy holding a 40 in a paper bag who immediately asked me for $5 for the bus (yeah right) and replied, "I don't have cash but I'm handing out these for anyone who is hungry." He essentially said 'no thanks'. Another scraggly guy who appeared to be a friend of his came up and started mocking me for handing out "food to the homeless." I told him I was handing out food to anyone who was hungry, not to "the homeless". He grabbed the tray from me, the conversation disintegrated, and I walked away.

The encounter sucked the spirit of goodwill right out of me. So, today I went out into stupid nature, and walked through the stupid mountains, ate my stupid lunch and tried to hike off my pissy mood. It was a great sandwich; bacon, egg and cheese on ciabatta. I am a big fan of eating breakfast for other meals, especially when it also pulls double duty as a carbohydrate and protein replenishment device.

Then, I was angry at people for being loud and stupid on my lame hike. Noted. I let the drunk and stinky guys-and-burritos encounter ruin my day.

The people on the hike were actually really nice. The hike was beautiful. My mood is still a cesspool. I'm trying, dear God above, to exhibit compassion towards people on this earth, and I was met with an angry dude grabbing a tray of food from me and being mean-spirited about it. It's going to take me a little time to smile anyway and recognize that an act of compassion itself is not necessarily about how it is received, but that it was offered in the first place. I believe it is important to keep being compassionate to everyone, even mean people, but damn, sometimes it is really, really hard.

The Simplicity of a Cheese Sandwich

Today for lunch, I ate a smashed cheese and honey-mustard sandwich. Unremarkable, except that it was at the top of Calabasas Peak, all 2160 feet of it, in the Santa Monica Mountains east of Malibu. While I was eating, a mayfly fell at my feet. A lizard ran down the side of the rock, stopped in front of the fly, looked at me, ate the fly, looked at me again, and took off as fast as he came, making it for a brief moment the most popular lunch spot I could see for miles.

It was hike #1 towards reaching the summit of Mt. Whitney next August. In terms of my physical health, the last two years have been a blurry combination of feeling sorry for myself after a bunch of health crap (I say that so I don't have to use the c-word), paralyzed by the anxiety of "what if it comes back?" Why did it take two years to get back into things I love doing, like communing with a lizard over lunch? And now, how do I fight off these feelings of being angry with myself for throwing a two year-long pity party?

I like cheese sandwiches. I like hiking. Sometimes, a day shouldn't be any more complicated than that, and our minds shouldn't search for meanings ahead or behind these moments.

End pity party.

Dear Blog,

Dear Burwell General Store,
We have been together for some time now, and I still and will always consider you the only blog for me. Over the past eight months, we have taken intimate journeys of fancy dinners and exotic travel, but lately, you've been feeling neglected, and I can tell, because last week, you mysteriously changed all your highlighted link colors to an attention-grabbing purple, and a shocking blue when someone clicks on your links. You've hidden from me the ways in which I would fix this problem. I still love you, but there are a few things I need to tell you.

I've been cheating on you with another blog. The reason I'm posting with you only once a week is because I am running around on the side. It's actually not just one blog, it's two, but that's it, I promise. They are really nice blogs and I think you would like them. I want to make this mess up to you. Next week, let's move, let's get out of this Blogger rut. I bought us a new place over on WordPress. We can start over. All our history, all our photos will all come with us, but you will look better, and I will feel refreshed and relieved that we both have a new home to build upon. And slowly, I would like to introduce you to the new content I've been creating with others.  It's a very unique relationship we have, Burwell General Store, like an episode of Sister Wives, but I think we can find a way to make this work.

Please accept these flowers to distract you from what I just said above.
My warmest thoughts,
Your Owner

When life hands you lemons, make a reading list.

Even the lemons went emo.

Usually, I slip out of the long, deliberate reads of winter and into something more comfortable for summer. Perhaps it was the repetition of travel in the last few weeks that wore the finish off my emotions, exposing the unmistakable pull to grab an armful of books, load up on pantry items and sit and read in isolation for as long as possible without worrying loved ones. I believe this is also known as introspection. It is happening out of season, like a second, unexpected flowering of something.

Last weekend, I snuck away to Tucson, via train, to surprise my sister for her birthday. Despite everyone but my sister knowing what was about to happen, in the life of a mother, apparently even 24 hours a year where you take someone who normally makes everyone else's lives run and ask them what they want for their dinner, take them to a place where someone will clean up their mess, and ask them what they want to do for an evening is a riotous act. As we packed for a birthday night at a Tucson hotel, a wonderful thing happened, it allowed me to respect that my writing is a reflection of how I see something, not how I hope it is seen. This past weekend, I stopped worrying about the difference, and that is a huge step forward, creatively.

Being less concerned about being nice and more concerned about being compassionately honest is a huge, inspiring relief. I put a list together of books to stoke the steam engine to send more of my internal thoughts and writings down the tracks to the "post" button. This list might make even the sturdiest of minds cringe. I'm entering a Blue Period, what can I say? I wonder how the gingerbread cookies post is going to turn out later this week.

I just finished:

• Blood, Bones and Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton
• The Dirty Life; On Farming, Food And Love, Kristen Kimball
• Just Kids, Patti Smith

And am moving on to oldies but goodies:

• Walden, Henry David Thoreau (If you have a better way to kick off introspection, let me know.)
• Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness In The West, Cormac McCarthy
• Seek, Denis Johnson
• Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
• The Frontier in American History, Fred Jackson Turner
• Cakes and Ale, Or, The Skeleton In The Cupboard,  M. Somerset Maugham
• Home Town, Tracy Kidder

(All of these can be found over in the Amazon widget on the side, and no, that's not an Amazon Associates pitch. I don't want to spend the time linking to each one.)

Isn't everything that is a combination of fantastic and awful, memorable and somehow pivotal? Fantastic is not always good, sometimes anger is, and from disappointment comes learning, if you let it. We had such a joy-filled weekend, it hurt to know we will never be able to bask in it. On the other hand, it made us realize how important it is to hold onto joy when you find it. So, I'm going to brood, and be sad and introspective for a while, and I mean that in the best way possible.

Someone's moment, not ours.