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Simplifying the Complicated Life

By on December 8, 2014 in acceptance, dreams, Family, inspiration, Letting Go, Love, meditation

It’s 7:30am, and I’m already tired. Partly it’s because I didn’t sleep well last night. You could say I was besieged by strange recurring dreams concerning gorillas and high schools. Since I’m in the process of registering my son to high school, that might explain the second part, but I’m still not sure about the gorillas. Partly, however, I’m so tired because I’ve contemplated my schedule this week, and I am dreading what I see.

Ever since I’ve come back from the meditation retreat in September, I’ve become more aware of how overwhelmed I feel inside my own life. So much happens every day. I feel responsible for so many things and people. The driving… don’t get me started on the driving. And all of it, I confess, is by choice. My choice. And the question begs, if this chaos is my choice, why am I not choosing otherwise?

My brother-in-law once told me a story about a teacher’s example for good time management. The teacher placed a large glass vase on the table and fit large rocks inside, up to the top of the vase. He then asked the students if the vase was full. Yes, they answered. The teacher took smaller rocks and let them tumble into the spaces between the large rocks. Is the vase full now, he asked the students. Yes, they said. The teacher poured pebbles into the vase. How about now? He asked. Yes. Then he poured in sand. Full? The students, now wise, wondered if maybe not? The teacher poured in water. Now the vase was truly full. The moral of the story was simple: we have to fill up our time with the biggest rocks first, what is most important, and only then down in size to the water. If we fill the vase with water first, then sand, then pebbles, we have no room for the big rocks.

So what are my big rocks? I always come back again and again to this question. The kids, of course, hiking and being outside, writing, spending time with Dar, my meditation and qigong. I also have smaller rocks that I do not wish to be without: reading, spending time with the dogs, cleaning for the chickens (I know this sounds strange, but it actually makes me feel more connected to the essential me, the earth-me), making music, spending time with friends, connecting with my family, exercising.

Then there are the things I do which are harder to classify: cooking, for example — is that a small rock or a pebble? It is important to me to eat healthy and organic. I would prefer not to eat at restaurants, but cooking takes up so much time, seemingly more than its share in the order of importance. And, to make everything more complicated, it is also closely related to the much bigger rock of spending time with and still taking care of the kids, in, once again, two opposing forces. I guess some of my rocks are just not so black and white in the size department.

Then there are other things, like doctors’ appointments, for example. If it was up to me, those would be sand, or maybe even water. But what if it’s a doctor’s appointment for the kids? And paying my bills, whether sand, water or pebble, is essential to living an orderly and responsible life with direct implication to my peace of mind and the well-being of the kids, myself, and Dar. Unlike my brother-in-law’s story, I have not been able to find a way to make all of my rocks come together snugly in the vase of my life. It’s always an either/or. Either I take the kids to the dentist, or we can go home and spend time together. Either I cook dinner, or I help them with homework. Either I write or I go for a hike. It is always choice.

I remember one of my first conversations with my therapist. I described to her all of these things which I would love to do and explained how if only I was more methodical, less lazy, more organized, more efficient, then I would be able to do all of them every day. Jeanne thought that it sounded exhausting. Sadly, she turns out to be right.

Here is a schedule of my dream day:
5am wake up
5:20-6:30am meditation and qigong
6:30am breakfast while reading
7:00am-9:45am hike
9:45-10:00 clean for chickens, water plants in yard
10:00am-11:30am write
11:30-12:30 play the ukulele and sing
12:30-1:00pm lunch
1:00pm-2:45pm prepare dinner
2:45-4 pick up kids from school
4-6:30 spend time with the kids, walk dogs
6:30-7 dinner
7:00-7:30 read french
7:30-8:30 showers, spend time with kids
8:30 go to sleep

Here’s what I didn’t put in there:
My Reiki stuff: sessions, planning classes, promoting my business, connecting with people
Hanging out with friends
Resting or even just pausing
Talking with my grandmother in Israel, connecting with my family
Writing this blog
Laundry
Loading and unloading the dishwasher
Registering Uri to high school
Exercising
Doctors appointments
Date night with Dar
Massage
Answering emails
Volunteering at school
Grocery shopping
And so much more.

As I am writing this, I am wondering if perhaps I could look a week in advance and schedule in some things which are important to me. I would love to write every day, but do I really need to hike every day? Perhaps three times a week is enough, and perhaps I could assure myself of having that time by physically penciling it into my calendar? Perhaps I could play the ukulele in the evening instead of the morning, freeing up an hour and sharing that activity with the kids? That hour could be used to put in-between activities, for much needed pausing or, perhaps, for the laundry.

Jack Kornfield often reads a poem by the poet Ryokan:

BEGGING
Today’s begging is finished; at the crossroads
I wander by the side of Hachiman Shrine
Talking with some children.
Last year, a foolish monk;
This year, no change.

I tend to agree about that for myself. Last year, a foolish Sigal. This year, no change. The more I live and the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. I realize how some things which seemed so ultra-important to me in the past are not necessarily that important at all. I find myself getting back to the essential, that which truly is important to me: to love, to share that love with people around me, to be at peace and share that peace with people around me.

Perhaps that, in truth, is my one big rock, living with the intention to love. Everything else, whether I hike or write, whether I play or talk on the phone, whether I answer email or water the plants — do these things ever truly matter if they are not done from the heart? And is not even folding the laundry the most important thing, the biggest of all big rocks, if done with love?

NaNo Update

By on November 9, 2014 in acceptance, creativity, dreams, fairy tale, Letting Go, meditation, perfection, writing

Today is day 8 of NaNoWriMo, and so far, so good, I’ve been able to write 17,245 words. That’s an average of over 2,000 words a day! I am making an effort to write first thing in the morning, when I’m at my best and when I am less likely to be interrupted. Usually that means I am sitting here at my computer between 6-8am.

I’ve been writing and only writing, not reading over what I previously wrote, and I think this method is working well for me. If I start reading back at what I wrote before, my inner critic becomes engaged, and all of a sudden it is not about being creative but about excellence and perfection or, worse, embarrassment and shame. I find that I really work much better if the critic is off to the side, minding his own business. Every once in a while he rears up his head and comments on my progress, and I politely ask him to back off. I don’t need him right now. I want to allow the words, unhindered, to flow.

I hope that when I am done with the first draft (as I feel fairly confident I am going to do) I can engage the services of my inner critic not as a critic but as a “feedbacker.” I think there’s a lot he can help me with, as long as he remembers that his job is to support and build and not to crush and shame. My cousin told me a good quote in Russian for this (and I’m using her translation): The first pancake always comes out in a ball. Similarly, I expect that this first draft is not going to be the end of the process. There’s going to be a second, and a third, and maybe a number twenty-third draft as well. There’s going to be revision. But the only way I can move from a ball to a beautiful pancake ready-to-be-served is with encouragement and love. It’s impossible to cook a nicely-shaped, yummy pancake — or a magical novel — with censure and hurt.

Other than discovering that NaNoWriMo does in fact motivate me to write, I’ve also noticed something else. I have more self discipline than I used to. I think all this meditation and qigong and Reiki practice is really paying off. I am better able to concentrate and to sit down for something that I know deep down inside to be very important to me. I am also, somehow, better able to let go. I put down the words, and whether or not the critic mumbles something from his place of semi-exile, I let my written words flow. There will be a time to review them later.

Having written one novel before, even if I did decide, after who-knows-what-number version, to leave it, I feel both awed and overwhelmed by the thought of what comes after the first draft. I know the task that is ahead of me, and I know what it feels like to have put so much effort into something meaningful to me only to discover that it is just not going to bear fruit anytime soon. I try to let these thoughts go too. Right now there are only two things I am doing, and they are allowing the story to tell itself and myself to feel the fun of it without thinking too much ahead.

Tomorrow I am going to a meditation daylong at Spirit Rock about releasing the inner critic. Very apropos, I think. I hope it will help with the writing as well. I have dreamed about writing a novel for so long, I’ve written and hoped, cried, shut down, avoided writing for months and months, and then found myself trying again and again. A part of me wants so, so much for it to happen finally, but I’ve decided to let go of expectations and hopes, and even of dreams. I have decided to let whatever happen, happen, and to stop interfering.

Many years ago when I was a student at Stanford, one of my professors said to me that in order to write a doctorate you need to have a fire burning in you. For me, the fire has always been in writing a novel. Sometimes it was on low heat. Sometimes on high. But it was always there, burning away, sending desire after desire into the sky. So we will see, won’t we, what will come of this new endeavor, this new concept for my novel. I will keep you updated as I continue following the NaNo path. For now, all is well. I hope all’s well also in your life.

Setting an Intention for NaNoWriMo

By on October 30, 2014 in adventure, dreams, fairy tale, Letting Go, writing

There is a novel in my head, with characters and a plot, that is yearning to come out. It’s been there for years. So many years, in fact, that they can be numbered in tens rather than ones. Princess Anna Mara first came to me as I was sitting outside Ostrovsky High School waiting for my friends to get out of class. It was October, I believe, and my sister and I were visiting Israel while our parents decided where our family was heading next. Not that there was much question about it. They were not going to stay in South Africa, where we had lived for the past 9 months, nor where they coming back to Israel, no matter how much my sister and I hoped they would.

Partly out of that hope, and partly because I truly loved to learn, I got permission from the high school to attend classes with my friends. I took that permission and my request very loosely, only going to classes that interested me, namely math and physics. The rest of the time, I sat in the courtyard and wrote funny stories to amuse my friends while they had to sit in their dreary classrooms. Annamara, as I named her then, was the protagonist of a short fairy tale about a princess living in New York who is kidnapped by a wizard in a flying car. She screams so loudly in the car that he loses consciousness, whereupon she jumps out of the car and into a chimney (no one said I had to be historically consistent). Down the chimney she goes and into a room with (surprise, surprise) a chimney sweep. The wizard climbs through the window, fights the chimney sweep, loses, and, now consistent with fairy tale rules, the princess marries the chimney sweep.

Somehow, Anna Mara stayed with me through the years, popping out again when I was in the army as the subject of a presentation (which was so successful it ended up being filmed and used as an example), and again, ten years later, when I took a class writing for children. There, when I began writing her in earnest, I discovered Anna Mara was not some silly screaming princess but a fully-fledged character with a novel behind her who wished for independence and truth and disliked being a damsel in distress. Anna Mara wished to be a revolutionary, a heroine.

Seven years later, a full novel lay on my desk, printed and ready to be sent to publishers and agents, and that was when the rejections began to flow in. Something was wrong with my novel, and I could not quite figure out what. Something was wrong enough that perhaps, just perhaps, I couldn’t fix it. Version 4, version 5, version 6 later, I had to admit that perhaps it was time to let Anna Mara go. Perhaps it was not meant to be, this novel. Perhaps it was time to move on.

No matter how much I tried, however, Anna Mara stuck to me. She, her new beau Anders, the Wizard Calypso Maximilian the Great, the wonderfully compassionate aquatic monster Fangarm, and the dragon Gozlianus, evil and yet wise at the same time. They simply wouldn’t leave. A new frame was required, I realized, something different to breathe new life into them. I began to rethink my old story. What is it these characters want? Where do they want to come to life? What is it they want to tell? And slowly but surely a new story began to take form, similar and yet different, full of exciting possibilities.

This new story is what I plan to work on during the month of November through NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. The goal: 1,666 words a day for 30 days, reaching a whopping total of 50,000 words, or, you could say, the length of a first draft novel. I am hoping that working within a structure and a deadline (especially one that has an end in sight) would encourage me to write. I’ve made myself a profile with the username sigaljoy, and I uploaded a summary and excerpt and applied to be part of their cover lottery. I even have one buddy, my wonderful cousin Iris, who is also an aspiring author, and who is going for it too at NaNoWriMo this year.

I wanted, however, to set an intention for the month, especially with the new direction my thoughts have been going lately with regards to simply being instead of taking on goals and purpose and such. This may sound strange when I’ve elected to take on a 1,666 word a day goal.… But, since this novel inside me simply burns to be written, here are my intentions for this month:

I am letting go of ego
I am letting go of fortune and fame
I am letting go of my needs with regards to this novel
I am letting go of any expectations
I am letting go of any hopes
I am letting go of control
I am letting go of direction
And I am letting go of all external or internal goals

I am writing because writing seems to flow in my blood
I am writing for the passion of writing
I am writing because I always wanted to write and still do
I am writing for the life of this novel whose heart is beating inside me, yearning to be born
I am writing for love of words and for the pictures and scenes those words create
I am writing for me, and for the characters, and for the sake of the story
I am writing for the love of these characters who are chattering away in my mind all day
I am writing because I want to read my own book and get to know my own characters
I am writing because I want to know what happens to these characters, kinda in the end, though it will never be the end
I am writing because I want them to be free to tell their own stories and live their own life
I am writing because, quite frankly, I must write

I am letting it happen, the way it will happen, even if I don’t quite know what “it” is, but I am allowing for the possibility that this novel, just the way I always imagined it, will flow out of me, one words at a time, coming into shape and structure and plot and conflicts in the way that I dreamed it would. I am realizing that all “I” need is to get out of the way, and so, this is my intention: to get myself out of the way and let the writing happen.

Wish me luck. 🙂

Fool’s Leap

By on October 16, 2014 in creativity, dreams, imagination, inspiration, Poems, Poetry, writing

Let’s build a box together,
Shall we?
One side made up of limitations
The second expectations
The third is disappointments
The fourth frustrations
The top from judgements
The bottom from beliefs
With some nails, scattered on the floor,
To symbolize our fears.

Let’s build a box together
A box to keep us small
To keep us safe from any need to
Grow
Expand
Or fly
Can you imagine flying in this box?
The nails shaking up a storm inside
The walls closing in
Crashing imminent.

Willing to give
Anything, anything at all
Just so there would be
No
Crashing.

And yet
What if
By crashing
Something new could come
Something fertile
Something blooming
Something green
And red
And pink
And yellow
And colorful all over?
What if
By crashing
The walls could disappear
And then
I
Could
Fly?

I’m listening to OneRepublic’s music in my car
Safe in the box
Safe in the car
Safe in my fears
But the music is beating, beating, beating
Calling me out of the box
And I find myself squirming
One part a sedate, responsible driver
The other dancing with the beat.
I want to leap out and explode
Instead of staying stuck
In this hurtling metal car
Inside of staying stuck
In my own self-built box.

Dancing, dancing, singing, dancing
My spirit’s hands reach up and out
Fingers tickling the stars
Sending storms into the stratosphere
I need to dance so I can write
I need to sing so I can write
I need more space
No box can fit
I dance and sing and sing and dance
With this creative, freedom trance.

The metal box, its speed, are gone
And in their place my soul explodes
To outer space, creating storms
Bringing blessed rain and more
Flowers, fruit, a golden shower
Words to fill out seven novels
Words to fill the heart with joy
I knew somewhere, somewhere within
This passion smoldered hid
Awaiting a single lighted match
To give it this release
Into a fool’s trusting leap.

And now,
What now?
No change.
No change at all.
After all,
That’s who I was,
You know,
Before.

A Dream During the Holy Fire Ignition

By on August 28, 2014 in adventure, dreams, hiking, inspiration, Poetry, Reiki

In my dream, I reached mountain summits.
Everest, the Top of the World, turned out
Both warm and cold,
Deprived of sufficient oxygen yet abundant in the essence of life.
Startled to find myself up there,
Without having ever climbed
And frightened of his height,
Clouds merging with snowy peaks,
My heart tightened —
How could I possibly deserve to be up here
So effortlessly?
I retreated as the dream flew me down
And across continents and oceans to

Shasta, magnificent in her aloneness,
Sheer in her glaciers and cliffs,
Her spirit grand and giving,
Filled my heart with health, confidence and joy,
Reminding me, this much is true,
This has already been done.
There I stood, alone on the summit of rock and snow,
Flinging my hands up in triumph,
Awash in the glory of my connection to the mountain
Vibrating to her spiritual song.

I flew north, the dream reminded me
There’s more summits visited —
On Rainier, my tears washed away
Sadness from my heart
Illuminated by the barely risen sun.
Cool and solid, the mountain
Received my tears yet reminded me
Breathe,
Adding himself categorically, without my asking,
First, and not alone, to a new list of
Successes.
My breath, not quite enough,
Left me whizzing, my lungs screaming for more oxygen —
All this crying left me lacking in air,
My heart heavy with the knowledge of the
Burden I had carried for so long,
Overcome by the mountain’s generosity
And the weightlessness of my burden
Now left buried in the mountain’s mantle of snow.

The dream then flew, wings at my back
South and East,
Over low-slung trees
And herds of tiny elephants
A desert, not a desert.
There, lonely on the Serengeti planes,
Kili rose above me, a goddess of freedom,
Surprising me with her majestic ridges,
Making me laugh and sigh with longing.
I strained to see her snow, her glacier,
But so close only the mountain rose,
Like a hump over the plane.
Up here, she whispered, come here next.

I wondered at this influx of mountains
Climbed or unclimbed in my dream, when
Once again the scene changed
To a path, made of a sudden
Into a river, an ocean of sparkling gold
From the rays of the sun,
Leading me,
(So it said in a gravelly, cascading voice)
To joy, with joy;
To peace, in peace;
To love, with love;
A path to path.

I walked, floated down the river, soared overhead,
And found that
There is only love and love,
There is only peace and peace,
There is only joy and joy,
There is only path and path.

An abundance of love,
And that love, nothing like I ever imagined:
Not a consuming love
Or an enfolding love,
Or a holding-on-to love,
But a space
A freedom
A limitlessness
An openness.

In my dream, I reached the tops of mountains,
Touching them with my feet and my heart,
A fire burning
In the palms of my hands.
In my dream, from these summits,
I sent out a message
Of peace and love.

Because, remember?
There is only peace and peace
And love and love
And joy and joy
And path and path.

The Tip of the Pyramid

By on July 25, 2014 in acceptance, adventure, dreams, hiking, inspiration

Dar and I returned home last Saturday from our Tahoe Rim Trail backpacking attempt. We had planned to hike 12 days, with ten nights spent camping and one night (on the sixth night) at a hotel in South Lake Tahoe, where we were also going to resupply. Planning, however, (as is often the case) was not enough. On the third day, an ignored injury in my feet became so aggravated that, when we arrived at that night’s campsite in Mount Rose, we gratefully accepted, instead, a ride down into Incline Village and the ER. The next day, saddened and disappointed, we made our way home.

The doctor at the ER had told me that rest was important for my feet to recover, and so for a few days I tried to lie on the couch, the bed, or the hammock, with my feet resting on cushions for most of each day. Such a small part of the body, and yet so critical that it can easily turn our whole world upside down. I was irritable from not being able to do much and from some discomfort in my feet, but mostly I struggled with strong feelings of inadequacy and failure. Why did I ignored the injury? Why did it have to flare up so strongly? Why could I not just walk through it despite the pain? This trip seemed yet another failed project in a long list of unfinished, unexplored, or un-pursued dreams.

As I lay harassing myself with my list of failures, a cheerful part of me piped up and said, “But what about the list of achievements?”
“Which achievements?” The critical part responded.
“Mount Rainier?” Suggested the cheerful one.
“Climbed with a group. Doesn’t count.” Retorted the Critic.
“Mount Olympus?” “Group. And Alan was a good leader. Doesn’t count.”
“Mount Shasta?” “Easier. With a group. Doesn’t count.”
“Yosemite Matterhorn?” “Cried all the way to the top. Cliff basically had to pull me up. Doesn’t count.”
“Half Dome?” “The guide (Con) had to carry my backpack down because I was so exhausted. Doesn’t count. And,” the critical part slyly added, “Notice all of these adventures were with a guide?”
“Ok, then what about the MBA?” “Liat forced me to study. Doesn’t count.”
“Stanford?” “They accepted me because my essay impressed them, and it wasn’t even about me, and it’s easy to graduate from English once you get in. Doesn’t count.”
“The kids?” “Don’t even get me started about that one!”

And so on, and so forth. That critical part always has an answer. No achievement ever counts.

I live my my life at the stressful tip of an upside-down pyramid. Every project I start is all-important, pivotal. If only this project succeeds (and succeeds according to a very specific set of rules and judgements), then I would be able to keep going to build the rest of the pyramid. Except, because each project is so pivotal, and because each project is so all-important, it is impossible ever to get out of the tip of the pyramid. Every project is again, and again, and again, the tip of the pyramid. Every project is all-important. Every project is pivotal. In every project my entire opinion of myself, my confidence, my worth, hangs in the balance. Each project is the tip, carrying a pyramid of personal failure and unworthiness.

Seems a bit hopeless, doesn’t it?

While hiking on our third day, both my feet were burning with an almost debilitating pain. There was no escape. Each step was excruciating. I tried putting moleskin and second-skin blister pads over the inflamed spots in an attempt to relieve the pressure. It helped, some. Mostly, however, I had to struggle with my thoughts. What is this pain? Is it just a blister? Did I just call pain from a blister debilitating and excruciating? Am I just spoiled? Is this something serious? Will I be able to keep hiking? Will we be near a town when we get to the road? Can we find a doctor? Is this the end of our hike?

In backpacking, many people say that 99% is mental, and the other 1% is mental as well. Fortunately, I am often my higher self in nature. That third day, I breathed in and out and tried to focus my thoughts away from the unhelpful ones. I trained my mind toward accepting the pain in my feet as it was. I reminded myself that most other parts of my body (my hands, for example, or the tip of my nose) were not in pain at all. I repeated some mantras (“I am well, I am safe, I am loved”). I sang songs to myself (“My Favorite Things” was more helpful than the moleskin, let me just say). Dar and I walked nearly 16 miles that day and climbed (and, worse, descended) 2500 feet in elevation. When we got to the ER, I still shouldered my backpack and walked in. After all, I was well, I was safe, and I was loved.

It’s nice to remember these things that I appreciate about myself. It’s nice to remember that on Mount Olympus I had so much energy that I ran circles around everyone else. It’s nice to remember that despite crying I was able to climb to the top of the Matterhorn, that I swung myself out to the crazy ledge and succeeded in climbing up, that (with Cliff’s support and protective rope) I did get myself all the way up and then down, that it was the most difficult climb I had ever done. It is nice to remember that I got good grades in classes with but also without Liat, and nice to remember that I had fun at Stanford and got to do some pretty fabulous things (like go to England and New York to research an author for my honor’s thesis). It’s nice to remember that the fabric of my being is made up of some shining spots, and even nicer to remember that I am the one deciding where I’m going to keep my focus, on those shining spots, or on the less brilliant ones.

I am realizing that in writing the last few paragraphs, I managed to turn the pyramid right-side-up.

Huh.

Just by focusing on some positive things.

Dar and I will be back at Tahoe. Probably not this season, since we still have a lot of plans this summer. But we’ll be back. In August, I am going to Glacier Peak (Washington) with Cliff. In September I signed up for a weeklong outdoor meditation retreat at Spirit Rock. We would like to take the kids to Oregon for a few days, maybe check out the coast there and the dunes. I also wanted to see the waterfalls around Oroville and to walk 20-lake basin in Inyo National Forest. And Dar said that when my feet are all healed (which they almost are), we can go on the backpacking trip I’ve been planning from Yosemite Valley to Wawona. That should be fun. So, yeah, I still have that fire burning beneath my backside, but I promise, this time, to take good care of my feet – and the rest of me, including my wandering, often critical mind. That, in itself, is an adventure for life.

The Mermaid in the Lagoon

By on August 20, 2013 in adventure, dreams, vacation

lagoonI found out about manatees in a children’s book and fell in love with these gentle sea cows (so named because they eat sea grass). The manatee in the photo looked lovable and cuddly, the perfect candidate for a child’s favored stuffed toy. The story told that Christopher Columbus mistook manatees for mermaids, and, looking into the human-like compassionate eyes of the photographed manatee, I could understand why Columbus (and other sailors after him) could confuse these graceful mammals with a mythological fish woman.

San Diego’s Sea World has a manatee exhibit, and the kids and I were charmed by them on several visits. But watching a manatee in an aquarium is not quite the same as seeing one in the wild. I wanted to go to Florida and see a real, live, wild manatee. In my imagination, I saw the manatee swimming about, floating before my eyes, just the way it had in the aquarium.

A Florida Visit in 2009 with the kids and my cousin Ella did not produce any manatee sightings. We took a boat ride to where we were supposed to see them, but there were none to be seen. We saw alligators, crocodiles, many kinds of birds and even had  our first viewing of dolphins, but no manatees. My disappointment was great. I had so wanted to see one!

On a Florida visit in January 2013, we were definitely going to see a manatee. We stayed on Key Largo and planned visits to parks where we had heard that manatees abound. We rented kayaks to get as close to them as we could. “Some people saw a manatee earlier today between those islands over there,” the ranger pointed at two little islands across a bay. We paddled but saw none. We saw none on Key Largo. And though a different ranger sent us to another park, we soon discovered it was a wild goose (or manatee) chase. We went back home empty manateed.

Third time’s a charm, you know. On this last visit to Florida, Dar made sure that seeing a manatee was in the bag. Not only did he rent us a beach house on the lagoon where the manatees live, but he also arranged for us to have a stand-up paddleboard tour of a canal where, we were told, the manatees live. They will actually put their noses on our boards, the guide promised. We could pet them, potentially, if we’d want.

My readers, are you curious to know if I finally had my wish come true? Did I pet a manatee’s head? Did I watch it swim flirtatiously under my board? A storm came in as we headed out and forced us back to shore, and there was no manatee petting, viewing or admiring from the stand-up paddleboard. I am almost certain, however, that I saw manatees three times from the pier near our beach house. They were kind of far, and only a little bit of them peeked out of the water, but they were round and smooth, and somehow manatee-like.

As elusive as a mythological mermaid, seeing more than five percent of a sea cow still remains a dream. Perhaps in nature that much manatee is all that can be seen, or perhaps next time we come to Cocoa Beach there will be no storm, and we can paddle to the canal, and the manatees will be there waiting for us, ready to lean their heads affectionately on my board.

The Crystal Merchant’s Dream

By on July 26, 2013 in adventure, book review, dreams, inspiration, Letting Go

I just finished reading Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist with the kids. I had read the book years ago and found it inspiring, with ideas that seemed to me radically new. Back then I was still only wishing for my own personal legend and not too sure which of my dreams I should follow (or maybe all). Reading the book with the kids gave me an entirely new perspective, especially since it was guided by (groan) summer assignment questions.

One of the questions asked whether or not we should fulfill our dreams. The main character in the book, who Coelho calls the boy, dreamed that he will find a treasure in the pyramids, but after arriving in Tangier all his money is stollen, and he is not sure how or even if to continue to follow his dream. He meets a crystal merchant and begins to work for him. The crystal merchant also has a dream, to go to Mecca and fulfill the last injunction left him as a Muslim. The boy encourages the merchant to go, but the latter explains that he does not wish to fulfill his dream. The dream is what keeps him alive, he says, and what will he have left without his dream?

After nearly a year with the merchant, the boy chooses to continue following his dream, his personal legend. Throughout the book the kids and I assumed that this meant finding the treasure, but when we began discussing which perspective we prefer, dreaming or fulfilling, we reached an unexpected conclusion. The treasure the boy finds is not the coins he unearths, or Fatima, the woman of the desert with whom he falls in love, or learning to understand the language of the world. The treasure that the boy finds is the path itself.

The boy leaves his job, his family, his sheep, and (later) Fatima behind in order to follow his dream. He makes a leap of faith and withstands the challenges thrown at him by the unplumeriaiverse. He lets go of what could have been and what will be and strikes out toward the unknown. The crystal merchant has a different perspective on fulfilling dreams. In his mind, he has already reached Mecca, prostrated himself in prayer, and headed back home. In fact, in his mind he is already back home. He looks around him and nothing has changed, except now he has no more dream to look forward to.

Except it is not the dream that matters but the path, the road chosen. It is not the fulfillment of the dream that is the dream but the process of fulfilling it: the people met on the way, the desert, the omens, the connection to oneself. Who knows what the crystal merchant would have become had he followed his dream? Who knows where the omens would have led him after he had arrived?

Having found his treasure of coins at the end of the book, the boy is far from having fulfilled his dream, because he is and always will be following the path of his personal legend. He did not limit that legend to the treasure, but allowed it to blossom as he went along. Finding the coins is only another step in his path, and the next already beckons with the whisper of perfume on the wind and the touch of a kiss. Fatima calls him. And who knows where his life will unfold from here.

Today and everyday, I wish you all success in taking that plunge into the unknown and finding the courage to follow your own personal legend and fulfill your own longtime dream.

What Will I Be When I Grow Up?

By on July 1, 2012 in dreams, Letting Go, writing

Something strange has happened to me, not completely unexpected and yet unsettling at the same time. I think that I have all grown up.

Top Secret Group, Hasamba

Remember when we were little, and our aunt, after squeezing our cheeks, asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up? I had so many dreams! I wanted to be prime minister and bring peace to the middle east, to sing on the stage of the Metropolitan, to be a famous piano player, a best-selling writer, a painter of amazing proportions. I wanted to get married (and stay married) and have four children and a house with fig and pecan trees. I wanted to be a journalist, and Spiderman (also Yaron Zehavi, the fictional teenaged leader of Hasamba who battled, in the 1940s, for Israel’s independence).

Now I’m forty, and all grown up. We could argue, perhaps, about whether middle-aged is an appropriate description (I’m going to take the devil’s advocate side). I have some white hairs and lots of laughter wrinkles, you know the kind. There were other signs I’ve been ignoring, like the fact that I have a house (one fig tree, no pecans), a boyfriend, two children, three dogs, seven chickens and one cat, all of whom I love. Or that my parents have both turned seventy already, my sister a successful pediatrician, my brother a game programmer, and my youngest cousins, the ones who are fifteen years younger than me, in the university pursuing their own careers.

But the truth is, I put all these signs on a back burner in my mind, because I was not ready to admit to one important fact: it is time to let go of some of my dreams and concentrate on one.

In this life, I will not be Israel’s prime minister. Or get a PhD. Or turn into a pianist or a singer at the Met. I will not become Spiderman despite the fact that we all, apparently, swallow a lot of spiders by sleeping open-mouthed at night. I could plant pecan trees, but a walnut will probably be better in the climate here, and there’s always my one fig tree.

Cover of White Bim

What I want to be now –not when I grow up, but now — is a writer. An author with readers who read my book, come to hear me speak, and send me emails. That is the one dream I have held onto from the first novel I read by myself (White Bim, Black Ear by Gavril Troipolsky) and all the way till today. And in order to become a writer, an author, I am willing to let those other dreams go.

Life is so often about letting go, but I hope (and I think somewhere inside me I know) that by letting go of these dreams today I am opening up a wider door to the one dream I truly love. Writing.

What do you want to be now that you’ve grown up?

Avoiding the Banal: How the Duke Fell in Love with His Maid

By on April 19, 2012 in dreams

Sebastian Digby, the hero of Maya Rodale’s The Tattooed Duke, refuses to adopt the shackling conventions of Nineteenth-Century British society. He had much rather follow his heart, explore the world and experience all sorts of adventures. Life, however, has a tendency to catch up with those who try to elude its responsibilities, as he discovers when summoned back home from Tahiti to assume his duties as the Duke of Wycliff.

Wycliff may now be a duke, but more than that he is a sensation in British Society — the kind of sensation no one wants attached to himself or herself. Not only is he rumored to have engaged in cannibalism and to have spent an entire night in a harem, he is now one of the Wicked Wycliffs, the spendthrift playboy dukes who tend to play around with their maids. No one doubts that this Wycliff will be just the same.

Eliza, a Writing Girl for a yellow newspaper, is sent to write a series of articles on the sensational new duke. Disguised as a maid, she falls in love with Wycliff even as she writes columns that reveal all of his secrets to the ever-more-shocked world. Wycliff and Eliza betray each other as they try to find a balance between their individual hopes and dreams and this new reality in which another human being suddenly has claims on their future. Does that sounds ordinary to you?

And yet nothing about this novel is banal. Not even the most minor character is what he or she seems. Wycliff resists falling into the Wicked Wycliff tradition while keeping his long hair and solitary earring, refusing to wear a necktie and proudly acknowledging his tattoos. Eliza ties herself in knots trying to redeem the duke while keeping her job at the crowd-pleaser, scandal-mongering newspaper. And the whirlwind begins: deception, lies, a secret locked room, an adventurous expedition to a legendary city, bigamy, tea laced with whiskey, a one-armed man whose second arm is in perfect working order, a child born out of wedlock, a  lady who is Hades’ Own Harpy, and of course loyalty and love.

Fabulous book! I loved the Henry Fielding-styled subtitles to the chapters (Fielding is also Eliza’s last name) and the many allusions to eighteenth-century British novels. And (Spoiler Warning!) the best part last: the novel ends with the most extraordinary marriage proposal:

…her beauty left him speechless. Of all the sunrises and sunsets he’d seen, of all the sublime natural spectacles and stunning sights he’d witnessed on his travels, nothing compared to Eliza emerging from the bath.

    Silently, he dropped to one knee.
    “Wycliff?” She said, lifting one brow questioningly. She glanced around for a towel. She looked at him on bended knee before her. Little rivulets of water trickled down her soft, pale skin. In that instant he was jealous of a mere droplet of water.
    “Will you marry me, Eliza?”

Enchanting.

Sigal Tzoore (650) 815-5109