I wait for the little things to happen. I look around, across, up and down. A crow is on a utility wire above me. He caws and bobs his head at me, making sure I am doing okay.

These are my slow days. They are the days between my jobs as a television journalist. I need days like these to bring me down from the speed of the fast-paced life of a news person.

When I am working the facts, I dart across the country.

I get in and out of airplanes more often than some people get in and out of bed.

The headlines beckon and I rush into the world with the urgency of a firefighter trying to save a burning house. Unfortunately, most of the time I don’t save the house, I usually get there too late. I arrive just when the victims return home to cry over their losses. I get there just in time to see them stumble over the ashes of things they once cherished. Just in time to get their reactions to what happened to them. I point a camera at their shocked expressions and ask them to express their pain as my camera person zooms in to get a closeup of their tears.

The hooting of the mourning dove and the soft rumble of the airliner high in the paint brushed white clouds above me, circling in for a landing at LAX keep me present in the smallness of me.

My warm cup of coffee at my side, loose sweat pants, flip-flops and my 14-year-old border collie mix at my feet are simple pleasures that fold their arms around me and speak “there, there.”

I watch as the blades of lawn grass silently stretch awake as the sun dries their dew covered backs.

The slow is where I place myself today. It is how I reacquaint myself to myself. I inhale and stop. I do nothing for a moment.

I get in and out of airplanes more often than some people get in and out of bed.

My life is a rush to move my body through space, squished up against the side of the flying tin cans, as my legs tuck under the backpack beneath the seat in front of me that holds my computer, notebooks, a kindle, and my travel masks.

I carry surgical masks, KN95s masks with ear straps, and KN95 masks with head straps for long flights, and I carry the professional mask I put on while flying to each news event.

I bundle myself into this small space, close my eyes, and hope to sleep a little before I have to jump into action as soon as the landing gear touches the tarmac.

I left this job once. It became too much about almost 20 years of nonstop action. I took a few years off, then slowly came back to it. My bills forced me back into the saddle. I can’t say I missed it too much, not with a cozy back yard, my dogs, and writing to entertain me.

When I left, I felt an overwhelm bundled with burnout. I thought I would die if I continued chasing the news. Not only was it hard on my body sitting in those planes, getting up at the crack of dawn and possibly pulling an all-nighter, it was also hard on my soul.

It got more and more difficult to go to the places where bad things happened.

The bad crawled inside me to feast on my humanity and ate my empathy for lunch.

It turned my face into a tableau of sorrow while I wasn’t being sad. The years of news plastered crevasses onto my face, each line of my furrowed brow slowly turning my expression into a permanent scowl.

I aged and shrunk. I lost myself inside the bad news and succumb to it like a slave to a master, powerless and shackled to my deadlines. Like all the people I interviewed, I became a victim.

It started early on, when I got my first assignment chasing the bad news.

I will never forget my first day of rushing into the fire. I got a call from the company that would eventually hire me full time as a television producer. They said there was a shooting in a school in Colorado, just outside of Denver, in a place called Columbine.

Go! They said.

So I boarded the next airplane out of LAX. The plane was full of journalists, television crews, print reporters, photographers, all of us heading into the storm.

I was nervous. I didn’t know how to react. I was in shock, like the rest of the world, at what we had heard had happened. 12 dead, bombs, automatic weapons, a library, school hallways, blood, many wounded, and dead. Teenagers killing teenagers.

I wanted to cry as I sat in the middle seat next to a reporter that had his laptop open and was pounding away at writing something; he powered out his words like a gushing wound and it spilled all over me. Though I couldn’t read what he was writing, I knew the words would shock just by stating the facts.
The air was so thick with anxiety mixed with the adrenaline that I couldn’t really breathe properly.

I didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want to see the place where the bad took over and killed innocence. I didn’t want to do anything but return to Los Angeles and cry.

I didn’t cry. I walked into the rumble and roar of the news and performed. I reported what happened. I found witnesses who told us about the horror of seeing their friends shot, about hiding in classrooms, under tables, about running out of the school with their hands in the air. I put on my cool hard mask of professionalism, which stayed on for the next 20 years, and listened to the crying victims.

And I didn’t cry.

The ruby breasted finches are gathering the remains of the weeds I pulled from my raised planter. The male nudges his partner. They bob their heads in unison, grab some dried grass, and fly up into the orange tree. Their nest is hiding deep under the green panoply, just next to a ripe orange. I see the fine twigs peaking out of the leaves, a perfect spiral home for their offspring.

The airplane high above me switches speeds, slows down for landing. I lift my cup of coffee and sit back on my plastic Adirondack chair. I watch my puppy roll on her back on the freshly cut grass, kicking her hind legs in the air in ecstasy.

I wait for nothing in particular to happen.

I try hard not go back to that day exactly 23 years ago in Colorado or all the other days when I had to ask the hard questions and not cry.

Maybe today I just may cry a little.

This is my neighborhood, where the lawns are parched and the dogs are plentiful. A place where people who drive electric cars have stopped watering the decorative patches of grass on their front lawns so that they can do the right thing when wasting water is the wrong thing.

It’s a place where unhoused people live along bicycle paths that lead to the beach where children play in surf that sometimes glows red. It’s where the sand is pockmarked with syringes, condoms, plastic cups, tennis balls, and discarded mylar balloons that wash up with the tides. It is the edge of a continent in a country that I call home.

Independence Day is just around the corner. It is a day when America will once again celebrate its freedom.

When I was very small, I didn’t really understand what America was until the day my father brought me here. My mother, brothers, and I were not born here. My father’s country was a gift to us from him.

America was a great gift. It came inside a very large package of forests, mountains, and prairies. It was so large and so great that it didn’t fit inside the small history books. It burst outside the margins of the pages and right smack into my imagination.

I am an American; I was born American though not in America.

My father worked for the US Government in Europe. He was special and on a special mission to spread the good news about America to the rest of the world. I didn’t know what he did, but I knew it was so important that he couldn’t tell us. And when we found out that he worked for a secret place, with a secret plan to spread America like sweet frosting across the world, we were asked to keep that a secret too.

God was on our side.

The LIES were part of our secret mission for the greater good of America and the greater good of the rest of the world, even if they didn’t know it was good for them. We were convinced that what was good for America was good for the rest of the world.

God was on our side. God was on our money. God was in our pledge of allegiance to a flag with stars and stripes. And we believed it because it was good for America.

Before I arrived to the United States in the late 1960’s America was a story I had heard over and over. The story had a hero, usually a cowboy, a flag-waving US Cavalry man on horseback, or maybe a general with a pipe in his mouth riding in a jeep. The stories had large men, always men, because men knew how to win.

It was about winning. It was about winning battles and wars against Indians, and Germans, and wild women. It was always about taming — the environment and the natives. And about building things, railroads and highways and tall dams.

The American hero appeared to me on a technicolor wide screen.

He was John Wayne, the hard-drinking stoic man with the funny walk, who always got the girl, with a cigarette in one hand and a six-shooter in another. The Duke brawled in bars, destroyed furniture, slammed people’s heads against the wall then shot the bad guy from the hip. But, despite being a bully, I remember that the bad guy stayed the bad guy, and John Wayne was always was the good guy no matter how bad he was.

When little Audrey arrived here, she filled in the blanks to the story with bright, bold highlights.

What was America to me?

It was a large grocery store with rows and rows of food in colorful boxes.

It was Lucky Charms and Captain Crunch.

It was Toys R Us — Monopoly, Twister, and The Game of Life.

It was Barbi in a bikini and GI Joe in fatigues.

It was a purple Schwinn Stingray bicycle with a banana seat and white tassels.

America was s’mores and campfires and swimming pools at the KOA.

It was buffalo, black bears, Old Faithful, and the Grand Canyon.

It was cresting waves and jellyfish and earthworms on hooks.

It was fishing trips at the lake, sunfish, and catfish. It was toads, and snakes, and opossums.

It was the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty.

It was a land of dozens of television stations with soap operas after school, and game shows where people won cars and dining room sets.

It was Saturday morning cartoons and comic books named Ritchie Rich.

It was movie theaters and buttered popcorn in large tubs.

It was indoor malls with water fountains and air-conditioning.

It was Disneyland and Coney Island, Atlantic City, Bush Gardens, and zoos with panda bears.

It was station wagons and RVs.

It was clams at Howard Johnson’s and lobster rolls in Maine.

It was bagels and donuts, and Dairy Queen soft served vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate.

It was peanut butter and root beer floats.

It was baseball, shelled peanuts, and hots dogs with sweet relish. It was hamburgers and barbecues in the backyard.

America was flags and parades, military orchestras, and fireworks lots of fireworks, that lit up the night sky.

We are the land of the free and home of the brave.

America was all of that and much more.

America was the land where everything was possible.

It was where truth was told over the airwaves, on radios, and broadcast television sets by men named Cronkite and Reasoner.

Most of all, America was a dream come true where everything and anything was possible.

America was that because we believed in it. We were in this together. We could do it. We could always make better things. We made the cars larger, the buildings taller, the airplanes faster, and the bombs bigger.

We are the land of the free and home of the brave.

We are the home of the brave police officers who stormed into a 4th-grade classroom and shot the bad guy.

We are the brave people who learned how to integrate people of color and people of different cultures into our schools, into offices, into neighborhoods, and into the stories we tell about ourselves.

We opened our hearts to embrace anyone who feels oppressed by gender definitions and the restrictive nature of a patriarchal system.

We are the ones who let people marry whomever they love.

We let everyone have equal opportunities and ensured that no one person runs away with the prize because we level the playing field.

We value humanity over profits.

We are the Americans who bused people to the polls, sent everyone mail-in ballots, made early voting accessible, and held elections on days where every citizen could easily participate in democracy.

We are the ones who build houses for people so that they can live with dignity and possibility.

We proudly help those who were confused or mentally and physically challenged as we reached out to them with a helping hand.

We secured a universal system of healthcare so that no one would ever not be able to go to the doctor or dentist in fear of going bankrupt.

We made universities and vocational schools free of tuition to everyone.

We are the ones who knew how climate change was killing our beautiful country and the planet, causing fires and floods and unusual storms. And we took action and reduced our carbon footprint before it was too late and we lost America the beautiful.

We let women make decisions about their own bodies so that they could also dare to dream they could do anything and then do it.

We broke molds in order to let people live in freedom as we tell this beautiful story that is America.

We knew how important it was to get this right because we are Americans.

Because America is the greatest place you could ever imagine?

Or was I just dreaming?

I saw a man with a gun once. It was just the other day. He pulled it out of his pocket to show me.

“It’s titanium,” he said, “I carry it everywhere. I once showed it to a group of German campers and it scared the living daylights out of them,” he said with a smirk.

I can relate to those Germans because right at this moment I had to stop myself from dropping my jaw in disbelief. A guy with a gun was standing not six feet away from me. To hide my shocked expression, I turned away to look at the orange poppies growing under the Sugar Bush next to my tent. When I saw his gun, I was suddenly torn out of my comfort zone, out of my false sense of safety, right back into the violence that’s out there, a violence that should not be here with us at this quiet campground. The gun was a like foreign object tossed at our complacency while we were all having fun sharing stories and some beers in the great American outdoors.

My camping chair was just a few feet from a fire pit that crackled and snapped as the flames burst open the dried sap-filled logs. The campground burned down a few years ago, along with many of the multi-million dollar mansions in this part of Malibu, California. There’s still the presence of the raging wildfire right on the other side of a sycamore tree, right where everything was still charred by the inferno.

It was great to get away for the weekend. Sleeping under the stars while being lulled to sleep by the ocean swell that was breaking just a few hundred yards from where we camped, was my kind of idea of relaxation. This place felt far away from everything that was happening in this world, from the news, and from the flashing headlines telling us about the latest gun massacre.

I was glad to be far away from the barrage of information pumped out at us from the radio, television, and internet feeds. Away is what I needed. In my real life, I live inside those events. My day job had trauma and bad news written all over it. I was a television news producer.

“I think everyone should be carrying,” he said as he tapped the outside of his shorts’ pocket where his titanium handgun lived. “I would feel safer if everyone carried.”

His smile and friendly face hid a darker part of who he was and what he was saying. He was the good guy with the gun. He was a retired cop. I couldn’t believe my ears that an ex-cop would be saying this to us. He must know that guns in the hands of bad people kill people.

Maybe his life inside prisons and out on the hostile streets running towards that danger we all run away from made him fearful. Did those bad guys turn him into something I don’t want police officers to be, afraid of? If he was afraid, how should I feel about what I see out there?

I know one thing, I wouldn’t trust myself to have a weapon.

Me and guns? I don’t think so. I could just see myself now pulling out the gun to threaten my husband if he wouldn’t take out the trash. Perhaps I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger if I was triggered by the right situation.

They say many of the gun injuries and deaths involve domestic disputes. If everyone had a gun there would be more funerals than divorces.

I decided to challenge my cop friend.

“Answer me this question, why didn’t those cops go into the school?” I asked him. “What was that all about?” I said turning my camp chair in his direction and staring him straight in the eyes.

“I think they were afraid of the bad guy with the gun?” I smiled cynically.

He lifted his leg onto the picnic table. A hummingbird buzzed his neck. He swatted at it and it flew off to find a sweet wildflower to suck on hiding beneath the burned trees. My friend adjusted his black beanie that covered his bald 62-year-old head and said, “It has everything to do with Defund the Police.

What did he mean by Defund the Police and Uvalde? Didn’t the Uvalde police department have more armored vehicles and body armor with an arsenal of high-powered weapons than most small towns? They seemed fully funded.

“It’s really messed up how Defund the Police has changed the police departments in this country,” he said. “It’s affected them. I blame it all on Defund the Police.”

“Oh come on. You must be kidding me. You’re telling me that guys who are trained to run into the line of fire to “serve and protect” were spooked by that bogus slogan?”

Defund the Police was a fringe movement that was not supported by the majority of Americans. A majority of Americans had no desire to defund their police departments. I believe Defund the Police stayed alive as a political tool to get Americans scared that anarchy was standing at the gates. But how could it explain the actions of the Uvalde cops?

“The cops really can’t do their jobs after Defund the Police became a thing,” he said while he adjusted his shorts which were sagging with the weight of that handgun.

“All I know is that I am ready. I have a closet full of ammo, I’ve got thousands of rounds so I’m ready no matter what happens,” he said.

I knew I needed to stop right there or this conversation would roll off the rails of civility. Someone else should k up the conversation. But all the other campers were still stuck back at “we have an armed camper in our midst!” I was waiting for them to catch up yet and help me out but they all stared in the fire to avoid a confrontation with this guy with a gun.

My mind wandered away from this campsite for a moment. Why the hell does he have a closet full of ammo? I pictured this hall closet in his nice suburban home just east of Pasadena, and a wall of boxes filled with shiny bullets.

Then I looked at his neighbors and all their neat tract homes lined up in a row. I saw their groomed front lawns and two-car garages hiding a sinister truth. They all had closets filled with boxes of bullets. Their backyard pools were filled with bullets. There were bullets everywhere.

And my mind wandered across state lines. I saw the bullet casings of the Uvalde shooter’s gun covering the laminate floor of the small elementary school. The shells pilled up under the desks lay against blood-covered green high-top tennis shoes and on top of canvas backpacks, and, the pool next to the bodies of the children who would still be alive if it weren’t for all those bullets.

The flames were subsiding now it was ready to cook our brats and open another beer.

I stood up and bent over the grill and threw the brats right onto the center of the grill. The cool dogs sizzled when they hit the iron grate.

I stepped over to the table and grabbed my sharp camping knife and cut into the fresh buns getting them ready to hold my grilled brats. I opened a packet of mustard. As I tore at the plastic pack some of the yellow sauce shot out and hit the bottom of my friend’s shorts right where his gun was hidden. I looked up at the face of this man with the gun.

He smiled and rubbed the mustard off.

“That’s alright, accidents happen. It wasn’t your fault,” he said as he adjusted the killing machine in his pocket.

A voice I heard said a number this morning.
A tragic laundry list of inevitability,
of injured,
of dead,
of statistical truths.
A cup of
black bitter numbers at my breakfast table.

Numbers tell stories.
The numbers of lies,
of words of hate,
of speeches that divide and of weapons that kill.

Numbers, like digits on our country’s trembling hands,
broken, maimed, shattered hands covered in blood.

The numbers of lifeless piles of flesh
left behind in pools of unfinished lives,
bones heavy on a dance floor of senseless acts.

The number of blood filled bars,

the number of blood filled concerts,

the number of blood filled stores,

the number of blood filled synagogues,

the number of blood filled churches,

the number of blood filled theaters,

the number of high schools,

and the number of elementary schools.

The numbers of tragedies
shoot deep holes into
a belief that anything

can be done to stop the endless flow of pain.

Numb, speechless, a country is waiting for the next numbers.

393,000,000+ million guns in America

12,477 deaths to gun violence this year (2018)

953 hate groups in the U.S.

307 mass shooting in America this year (2018)

20 veterans complete suicide everyday

12 is the number today (Borderline Grill Thousand Oaks, CA-Nov 7, 2018)

Please Give Us Back Peace

Because all I hear is crying, can you hear it too?

Emotions are on high alert like the nuclear arsenal that Putin has put at the ready. War is living amongst us like an unwanted visitor.

The whole world is tense and living in a state of wide-opened mouthed disbelief that something like this could happen again in Europe.

As if war was a distant concept that lives somewhere else, in the deserts, and jungles, not amongst pine and oak trees, or on the streets with ornate filigree-crested facades of pink and yellow baroque buildings. War happens on dirt roads, not BMW-lined boulevards with outdoor cafes and shopping centers.

I saw a photo today in the newspaper of a smoldering tank, or maybe it was just an armored vehicle. In the photo’s foreground was the body of a soldier who looked like he was holding a rifle. The caption mentioned the city in Ukraine, Kharkiv, but nothing about the dead man or woman. The body was a feature that underlined the horror of the scene, yet there was no mention of what we were actually seeing.

I immediately felt horrible for his family. Someday he will be identified, and this picture will be something they will see. I can only imagine how they will cry over it, then fold it up, and place it in a drawer with other things of his — his high school graduation photo, his enlistment papers, his medals, and of course, his death certificate.

As I write these lines, my eyes well up with tears. I am triggered like so many millions of people around the world.

When we see these images, we remember — like the Vietnam vet who tries so hard to hold back his overwhelm as the shudder of combat memories shoots through his body; the Marine Corps Humvee driver who lost his legs in Afghanistan in an IED explosion who turns his head away from his thoughts; the “lost boys” of South Sudan who’s scares are so deep they have no words for them, and the Iraqi taxi driver that drove me from Chicago’s O’hare airport to the city center the other day.

It was snowing, and the wind was blowing so hard the flakes were being pushed back up into the black night sky, like ashes floating above a fire. The quiet young driver had the radio on NPR low.

I asked, “Are you following what is happening in Ukraine?”

The lights of the Chicago skyline glowed orange. My windows were fogged up. My mask felt tight and uncomfortable as I spoke those words. What was I thinking? And why did I have a sense that he may have something to tell me?
“Yes. I cried last night.” the young man said.
“Where are you from?”
“Iraq. Kut, just south of Baghdad. I know war, so I cry. I know what crazy men like Saddam and Putin can do to people’s lives. I spent 2 1/2 years in a refugee camp in Saudi. War is bad. 8 years of depression. Very Bad?”

The flashing red brake lights ahead of us stopped the flow of traffic. The snow was falling hard now.
I felt caught in the conversation, like war was holding me close, straggling me. I wanted out of the cab. I wanted it all to be over. I so bad the warm comfort of Peace on this cold winter night in Chicago.

I don’t know war, but I know it very well. I grew up listening to the horrors of living through the bombing of Berlin at the end of WWII from my mother and grandmother.

I heard the stories of forced marches and saw the lash marks of torture on friends in college who survived Ethiopian-Eritrean as they were forced to hundreds of miles south to Sudan to escape.

An old boyfriend lost his mother in Algeria’s war for independence from France in 1961. She was falsely accused of collaborating; they imprisoned her, and she died in her cell, giving birth to his younger brother.

And as a journalist, I spent years and years covering the war machine and its destruction of people in the United States as we fought our wars against Terror in post 9/11 America. So I carry war with me so that I can talk about how bad it is and how we should avoid it at all costs.

Yesterday, an article in the LA Times wrote about how parents should talk about war with their young children.

• Should they openly talk about war? No. Have the children approach the subject with the questions. Hold their hands and answer them.
• Should we hide the newspaper from them? Perhaps cover the photo that shows dead people? Yes.

I spend a lot of time deep inside each and every photo. Because I will not shrink from the truth that this evil called war is living in our midst again.

I will be present, even it is painful. I will hold space for those who need to speak about it. I will hold their hand if they need it.

I will listen to taxi drivers to hear the trembling voices triggered by the events of our times.

I will cry with the world.

And, I will stand with humanity and say, please, please stop dropping the bombs.

Please give us back our Peace so that we can go back to what is most important — family, friends, a decent job, a good meal, and perhaps even a good laugh. Because right now, all I hear is crying.

The pandemic is over, right? Not quite, but almost.

Even if the Delta variant is still playing havoc on our lives, we need to get ready for our so-called reentry. As for me, it’s time to think about how I can lose those pandemic pounds. It’s time to get my butt in shape. Yes, literally, my butt is dragging on the floor from inactivity.

I stopped looking in the mirror about 6 months ago.

I got tired of looking at those layers of ice cream and popcorn folds of fat around my midsection. So I rationalized ignoring them by telling myself — who cares? I’m not going out anyway.

But last night, my ugly voice of shame raised its little hand. I took notice. I knew it was better not to let the pandemic be the excuse for everything going wrong with my life because someday it will be over, and then what?

I had to look for inspiration somewhere, and I found it when I turned on the television. I saw blue sky peeking through my dark layers of self-pity. I felt a disturbing tingling inside me that I didn’t recognize.

It was the Olympics that gave me hope.

I saw athletes competing in stadiums completely void of cheering fans. They were pushing themselves to the limit, breaking world records, and no one was watching.

No fans, no problems, I thought to myself. If they can do it, I can do it. I need to start now if I want April Ross’s beach volleyball body before the summer is over.

Getting an Olympian’s body is hard, if not impossible, in my 5th decade of life. But I’m going to try for good measure.

I believe life is all about how we frame doing the hard things. It’s all about changing how we approach them. So, first, make a plan. Then, one step at a time.

This morning I got up out of bed with a plan — to create a backyard gym.

I gathered all the loose weights I’ve collected over the years, a bench press I bought a decade ago, and a dusty workout pad and set up my little gym. Finally, I was ready to give it a shot.

I was hyped and pumped just like the women’s gold medalist freestyle wrestler Tamyra Mensah-Stock’s biceps. I was bulging with excitement.

But like a disruption in a video feed, I froze as I stared at those weights. They seemed to be snarling back at me like a rabid dog. I was afraid. My amygdala was telling me to run. I wanted to run. But I didn’t. I needed to find a workaround. How do I start?

Watching the US women’s volleyball game last night broke my heart; there was absolutely no one in the stands of the indoor arena. At least the swimmers had all their teammates, coaches, doctors, and various random accredited people cheering them on. But the volleyball girls had not one soul watching — crickets, maybe not even crickets. So the Olympic organizers did something clever — they blasted happy pop music into the empty hall as the teams rotated service.

Happy music can make all the difference in your mood.

I got my iPhone out and set up a tiny speaker, and started blasting some summertime dance music into my makeshift workout space. That’s more like it. Let’s get this party started.

I sat down on the bench press, and the resistance sat down right next to me. I lifted the weights and heard the muscles in my arms screaming. Seriously! Don’t even think about it. Stop now before it’s too late!

My inner critic was alive and well. I let her take me to that dark place of — forgetaboutit land.

There was no one here to cheer me on.

The music wasn’t working its charm — it made me feel like dancing, not bench press my six-pound weights. Now what? I had to refocus.

I looked up through the limbs of my pepper tree and saw the sun. Then suddenly I heard a voice — You can do this. Go for it! The sun’s rays were like cheering fans quieting my inner negativity. I lifted the pair of six-pound weights up and down — One, two, three, four, five …I got this! I can do it. Yes! Yes! Yes! the sun screamed back at me.

It was a trick of mind over matter that got my middle-aged flabby pandemic body lifting those weights. Each time I lifted, I heard a roar of support that silenced my inner critic and my protesting muscles.

I felt like Karsten Warhold, the Norwegian 400-meter hurdler who broke a world record and won gold. I was thrilled. I wanted to tear off my jersey (an oversized t-shirt in my case) and run around my backyard waving up at my non-existence crowd of supporters. I did it! I did it! I did it!

Next, I moved on to the 5 lb kettlebell exercise — yes, only 5 lb, I’ve got to start somewhere. I lifted it and swung it into the air, then let it drop down as I bend my legs into a squat. “Ahh, that hurts!” my butt, back, and neck screamed. “Are you kidding me, sister?”

I kept going and stood up again. I looked across the back fence and saw the tips of the branches of my neighbor’s Cassia tree and a cluster of bright yellow blossoms. I let the kettlebell drop down and then stood up again. I looked up at the yellow flowers that were now smiling back at me. So down and up I went again.

My focus shifted away from the pain in my legs to the beauty of those flowers. And before I knew it, I was done. A set of 15.

I am convinced that the best way to do the hardest things, in my case, working my butt muscles, is by refocusing away from my pain and onto the positive things around me. It’s in paying attention to the small perfect things where magic actually happens.

It may take days, weeks, and months of this kind, refocusing my mind over matter to even get close to feeling good about my body again. But I know it’s time to get my butt in gear even if there is no one cheering you on, or maybe there is, and you just didn’t notice.

This post was originally published on Medium in the Middle-Pause publication.

My attention lifts off my morning newspaper like the steam rising from my coffee cup. It floats out of my living room window and onto my quiet neighborhood.

She stands about 4 1/2 feet tall. He towers over her, his thin, lanky frame covered in loose-fitting green coveralls. He must be at least 6 feet tall. A steady beat of a smooth R&B melody drifting out of the large green garbage truck’s open door like a cool breeze on a hot summer day. The beat is subtle and steady, like a metronome for the moment.

The scene was familiar. Every week he comes. Every week she waits. Every week she hands him a plastic bag filled with things growing in her backyard, from her trees, some persimmons, or oranges, or maybe lemons, and pomegranates. During the height of the Covid pandemic they would wear masks when they met in the middle of her driveway. Today they bump elbows, but the masks are now somewhere at the end of the line, piled high on a landfill, no longer part of the ritual of their weekly meeting.

Today they bump elbows…She understands him. He understands her.

My neighbor is a Japanese woman at least 80, maybe even 90, years old. He, is a garbage man, a working man, who takes a moment out of his busy schedule hauling our weekly refuse to connect with his friend, the elderly Asian lady. When she speaks to me, I can hardly understand her through the thick accented English that lingers even after a lifetime of being an American. But he understands her; his smile is bright as the day is sunny. She nods and bows while gesturing with her hands. He nods and bows back. He speaks her language. She understands him. He understands her.
I don’t hear the words. I don’t need to hear the words. I see their bond through the canopy of my wisteria as I watch the scene outside my front window. I begin to cry tears of joy. I am suddenly filled with an incredible sense of awe at being an invisible witness to such a perfect yet, improbable connection between these two people.

I look back down at the newspaper sitting on the table in front of me. Drought, war, Covid -19 still ravaging communities, and billionaires getting their kicks flying into outer space. The headlines disturb me. The bathtub rings around the reservoirs, like rings around a fallen tree. How can this planet survive? Fish are drowning in the puddles of toxic waste. When will our civilization cease to exist in this overheated place? Water is life. Water is evaporating. Water is gone.

The next page has a large picture of people wading in a pool to cool off in a place called “Drytown” somewhere in California, where the temperatures hit 107 in the shade. They look like human water lilies bobbing up and down in plastic inflatable lifesaving rings in chlorinated man-made ponds with concrete walls to keep in the little water we have left.

…no spectators for the Olympic Games in Tokyo because the pandemic can’t be stopped, but the games must go on.

I turn the page. I read no spectators for the Olympic Games in Tokyo because the pandemic can’t be stopped, but the games must go on. I flash back to memories of attending five Olympic Games as a volunteer, a journalist, and a spectator. The roar of the crowds still resonates deep inside me as if it were yesterday. The collective energy of a universal love connected the watching and the competitors and the collective breath-holding as the athletes put their entire blood, sweat, and sometimes tears into pushing their bodies to the limit.
I close the paper, but the front page screams out at me. Images of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spacecraft successfully flying 53 miles above the earth’s surface. NASA says that qualifies for outer space. Why do this? Because they can. Branson said it was 99.9% beyond his wildest dreams. What are those dreams? A life-changing experience? Is it the price tag or actually the experience that is life-changing? People will pay $250,000 to take a flight above it all in order to look back down at us. Just imagine how $250,000 could give decades and decades of food and shelter to millions of people down here on earth.

The small perfect moments that I witness daily down here on earth have a big impact on my well-being…

The small perfect moments that I witness daily, down here on earth, have a big impact on my well-being, and many of them are free. Do I really have to fly into space when I can see a flower growing through the crack on the concrete sidewalk? Or I see my two dogs licking each other’s muzzle and smiling? Or the joy when I see a hummingbird feeding from the sweat nectar inside the orange bird of paradise blooming outside my bedroom window? Or when I witness the smile on the face of a neighbor’s 4 year old riding her bike without training wheels for the first time. Or when my octogenarian Japanese American neighbor bumps elbows with a tall, smiling black man.

The man in the green coveralls rolls her two garbage bins back behind her large gate so she can fill them up again. She closes the gate behind him. He walks to his truck and jumps back inside the cab and onto the driver’s seat with a smile and his bag filled with small things. He drives away with his humanity, and I close my newspaper.

I am a writer. I wrote a book. I know I did. I printed it out.

My book is sitting on my writing desk next to me. It is big and heavy. It weighs a few pounds. It weighs on me. I carry it with me everywhere I go. Not really, it’s too heavy. But I do carry it with me, inside of me. It’s there. It’s always there.

It’s there because it’s not yet finished. Yes, I did a few passes, but it needs more work. I can’t seem to get back into it, to give it the rewrite that it needs. You see, it’s not finished without the polish. What’s holding me back?

Everybody wants to write a book, right? Well, I did. I slaved away at getting 123,000 words down on paper. I wrote and wrote, and then I wrote some more. It was hard, but at the same time, it was exhilarating. I wanted to do the hard, to push myself to places I have never been before. I crawled out from under that rock I lived under for 55 years to lay down words on paper. They were my words. It was my book. It was about me. But it was raw and rough around the edges. It was a pile of words and chapters that needed to be refined and polished. Refining and polishing were not what I was good at.

After sending my book away to two very accomplished editors and receiving their feedback, I fell into a hole. They let me know that I was on the right path but had to cut it down, refine it, and make the sentences tighter. I now feel caught like a deer in the middle of a writing highway, not knowing what to do next. I am frozen. Fix this thing? What? How? Are you kidding me? It was hard enough to put all those words down on paper! Now your want me to fix it?

I have spent the last four months trying to figure out why I can’t seem to finish it? Why is rewriting such an overwhelm for me? I think it is because I am living in THE GAP. I call it a gap because it is a gap. It is the gap between my ability as a writer and what I know is good writing.

As Ira Glass, the creator of the radio show This American Life says, the problem many artists have is that we all have

good taste.

We read amazing books, essays, short stories, even watch films, then drool over the work of others and think, “Yes! That’s what I want to be. I want to be like that. I want to write like that!”

That’s the problem in a nutshell. Good writing takes time and commitment. No one thinks about how much bad writing had to happen before writer X got to the place where they could write so well. What did Gladwell say 10,000 hours? I have no time for that! I’m 56 years old. Give me a break.

Practice practice practice.

Everyday. Yes, I know.

But, still…

there’s the overwhelm.

That’s what it feels like to be in the GAP.

I began this pursuit (that’s what I am calling it only a little over two years ago. I dropped into it like a parachuter on a mission behind enemy lines. I was going to get in, take care of business, and then get the hell out of there. Become a writer? No way that would be to frickn hard. I don’t have time. I’m too old.

That’s been the story of my life, to do something fast and dirty. Just do it well enough, so it looks okay without committing to it. I rush through things. I dress them up, make them look pretty, and then shut the door and leave the crime scene.

Don’t get me wrong. I love making things. I love making art. I love playing. I draw, I doodle, I sew, I knit, I make animated films, I make other films, I make paper mache masks, and even make my own clay to mold things… sometimes.

While I wallowed in self-pity about not finishing my book, I realized how much I loved making things. Why? Because its fun! I can let myself be free to experiment and get dirty with it. I don’t let my ego get into the way. I make mistakes. The mistakes become a feature. I work with the mistakes, and I keep going until I have something I like, that’s just for me no one else.

What does that have to do with writing?

I stumbled upon a writing course on Skillshare. It was mostly about a writer’s mindset. The author Dani Shapiro said something that stuck with me. She talked about how she envies her friends, who are painters and sculptors, who have material to mold and form. But what Dani said next stuck with me:

The first draft is always a “first shitty draft,” as we all know. But that first draft becomes the material you can work with as an artist. If I thought of my first bad drafts as something I can mold and chip away at, it feels less daunting. That’s the key. I can change the whole way of looking at the book. I could erase, bend, and shape the 123,000 words into something else. I didn’t have to delete it. You know…I could have fun with it. I could “save as” on my writing software and play with the chapters. I could polish and whittle those sentences into something more pure and true to the story I wanted to tell.

And what about the GAP? Well, I am sure it will always be there. But without learning how to refine my writing and have fun with the process I will never get anywhere as a writer. My book will just sit there and haunt me forever. It’s time to get that thing off my back and have fun doing it. It will never be perfect, but that’s okay. I have to finish this book, let the paint dry, send it off into the big bad world, and move on.

It is really not worth standing still like that damn deer in the headlights and become some GAP roadkill! I guess that’s what it feels like to stick with it. Maybe this writing thing could be fun, after all.

Being stuck in a dream I cannot get out of has stopped me from finishing my book.
A few years ago (June 2018), I had a dream about writing a book. It was a large dream. It was a dream about becoming a writer. It was a dream of pushing myself really hard. It was a dream of accomplishment. The dream came packaged in a beautiful box filled with beautiful words, words that would inspire people, help people, and change the world.

I believe the only way to write your book is to give up on the dream of the book. The dream of the book is always a distortion of what it actually will be and the only way you really know what something will be is by doing it, by giving it space to breathe and come alive, to let it grow into what it wants to become. A book has a life of its own once you start writing it. The dream of it was only a precious box you can see from the outside. It is all golden and shiny. You have no idea what’s inside of it. But you wanted it.

Dreams get you excited. Dreams highlight a desire. Dreams are just the beginning.

Maybe the Bhagavad Gita is right that we have to let go of the results and believe the work will give us meaning. When thinking of a project, we are always caught up in thinking of the product, and we never think much about the process. The work is hard and messy. But the magic happens when we let go of those achievements and just do that work. It is all about falling in love with the process, not the product.

It is in the doing that the clay is molded. The art that lives inside of the dirt of our minds heats up and comes alive when we touch it. We need to touch it. We need to feel it. We need to smell it. We are part of it, but it is not us.

It is what we do. The process is an opening between you and the divine. The work gives us that portal.

That is the truth in so many things in life. We have dreams of things we can do. They area always fantastic when let our imaginations go wild, but nothing ever turns out as you dreamed it, and that’s okay. I think people get discouraged because the inflated idea is always so much grander than it could ever be. The illusion of that greatness, that perfect thing, stops people in their tracks once they realize that life can never be exactly what we imagined it to be. Creating something is hard work. It chews you up and spits you out. When things change and the idea begins to turn into something else, and they do, we have to be able to pivot and roll with the punches. The unexpected is always out there. It shakes you up and pushes you hard, causing a roller coaster of emotions. The suffering in life offers us clues to what life wants to become and fuels our creative endeavors. It is in the breakdowns that there are breakthroughs. It’s hard, but therein lies the magic. To be fully engaged with life we should harness all of what happens to us.

You must take action and step over that threshold, walk into the dream, and keep moving, watch it change and morph and always have faith that the work will help you. The work will open up the magic.

It is a paradox that I am living right now. To have the dream and then let go of it. In the end, once you let go of the dream, it rewards you with the beauty of the process. That is what I am learning. Just keep working.

The mother covered the long black braids with a weave of pink and green ribbons. She started with the green ribbon from the point where the braid descends from the girl’s small head all the way to the tiny tips of the ponytail. At the bottom, she tied a tight knot, then started weaving the pink ribbon crisscrossing over the green ribbon until none of the girl’s braided dark hair was exposed.

The mother asked her daughter, “Why do you like to dance?
Without moving her head, the five-year-old said,

“I dance to honor my people, my traditions, and mother earth.”

The mother moved around to the front of the folding chair where her daughter was sitting and kneeled in the tall green grass. She sat eye-level with her daughter. The little pink canvas chair was inches from the door of a red Ford F150 4 x 4 pick up parked on the slope of a field in the middle of the North Dakota prairie.

Her mother said, “And what do we say?” The girl knew that her mother was testing her? She hesitated because she wanted to get it right. The girl knew the answer? It was right at the tip of her tongue. But she waited.

The sky was big; the clouds stretched their arms around the green grass below, holding time and space for this moment, holding time and space for the little sat cross-legged child. The sky also held time and space for the young mother.

The girl had long thin legs, brown and bruised from her summer play. But, she loved being outdoors, she told me.

“Also, in the winter?” I ask.

“No,” she said, “I could freeze to death.”

The wind was calm, the sky a cornflower blue, the sun hot when it peaked through the paint brushed white laughing clouds. The girl’s left leg was swinging back and forth as it hung over her right knee. The girl seemed full of excitement that spilled out of her and over the wildflower field.

On her feet were golden sandals, fit for a little princess. Her eyes were dark brown, attentive, searching for focus, waiting to engage with her mother.

She understood her role as the inheritor of the ways of a proud people. She knew what will be demanded of her. She knew she had to make her mother proud. And, she knew she could do it.

The palm-sized beaded necklace, blue and green, a scene of sky and hills, hung heavy on her tiny neck. It hung like those responsibilities she has as a descendent.

A pencil lay next to her right foot, next to the eagle sage, the holy cleansing sage of her native prairie people. She wanted to learn everything about this place, about its nature, and about living on the spot where the hills roll over her dreams at night.

She knew she must learn before it is forgotten before the land is killed by the hand of the takers. The greed is all around her now. The takers had come to lift black gold from deep below the surface. She must learn everything to know before the air is too thick with black soot of toxic flames that shot into the prairie sky –

– and before the day when the water will be too poisoned, and the fish are gone.

She loves the fish. She waited at the edge of the lake for them to come to her when she called them. She caught the fish after she greeted them and asked them if it was OK for her to take them from their place in the water. She couldn’t imagine a world without her fish.

Her mother stared at her, smiled, and asked again, “You know what we say? Don’t you?”

The girl lifted her tiny brown right fist in the air and whispered, “Mni Wiconi,” and her mother asked, “And what does that mean”?

The girl stared straight into her mother’s dark loving eyes and waited.
The little girl’s mouth open ready to say something, as she lifted her left hand and placed it on her kneeling mother’s right shoulder and said out loud, “Water is life.”

The girl knew what she had to do. The mother was proud.

More about Ashly Hall and the – Descendants Alliance.

More about Water is Life and the movement.

Voices. Values. Identities.

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