The way down.

Accessing my favorite spot to contemplate by the sea entails a narrow ledge and a ladder.  But it’s worth the butterflies accompanying the first couple of rungs, because it leads me to a quiet, rock beach that I can enjoy all to myself most of the time.  The notable exception being the man who is sometimes there, strolling the shoreline in the nude and eating apples.  When he’s doing his Eden thing, I make sure there’s distance between us, because he’s not shy about bending over to tie his shoe. One full bronze moon was enough, thanks.

I keep coming back to this hideaway that is sometimes perfect and sometimes not for many reasons, but primarily because I’ve become attached to a lone anemone I spotted in a rock pool when the tide was low. When I first saw it I thought it was a tomato.  It turned out to not be a tomato but this strange, slick, lovely sea creature.  As soon as I step off the ladder, I head straight for the rock pool, tense until I can affirm my little tomato is still there, OK. It’s the only one and so small and the sea is so powerful.

At low tide, the anemone holds itself tight and round.  At higher tides, it relaxes, shivering ever so slightly with each contraction of the current.  Having stumbled on something that’s kind of extraordinary, I have new reason to not rue having moved 5,000 miles from familiar shores.  It almost feels like  I’ve been rewarded with being privy to one of the world’s secrets.

The other night I had a dream in which my little tomato anemone one day disappeared.  As I crouched over the rock basin that had been is home, I sensed the presence of someone beside me.  It was the nudist wearing white tennis shoes, bending low, and like me peering at the the rock pool missing it’s main attraction.  I didn’t say anything.  He didn’t say anything.  And then he left, the residual feeling of his presence being one of “oh well, let’s not be ridiculous.”  I woke up mad at the nudist for being so…practical.  I was sort of mad at him still when I saw him on the beach the next day, perched atop one of the overhangs, absorbed with doing a long series of stretches, but you know, it wasn’t as if I was going to do anything about it.

It’s weird how odd occurrences like naked sunbathers and sea anemones hook into our conscious and unconscious lives, become cast members in dreams and objects of affection.  Respectively.

An itch to draw has been growing steadily over the past year.  But I wrastle with a demon of doubt who advises me to not bother, because I’ll just be disappointed with whatever I end up doodling.

Eons ago I drew without worry, without demons of doubt piled on my shoulder.  Sure I would get frustrated sometimes when I couldn’t capture what I was seeing in the way I wanted, but not enough to make me give up my 2HB pencils and pastels.

Living abroad has provided ample time for reflection and mood swinging.  For example I’m not in the mood for the various demons of doubt that pee on all the stuff I want to do for pure pleasure.  Like drawing.  But even though I don’t feel so thwarted by the free-peeing demons, my hands don’t sketch with the ease they once had.  They need to relearn, it seems, what was once second nature.  In all fairness, it must be 15 years since I last opened a sketchpad except for the occasional jiggly squiggle (that I’m never satisfied with, doncha know).

It’s hard, this relearning.  I don’t like it.  I want the old feeling in my hands to come back effortlessly, as if they were never disconnected from paper and pencil and the magic.

So, after much harumphing and wingeing about the inconvenience of all that, I decided to enlist some help in the form of Danny Gregory’s book, The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to Be the Artist You Truly Are. Slowly, slowly I’m going through the exercises in the book, looking forward to that breakthrough when I lose all sense of time and lose myself within the creative process.  It’ll be like reuniting with someone you care about deeply and haven’t hugged in a dog’s age, I imagine.

Rufus laying near me on a rock as we sit close to the sea. He's resting, but I don't think he's relaxing. Is that the snake eye he's giving me?

At any rate, here’s a little doodle I did of Rufus while we were sprawled on a one of the rocky nooks overlooking the Mediterranean.  He kept giving me these side-eyed glances, as if asking, “WTF?”

Yesterday marked the day we landed in Barcelona last spring and the living abroad phase of our lives officially began.

I was vacuuming the Rufus hair from the couch and Tim was doinking around on the internet when we realized that it was a special day.  You would think we’d have the date circled in red on the calendar and decorated with gold stars.  You would think that at that moment we would have dispensed with the mundane stuff to open a bottle of bubbly and celebrate.  Because it’s been a hell of a year. But no.  We had a misty-eyed moment of remembrance, and then we decided we’d go out in the evening for a drink.  Chores and internet-doinking resumed.

Which is not to say that we weren’t internally mulling the past year for the remainder of the day, it’s surges and its dips.  Of course we were.  My sense is that we’re not quite sure what we want to do with these memories just yet.  They’re too fresh for just an airing, refolding and re-tucking away type of treatment.  To some degree we’re still on top of them, recalibrating and analyzing them, filtering them through the shared vision constructed at the beginning of this adventure, and (nervously) eyeballing them from where the shared vision gave way to the pressures of individual wants and needs.

In truth, at the end of the day, I think their edges are still a little too…pronounced.  We still step around them a bit gingerly.  Still, after a dinner of Tim’s Lamb Stew we walked with Rufus to an Irish-y pub.  Over a  couple of pints we talked a little more about the highlights of the past 12 months – Corsica, Biarritz, Paris – and ignored the lowlights.  Because while the lowlights don’t go away, neither of us wanted them to be the life of our quiet little party.  Not now and not moving forward.

I don’t have any significant photos or even ticket stubs from day one in Barcelona.  Just a recollection. Initially we were consumed with schlepping our very, very heavy bags (that cost us $250 in overweight baggage fees) and our wigged-out dog (who hadn’t had an “out” for many, many hours) out of the airport.  Rufus enjoyed a rocket of a pee at the first available tree while Tim stood in the taxi line.  After we arrived at the hotel, we spritzed the travel slime from our faces and brushed our teeth again and went out for lunch and a long walk around the city.  I was afraid that if I showered or lingered too long  in the room I’d get sleepy.  I didn’t want to sleep.  I wanted to step into the dream.  And just a meter away from the hotel lobby there it began, glory and flaws and all.

In this post I reveal a strong distaste for jargon and what I fool I’ve been for not eating more of my new fave fruit.

For a while I’ve been struggling with some of the buzzwords of the life coaching profession, terms like “being present”, “authentic self”, “being in integrity”.  Ugh. Ew. Sputter. I get what they mean and the value of what they represent, but these days every encounter with them makes me shrink into myself, as if these terms are close-talkers jamming their face into my personal space.  I’m pretty jargon intolerant, especially if it’s woo-woo jargon, anyway.  So, what to do?

For two seconds I thought about campaigning to rid the collective consciousness of these vocabulary pests. But that would entail some serious effort and maybe crossing swords with the barons and baronesses of self-help that popularized said terms in the first place.

Being an independent minded person who doesn’t need more conflict in her life, I’ve opted for Plan B, which is to assemble some synonyms for the worst of the offenders. This will help me sleep at night, and it will be a saving grace to client conversations. I know clients can’t actually see me cringe every time these terms come up during a coaching call, but I swear they can sense the shudders.  And that can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings of the was-it-something-I-said kind.  Not ideal.

That said, it’s surprisingly difficult to swap new vocab for old vocab and still get your point across with relative ease.  Slowly slowly, though, I’m getting the hang of it, and helping clients do the same.  Here are a few examples of what I have so far:

Out:  being present
In:    here and now.  As in living in the here and now. Uses more words to say the same thing, but they all roll nicely off the tongue.

Out: authentic self
In:    real you.  Or, your real ramona as a backup.   The origins of the latter are fantastic (scroll down to the Cultural Impact section to get to the gist of how the phrase came into being), but it’s not a universally recognized phrase.  Bummer.

Out: being in integrity
In:    honorableness.  Who knew that was an actual word?!  It’s a mouthful, but I love it anyway.  Plus, it’s memorable.

Out: values
In:    fundamentals.  Actually, the verdict on this one is still up in the air, because my take on our essential fundamentals  is that they encompass more than just values. (Which aren’t morals but a kind of baseline to how we express who we are .)  Our fundamentals include the golden rules we live by, the dreams and ambitions that define us – a whole bunch of other stuff that when stirred together create what’s unique to us as individuals. The thing to know about values/fundamentals is that when you’re not living attuned to them, there’s an ongoing sense of clashing.  That’s your main cue something’s out of whack in that area.

One last thing I’ll add for posterity about my vocab reassembly before moving on to raving about kiwis, their greenness, their sweetness, the miracle that is their quirky halo of bitty black seeds, how easy they’re peeled because the hairy skin means you don’t lose your grip and gouge a chunk out of your finger, etc…

People often speak with sorrow of how they can’t find their voice.  They can’t find it on the page or in their head and a tailspin or a crisis ensues.  One way to begin climbing out of  that predicament is to listen for your isms, the words and expressions you use a lot,  if not all the time, in your every day speech and your every day internal chatter.  Listen for and list your isms.  That’s your voice in action. And it’s not lost. It’s always been there.  You just haven’t been in the habit of recognizing it.

As for kiwis, I’m don’t have much more to wax about without repeating the obvious stuff that even all moderate fruit-lovers knew, except to rinse and repeat about the utter idiot I’ve been for not recognizing kiwi wonderfulness and loveliness my whole life through.  (Mangos, there’s now a serious chance we will befriend – someday.) With kiwis, I’m now in serious adoration.  Can’t say I love them as much as salty roasted peanuts.  But in the healthful eats category, kiwis rule.