Second Life

Laundromats to Peace

Today, I want to suggest you engage in a little experiment. I am going to suggest you do something outside of your normal routine that takes you somewhere you wouldn't normally go and then just try to experience it-just be present in the moment and see and hear everything. The light, the sounds, the people. You don't have to do something profound. You can do this in the most ordinary way. I fell into a wonderful experience because of a plumbing problem at my house.

The Other World of the Laundromat.

Because of my plumbing problem, I had to go to the laundromat to clean my clothes. At the laundromat, I watch precision on a level of a military action. I watch mothers wrangle children while bringing in 14 tons of clothes (OK, not the actual weight but it looked like it), choose a line of washers, put in the clothes, the detergent, and money with an amazing assembly-line efficiency while their children run around them.

The languages in the laundromat are various, from English to Spanish to various Asian dialects; but it didn't matter, because we all understood each other in this place of common mission. We all got along; people held the doors open when someone was struggling in with a big load; people smiled if they made eye contact; communication is handled through hand gestures and broken English, and I think the common purpose. A man tapped me on the shoulder and held up a baby blanket he found in the parking lot. He didn't speak English so he just smiled, nodded and offered it. I smiled back and shook my head no. He then went to each woman in the building till he found the owner. We all realize we were here to get something done; and we try to make it as pleasant as we can for ourselves and each other. The place is noisy in a busy din of washing machines, dryers, adults and children. It is warm and light and bustling. I find it was a wonderful place to read because I have 42 minutes that I have to just hang out somewhere. Sometimes, the life around me drawd me from my book. Whether I read of watch people, the Laundromat forces me into a different time zone of wash and dry cycles. It slows me down. At home, I would be doing several things during the wash, but not here. I love my time-here-doing one thing and waiting (a luxury I have forgotten in my busy world).

I now take my laundry even though I had my sewer pipes snaked (Plumbereze for cleaned out so the flow is restored) because I ENJOY the atmosphere. I love the din of busy people; I love the laughter of children running up and down; I love the determination of their mothers; and I love the laughter I hear, many times coming in conversations that are spoken in languages I don't understand. It gives me a kind of peace and hope for humanity that I can't quite explain except to say, that the place gives us a commonality of purpose that works. Maybe we should negotiate peace treaties in laundromats among people who know how to work toward a common goal.

Jann

Soundtrack to my Life

This may sound strange, but I've always longed for a soundtrack to my life. Literally, I'd like to have music playing around me at key moments to help me make sense of whatever's happening. This seems particularly useful to me in identifying when I should be concerned about what's coming next. Like you know in horror movies where people are just sort of happily going along with their lives, assuming that all is well, but because of the ominous music playing in the background YOU know that something really bad is about to go down? If I had a soundtrack for my own life, then I'd get the warning, too.

Unfortunately that has never seemed to work out for me, so I must be the producer of my own soundtrack. Instead of getting someone else to play the music that will tell me where I'm going, I find my own accompaniments to my life.

Music has always been like smell to me. You know how you can catch a particular scent and it immediately reminds you of Grandma's house or that guy you dated in high school? Music is like that for me, immediately taking me back to some key moment or period of my life.

This happens to me frequently in the car when Ali is scanning through radio stations and some cringe-worthy Journey selection comes on the radio. Even though I HATE Journey, there's a part of me that wants to make her stop right there because it reminds me so strongly of my senior year in high school and I want to go back there for a few minutes.

Madonna's "Holiday" has me dancing at college frat parties. Eric Clapton's Unplugged takes me back to the days right after Ali was born and I was all teary about having a new baby ("Tears in Heaven" used to just KILL me).  Dave Matthews Live at Luther College is the only thing that got me on and off of planes during the horrible 8 weeks of non-stop travel I did 5 years ago as I crashed into a major depressive episode. And Beth Orton's Daybreaker is the soundtrack to the beginning of my relationship with Darvin, guaranteed to evoke the sense of longing we felt at being apart for weeks at a time.

I've passed along this particular relationship with music to Jess, who at almost 19 marks the passage of her life in terms of her "Spice Girls" period, her Dave Matthews period (still going on, BTW), her "Emo" period and now her "Death Cab" period. It's funny, in a way to hear her get all nostalgic about some song, knowing how much of her life lies ahead, but I also love sharing this particular passion with her, especially when we have both imprinted a particular memory with the same song.

So now that I've revealed my life soundtrack, what songs or albums evoke particular periods of your life? I know I'm not alone here, so come on, let us know what music drives your memories.

Michele

The Global Fireplace

Last night Darvin and I were talking as we prepared to go to dinner with Jess (my older daughter) and her friend Dhani who were home for the night for a concert. We were talking about blogging and why it has taken off like it has.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this as I try to understand how to help nonprofits embrace new technology. What I realized last night is that what is driving this new urge for self-expression via blogs, video, audio, etc. is actually a very old and very human tradition--that of the storyteller.

For most of human history, we had to turn to live humans for entertainment. After dinner, we might gather around a fire and your father would play the fiddle and your sister told ghost stories. People played the piano, painted, drew, talked about the events of the day. When radio and later TV came on the scene, we began to turn to that "black box" to entertain us, rather than entertaining ourselves. In that process, I think we lost our ability to tell stories, although I don't think we lost the desire to do so.

Now, with a blog, I can tell stories, but to an even wider audience. I can upload photos that tell a story and videos, too. I can share my artwork, my music, myself. I get back my power to create and express myself to other people. That becomes the entertainment over sitting back and waiting for some corporation to entertain me.

New media gives us the chance to gather around a global fireplace and to share our very human connections and expressions of ourselves. That's very powerful and compelling. I'm thankful that it's come in my lifetime.

Michele

Road to Your Dreams

I've always wanted to drive America-not with a plan just a map. I like small towns. One of my favorite people in the world and one of my biggest inspirations was a woman I worked with named Phyllis. Phyllis retired and crossed America on a bicycle. We all followed her progress on a map, and she had a web-site where she would post here progress from Internet Cafes. She was a member of a bicycle club and was very versed at long rides, but she didn't have anyone with her for the whole trip. She had a dear friend that was going to make the journey with her but became ill with cancer and couldn't go. Phyllis and her friend had planned this trip for a year, so Phyllis did it anyway. I thought that took courage. Phyllis would tell you that it was her dream so she had to do it. Sometimes she had someone with her on some leg of the journey, but many times she was alone. I think about Phyllis a lot when I think about a Second Life. She had one planned and she went to it. Phyllis, unfortunately, was killed about a year after completing this journey on a 100 mile ride in Texas. A driver veered to catch something in the seat and didn't see her. At her funeral, as sad as we were, we did it her way. One person after another got up and told some story about Phyllis. Most were funny, some were sad but they were about how she bounced back. I know Phyllis lived her life on her terms. She didn't get to do it everyday, because none of us do. But she made it her life's mission to try to spend the majority of her life doing what she loved. She was survived by her children, her friends, and the legacy she left us. By the way, Phyllis, who hated telling her age, was almost seventy when she did all those things. She did it and so can we. Michele gave us a bunch of cool sites to visit on the right side of the blog. One that helps you plan your dreams is under "Things To Do in a Second Life." This site helps you plan to achieve your dreams. Take it from Phyllis-it's worth it.

Jann

Anniversary Thoughts

Since my first wedding anniversary is tomorrow, please indulge me in a few thoughts on second marriages. Mine in particular.

The first time I got married, we spent a lot of time worrying about the wedding. We had over 100 people coming. We were concerned about where everyone would sit, would there be enough alcohol (I was a year out of college--drinking was more important then), what would I wear. The usual stuff. We also had a lot of "mother-in-law" tension because while my family was out of the picture, my soon-to-be husband's mother was painfully involved. I won't bore you with the details, but I seriously reconsidered the marriage on several occasions because of her.

My point here is that the first time around, all we really did was think about the wedding. We thought we had the whole "marriage" thing under control because we'd been together for 5 years already and we thought we pretty much knew what we were getting into. Turns out we were wrong.

Fast forward 19 years to the second wedding. While we spent a lot of time on planning the wedding, we were MUCH more focused on being married. Yes, we were living together, but we also knew that the wedding is the easy part. It's the marriage that can be the killer. So we spent hours and hours talking about what we thought a marriage should be. We considered the influence that our own parent's marriages had on us and how that shaped our unspoken and unrecognized beliefs about the roles we should play in our own marriage.

As we planned our ceremony, we focused on including readings and elements that focused on the marriage and on the joys and challenges of building a life together. I know we got that right because after the wedding, several of our (married) friends told us that our wedding was the only one they'd been to that played up the marriage and the journey, rather than the wedding itself.

So tomorrow we'll have been married for a year and I have to say that this time around I'm far more connected to Darvin than I was to my first husband. Part of this is, of course, that he's a different person. But the other reason for it is that we pay more attention to the state of our relationship and what we need to do to keep our connection alive. It's easier when we don't have children around us all the time, no doubt. But I think it's also a function of who we are as a couple. We are much more aware of how easily a marriage can slip away from you under the daily grind of work, friends and family. We realize that the gift of intimacy with another person is a precious one, but that it's also a hard one to maintain. We see how you have to work at your marriage and so we try to do that every day. Sometimes that can be hard to do.

Lately we've been going around about a few things and I find myself thinking "Maybe I shouldn't have gotten married again. Maybe I don't really know how to do marriage and I should just be alone with my cat and my computer." In my heart, I know that those thoughts are just my way of dealing with the inevitable conflict and rubbing against each other that occurs in any marriage. But, DAMN, it can be annoying sometimes.

Then we have times like last night when Darvin took me to see a play downtown. It was a good play, something I wouldn't have chosen on my own. And I thought about how glad I am to have this man in my life who brings me new experiences--along with Ben and Jerry's "Half-Baked" when we got home. I love this man who wraps himself around me every night and who tries to hold me in bed with him to cuddle in the morning. This man who understands my heart sometimes more than I know it myself.

So in honor of our anniversary, I'm going to leave you with two things. The first is a reading from our wedding that I love for how it gets that marriage is not some hearts and doves kind of thing, but the bringing together of two flawed people who try to make the best of themselves together:

“I love you, not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you, not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you, for the part of me that you bring out. I love you, for putting your hand into my heaped-up heart, and passing over all the foolish, weak things that you can’t help dimly seeing there, and for drawing out, into the light, all the beautiful belongings that no one else had looked quite far enough to find. I love you, because you are helping me to make of the lumber of my life, not a tavern, but a temple. Out of the works of my every day, not a reproach, but a song. I love you, because you have done more than any creed could have done to make me good, and more than any fate could have done to make me happy. You have done it without a touch, without a word, without a sign. You have done it by being yourself.

I love those parts about putting your hand into my "heaped-up heart," and making "of the lumber of my life not a tavern, but a temple." Believe me, I had the tavern half built when Darvin came along.

The second piece I'll share are our vows--as much a reminder to me of why we're doing this as anything I can think of:

Darvin: You have taught me so much about love and truth

You have helped me become a real man, in mind, body, and spirit

I come today to give you my love, my heart and my strength

I promise to cherish and protect you,

I promise to work with you to build a sacred union of body, mind, and spirit.

You have taught me how to be a Warrior, King, Lover and Magician

As your husband I offer you all these things in love and trust, 

ame além de morte (love beyond death)

 

Michele: Darvin, from the moment you used a black marker to write “courage” on my arm, girding me for battle with my own fears, I have been yours. You’ve seen through to the heart of me, past the woman I’ve become to the little girl I was, healing my hurts and helping me to know parts of myself I’d long forgotten. With your love and support, I grow each day, challenged to become a better partner and a better person. I come to you today with a heart filled with love and joy, but also humility and thankfulness for having this chance for a life with you. 

As your wife, I will give you my love and trust, my heart and soul. I promise to honor our marriage and the commitment I’m making to you today. I promise to protect the secrets of your heart and to share with you the secrets of mine. I promise to give you the best of who I am, spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically and to work every day at creating a marriage that fulfills and sustains us. Most of all, Darvin, I promise to love you.

P.S.--A note on the family photo. We were so proud of our kids that day, particularly mine. While my girls had been VERY unhappy at their father's wedding several months before, they were wonderful at ours. We included all three kids in the ceremony--they "stood up for us" and we started with lighting a family unity candle with the five of us. I think that it made our wedding even more special because we saw how it was bigger than just the two of us. That our marriage was bringing together not just us, but our children. It was really even more beautiful than I could have imagined.

Michele

Connecting to Yourself

"Who are we?" Don't we all ask that question at some point in our lives? That question is one of the reasons Michele and I started Second Life. We believe that there is a point in life where you look at where you've been and start to question where you want to go. This question doesn't arise because you are unhappy with your choices, although I haven't met a human yet without some regret. I think it arises because there is a point in life where we recognize that we have less in front of us than behind us and that quality of how we spend our time matters. Long dormant dreams find a way of bubbling up to the surface, so does long dormant pain.

Time is at the center of my crossroads. Oprah Magazine devoted an entire issued to "time" in April 2006: spending it, saving it, experiencing rather that existing in it. I think how you spend your time and how connected you are to yourself are directly related. I saved Oprah's comments from that April magazine and would like to share them with you. She wrote,

Who'd have thought that with all the technology designed to give us more time--microwave ovens, TiVo, PalmPilots,Blackberrys--we'd be cramming all those "extra moments" we saved with even more doing and less being?....If time is flying you are the lead pilot. Navigate it-because only you can. Guard it as a treasured possession-because it is. Spend it judiciously-because you can't get it back. Then use it on the things that really matter to you. 

For Michele and I, who by the way know each other in our professional lives, the need to explore who we are has found expression in creative venues. Both of us are considered cerebral in our professional lives and make our living providing strategic, logical and practical thinking to those who employ us. Maybe that's why our creative sides demanded a "little me time." I write fiction and Michele draws and creates art. We both participate in other blogs as an outlet for our creative needs. Neither of us are brave enough to provide those blog addresses because those things are so personal and the anonymity provides some safety. But Michele, sent me two of her pieces she created this week while considering her emotional side. (They don't look right, so I'm going to ask her to re-post them when she gets home, but one of them is below.) She wrote about getting in touch with her emotional side yesterday; and I think it was extremely brave. So, as Thursdays are about connection, I invite you to think about how connected you are to yourself. Knowing myself has been the hardest relationship I've ever tried to develop. Wasn't it Shakespeare that said, "to thine own self be true." Um, harder than it sounds.

Jann

Here's Michele's work:

Stop Rescuing Me

Darvin, my husband of a year, told me last night that he fell in love with my heart. Apparently I exposed that tender organ to him when we first met and he was immediately drawn in.

It was a mistake, I think, that exposing of myself. I didn't really mean for him to see inside. But at the time we met I was going through a painful divorce and recovering from the aftermath of months of depression. I was raw, bruised, bleeding and my usual armor--my brain--had deserted me.

My heart is something I usually hide. In fact, it's often so hidden I can't even find it myself.

In my life, sharing my heart has been an invitation to pain. It's like wearing a big sign on my chest with a flashing neon arrow that says "Here I am. Crush me!"

Luckily, though, I've had a protector. My brain. When troubles starts, it springs into action, over-analyzing and intellectualizing, studying, calculating and strategizing. Like the prince who rescues the damsel in distress, my brain jumps in as soon as I may get hurt. It rides to the rescue again and again and again.

I discovered the power of my brain in my grandparents' living room when I was a little over 2 years old. It came barrelling over the hill and swept me into its arms, just as we were discovering that my mother wasn't going to wake up from the "nap" I thought she was taking on my grandparents' couch. It soothed my aching heart by trying to make sense of the death of a 21-year old woman, even though there's no sense to be made of something like that.

My brain protected me again when my stepmother's brother began molesting me at 6. Each time he would touch me, each time I had to do something to him, I would go into my head and think about anything except how my poor heart was being betrayed. My brain got me through hand jobs at 7 and blow jobs at 8. It saved me when I had to watch him molest my little brother and when my parents found out about it all and still blamed me.

My head has been there for me  through years of parental beatings and verbal and emotional abuse, right up until my father and his wife kicked me out of their lives at 21. It has intellectualized me through several bouts of depression, my divorce and the reshaping of a life that no longer allows me to kiss my daughters good night at the end of each day.

My brain has been fabulous at keeping me safe and sane when the world wasn't either of these things. For that I'm eternally grateful. But the problem is, now that my world has changed, my brain doesn't know how to stop doing its thing. It's like the parent who doesn't understand that her child has grown up and can take care of herself. This head of mine keeps turning my heart to stone.

So why am I writing all of this anyway? I don't know. Maybe because Jann and I talked this morning and I told her I wanted to write more from my heart than from my head. Or because last night I realized that I was closing myself off from both myself and my husband because of all the thinking I've been doing and that can't be good for our relationship. Maybe it's because my head is "protecting" me not just from the bad things in my life, but also the good things and I'm tired of feeling a little numb all the time.

I'm not sure, why I'm saying this, but I feel a little better for having written. So at least there's that.

Michele

Photo via Magnusdigity

 

Connection Thursday--How Do You Stay Connected with a 14 Year Old?

My 14-year old daughter, Ali, is getting on my last nerve. Seriously. I love her dearly, but if she does that combination disdainful sigh/head toss thing one more time, I may have to throw her out the window.  Also on my list of most annoying behaviors ever is the "God, Mom . . . " followed by a reiteration of whatever stupid thing I've said or done to piss her off this time, as well as the eye roll and the sneer.

In a way I was ready for this, having been through the drill 4 years ago with her sister. But in some ways I wasn't, because Ali has always been my sweet-tempered, easy-going child. Maybe the fact that her sister isn't here to be the bitchy one has given Ali a license to annoy that she's been waiting for. Or maybe it's just the age. I don't know. Regardless, it's making me crazy.

When I went through this with Jess, I was also in the middle of divorcing her father, so there was added drama and angst. I will admit that what we're dealing with now is much less than what we went through before. But in a way it's more painful to feel this disconnection from Ali because she's always been the snuggler, the connector and now she clearly wants nothing to do with me.

A wise friend of mine told me that the way to survive these years is to just keep thinking to yourself, "I don't have to get along with her now. I just have to stay connected enough so that we have something to build on when she starts to emerge from this stage." True, but difficult at times. It's hard to be around someone who finds your very existence a painful embarrasment and who snaps at virtually every word out of your mouth. Yes, it's normal for her to be breaking away from her mother, but does this really mean she has to break her mother in the process? The nastiness of this age can really be disturbing.

When I was 14, I had to hear a lot about my "tone" and my "expressions" and I swore I would never harp on that with my own daughters. But what I find is that it's one of their favorite passive aggressive acts, to use tone and facial expression, because it's so easy to then deny that they've done anything. "What? I didn't SAY anything."

I'm trying to maintain a Zen-like calm, focusing on keeping her comments and tone relatively in check while not taking any of it personally. When she starts up I let her know that I don't like it and then stay quiet to avoid additional jabs.

My husband and I were talking about the situation earlier in the week and what I realized is that in some ways I'm less worried about her disconnection from me and more worried about what happens when I disconnect from her as a form of self-preservation. I have a long history of emotionally cutting people out of my life when I've had enough of their barbs and so it's a delicate balancing act for me to maintain the connection enough to be able to stay in touch with her, while still being able to protect myself.

Daughters know exactly where to hit you, your most painful spots, and it's a challenge to both protect yourself and remain open to when they're going to stop "beating up on you." It sometimes feels like I'm a boxer who still has to be prepared for when her opponent decides she wants to be friends. Frankly, it's a form of emotional whiplash I find hard to sustain at times.

Connection to the people I love is really important to me and I understand that this is a time-limited thing. I survived it before and now have a great relationship with Jess, so I know I'll survive it again.

In the meantime, does anyone want a 14-year old girl?

Michele

(Photo of me and Ali when she was 13 and I wasn't so stupid and embarrassing)

Learning to Love You More

Here's an absolutely fabulous site guaranteed to help you learn more about yourself and anyone else who is willing to play along.

Learning to Love You More has been developed by a group of artistis who put "assignments" on their website. If you're interested, then you can accept the assignment and then send the artists a "report"--a collage, a video, an audio recording, etc--it depends on the assignment. Some of my favorites include:

  Start a Lecture Series.

Recreate an Object From Someone's Past

Make a Flier of Your Day

Write Your Life Story in Less Than a Day

Record Your Own Guided Meditation

Recreate a Poster You Had as a Teenager

Spend Time with a Dying Person

Make a Protest Sign and Protest

. . . Wait, I have to stop. . . I'm only halfway through the list.

When you visit the site, be sure to check out what other people (and they aren't all artists) have done with the assignments.  Some amazing work. And the artists are coming out with a book in 2007 to share what participants have turned in.

What I love is the potential of these things. I could see picking one of the topics and working on it with a group of friends to see the different ways that we covered the same topic. Or putting a few of your favorites on slips of paper and then letting each person select one to produce and share. What a cool activity for a family reunion or a getaway with family or friends. Something to do on a rainy afternoon with bored children or grandchildren, or goals to set for yourself to accomplish over a period of time as you explore yourself in Second Life. 

I have to admit that I'm not too fond of the layout of the site, but the ideas are incredible. . .

Michele

Photo above is for assignment # 30, Take a Picture of Strangers Holding Hands, done by Keiko Yamamoto

Flickr Mini-cards

I was visting Mighty Goods (Maggie does the shopping so I don't have to) and found these. For $20, you can create a box of 100 minicards using your Flickr photos. What a great gift idea or way to share your art! And it looks like the process couldn't be any easier. The only hard part is picking out the photos you want to use.

Michele