Big M, Little M ~ It's time for Maitri to take care of Marcia...

Oh, my dear, I left you all alone.

When I changed my name to make a whole new identity for myself in the world, a place where I could feel whole, could feel true to the woman I wanted to become, I hadn't realized that the little girl who had felt abandoned her whole life would be abandoned once more. When I think of it now it breaks my heart.

I was Marcia. She was the one who was sexually abused for her whole childhood. She married a lovely man and had 3 children she adored. She was an artist and a writer, who grew up on horses and saved kittens and puppies and hamsters and mice, wild birds and squirrels, and she was the one who never learned how to play. She was too afraid. She hated playing games as an adult because anything that she didn't have control of terrified her.

Marcia was the little girl who was adopted, and through her entire childhood never felt as though she fit in, always felt like the little girl with her nose pressed to the glass on the outside looking in, wanting desperately to be part of the happy family inside. She would never be part of that family, and when, at 26, with 2 babies of her own, she searched for and found her biological mother, believing, with her innocent heart, the heart that so deeply loved her own children that she would die for them without even thinking, it never occurred to her that the woman who gave birth to her wouldn't want to know her, especially since she had gone about it very quietly, discreetly, never wanting to hurt anyone or cause any trouble. She found out these things --

She and her middle daughter looked like her biological mother.
She had 6 half brothers, the first of whom was born one year after she was given up for adoption.
She was a product of rape.
Her mother hated her and wished she had never had her. She told her so. She said that if she had been able to have an abortion in 1953 she would have.
That her biological mother would threaten to kill her, and be so graphic about the way that this would be done it sent her reeling in shock, and into years more therapy than she had already had.

How much more abandonment would there be?

I can tell you the rest of her story, but in this moment I only feel the deep, stabbing pain of remorse. In July of 2005, after my divorce, I went to the courthouse and changed my name, legally. It meant a lot to me. I wanted to wipe the slate clean, leave the abuse, the abandonment, the neglect, the terror, the pain, behind. I signed the papers. I became Maitri Libellule.

But what happened to Marcia?

 I never really wondered until today. I have wondered why this bi polar madness that I live with has swelled all out of proportion and daily nips at my heels and seems to get worse with each passing week, and then, oh dear God, then it came to me. Perhaps it is not being bi polar as much as it is having buried alive a part of myself and she, Marcia, who was left for dead, has been clawing her way up out of the grave I buried her in.

Dear God.

Oh my God.

I hadn't meant to erase her. She would always live inside of me. I simply wanted to embrace a beautiful name that held all of the spiritual teachings that mattered to me. The teachings of loving-kindness, of compassion. I wanted a name not tainted with a childhood filled with hidden darkness when she, the seemingly privileged child, to everyone who knew her, including family, lived through horrors no one would ever know. Shreds of dark fibers from the nightmares of those days would cling to her through marriage, and motherhood, and her young adulthood into middle age. How would it ever be possible to step out of the darkness into the light?

I thought I had the answer.

After a 6 year separation we finalized the divorce. Upon legally changing my name Marcia ceased to exist. You will not find her in any legal records. Maitri Libellule was born and Marcia slipped away, except... except of course she never really died. She has been living inside of me with a broken heart. How many times would she be cast aside, by birth, by chance, by circumstance? I left her, but she was still clinging to part of me.

Am I bi polar, or am I a woman who cut off half of herself and is being chased by her other half through nightmares and daydreams, in the pathways between the two poles of her brain? Will I only find peace, will I only ever be well if I go back and meet her face to face, embrace her, tell her that I love her, and bring her with me? The day that I signed the papers and became Maitri a black curtain dropped down on all that came before, inside of me that is. I still had my beloved children, and all of the outer trappings of life, but I had tried to kill my other half, not intentionally, but effectively had I done so, and not for the past 8 years have I understood what this gnawing, gut-wrenching pain was.

Next month I will be Maitri for 8 years. Is this why the last months have been so desperately difficult? Has Marcia been crying out, begging me to reach out to her, to bring her along so that my two halves could once again be whole?

Can Maitri love Marcia and still be Maitri? I think that is what I need to know.

Perhaps for me the bi polar journey is as much about reuniting both sides of myself as well as dealing with the biochemistry that rules my brain and must be reigned in like wild horses lest they go off in opposite directions and never come back to the middle again, or, perhaps, and I think this is far more likely, I need to reach out to Marcia, to embrace her, to hold her, to love her, and finally, acknowledge the she that is me. I need to weave the two halves of myself together. I think more than the pills I swallow every day this might be the most important answer of all.

Tonight I will warp my loom and begin to weave. I will weave together the two halves of myself before they are rent apart for good. I have been terrified by the struggle through each and every day as it became harder and harder. I did not want to be one more woman who went mad. I have too much to give. I want to live.

I am opening up my arms tonight and welcoming Marcia into my warm embrace. I love her. She is me. This is very hard work, but this is the summer that will transform my life from broken pieces into a whole. I will weave a tapestry where both of us will be woven fine. Big M will take care of Little M. It's time someone does.

I have been desperately searching for an answer, and she has been inside of me all along...

Sitting with the changing tides inside of me, sharing honestly...

The one thing that you will always get from me is honesty.

I do get afraid, but I am not afraid to share my truth, or perhaps, better put, I know I must share my truth, because there are too many of you out there that need to hear it. You tell me so.

The pendulum has been swinging wildly, I am waiting for it to come to the center and rest. I am getting closer. The difference between me, I suppose, and other people, is that you are seeing process, not just product. I am capable of producing, of finishing, but I go very deep and shine my searchlight in every direction before finding the thing that I am looking for, I cast my net so wide for fear of missing that which needs to be included, the right way to say it, to engage people with the idea that I hold in my heart, that I sway too far this way and that. 

Is it all about being bi polar? I don't think so, but that is surely part of it. 

I do know that my work is about helping people come to terms with fitting out, embracing that concept if it is true for them. But it won't come by way of blue-footed boobies (They were in the last entry that I took down if you didn't read it. Just say that I was looking for a light-hearted way to approach an often difficult and painful subject. The intent was good, but it did not fit.). I love them, I might have a stuffed booby here on my desk to cheer me, but he won't be the emblem for the flagship enterprise. If I spoke too soon I am not afraid or ashamed to say so, but I will move slower as I head toward this goal. And I will share all these missteps with you because maybe you will accept yours, if you have them, a little more easily, and love yourself, despite it all, along the way.

Somewhere between 3 and 4 a.m. I woke up with an uneasy feeling, a panicky one, and I held onto my wee pug, baby Tanner, cuddled next to me, and I tried, hard, to go back to sleep, but it was haunting me, it was wrong. In the wake of moving house, taking this blog to the new site, perhaps I have felt as though I were flying without a net and tried to create something solid to stand on. But life doesn't work that way, so what I will do is slow down and move forward a little slower.

I am going to have the new website. I am moving this blog, but Maitri's Heart must needs continue as it has because what it represents is one woman's heart, wide open, for all the world to see, wild shifts that might seem embarrassing to some but to me are part of my fragile humanity and if I bring it all to the light I will not lose my way. I won't hide these missteps. I will make them, as we all do in our own way when we are building a life, but I will own mine publicly because someone else out there is sitting there feeling so alone and so afraid they don't know which way to turn. They are filled with fear, shame, and maybe even self-loathing for once more stepping out, and falling back, for all the world to see.

If you are that person, dear man or woman, you are not alone. We are here together. As the fear rises we will catch it in a net. We will take it out and sit it gently on our lap. We will stroke it and tell it it's okay, we are here with it. Love your fear, embrace it, don't run from it, don't hide it, love it tenderly, and then sit it in a soft basket filled with downy quilts and cover it lightly. 

You have taken care of your fear. I have taken care of mine. Now we can move on.

I believe that more dreams have fallen by the wayside because people have great bursts forward, they stumble and they fall,  but instead of getting up, dusting themselves off, and taking a deep breath, being very very gentle with themselves and accepting where they are, and knowing that it is all part of the process and if they just keep getting up and moving forward they will get there, fear or shame causes them to drop their fragile dream and run from it, hoping not too many people noticed them stumbling on the way.

You have seen me stumble. You have seen me fall. I'm sure you will again, but you will see me continue to get back up and keep moving forward. You can too. Come on dearheart, it's okay, it's part of being human. Take my hand, we can do this. 

I am tenderly cradling my book, Tending Grace, and I know that I will finish it. It is about fitting out, because I do, it is the gentle story of me, getting here, to this place, and moving forward to the next. It is the story that I will tell first, it is the heart of Maitri's Heart, it is the truth of my life. Digging deep I find my truth, and I must needs keep finding my way back to this soft gentle place. It is not flashy. There are no blue-footed boobies here, but there are pugs and parrot and a growing garden and loved ones and what more is there? I have all that I need. I am blessed, and I am grateful.

And so once again I move forward...

The Heart Speaks If We Listen...

The days following my last post have been peaceful. 

Have I worried or been afraid if I will be alright, if I will be able to make an income, if I can trust what I believe, with my whole heart, to be true?

No, no, and no, I have not been afraid, and yes, I trust. 

Do I wonder how it will all happen, am I filled with hope, do I get a little shy around the belief in myself needed to create what I believe I am here on this earth to create?

I wonder, I get a little shy, I smile, I get a little fidgety, my heart flutters a bit... in excitement, because I know that I can survive and from that place of knowing, from a place of sitting, very still, and in a quiet meditative place taking time to listen to that still small voice within, all of the answers that I need are coming, floating up one at a time. I don't need to see the whole picture now because I couldn't do everything at once anyway. I get quiet, I listen, I pray for guidance, I trust the answers.

One thing that has really come up for me in an amazing way is the realization that when I stop trying to do what I think I'm supposed to do in a way that works for others, that I have been encouraged to do, only to become afraid and frozen and shut down, when I gently release those ideas of how it should be, and stop criticizing myself because I feel that I should have been able to, and sit with it all for awhile, really releasing it all, something shifts. What happens is that when you listen very closely all that you need is already there inside of you. Yes, there will be outside things that you need to learn or do to see those dreams into reality, but those things are easy once you have confidence in yourself and your dream. I never had that confidence. I was waiting for someone else to tell me that it was alright.

I am alright just as I am, right now, in this very moment. I am not afraid of hard work. I can do what I need to do. To that end I am already creating a website that will be in place to create income in a way that I feel good about that is separate and apart from the work that I hope will one day be my full time work, but it is all connected and true and authentic and part of my soul. It has to do with gardening, and more than that I am not yet ready to share. Too early. But I will say that in finding a way that I can create income now, with gifts and talents that I already have, enables me to breathe a little. Too much pressure put on heart~work to be the sole means of income just kills the very soul of the enterprise. It is too much for it to bear. It will never see the light of day if you crush it with expectations it cannot hope to live up to as it is just getting up on its wobbly newborn legs. Let it grow unfettered and free. My work will be from home but it will be the equivalent of a day job that feeds one's passion, and as it is about gardening it is also a passion. 

When we focus so completely on one way of looking at things, or achieving our dreams, we limit ourselves in such a way that we are almost surely dooming it to failure. I have cast my net wide, become expansive with my notion about what can be my work in this world, have begun to look at what for me are more practical and perhaps a little less dreamy pieces of the puzzle but still all part of the dream. All of the parts support the whole. I have stood back, taken a good look at my life, and saw that there was so much more there than I had ever given myself credit for. I am amazed by my own abilities, by the gifts and talents that I have that I never thought about using because I took them for granted, and as all the parts and pieces are moving closer together I see that they are all part of the same tapestry and they are woven fine. Woven together my life begins to look both possible and doable and in a way that will make me happy. I thought anything less than being able to fully and solely achieve my soft little dream was, well, not selling out, but taking away from the potency of that which I had hoped to create. No, when we take care of one part of our life it creates a vibrant energy that spreads through the whole life at hand. A mystical, magical, mysteriously awesome experience.

That I have found this, almost by accident, to be true for me is a revelation, and it is true for you too.

How often do we find ourselves living by others shoulds, oughts and musts? What happens if we gently let all of those things fall away -- scary, entering the unknown, actually trusting ourselves -- and let those little fragments break free and float up to the surface? Those little pieces of dreams that we have pushed down so hard they might never have surfaced again. And they might not be easy to retrieve but it is so worth taking the time to try to reconnect with them. Do this...

Find a little time each day to sit quietly, to be with yourself in a comfortable, peaceful place. It may be for 10 minutes at night when you are actually in bed before you go to sleep. 

Sit, close your eyes, breathe, and picture your beautiful heart opening up, slowly, maybe just a little. In whatever way is comfortable for you tell your heart that you are ready to listen, to receive the messages that are meant for you to hear. Imagine tiny little notes escaping from the opening and floating up, up, up. Try to read what these little notes say, it may be a word, a phrase, a picture. These are the messages your heart is sending you, and will keep sending you, until you are ready to hear them. You may not be able to read them yet. Come each night with a willingness to listen. It is your life that you are listening to. It is your soul trying to call out to you to bring you back to the place of innocence and longing, dreaming and hoping, wanting dearly to have or do or be or achieve that special thing we held so dear before the loss of innocence, when everyone around us gave us a hundred reasons, a thousand, why it could never be so. Look at the faces around you. How many look sad? How many are walking through life with the weight of long lost dreams weighing them down?

I think a lot of depression comes from closing our heart so tight and determinedly not listening because we feel that it isn't safe, that what we hear will be frivolous, or impractical, that we will be made fun of, that we aren't up to the task, that we let them sink to the bottom of the sea of our soul. I think more people than less die with broken and lost dreams in their heart. Is there anything sadder? What if you try and it doesn't pan out the way you had imagined? Well, what I am finding out so far -- and I am still very early on in this journey -- is that once you trust enough to make a start you may not come, in the end, to the place you thought you wanted to go, but most likely you will come to the very place you are supposed to be, or at the very least you will have come  closer, and be more fulfilled, than you would have ever been without trying. 

It's only your life. Do you want to die without trying? All we can do is try, but the very act of believing enough to try is positively life changing, it changes your perspective on everything else around you, every little corner of your day is a new, brighter color simply because you are allowing hope in again. I think belief in ourselves is the hardest part. Then, step by step, it gets easier. There will surely be times when fear rises, we are human, but come back to your night-time meditations with your heart. The messages will keep rising and direct you back to your course. Once you have opened that door it is not easily shut.

It is never too late. It is never, ever too late.

I am just beginning. I am the little horse trying to stand up on wobbly legs, but I am determined to keep on, and to share my journey here with you. There is strength in numbers. Why don't you leave a comment below this post, and you don't have to share what your dream is, but perhaps just say, "I'm with you Maitri, I am ready to listen to my heart, I will not die with my song unsung, I am ready to begin."

It is a journey, not a destination, but it is easier when you know that you are not alone. We have to follow our own individual paths, but we can walk parallel to each other, we can wave to each other and offer a hearty, "Atta girl, keep on keeping on!" to one another. 

I'm waving at you now. Will you wave back at me?

I Found My Way Home...

Be it ever so humble there's no place like home...

The front porch at Dragonfly Cottage

Dear Ones,

The last couple of weeks have been an intense and scary roller-coaster ride around and through the bi polar pathways that start in my brain and run through my life. I sat down two nights ago trying to figure out what had been going on and I realized something that was so important I don't know  how I could have missed it, but one thing that I know for sure is that bi polar or not I will always find my way home. Home to myself, home to that which is real and true for me, and this is what I discovered...

There are many ways to create a life and a business today and all are good and have value for those who fit with the current paradigms. I do not fit. I have written here that we -- those of use whose life must needs be lived outside the box -- need to learn how to be comfortable with fitting out rather than fitting in. I was trying desperately to fit in, and it's just not me. To that end I removed the last 2 blog entries about writing and teaching because they came from a place that while authentic at one time no longer work for me. I can cook them up but I could not continually dish them out. I am not that intense, over the top wild writer anymore and, as I read it, I must say, I was a bit unnerved. I don't know where that came from. I am a very good teacher, I taught my writing classes for over thirty years and had waiting lists to get in my classes. We went deep, for sure, but I am a much gentler soul than that, and as time has gone by I get softer, and gentler, and quieter. I cannot work with people one on one. I left the world for a reason when I decided that Dragonfly Cottage would be my home, my sanctuary, where I would create a life that would be the safe haven that I need, but also I want, in my deepest heart, to help others find their way home, to themselves, to what is true and real for them even if no one else understands it. It is what I am doing here. It is what I want to share with you.

Tanner and Sampson just waking up -- on my chest!

Yesterday morning I woke up, as I always do, snuggled in with my 3 pugs, and Sam and Tanner were right on top of me, firmly planted on my chest and tummy, two sleepy pug boys, my sweet loves. I am a simple woman, my animals, my garden, my writing, my art, solitude and silence, prayer and meditation, reading, and sending love notes out to the world through my blog and the books I want to write and the podcasts that I am now doing, this is the way I want to live my life, this is what I have to offer, and yes, I have to find a way to create income to live on but it has to be my way, a way that can sustain me in a quiet gentle way that does not set off solar flares that awaken the sleeping dragon inside of me. I have so much that I want to give, so much that I can give, and yesterday I started doing just that. I am creating my own paradigm for how I can live my life, tend it gently using the gifts and talents and elements of my life that I have that keep me at peace and help me create what is real and true for me now, and what I think, I hope, will reach others and be something that might help them as well. I want to help you, dear readers, to feel less alone. I want to help you see that if I could find and create a life that works for me you too can find and create one that works for you even if no one else in the world understands it. I want to create safe space for you in my books, and perhaps there will be a community online, I'm not sure, it is a possibility, but first there is so much more that I have to create. I am doing this for me, and I am doing it for you. If what I have to offer can be a help, a comfort, for you, I will be blessed a thousand fold, and my life will have purpose and meaning.

I will also be working on my novel as well as my book about the 100 Ladies. I will be creating art to sell, not only the drawings that I have been doing that I will use to create merchandise to sell but in this beautiful, peaceful place I am finding my way into I am finally returning to my fiber art as well. So much of me has been taken up trying to do things that I thought I was supposed to do that I dropped the thread that connected me to all that I loved to do. I will be weaving and hand-spinning yarn and doing free form crochet and upcycled art, nature art, and more. Soon I will be re-opening my etsy shop, maybe by the end of the summer when I have had time to create enough to fill it. Oh my, it feels good to have found my way home to my true self and the life that I have known all along was the one I was meant to create.

Tall blue salvia opening up in the green cottage garden...

In the next few months much of my life will be spent in the garden. Just now I have a number of plants to plant, and a great many bulbs, hundreds of gladiolas and a great many lilies. Two boysenberry bushes arrived yesterday and I can't wait to plant them in my studio garden on my deck where herbs, roses, fig and berry bushes, and so much more are growing. I look out these windows here where I am writing on so much beauty, the bright flamingo pink deck overflowing with new little plants shooting up, a host of wild birds at 3 feeders, two, just on the other side of these windows so close that I can almost reach out and touch the tiny birds that come to these two, the chickadees and the nuthatches, rosy finches, and even downy woodpeckers, and so many more. All of the things that I have wanted to do, that I came here to do, are the things that hold the keys to creating the income that I need to create. A flood of relief came over me and I cried. The weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders.

Finally, yesterday I set up the PDF for the book I will definitely publish and I can say that with confidence because it is just this, the book of my heart, coming out of the world that I have created. The pages are a warm rosy pink, each 8x8" page outlined, a little box to live within, to write my stories, share my art and photographs, and mostly, in sharing my life here at Dragonfly Cottage, I hope to help you see that if you haven't already you can create the life that is one where you can sink into with ease and relief, grace and peace. There is so much I want to share with you and I have to do it in the way that I know best how to do it. It is not unlike The Contemplative Way, the quarterly journal that I published on all blue paper under the auspices of The Blue Hibiscus Press.

This may end up being a quarterly journal too and it will be full of notes and quotes, resources and stories of animals and gardens, of one woman finding her way through the maze of life as a bi polar woman to a sanctuary that she created, that I created, to be able to share the gifts that I do have. We all can do this. I want to invite you into the cottage in the way that I can. I want to welcome you to my home through the pages of this book, the first in a series. Yes, that's just it, it is the first book in a series and I am so excited to bring it to you. Would you like to share this journey with me and be guided gently into a life where you, too, can find your peace? I hope you will come with me. Oh, dear ones, I hope you do. There will be journal exercises -- gentle ones -- and so much more. I want to reach out to you and offer you all that I have to give, all that is inside of me. It is time. Oh yes dear ones, it is time.

From this beautiful place, this gentle place of peace and calm, I send you so much love. I offer you my heart, like an open book. The pendulum had to swing wildly in every direction until, dazed, confused, afraid, and hurting, through prayer, meditation, silence and solitude I was able to come home to myself. It is only from this place that I truly have anything to offer, and I am ready to offer it to you.

I wish for you many blessings. I send you so much love...

Harnessing That Bi Polar Energy, A Renewable Resource ~ Dedicated to @kseniaanske ...

It began like this...

Like over 50,000 others on Twitter I have been inspired by the incredible Ksenia Anske whom I "met" there, as one meets, tweet by tweet, in this now not in the least bit unusual medium. This amazing woman/writer/Twitterologist has published one novel, and not only self-published it but she offers you her writing for free right on her website. (Yes, you can download her books for free. You can also buy them on amazon. But first she just wanted to give them away entirely for free.) Her work and what she is doing with it, as well as the amazing phenomenon she has become on Twitter tweeting her way through the day as she writes, now working on her second novel, and encouraging others far and wide to do the same, "Write-Write-Write!" has me all fired up and more excited than I have been in a long time about just-plain-writing. Writing for the joy of writing, for the thrill of it all, because you can't NOT write, because you write like you breathe, because words are your LIFE, because reading and writing are all that matter. Because...

I have been saying this and writing this and teaching this for nearly 40 years but I forgot. I have written in magazines, newspapers, been published in anthologies, had 3 small presses and written a dozen novels that didn't sell but I always wrote with a passion, a desire, and a fervor that nearly set my hair a-fire. I was known for this, until I didn't know it myself anymore. What happened to me?

Somewhere after leaving my decades long marriage I fell through time and space and lost myself so completely that for someone who picked up a pen at 9 and wrote her way through a lifetime of pain and confusion and depression and whatever else life handed me I lost the thread, over a decade I unravelled, and writing left me. Oh yes, I've blogged, but I stopped writing books. It didn't matter if books were not published -- and if I'd had the option to self-publish, the kind of options that are available today, some of them might have been published and I think I would have been proud of them -- no, it didn't matter that they weren't published, what mattered is that I never had any trouble writing them. I'm not talking about quality, or publishability, I'm talking about the zest for it all, and somewhere along the line I lost it.

Enter Ksenia Anske on Twitter. Now, mind, we don't really know one another, we've just tweeted, or retweeted as it were a few times, but her energy is contagious and it has reignited a passion for writing in me I'd lost without knowing it. Thank God. Just in the knick of time. And it's so much more than that. 

I had nearly written myself off, so terrified have I become over the fact that being bi polar seems to have become more of a struggle as the years have gone on to the extent that I have worried that I wouldn't be okay, okay as in able to make a living and take care of myself. It's really been a very scary time and every day is a bit of a Sisyphean task to push myself up the hill through the hours only to roll back down and have to start over the next day. What I hadn't realized was that the not writing was making it all worse, and I couldn't get my groove back, not until Ksenia. I am on my knees thanking God for that woman, and I can pretty much guarantee you a lot of other people are too. 

Okay, so what is the point of all of this? With my new found inspiration I pulled out a novel I have been starting and stopping for years. It is an odd little novel that I have great affection for but every time I start it I get just so far and I think, "Yegods, this is, well, it's... what would people think?" And the thing is that now I don't care, I just don't care. Life is too doggoned short to care so much that I don't write and if I don't write it just won't bode well for my life as a whole. It's just that...

Well, you see I got the novel out, I dusted it off, I set a timer and I wrote for an hour. BAM! Something inside of me like a sleeping dragon woke up and went WILD. I was laughing while I wrote. I was prickly with fear and shivering with delight. I startled myself and I just WENT for it. This set me to writing everywhere, Facebook, Twitter, you name it, that I was going to write this novel and tweet the dickens out of the whole process and, and, and...

And then it hit me. I was riding a wave of bi polar mania and it scared the hoo ha out of me! And it stopped me in my tracks. And then I realized that I have done nothing but be stopped in my tracks for over a decade. And if I have to surf the wild waves to write this book I'm going to do it. 

Now, here's the thing. I am on medication. I may get manicy in moderation but I get a grip fairly soon. I don't drive my car off a cliff, I don't take drugs or go on alcoholic benders, no, I just get razzle-dazzle excited (and sometimes buy too many pens or books or art supplies or plants for the garden) but the thing is that if I'm gonna have to be bi polar then gosh darnit I'm gonna USE it! Why not harness that bi polar energy?

So my plan is to set that timer for 1 hour a day, and no, I haven't done it today but I can promise you that as soon as I publish this blog post I'm going to do it and here's why. I'm going to do it because I have to, because I need to show myself that I can stick to something, that I can finish something, that I can DO something, and that joy, that over the top sheer reckless exhilaration I feel when I am working on that book is something that I need to harness and store up inside of me. I need it, like the solar lights that I have all over my yard that soak up the rays during the day and glow at night, I need to write this novel and let that part of me kick up it's heels and write whatever I want to write, as big and bold and wild as I want to write it, because, properly harnessed, within the framework of that hour each day, I will be charging the solar battery in the center of my being so that I can move through the rest of my life and create the business I need to create to take care of myself and yes, maybe save my very own life.

There is a lot written now that bi polar disorder has entered the mainstream mental health arena about all of the writers and artists through time that were bi polar and how they created in such angst that they did such things as cut off their ears or kill themselves leading a lot of people to wonder if you had to be crazy to be an artist at all. Can you be "healthy" and be an artist? Well, I think that's not the point, not for me anyway. The point is that I believe you can be bi polar and create and have a happy life. I think you have to be aware, very aware, and take good care of yourself, and use those energies in a way that moves you forward. Within the confines of that hour I can be as flippin' manic as I might be writing this story that screams to be born, but then... Then the timer dings, I save the document 56 ways to Sunday, I kiss a pug, and I go on about my life. Every single page that I write is an affirmation that I can do it at all, and that affirmation is something that is spreading through me and into dark corners that I thought would never see the light of day. I knew it before but I forgot. It's writing I need. Writing will save my life.

And no, I'll leave it to Ksenia to tweetly-deedly-doo all about the writing process on Twitter and elsewhere. I will be there soaking up her tweets and thanking God that I stepped into "the twitterverse" and found her. And I will rip though this novel without stopping or looking back. I'll say anything I darned well please any way I want to. If, in the end, it is something that with time and editing and work becomes a book that I feel that I can publish, well, wonderful, but it's the act of writing it, of finishing it, that I most need to do, and so I am. By the time you see this my timer will be ticking and I will be pounding the keys fueled by bi polar delight.

Skyrockets in flight, it's bi-polar-delight, I'm harnessing bi-polar-delight. (If you're old enough to recognize the song that inspired this you can sing it out loud with me just for fun!)

Thank you Ksenia. Now I'm setting my timer. It's time.

Weeeee doggies!