Finding The End of the Rainbow

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Oh geez, Invisible Audience,

So much to say…so hard to summarize.

I’ve been making the rounds and saying goodbye to all the people I’ve known in Boquete before I leave, and it suddenly feels like almost two years has gone by in a flash. That, or I’ve been here for a lifetime. It’s all wrapped up in one.

I have passed houses of friends that have moved on, smiled at memories in restaurants, at swimming holes and up hiking trails, and stood on the bridge where I stood on my first day here, bathed in the light of a full moon, and felt something that had been wound too tight inside me start to release and unravel. 

In daylight, many, many days and memories later, I put my hands on the railing, heard the river rushing by below me, and looked up the valley, a completely different person than the one who arrived.

Every piece of the puzzle I received here has felt monumental and essential, and it is hard to believe that I was able to pack all I have learned into such a short time period. I have met so many people who taught me so much: so much about myself, and also about the world and how it could work, if I just got out of my own way -- out of my own head -- and let it.

Linda, my chiropractor but also my friend, may have summarized it best: 

“I am not going to say I will miss you, because that indicates that I will feel the absence of your presence. That’s not true. Instead I will say that I will never forget you, because that is far more accurate. You will always be here with me. It has nothing to do with physical distance.”

I will never forget you, Panama, nor all the people you have brought me. I can’t remember every rainbow anymore, but I will always remember and talk about living in a place with a whole season of rainbows. More than one taxi driver has told me that he has actually driven THROUGH the end of the rainbow, something that science and our Western thinking tells us is absolutely impossible. Then again, many things I thought were impossible have come to fruition here, so it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the end of the rainbow is something you can find here -- that the proverbial pot of gold may be a metaphor for many other types of treasures that are reachable if you simply let go of the idea that they are not.

 

“So, you just didn’t like it here enough, huh?”

A lot of people have asked me this question. And the true answer is very simple: I loved it here, until one day I didn’t. And that day stretched on into another and another, and, because it has happened to me many times before, I knew what it meant. I came here to learn something, although it is only now that I know what it was: I came here to rest, rejuvenate and find myself. I spent a blissful couple years here, and now it’s time to go. I have done what I came to do. Whatever is next in this ever-changing and ever-evolving journey, this wild crazy adventure called life, it will happen somewhere else.

I guess that’s all for now. I have a lot to say, but a lot has to go unsaid. When I lived in Spain in my early twenties, I told the people I was studying abroad with that I hated the idea of having to summarize an experience into a sentence, because it could not possibly encompass all the joy, the ecstasy, the grief, the tears, the growth, the laughter and the smiles. So it wouldn’t matter if I wrote volumes about it, invisible audience. As much as words serve me well, they can only describe what happened. They cannot replace it. So just imagine having lived at the end of your own rainbow, perhaps, and then realizing that you can carry that rainbow with you wherever you go. Maybe then you’ll understand what I’m trying to convey. Maybe then the words will be enough.

Love and rainbow kisses

Morgan

Letting Go

When I first moved to Panama nine months ago (!!) I sent an email to an author I knew who told me that after self-publishing his own book, he eventually got to the point where he had to have the majority of the stock destroyed because it didn’t sell.

When he told me this story – as we were sitting at a Farmer’s Market and I was trying to sell my cookbooks – I remember being astounded that he could admit it so easily and without any self recrimination (it was years later, mind you, and he did admit it was a really humbling experience) but I also remember having a sense of envy that he’d been able to let go without it being a sign to him that he had failed.

Somewhere along the road, I started to hate my cookbooks. There are many reasons for this. One, they never made me any money. Two, for the first time in my life I was (and am) in debt because of them. Three, I felt like a fake when it came to talking about wine; I learned a lot about local wine from writing the books, but it was also the part that I needed the most help with, and I felt like a fake pretending that I knew anything. Four, and most importantly, it felt like the books were tying me to North Central Washington when everything else in my body was telling me it was time leave: that my destiny and my heart lay elsewhere. Cookbooks were never what I wanted to write when I quit a corporate job in Bellevue to write a book, but there was a niche and I had the skills to fill it. Even if I didn’t know a lot about wine, I did and do know about layout, design, cooking, project management; I had just spent a year researching the publishing industry for books closer to my heart, and of course I knew how to write and edit. I also knew the people in the local wine industry. All of this made sense, but it didn’t really make my heart sing the way that other writing did.

Before I go any further, let me say that I know this is a skewed perspective. When my first cookbook came out it was invigorating; I was on a high and I loved it. It was only later that the cookbooks began to weigh me down, and that I realized I had veered off of the path where I had originally wanted go. Obviously I learned a lot from writing the cookbooks, and any experience that teaches you what you don’t want is just as important as teaching you what you do want, so I don’t consider it a complete loss. All I am saying is that I am finally processing some things that I pushed down and out of the way in the process of writing the books because what I was hearing and experiencing from everyone else didn’t jive with what I was feeling internally.

Anyway, when I first got to Panama I sent an email to this author, asking him how he had arrived at the point where he could let go of his books and simply move on. He gave me some simple yet profound advice: they will be important to you, until one day they aren’t. That day, his advice implied, you will finally be able to let go.

That day arrived about a week ago. In the midst of being sick, I have started to really look at my life: what I’m still carrying around that doesn’t serve me and the things that I keep to myself that cause me to be alienated. My cookbooks are something that I have wanted to let go of for a long time.

So I did. Without much ceremony besides a post on Facebook and some emails, I put them down. I deleted the Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest accounts that I only had because of them, I started selling them at cost, and I completely let go of what I had been holding onto, because it was no longer important.

Invisible audience, I have not felt this free in a long time.

I’ve been doing some SEO marketing work for a freelancing blog lately, and one of the final nudges I received was from this blog post. It talks about how many of the most successful people in business today never finished college, have never really followed all the rules, and that they know when to let go and move on.

It made me realize that not only was it ok to let go, but it was actually the BEST THING I could do: put down what wasn’t working to make room for something new, something that DOES make my heart sing, doesn’t feel like a drag and will make me money. Not only that, but I realized that with every other big life-changing decision I've made, I have had to leap first, and THEN the net appeared: with my cookbooks I had been waiting to pay off my debt before letting them go, instead of trusting my intuition and past experiences that told me that it was ok to let go first and find another income source to pay off the debt in the new space I'm creating.

It also made me realize that, as much as it appears I don’t follow a lot of the rules, I can actually disregard the rules entirely. I see a counselor here, and many of the conversations we have are comprised of me telling her something that I think is true and her asking gently, “Whose voice is that?”

The number and depth of these “rules” that I have internalized is staggering. I am selfish for moving far away from my family. I am selfish for wanting to take the time to figure out my own emotional issues and try to heal them when I should be focused on a career or starting a family. I am worthless because I’m not making more money. I am unsuccessful because I don’t have more to my name. That if I possess a skill, I am required to use it; if there’s a niche I can fill, then by God, it is my moral obligation to fill it. That there is something wrong with me because I write a blog like this one, where I share the parts of myself that should be kept quiet. There is something wrong with me because I need a lot of alone time; that the thought of the white picket fence “American dream” existence literally makes me want to run; that I will be burned at the stake for admitting that I am not Christian or atheist, but pagan. That no one will love me if I finally let go and admit that there is a growing part of myself that I have kept hidden for too long that is fascinated by a divine feminine power, astrology, the phases of the moon, tarot, energetic healing, and herbal remedies. 

There. I said it. All of it. And you know what? This is not new information. It is simply information that is no longer important to keep to myself. I have finally let go of the idea that I can control anything that anyone thinks about me by hiding the parts of myself that are most sacred for fear they will be trampled on. If you’re going to think I’m a failure because I gave up on my cookbooks, there’s nothing I can do to change that. If you’re going to think I’m loony because I would rather celebrate the solstice than Christmas and because I feel more connected to God, the Goddess or the Universe on a hiking trail or with my feet in a river, then you’re in the wrong place, invisible audience member. I have already let go of you, and you are welcome to let go of me.

I am letting go, and in that process I am making room for better things to come along: opportunities, people and situations that make my heart sing instead of making me want to hide my head in the sand; adventures that energize me instead of those that suck the life out of me and make me feel like I have to hide who I really am if I want to be loved.

So here’s to letting go, and the lightness of my new existence outside the rules.

Love and light kisses,

Morgan

The Search for Self Worth

“Crazy people don’t sit around wondering if they’re nuts.”

It’s a line from Proof, the play I’m currently in where I play the older sister to a potentially crazy potential mathematical genius, and daughter to a mathematical genius who truly was crazy. It is my job – my character thinks – to gently or not so gently convince my sister to move to New York now that our father has died, so she can be near me, where I can watch her, take care of her and get her help…because I think she’s crazy.

“I think you have some of his talent…and some of his tendency toward…instability,” I tell her.

I am undermining, condescending and even somewhat manipulative. I talk down to her, tell her what’s best for her, try to interest her in the mundane and materialistic world that I want to pull her into, and I treat her like a child who cannot possibly know what is best for herself, even though she’s 25.

Call it what you want. As of last Friday, Mercury Retrograde ended, which is one of three periods a year of a three-week window where astrologically Mercury appears to be moving backward in the sky. According to astrologists, the ability to communicate effectively moves backwards with it.

Whether or not this is true, it’s been a hell of a couple weeks for me. Not only did I find myself misunderstanding and misunderstood, I found myself fumbling around in my head, trying to figure out what my actual perceptions were and what my ego was insisting was the truth – how I was protecting myself and whether I was simply refusing to take the blame for something – many things – that were or weren't my fault.

I know that seems vague, but really the issues at hand weren’t what was at the root of the problem, it was my feeling about them. Was there something wrong with me? Why was I finding it so hard to find my footing; to acknowledge my own role in these situations and yet still be able to recognize that despite my faults I was an ok human being; that these faults did not completely define me?

Let me be clear here: I am not hearing voices, I do not see people who are not there, and I have yet to have anyone tell me that I might actually be courting mental illness. Yet in my own head, I was the sister that I talk down to in Proof. I am Catherine, struggling to find footing, vacillating between truth and fiction, between fighting for normalcy and fighting against lunacy, and finding both sides to be a slippery slope. I found a part of me telling me that there was no way what I was saying or thinking or even feeling could be true; that I am incapable of anything; that I am, in fact, crazy for thinking that my life might work the way I’ve been living it: that it is crazy to believe that I can live a happy productive life in any way, shape or form that I choose.

In the last week, I’ve found myself stuck there: my brain insisting that I am wrong, worthless, while my heart screams that the world is what I make of it; that the world I want does exist, and even if it’s not coming about in the easiest and most comfortable way possible, it is coming about nevertheless.

The other day I went for a long walk that turned into a series of short jogs interspersed with walking. I’ve been wanting to run for awhile; run, or swim: some more active form of exercise than the long periods of walking I’ve been doing. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that my epiphany came about as the result of the release of some endorphins, and it reminded me that it’s my job to take care of myself and do the things that make me feel good, physically and mentally. I was fighting with these two sides of myself as I came back up a long hill, trying to figure out what the problem was, and finally, even though it’s been there all along, even though I had been staring at it in the face, alluded to it constantly and even acknowledged it to some extent, the answer finally showed itself in full glory: I think I’m crazy because I don’t think that I am believable: because I don’t believe me. And I don’t believe me because I am lacking the self worth to believe that I could possibly have anything good to say or offer, even to myself; because, unlike what I had previously believed, low self worth doesn’t mean only that I am lacking in the confidence to know that I are lovable regardless of what I am doing, it also means that I don’t think that my ideas, thoughts, feelings and intuition are worth as much as everyone else’s...not even to me.

(Writer's note: before you panic that I am losing all perspective, please read my last post, Writer's Tourette's, about how I write about my feelings as they happen as a way to release them.)

By realizing that self worth is at the root of the issue, I have finally realized that the answer is not in asking again and again if I am justified in feeling the way I do, but instead in taking the steps to develop the self worth that will help me know that at a deep visceral gut level, without having to ask.

I can now look back at a lot of my life and see it: see this lack of ability to trust myself in situations where I might have been right; perhaps not in how I handled it, but right at least in my feelings about the situation in the first place. I would cast about for the opinions of others and ask them if my view or feeling was worthwhile; made sense; didn’t seem crazy. Every time, they said yes: that I had a reason to feel as I did, that I was right to take the step I had taken, that I had a right to my own happiness. And yet, I still found it hard to believe.

This is not to be mistaken with an egotistical need to always be right. I think for most of my twenties I angrily insisted that I knew the right way that everyone should live and would tear someone down for disagreeing with me. I don’t think I’m there anymore…most of the time, anyway.

I would like to think that the phase I have been in -- where I am struggling to see where the bullshit lies and what I actually believe -- is a step between the angry, Always Right Morgan and the Confident Morgan who can fully accept responsibility for what she did wrong, but also know what she did right, and why neither of those things really matter in the long run of who she is, only how she acts and evolves.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I’m a work in progress. What I know today is that something set me free on that walk: it was knowing that the answer was no longer in asking if I am crazy, it is asking what I can do to improve my self worth to the point that I know when an idea I’m entertaining is the stupidest thing I could possibly act on, the best way I could handle the situation -- not for anyone else, but for me -- or somewhere in between. 

It is being able to trust the gut feeling and the logic, and knowing that it will work out for me if I follow it, because my ideas, my gut feelings, are worth just as much as everyone else’s, and because – ultimately – they need to be worth even more to me.

Love and self worthy kisses,

Morgan

You Can’t Know What You Don’t Know

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Last summer I was working in the kitchen at an ashram in British Columbia, and I got put in charge of hard boiling a bunch of eggs. Someone explained to me how to do it, but I misunderstood, and basically didn’t cook them long enough, then didn’t test one to see if it was done. All of them came back to us from the guests, soupy and raw.

Every time someone mentioned those damn eggs in the kitchen after that, I would leave the room crying. I don’t eat hardboiled eggs, so I’d never made them before, and since I thought I was doing it right, it didn’t even occur to me to crack one open. It was supposedly a fool-proof recipe, but I didn’t do one vital step: put the eggs in the water first, THEN bring it to a boil; once it’s boiling, set the timer for eight minutes.

I beat myself up for days, and beat myself up again whenever we were having hard-boiled eggs and the subject of the raw batch came up. I was much harder on myself than anyone else was on me: the cook in the kitchen that day took responsibility and forgave me; the person in charge of the kitchen was surprised when I brought it up as something that I was still mortified about months later. I was hard on myself the way that I have always been: I was beating myself up for not knowing something that I didn’t already know.

Yes, I should have tested an egg. However, the bigger problem is not even what happened, but how I continued to berate myself for not knowing something I had never been taught. It seems that even though I learned how to hard boil eggs, I am still working on the bigger lesson: accepting that I can’t know something until I learn it, and that  sometimes it’s not an easy lesson.

For years I have been beating myself up for things that I could only learn through experience: that I am not happy in 9-5 jobs; that I need more space than most; that I can’t speak fluent Spanish until I’ve misspoken and embarrassed myself over and over and over again. However, the biggest one that I have learned recently is that I cannot know what the right living situation is until I’ve tried it.

I am getting ready to move for a third time since coming to Panama. For various reasons the places that I have moved into have not been the right places. The hardest part about this for me is that it seems like a great idea when I am planning it out, and yet something isn’t right when I start to settle in. If I were the only one involved in these decisions it would be easier, but it tears me apart to let someone else down. The same thing happened when I went back to Wenatchee after spending the summer serving undercooked eggs to yogis in Canada: I thought Wenatchee was where I wanted to stay, until I was there and I realized it wasn’t.

This ties into a bigger realization that I have had that I try to plan for every eventuality in advance. Although sometimes this can be helpful – like carrying jumper cables in a car – sometimes it limits me, because I am always planning for the worst possible scenario. It limits me because I will only enter a situation if I can guess the outcome, then I beat myself up if the outcome is not one I predicted, and have made plans for.

I miss out on so much this way, invisible audience! How can I fully step into the adventure I am living here if I expect myself to know in advance what I want, when I haven’t ever been in this situation before? How much do I miss if I’m not willing to let myself learn the process without judgment along the way?  A lot. The answer is A LOT.

A friend’s mom told me once that there is a concept in yoga called neti neti. Although when I look up the actual meaning it’s not exactly what I understood when it was explained to me, I nevertheless took much comfort in the original explanation. She told me that neti neti means “not this, nor this;” that the only way to find what I am is by figuring out what I am not.

This is most likely a life-long process, and yet it applies first and foremost to today. Today, I know more than I did yesterday about what I want and need. Today, I am choosing to use that information to build a life that feels comfortable for me. Today, I am working on not berating myself for picking out a brick for my home and hauling it all the way up the hill to put in the foundations only to find that it doesn’t fit. Instead, I will be grateful for the knowledge that the brick gave me, and know that it’s all part of the process of learning to build.

Love and learning kisses

Morgan

Sleeping on the Floor

When I can’t sleep for an extended amount of time, I get out of bed with my pillow and a blanket and lay down on the floor. It almost always works: regardless of how long I’ve been tossing and turning, moving to a different surface does the trick and I immediately fall asleep. After a couple hours – when my arm has gone numb or my back screams at me to wake up – I can haul myself up off the floor, get back into the bed and fall asleep with no problem at all.
Strange, I know. I don’t think that this trick has anything to do with my body craving hard surfaces. I think it has a lot more to do with removing myself from the space I was in and putting myself in a new space. Somehow the shift off the mattress works as a switch on my brain, and whatever it was that was keeping me awake – because obviously it wasn’t the bed – clicks off with the change of location.
You would think that knowing this would have changed how I handled other problems too, but that is not the case. You would think that I would be able to draw some parallels between being able to sleep on the floor and moving out of any other space that made me restless. You would think…and you would be wrong.
It has only recently occurred to me that the things that make me angry or hurt have everything to do with how I handle a situation and very little to do with who hurt me or made me angry. Basically, instead of shooing these people out the door, I could change the way I react to them, or * GASP * tell them how I feel and ask them to stop.
If this seems like a simple concept, you’re way ahead of me in the game of life. I have only just identified my ego as my biggest enemy, and for the first time in my life I actually get it when my dad tells me that you can’t change people, you can only change how you react to people.
But just because I get it doesn’t mean I can follow through with it, or I would be sleeping on my proverbial floor more often. If I got it completely, I would be able to demand more for myself, and stop trying to sell myself short. I would be able to ask for what I need instead of hoping others will recognize what I am worth and treat me accordingly. That approach hasn’t worked so far, so I think it’s time I try a different approach. So I’m getting out of the bed and choosing the hard uncomfortable floor to help flip the switch in my brain, the switch that says I’m not worth something unless someone else has noticed it and said so.
So, instead of waiting for someone else to notice how much I’m worth, I’m going to just tell him or her myself. Perhaps by doing this I can also convince myself that it’s true. Maybe, eventually, I will be able to start sleeping the bed again, because I will have moved it to a new, better, more restful, space.

Love and floored kisses
Morgan