37days

Come, let's ride brightly painted inner tubes, you and I

If you have watched TV commercials for the new teeniny microscopic MacBook Air, perhaps you will recognize this song by Yael Naim. Come, let's ride brightly painted inner tubes, play cymbals in a field of sunflowers, sing with a gorgeous Israeli-French accent, and realize that there is a whole big world out there, ripe for the dancing and for the floating. That's real air.

It takes so little...

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. - T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

It really takes so very little to amuse me.

Yesterday, I got an email from a favorite bookstore in town: "we'd like to name a drink after you."

Lest we get too carried away with the sheer excitement of it all and before we give in to an exaggerated sense of self-importance that centers solely on espresso drinks (and before we resort to always speaking of our own self in the third person), it's important to know they are creating specialty coffee drinks not just for moi, but for authors or other people hosting events at the bookstore.

Since I host a "Bridging Differences" book club there on the first Monday of each month, I am One of the Chosen to be Memorialized in Caffeine. Though I suppose "memorialized" is not the right word, since I'm still above ground, but I have a way wicked headache right behind my left eye (is that one the eye to my soul? hope not) and can't think of what the right word would be.

I laughed when I read the email. It's clear to me now. After all those years of seeking, my whole life has been directed to this one moment: The Patti Digh Coffee Drink.

37days book ("Life is a Verb") coming this fall from Globe Pequot Press

Maverick writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman once wrote that "life is a verb." It is a sentiment echoed by the likes of Buckminster Fuller and Kevin Kelly.

And so it is. Life takes action, not wishful thinking. It takes mindfulness and intention. It takes slowing down and saying yes and being generous and being amazed and loving more. It takes getting out of bed and going to see the tiny Ninjas.

Together with artists from around the world who created amazing works of art to illustrate the essays, I'm so pleased to announce that my third book, LIFE IS A VERB: 37 Days To Wake Up, Be Mindful, Find Your Heart, and Do it Now (Before It's Too Late) will be published under the Skirt! Books imprint of Globe Pequot Press in the fall of 2008.

If you'd like to be among the very first to hear when it's available, please complete the form below. I can promise on a stack of vegan pancakes with fresh raspberries that your email address won't be used for any other reason than letting you know when the book emerges, with that fantastic smell of fresh ink and clean, crisp paper we love so much.

Name:
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free forms

N is for now

“Nothing is worth more than this day.” –Goethe

In 2008, I am going to be here now.

When you unpeel it, 37days is all about now, but I find I don’t live in now very often. I live in then, or when, or one day.

I want, instead, to live in Now. This moment. What does that look like? I think it looks like a lot less time on the computer and a lot more time playing Candyland with a four-year-old or making vegan cupcakes with a teenager or raking leaves with Mr Brilliant. I think it looks a lot like paying attention. I think, for me, it looks a lot like writing or being creative every day. Maybe it just looks like breathing deeply every morning before flinging ourselves into the whirling stream of our lives. It is far too easy to be swept into the competing currents.

As Thich Nhat Hanh has written, “Life can be found only in the present moment. The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.”

Pema Chödrön has reminded us that Now is the only time. That how we relate to Now creates the future. That what we do accumulates and that the future is the result of what we do right now.

I asked Billy Collins (you know, we talk constantly) if death is the main chord of all poetry. “Yes, it is. But poetry isn’t a consolation for death, for the reality that you will die. Instead, it is an expression of gratitude that you’re alive. Poetry italicizes experience or brings it into sharper focus. It provides a fuller immersion into life.” Poetry is about seizing the day, but we only need “carpe diem” if we realize we have a limited number of diems.

Becoming Larger Than Our Skin Allows

And no, that title isn't a reference to overeating.

In the U.S., today is Thanksgiving Day (and my friend Karrie Manson's birthday, so a shout out to her for being so powerful that the nation stops when she ages). This year, I'm not spending Thanksgiving at a long table full of vegan alternatives to turkey, but hunched over a computer screen like a madwoman, panicked at my book deadline next week and snarking at my family when they breathe too loudly. What was I thinking?, I'll be thinking, in one of those beautiful infinite regresses of thinking, the fear that emerges from finality, essays congealed into book form.

Soon, I'm sure I'll give in to the overwhelming urge to eat cranberry sauce from a can, as detailed last year this time on 37days,and will pop the Tofurky into the oven. But not before being thankful, and deeply so, for all of you who come here and read my few words and email and comment and hold me up when I'm falling. My deepest thanks.

My glorious friend Sid Jordan sent a Thanksgiving message this morning that I'd like to share with you this fine day. Let us lift each other up.

Becoming Larger Than Our Skin Allows

We seek metaphors
To describe our friendships
But alas, even these fall short of our true emotions
So we joke, tell stories, and hold each other
Accepting the inner weaving of our connections
As part of the evolving tapestry of our lives

What is amazing to me
Is how little it takes to impact another human being
In profound and deep ways
Simply by being present
By witnessing each others stories
By honoring each others thoughts and feelings

It is physically possible to lift each other up
And hold each other under a starlit sky
Enough to feel the power of the universe enfold us
Wrapping us up with simultaneous feelings of love and immensity
Yes, we are only a speck in the whole of things
Yet, our love mingled with the love of others
Is more immense than we can ever intellectually know

Our ability to tap into the collective energy of the world
Allows us to transcend our language
Each of us becoming larger than our skin allows
Each of us finding power
From the source of our humility and awe
But mostly from each other
As our hands work to lift each other higher

-Doc Klein

Let go of the monkey bar

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” - Lao Tzu

Sometimes taking flight takes letting go.

Letting go takes faith.

Faith takes letting go.

It all requires wings.

And so it goes.

As Kierkegaard has said, “Without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith.” Flying begins with a leap of faith. And with someone to catch you when you’re falling, perhaps?

At the end of each year, I ask myself two questions: 1) what do I want to create in this new year? and, perhaps even more importantly,  2) what do I want to let go of?

Always carry a pencil

“What writing is all about is what happens on the page between the reader and the page...What I want is a collaboration, really, with the reader on the page where the reader is also making an effort, is putting something of himself into it in the way of understanding, in the way of helping to construct the fiction that I am giving him.”  -William Gaddis

Not surprisingly (given the inscrutable depth of our relationship), My Personal - Poet - Patti - Laureate, Billy Collins, has spoken directly to me again by ostensibly making a commencement speech, couching his words for my ears in a vehicle he pretends is also for others to hear. This time, he’s talking about marginalia:

“When Nabokov was asked, "Who is your ideal reader?"--he said, "My ideal reader is someone who reads with a dictionary and a pencil." A very literal way of keeping alive our inner student lives, I think, is that simple habit of making marginal notations. When we do that, our pencil acts as a kind of seismograph—to register the mental tremors we're feeling as we read. I'm not talking about the yellow highlighters—that’s a device easily abused—because there is a physical, I think, almost erotic pleasure in just doing that—and, so, there's a tendency to just fill the book and just make it yellow. I'm talking about a slightly more judicious kind of notation that might go on, in which we create a dialogue with the author, and our reading becomes an interaction with that person. Such jottings are a sign of our presence, and the book we hold in our hands becomes, not just The Heart of Darkness, but my reading of The Heart of Darkness—the silent communication and conversation that took place between me and Joseph Conrad.” 

Frame your storyboard

“Not equal to

Not metaphor

Nor standing for

Not sign.” – Minor White

Imagine Beetle Bailey’s surprise.

As Aldous Huxley said, perhaps Earth is another planet’s Hell. And maybe on that other planet, gargantuan people sit down with their oil drum vats of coffee, butter their big-as-car bagels, and open their 12-foot Sunday newspapers to find human Earth lives splayed above the fold as comic strips, our daily living played out for their amusement and edification in frames of our own choosing, and sometimes in boxes we wouldn’t choose—those defined by cancer, leukemia, dementia, racism, jealousy, hatred, boredom, inhumanity, wrong choices, name your fear, your awful regret, get inside that tiny box we draw for ourselves sometimes.

Own your typhoon

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” – Alfred Souza

I found that quote by Alfred Souza in the most-read magazine in my mother’s house many, many years ago – way back in the 80s, that wacky decade of my youth now depressingly the subject of retro parties on college campuses (retro! the nerve!)

Being quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, New York Times, Fortune magazine—all that fluff and business blah-blah was nothing compared to the thrill for my mother when my name appeared in print in Reader’s Digest.

Let go of your legal pad

“The best things in life are not things.” – C. & J. Woods

On Sunday, August 28, 2005, as I cleaned Cheerios off the kitchen floor for the 59^th time, and just after the contents of a 12.5 fluid ounce glass bottle of maple syrup were ceremoniously unleashed onto that same floor by a 36” tall human tornado named Tess, I happened to look out the window into my backyard as I held the small of my back and stood up again. And as I straightened to a full stand and saw the orange and yellow lilies and happy zinnias and Tessie’s bright shoes and a swing set and a little red plastic chair on the deck outside—all in just the right light, that bold rounded yellow kind of light like the good people of Cadiz so often enjoy, it hit me in a rush of physical sensation: I have everything I need. I don’t need anything else, ever.