The American Dream. (Or Crash? I cannot decide which title.)

I crashed.  Somewhere in between the kitchen dishes and the office stacks. Sometime in between acting as Lead Motivator: cheerleading my budding teen daughters out of bed /off to school on time; and assuming SF Site Directorship for The Art of Yoga Project and diving into a laundry list of deadlines piled up after events and trainings and teaching. Someplace amidst the chaos of my muddled home betwixt the stacks of books for goodwill, heaps of un-hung jackets and corners coated with dust bunnies, I went down.  I tried to look out the window for a shot of pure and fresh and innocent and inspiring nature love and all I could see was a collection of fingerprints, dried raindrops and dust streaks.  Rupa over excitedly urgently nudged me with her nose and eyeballed the front door.

I crashed.  The clothes dryer has died, my cheap Microsoft Word suddenly displayed mysteriously odd polka dots instead of spaces, and my train of thought collided with the juggled bowling balls I dropped.  Hopes, dreams, expectations, fears, current dramas, imagined/unimagined judgments of people I love, demands, decisions, delightlessness!, the weight of my world, it crashed down down down upon me.  And, worse, I felt fat.  Go Outside, my spirit chanted.  I looked up and out the smeary windows as a black cloud forcefully gathered up overhead and squeezed out giant drops of freezing rain.  In May.  I screamed, Rupa hid and I deleted my blog.

Overwhelmence.  It happens.  I live a beautiful, blessed and sacred life yet, overwhelmence happens. And as I write this I suspect a twinge of de ja vu.  Have we been here before?  Yes!  I have, in fact I ought to make Overwhelmence my bud so as least we can play cards during his/her all too frequent visits.  Or what, pray tell, am I excessively doing that invites his/her hot breath on my neck?

It’s simple really.  In fact, that’s just it: Simplicity.  Some have the chutzpa to live the chatterfull, busy, speedy life full of fabulous popping and burgeoning ideas and jobs and moments bursting at the seams with go go go.  Others, like me, dreamed of living off the land in France.  Slowly eating grapes.  Or collecting conch shells in Costa Rica.  Or roaming the windswept beaches of Mexico.  All very very quiet activities. And instead I find myself in media driven and fast paced and materially expensive America, more so, in the Bay Area, in the belly of howling modernity, swirling around with inimitable gas prices and incomparable manic technological ingenuity and intimidating over educated everbodies.  It’s kind of scary.  Yet here I am here I am here I am and mostly, usually I can love the entertainment of it all, the interaction and skimming the edges of potent possibility.  But some days, like now, this reality gathers so much ground speed; collecting bits and pieces of imposing necessity, vagrant ideas, emotional riffraff and oddly shaped fragments of responsibility that my brain, my dear sweet little swiss cheese cerebral membrane that envisaged nothing more complex than mulling over mollusks in Mexico short circuited in the most marvelous of ways.  Crash.

And what to do?  Yes, sadly: unleash upon the unsuspecting husband who unfortunately calls mid morning full of pleasantries.  Yes, walk away from the computer and its dizzying new character space dots. Yes, stuff yet another bag with useless knick knacks and books titled: Chickens in Your Backyard and or California Camping 1997 and toss out 11 year old half-finished paintings and yank out the cardboard box jammed under the desk, overfilled with cords to I-don’t-know-what.  Yes, crack out the Swifter for a quick dusting frenzy, jimmy the broken dryer to serve up one more load that I can heave onto the bed and walk away from and sink to the floor for a little Rupa puppy love scratching.  Yes, return to the laptop, tackle the deadlines, the emails, the phone calls. One at a time.  I even resurrected the deleted blog.  Before I knew it, the skies shifted and I wandered into full sun on the back porch.  I lay myself down on the bench, pretended that it hadn’t missed four years in a row of staining and that I was not in my pajamas at noon or that a few lingering 4 inch pots of saplings weren’t impatiently staring me down,.  Sunshine.  Sweet Sunshine.  I murmured my gratitude as Swamiji taught me, honoring this simple and precious gift of light.

John bravely called back. And gone is the childhusband who had spent years killing me with falsehoods and here was a beautiful grown man smiling at me through the phone not freaking out; and saying, it will all be okay; and here in the tropics of my rainsoaked and lush backyard, I closed my eyes and was peacefully in Mexico.

Completing most of the complicated List and accomplishing Necessary Life I dressed and strolled Rupa down the backroad past fledgling crops and singing birds and beautiful horses; up to my neighbor’s garden where she filled my arms with fresh home grown lettuces and mouth with red raspberries.  Back back back to Simplicity.

And that is that.  Here I am.  Here we are.  In the middle of chaos in the throes of pleasure in the face of pain at the feast of our deliciously divine lives.  Living it.  The American Dream.