A New Season

"Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

- Walt Whitman

The days are getting shorter, the light of the day turns to that beautiful goldenrod hue at about 2 in the afternoon, and seems to hang there until it feels compelled to dusk.  Crisp leaves fall from the trees, and there's a brisk breeze that cuts through the heat of the sun or the humidity of the lingering summer.  Soon, smells of woodsmoke will fill the air, the blue mountains that surround my home will light afire with trees of scarlet, yellow, orange and earthy browns.  This is my favorite time of year.  You can almost taste Autumn in the air.  

I ring in the fall like most people ring in the new year.  I feel, with the crisp refreshing breeze of Autumn, comes a new excitement for life, a change with the season.  Each year of my life, thus far, I have felt that, and have had good reason to.

This year brings certain excitement, but unlike years past, this Autumn brings with it a desirous, almost desperate need for change.  

I'm not one to air my dirty laundry in public, as we southern ladies say, but I feel sharing my story with...well, the world...is a way of healing.  Both for myself and hopefully for others who may be going through something similar.

My whole life, I have been, I think, a healthy person.  Around this time of year, I may get the sniffles as the seasons change.  I dose up on vitamin C, fluids and rest, and in 3 days, I've knocked my cold on it's ass.  All of that oddly changed almost a year ago.  I was doing a show at the time, which was emotionally demanding--I hadn't been taking care of myself as well as I could have, physically, and before I knew it, my skin was breaking out in strange rashes, my eyes were swollen and puffy every morning, my glands began to swell, and my energy level plummeted.  Come to find out, the mono virus was rearing it's head in my system, and I haven't felt quite the same since.  Not like myself.  Most recently, I've been dealing with a head to toe outbreak of what I believe is eczema.  I never, ever wish this kind of ailment upon even my worst enemies. I was red and itchy--I've lost confidence, I've lost sleep, which in turn diminishes my appetite, makes me more irritable, motivation, passion, control has seemed to vanish, and, at times, it seems like a downward spiral of bad after bad.  

I'm not in too much physical pain, I've not been deformed, and I am certainly not dying.  But, when your physical world is shaken up, everything else seems to follow suit, and this is not something I have hereto experienced.  My usual normal routine of going about my day suddenly became 'What's wrong?' 'What's this?' 'What symptom is going to pop up today?'  I found my luck, my love, my outlook, my artistic zeal all dimming a bit under the shade of my newly found wonky outlook on myself, my health, and then the world.  The past year has been like riding a strange roller coaster ride that I am ready to get off, but can't quite find the STOP button.  Physically, emotionally, mentally--I feel sort of spent.  The mind, the body, the spirit have dualities of being one but separate: they work together in tandem to create this experience we call life, I think, but ultimately, we are not our bodies, and we are certainly not our thoughts.  I believe we are immortal souls using our bodies as a vehicle through which to gain enlightenment, to elevate our inner workings and our spirits to realize the God within us.  We can pour light and love in to one element of our earthly being (or, on the other side of the coin, pour darkness) and feel the other elements begin to radiate as well.  So, the more I look inward, the more I find myself going, "OK, life...you win.  This is an experience.  I'm learning something here.  This, perhaps, is not necessarily a bad thing."

Fall is here, and I am where I am, and I find myself trying to find myself.  In a good way.  It's as if I've jumped in a pile of leaves, and I'm uncovering the layers again.  I have still not gotten to the bottom of what my body is experiencing, nor I may never, but I've plumbed the depths of my heart and spirit a little deeper than I would have had I had a spectacular year of great health and no hard times.  

I've tried to maintain hope throughout all this.  

Most importantly, this past season, I've learned what to hold on to, and what to let go in this lifetime.  I'm re-examining what I've been told--and because I am left vulnerable by the past month's experience--I am weeding out what, truly, insults my soul and giving myself permission to throw it the f@*% away.  Fear clings, love lets go.  So I'm loving and letting go and asking:  What doesn't serve me?  Am I clinging to this belief out of love or fear?  How can I love more?  How can I see, reveal the love and God-like qualities in every person with which I come in contact?  More importantly, How can I love myself; see myself with new eyes, which, in turn, will lead me to be a better lover all around:  a better lover to myself = a better lover to others, romantically and otherwise = a better lover of life = a more joyous, calm experience in this lifetime.  

I used to find myself going, "How can I get back to before all this?"  "How can I feel like my old self?"  But, our experience here on earth is cumulative isn't it?  We are beings who can't go back in time, but only look and move forward, yet try to maintain an openness to presence.  Some might quote that beautifully bittersweet Joni Mitchell Song, "The Circle Game"

"and the seasons, they go round and round,

and the painted ponies go up and down,

we're captive on the carousel of time,

We can't return we can only look behind from where we came,

And go round and round and round in the circle game."

I get my optimism from my grandmother Pat, and I choose not to look at life as such a round about circle.  We have peaks, we have valleys.  A very wise woman I knew once said, "You know, I never anticipated the journey I've taken to get where I am.  Particularly health wise.  If I were to look at my life as a mountain climb, my path was not straight up, as I often wished it would be.  I started at the bottom, and wound my way around.  I got to the top, but it was a slow, circular journey.  I made it, though."  

I have a confession to make.  I started writing this particular post two weeks ago.  It started as something completely different.  There were days in my very recent past when I felt like I was literally having to pick myself up off of the ground, plant my feet on the earth and take one step at a time, my stride has picked up now.  Even between the time in which I began to write this post to now, my health, my energy, my mood, my outlook has taken a great shift.   I'm looking up to the top of the mountain, and down a little bit below me at where I began.  

Our bodies tell our story.  What story do you tell?  We can change our minds, we can change our bodies, we can change our stories, and we can change our lives.  

I have decided to remove this shell, this armor this hide with which I harbored anger, resentment, hate, doubt, fear, sadness.  It's time to compassionately remove that now.  It no longer serves me to be the person I was meant to be.

I am shedding an old skin.

I am ending one season, and beginning another.

Literally,

Figuratively,

I am making a concerted effort to tediously examine and re-examine all I have been told at school or church or in any book.  I am lovingly dismissing whatever insults my soul.  With this, in Mr. Whitman's words, I think my flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of my eyes and in every motion and joint of my body.  

I am beginning to love the poem of my body again.

Le Papillon - The Butterfly

'Le Papillon,' ink and paper, Pablo Picasso, 1936.

Besides being the name of a very funny looking breed of dog, Papillon means butterfly in French.

Et, voici!

I stumbled across this beautiful line drawing some time during my teenage years.  I think I was looking for a good enough reason to get a tattoo.  I've always said that if I get something permanently etched in my skin, it's got to be a masterpiece of a work done by a master.

Just so you know, I never got a 'Picasso' tattoo, nor probably never will.

Then, I liked it's clean continual line, and the freedom in the ink, done with such whimsy, it seems as if the figure might flutter off the paper.  I appreciated this beauty for the sheer aesthetic qualities, but after all these years, this image still calls to me, and I think it is because of the energetic or symbolic implications behind the image and the title: The Butterfly.

Come to think of it, the butterfly's journey has held me captive since I was of reading age.  Anyone remember this classic?  There's a wonderfully read version recorded here, probably read by a former school teacher.

In this story, the caterpillar boastfully brags to any animal around the pond who will listen "When I grow up, I am going to be something different!"  She meets a polliwog along her tour who is excited for the caterpillar's transformation.  He soon finds, though, like the caterpillar, he will also 'grow up' into something different.  He suspects since the caterpillar is turning into a butterfly, he is going to as well.  After watching the caterpillar wrap herself in the cocoon, the polliwog patiently and excitedly waits to witness his friend's metamorphosis before his own.  When the butterfly emerges from it's wrapping, the polliwog gets so excited, he jumps up and down.  Wait.  Jumps?!  Yes, the polliwog was so enthralled with the butterfly's seemingly conceited metamorphosis that he failed to witness his own.  He had become a frog!  At first, the polliwog turned frog is slightly disappointed.  He thought he was going to become a butterfly, but soon he grows to love his new embodiment. The last few pages of the book shows a new caterpillar boasting of his future change, but the frog is too busy to notice, he is admiring his own transformation in the reflection of the water.

I even remember in first grade getting a monarch butterfly kit in the mail, and watching the caterpillars wrap their cocoons and eventually hatch into beautiful butterflies.  How amazing a transformation from literally one thing to another.

So why Papillon?  Why Papillon Project?

I feel I've reached a time in my life where my physical sense of the world is being challenged through recent rising health issues, which has also forced me to see the world a bit differently from all aspects of my life, be that physical, spiritual, emotional, creatively, professionally...

In the last year, much has been accomplished by yours truly at age 25, and yet, I find myself no where near where I expected to be if someone had asked me to predict my fate a year in advanced.  When I graduated college, a few years ago, I was faced with the very blunt reality that planning will only make your brain feel better in the long run--as far as 'life stuff' goes.  It really does no good, and yet, here I am years later slightly perplexed that my life hasn't unrolled in some kind of linear fashion, right?

I am reframing, as it were, my own perception of myself.  And, as of late, that seems to be happening sometimes on a month-to-month basis.  Like the polliwog's situation in the story, sometimes I feel our society projects the butterfly's outlook on the world.  'When I grow up, I am going to be different.' -- the butterfly knew exactly what she was going to be, how she was going to get there, and the confidence and practical skills, tools, and knowledge it took to get there for herself.  And here's this little polliwog observing and excited for it's own transformation to become a butterfly, too, only to find out that not all pond dwelling transformers sprout wings like a butterfly.  In fact, he became something entirely different.

From a very small age, children now are force fed a path toward success and employment:  go to school, go to college, get job, marry, have kids, retire...let your kids rinse and repeat.  No one ever told me in school that life was entirely and almost absurdly not like the linear line toward retirement that perhaps out grandfather's had.

I wrote in my last post I am learning.  I am learning now more than ever about who I am, and who I am becoming, and who I am becoming...

I let it play like an old, beloved broken record, because aren't we all in constant motion toward becoming something slightly newer than we are now?  Haven't we all heard about the 'Chapters' of our lives?  The person you were when you were 15 versus the person you are when you are 30?  Hell!  Like I said earlier, I feel like I am swapping lenses on a month to month basis!  Like the little polliwog in the story, most of the time, pre-adulthood, we are completely unaware of the various lenses we will look at ourselves and our lives through during each of our lives here on Earth.

I am finding, too, that this reframing can be quite uncomfortable.  As human beings, I believe we are adaptable to many many things.  Unfortunately, one of the many 'limiting beliefs,' and quite frankly, lies, we are told as young humans is that change is, or has to be hard.  It really doesn't have to be, I am learning, too.  You decide how you react.  What it can be is uncomfortable, perhaps...which brings me to my next point about our lovely little Papillon:

It's an odd act--wrapping up in a silken thread, then struggling to break free--and, as that wide-eyed first grader, I recall watching the hatch and seeing the Monarchs struggle, and fearfully asking my teacher, "Is that blood?"  "No," she replied, "the butterfly's coloring drips off sometimes in this process like paint."  Something registered in a younger me, then, that that butterfly's struggle was nothing to create fear in myself about.  In fact, it was something surrounded by beauty--like paint.  I've heard that if you help a butterfly out of their cocoon when they are 'hatching,' really re-birthing themselves, you will actually kill the emerging butterfly in the process.  The struggle is necessary to come out on the other side.

I'm learning that, too.

A friend of mine synchronistically sent this to me today...

A lovely reminder that ten years from now, we may be altogether a foreign person than who we are right now.  I feel like the best way to begin to cope with such a large thought (and this is the only way I plan on seeing things, for now at least.  Note:  I could be wrong, and note: 'tis only my opinion)  But, I think a great way to begin to digest these times of reframing in our lives is to view ourselves with compassion and love.  By way of having compassion toward yourself, I think you will find the compassion contagious for others. Carry grace and love for the great changes that will occur, and hold hope in your heart that, although the path may not be a linear climb, the rough patches make you richer, and realize that good awaits.  Always ahead.

Someone I love very much consistently reminds me, "You can't stop your good, you can only slow it down."

Somehow, I think the butterflies intrinsically know and have these qualities; when they are caterpillars, and when they are butterflies.

I was reminded of all these things and more today while on a walk during my lunch break.  Mother Nature offered a lovely reminder, as Mother Nature so often does when she wants to communicate with my soul.  I stepped out of my dark office and in to the sunlight of the day, and first thing I meet:

Le Papillon.

A Blog? A Blerg!

I did it.  I started a blog.  

"Blerg!" 

As the great Tina Fey so geekily, yet truthfully, coined as Liz Lemon on NBC's 30 Rock, "Blerg" is a verbal denotation of exasperation, perhaps frustration; as Urban Dictionary puts it, Most commonly used in the same context as 'oh damn.'

 And this is how I begin my blogging journey?  Yes!  It's intimidating!  And then I say to myself, "But Prentiss, everyone is doing it..."

Yes, I am one to fall in to peer pressure from time to time.  But only from time to time:

 My upbringing was constantly reiterated with sayings like "March to the beat of your own drum," as my mother swept me out of our peace frog bumper sticker laden Volvo station wagon.  Peer pressure was something I laughed at in those D.A.R.E. classes in the 5th grade where police officers would come to talk to you about the danger of leering drug temptations.  Peer pressure was not in my vocabulary as a pre-teen, OK?  Needless to say, you never found me smoking behind the English portable in junior high before 2nd period, or going into the closet to make out with the smelly, greasy faced 14 year old boy next to me while playing Seven Minutes in Heaven at the first co-ed Halloween party I'd ever been to in my whole life.  I didn't even WANT to play Seven Minutes in Heaven!  I wanted to bob for apples and talk about plays!  (OK, I was a square.)  In 7th grade, my only falling into the peer pressure pool might have been when I bought my first pair of Chuck Taylor shoes, because "all my friends were doing it."   And, I suppose that is a sad excuse for snapping under peer pressure.  I marched to the beat of my own drum.  What can I say?

So you gave into peer pressure now, you might ask?  For a BLOG?

Yes.  To blog.

I suppose the seed of blogging peer pressure was planted several months ago, amongst the often trivial Facebook status updates.  Occasionally, I would come across a friend's blog link.  Being the Internet junkie I am, I would read it.  Literally any friend's I came across. And soon after, I would feel a sense of connection to that friend that I hadn't known before.  No matter my level of intimacy with that given friend, somehow these virtual words on a virtual page connected us, and inspired me beyond belief.  I realize it takes a huge amount of bravery to put personal words on a page and then let someone read them, let alone complex and intimate thoughts for the entire world wide web to see.

Blogging never crossed my mind until many months ago, when my so very supportive boyfriend suggested I start a blog about cooking and household experiment findings I'd been conducting.  I laughed at the notion then, and have been laughing for several months.  Yet, the lingering connection and impact my friend's blogs had on me initially, and their continual resonance as they update with more posts stuck around with a gnawing patience.

The artist in me is shifting, as we artists often do.  The perception I had of myself as an artist is changing into a new permutation.  My creative outlet has been demolished, or broken or shifted with this personal persona re frame, and so the a new outlet must rise, I think.  My perfectionist personality tends to get extremely overwhelmed by decision making, and my previously irregular lifestyle has never been condoning to ritual.  I am learning, however.  About all of these things and more.  I am learning more in my life now, than ever about who I am...and who I am becoming, and who I am becoming.  Much more on all of this soon.  But know out of this:

The muse of the blog struck me.

After my striking, of course I began thinking of trillions of ways to talk myself out of a simple endeavor such as pressing a button to type some words that people may or may not read.  I was resistant, because it was intimidating. Firstly, do I have anything to say to my friends far and wide?  Moreover, do I have anything to say to the world wide web, meaning, the world?  Is what I have to say worthy?  What background do I choose?  What font do I choose?  What do I call the blog?  Who the hell sits around and comes up with font names like Homemade Apple?

You see the vritti, the mind chatter, the monkey chatter as my dad says...the self-doubt, the anxiety, the whirlwind of question and thought has been quieted began with one step and ended with a completion of that step.  I pressed the button.  I began at the beginning.  I quelled those doubts and questions, even for a second, and began something that, I think, is going to bring a lot of solace to my life, and I hope to yours.  I started this blog, here.

As I look back at these collected paragraphs, I think, you mean all that for a blog?  And, even through this first entry, I am finding my voice and saying to myself, "Yes."  "All of that.  And it is OK.  You are allowed that.  You are worthy of that, and more."

You hear that?  I am worthy a blog, DAMN IT!  It is a small start to the awakening of something large.

Now, when I watch 30 Rock in it's last episodes, every time I hear Lemon exclaim, "Blerg!"  I'd like to think that her subtext is as long as this.  My first blog post.  Because, frankly, I think people go on this wild goose chase of doubt and discovery and self-conflict more than they let on, or perhaps even know how to begin to let on.  And, here I am, it's 1AM, I've formatted lots of templates, I deleted my first blog because I spelled Papillon wrong (more on that later), after paragraphs upon paragraphs, (thank you, kind reader, for sticking with it), I've surrendered a bit.

I can breathe a bit deeper.  Here I am.

Here I am:   Blerging...uh...Blogging.