Team Up With the Demons You Fight

Hey yo, just dropping in with a tiny blog to say life has been a flow and I've been going with it quite peaceably. I went on a fun trip with my family and ate my annual allotment of hot wings. HR's been smashing the whole school thing and I'm super proud of him. It's snowing outside, because that happens sometimes in November in the Northeast. I've been listening to Joseph Arthur's Come Back World on repeat repeat repeat. I do this, with music, periodically - I latch on to one album and just play it beginning to end to the point that nearly requires an intervention. The last one to which I attached with a fearsome vengeance was probably The National's Sleep Well Beast a few years back. This one, though, it's just so good and beyond that I can't remember another example of a convergence like this, of a particular album and its overall vibe and meaning lining right up with the place I'm holding down in my life. 

I'm going to be 45 next week, which is a perfectly good age to be. For some reason my brain convinced itself on my 44th birthday that I was 45, so I've had a year to try it on for size and it fits pretty well. I like that it's solidly, literally middle aged. I'm not a betting woman, but based on my genetic roadmap, I like my odds on getting to 90. Operating from that standpoint (and even if I only get one more day, I mean who can say?), I am invested in living out that future as my real--and best version of my real--self. It's taken me a bunch of therapy to realize that for most of my history, I've been pretty closed off, attached to the idea of this perfect image of myself at all costs, and it made me really hard to know. I mean, I didn't really know myself because it was that automatic of a mechanism. I'm emerging from that quasi-person, a control freak with an everyday wardrobe of emotional armor, or I'm trying to be. I've always been loving as hell, I truly adore the dear people I'm lucky to have always been surrounded by in my life, but part of me has always been afraid of the whole picture of love, of loving too much and losing, of not being worthy of being loved as I am, not if people knew the real me. The risk was too big, in my head there were just too many ways it could all go bad and hurtful, and because of this, very few people have ever gotten to truly know me in all my messy human glory. I haven't let them, I haven't trusted them to love me anyway, and that's my loss. Anyway, I've gotten to the point where I can not only identify this business, but to declare enough with it. My goal right now, at its essence, is to be brave enough to be vulnerable. That's it. It's hard as hell, after all these years, to unlearn my automatic patterns of behavior and knee-jerk feelings about myself. I'm ready to level up as a human being.

Come Back World has inadvertently helped me on that journey, not only because the lyrics of the songs are so rooted in connection and forgiveness and hope, but that helps. I got to see Arthur perform the album in its entirety a few weeks back, and that was pretty fucking special. I've been following his career over the past decade, and recently I've started listening to his podcast, Come to Where I'm From, where he talks candidly about recovery and consciousness and unlocking his potential. His entire trip isn't exactly my trip. He finds freedom in discipline to the point where my unapologetically decadent ass can't relate, and he operates from a spiritual place that makes me wary. I appreciate that he and his guests are so open to conversation, even in disagreement, and following him on social media has introduced me to the practice of Ho'oponopono, which is probably the closest I'll ever get to praying: I love you. I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.  Like I said, I don't consider myself spiritual, but the energy behind the words have become a mantra to me - saying them, even silently, puts forward the intention to keep humility, gratitude and love to the forefront, and to keep trying when I fail. It helps me every day, in a lot of ways. And Joseph Arthur is just a good musician with a ridiculously prolific career and I recommend checking him out.

Man, you'd think someone who has has been publishing an exhaustively detailed chronicle of the contents of her own navel for the past two decades would be in better touch with herself from the jump but in the immortal words of Ice T, SHIT AIN'T LIKE THAT. Apparently.

I'm looking forward to the potential of Dawn: The Next 45, and I hope you'll be around to see it unfold.  

Comments

[Megan]

Happy (almost) birthday. And I just want to take a moment to say that I think you ROCK! I think you are a hella talented writer and I just want to put it out there that one day when you get published and you are doing a book signing and I come up with my book and give you the special online wink from our days back in d-land I will hopefully get an extra exclamation mark when you sign my copy! And so far my 2 months experience in of being 45 isn't so bad :)

[Dawn Emerman]

You are the sweetest, thank you so much! XOXOXO

[penelope]

my eyes carry old words.
soft as clay pulled from
ought-clear nocturnal streambeds
which run dream-swift.
flotsam of the past,
glance and patter like butterfly 'lashes,
and which even in piecemeal and dream-logged
drip nectar,
emulsed by years' longing,
clear and pure and deep.