Friends, Romans, Artisans, lend me your rears. I mean ears. Rear end I have enough of. All the same, this is a bit of a proclamation. Thought I'd let you in on a little secret of mine: I've started plurking on a new writing project. It's kinda dishy and fun, but the title is all hush hush for now. Let's just call the project "Diamonds in the Rough."

Inspired by the emails, letters and blogging comments on my site that credit me with a "real world" perspective on spirituality and consciousness, I've decided to put my thoughts into a book, bits and pieces of which will inevitably show up here. Like this one, my first attempt at chapter one. It's just the rough draft, but since the whole point is owning up to all the coal and grime that's part of being a spiritual diamond-in-the-rough, I present it here unedited, with all its jagged edges.

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Chapter One

"I meditate. I light candles. I practice stillness. Still I want to smack someone."

I read this on a post-it note some months ago and am still laughing about it. Yanno, it's so true. In my life, for example, I have many moments of peace and openness. I revel in the appreciation of both small miracles (like the opening of a sunflower) and humongous displays of magic (like walking again after paralysis). I study the lessons of my spiritual teachers like Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, and Abraham and experience the joy and freedom that these teachings gift my spirit. And yet I fear. Many things. I fear that I'm getting older and wrinklier in a society that values youth and immaculate beauty, and that I have 87 bills on my kitchen counter and exactly 87.00 in my bank account to pay them.  I worry that Tink's health is in decline and I'll not know how to go on living without her. I worry how I look in a pair of jeans, how I'll face an increasingly challenging body with no health insurance, and  how Oprah will know which eye to look at when I'm on her show (I have a wandering eye that makes photography and television an almost impossible thing)...and yes, when sitting in traffic on the freeway, bumper to bumper in the summer heat with my AC working overtime but not nearly pumping enough wattage to remove the sweat from my upper lip, the tide pool under each armpit and the Amazonian river running down my thighs, I want to smack someone. Hard. And for good measure I might just wanna dole out a few atomic wedgies while I'm at it.

And then I hear the voices of my teachers in my head. They attempt to soothe the writhing, suffering creature living inside me. "Accept the present moment as if you had chosen it. Make this now your friend." And when I follow this advice I feel much better. Sometimes I even fly. Which makes me marvel: why do I so often get lost in anxiety? Why do I paint dire pictures in my head when I could be creating enchanting ones? Why am I driven to smack the dumb-ass waiter who not only brings me the wrong food, but when I point this out to him, treats me with disdain as if I'd ordered incorrectly, as if I was inconveniencing his very life, as if I was single-handedly responsible for his bad haircut, his strained relations with his father and the incessant hair-ball hacking of his prize-winning Siamese cat? I just know he's spit in my Chipotle Chicken Salad when he returns to set it on our table, so it sits pristine on my plate. I lose my appetite. And now the entire restaurant needs a smack.

What to do? I cannot turn my back on the teachers in my life. Their messages of love and expanse are a life-line, creating a capacity for joy and hope I didn't know I had.  Is this what consciousness does? Is this evolution? A series of lessons which make our old patterns and habits increasingly distasteful until we release them permanently? I dunno. I don't think I'm up for sitting under the Bodhi tree or scrubbing floors in an East Indian ashram in order to attain enlightenment. So maybe this is my task. Maybe life is my dharma, in all its cellulite-inducing anxiety. And if so, how can I pass this test and move onto the next phase? Can I please just study hard, take an exam, and graduate? When does the struggling end and the consciousness begin?

Years ago, when I was in college, I didn't really care about learning. I cared about grades. Give me the syllabus, the books, the schedule and let me at those exams. I aced every single one and when the paper or test was turned in, I promptly forgot everything I'd studied. On paper? A model student. In reality? A short-cutter, a side-stepper, just lookin' for the grade. Not exactly what a University has in mind when it dreams up the competent, courageous students it will one day offer up to society at large. And yet, this is what I did with my college education, and what I'm dangerously close to doing now with my spiritual education. Just tell me what's expected of me, let me memorize it, regurgitate it back to you and then I'm outtie with my 4.0. Only one problem. Spirit doesn't care about test scores and GPAs. Spirit cares about learning, experience, growth.

I just hate that. But I admire it, too. (Maybe Spirit needs a smack?) And in the deepest recesses of my heart, I want to BE it. To live out the poetry in my veins, to touch the essence of the intangible within a life incarnate, to dwell in harmony with my own body, with my state of mind, with my world at large...these desires are bigger than my fears and more powerful than my need to smack. And so I chafe. I chafe at the cellulite on my ass and my disparaging reaction to the cellulite on my ass. And then I remember that my ass is temporary, that my soul is not. And I wonder. Does my soul have cellulite? Does it care how it looks in a pair of jeans? Does it strive for a 4.0? Or is it possible that my soul is glorious and generous, that it loves me just as I am, no matter where or how I am, and that it draws to me the things, events and circumstances I need in order to become the very glory and generosity  dwelling at my core?

to be continued...