Cynthia Harrison's Blog, page 34

Last Dance

I’ve had so much fun reviewing for Ali on A Woman’s Wisdom, but alas, my sweet tenure there is at an end. I currently have three books in various stages of coming out…one into the world and two out of my head onto the page. The stars tell me (and a psychic too) that I need to get out into the physical plane more and although I love my cozy place in the social media sphere, it seems these boots are made for walking.

Still, my last review is for a bone-shaker of a book. I just loved it. One of my favorite genres, rock and roll. Be it memoir or fiction, all things rock really make me want to put on my make up and go out to a club for some dancing. This one Welcome to Groove House by Jill Meniketti, herself an honest-to-stars rock wife and manager, blew me away. It’s gritty and more real than some of the memoirs I’ve read. Read on…

Happiness & Gratitude

If you’re looking to boost your personal happiness by 40 percent, this series of posts, taken from tips researched at UC Berkeley, just might do the trick. I’m only on #4, gratitude, but have already noticed a general uptick in my mood. Gratitude is a habit that can only help. Begin every day with a big thank you list, maybe even before you open your eyes. I’ve been taking note of gratitude for many years, and one thing I’ve figured out is that the less happy you feel on any particular day, the more you need to find something to be grateful for.

What we are grateful for is such an individual thing, so personal, But it’s universal, too. We in the USA have a couple of precious things to be grateful for this week. Our courts have saved Obamacare (again) and made marriage legal for everybody. Decent health coverage and the right to love. Most of us are grateful our corner of the world is changing in positive ways.

So thanks America, because frankly, I have not been feeling super-grateful these days. It’s been tough going with the knee and the shingles and the pain and the crutches. Yet somehow gratitude wedged in to every corner of my despair, making space for happy. Maybe because I have permission to walk in the world again (without crutches) come July 1. That’s only a couple of days from now. Then a few days after that my Seattle family is coming to visit. See heart overflow with gratitude like a geyser.

The highly individual thing I’m really grateful for this week is the current book-in-progress. I wasn’t sure until yesterday I could manage what I wanted to do. Change setting. Change genre. Change tone. Change a character who has been with me for a few books now. Huge ask but I wanted to do it, really had that on fire desire to create this new thing that has been in my head for over a year now, have been aching to start the new story but the thing was just not flowing.

The problem was Paxton, an important character who would not let me in. Not even an inch. I thought, I stewed, I brainstormed. I simmered, I researched, I assembled a collage. Finally got a big hit of that feeling I’m chasing. The collage is pretty. I can’t stop looking at it. It makes me feel so good and this is even before words:) Somehow pictures help me draw out the words. It’s a mysterious process. I look through dozens of magazines and tear out imagines that call my name. I don’t know why a watch from Shinola called my name, but it did and into the stack of images it went.

I’m so grateful to that collage because yesterday I wrote pages and pages and felt that on fire inspired feeling that is the true reason I write. For me, it’s all in the process. Cracking Paxton’s code. Now I think I can write this book. Another good feeling. Happy, part four.

The fifth happiness booster on the list is Keep Friends Close which has not been a thing I’ve been doing lately. When I’m in pain, I isolate. So…the pain is leaving (thanks and goodbye!) and the peeps are gonna be hearing from me in the next couple of weeks. A lot.

Tagged: collage, desire, gratitude, happiness, love, on fire inspired, writng

Been Reading

Summertime and the reading is easy. I have a TBR pile a mile high, some from favorite authors, some new but interesting looking stories, one from a writer pal, and, once a week, I read an indie title sent to me from book blogger Ali who owns A Woman’s Wisdom. This week I discuss a fun summer read with serious consequences for the entitled and glamorous heroine.

Tagged: e-books, Gossip & Inspiration, reviews

Happiness & Grudges

Despite the dubious math involved, I’m on a quest to kick my happiness factor up a few points using a list from Mindful magazine. Really have been noticing the little joys that surround me but will refrain from mentioning all of them because that would just be bragging.

So, DITCHING GRUDGES was an interesting exercise. I made a list of all the people I held grudges against. They are usually front and center somewhere, so I didn’t have to think long or hard about it. 14 people, some of whom I have held grudges against for several decades. Nobody holds a grudge like I do. I know this. I’m not proud of it. But I am trying now to just stop it already.

14 isn’t that many. I figured the number of people who have done me wrong would be much higher. I have likely forgotten some folks. These others on the list–I’ve done a lot of work on “forgiving” each and every one of them. Many of them more than once. Forgiving works, for awhile. Then up comes the thought “If he hadn’t done that to me…” or “If she had only….” and I start thinking of the ways this person made my life so difficult and sad. And the grudge is reborn, like a weed in spring.

And you know how stubborn weeds are when you try to pull them out at the roots. But I did a good mental pruning of my life’s garden, and all the grudges have been burned like bad bridges. I learned a few interesting  things along the way. Like this: every person I held a grudge against had disrespected me in some major way. And they never apologized. Not even did they fail to say sorry, they pretended as if there was no need to do so, and in some cases, projected the blame back on me.

So, yeah, I can feel that righteous grudge juice stirring. But no. Down the drain it goes. I’m done with that. What else I discovered: anyone formerly on the list who has passed did not make the last list. (And it will be my last list, if not my last forgiveness session.) It must be impossible to hold a grudge against a dead man. That surprised me. And gave me faith. In exactly what, I don’t know. The power of death to transcend and erase all the silly grudges of life? Or how about: What really matters at the end is not the grudges you hold but that letting go of the ugly stuff is an act of grace. In my case, bestowed by unknown angels, because I did no “work” to release those grudges as I am having to do with the living ones.

The “work” for me meant a long session of thought and writing and forgiving. When I feel a grudging thought pop up (and a few have since I started this grudge-begone business) I just think “I forgive you, and I forgive me too, for not being able to let this go before now.” Quick and effective. I can feel the happiness increase as the weight of those grudges slides off my shoulders.

Another lesson learned while drawing up the (now extinct) grudge list, a few people I really love who hurt me bad were nowhere on the list. Probably we had an unpleasant verbal altercation or six. Difference was, those people loved me back, we talked things through, we made it okay. Turns out I’m pretty easy as far as grudges go. That delighted me just a little. I thought I was a way bigger bitch. Just don’t hurt me or hate me then leave me hanging on.

Truth is, haters gonna hate, I’m not always gonna be everybody’s best beloved, and nobody says I gotta hang with that grudge. I can be like a breeze and just blow it off. Done!

Happiness tip #3 is GET MOVING and I don’t mean out of town, though that might help some people. I am still banned from most exercise while my knee repairs itself, but I have been doing some easy floor stretches and other things that don’t involve my precious left knee.

Happiness tip #4 is GIVE THANKS and I know I can use some help in that department. Got any good ways to give thanks? Please let me know, in comments or email or phone call! I’ll post whatever I come up with in a couple of days:)

Tagged: angels, grudges, happiness

Homemade Happiness

When it comes to happiness, we are in charge. 40% of our happiness comes from things we can do to keep it alive. I’m usually pretty cheerful but it has been a dire year. With some beautiful highlights, but no way 40%.

Yet, according to Barbara Graham, our culture promotes the idea that happiness is a given, and that most people believe there’s no reason why folks can’t be happy all the time–unless there’s something wrong with them.

I never believed that. When I was young and cynical I was taken with the idea that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation” and women got an extra spoonful. As I matured and designed life the way I wanted it to look, I figured I got it right about half the time. That seemed fair: 50/50 equal measures of suffering and joy.

Now math is not my subject, but if i automatically have 50% happiness and I can add 40% more, that means  the happiness in my life shoots up to 90%. Well, wouldn’t that be nice right about now? I really want to get off these crutches, stop dealing with medications and pain and sleeplessness, and just be ME again.

UC Berkeley has an entire department devoted to the study of happiness (I think I would be 100% happier had I graduated with honors from that school) and they put together a sort of top ten list of things to do to increase the happiness quotient. Let’s see. Right now, honestly, I’m at about 30% (with zero being dead). This is up from 20% yesterday when I spent yet another day having blood drawn at the doctor’s office.

So here’s my plan. Do those ten things on the list and get 70% happy. I can totally live with 70% happy. The first thing on the list is to SAVOR LIFE’S JOYS. “Pay close attention to life’s pleasures and share them with others.”

All I have to do is look in front of me to see one of my favorite pleasures: my laptop. I don’t know what my happiness numbers would be without writing, oh wait, I do, because some days in the past couple of months I’ve been too sick to write. So here I am with my best pleasure. And next to me: a cup of tea. Nothing beats a cup of tea. I like Stash Black Breakfast with a splash of almond milk. And almond milk?! Thank you whoever thought of that stuff. Regular milk and I don’t agree, soy milk is just okay, but almond milk is like a sweet dream.

Seems I don’t have to reach far to get that happiness thing heading higher. Next up? DROP GRUDGES. Give me a few days for that one as I have a longish list. But I will be back and will send progress on my health and happiness for the next ten posts. Want the complete list now? I read it in the June issue of “Mindful” magazine. Page 49. And there’s another of the joys I savor, reading and sharing what I read:)

Tagged: happiness

Dreams of You

I don’t know what your cover looks like yet. I don’t know in which month of this summer or possibly fall you will appear. I’m not sure of your reception in the wider world. I don’t even know what I’m going to do to help you make your way in an overpopulated book market. All I know is I’ll do my best and muddle through.

Yes! I signed the contract for my third Blue Lake novel and I’m in that happy La La Land before edits arrive but after the deal is done.

I’d rather think about the book I wrote than the one I’m writing, and that’s the problem. I’m late on my pages for the critique group. All was fine and dandy, I had a swell idea for chapter three, I even wrote out the biography of my bad guy. Then I went and wrote myself into a corner. It happens. I thought about how to fix that. And then my editor wrote and my mind went to the the appealing thought “finally…a trilogy!” and then my brain started making appointments for a good head shot for the blog and maybe some new business cards and possibly a book party.

Meanwhile book number eleven, the book that is different, the book that I am writing for my dad because he loves mysteries, the book about my real town where bad things happen, the book that is my homage to Elmore Leonard, the book that follows one of my favorite characters into a new life. That book. It ran out of gas.

I know I need to get BIC and crank out a better chapter three. My critique group expects it, for one thing. For another, should I really be planning a book party for my tenth book? Why not? I think it’s time. In fact, I’d like to change the way I do business completely and instead of writing the next book I’d like to change things up and come a Public Relations Expert full of Promotional Mojo. I’d like to be that instead of a writer, I think. I know just the project I can publicize.

It will be so cutting edge they’ll have to invent new scissors.

Cage of Pain

Imagine an old-fashioned corset with whalebone insets. The different thing about this corset is that sharp teeth have been embedded into the whalebone and pierce the skin of the person wearing it. That is what I experienced early in my week-long (so far) trial by shingles. Now it sort of feels like I have ten broken ribs and every so often a random one tries to poke through. This is a vast improvement, although I still cannot move without pain, breathe without pain, exist without pain.

I am not a person who deals efficiently and stoically with severe pain. Yet I have had to endure it, because OTC pain relievers like Motrin do not touch this pain. And my body has no tolerance for most opiates. They make me very ill and the last thing a person needs when her ribs feel broken is to be heaving over a toilet bowl.

Day 6, yesterday, the pain began to subside. Either that or my doctor finally found a pain pill that semi-works. The course of anti-viral I’ve been on for a week is almost done. So, IMO the pain should be almost gone. It’s not. It feels like this will never be over. I have no idea how people who have medical conditions that keep them in pain all the time cope.

If this becomes chronic, I will be looking into medical marajuana and moving to a state with legal euthanasia. I’m having a difficult time reading, can’t write for crap, and even talking on the phone hurts. I can’t even sit in my favorite reading chair. All I can do is lie on the sofa or tuck into bed while listening to Ainsley McLeod’s soothing voice discuss karma, reincarnation, spirit guides, and how past lives impact our present existence. That guy is the best medicine.

Before the shingles descended, I was already having sleep issues, but they were passing. I was getting better. Now, I get maybe two hours of sleep a night and writhe in agony the rest of the time. Poor Al. I should move upstairs for the duration. But, you guessed it, I can’t climb a stair. However, I have hope. A new sleeping pill got me 7 hours of shut eye last night. It’s amazing how much better I feel just for having finally gotten some sleep.

Ironic how as I begin to feel better my doctor hits on the correct meds. The other thing bringing me so low isn’t ironic and it’s not bad karma but damn you know I just spent a month not walking much. The knee thing was not a world of hurt like this, but still, I was pretty much immobilized. And so fate or the universe or some cosmic trickster adds another week, and this one with a deadly sting. Probably I am overdoing the drama but think I said, I’m no good with pain. Perhaps in a past life I was tortured in that room in the London Tower where you can never sit, never stand, never lie down.

I feel broken. It’s hard to believe I will ever be whole again. I was able to keep positive for more than a month, visualizing getting well, climbing my mountain, but shingles makes me feel like I’m falling apart. So my advice to you is get a vaccine for shingles. Especially if you are over 60. 20% of the population over 60 will get the shingles virus. As I just explained, it is a picnic crawling with biting ants that cover your entire body inside and out.

If you don’t get the shot, here’s what to be aware of so you can nip this fucker in the bud. First thing I noticed was an itch on my torso on the right side. I even asked Al to take a look for me. “Do you see anything?” He didn’t. The day after that, I thought I pulled a muscle in that same spot because my side really hurt. Bad. And three little bumps popped out. “Mosquito bites,” Al said. He put some Benadryl on the spots. “But isn’t it weird that they’re right where I pulled that muscle?”

I couldn’t do much that day except meditate and listen to Ainsley. I asked my spirit guides if they could just tell me what was wrong. Al thought it might be appendicitis, but we Googled it and I didn’t have any of the symptoms. Still, something was clearly very wrong. My guides had no answer at the time I asked. That’s how it happens sometimes. Sometimes I get an immediate answer and sometimes it comes later. (If the word “guides” freaks you out, substitute “angels” ~ basically same thing.)

Next morning I woke up and there were more bumps marching in a belt pattern across my torso. “Shingles” appeared in my brain. Thanks, guides. (Honestly, this practice works. Whether it be intuition or angels or guides or good sense, if you have a tough question, ask for the answer. You’ll get it every time.) I made an appointment with my doc that same day and quite possibly saved myself some time in that cage of pain. The quicker you catch it, the sooner you get on the path to recovery. Yes it’s a road filled with thorns, but I gotta believe it leads back to radiant health.

Full Moon in Cynthia

Wasn’t it a glorious full moon the other night? I took my friend Ali’s advice and lay my crystals out on the window sills to give them a hit of moonglow energy. Here is a tarot card of the moon featuring moon goddess Cynthia. She is sometimes called Diana Cynthia, but most often, Artemis. Cynthia comes from the Greek, from the mountain where Artemis and her twin brother Apollo were born of Greek God Zeus and immortal Leto, on the tiny island of Delos in the Aegean Sea. Zeus as usual was trying to keep his shenanigans secret from his wife Hera.

Hera figured out what was going on and barred Leto from giving birth on any land and because Delos was so tiny and not attached to the ocean bed, Leto was able to deliver her twins there. Later, a temple was erected in Artemis’s honor and Delos became a spiritual center of the ancient world. The name of that mountain in Delos where Artemis and Apollo were born is Cynthus (Kynthos in Greek) and thus the goddess is sometimes given the name Cynthia. You don’t often hear it, that’s for sure. Like Leto herself, Cynthia fades into the background.

A high school course sparked my interested in mythology even before I looked into one of those “what your name means” books and saw to my utter surprise the title “moon goddess” next to my name. I would have thought Cynthia meant “scullery maid” or possibly “milk maid.” Nothing so grand as a goddess. I of course never brought this connection up in college when I studied Greek and Roman literature, history, and philosophy. In academia, the moon goddess is Diana or Artemis. Cynthia is the unnamed one. I was content with that until I read a memoir by Sue Monk Kidd called The Dissident’s Daughter about Kidd’s break with mainstream Christianity in favor of goddess worship. Kidd, like so many before her for thousands of years, took a pilgrimage to Mt. Cynthus in Delos.

As I read of this trip, I felt a yearning to take the pilgrimage myself. But at the time my life was busy with teaching and writing and I never imagined I’d have the resources for such an endeavor. I could only look a little deeper into Cynthia. Pretty much all I know is the name is derived from the mountain and somehow mountain and moon formed a bond that the ancients honored by bestowing Cynthia the title of moon goddess.

I like that Cynthia was a bit elusive; she’s a secret. As Artemis is called the huntress, I too hunted down my namesake through the years, certain only of the fact that I possess a secret goddess name and I should see what I might do to live up to it. I’ve never held a bow and arrow or seen a unicorn. Still, the honor and mystery of my name has grown on me to the point where I suggested to my husband we travel to Greece. To Delos. To climb Mount Cynthus. And to my surprise and gratitude he said yes. I expect I will find something at the top of that mountain, something that has been inside me all along will spring forth and reveal its secret to me.

Either that or I will just have a nice view and tired legs. Oh, and the trip of a lifetime.

Tagged: artemis, cynthia, Delos, diana, greece, moon goddess, Mount Cynthus, mythology

Sweet Love

I don’t read a lot of romance these days, but this one by Helen Pollard reminds me what I’ve been missing. I talk about her sweet (that means no sex before love! how refreshing!) romance on A Women’s Wisdom today.

Tagged: Helen Pollard, Holding Back, novel, reading, reviews, romance

On Fire Inspired

When I first started getting my special words, those ones that describe exactly how I want to feel, those words that resonate deeply for me, I was in a weird place. I had just started a two week trip thousands of miles from home and almost before I began I injured my knee to the point that I couldn’t walk. So there I am at a nine-hour Desire Map workshop, doing the things I needed to do to go deep enough to find the right words.

Not all of them stuck, but a couple did. The first word I came up with was content and another one was present. I like the fact that both these words have double meanings, even though for “content” I mostly mean “at peace with the present moment” and for “present” I mostly mean “be here now.”

It was no accident that I chose those words. I had to find contentment in the present reality. On vacation with an injury that makes it impossible to walk through an airport, difficult to be on an airplane, and just a plain old pain in the ass, really, if you want to know the truth. I wanted to feel content with that and present with that. And guess what? I did.

The Desire Map workshop kicked off my vacation, and it’s a very good thing, as my usual way of behaving when something goes horribly wrong is to be a big baby, stay in bed, and pull the covers over my head. I really couldn’t do that as the whole purpose of my trip was to visit family, including a new family member who had only recently landed on the planet. Also I was staying with my kids for part of the trip and you can’t stay with people and hide in the bedroom. I needed to be present and content.

And thanks to Laura, I was. I still am. Oh and I’m still laid up, too. It’s been exasperating and enlightening, relaxing and irritating. But I have been most content to be present with these passing feelings, focusing instead on how I want to feel, my core desired feelings as Danielle LaPorte calls them.

Not being very mobile has enabled me to enter deeply into the work laid out in the Desire Map. I have refined my words, dropped a few, added others. One word I did not have when I started naming my core desired feelings was something to express the way I feel when I write or do other creative things. “On fire inspired” is kind of an antonym of “content” but I wanted a balance of both. So I added On Fire Inspired to my words.

I am not sure why I can’t just be satisfied with a more simple “inspired.” I only know that I am not. So On Fire Inspired it is. And then I had to add balance which has been a big word for me for many years. I’ve come a long way finding my balance, both literally through yoga and figuratively through meditation. So I wanted that word in there. My words actually kind of make sentences. I even did three of them like a math problem a few times. “On fire inspired + content = balance”

My other words make a sort of sentence too “authentic present love.”

It’s obvious why I didn’t feel the need to be “on fire inspired” on vacation. I was taking a break. Filling the well. And then I had other things to deal with…like remaining present and content. I played around with using a word to signify radiant health or some such thing, but then I thought, no, “content” covers that. If I feel pretty good in my body, then I am content. I am healthy if I can radiate authentic present love.

Anyway, that’s the picture at the moment. The thing about the words is they can change anytime I feel like they need to…and when I got back home, and back to writing my novel, I needed to feel, I  really missed that feeling I get when writing. It’s my favorite feeling in the world (except maybe love but then it is a kind of love so never mind) … what was the one perfect word? The way I feel when I am flowing in the writing or some other project that inspires me is too big for one word. When I got “on fire inspired” I didn’t care if it broke the rules. I was keeping it.

It made me feel good just to have those words in my list. And something else happened when I added “on fire desire” to the words that describe my core desired feelings. I got what this whole Desire Mapping thing is about on another level. Feelings first, then experiences that bring those feelings on in a heady rush. If I am not feeling on fire inspired when I write (I have been experiencing some boredom in the old writing mode) I know that I need to move to a different experience because I love feeling on fire inspired and I need to feel that way every day for a few hours before I come down to content and balanced.

I realized there are other things I can do that create that same feeling. If I’m writing and I’m not there, I can find something else that will get me moving in the direction I want my feelings to go. It can be something as simple as creating a collage or as complicated as cleaning out the pantry. So that’s why I’m blogging today instead of writing the next chapter of my book. Because I thought about this post before I wrote it and I felt that feeling… You got it: on fire inspired!

Tagged: CDFs, core desired feelings, Danielle LaPorte, Desire Map, Laura Zera