Marilyn Jaye Lewis's Blog, page 4
December 12, 2010
No bananas, no toast, not even a frozen waffle
OMG! What the hell was I thinking of yesterday when I didn't manage to go across the fucking street and get some groceries before night descended???
Now, here it is morning, and dark and rainy and cold out there, and I'm still in my comfy Christmas PJs and my incredibly snuggley black fleece robe (the key -- when you're a gal of my height -- is to wear large-sized men's robes! They are the greatest! So roomy and the sleeves are long enough for my very long arms!). Anyway, nothing at all about this scenario is screaming: "Hey! Go over to the store now and buy some food!"
Grumble, grumble, grumble. (That's me talking. If it were my tummy talking, it would be "rumble, rumble, rumble." Learn the difference! It might come in handy one day!)
Anyway. Yesterday, I stayed mesmerized watching the DVDs of The Singing Detective . The BBC TV series, not the Hollywood movie version (Robert Downey, Jr.). Although, I must say, I really really loved the Hollywood movie version but that was sort of the bite-sized version of the original BBC version of The Singing Detective (with Michael Gambon). And what strikes me most, at my current lofty age, and not to downgrade how awful it must be to suffer from that disease he suffers from in the story (a type of severe & horrifying psoriasis that also causes severe arthritis), I started to see how similar that character's world was to my own and it was kind of, well, creepy.
Being a writer is already such a hopelessly internal existence. You are always observing, watching, crafting, processing. And then add to those qualities, being an introvert, as I am.... Well, jeez. In so many ways, The Singing Detective really is an accurate reflection of how it feels to be trapped inside of "being me."
Stuck behind my eyes (& heart). Always watching, always thinking, always wondering & remembering. Always trying to craft "life as I see it" into a story that makes sense even as it continues to play out in front of me. It never, never stops. I even, of course, do it in my dreams. I guess we all do that part, right?
Well, I guess the whole mood of yesterday -- even though I chatted on the phone with Valerie, a couple times, really. And I did my yoga, I bathed, you know; I fed myself and played with the cats. I wasn't in some paralyzing emotional coma, or anything. But I guess a sort of malaise settled over me that kept me returning to the TV and hitting PLAY and watching more of The Singing Detective. I got sucked into that energy and I just never got out to the store.
Now, here it is morning, and dark and rainy and cold out there, and I'm still in my comfy Christmas PJs and my incredibly snuggley black fleece robe (the key -- when you're a gal of my height -- is to wear large-sized men's robes! They are the greatest! So roomy and the sleeves are long enough for my very long arms!). Anyway, nothing at all about this scenario is screaming: "Hey! Go over to the store now and buy some food!"
Grumble, grumble, grumble. (That's me talking. If it were my tummy talking, it would be "rumble, rumble, rumble." Learn the difference! It might come in handy one day!)
Anyway. Yesterday, I stayed mesmerized watching the DVDs of The Singing Detective . The BBC TV series, not the Hollywood movie version (Robert Downey, Jr.). Although, I must say, I really really loved the Hollywood movie version but that was sort of the bite-sized version of the original BBC version of The Singing Detective (with Michael Gambon). And what strikes me most, at my current lofty age, and not to downgrade how awful it must be to suffer from that disease he suffers from in the story (a type of severe & horrifying psoriasis that also causes severe arthritis), I started to see how similar that character's world was to my own and it was kind of, well, creepy.
Being a writer is already such a hopelessly internal existence. You are always observing, watching, crafting, processing. And then add to those qualities, being an introvert, as I am.... Well, jeez. In so many ways, The Singing Detective really is an accurate reflection of how it feels to be trapped inside of "being me."
Stuck behind my eyes (& heart). Always watching, always thinking, always wondering & remembering. Always trying to craft "life as I see it" into a story that makes sense even as it continues to play out in front of me. It never, never stops. I even, of course, do it in my dreams. I guess we all do that part, right?
Well, I guess the whole mood of yesterday -- even though I chatted on the phone with Valerie, a couple times, really. And I did my yoga, I bathed, you know; I fed myself and played with the cats. I wasn't in some paralyzing emotional coma, or anything. But I guess a sort of malaise settled over me that kept me returning to the TV and hitting PLAY and watching more of The Singing Detective. I got sucked into that energy and I just never got out to the store.
September 29, 2010
The art of looking in a better direction
The art of letting go hinges on the constant awareness that there is always another direction I can be looking in.
Normally, I choose to look in the directions of abundance, hope, offerings of love -- or, best yet, in the direction where signals are coming from people, whoever they might be, who clearly want to forge their positive energy with the power of my own fast-moving-energy stream. It's not always easy to look in that direction. Sometimes the people who might confound us or disappoint us for whatever reasons, seem to be sending out a more powerful beacon and I can't stop looking at it -- do you know what I mean? So it takes discipline, I guess, to form the habit to look in the direction of the beacons being sent out by people who are offering something more uplifting and creative. Luckily, in my life (and I thank God & the Universe for those people every morning when I light my prayer candle and pray) there is always an abundance of people offering me something uplifting and creative if I take the time to recognize them. What's more is that sometimes if I look really hard, I can even see what's uplifting and creative in the offerings from people that initially look like just the opposite.
Yesterday, I was really, really tired. And even though I'd had a really nice day wandering around with my Uncle, we started talking about things like choices that people do or don't make, or the judgment they choose to not exercise as the years fly away from them and they wind up just repeating the same patterns over & over, never really getting down to the business of living their lives fully, and I wound up just feeling really tired & burnt out by people and all these choices they do or don't make. I don't know about you, but for me, feeling really tired (on every level) can be an excellent breeding ground for feeling really hopeless, too, especially when my wee bonny head is getting ready to hit the pillow.
I know I was doing battle in dreams all night long, trying to regain the upper hand over all those feelings of hopelessness. It's just a matter of choosing a different thought; of looking in a new direction. But sometimes, I am so tired that I can't figure out what a different thought might be or: Where is this other direction I can look in? The seemingly simple "better" thoughts become covered in thick molasses, you know? It's a struggle to get to them but I keep plowing on.
Now that I'm single again & sleeping alone, the cats are in the habit of waking me at 4 AM to be fed. However, the upside of that bit of ridiculousness is that, when they wake me, I am always in the throws of some highly symbolic dream -- the stage of dreaming that would be impossible to recall otherwise b/c it is just too symbolic and unrelated to our usual grasp on reality. I think that the dreams happening at that deep level of consciousness give us vital information about how reality works, even though I can't understand it for the life of me. Still, I do believe that on some deep level, it has profound meaning. So I've been lurched awake at 4 AM by cats so many days running now (hence the reason why I am really, really TIRED b/c I do not go back to sleep -- I light prayer candles instead, and I meditate, I do affirmations & visualizations, and I focus on where I want my life & my relationships to be going), but my dream notebooks are filling with details of logic-defying dream information b/c I can reach for the flashlight, grab my pen & my dream notebook and start scribbling the dream recollections among the chaos of all those crazy cats meowing and rubbing up against me; it all stays fresh. It's kind of exciting!
This morning, I woke in this manner, and I was well aware of how unhappy I'd felt when I fell asleep last night (those feelings that my career was eternally stalled, or that the soul mate was steadfastly refusing to look in my direction, or that people are so bogged down in their own unhappiness that all they will ever do is disappoint us, etc.), but I grabbed my flashlight and my pen & my notebook, and amid the chaos of the crazy cats, I wrote down this: "I was somehow constructing these archways made of flowers. Each arch was a different color; one was green, one was blue, one was yellow. I was doing this to overcome some type of severe depression. My Source energy was helping me construct these colorful archways with the power of my mind. The voice told me that doing this would lift me up above the rooftops but keep me below the clouds."
How cool is that?
And you know, after I snapped off the flashlight and got out of bed to feed the cats, I started remembering that yesterday I had received some new contracts in the mail from my French publishers. And yesterday, two people wrote to me and told me how much they loved my erotica. And yesterday, someone hired me to do some editing work. And yesterday a writer-friend in Los Angeles wrote and asked me if I might like to partner with him and write screenplays. And yesterday a new writer I'd met over the weekend sent me a really lovely poem she had written last fall. And yesterday one of my best friends, Peitor in Los Angeles, texted me on my cell phone to tell me something funny that Charo had just done while he was in the studio producing a new record for her. And yesterday, my agent emailed me an interesting article about memoirs from the New York Times. And yesterday, someone emailed me a recent photo of Johnny Depp wearing a tee shirt that had a picture of Patti Smith on it -- a double-hero day! -- reminding me that I still have heroes out there who are still fighting the good fight, whom I cherish & adore.
Wow. And that was all just yesterday. So somewhere during the night, while I was learning how to construct those colorful mental archways made of flowers that would lift me up above the rooftops but keep me below the clouds, I mastered the art of looking in a better direction.
Normally, I choose to look in the directions of abundance, hope, offerings of love -- or, best yet, in the direction where signals are coming from people, whoever they might be, who clearly want to forge their positive energy with the power of my own fast-moving-energy stream. It's not always easy to look in that direction. Sometimes the people who might confound us or disappoint us for whatever reasons, seem to be sending out a more powerful beacon and I can't stop looking at it -- do you know what I mean? So it takes discipline, I guess, to form the habit to look in the direction of the beacons being sent out by people who are offering something more uplifting and creative. Luckily, in my life (and I thank God & the Universe for those people every morning when I light my prayer candle and pray) there is always an abundance of people offering me something uplifting and creative if I take the time to recognize them. What's more is that sometimes if I look really hard, I can even see what's uplifting and creative in the offerings from people that initially look like just the opposite.
Yesterday, I was really, really tired. And even though I'd had a really nice day wandering around with my Uncle, we started talking about things like choices that people do or don't make, or the judgment they choose to not exercise as the years fly away from them and they wind up just repeating the same patterns over & over, never really getting down to the business of living their lives fully, and I wound up just feeling really tired & burnt out by people and all these choices they do or don't make. I don't know about you, but for me, feeling really tired (on every level) can be an excellent breeding ground for feeling really hopeless, too, especially when my wee bonny head is getting ready to hit the pillow.
I know I was doing battle in dreams all night long, trying to regain the upper hand over all those feelings of hopelessness. It's just a matter of choosing a different thought; of looking in a new direction. But sometimes, I am so tired that I can't figure out what a different thought might be or: Where is this other direction I can look in? The seemingly simple "better" thoughts become covered in thick molasses, you know? It's a struggle to get to them but I keep plowing on.
Now that I'm single again & sleeping alone, the cats are in the habit of waking me at 4 AM to be fed. However, the upside of that bit of ridiculousness is that, when they wake me, I am always in the throws of some highly symbolic dream -- the stage of dreaming that would be impossible to recall otherwise b/c it is just too symbolic and unrelated to our usual grasp on reality. I think that the dreams happening at that deep level of consciousness give us vital information about how reality works, even though I can't understand it for the life of me. Still, I do believe that on some deep level, it has profound meaning. So I've been lurched awake at 4 AM by cats so many days running now (hence the reason why I am really, really TIRED b/c I do not go back to sleep -- I light prayer candles instead, and I meditate, I do affirmations & visualizations, and I focus on where I want my life & my relationships to be going), but my dream notebooks are filling with details of logic-defying dream information b/c I can reach for the flashlight, grab my pen & my dream notebook and start scribbling the dream recollections among the chaos of all those crazy cats meowing and rubbing up against me; it all stays fresh. It's kind of exciting!
This morning, I woke in this manner, and I was well aware of how unhappy I'd felt when I fell asleep last night (those feelings that my career was eternally stalled, or that the soul mate was steadfastly refusing to look in my direction, or that people are so bogged down in their own unhappiness that all they will ever do is disappoint us, etc.), but I grabbed my flashlight and my pen & my notebook, and amid the chaos of the crazy cats, I wrote down this: "I was somehow constructing these archways made of flowers. Each arch was a different color; one was green, one was blue, one was yellow. I was doing this to overcome some type of severe depression. My Source energy was helping me construct these colorful archways with the power of my mind. The voice told me that doing this would lift me up above the rooftops but keep me below the clouds."
How cool is that?
And you know, after I snapped off the flashlight and got out of bed to feed the cats, I started remembering that yesterday I had received some new contracts in the mail from my French publishers. And yesterday, two people wrote to me and told me how much they loved my erotica. And yesterday, someone hired me to do some editing work. And yesterday a writer-friend in Los Angeles wrote and asked me if I might like to partner with him and write screenplays. And yesterday a new writer I'd met over the weekend sent me a really lovely poem she had written last fall. And yesterday one of my best friends, Peitor in Los Angeles, texted me on my cell phone to tell me something funny that Charo had just done while he was in the studio producing a new record for her. And yesterday, my agent emailed me an interesting article about memoirs from the New York Times. And yesterday, someone emailed me a recent photo of Johnny Depp wearing a tee shirt that had a picture of Patti Smith on it -- a double-hero day! -- reminding me that I still have heroes out there who are still fighting the good fight, whom I cherish & adore.
Wow. And that was all just yesterday. So somewhere during the night, while I was learning how to construct those colorful mental archways made of flowers that would lift me up above the rooftops but keep me below the clouds, I mastered the art of looking in a better direction.
July 13, 2010
Freak Parade, New Erotic Novel by Marilyn Jaye Lewis
Just a head's up, gang, that my new novel, Freak Parade, has gotten a really great review at the Erotica Readers & Writers Association web site for July. You can read it here, if I'm linking this right!
Freak Parade Review
Thanks!! See ya!
(Hey, this photo of me is 3 YEARS OLD!!! What happened to the new and much cooler one??)
Freak Parade
Freak Parade Review
Thanks!! See ya!
(Hey, this photo of me is 3 YEARS OLD!!! What happened to the new and much cooler one??)
Freak Parade
