Teresa R. Funke's Blog: Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life, page 14

Color Me Here

As we stepped outside the other day, I suggested my husband and I do a “color walk,” where you look for a specific color as you stroll along. He chose red, of course. It’s his favorite color. So, we started naming red things immediately: red front door, red car, red trim on house, red wagon. Very soon after, my husband said, “What are we? Two years old?”

I said, “Yes, I think that’s exactly the point. To walk as a two-year old would. Noticing and reveling in everything. Being truly present.”

So, we kept at it: red Adirondack chair, red baby swing, red words on a “for sale” sign.

At a certain point, though, our grown-up selves did assert themselves as voices of judgement. “Red Christmas lights that should have been taken down by now. Cracked red tail light. Red snow shovel laying out which should be put away.” Oops . . . Back to the mind of a child.

Noticing a little deeper now: small reddish rock in one lawn’s gravel, red on the corner of a piece of food wrapper, red on a long-squashed berry on the sidewalk.

Memories surfaced. “Remember the little red snow shovel we had for the kids? They’d follow you around the driveway thinking they were helping so much!” Questions arose: “Is that lady’s coat red or more like maroon? Can we count that?” Even a bit of debate: “Isn’t that like the color of our old Rodeo? It’s not? You think it was darker? Are you sure?”

It’s not like our color walk changed us forever, but it pulled us out of our usual conversations about what repairs to make on the house, when to fill out that form we’ve been ignoring, how to handle a delicate conversation at work, etc. It gave us a game to play together, a chuckle here and there, and a sense of wonder. It helped us see our same old walk through a new lens. We didn’t solve any big problems, but we had some fun. And maybe sometimes that is just as important.

By Teresa R. Funke

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What is Your Shower Song?

Lately, I’ve been musing on my choice of shower songs and worrying a bit about what they might say about me. I’ve found lists of the most popular shower songs on the internet and none of them make it into my repertoire. Mine seem to be dredged up from the far reaches of my mind or maybe my past and there’s no rhyme or reason to my choices.

If you tried to make sense of my shower collection, you might say that some days I seem to be oriented toward the future, other days to the past, resulting in either “Tomorrow” from Annie or “Yesterday” by the Beatles. Other days I seem to be more sentimental or maybe melancholy, gravitating toward “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof or “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” Occasionally old church songs from my youth will surface, particularly “Lord of the Dance,” which is odd, because that was not a standard in most Catholic masses. I should pay attention to whether those church songs pop up on Sundays. That might be telling. And what does it say about my happy marriage that I so often sing “Matchmaker, Matchmaker”?

I think what fascinates me the most is that I don’t sing contemporary songs in the shower, although I’m known to crank up new favorites when I hear them on the radio. I have no idea why they don’t make it into the shower. I’m also intrigued that I tend to sing songs that would not be found on any of my “favorite songs” playlists. In fact, some of my shower songs are by artists of whom I would not describe myself as a fan. For example, one of my stand-bys is “Isn’t She Lovely” by Stevie Wonder, though I’ve never considered myself much of a Wonder fan.

The one that baffles (and embarrasses) me the most, though, is my penchant for singing “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am,” by Herman’s Hermits. What a truly bizarre song to have stuck in one’s head for decades. I try to convince myself there’s an intellectual reason I gravitate toward that insanely ridiculous song; that it’s a subliminal connection to my love and pursuit of knowledge regarding British history (I almost went to grad school to study just that). What other reason could there be, right?

If you look at my shower playlist, there’s really only one true conclusion: my brother was right. I’m a hopeless nerd.

Interestingly, my husband never sings in the shower. I think that’s kinda sad. I mean, with those acoustics, you’ll never sound better no matter what you sing. And even the melancholy songs, when combined with soft light and warm water, can make you feel so good. So I suppose I needn’t worry about my odd choices. Not everything in life needs to tell us something deeper about ourselves.  It’s like I’ve said before, make no apologies for the art you love, even if your shower song is even dumber than “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am” (is that possible?)

By Teresa R. Funke

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The Wisdom of the Gummy Bears

Recently, I had two dreams back-to-back that both featured me eating gummy bears. This struck me as odd. I like gummy bears, but they’re not something I usually seek out. Being more the organic dark chocolate type, they’re not a candy that typically crosses my mind. I’ve always meant to get better at interpreting and honoring my dreams, though, so I decided to buy some gummies and eat a few each day in the hopes that the “wisdom of the gummy bears” would come through.

I’m on day ten now of devouring about three bears a day and so far, no lightning bolts. I used to think I preferred the green and orange ones, but now I’m pretty sure they all taste mostly the same. I still enjoy squishing them from top to bottom and then watching them return to shape, so there’s that. And they’re darn cute, especially piled so colorfully on top of each other, so I confess it makes me happy to look at them.

The kid in me who still believes in magic imagined this would play out like a Hollywood movie. I’d follow the message in my dreams, buy the gummy bears, and have an out-of-body experience. Or maybe one of them would start speaking to me, telling me which direction to take next. Or possibly, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I’d enter into some fanciful Gummy world and learn what matters most.

When those scenarios started to seem unlikely, I wondered if this was an exercise in embracing my inner child. Or a simple reminder to seek more joy in life. My son thinks the bears in my dreams represented my three kids who are all quite different, but all loved gummy bears.

Here’s what came to me today . . . I’ve been working lately on mindfulness. Notice I said “working” because that’s how it feels most of the time. Maybe this was the universe’s way of making mindfulness fun. After all, I’m not mindlessly downing a handful of candy. I’m deliberately removing the bag each day from the pantry; choosing out three different colors (even though I know they taste mostly the same); squishing them first, like a four-year old; and then eating them with intention, hope, and love. That’s mindfulness, is it not?

So, what is the wisdom of the gummy bears? I think they are saying, “Be here now.”

Either that, or it’s the sugar talking. You decide.

By Teresa R. Funke

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Reclaiming the Aha Moment

Since I was young, the F-word has been what I called my “reserve word.” If you heard me say it you knew one of two things: I was either royally pissed or I’d had too much to drink, and either way, you should probably take me home. In the past few years of living in a pandemic and with social and political unrest, I’ve said that word often enough it’s lost a bit of its power. My husband no longer flinches when it comes out of my mouth, although he still takes note.

Lately, I’ve been thinking the same thing about the expression “aha moment,” which was popularized by Oprah Winfrey. Though some linguists can trace the term to times before Oprah’s influence, it was she who insisted an “aha moment” didn’t just mean something you realized. It meant something you realized that you somehow already knew inside but had forgotten. It’s not just a moment of insight. It’s a moment of seeing into yourself. It might be prompted by something that happens, or something someone says, or even something that just “comes” to you while reading or meditating or praying.

In the past week, thanks to conversations with a few wise and intuitive friends, I’ve had several aha moments. Interestingly, they built on each other to lead toward a major shift in my thinking, but a shift that feels like a return to something in an exciting and comforting way. A return to what? My child self? My core being? A more honest awareness of who I really am once you strip away the roles, responsibilities, pressures, and expectations that attached themselves to my journey?

What makes an aha moment different to me than an epiphany, insight, realization, or even come-to-Jesus moment is the feeling of joy and liberation that comes along with it. But a familiar joy. A joy of returning to a beloved place. When you feel those things, you know that’s a true aha moment.

So maybe we need to reclaim the power of that term. Stop ending every one-hour meeting or half-day conference with the suggestion that people write down their “aha moments.” Stop asking at the dinner table, “What was your aha moment today?”  Stop trying to teach us how to have an aha moment in seminars and workshops. Stop equating aha moments with solutions. That great idea you got to improve your art or business is what I call a “burst of brilliance,” which also feels joyful and liberating, but not even that is an aha moment.

Let’s get back to a place where we don’t turn an aha moment into an objective and instead let it arise from curiosity, investigation, and deep, meaningful conversations. Let’s accept and celebrate that an aha moment doesn’t always have to be “the answer,” but it can be a step in that direction, which is just as powerful. An aha moment is not a mundane experience, it’s divine, however you define that word. Let’s allow it to be that way.

By Teresa R. Funke

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A Good Kind of Rejection

A friend and I are going chapter by chapter through the book It’s Not Your Money by Tosha Silver. We had both read it before, but not one chapter a week as the author suggests. There’s a very important section in the book where the author talks about getting rid of clutter. Casting out the old to make room for the new. Tosha implied that by the time we finished the chapter, we’d know exactly where to begin. The first time I read the book, the words “business cards” popped into my head for no apparent reason.

I immediately opened a drawer and pulled out an enormous envelope and two binders full of business cards I’d collected over 30 years. Many were wrapped in rubber bands and labeled according to the events at which I’d gathered them. I started removing rubber bands and throwing each pile into my recycling box, and as I did, I felt lighter and lighter and then downright giddy. When I was done, I danced my little box upstairs and dumped it into my big recycling bin, grinning as those cards fanned out across the can in a rainbow of colors. I closed the lid behind me.

See, those cards had been weighing on me in all kinds of ways. Serving as a reminder of people I should have contacted and never did, and people I did connect with but the communication didn’t go well, and people who never contacted me back, and people I don’t even recall in the slightest. The fact is, in this day and age the people with whom I share a real relationship are all stored in my e-mail and the ones with whom I might want to connect in the future all have websites or Facebook pages I can find easily.

This week, as I went through the book again, I was inspired to open a filing drawer I rarely open. In it, I found a hanging file of very old rejection letters from the literary and commercial magazines, agents and editors I queried in the early days of my career. I had thought all of my rejection letters were stored in a shoebox that I take with me to school visits as a prop to show kids why we never give up. But here were more.

Many of my friends have never saved their rejection letters. They throw them away or, more dramatically, set them on fire. But I’ve always kept mine. I think the historian in me wanted a physical record of how long and hard I’d worked (or how long any writer works) to achieve each publication. There are well over 300 rejection letters in my box.

In the hanging file I found plenty of form rejections typed, insultingly, on tiny slips of paper. But I also found handwritten comments like this from the editors: “Not a bad story at all; a sharp essay; this was a delight to read.” And my favorite: “Absolutely gorgeous writing, each element masterfully placed.”

Many of the rejections included the invitation: “please send us another story.”

Reading them, I was awash with gratitude for the time it took those editors to scrawl those few words to me, knowing if they hadn’t, I might have given up on my dream. It sucked to get several of those letters a week back then, but those words of encouragement on the “good rejections” kept me going. And eventually, the acceptance letters started arriving too, along with the good reviews.

I decided, though, that a shoebox full of rejections is enough, so I threw away many of the form letters. It felt a bit like throwing away a part of my history, but it was a part that no longer really serves me. I’ve moved beyond that stage now.

I don’t think I could have done this “decluttering” six months ago. I wasn’t ready yet to let go of things I’d for so long held dear, things I’d long thought of as essential. I wasn’t ready yet to let go of the story I’d told myself about who I am, or to admit that it’s okay to move on. But I’m ready now to make room for whatever is coming next, for this next phase in my journey. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed “cleaning up” more.

Give it a try. Start small. A simple drawer or box will work. Or condense the items in two drawers into one, leaving one empty drawer beckoning; an invitation for what’s to come.

By Teresa R. Funke

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How to Be Lost in a Good Way

A couple of days ago, my instructor explained how we’d be doing things differently “because of Covid.”

“Ah, ‘because of Covid’,” I said. “The crappiest words in the English language.”

“Are they really, though?” another student asked. “I could think of worst things we could say.”

She was right, of course. Words are just words until we put meaning behind them. I had chosen to make that phrase the worst it could be, and my peer had chosen to strip away some of its power.

That got me thinking about some of the words I’ve been using to describe my creative journey in the past year . . . “lost,” “stuck,” “floundering.” These words themselves are just letters pushed together. And there’s a range within each word. A person can be hopelessly lost or just momentarily lost. She could be slightly stuck, like the cap on the maple syrup bottle after a few pours, or desperately stuck like Winnie-the-Pooh in Rabbit’s front door. She could be floundering in a thrashing sort of way or just in a fumbling kind of way.

It sucks to feel lost, unless it doesn’t. Have you ever been trying to find your way back to your hotel in a new place and taken a wrong turn down a beautiful street? As soon as you let go of your fear that you won’t find your way back, you can enjoy the scenery on your unexpected route. Fear, that’s the word behind the words in my case. That’s the word that’s held the most power.

I considered banishing those “bad” words from my vocabulary, but where’s the fun in that? I think I’d rather play with them a bit. I’m not “stuck.” I’m stuck in a state of exploration. I’m not “lost.” I’m lost in a curious frame of mind. I’m not “floundering.” I’m floundering toward a new and exciting shore.

Words, like emotions, are neither good nor bad. Even a word like “hate” has a positive side to it. If you hate something, you’re often motivated to change it. To improve it. And that could be good.

So, I’m changing my association with certain words this year. I’m not casting them aside, I’m repurposing them. I’m giving them another chance. I’m giving myself another chance. If you run into me and I still look a little lost, that’s okay. You don’t have to rescue me, but don’t wait dinner for me either. It might take me a while to reach you, but I’ll have some great travel stories to tell you when I arrive.

By Teresa R. Funke

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Read This with No Expectations

I’ve started off this year enrolled in an eight-week creativity class. Me, a 30-year veteran of the creative life. You’d think I’d know it all by now, but I sometimes need to sharpen my creative tools or be reminded why this work matters.

As part of our homework for this week, the instructor suggested we write the words “No expectations” on five sticky notes and put them up in places where we’d see them often. I put four of mine on the microwave, the refrigerator, my laptop, and the bathroom mirror. The last one I stuck to the TV so that when I finally sit down in the late evening to unwind, I’ll be reminded not to do that mind-racing thing where I start making expectations for the next day.

A few years ago, I headed into the new year with what seems at first glance like an opposing vow. I promised to live a life of visualization and devotion to the law of attraction. Which I took to mean expecting I would get the things I wanted. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t.

In ruminating about expectations, though, I now realize how much of my days have been spent in anticipating an outcome. I’d head off to a party expecting to have a fun evening. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t. I’d arrive for a blood draw with a pit in my stomach expecting them to have trouble finding my tricky veins. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Expectations often filled me with excitement or anxiety when really, they were never more than a best guess.

Even still, for a brief moment I hesitated before committing to living without expectations for a week. Part of me saw that as just “drifting” through life with no purpose, plans, or hopes. But it’s not that at all. I can enter a writing contest and still hope I will win. I can still visualize that moment when I receive the congratulatory e-mail. Then I can release the expectation of winning. Because either I will or I won’t. And whether I win or not, good could come from the experience, but so could bad.

This is all new territory for me, someone who is constantly thinking, often worrying, sometimes analyzing, and always hoping. I’ve dedicated the last two years to getting better at living in the now without realizing all the expectations I had put around that goal. I expected myself to change, to become a peaceful, Zen-like person who could fully inhabit this moment and appreciate all it had to offer. I expected myself to “succeed” at living in the now and to be better for it. It turns out the only way to really live in the now is to give up all expectations. Ironic, isn’t it?

To me, living with no expectations does not mean sitting idle or giving up our passions. The work we are called to do is important, whether that’s mopping the kitchen floor or writing a poem. Giving up expectations just lifts the pain and pressure we inflict on ourselves by expecting that the floor will stay clean for even an hour simply because we put the effort into scrubbing it. Or that everyone will love our poem as much as we do. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But something was gained from writing that poem, and the sentiments you expressed in it are now part of this world, and that’s not nothing.

Expectations take energy, whether we are expecting something good or bad. Wouldn’t that energy be far better spent in pursuit of something that brings you joy? Something that taps into your unique talents and skills? Something that recharges your overwhelmed mind?

I always told my children, “There’s no such thing as a wasted experience.” We learn from everything we undergo. If I believe that, then I also have to believe that outcomes are what they are for better or for worse. There’s peace in knowing that. And from a place of peace and calm, new ideas emerge. We’ve got a lot of work to do this year to “fix” our heartsick world. We’re going to need all of our energy to tackle the challenges that face us. So, release your expectations and just do your best. Our smallest efforts might pay off big, and our biggest efforts may land softly. Either way, we all move forward.

By Teresa R. Funke

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Cast Out the Clutter – Revisited

This post originally ran on January 12, 2019

Every month, our local thrift store calls and asks if we have any donations, and every month we say, “Sure, we’ll leave a bag on the porch for you.” It forces my husband and I to walk through our entire house every 30 days, dig through all our closets, and ask ourselves what no longer works, what we’ve grown tired of, or what we’re never actually going to use though we keep thinking we might.

What if we artists and entrepreneurs did that every month in our workspaces too? What if we looked around and said, “What’s just cluttering up my office, what am I keeping around because I think I should, what am I holding onto that no longer serves me?” Sometimes it feels great to toss something into that donation bag, other times it’s hard to let go. Release isn’t always easy, but it keeps us growing.

And what if once a month we took stock of what’s cluttering up our minds? What old worries do we need to turn loose, what obligations do we need to reconsider, what assumptions do we need to test? What did we learn about ourselves or our art in the past month that frankly changes everything? And how do we need to rearrange our thoughts to support our new directions? You can write down those old beliefs or goals that have been burdening you and set them on fire, you can journal about what you plan to do differently, you can call an accountability partner and speak your new notions out loud, or you can just close your eyes and imagine those thoughts or directions floating away. I’m committing to doing this every month during my meditation.

It’s taken me a long time to realize just because I’ve done or believed something most of my life, doesn’t mean I need to anymore. That’s not to say I was ever wrong to do it or think it or that I need to regret it. It just was. And now it’s not.

Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting or dismissing, it just means embracing something that feels better now. Because now is where we are and the start of where we’re going.

By Teresa R. Funke

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Who Best Sings Your Favorite Holiday Song?

This holiday season, – our second in pandemic times – there are fewer parties, fewer trips to the minimally stocked stores, fewer visitors, etc. But one thing that has not changed is that two of our local radio stations are playing nothing but holiday songs, and that certainly helps bring in some yuletide cheer.

When I listen to those stations, though, it’s a bit mind-numbing to realize how many artists have put their own spin on songs like “Jingle Bell Rock” or “The Christmas Song” (that’s the one that starts Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .). While I sometimes like new takes on the old classics, I realized that some songs just sort of seem to “belong” to certain artists. To my ear, Mariah Carey “owns” the song “All I Want for Christmas is You.” And John Lennon really needs to be the one singing “Happy Christmas (War is Over).” And “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” simply must be sung by its original artist, Thurl Ravenscroft with his deep gravelly voice.

My favorite Christmas song is “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy,” sung as a duet with Bing Crosby and David Bowie. It kind of needs to be them for me to enjoy it.

Each year, new artists arrive on the scene with new songs they hope will become holiday classics. Some will “own” that song forever, others will live to hear their creation adopted and maybe perfected by another artist. Either way, they will get their classic.

Speaking of classics, I still prefer Bing Crosby’s rendition of “White Christmas,” which first appeared in the movie, Holiday Inn. It debuted in 1942 in the middle of World War II. Maybe I prefer Bing because his rendition is the most popular Christmas song of all time, and maybe it’s because I remember some of my friends from that generation telling me how much comfort that single brought to them during the difficult war years.

Whether you prefer Nat King Cole or Mary J. Blige singing “The Christmas Song,” I hope your favorite holiday music takes you back to happy memories in your past, helps you stay grounded in the present, and moves you peacefully into a new year.

By Teresa R. Funke

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What Emotion is “On” You Right Now?

I was listening to an episode of Poetry Unbound, a podcast hosted by Padraig O Tuama who is definitely a person I’d love to have at my dinner party. He mentioned that in Irish when you talk about emotion, you don’t say, “I am sad.” You say, “sadness is on me.” You don’t become the emotion, but you acknowledge it, and you understand that soon a different emotion will be on you.

Today, worry is on me. At least until I hear some news that will let me know whether or not I really need to be worried. A few days ago, calmness was on me for the first time in months. Deep, peaceful, joyous calmness. Oh, how I’d missed that emotion during these many months of pandemic living. At a recent gathering of my book club, happiness was on me, and on everyone else in the room. Several people commented on how good it felt to laugh.

I love this concept of not becoming an emotion, but also of acknowledging them. It’s okay to admit you are sad today or angry or worried or mourning. You don’t always have to smile. We will love you anyway.

But I think that sometimes an emotion does seep into our bones for a while. Depression, for one. But even something like determination can feel at times like a fixed emotion, especially for those of us who at some point got the message we were supposed to save the world or those of us whose high ambitions have manifested as overly serious goals.

Creative people can sometimes experience several days of inspiration when they are in the flow. And that’s powerful. But they can also experience periods of pessimism when things aren’t going well. With the former, you hope it’s your new state of being. With the latter, you pray it will pass. It doesn’t help that the general public sort of idolizes the idea of the “moody artist,” which makes us feel like we’re supposed to swing wildly between elation and misery.

So, what keeps our emotions flowing? What keeps us from getting stuck in, say, sadness? As with so many things, I think it comes down to loosening our need for control. It’s about giving ourselves permission to feel what we’re feeling without judgment or a compulsion to change it. Instead of beating ourselves up, we could nurture ourselves instead. We could say, “It’s okay, sweetheart. Go ahead and be sad. You won’t be here forever, but for now, you’re safe and protected and loved. You’re not ‘wrong’ to feel sad, you’re just human.”

And when we’re euphoric, like in those early days of falling in love, we can tell ourselves, “It’s okay to be giddy. You’re not wrong to call in sick so you can linger in this bliss a bit longer. You’re not ‘silly’ to be so outside yourself with happiness. This too shall pass, so enjoy it for now.”

Then see where that permission takes you. We creative beings often gain deep insights when sadness is on us and build whimsical works of wonder when joy is on us. Welcome your emotions. Sit with them for a while and get to know them. They each have something to teach us. They each have something to show us. And sometimes they overlap in magical ways.

What emotion is on you right now? Where’s the beauty in it? How is it making you feel human? How is it making you feel creative in whatever way you choose to define that?

By Teresa R. Funke

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