Christine R. Peña

I approach this blog post with an accusatory air and the question:

“Since when has writing become the last resort for me?”

Growing up, when I wanted to assemble my sanity writing was my first “go to” place.  It was my way of connecting with myself and sorting through my feelings.  By the time I’d finished writing the process itself had brought me to a deeper place of connection with my inner being – although admittedly not always my “highest self” because often I came to my journal with a bee in my bonnet or, more realistically, a bug up my butt! – and the mental by-product was a delicious sense of clarity.  The clarity informed my childhood/teen aged/young adult self, “This is how you feel!”, and hence, “This is who you are!”

Of course then I grew up, “got spiritual”, and learned that I am more than my transitory feelings and emotions. By then the world had changed so much that my emphasis on what I was now calling “self care” became more about getting out of isolation, and instead seeking connection.

A writer’s life, or should I say MY writer’s life, by it’s very nature, has had me planted in one place. The first journal I ever actually KEPT was the journal I wrote in my 13th year. (All those awful, terrible things I wrote down, and my inner young, budding critic subsequently tore up, from age 11 on didn’t count!) Writing meant holing up in my bedroom with a spiral bound notebook, and a series of pens that never worked, usually while weeping copiously, blathering about how no one understood me. (And why doesn’t this pen work either?)

Then I fell head over heels in love with technology and my computer became my new, very best friend. To hell with everyone else! My computer, my obedient little slave, understood me! So I became dedicated to understanding it. Computer geekery brought my love of writing to an entirely new level, and merrily down that rabbit hole I went.

Then holy smokes! You could actually “talk” to other people through a computer!? I kissed my first 300 baud modem passionately, and I was off and running. Writing? Yes, I was writing. I was writing dem E-eeeeeeeeemailz! Long, sensuous, involved e-mail exchanges now opened the window between me and the rest of the world.

Then in the late ’90’s while enjoying an après sex cigarette with Al Gore, he rolled over to put his socks on and said, “By the way, baby, did I tell you I invented the Internet today?” (Well, okay. That’s a lie. I was never much of a cigarette smoker.) That lead me to the addictive pleasures of online journaling. Wow! You mean I can spill my guts out in front of a relatively small audience of people and they’d actually LIKE what I have to say and we could, you know, like talk about what I said and stuff? Neat!

After that, for reasons I’ve still yet to grok, it was no longer cool to call online writing “journaling”, and instead you had to tell everyone you have a blog.

So, okay, here we are… Welcome to my BLOG!

When I tell people I have a blog it sounds like I have some leech-y, blood sucking fatal disease… “Help me! I have A BLOG!” At the bottom of all those outdated e-mails I still send, my signature line even says, “Subscribe to my blog!” It sounds like I’m walking around shaking a pencil cup and begging, “Trick or treat for Unicef! Help me cure this fatal disease! I’m an impoverished blogger! Please help!”

Side note to Self: If this is what I’m doing, I’m doing it all wrong since I don’t even have the obligatory, “Please, Sir!” PayPal begging bowl button on my blog. But… wouldn’t it be cool if I had a PayPal button on my blog that would make the sound of change shaking in a can every time someone tipped me? Hmmmmmmm… I digress…

I still refuse to call myself a “blogger”, however. It conjures up crane-shot images of George Costanza trying to get his Frogger arcade game across the street for me. Listen sister, I’m no lily pad jumping blogger!

SOCIAL MEDIA! Well! Now we’ve really arrived, haven’t we? I love social media mainly because it has all the benefits of instant connection without any of the hassles of me actually having to dress, put on make-up or get in my car to come and say hello to you. You and I can exchange witty cocktail banter at any hour of the day or night on Facebook, Twitter, or a myriad of other social networking time eaters while you sit around in your moth eaten undies and I squint at the screen held two inches from my face because my contacts are making my eyes red today and I had to take them out two hours ago.

Whatever juice I had for writing now seems to be poured into all these various red plastic party cups and at the end of the day I’ve got nothing left in the pony keg for myself! But today, through a series of other outer and inner events that I may or may not ever write about (*groan*) all of my original reasons for writing came back to haunt me like so many of Marley’s ghosts.

No, no, NO!

Yeah. Those guys.

It all leads me back here, where I haven’t uploaded anything since… ah… last year. So why should I write? And more importantly, I guess, is why should you READ what I write?

Well, you shouldn’t, really.

Leave. Leave now. Do not pass go, do not hit the non-existent tip jar on your way out, just RUN and don’t look back. Why ARE you reading this?

The reasons I write are:

1) It keeps me sane. It’s how I straighten out the crooked places in my head and how I soothe my heart when it hurts.
2) It connects me with all the different aspects of myself. My self with a small “s” and my Higher Self.
3) It feels good to share and connect with others and…
3) I crack me up!

Yes, Virginia, it’s true, my writing is ALL ABOUT ME! Because like or not, I’m doomed to be me for the rest of my life, so why not inflict share what’s within me with you?

And what’s been holding me back on this particular (*cough*) blog is an old belief that if I was my goofy, silly self here no one would ever take the side of me that that’s deeply spiritual seriously. But I say to you now, my friends,  I sing it loud and proud that spirituality, sexuality and silliness can not only co-exist but they can thrive within us and enrich every single aspect of our lives across the board.

So now that I’ve exposed myself here and have made the decision to change up my game, I’m sure that means you can expect to see another post from me in… oh, another 4-6 months!

Alright, enough about me already. What about you? Do you write? Why? When? Where? Talk to me and feel free to pimp your blog, if you have one, in the comments section below.

“All differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.”
~ Swami Vivekananda

This morning while Live Streaming the 11:30am service at the Agape International Spiritual Center I was sitting vigil and letting the words of Michael Bernard Beckwith wash over me during the sermon.  It was a wonderful message this morning, which I wasn’t listening to in terms of the words, what I do in vigil is tune in to the vibrational feeling tone the Rev. is carrying and then latch it down and camp on it while I’m in silent prayer for the congregation who is listening.  So I’m there and humming along with the tone, lots of love and energy and enthusiasm… good stuff, but some of what he was saying was very present with me while I was there as well.  He worked with a few questions over the course of the sermon, but the ones that stood out for me were very simple:

Where am I going?

And what is my mission?

I opened my eyes from my vigil and wrote the questions down to work with when I do my visioning to download the tone of where I’m headed in the coming year.

Today those questions have been bouncing around in my head as I went about the business of the day. I was flat out of food in the house, so taking a walk to the store was mandatory on the To Do list after service. I put on my earbuds and started listening to an Abraham-Hicks workshop. Like an MBB sermon, the Abraham talks are always so chock full of profound Truth that it’s like getting a big box of spiritual candy and it all looks so good that you want to stuff it all in your mouth at once. But it’s such delicious, rich stuff that the best way to enjoy it is to cruise past the box several times and then pick and savor each piece individually over time. I’ve listened to this particular workshop before and I was turning over and savoring and deepening in the awareness of what feeling into the Vortex feels like…

And while this is all going on I’m walking out the back gate of my yard, futzing with the latches that bind the fence that separates my property from the Greenway that runs behind my house, walking, shifting my backpack around… listening, thinking, feeling and then remembering the MBB questions, “Where am I going? And what is my mission?”

In that moment the answers were easy ones:

Where am I going?  The store

What is my mission?  Well, to get groceries, but really, to be a beneficial presence on the planet.

That thought activated my heart and pulled me higher into the present moment and my own true self-identity as I continued to walk. I pondered my own mission and as I continued to get nearer to the shopping center I thought about the homeless guy whose little encampment I spotted and photographed as I walked the Greenway on a previous day.

My neighbor with a fondness for stuffed animals and X-rated newspapers.

Just then I realized there was background hubbub going on that I wasn’t hearing because I had become one of the dreaded Earbud People walking along in my own world, not listening to anything but what’s going on in my own little head and then sealing the deal with earbuds.

Someone was shouting.
Swearing, shouting and ranting.

Well, good morning Stuffed Animal guy!

I had been thinking about him ever since I stumbled upon his lair on my walk. Something about the fact that he slept with stuffed animals just got to me and I’d held him in my heart asking the question, “How can I help?” ever since. I thought about packing him a lunch, or leaving him one of my stuffed animals. I wondered if he knew about the food banks in our area. I wondered if he knew he’s probably eligible for food stamps. Is there a place homeless people can get mail delivered so they can qualify for eligibility? I’ve been thinking about where he might shower, shit and shave in the mornings and how it might be better if that was not right outside my back gate. (Long before I discovered the encampment of Stuffed Animal guy I’d been discovering human “gifts” on the path behind my house. I think Stuffed Animal guy might also be my Mad Pooper guy, but I don’t have any desire to find out for sure!)

Basically I was thinking things through as if I was in his situation. If it was me, what would I do? How would I survive? Where would I go for help?

Listening to him ranting turned my attention in a new direction. I observed my own reaction. His vibration felt angry, crazy, scary. His words fell like acid on my ears. I noticed how my thoughts of “How can I help?” became “How can I stay as far away from him as possible?” instead.

And I thought, “That must be so challenging for the Universe to deliver this guy’s good to him when he’s offering up so much anger.” It felt as though this guy, in addition to the encampment he’d found himself over by the concrete wall, was building this wall of anger up around himself as well. I wondered if he was yelling because it made him feel better to yell, or if he yelled to feel safe or if he was just yelling to say, “Hey, I’m alive! I matter! Deal with me!”

It gave me a whole new insight on how we can pinch off our own receptivity to our good simply by not being able to regulate our emotions. When we are angry, it scrambles the signal and makes what we seek, that which is simultaneously seeking us, harder to connect with.

Now back to this guy… Here’s this guy who probably has never seen me, but he’s touched my life profoundly over the past several weeks just by being there. And although he has no idea about it, he’s teaching me things.

It reminds me how profoundly interconnected we all are and how we all can make the choice to be a beneficial presence on the planet just by being kind and walking softly around those who may be angry and screaming into concrete flood control channels. Because, even if you’ve never done it, haven’t you had days where you wanted to just scream and rant and curse? Like it or fear it, Stuffed Animal guy is a part of me and I’m a part of you and here we are, just a big clump of US here on this planet, having this experience, walking our walks on the path of life.

Where am I going?

And what is my mission?