Goodbye Michael and Farrah

I’d say I’m speechless, but then I wouldn’t be writing this blog. I just don’t know how to express how I feel.

I come home and am standing in the kitchen, low lights, with my husband and his sister and I hear a comment. “He was 50.”

“Are you talking about someone who died? Who?”

“Michael Jackson.”

I swallowed, wanted to be alone, searched my mind, but found only void.

“Farrah, too. It’s been a weird day.”

Two icons from my life. People that were models, heros, artists.

Both brave survivors, supernaturally brave.

I feel, above my heart, below my throat, a fist-sized weightiness, not a rock, but a weight just the same. Farrah’s tremendous sense of life and her beautiful smile will never be forgotten.

Mostly, I am shocked about Michael Jackson, a larger-than-life legend. I can’t have danced to his music so much and listened to his music so much without it getting into my soul and without there being a connection between us. Just like the rest of us, he just wanted to be free and happy. He tried so hard to be free…

I think that sticks with me, connects to that inner yearning within each of us.

He gave me so much joy!

Thank you, both, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.

Here’s Michael Jackson on YouTube. Here’s Farrah Fawcett on YouTube.  Sometimes we just need to go back and watch or read about or connect in some way with people who have died. These links are for that. An honor to them and a sense of connection for us.

May you find the peace you are yearning for.

Laurie

Loving it is enough, isn’t it?

I read this in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees and cried:

“Actually, you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.”

There was relief in that crying. I can just do it. Just because I love it! Oh God, thank you.

But now, a week later, I ask myself, Is it enough?  Is it enough for me to just love doing it–writing?

Of course, soon after reading the Bees quote, I reread something (that I didn’t remember from any of the earlier readings) in The Intuitive Writer by Gail Sher.  Sher tells a story about a painter in the 30s, Harlen Hubbard, who from seeing his work ignored and rejected, eventually (ten years later) rejected all others, but not his work. He kept painting. Sher writes,

“‘No Paintings for Sale’ Hubbard firmly tacked across the door of his studio when he realized that the mere hope of sales and acceptance by other  artists had created a psychic trap. Not untl he could paint without even the possibility of selling, would he be able entirely to surrender to himself.”

And that surrender, that freedom for the work to come from Truth,  is more important to me than “the mere hope of sales and acceptance by other artists.”

So, Yes, for me, Loving doing it is enough.