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making happiness

things i do to stay happy (reposted from facebook where i wrote it to respond to a question by piper anderson for her book!):

i give away a third of my belongings 2-4 times a year, and donate to people and organizations that excite me.

i keep my dishes done and everything in it’s place in my home.

i sing really really loud when i’m all alone.

i book time to be with my family, and lately, to geek out on my delicious nephew.

i work hard for people and places i love.

i turn myself out.

i swim, get massages, and stalk hot tubs and saunas.

i sage my space.

i make myself open up when i want to contract, when i’m scared.

lately i have been walking around with this meta superimposed vision happening. i see people in their ancestral wholeness, from their faces to their dress. i have no way of knowing where folks are from in the world, but i keep seeing people in gorgeous paints, feathers, headdresses, loincloths, mud cloths, piercings, tattoos. regal, telling many stories about their lives in what they do and don’t wear. everyone’s bodies look beautiful to me, especially older people. older women, loose and wide in the hips, breasts dropped low as if they’d been much used, soft bellies, crinkled thighs marked with purple pathways…i see them sitting in a council, their words deciding everything. men in their 50s, with the posture of hunters and chiefs. i can’t seem to help it, i look at people and another vision of them comes into view, and seems right. its been kind of daunting and beautiful.

i am so in love with the Y. i went to kabuki springs yesterday, and had a facial. it was so deeply painful, my first, and now i don’t know if i feel injured or pure of pore. then i sat in all the rooms at kabuki, and they felt too big, and too hushed. today i went swimming at the Y, and afterwards i sat in the hot tub, the sauna and the steam room. and there was the murmur of women talking, all the spaces are smaller and feel more intimate. no candles or statues of dieties, and tile everywhere, evidence of people on every surface. but i love it, i love swimming – and have been swimming well recently – and then sitting in a hot tub with jets on my knees, then steaming my lungs and skin, then dry sauna, shower, walk out into oakland feeling all fresh and sore.

today i’ve been moving things around in the ruckus office, organizing what we can give away and what we need to keep. i am so excited and ready for this move out of this massive office space, though i already miss parts of the huge room. now feel sleepy.