Monday, September 17, 2012

Quoted...

You train people how to treat you. 
- Iyanla Vanzant

Act like you know and they shall follow. 

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Wine Makes Everything Taste Better...


It doesn't always take a ton of bricks for you to feel like you were just hit by one. A few days ago I came across video on Facebook that slapped me across the face with a huge wake up call. It was just a remix of a song but something about the music and the visual made me stop and take a mini inventory of my life. And while I am very proud of everything I've accomplished in the past 8 years, I want stories to tell. I want to be able to sit down with my kids and tell them about being humbled when I stood at a temple in India or how I was a kick ass surfer who danced 'til dawn on the playa. I want to find freedom on a mountain top and silence in the ocean before I become a suburban housewife, and after. I was born with magic in my blood and I refuse to give up that potential without fulfilling it. 

In the spirit of learning who I am, I have decided to dedicate the next 2 years to blowing up my boundaries and doing all of the things I only wanted to do in dreams instead of waiting for my 20s to silently expire. While I do have a day job to keep, saving to build and a time limit to consider, I've come up with 30 things for me to do before August 26, 2014--when I turn 30--that are ambitious, international, totally doable AND full of magic. 

So here's my 30 before 30. If anything on here seems like a shock, you probably don't know me outside of the internet. And didn't I say I'm a beautifully strange amalgam of Beyonce, Carrie Bradshaw and Lisa Bonet? Keep that in mind...here'd the list.

  1. Go to Burning Man
  2. Go Paleo for 30 days
  3. Publish my 1st book (OK this is SUPER ambitious and totally doable.)
  4. Learn the art of trapeze
  5. Go backpacking through Europe
  6. Celebrate Durga Puja in Kolkata aka Calcutta
  7. Map out my family tree. 
  8. Throw a proper dinner party, with food I actually cooked. (I can burn. Lafayette voice)
  9. Finish reading those half read books on my shelf.
  10. Watch the sunrise over the ocean.
  11. Take a good old fashioned American road trip. 
  12. Learn how to surf. 
  13. Make my apartment beautiful.
  14. Spend the weekend with Gabby B at Spirit Junkie summer camp at Kirpalu.
  15. Finish a Course in Miracles. 
  16. 30 days of getting my yoga on. 
  17. Get published in a national glossy. 
  18. Go to the shows (not work them) at NYC Fashion Week. 
  19. Get my savings on!
  20. Add one pair of Louboutins to my closet. 
  21. Become fluent in French. 
  22. Learn the art of burlesque.
  23. Run a marathon....did I mention I don't run at all. 
  24. Hike the Appalachian Trail.
  25. Go to a music festival that is not Jazz Fest or Voodoo.
  26. Bungee jump.
  27. Visit the Grand Canyon
  28. Give snowboarding a try
  29. Learn how to make a stiff martini
  30. Follow through. 
I find it fair to mention that I have an intense fear of flying that I intend to conquer during the course of these experiences. That's technically number .1 on the list. 


Friday, September 14, 2012

(+)

There are quite a bit of music videos on this page...here's one more.

 

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Quoted

If poetry does not come as easy as leaves to a tree, then it had better not come at all
- John Keats 

Monday, September 10, 2012

Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand blah blah blah


Creation always begins in darkness. Whether you are reading the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Popol Vuh or pretty much any religious or mythological text, they start with an all encompassing abyss. So too does our creation, unless your mother had a tap light in her womb. But aside from the moment when we went from a drunken night between two relatively responsible adults to a fetus, the moments that make us usually begin in darkness as well.

A year ago on this very day I was a nervous wreck that couldn't eat, sleep or move without falling to pieces in anticipation of the inevitable. I knew that my relationship, which up to that point was perfect in my mind, had done a complete 180 overnight and no amount of pleading, crying or talking could change that. I knew in my soul that my love could fix what was being held together with tape--me, him and us. I knew we were stronger than whatever had come between us. I was wrong. But then again, I was right.

This is not my ex...I don't remember this guy's name and this was from two weeks ago.

My relationship was not perfect, I spent as much time happy and in love as I did feeling clenched, unworthy and miserable. I wasn't in love with a person, I was in love with the way he validated my existence, boosted my self-esteem, made every other girl--and my shitty ex's--green with envy, and everything that made me feel better about me because of who he was. The ambition, drive, affluence, and success that drew me to him like a moth to a flame eventually made me feel small standing next to him. It wasn't all "I love you because of the way you make me fel about me", I still love and am inspired by who he is as a person--flawed, funny, and a shit talker--but I was wrapped up in finally finding my Big not how we worked or didn't work together. If you don't see the cracks in the foundation from day one, you end up buying a house that eventually sinks and I saw the cracks, and ignored them just to have my dream guy. Love cannot save a sinking ship. Ask Jack Dawson.

Guess no one told Jack to secure his life vest before attempting to help others. 

While all the love I had for him and us couldn't save anything, the love I had for myself eventually won out. There were days when I literally could not get out of bed and wanted to kill myself, obvs I did and did not. Then throw in losing your job on top of going through the most difficult breakup of your life and you get me circa January. In that vacuum, no job, no man, no money, I began to feel more free than I had in years. (It's funny what hanging at home and collecting an unemployment check can do for you.) For months I devoured self help books, checked into therapy--long over due, did a 4 week group coaching course, started doing volunteer work and a fuck ton of other shit. My life was a nothing like he life I'd spent the past 3 years building, one that would have ended with me and my ex as a strange hybrid of the Obamas, the Clintons--not really but really--the Gates, Bey and Jay, and basically almost any bad ass, smart, talented, revolutionary couple ever to have a documentary made on them. There were few martini circuit events to attend, no tiki Tuesdays and my calendar looked more like that of a yogi/new age/ hippy than a bad ass fashion blogger/writer. I'd gone from Carrie Bradshaw to Lisa Bonet over night and I wasn't mad at it.

Lisa aka Lilakoi Moon & her daughter Zoe make one bad majama mother-daughter duo.

In between all the manifesting, meditating, cleaning, and starting this blog, I landed a job that I wasn't even looking for--that my psychic connection predicted months before--and my life changed back to what I always wanted it to be. I am way closer to financially independent than I ever have been, I have a pretty decent job that is not a major life drainer, I can afford to shop at Whole Foods, I have successfully married my Carrie side with my Lisa Bonet and Beyonce sides--it looks and feels as amazing as it sounds--and I have reconnected with friends that I abandoned when I started my relationship in 2009. My life could only be more phenomenal if I were engaged to Alexander Skarsgard....dreaming is good for the soul.

He is really, really ridiculously good looking.

The point is, everything begins in darkness but it does not stay that way. I mean first there was darkness and then God was all like "let there be light" and darkness peaced out. Everything changes, all the time. Change is the one constant in life. If I have moved form wannabe socialite, shop girl balled up on the floor crying herself to sleep because the one thing that made her worthwhile was someone else to a badass creatrix ready to run shit in 2013 in only 365 day--was it leap year this year? Imagine where I can be in another 365 days, or rather where you can be.