Lose Your Mind, Find Your Heart
– the narrator
It’s a lovely morning on the screened porch. Bird song, seeking lovers, family, friends. This morning is Eeyore’s Birthday. We celebrate royally in Austin. According to historical lore, the hippie party was started by the poor bus drivers working for the University of Texas. Nearby, Pease Park, of the famous Pease family, is normally a sedate urban park and playground, with a bathhouse that has a checkered past.
Today it will be drum circles, bare-chested men women and children. (Sometimes the comma is irrelevant) Parking in the area is nuts. I’m going at 10:30 to park and walk. Two friends are meeting me there, a core support team friend of over thirty years, and another writer, a social friend through the church for at least 25 years. Let the freak out begin. Freak off? I wish.
Lose your mind. Let your consciousness absorb the experience around you. Tune into the bird song, the anticipatory joy, the delight at friends and breasts of all shapes, colors, and sizes. (See, sometimes a serial comma makes sense. Sometimes, it does not. Suck it Grammarly.
In this moment, I am as happy as I’ve ever been. My anticipatory joy is high. I am not high. I am lit. Stoked. (See, Hemingway liked to make short sentences rather than use a lot of commas. Thoughts?) If my tippy top set point of joy is 100% joy, I’m there. At this moment. Alone. Birds. Cats hovering and scouting nearby. We all love the screened porch. We love birds. Squirrels. Ghosts.
There is a healthy red-shouldered hawk that hunts in my backyard. The cats come inside with bothered protest. The beautiful bird, and spirit guide (not here this morning, btw, this is memory unspooling) is bold, quiet, intense. Sitting in an oak tree that needs some clean up. He silently drops to the forest floor below, rustling in the leaves that have begun to pile. (I’m a hippie.) He flies off to my left and around the house into his morning somewhere else. He returns.
A fox. A roadrunner. Lots of spiders and frogs. These are my companions. Entertainment, enrichment, for the cats. We all talk. Various levels of conversation. There is a Duolingo for bird song, it’s from Cornell. BirdWatch or BirdTalk or BirdLab. You can watch a spectrographic recording of your backyard birdsong, along with the ID of the birds singing.
My neighbor, the gnome, informs me a lot about birds, and weeds, and how my front yard is one of his favorite places in the cul-de-sac.
Aside: I wonder how the scarlet letter girl is doing.
We won’t think about her. Sad. Ghost. May her future be peaceful and bright.
What does a 40-year-old do to reboot her life? Move to Austin. Okay. Then what? Get a job. Harder than it might seem. Find some calm habits and exercise routines to keep her mind fresh and focused. In our time together, we discussed both the importance and magic of sleep. Sleep, not bed. (She is not a target. I am not hunting. – a lie I tell myself.)
Moving along.
I forget where I’m going sometimes. I have to refer to the title. Oh right, that. The key to flow is to not give much attention to the editors in your mind, the gatekeepers of your soul, the cultural bias against manic creative expression. Think Jim Carrey in most movies. Robin Williams, the poster child for happy manic depressive. Bless his energy and soul. (Waves at Robin. He’s here now.) I should return to the biography of his life. So revealing. Like reading a neurological map of his malfunction. The one that caused us all to fall in love with Mork, just like Mindy did. He’s ridiculous, often wrong, but how can you not love him?
That’s how it should be. Let me be ridiculous. Let me go topless with the topless today. In solidarity and praise. God made young hippies and old hippies alike. Thank god I was raised in the soul-hippie-love-mecca of Austin. Thank god for the Whole Foods mothership. Like the teat that never runs dry.
That’s the thing about high school girls. We keep getting older, but they stay the same age. – MM, dazed and confused.
I don’t want a young-young partner. It makes conversation and connection over life experiences a bit more challenging. Creating new experiences together, shared experiences, love, passion, adventure… Still, if you’re dating her, and she wants you to come hang out at a party with her friends… What are you going to talk about? Your charming, “most interesting man in the world” routine? Gross. How can you be yourself in a sea of teenagers? You can’t. You’re dad. Fuck, you’re grandpa. Harsh!
“Coming around.” Turning with the wind, tack and fly into the day. A celebration. It is 7:35 am on Eeyore’s birthday, 2026. Nothing could be better. Honestly. A woman, still sleeping in my bed… (fantasy) That would be nice. Waking up around 9. Kisses. Love. Coffee. Food.
I want to say, “I love you so much.”
I’ll say it to myself and my cats today. All is in its right place. The plan for all of this: does. Not. Matter. God is passive. Happy. He likes us to enjoy ourselves. He is pleased when we are pleased. He is very happy with me and my antics. He’s a fan of the writing.
In this perfect moment, I can release the expectations of my life. Open to the possibilities of joy beyond my comprehension. Just got out of a partial paradise of passion. She was… (end thread)
In this moment, perfect and sad, poignant and hopeful, cats asking for more contact, what could be better? Nothing. Loneliness is low. Creativity is high. Blood is centered and warm. Mind clear. Hopeful. (See how the short sentences and periods give it a fast feeling. Little bits of thought, letters in groups, and simple. The language gets rather plain. The symphony of letters swirling in my head is more Baroque, flourished, and tie-die. She is around me. She is. Gone. A ghost.
It can be overdone. The period, short sentence thing. A style. What’s your favorite Hemingway story or book? Steinbeck? Joyce. Sorry, English major epiphanies. I want the pace and energy of a Kerouac with Thompson wildness and Joycean complexity of language, sound, and date-stamped fiction. Bloom day. I don’t even have to know more about it. The “companions” will sort it out in the podcast of this chapter. (Wait, what?)
Scarlet Letter Girl will not be at the party. She’s lost in space. Not gone, or forgotten, bless her heart.
What would be the ideal day? Today, what’s the absolute best path for the next 24 hours? Let me dream.
The weather to stay pleasant. Overcast. Flat light for oogling the dancers. Be a dancer. Enjoy the company of two dear friends. Celebrate the depressive donkey in all of us.
Eeyore represents our doubt. Pooh our hope. Piglet our worry. Christopher Robin our joy. Who else? Mad hatter? Wrong multiverse. A fine one. When is Alice’s Day? Or Alice’s birthday (eh hum) tea party?
Ho hum, I guess today is my birthday. Probably no one will remember. I’ll be alone. At least it is pleasant weather.
This. This right here. This moment. This is what I’m aspiring to. I am.
Writing. A loved one is nearby. I have no worry. No fear. Concerns about the future? Of course, who doesn’t. Concerns about the next 24 hours? No. Hopes? Already arrived. The eternal spring of hope is what keeps me upright and writing. Finding the next wrong word, the next absurd word that trips us both into a rabbit hole of life adventures… together.
Longing again. Oh.
A small group of wrens is playing in the oaks. Sid, beside me, is amused. We amuse ourselves. That’s the greatest gift I can give you. The ability to amuse yourself. Je’m muse. I’m terrible at French. No DuoLingo for me. Let’s have conversations with people. Join a conversational meetup. But, if I want to meet Julie Dephey, who already knows French, I guess she could be the instructor. Nope. How about starting up that Mindfulness in Relationships Meetup again? I got 200 followers in 24 hours. About 10 showed to the first gathering.
What? I know. My focus is not in starting Meetup groups or stalking a French actress to make love on a blanket under the canopy of stars. “Out here we is stoned, immaculate.”
[Will Dick and Jane get the reference? Do you guys need a hint on the last one, or will you ferrit things out even without attribution from me?]
Out here, the air is pleasant, the company is quiet and cuddly. The glasses I’m wearing are cute but have no pads on the nose bridge. No glasses at the birthday party, later. If I’m lucky, no clothes at some point. Of course, that’s a “free love” fantasy.
Free Love Fantasy, by John Oakley McElhenney, age 63.
My companion is strong, athletic, and filled with my joy. Their own joy. Our joy. So much of relationship negotiations is co-creating an idea of joy. Together, what will be our most joyful position? On the globe, I mean. Location. (Dirty minds think alike. No worries.)
My companion has creative ideas. Our lives are giving and receiving love, attention, praise, and skintime. Yes, that is magic time. Better than any “high” I could purchase. Love, real love, connected love, takes time, trust, and two healthy partners. If one flips into crisis, repeatedly adjustments must be made. If the fracturing keeps happening, the algebra begins. With this much love and energy, I could coax her back into the bed. No. With the proper balance and play there is no bed. It’s all lovemaking. Holding hands. Walking around Town Lake. Swimming in Barton Springs at night.
What is more invigorating than sharing peak experiences with someone who can reflect on them later? Forever. Forever and ever until we die. Together, in a ceremony on an active volcano in Hawaii. (I’ve never been and don’t care much about tourism.)
I am okay alone. I thrive with blood boiling, toe-curling, adoration. Flows both ways. Begins a feedback loop where the resonance builds. Being apart becomes a tonic not a hardship. Gathering new ideas and tangents from our cultivated interests… That’s a goal of mine for me, so also for you. If we’re together. You know. How we want things to go.
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