Elephant Journal can kiss my fine writerly ass

You know how there are some days that just stand out?  Like the time your boyfriend surprised you with a sloth for your birthday or the time you discovered a tiger living in your apartment building?  You know, those days where something completely amazing or extreme or insane happened, and you don't just remember every detail -- you feel every detail.  You've got the sights, the sounds, the smells all queued up enhancing the memory, making it fat with meaning.  Fat with specialness.

Yesterday was one of those days for me.

Look, if you think I'm whipping out sloths and tigers in the next few moments, I'm letting you down right now.  I WISH there had been some animals involved, even just one -- besides Mr Burns, who continues to be an utter joy.  No, yesterday was all just about stupid human tricks -- no exotics.

I got up at my favorite Fuck-Yeah Early-Early Wake-up Time -- aka, 4:30 -- and got down to it.  Taking my writing teacher Susanna's words to heart, I sat down with a cup of coffee and started re-working a piece I wrote last October, for publication on Elephant Journal.  It's a piece about my experience at Wanderlust last year, which you can read in its revised entirety here if you wish.  By 6:00 am, I'd made the changes I wanted to make and was formatting it on the Elephant platform.  By 7:00 am, I was done, and hit the hills with Burnsy, trying not to obsess about the piece or the new website but really, really take in the trees.  Keep my head where my body was. 

If I could, allow me just to sing, again, the praises of the Fuck-Yeah Early-Early Wake-Up Time.  What's so wonderful about it for me is that I basically can get in 4 hours of whatever I want, before I have to head in to the job that keeps the lights on and the kibble flowing.  Four entire hours of writing, reading, hiking, scheming.  I figure if I get these 4 hours in before work, and I have roughly another 4 after work, then I can manage an entire 8-hour day of Shit I Want To Do even though I also devote 8 hours to sitting at my paid-desk.  That so works for me.  I'm an early bird but I'm no sleep-hater.  I'll admit that getting up that early is sometimes challenging.  But just for 5 seconds.  Then it's back to Fuck Yeah.

OK, so listen, everything was going great yesterday.  The post was on Elephant and I was watching the Views number tick up, playing a little game in my head of competing with Michelle Marchildon whose piece about mercury retrograde posted at about the same time as mine.  She was kicking my ass, but I wasn't too far behind. I had a delicious lunch outside with a colleague at the Marin County Farmer's Market -- really just the most glorious sunny winter day, utter perfection.  I could see the hills I'd hiked in that morning as I greedily consumed the most delicious fish taco ever.  

In the car, my phone informed me that Wanderlust had just tweeted a link to my piece on Elephant.   More than 11,000 people follow them!  I was stoked that they liked the piece enough to send it out to their people.  So awesome, right?  Everything in my master plan for world domination was well underway. I was jump-around happy, wagging , Snoopy-dancing, stoked.

And then I got back to my job, checked my personal email and set my jaw.  Here's what awaited me.

I won't lie.  I was both on the verge of tears and shaking-mad, super-disappointed and super-mad. Don't get me started on the whole etiquette aspect of this.  Really, in the Subject line?  That email was sent 20 minutes after the Wanderlust tweet.  On a day when some subset of the 11 THOUSAND people on Wanderlust's Twitter-feed might have a) read me b) on Elephant Journal, Elephant's editorial decision was to take the piece down, landing any clickers-through on an unhappy error page.  

What a wasted opportunity, and not just for me.

The part that made me sad -- ok, I admit that I was truly sad not to have the chance to get in front of all those sets of eyes, because YES, it's true: I just want to be read, loved maybe, but read for sure -- was that what I wrote got taken down BECAUSE OF MONEY.  Which is just so lame.  It reflects so poorly on Elephant and was really and truly the last straw for me.

Because I'm not going to lie: it's not my favorite.  I read the people I know who post on Ele, but mostly am completely uncomfortable with its overall prurient tone, sensational headlines, childish obsession with booty (and don't get me wrong: huge fan of booty over here).  I've published to Ele before of course.  Naturally, the piece of mine that had the most traction was my old "Retiring the Porno Pants" one.  To get eyes over there, you need sex in the title.  So yeah, that bugged, but I was willing to overlook that in favor of more eyes.  Oh wait, eyes who are willing to pay a $1 for the privilege of reading what's posted there.  MONEY again. 

But no more.  Elephant Journal can, as titled, kiss my fine writerly ass.  I don't respect what they're doing and I don't need them.  It does bum me out -- I don't want this hate-on over them -- but it's time to face facts.  They're bogus.  They can kiss my ass.

What's super-awesome is that even though those suckas pulled my writing down, everything turned out so much better than if they hadn't.  They did me the gigantic solid of showing themselves for who they really are -- so now I'm done, and that's a good thing.  But check out what happened next: I got a super-nice email from the co-founder of Wanderlust later in the afternoon, when I'd done my emotional highs and lows, my weeping and my gnashing, telling me how much he liked what I'd written because it spoke to why he started Wanderlust in the first place, "to bring people together and inspire them to follow their dreams." THAT right there is enough for me, to know that I was able to give something back to him, in thanks for the deep way that Wanderlust changed me, in unexpected ways, in lasting ways.  Super-awesome.

So yeah, yesterday was CRAZY.  But I learned so much.  I am standing so much taller on my own two feet, knowing I don't need some other website to move my writing in front of people.  I got it all right here, yo, and thanks to Ele's lame BS, I'm bringing it FOR FREE from my own heart, no middle man, straight to yours, 7 days a week, rain or shine, in sickness and in health, loving you forever to infinity and back.  

XO

Wanderlonging

The Wanderlust buzz has started.  Emails are showing up about the annual festival from the organizers, from teachers, from studios, from friends.  The Facebook chatter is beginning -- while some people are talking about whether they won tickets in the Burning Man lottery, others are beginning to plot our trips to yoga camp.  I've been injured since December (piriformis) and not practicing as I try to heal, but still I'm feeling swept up already in the dreaming of being back at Wanderlust this year, to see if I can replicate the most excellent experience I had there last year.

I consider myself an unlikely convert.

I went prepared to Wandersnark, and truly, there was plenty I couldn't relate to or really didn't care about, as the following sampling of Facebook status updates demonstrates.  I'm generally suspicious of the lifestyle-marketing, and always a little wary in a big cohesive group, wary of our very cohesion, alert to any sign of cultishness.

The long, hot Wanderlust days passed in a blur of class, heat, laughs, class, more heat.  I spent my entire time in Village Anusara, my yoga home, venturing to other classes only once -- no need to go elsewhere.  I fell completely head-over-heels in love with Amy Ippoliti.  I felt too busy the whole time, unable to take in everything happening around me, only able to focus on one ring of the multi-ring circus.  I never went to the tea house, didn't eat from the Dr Bronner's food truck, didn't take the tram to the top, didn't bla bla bla.  Watching videos afterward, I was amazed at all of the things that happened that I missed.

But what did happen for me?  I practiced, a lot.  I enjoyed back-to-back classes, some with music, classes packed with people, with a breeze blowing by.  I laughed and jumped around and generally was so happy to be at camp, doing nothing but yoga with my friends, practicing with new teachers in a gorgeous setting.  There was art happening everywhere.  In every class, the yoga was a form of expression.  As usual for Anusara, it was never just poses on a mat.  It was always what can you express in this pose, how do you make this the purest expression of who you are.  And people were expressing themselves all over, whether in class or out, stilt-walkers, painters, acrobats or just whatever get-up any given person was wearing.  It was, even though not 100% my scene, still deeply beautiful.  Damn it, like a Ren Faire of yoga, but sweet.  An entire self-sufficient little universe.  I wished to be there longer.  When it came time to go, I was ready to be home but also sad to leave.

And the next morning, as I sat at my desk at work, the little bomb detonated -- this little bomb I'd been seeded with while doing yoga in the mountains with my friends went OFF.

Completely unexpected.

Facing a day of spreadsheets and invoices and the cool and usual satisfaction of numbers, I sat in my chair and stared, dumbfounded, at this realization: 

I am an artist, and this is what I do all day?

Yes, after four days at Wanderlust, that four-day immersion in art, I came back changed in that one most-significant way, suddenly and uncomfortably aware that I am truly a creative person and that I absolutely have to make that existence for myself in which I make a life and a living from what I truly am.  It was a flower bomb that went off, but a bomb nonetheless.  Yes, I can do the spreadsheets more artfully (believe me, I do), bringing every bit of creativity to that process I can, but really, end of the day, bottom line: that ain't it.

There's more.  There's more and like those pesky little seeds, that more is germinating and clamoring for light, pushing its way out, knocking other shit out of the way, all in the interest of expressing itself.

Damn.

That's a long way from "I will not slackline," right?  The thing that's so cool about it for me is that I never had to buy all of it -- I never had to slackline or get feather extensions or park my intellect at the door.  And *still* I had a life-changing experience, the one that I needed to have.  I got the bomb with my particular name on it.

And that is something fierce.

So even though I'm hurt and unsure when I'll ever be really, fully back on my mat again, let alone capable of rocking back-to-back intense 2-hour classes, I am dreaming of the next Wanderlust, hoping to be strong enough, wanting to re-create the feeling I had there last year at yoga camp.  I won't be nervous about it like I was my first time, trying to figure out how to work it, how to have an experience that is not the full-package of daytime enlightenment + poolside debauchery.  I won't care.  I'll just know that I'll go and have whatever experience is there waiting for Just Me.  I'll pick up whatever bomb has my name on it, and see what happens next.

It'll be good no matter what.  It'll be bombs and flowers all over again.  In the meantime, I'll content myself with the little reminders I keep around and this profound shift in how I feel, who and what I know myself to be.  Oh, the fruits of practice are so many, and sometimes so unexpected.   Who knew I'd go to camp for four days and come back so resolute, my inner artist awakened?  Who knew that even 7 months later I'd still be feeling the glow?  That three-day Seeker ticket was just right.  I found what I didn't even realize I was seeking: a glorious sense of Me, one that's still with me, one that ticks and throbs just under the surface of every single moment since.

XO