The Waiting Place

I remember a line in a Dr. Seuss book -called Oh, the Places You’ll Go – about “the waiting place.”

The Waiting Place… for people who are just waiting.   Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go, or the phone to ring, ot the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No or waiting for their hair to grow.  Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for the fish to bite or waiting for the wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake or a pot to boil, or a Better Break or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.  Everyone is just waiting.

While I most certainly am not so suspended as the people caricatured in this passage, I am indeed waiting for something.

Waiting for a brand new chair

Waiting to learn to braid my hair

To learn to remove my captive bead ring

(Although it’s among my favorite things)

Waiting for a call from her

To help pry my brain from a dysfunctional stir

For Saturday to come and pass

So I can get on with my life at last

Waiting for someone to step my way

To look at my chair massage sign and say,

“Not only can I use a chair massage here,

But I haven’t had bodywork at all for a year…

Do you think I could get an appointment one day?

Sometime in between my hard work and my play?

Life’s tough on the body, for a jock or a geek…

Come to think of it, I’d like to visit each week.”

But right now I’m just waiting.

I’m reasonably sure nobody wants to hear the details, but suffice it to say that as busy as I constantly am, on another level I feel I’m always waiting for something to shift, waiting for some opportunity…I’m getting bored with it, to tell the truth.  I wonder what the alternatives might be.

Yeeehaaaaaa!

I’m just feeling good these days.  For me, some of the most exhilarating life experiences are learning, creating, and healing – healing either the self or someone else.  And more and more, it seems like I’m engaged in at least one of those tasks most of the time.

In particular I’ve found there’s a lot I need to learn before I can create and heal the way I intend, and so I’ve spent progressively more time during my day in that process.  Many days I will read or watch something related to massage or practice management; practice guitar, violin, and flute; work with some self-improvement book or books; and go over vocabulary words in Hawaiian, learn new signs in ASL (American Sign Language).  I don’t do a lot of each of these, since I am in fact working on my business and looking for work opportunities every day too, but I do make little bits of progress each day.

It’s exciting living with a mind that changes and develops a little each day.  I feel better prepared to deal with things; I feel more interested in the details of everything…you know, I made a decision very early on in life not to take recreational drugs, and I’m all the more glad now that I never did it because what I’m experiencing right now seems to meet or exceed the most positive descriptions I’ve ever heard of that sort of experience…and I can still drive just fine and I don’t feel like eating an entire box of Twinkies afterward.  When I can actually grant myself the time to sit down and do some songwriting I bet it’ll be a trip!

Keep on frettin’ away…or something…

In addition to my primary instrument, guitar, there’s a host of other instruments I play to at least a limited degree. My technical limitations mostly reflect limitations on the time I’ve put into each. I’ve actually obtained several of these instruments within the past two years, a time in which I’ve been ridiculously busy, so it’s been hard to keep up.

I decided, however, that some baby steps were needed to keep myself moving, so I chose one non-primary instrument and created a goal to play it – at least a little – every day for a month. I started yesterday…the trick will be to make another session happen tonight. These days spent doing promotions for my massage practice tend to be a bit on the long side at times, particularly when it’s slow like today, and I might be stopping by a friend’s for a little New Year’s gathering later.

Finally, this has to be a rushed acknowledgment, but thanks to my buddy Barry for taking me out for a great New Year’s Eve. The music and dancing were much needed…and the incredible dinner fueled me up in more ways than one.

Even more frustrated

Last night I finally managed to drag out Ye Olde 6-string and play for an hour…which gave me the recording bug again. I decided I’d move on to the third step of installing ProTools…and realized I had NO CLUE what the manual was talking about. Due to illness and major life changes, my one-month free phone support allowance was already over by the time I contacted the company for the first time today. To get any more help over the phone I either have to pay $3/minute for the call or buy a $99 1-year phone support package. Cute.They understandingly let me have some support today anyway…which led me to find that I lack basic hardware that’s needed for this (M-Audio), need to update to a new service pack, don’t have enough RAM, and have an unsupported processor which means that even if I fixed everything else the thing might not work.

I’m hoping the new laptop I just got which is literally still sitting in the box will turn out to be ProTools compatible, otherwise I’m stuck with a $300 software package I can’t use, and I still can’t do recordings on my PC – I’ll have to keep on kickin’ it 20th-century style with my dang multitracker from high school!!!

Welcome

…to my new blog.  My name is Lanakila Iesu, and I’m a massage therapist, musician, writer, and all-around good gal to know, living in San Lorenzo Valley, California (think Santa Cruz mountains).

I’m a little bit practical and a little bit kooky…a little bit balanced and a little bit extreme…but all of it is ultimately in the interest of creativity.  I’ve maintained other blogs pertaining to different topics, but this blog is my way of sharing and celebrating what’s going on for me as a creative person, so that whoever is interested can pop the hood, peer into my cranium, and see just what I’m up to now.

You’re most likely to enjoy reading this blog if you’re generally interested in exploring the meaning and process of creativity.  It’s not specifically a blog about any one form of creative expression; I plan to write about my primary modes of expression but also roads that are, for me, less traveled by.  Some days it will be music or writing, but other days the topic at hand might be creating a heart-centered business, sewing a soft-sculpture marotte, or simply approaching life’s challenges in ways that I haven’t previously tried.

So if this sounds like something you’d like to hear about, kick back, pour yourself a banana smoothie (or other drink of choice), and enjoy…and if I don’t write often enough for you, write me and give me a little nudge.  It might mean I’m being so creative that I’m forgetting to write…or it might mean I’m losing sight of my creative focus and desperately need a little poke in the right direction!