Paradise: Lost Connection

Oct26

Ok, it has been awhile since I wrote a blog post and it is mostly because I live in a time warp. It might be that living here in Cost Rica when the sun sets and rises at the same time each day you can just get lost in the rhythm. Paradise has it’s own timetable and no matter how hard I try to stay on task, live with my Day-Timer loaded to the gills, I simply cannot do it. I could be on a publishing deadline that feels like the thin line between life and death and find that I have been staring at the Toucans in the tree outside my window for a half hour. Costa Rica is a drug.

So, I thought to write about all the things that can derail you here in Costa Rica. Things like the big weather, car repair nightmares that define what it is to have a car in Costa Rica, living without a dryer and hanging out your clothes for days in and out of rain showers, my addiction to farmer’s markets and even about jellyfish when snorkeling, but alas, I am writing about the Internet. The Internet for us here in Costa Rica is the true test of one’s patience and fortitude. It tests your true metal.

My entire Internet life in the USA was a breeze. If something broke the Genius Bar at Apple did magic in a day. If the Internet went down in the mountains of Colorado it was up in no time. I depended on connectivity like I depended on the sun rising and setting. But, not so, here in a developing country. The Internet, just like absolutely everything else, is subservient to mother nature and repairmen who are never for any reason in a hurry about anything.

We get storms every day. One storm can boot you off the Internet for days. And then there is no talking to your children, no being punctual with clients on Skype, no surfing the web for an answer to how to get rid of ticks on the dog your are fostering, and no watching Netflix and keeping up with your new obsession: Legends. It all comes to a grinding halt. The parrots keep squawking and the breezes keep blowing but that little circle in the middle of your computer screen that keeps spinning and spinning, just keeps on spinning.

So fixing a Wi-Fi tower is not like in the USA. They have to use machetes here. I think you get the picture. So, patience is what this ongoing debacle breeds. You end up having to, by no choice of your own, just allow for the possibility that even if the internet is down, work will get done, people will find you, deadlines will get met and life will go on. Pura Vida.

My IV Drip

Sep24

I had surgery once where I thought the panic attack would kill me before the surgery did. I clung to the nurse’s arm and squeaked out, “I need a Valium”. Now, let me say that I don’t take valium, nor have I ever. But I saw all the shows on TV for decades where that little pill seemed to be all too friendly with women to help them sleep, manage stress or simply just check out from being a Stepford Wife. My nurse said, “Oh, honey, we’ve got something far better than that for you,” as she hooked me to an IV drip and I was out in LA LA land in four seconds.

Costa Rica is my IV drip.

I arrived here in a hurry. I arrived here living a hurried, fast paced type A life. I had no clue how to do it otherwise. And pretty much upon landing, setting my toes deep in the hot sand and sipping agua de pipa, I unplugged from a power source that in almost every way, I had become addicted to.

Suddenly, I was drifting off to a deep sleep at 8pm once the blackest curtain of dark was drawn over the jungle, precisely at 6pm. For a girl who had never thought to see 4am, I was up with the first spark of pink light. My gate slowed, my needs of the day thinned out like plucking weeds from an overgrown garden, to reveal the fact that I could get it all done today, or maybe get it done manana. It did not matter.

Now, five months later, I am not only type B, but I am not concerned with moving to any particular destination in my day. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I work, I see a dozen clients a week on Skype, edit a half-dozen books, write my own stories and yet there is no inner coil of tension from the decades of living in urban life and off a grid of energy that never shuts down. I can be in the thick of writing a scene and not lose my place when I pause to watch the scarlet Macaws fly over. I just take the bliss of that moment and pump it all into the next sentence I write.

Here there is no need for Valium, or vodka tonics, or having to read Eckhart Tolle for the hundredth time on how to be here now. I am here now. Nature requires it and her grid of energy is so powerful that unless you let her reboot you, you will simply go back to where you traveled from.

Nature is my drug of choice. Nature never leaves me with a hangover in life. She simply returns me to the rhythm that is innately humane.

No Hair, No Clothes, No Shopping?

Aug2

What’s a girl to do in Costa Rica?

Ok, admittedly I cannot tell you a thing about much of any of this but to say, forget hair, forget clothes and forget shopping. Costa Rica brings you back to the basics of just about everything. Sure you can get an $8 haircut but don’t expect to want to leave the house anytime soon. Hair color? Lemon juice and the brilliant sun. You can find clothes but sarongs suffice and as for what Americans call shopping, the local Feria (outdoor market) is the only place to find organic food, local jewelry, an imported bra or two, (no kidding) and biodegradable detergent. When in Costa Rica it is all about local.

And unless you live on a huge pension or have a trust fund forget about anything imported like, anything in a box, wine, liquor or shampoo. Quinoa for the healthy is $12 a box, cheaper American shampoo is $25 and a bottle of imported Milagro Tequila can run you upwards of $80. So I get to put my money into the local economy and eat, dress and look like someone who cares about the land, the people and the economy here. I have learned about odd vegetables I have no idea what the names are, I get to help support a family who picks lychee nuts from nearby trees and sells them outside of the bank and I have the opportunity to simplify my life, my diet, my expectations and my life in general. As a result I am simply happier.

Living in a third world country is good for the soul if you leave American standards where they belong.

Hopeless in Seattle: A Gypsy Confession

Jul26

I woke up today, a beautiful sparkling day in Costa Rica, mad as a hatter. Then I just found myself crying into my pillow. My heart hurt and I had to wash my face, click on my computer and tell you why. You read posts about the encounters I have on the road being my own sort of Gypsy. But sometimes I hit a wall. Sometimes something gets under my skin and I cannot shake it so I do what is my one great passion. Write. And as you know I am a writer, a coach, a ghostwriter and a teacher. I can take my passion to the four corners of the world if I would like and do my work from anywhere that has a wi-fi cafe. And I have. But today the writer in me has a burr under her saddle.

When I started another site I have called Mythotherapy.org nearly a year ago I had three inspirations: To encourage people to tell their stories, to help writers get published and to share what I know about writing, navigating the publishing world and most of all, to honor story as power in the world. The Gypsy Life blog is a place to tell stories, to share how stories, places and people have changed me entirely.

Most of my clients are first world citizens who enjoy many of the luxuries that most of the planet do not have the opportunity to experience: Clean and free water, electricity, watching a show before bed while eating Ben and Jerry’s, a bed, buying food on every corner, one or two Starbucks coffees in a day and money. I think it’s safe to say that my clients are mostly Caucasian, privileged in my sense of the word and writing is a luxury, sometimes a hobby and most of the time a story that is true in their lives and the telling of it will help others and heal the writer at the same time. All but one storyteller. This is who I want to speak about in this post.

Over the past two years I have been getting to know a young man in his twenties from Zimbabwe. He has a story to tell, passion for his people and his family, a large family that his mother is raising, and he has no vehicle to tell his story other than Facebook. And in my mind the best writers are those who cannot help themselves and have to write, are roused in the night and must jot down ideas or begin a new chapter, dig into a new flash of insight or who have lived through the unthinkable and still possess a light in them and their story of triumph is the medicine the world needs. A writer who does not write as a hobby or a tangential part of life, but sees writing as their life, like breathing, is a very different animal. Emmanuel is one of those writers and storytellers. And he has gotten under my skin.

I grew up in a black and white world of the 50’s. Yes there were pink poodle skirts, bobby socks, diners, 38 records and then came the Beatles, the Vietnam War and chaos and cover-ups. But there was also growing up in the south where an African-American person was a “nigger”, when Brazil nuts were call “nigger toes” in my family, where I grew up with maids and drivers and black gardeners who pruned our hedges and clipped the grass around a four-foot metal lawn ornament of a black man holding a lantern and wearing a butlers outfit. This was my norm as a child. Then it all changed. I saw more sides of the black and white issue, as I became a teen.

My knees buckled as race riots were out of control in Watts. As front-page news was Selma and countless other towns and cities brutally murdering black citizens. I sat with my parents with our aluminum TV trays and Swanson TV dinners in front of a black and white television as JFK was gunned down and began hysterically crying as my parents sipped a vodka tonic and praised the conservatives and bashed the liberals. I became despondent when our government murdered Martin Luther King, and then the same people assassinated Bobby Kennedy. By 17 I was hopeless.

The black and white issue began to eat away at my soul. Why? Because it was a human story for me. It was about people intentionally killing hope. From those days forward I was all about keeping hope alive. My hope, the hope of people in poverty, people who had so much less than me, people who had no future in our country back then because of the color of their skin. As for me I was lily-white, blonde, blue-eyed and wanting for not one thing in life.

Fast forward. I moved from hand writing letters to my congressman on stationary with my embossed initials at the top and mailing it to them by snail mail for eight cents to emailing those letters decades later. The KKK had gone underground and reappeared dressed differently. They were now corporate leaders, governing officials and not very interested in my emails. The Internet opened doors for all of us and there was a new power of the word birthing itself every day in cyberspace. Facebook shattered barriers and became a tool I would come to use religiously. Not because I wanted to simply dazzle the world with photos of my children or inspiring quotes, but because it connected me to stories around the world. I then started a Facebook page called Equilux, all about the dark and the light, all about the not so black and white issues we face. Then I met Emmanuel through Facebook and was instantly transported back to the days of my life at thirteen when life was becoming hopeless.

Emmanuel in his twenties, lives in a country in Africa that is a regime dedicated to keeping people from telling their stories, keeping people in poverty and powerless. Zimbabwe is not necessarily a black and white story though; it is a black and black story that is perpetuated by white values. Emmanuel is one of several children, the oldest, raised with the rest of them by his mother, living a life in a house with dirt floors and tiny brothers and sisters who dream of school and an easier life. Emmanuel is the only one to graduate school and who wants to go to college and follow a dream. His dream is not to get a job in IT and adopt empty western values, his dream is to go to film school so he can tell his story, his mother’s story and the story of his people. Emmanuel knows that is the only power of change for him and for his country; Words, stories and telling his truth.

If you go to Facebook and look Emmanuel Mazivire up, you will see him post photos of his family, his people and say things like “One kind word can change someone’s day” or “Do not judge by appearances, a rich heart may be under a poor coat”. He has not lost hope. So Emmanuel and I started to talk two years ago. He shared some of his writing of a story he wants to submit for a documentary on his mother and all the single mothers raising children in Zimbabwe. I posted about him and tried helping him get a basic video camera, which took six months to reach him because of how they monitor the mail in Africa. He still wishes to find a way to go to film school in the United States, still needs a video camera worthy of a documentary and is working on his writing.

So before the sun came up today I was roused by the part of me who after five decades of watching the black and white story, which is really the privileged and underprivileged story, the money and no money story, the entitled and not very entitled story and the turn a blind eye story because it is too inconvenient to know too many inconvenient truths, my heart hurt. Because Emmanuel is one in a sea of young people with stories to tell, dreams to live, love to share and who has very little means of doing so without help, without compassion, without others sharing the load. And like many I am not one to swoop into Zimbabwe on a plane with great video equipment and shoot a doc on Emmanuel and his life. Why? Because, no one can tell the story better than the person who is living it.

And I am one single mother in the world myself, privileged to live my dream, and not wealthy by a long shot. What I can do for and with Emmanuel is help him tell his story, be a voice along side of his, read his writing, coach him for free, share with people who are touched to help with a camera and support him on Facebook. But he needs more. He needs to have the flames of his hope fanned. What power each of us has to do that. He is pushing against all odds even in circumstances you or I would cry uncle to have to face. He needs a mentor, a documentary camera, a plane ticket, help for his mother, his siblings, his story. He needs to go to school, have a patron, get his video into film festivals. He needs me, he needs, you. I do what I can but as Emmanuel knows first hand…it takes a village. He is one person in a sea of stories. But as he posted last week:

So these are my few sincere words. There is an ocean filled with Emmanuel’s in this world, on every street corner, in Mumbai, Russia and New York City. Story is power. The power I chose to use in my world. We hold it in our hands every day and have a choice what to do with that story, sometimes failing to see that words are one of the most powerful tools we all have and only second to the power of the heart. Put the two together and we would all be unstoppable.

Note: If you are interested in knowing more about Emmanuel, helping in any way, running a Kickstarter Campaign to raise money for him, buy him a plane ticket, give him your video camera that is documentary worthy, or help me to help him please contact me personally at mayachristobel@gmail.com or write to Emmanuel directly at emmanuelmazivire@gmail.com and visit him on Facebook at Emmanuel Mazivire and send him your support. Become part of the global village.

Emmanuel doing some teaching.

Your Bucket List

Jul7

As a modern day gypsy living from pillar to post was not on my top ten Bucket List items. I had the following dreams instead: I had things on my list like getting an Oscar, writing a bestseller, seeing the caves of Damanhur, going to Antarctica, and winning the lottery, of course. But I won the lottery the minute I said yes to my heart and left normal life, as most of us know it.

I have been having a life on the road that is dotted with awe-inspiring, jaw dropping beauty, kind-hearted people, challenging culture shocks, language barriers and physical limitations. I chronicle how different I feel when I live in the city versus what my body changes into when I live in the jungle here in Costa Rica. Not a day anywhere is the same as the day before.

I have grown to know two certainties in my life: That all you can count on is change. And secondly, that love is the only real human currency. Money can in fact, not matter. When I can focus on these two things then fear can’t take a foothold. If every encounter I have is rooted in love and each moment of change is embraced then there is no way to contract from what life dishes out on a daily basis. Everything becomes a way of learning about self and other, about having and not having, about what the soul truly needs in order to thrive.

This is why I am a gypsy. I value experience far above stability and job security. As a result, my mind cannot become entrenched in the cultural mind, cannot feed on bad news, or really run the show in my life at all. Living and navigating by intuition and a spirit of “Yes” is a heart-based matter. Living in the heart takes courage and is a bit like “spelunking” into caves that are dark and unclear with the full knowledge that you are tethered to a large Universe that has only your wellbeing and growth in mind.

But one of the hidden benefits of living a nomadic life with few possession and estimating real wealth as beauty, spirit, new friends, new opportunity and an adventurous spirit, is it changes your physical chemistry. The body is not a vehicle just to get me from one country to the next, but is completely tuned to the vibration at which I live when I am inspired and challenged. Those experiences raise endorphins, change brain chemistry, metabolism, and virtually every cell in the body.

Living as a modern gypsy insists on total integration of mind, body and heart humming forward as one unit with the life battery being the soul. I don’t know how I could go back to living any other way.

The Gypsy off Road

Jan4

My Gypsy Blog was started nearly four years ago when I took a leap out of my life as a therapist (and a closet writer), and decided to discover the story of my life…on the road.

But one thing I was not prepared for was that if you pack up your life in one tiny car, put your cat on the front seat and open your map and go east, there is no guarantee of getting there. Not when you are open to what happens when you are on the road. There is no promise that you will end up where you think you are going. That seems to be not only true about life in about every way, but true about writing a story. You may decide to go in one direction and end up with a totally different story…writing your life.

I have been in almost every state in the U.S. and have wandered my way back to one of my favorite places of all: Colorado. I was on my way north one time and ended up in Oklahoma, I was on my way to NYC and stayed in Asheville NC for a year, I went to visit someone up on the border of Canada and didn’t leave for a year. I decided to settle in Seattle and promptly was called to leave and go back east. I flew to Africa swearing I would never ever leave and landed back in Oklahoma a far cry from Africa. I have set out on so many journeys that my mind had constructed, but in the end, my heart took me places that were unexpected, serendipitous and magical.

And then there are the times that are not so magical. Or at least in that sparkly happy-to-be-there kind of way. Travel strips you. It makes it near impossible to be your limited self, to be afraid or get lost. But, in the end, you still get do get afraid and lost and more often than you would like. You run out of money and have to take a job you don’t love. You meet people who are not kind or generous, you make decisions that turn out to be bogus or you stand still at a hundred different crossroads and don’t have one clue which way to go.

That is the story for a writer as well.

A good story has all those elements in it: You get lost in the weeds of your own story, you stare at the blank page and have no clue which way to go, you run out of money to pay the electric bill since you never leave your computer long enough to know what time of the month it is, you let someone read your writing and they trash it and you give up at least once a week and you then read the chapter you just wrote and are bored to tears. These are NOT the magical moments for a writer.

And I decided to take a new road in my life where that is all I am now doing…I write. I have one magical, fluid, simple ten page day. Then I reread what I wrote and cringe. Rewrite it and smile. I set out to finish some research on a project and it leads me down a new path of thinking. I read a bestseller at noon for a break and realize I am not as good as the author. Then I stumble upon a poem just itching to get out onto the paper and I am hooked on it, I swallow it whole and by 2am I have the making of a great screenplay. This is a writer’s life.

You put all these inevitable experiences for a writer together like a well woven tapestry and you have the landscape that a writer lives in day in and day out. It is just as exciting as going off-road in a four-wheel and getting high into the back-country.

I have a new map. It is not the well-worn Road Atlas I have come to depend on when I am on some one lane road in a January snowstorm in North Dakota while I look for Devil’s Tower, it is a map that is born in my heart. I love storytelling and have so many to tell. I love to help others write the story that has been simmering in their psyche for a long time. Writing is just as spectacular an adventure as travel.

So I am currently off-road. For the time being the gypsy in me is hunkered down in the snowy mountains of Colorado and I am navigating a new territory. I am mapping my own life in words….I am excited to see where this new road will lead. Please check often since I will post stories, and gypsy adventures. And hear more about my writing adventures at www.mythotherapy.org.

The Story of My Life

Jan3

This was a frequent phrase around my home growing up. “Holy Moly, story of my life”. If I got a collections letter in the mail, or I hear that a great guy has a secret wife, that my brand new shiny car needs a transmission or that in fact I really didn’t win the lottery…” story of my life”. A handy phrase. But what’s in a phrase?

We each have one story that repeats itself over and over again throughout our lifetime. I promise you, one central ever present and every changing “story of our lives”. The casts of characters change but they fundamentally play the same roll in our lives year after year. Every new love, new boss or new dog is just like a mother, brother, father, betrayer, helper, teacher and the best of ourselves the worst of ourselves. The place, the reasons, the motives, the fears, and the outcomes seem to remain similar as well.

So, if you were to just pluck out of the sky a scenario that you recognize as so familiar that it is a “repeat story” in your life, what would it be? Would the themes be endless hope, deep despair, betrayal, running away, lost love and fighting for what is right, or would it be, men leave, women love you but die, or would it be, am I good enough, can I prove myself, or that there is never enough money or time or money or love or money or food, nourishment or support. Could you be in Groundhog Day like Bill Murray where over or over again you love the wrong person, you loose everything you have and need to start again, you never feel smart enough or have enough of, or ultimately are loved enough. Does the white knight turn into the villain or are you the one who rescues and heals the world? We all have one story.

If we take the time to identify this story, which repeats itself over and over again for our learning and growth, then we have abundant power to change the story, but not before we look it square in the eye and say “Yes” this is MY story. For most authors who are seized with a story line and write until the days are a blur and who forget to eat or take a shower, most likely the book or story being written is a mirror of the writer’s psyche.

Most writers have to cop to the fact that writing is therapy. Writing is sanity. Expiation. Transformation and atonement. Most writers on a good and honest day will say that the story they think is pure fantasy is really from their own life, own fear, own desire to be a hero or heroine and to rewrite what went so wrong, so long ago. It is a powerful moment when you can write a fictitious character that is not you in reality so that they can do all the things that you only wish to have done or said or experienced in your life. Why else do we write?

And when we can fess up that our own story is driving the bus, we can not only heal our lives but we can write a story that touches the collective nerve. That is what makes a bestseller. In the end….the story will write you.

The Telling Room

Dec20

My generation had no idea that the age of the computer was coming or what it would mean. Back then spelling was a mandatory class we took. We could not go into middle school without getting a passing grade in “penmanship”. I remember practicing my upper case and lower case letters on lined paper over and over again until all my words flowed like little art forms onto the page without effort. The act of writing with a favorite pen and crafting a story for school magically changed brain chemistry and balanced right and left-brain. But, now days, writing on anything other than a computer is rare and making up stories is becoming rare as well.

Then in college we had Selectric Typewriters that were all the rage, which replaced the typewriters that had spools of carbon ribbon used by Hemingway. Then came the Brother Word Processor and life was about to change forever.

Fast forward to my daughter’s generation who had computers in school, spell-check and there were no spelling and grammar classes or cursive in school. In fact unintelligible printing replaced cursive and the intimate relationship between a well-sharpened pencil tucked neatly in a row inside of a wooden pencil box put to a blank piece of paper all but disappeared. In fact reading books began to disappear and daydreaming and imaginative story telling was capsized by video games and television.

The art of storytelling is under siege and in fact the power of storytelling is rapidly becoming a lost personal art, and an underutilized healing tool in our society. Even movies are slowly giving way to franchised super hero trilogies and beyond that dominate the world of storytelling on the big screen.

But, there are those who want to teach storytelling to kids and young adults as a means to unlock creativity, unleash personal power and heal lives. One such teacher and writer is Susan Conley, a co-founder of The Telling Room, a creative writing lab in Portland, Maine who believes in the power of stories to transform lives and change communities. She also believes that writing and storytelling healed her from cancer. Here is her story on TED:

Susan served as the executive director of The Telling Room for its first two years of life before moving to China, where she wrote a memoir titled The Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf, 2011). This book chronicles the years Susan, her husband and two young boys lived in Beijing, learned Mandarin, set out on The Hunt for the Greatest Dumpling in China, and contended with Susan’s cancer diagnosis. The book was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine and The Daily Beast and was voted a Goodreads’ Choice Award Winner for Best Travel and Outdoor Books of 2011.

Susan has been the recipient of two MacDowell Colony residencies, a Breadloaf Writer’s Fellowship and a Massachusetts Arts Council Grant. Maine Today Media gave Susan a 2011 “Greatest Women of Maine” Award. A graduate of Middlebury College and San Diego State University, Susan has taught creative writing and literature seminars at Emerson College, as well as at Harvard’s Teachers as Scholar’s Program. She continues to teach all flavors of writing workshops at The Telling Room and has a novel forthcoming from Knopf in the spring of 2013. Susan lives in Portland with her husband, Tony Kieffer, and their two boys ages 9 and 11, who are avid story tellers themselves and not at all sick of dumplings.

Quantum Storytelling

Dec3

I sat in a kind of stupor as the credits rolled, the crowd silently leaving the theater. I had a feeling that being in Oklahoma at the time, the majority of the moviegoers were baffled by what they had just seen. No one was talking, something had happened. I was the only one still in my seat. I had sat through three hours and two full bags of popcorn watching Interstellar. Not because Matthew Mcconaughey is beautiful or talented but because I knew that embedded in this film was far more than star power.

I am not going to review the movie here. But, I want to talk about how story can wake you up. Interstellar was written and directed by the Christopher Nolan who did Inception. Most of us know how it felt to watch that movie and witness something just outside of our grasp, but mesmerizing and intriguing enough to keep us glued to our movie seat. Interstellar was no different for me but far more powerful since it is a premier example of how story can change us at every level. I mean really change us.

That any filmmaker would attempt to take me into the heart of quantum physics and nudge me toward a new and more defined perception of time and space gets my attention. Flaws of moviemaking aside, I loved one particular thing about this story: That it revealed what the shift on our planet and in our own DNA as humans may be all about. And that is powerful.

I find myself gravitating to substance instead of the entertainment value of story. And Interstellar seemed to allow me to sink into the big questions of life, the unanswered questions, the heroic ones and the questions we all fear to really look into the heart of. Questions of where do we come from, why are we here, what is god, are we alone in the Universe, what is beyond three dimensional existence, is there more than one Maya in the solar system and what does relativity and gravity have to do with everything? As for me, those are the only questions I am interested in.

So when I took the leap three months ago out of the world of psychotherapy and embraced what I truly love the most in life, I did so with the understanding that story would heal us as individuals and story would heal the planet in ways that are ineffable, illusive, complex and sometimes simply a mystery.

I held up a torch in my life to ask for stories to come to me. I held tight to my deep love and passion for stories of transformation, survival, hope and love as the greatest power in the Universe as I intended to write only these stories, and help others bring their amazing adventures and dreams into reality. I got far more than I bargained for. Gratefully.

People from all over the world are finding me in some of the most unusual ways. Phone calls and emails from those who suddenly feel ready to reveal secrets of the Universe only they have been entrusted with, stories of unparalleled heroism that will change lives and creative dreams and fantasies that speak to transforming our own natures from war to love, and from fear to magic.

I am pausing to allow myself to feel how very important each one of these stories are and how I can be a part of birthing weapons of mass love and power which is the medicine our planet needs. Medicine the storyteller needs as well, which will affect them on the deepest level imaginable and affect the lives of their families.

Storytelling is a sacred event. I cannot urge everyone enough to begin to see the stories that you have lived or imagined as sacred energy that you were entrusted with long before you were born. You alone are the keeper of your own unique story of bravery, courage, pain and suffering, triumph of the spirit, love and lost love, finding god or becoming god.

The energy inherent in a great story or film creates a resonant response in our physical bodies, our thoughts and our hearts. That resonant energy begins a cascading shift and change in our own cellular nature. We are not only changed emotionally or intellectually when we read or watch an amazing story, we are changed energetically and physically. This is why I would always caution against the Horror and Death Film. We are changed in ways that only fear can accomplish when we subject ourselves to the images that these films provide in abundance.

And fear releases adrenaline and then fear becomes an addiction to the thrill of the adrenaline. In the end we are physically, emotionally and spiritually changed. The same can be said for the stories that we need far more: Stories of love and hope and courage. Stories of overcoming the unthinkable.

So, I am blessed to be given the opportunity to help any storyteller birth what is uniquely their primary and most powerful contribution to their legacy on this planet: A personal story that will resonate with the people who have simply been waiting for your story and just have not known it.

Later this week I will post under Screenplays the movies that are must sees and the books that should be movies. We all need food for the soul since our souls are under siege by technology and a planet in peril. Your story is a life raft, is a story to help each of us remember who we are, who we were born to be and who we have yet to become. Bravo to our brave storytellers.

From Rural to Urban

Mar2

New Stop….Seattle. I have just spent one month in a place, cut off from the United States but still part of Washington. Point Roberts. You have to go over the Canadian Border, drive a bit and then go back over the US border to get there. Then to go shopping at the nearest Safeway equivalent you have to do that all over again. The rub? Sometimes the border crossings are an hour wait.

But, Point Roberts turned out to be a haven for my writer’s soul: Pastoral, wild, rural and bordered on three sides by the Strait of Georgia. And if the solace was not wonderful enough, the place was crawling with film industry writers, producers, camera men and great interest in the screenplay I am writing. I found that as I kept aligned with my inspiration to tell a story, to care for self and find joy in the beauty around me, I continued to experience the magic of living in the flow. Wonderful people and experiences have flooded my life and led me to deeper and more meaningful expressions of myself. But time was up and I needed to head for Seattle. My next home for a month.

Seattle is where I will be attending The Film School (www.thefilmschool.com) to immerse myself in a month long intensive bootcamp for screenwriters. Working with Tom Skerritt (A River Runs Through It) will be amazing. My hope? To polish a form of writing that is not a perfect fit for wordy ole me and to create a final version of the story I am currently writing. As I will most likely be the age of most of the other participants parents, I am excited to have this opportunity to strip down to the most basic me, pull out all my writing weaknesses and build my skill as a screenwriter. Somehow, at this moment I am remembering Demi Moore in GI Jane and a shudder runs up and down my spine. Twelve hour days, six days a week with Sunday for sleep and laundry.

And, since I last wrote about my travels, my trials and my over the top excitement about the life I am living, the following things have happened: I was ultimately denied a driver’s license after five months of effort with my lawyer. I am quietly considering my options and have not a bone in my body that is having a problem with my new non-driver status. My not driving has led me to more experiences and people I would never have had or met otherwise. I am determining which radical path I will take to solve the issue. But ultimately I have found out first hand that no one really needs a car. No one.

I have met producers interested in the film I am working on and I have joined as a full partner with AOMUSIC which I count as the greatest gift from my not driving, for if I had my driver’s license way back in September I would have been off to NYC and I would never had met Richard Gannaway, who is the heart behind the music that I believe can change the world. It has certainly changed mine. (please read about AO and Richard on my new website http://www.mayalunachristobel.com)

I have a new website which has been the best therapy I have ever done with people I love helping me to create myself in the world…. anew. I have attended an Oscar Gala hosted by Tom Skerritt and won a raffle that benefits The Film School, to do something I have wanted to do all my life: Fly Fish! And fly fish with Tom and his wife for three days on the Yakima River here in Washington at the Canyon River Ranch Resort. Pinch me now. Gotta get some waders!

I have also teamed up with Todd Huston to start an independent production company, Light Show Productions, to create films with heart, soul, integrity and inspiration. Todd has been wonderful to write about, wonderful to work with and he is now headed back to Missouri to the little cabin where we had our “Deliverance” experience. I am oddly happy not to be going back again if I may say so myself and will just stay tucked in here at the Mediterranean Hotel in Queen Anne. Hotel living is pretty great. Simple, small, efficient, friendly and has a 24 hour business center and a coffee shop on the ground floor. My Leo self really likes this.

And this tiny accounting of life in the flow for a Gypsy without a car, is just scratching the surface of the amazing things that have been rushing into my life since I made this commitment to living on the road as a way to discover what makes me happy. What I have found out it that I never once had to even look for happiness. It was there all along and the Universe simply was poised, ready for me to open my heart and my arms to life in it’s fullest. Happiness has been that easy all along.