How maybe tomorrow I will settle down (or how I found Littlest Hobo on Youtube)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=banXT6azA-4

Found this on Bobby Gill's blog. Made me smile so sharing here.

Maybe tomorrow I will want to settle down, until tomorrow I will just keep moving on.........

Jx

How to make every man want you (or not as the case maybe)

No I haven’t just gone mad. That sounds like my personal idea of hell at the moment. My head and heart would question my sanity and yell at me for a long time. No this is a book by Marie Forleo called ‘Make every man want you’ that one of Ruth’s friends had sitting on the side at dinner the other night and I have since been reading. My immediate thought was Ms Forleo should write a part 2 called ‘How to recognise and avoid the arseholes that you attract having made every man want you’ because we don’t want every man. We just want that one that will make us happy.

The book isn’t of course about making every man want you though, but about uncovering personal glow or as she calls it ‘irresistibility’ and being comfortable in that. Knowing you are worth it in short. Personal glow was something I used to have in abundance. My nickname is ‘Gloworm’ for goodness sake. Recently though the trust in the Glow, especially the power of it, has been tested. I am not so much hiding my light under a bushel at the moment as burying it beneath a mountain.

The techniques Ms Forleo offers are neither rocket science or new. But the way she tells it makes it fresh to my current way of thinking and returns me to what I already knew to be true, but had temporarily forgotten. Whether I am ready to hear it however remains to be seen.

I was thinking about this in the spa today. Auckland’s temperatures were plummeting and I went for a swim and a warm-up in the sauna and steam room. I was sitting in the empty steam room thinking about the book and about whether I want to make men want me, let alone everyone and whether it’s about trusting that you have glow on the inside and letting it shine on the outside and that you are really are a glorious, beautiful, wonderful woman if you just accept and trust and know it. I was thinking about this as I stepped into the fog of the room that prevented me from seeing more than a foot in front of my face (which is hampered even more by my short sight that is of the level that if Gordon Ramsey were to stand in front of me I would say his skin looked like silk). I was thinking about this as the beans and broccoli I had for lunch made their presence known in my stomach and I was thinking about this when their presence converted to loud, uncontrollable, fabric and bum skin flapping fart. Fortunately it was smell free.

I was still thinking about this when the men I hadn’t seen at the rear of the steam room got up and walked out. I emptied the room. Of men. The irony wasn’t lost on me. It seems my body doesn’t want to make any man want me just yet.

I told Dale, my Aussie mate that I am staying with, this story and he said,

‘I take it this wasn’t in Australia?’

‘Why?’

‘Well because in Australia the guys would have gone ‘WA-HAY! Good on ya girl!’

To get a date here in Australia it seems I must brew up some crowd-clearing/pleasing beauties. Having Glow it seems isn’t enough because Glow is only a foot in the door. After that there are extra culturally specific things to take in to consideration. Like eating lots and lots and lots of beans in Australia.

How everyone has an opinion

Not in my name

So the Man and the Mother have been fighting. Mum told me she contacted him - after she did it - knowing full well I wouldn't approve. Not because I don't get her maternal desire to protect, but because when Mum gets going her anger doesn’t so much put fuel on the fire as the whole bloody Kauri tree and there is fall out from fires like that. Rather than contacting her directly the Man then voiced strong opinion to me about what she had said (lets just say what she was colourful) and I in turn voiced strong opinion to both of them to just get on with it and leave me out of it. I am not being their intermediary and having anymore stress.

Sometimes the hardest thing to deal with it not the event itself, but other people’s reactions to it.

And by people I mean those friends and family that hail from what I previously called my life and home. There are always going to be reactions unless we take off, telling no one and lick our wounds alone in the wilderness much in the way animals do. Making sense of these reactions and knowing what reactions resonate with us is a different matter. It’s a sieve and discard process.

People are telling me that I should cry more and be less jolly, others say I should cry less and laugh more. Then we have rest more, rest less, get out more, or stay in more and do less. Some say I should feel my emotions more and others say ‘let go’ because wallowing is bad. Then I have been told to garner a bit of hate and that I should have punched him (a lot) and others have told me hate immobilizes and just to embrace the learnings and enjoy the journey. Some hail from the ‘I told you so’ school of wisdom and aren’t backward in sharing and others just want to cry with you and for you because no one saw it coming and it was a great shock (our parents being some of the people in this category). It’s all a minefield of assumptions and personal interpretations where you are not just told how to feel but how to ‘do’ the feelings you should be having. Perhaps this is why NZ’s people and places are beginning to mean so much to me. The hills and people alike are staying quiet and just letting me be so I can work out how I feel and just accept it.

If I follow the tribe and start making assumptions Mum needs me to be angry because she is and the Man needing to get me angry because he needs the emotions he is feeling (guilt I assume being one) to stop turning inward and starts turning outward. It’s an emotional game of pass the parcel with no one wanting to be left holding the wrappings when the music stops.

The only pain we ever have is both derived from how our mind interprets our current situation and then our insistence in holding onto it for dear life. I realised early on if I didn’t like my level of pain to drop my interpretation or better still drop my mind all together and just be for as long as I could (it’s still a work in progress on that one).

We all get to choose again in every moment.

How to have your best day

The Taxi Driver that picked me up when I left the Man could, as we say in England, talk hind legs of Donkeys. Actually he was so good at it he could leave a field of donkeys legless and crawling around on their bellies. Having shared all his love life difficulties he then said to me ‘If you open your eyes today and you are alive, today is your best day.’ However he said that didn’t make it sound like overused, saccharine piece of pop wisdom. It made it sound real. How my god awful day could ever seem to be my best day was something I couldn’t at the time ever hope to fathom. I was however open to the notion that there was more to that day than being emotionally clobbered.

Kindness as currency

I know I have said this before, but increasingly I am realising that this journey had little to do with the Man now and everything to do with finding out who I am and some of the great truths in life and my life.

Abundance is a term bandied around a lot in personal development circles. Too much so. The way the word is used is the same way that Down Under use the word awesome for everything from a hotdog to a breath taking vista of a snow capped mountain. No one seems to know what the word actually really means anymore. That did include me too. Regardless of what is said abundance invariably means ‘having more’ and thus ‘having more money’ to most people. And because most people don’t have as much money as they would like abundance becomes a goal for the future rather than something realised in the present. Here on this journey I am realising abundance isn’t money. Money is the mere shadow of it. It’s what happens in every moment. And we don’t have to change umpteen things about us to have it. We can have it right now.

I Promise to Pay The Bearer

If I added up all the accommodation I have been offered from friends, friends of friends, strangers, couch surfers and anyone else I have forgotten I could live in Auckland rent free for the best part of 6 months. If I added up all the trips in cars, teas, coffees, meals in and outside of people’s homes I have been given or offered for the future I could survive here almost bill free – for that read money free. This doesn’t mean I am doing nothing for it or giving nothing for it. It’s just that I am trading on a different currency at the moment. This currency is kindness. And when you trade on that you don’t lose anything, but gain everything. You bank gratitude in every transaction and the compounded interest is colossal. This isn’t some manufactured Pay It Forward experiment anymore. It’s a true example of how random acts of kindness that are kept circulating by genuine warmth and promises form part of the very fabric our world is built on.

Gandhi said ‘live like it is your last day on earth, but learn like you are going to live forever. ‘ Well I am learning what all those pop wisdom phrases ‘contentment is wanting what you have’ actually really mean.

Spiritual readings

“Perhaps in the end all we can do is trade the love we need for the loved we need to receive. Sometimes life is hard through no fault of our won. Make yourself laugh and let God do the rest.” (The I Ching on Love- Guy Damian Knight)

In NZ it is normal to hike it to the homoeopath, hypnotherapist or herbalist before the doctors. Astrology, numerology, psychic and spiritual readings also abound. Such a pass time does not proliferate in the same way as it does in LA where such readings seemed to be born out of a need for answers and to fix something. In LA neon signs of psychic premises line strips of road like sex shops for the soul. No, in NZ it’s about fun, personal discovery and curiosity. In NZ they go tramping through their souls as much as they go tramping through their mountains. For a bit of fun Ruth gives me a reading using I Ching and numerology. I am staggered by its accuracy. And rather relieved it bodes well for the future even if I no one have any idea what that is anymore.

Staggering statistics in NZ’s population

Ruth and I talk of the statistics I have learned since I have been here. 1 in 4 of all NZ’s girls are sexually abused by 15 years of age, mostly by relatives. This is nearly 2 in 3 in the Maori population. Equally NZ has one of the worst bullying rates in the world and domestic violence is rife. What is missing in one of the most beautiful countries in the world to make their people behave so?

Some people are clearly trying to do something about it. Ruth’s own daughter is 20 and both her and her husband are part of the Destiny church. Over dinner they told me of the 2 week school tour they had just done with their church around NZ to promote change. They had been given a lot at the start of their married life so were now saving for a van to take under privileged kids on trips. Their efforts would be noteworthy for a person of any age, but at their young age they are an inspiration.

Still in regards to this as one person said to me 'we do have nice beaches though bro'

How to get a crash course in Maori

A Maori called Ruth – my first Couch Surfing Host

Ruth’s iwi (people) are from two areas – New Plymouth and some other area I daren’t try to spell. She is descended from a Maori Warlord who she tells me would be like the English equivalent of Henry the 8^th. She is a health researcher that is doing a thesis on female empowerment in her culture (she will no doubt correct me on the specifics of that). Like a lot of people in their 30s and 40s Ruth seems to be part of a crossover generation and speaks both ‘spiritual’ and ‘academia/intellectual’ in equal, fluent measure.

She is a mercurial orator and most of her stories have me laughing out loud or riveted. She tells me of her time in Australia and talks of ‘budgie smuggling’ (men in speedos) and freak waves on the beaches (about 6m high) that separated her from her tiny bikini giving her a lifelong aversion to 2 pieces and regret she didn’t stay in the arms of her rescuing bronzed lifeguard longer.

She then teaches me the pronunciation and meaning of the Maori language (which she pronounces like Mar-ree) and I am struck by the similarities to Irish and Gaelic sounds. Maori I am told means ‘ordinary’ and is the name that white people gave to them. When the ‘Maori’ where asked what they call themselves they said simply ‘we are just us, just ordinary people’ inadvertently naming themselves by their humbleness. She tells me also that the place that I first stayed in when I came to Auckland (Te Atatu) translates to sunrise and thus a place of starting something. Apt I thought.

Ruth had to learn the Maori language because the generations before her were beaten and punished at school for speaking Maori, all but killing it off. In the eighties the language began a revival that was modelled on the resurgence of the Welsh Language in the UK. I can’t remember the last time I was in someone’s home when they were surrounded by so much of their heritage and history. Pictures of her relatives and ancestors rest above every window and her art reflects her abundant spirituality. She has a lady doing the ‘pukana’ above her couch. This is a facial grimace, but the meaning of the syllables are more telling. Pu means to explode/shoot and kana means energy. Pukana therefore is about drawing the energy up from within – the fire from inside. Ruth tells me that it is easy to do this in a crowd when you can draw on others, but for a woman to be able do it alone is rare and special, hence the reason she rests above Ruth’s couch. Ruth is all about the empowerment of Maori women – and NZ’s children too for that matter.