Once we were so in love we wanted each second to lengthen: to extend a little longer, hold a few drops more. Walking the streets slowly, delighting in each opportunity to stop. We worshipped red lights, cherished every moment of red.

The horizontals were Ice Cream, Panda, Sandbox and Barnacle. The verticals were Scrumptious, Cloud, Clam and Orange. It was highly entertaining.

It’s a cloud, shaped like a panda, in a sandbox, eating orange ice cream. Scrumptious panda has barnacle clams? The oranges are cloudy!

But even with silly, ridiculous play-words, you still never know what people’s personal baggage is. Who knows what tragic ice cream panda incidents live in their past?

Sometimes you really, really, really want to make some progress on a project.

But then you don’t.

And sometimes this state of Whoah This Is Really Not Happening is related to the fact that the some part of the project itself is kind of scaring you. Like maybe its existence, for example.

(Tiny little popsicle stick reminder here that avoidance is normal! And it always makes sense even when it doesn’t.)

Anyway, this is where proxying comes in.

There is nothing more frustrating than not getting what you want.

Oh, wait. Except getting up the courage to ask for it and then still not getting it. That’s even worse.

It’s an awful feeling. Vulnerable and lost.

This is the hug for all those times you have experienced felt the pain of unfulfilled wishes.

For all the various parts of you who have craved love, support and sustenance, and didn’t receive it when they needed it most. I am so sorry.

Let’s talk about Very Personal Ads and how the whole thing works.

My uncle Svevo, who also happens to be my favorite person in the entire world, takes more joy and delight in the unexpected than anyone I know.

Whenever he visits Hoppy House, I know that he’ll bring along crumpled paper bags filled with marvelous and unlikely things.

A loaf of bread he baked on top of his pot-bellied stove. A toy chicken that lays pretend eggs. A ridiculously enormous supply of my favorite feta. Beeswax candles. Something he found in the woods that makes a good tea or an unusual snack. Like pine tips.*

* I just found this entertaining post about pine tips. See also this one for recipes.

Once — at a wedding — he gave me a toy car wrapped in old newspapers in a shoebox inside of a shoebox inside of another shoebox. The car was blue. The real present was in the trunk.

I could go on.

About three seconds after I said it, I realized how incredibly incongruous a thing it was to think.

Even though apparently I do think it.

I had to stop and make a list about why this might be something else I’m wrong about because even if my monsters have convinced me that I’m not a dancer, look at all these things that are also true:

Permission to forget.

Even if you’ve forgotten about something that’s really important to you.

And permission to then remember it again.

When you’re ready.

Not only can you set some sort of intention about what you want, but you can also toss in everything else you want to work on as well, no matter how unrelated it seems.

Doing some sort of healing process for your back? Acupuncture for your knee? Or maybe you’re visiting your accountant for advice or having a difficult conversation.

A little raw. A little messy. I spent the weekend running the Shiva Nata teacher training, doing insane amounts of brain training and pattern rewriting, and everything is jumbled. In a really good way.

All the snow globes have been shaken, and everything is sifting and settling in new and remarkable ways.

But processing it? Still a little incoherent. And useful. So here is some of what has come up in my journal, as I prepare for Rally (Rally!).

Follow-up! To this bit I wrote about my relationship with making piles of things.

It’s part of an ongoing process/investigation:

Figuring out why I create these giant piles of iguanas and doom, what their purpose is, and what needs to happen next.

So I’m documenting both the piles themselves and everything I know about them, as well as everything that I’m trying/learning/noticing/perceiving/experiencing in the investigation.

And I’m also documenting the variety of experiments that I’m using in this destuckification practice. And letting you peek.