Resume Writing 101

The world outside is like a sleepy child, it's pink lids fluttering with tiredness but not yet ready for bed. The orange and pinks of the sun are sinking down, the drawn lilac of evening is pulling up the covers for the darkness to approach.

I have spent the afternoon writing my resume, which is really up there with having your bikini line waxed, doing your tax returns or swallowing a spoon of fish oil. But surprisingly I am revived and excited. I took a different approach this time. I stayed in the moment concentrated on what I was doing, rather than allowing my mind to go into that swamp of negativity that I usually dive into every time I am job hunting.

I am determined that this job hunt is going to be totally different, I am sick of the up and down drama I normally indulge in, as I swell with negativity and imagine all the impending disasters. This time I plan to relax, not take it personally, focus on the work and the NOW and just surrender and I'm sure the job will find me.

I am feeling remarkably stable and happy, I say remarkably because normally when I don't have a job I am the loosest of all loose ends. But I am liking this new me, I am taking time to heal, reviewing where I am and what I want to be doing and am prepared to wait for the job that is right me. I am so grateful to be able to wait.

BE HERE NOW

The TV antenna guy is here, having just scaled the roof as casually as he would take an elevator, he is now in the lounge room playing with dials and testing the TV. For the last couple of months our TV has looked like there was a metallic grey blizzard in every location. Although I don't watch a lot of TV, getting it fixed is part of a general cleaning up of my life, a symbolic preparation, of tossing out the old to let in the new and sharpening the reception to listen to the signs that I need to hear.

This has been an incredibly healing time in my life, like the seeds that sprouts from the remains of a searing fire, I feel like I am ready to grow out into the sunshine again after the raging chaos of the last couple of years. What I am coming to realise by reading The Power of Now by Eckhardt Tolle is that most of the this chaos has been staged and played out in my mind.

The journey started for me 3 years ago when I first went travelling, a journey not so much to see the world but an attempt to find this missing piece of myself which I was convinced would be in India. I was certain that going to India would give me the sense of completeness and belonging that I had longed for all my life. For those that followed my Bollywood Dreaming blog you would know that this was not what happened, if anything I left feeling more confused than ever.

When I came back to Australia I was convinced that my completeness lay in finding a job in the arts and pursuing my calling. When that didn't work out as I planned I fell into a tail spin of depression. Wanting and needing anything to anchor myself to, I took the first job I could find and that recently ended like a bad horror movie. Then the miscarriage brought all of this longing and sadness to a head, as I again tried to anchor my lost soul onto something else. It was at this point that I realised that nothing was going to fill this gaping hole. That no matter what I did, what success I achieved, fame or fortune that it would still be there.

From my reading of late, largely spiritual books, I am coming to understand that this sense of incompleteness is part of the human condition. An aching need in all of us drives us to be better and to create, but also to consume and destroy. Our appetite gets bigger and bigger from the furstration of not be satiated. The sad part it seems is that we already have what it is that we so desperately seek, we have only to truly look within ourselves to see our own magnificent sense of perfection and wholeness.

Sounds easy right? Tolle claims that to see the perfection of ourselves and life we need to be here now. My first thought is; I am bloody well here now. But as I listened to myself I discovered that I have been checked out of the present for as long as I can remember, either digging through the past and trying to force it to make sense or reliving it's drama. Or by living far out into the future full of promising better-ness, shimmering like a desert mirage, or blazing red in an inferno of impending disaster.

So I am off to meditate and to BE HERE NOW.

Coming Back To Now

It's been a long time between visits but I am back. Let me tell you where I have been for the last 7 weeks.

1. I quit my job - it was incredible to finally stand up to an oppressive, abusive and aggressive person who was making my life sad and crushing my soul. However, I feel truly blessed to have been in this experience it has taught me so much. I believe in years to come it will be noted as one of my greatest teachers.

2. I had a miscarriage - my heart was broken in a way that I could never have imagined. But again I am amazed at how much I have learned from this experience, sometimes I feel like I have been asleep and the is what it took to wake me up.

3. I pitched an idea to a contact at NINE MSN - about a book review blog, I got some amazing ideas and have sent some work in for them to have a look at. I will keep you posted.

4. I have been doing a collage and multimedia class - I have returned to my first passion - art. I am rediscovering what led me to art school. The loving ritual of keeping a journal and creating artworks within it. I am currently creating a beautiful watercolour book about the last 7 weeks.

5. I have been doing a 40 day soul cleanse, following a wonderful program by IylanaVanzant called "One Day My Soul Just Opened Up". Today's lesson is about Authenticity her gem of wisdom "Wherever you find yourself is exactly where you need to be."

6. I have been meditating almost daily and have discovered the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Sydney, in between the chaos and sadness of my thoughts, I am actually experiencing blissful quiet.

7. I am learning to live in the here and now.

With that I will leave you with the eternal words of Maxi Jazz (Faithless)

I want more oneness less categories
Open hearts no strategies
I want decisions based upon faith and not fear
I want people who live right now and right here
I want the wisdom that wise men revere

Where You Are Is Who You Are

By the time I was 18 I had moved 18 times, at 29 I have totalled 27 moves, I have only a few more to meet my age again. Today I find myself longing for a home, not a place to live but a home, resonating in warmth and safety a place to set myself out and gather myself up.

Frances Mayes writes "Where you are is who you are. The further inside you the place moves, the more your identity is intertwined with it. Never casual, the choice of place is the choice of something you crave." Perhaps the transience of the places that I have chosen in my life are a reflection of a need for freedom or more correctly my need to continually be starting over and renewing. Unfortunately the choice has had the opposite effect and I find myself peeled away and left behind in so many makeshift homes that I barely exist as I want to anymore.

These thoughts have me piecing together fragments of an ideal home although a shaky image they have strong feeling. Streaming sunlight through sparkling windows, clean whites tones with earthy reds and oranges. Mint tea brewing a conversation with the succulents on the window sill. Brazilian music winding it's way around the house, fresh carrots and greens humming along in the garden. Day's spent in galoshes, a desk looking on a wall of images, lovingly collected and haphazardly pinned. Provocatively red tomatoes topped with mozzarella and basil, spelt banana bread baking a sweet pungent smell and me playing in the yard.

The Power Of Words

Fragrant wisps of chicken soup are penetrating my deeply clogged nasal passages as I write this tucked up in bed and generally dying with what appears to be a severe cold. As fast as the day snapped into a rigid 17 degrees a cold has descended over me and taken firm hold.

I am a bit lost, the last few weeks have seemed formless, this or that has prevented me from getting into any sort of routine and my sense of continuity has been broken, this packaged with endless days of waiting has me in something of a muddle. If nothing else it is usually books that give my days structure, I look forward to the onward motion of their stories and the continuity of their essence. In that regard I have also fallen in limbo finding myself unable to get into anything with real commitment.

I went back to an old favourite this evening, Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes, I first read this book when I was 18 and still list it as one of my most loved , the tale that started my dreams of walking the Tuscan hills and of growing a feast in my garden, cooking pasta from scratch and sharing a table with friends under dappled vine leaves. Although I can't remember much of the story the mood and feeling it created are still deep within me. Frances Mayes gave me my first young glimpse of the ideal life I would like to live.

Even tonight at it's beginning pages I felt the need to leap out of bed and investigate the alchemy of the soup that is lingeringly teasing me, to take in the tantalizing smells and sights of my humble existence as she has hers. I am constantly amazed at the gifts that writers bring to our lives that I can have drawn a map for my soul or been inspired to reframe my day just by reading tells me the true power of words in our world.

Waiting To Take Off

Over the last couple of weeks I have begun to realise more and more that I must write what I think rather than forcing myself to think about something to write. At the moment I feel like I am stranded in a small airport. I have been planning my future destination, the completion of renovations, finding our own little abode and having a baby - they are the exotic locations I hope to be at. Although my bags are packed and I have my ticket in hand, the plane keeps getting delayed, grouded or I am caught mid pee while the last boarding call is being announced. At any rate I am waiting not at all patiently for my life to take of.

The brief respite from all this waiting has been my daily walks, among bustling commuters, halting traffic and a general atmosphere of things drawing to a close, I feel like things are just opening up. I maze through my suburb and then amble to the park, I walk one side on the path and other through the grass, softly greeting a patch of trees I adopted a few years ago. A slight wind stirs the dense wet autumn air, the ground is sodden with the masses of rain that have been failing daily. My world which has compacted during the day begins to unfurl with each step and by the end I am expanisve again connected the wider world and the even wider universe.

The theme of the last few days has been waiting, about patience and about staying calm in the face of a life whirling uncomfortably around me. Since waiting and the uncertainity that the wait brings are things I have never really been good at, it has been a challenging time and not one I feel like I am getting on top of. I find myself taking small sips of idle dreams rather than the large gulps of life I would like to be drinking down.

I sadly realised this morning that since my destination seems so far away and my airport is small I am feeling rather uninspired and passive about life. Nothing is turning me out of bed in the morning, I am just killing time and it is too precious for homicide. I am not really sure what to do from here, get a new job, take a course, start writing more seriously? Nothing is quite fitting the bill at the moment....what I wonder am I meant do with this time and these emotions.

Please Explain!

A little while ago while doing an exercise from The Right to Write by Julia Cameron, Cameron asked me to imagine that I was sitting under a tree next to my story teller and I could ask him to tell me any story my heart desired to hear. Almost unconsciously my fingers started moving across the keyboard and I found myself typing, 'I want to hear a story that makes me love art again', as soon as I had written them the words brought up a well of emotion and I started to cry I realised that I did indeed want to hear such a story.

Before I started art school, looking at art for me was like reading the traffic signs of my life, it gave me the directions to my soul. It was a heartfelt communication that led me to believe that perhaps being apart of and around art was what I was meant to be doing with my life. After the ups of art school and the downs of looking for a job in the arts, I was left mostly disillusioned. Art had become a casual acquaintance rather than a loving friend. When I really thought about it I had started to feel about art the way that I had heard many people around me relate to it, I just didn't get it anymore and I felt locked out.

It was after this that I decided to write a book about art, about engaging with art as a means to not only show people how to just hang and have a good old chin wag with art, but also as means to reintroduce myself to art and start looking at it the way I used to, with wonder and openness. After one chapter about my own experience with art and the art world, I moved onto the next titled 'That's Not Art, What is Art?' and was completely stuck. It was then that I decided to write about it on my blog to get the juices flowing.

Hope this clears up the sudden detour the blog has taken. Not sure if I will continue with the essay would love some feedback and then I will keep going.