MARCH MADNESS
No one much likes March in New Mexico. It is a month of brutal winds and plumes of juniper pollen, and just as the apricot trees finally bloom, it snows. Most New Mexicans march through March in miserable moods. I was glad to be heading to Texas for work.
That’s why the day of my drive to Austin seemed like the perfect time to begin figuring out what my new joy practice might look like. I decided that instead of taking the shortest and fastest route, as I usually did, I would stop at a bird refuge because birds always make my heart sing. By the time I got there, however, the day had turned hot and my pollen-filled head was pounding. I slogged through the refuge filled with more duty than joy, my nagging workaholic clock ticking in my head, and a long drive ahead. Yet somewhere deep within, I felt something familiar—like a distant mirage of joy.
When I drove on, I let joy choose my route through West Texas. A few hours later, and still far from my final destination, I found myself on a deserted stretch of road just as the sun was setting, deep sienna loamy furrowed fields on either side of me fairly glowing in the last embers of light. Out my window, I saw a lone V of geese. Then another. Then another, until V after V of geese filled up the whole sky.
I pulled over, and as the evening sky colored from spectacular red to majestic purple to glorious gold, I got out of my car and stood there listening to the cries of thousands of snow geese seeking their nightly refuge. It was a truly magical moment. A panorama sunset of geese calling out—to my heart—which cracked open and called back to them in immense gratitude.
In that moment, I knew that I had found my joy practice. I committed to consciously and consistently connect to the wonder all around me—feeling and sharing the pure and simple delight of being alive and present in the world however and wherever it manifested. It wouldn’t be easy to maintain. I had done too good a job burying joy for it simply to resurface without some serious dedication. But that day had proved to me that my connection to my own heart and to this big beautiful planet had not been, cannot ever be, extinguished.
Throughout my Texas trip, I felt as though something was being birthed inside me. In Austin, I had dinner with Carly, and we talked about our excitement for one another’s journeys. In Dallas, on my lunch breaks, I found that I was seeing with fresh eyes as I walked around the neighborhood where I was working, reveling in the spring flowers. When the time came to drive home, I decided to try another joy practice. I would take all back roads—without a map.
I left Dallas, pointed the car compass northwest, and let joy lead me home.
Joy took me through towns with unpronounceable names, past abandoned cotton fields, through the increasing desolation that is rural West Texas. All the way, I went with an open heart and gratitude for my journey.
As the sun began to lower in the vast Texas sky, I listened to the audio of a class I was taking on sacred activism with Andrew Harvey and Diane Berke. At the beginning of the course, Diane had lovingly introduced Andrew as a “recovering diva.” Within ten minutes of listening to him speak, I thought to myself, “Recovering? Please . . .”
One of the many privileges of growing up with my showbiz parents was the opportunity to meet quite a few divas—male and female. I know a diva when I encounter one. Andrew Harvey is definitely a diva—one whose emotional ecstasies frankly pushed every single damn one of my uptight WASP buttons when I first began the course. But that same diva ended up breaking through something no one else could have.
As I tuned in, I heard people sharing their mystical experiences with animals. I was loving this sweet exchange when Andrew interrupted, rather brusquely, “But what are we really doing here? This isn’t just a lovely chat.”
These lines from one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, Sometimes, came to me:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
Suddenly I noticed a small dark cloud in the vast Texas blue sky, so small I might not have seen it had I not been paying attention from my heart. I realized it was a murmuration—a group of starlings flying together in unison—not a vast showy one, but a quiet fluid one. I prayed for the cloud of birds to fly toward me. It did. I prayed that I would catch up to it, and I did. Then just before it was going to fly away, it suddenly turned into a black liquid maelstrom that whirled down from the sky into a tree. I slammed on the brakes and stared in wonder at the formerly bare branches now ornamented with at least a hundred tiny black birds. I felt unspeakable gratitude.
An hour or so later, I found myself in Happy, Texas. (Say what you want about Texas, but it has the best damn names.) In the audiobook recording, Andrew was talking about his daily practice of gratitude, about the rapture he felt hearing an opera singer, and about gazing into the eyes of his cat Topaz knowing he was seeing the eyes of God—and so was she. Everything he said resonated.
It made me think about my father. At the end of his life, as miserably as his body failed him, my dad would always be resurrected by beauty—be it a pear in a bowl, a single chartreuse cymbidium on a pale green stalk, or a Wagner opera. He never lost his capacity for gratitude, rapture, or joy.
At that point in the audiobook, Diane and Andrew reached their final exhortation—urging us all to engage in what they called a daily practice of adoration. In that moment, inspired by the beauty of my backroads drive, I decided to begin. I would add that to my joy practice!
I was smack dab in the middle of Hereford, Texas, and I desperately needed to pee. So I stopped at a gas station and declared my intention to adore everyone I met and everything I saw.
I stepped out of the car into what I can only describe as the smell of someone taking a cosmic dump—the stench of slaughterhouses and feedlots that made the air feel almost solid. As I should have known from the name of the town, I was in the heart of West Texas cattle country. I thought, If I can adore this, I can adore anything.
My heart was so filled with the joy of everything I had been hearing and feeling that I did: I adored the elderly cowboy in the black hat who would have hated everything about me except possibly my famous family. I adored the dirty tattooed feet in the bathroom stall next to mine. I adored the unexpected cleanliness of a restroom on the road. I adored the toothless smile of the dark-skinned woman walking through the gas station’s glass doors whose discomfiture at being in small-town West Texas probably exceeded even mine. It was amazing!
As I left Hereford on a two-lane road driving toward the setting sun, my heart started to swell in a way that words will never be able to describe—and suddenly, I was filled, absolutely filled, with gratitude for all the love I have felt in my life, both human and divine. Tears began to flood down my face.
My favorite music was blaring, which reminded me of when I was a little girl and my father would drive us through Beverly Hills. There he would roll down all the windows, turn up opera on the radio as loud as it would go, and sing at the top of his lungs—half from the joy of singing opera and half from the pleasure of seeing my immense mortification at having a father who could do such spectacularly embarrassing things in the eyes of his daughter.
Tears of adoration just poured out of me for this man who taught me what it was to love and be loved—to love people, to love life, to love art, to love food, to love adventure, to love music, to love generously, fully, and well, well, well. I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed. In pure joy.
As I drove the remaining three hours home, I thought about my resistance to Andrew at the beginning of the course and realized how that had shifted. An hour from home, I asked myself: You used to be a diva. Where did she go? When did the 5'11" fashion risk taker become the scrawny wearer of yoga clothes? When did the irreverent mimic become the isolated homebody? When did the child whom her poet brother dubbed Merry Victorious become so somber and subdued? When did I stop being the diva iconoclast I-don’t-care-if-I’m-different me—the me who felt alive?
I pulled over and stepped out under the black bowl of a Northern New Mexico sky pinpricked with lights, splashed with galaxies, and I felt my diva come back into me—but in a whole new way. Divadom as an expression of the Divine. I threw my hands wide open and I welcomed her back as part of my truest self.
When I got home I couldn’t sleep. I felt filled with an energy that I had thought might never return. I wrote these words in my journal: “A diva adores and is adored. A diva is filled with joy. Diva comes from the Latin word for goddess. A diva is divine. Though I am beyond grateful for all the dark nights of the soul I have endured (and will yet endure), for the stripping of it all away, for all the humility that I have embraced, for all the ways in which the trappings of the world mean less and less, I need to remember that spirituality does not mean always wearing my hair shirt—unless it’s made of Fendi faux fur, of course!”
We are met with what we give. By cutting off my inner diva, I had cut off part of my divinity. Adoring and being adored is part of the divine equation. For the first time in what felt like forever, I remembered how it felt to be fully alive—awake and alive in joy. I felt ready to reclaim it for good this time.