All happiness depends on courage and work, or so says Balzac

All art demands imagination. All art is imagination. But how do we learn to trust the fantastic beauty and grim monsters of our minds? How do we learn to listen? How do we leap from the well-defined lines of our daily lives up into the ether?

It feels like my own imagination is ossifying. What was once flexible and willing is now stiff as bone. It makes no sense to write fiction in this kind of state. But I want to write fiction. I don't know what else to do with the world.

In the next week, before I begin my novel-writing escapade, I need to find that crazy, magic potion that will reverse the effects of too many years of over-editing. Too many days given over to drudgery and easy numbness.

On some level, I worry that I will lose my sense of balance. I wonder if it's possible for me to write a worthwhile story without abandoning that balance altogether. So add to that magic potion something for my courage. Or maybe that's the whole of it. Courage and more courage. Gotta go get me some of that.

I'm signed up for Nanowrimo. The goal is to write a novel (or 50,000 words) in one month. My personal goal will be to prevent a nasty ear-biting bar brawl with my own psyche. I like to edit and fuss. I like to stop and savor the three lovely sentences I've written then pat myself on the back for a hard day's work. Keeping that instinct at bay is going to be hard. Very hard.

The last few months of writing have been painfully slow. If I'm going to tap into the flow of swift and heavily flawed prose, then I'm going to have to get in shape, grab a few books and do some arm curls. Jack LaLane, show me the way.

Fire Cupping

This isn't torture or magic or performance art. This is a little glass globe fixed to my arm with the power of suction. This is ancient medicine, as old as the instinct to suck your finger after you've knocked it against something. No pain is involved. In fact, it feels good, the way stretching feels good.

I wouldn't have thought this odd, sometimes brutal looking technique would appeal to me. The tissue pulls up into the cup and can turn pink, red, dark purple. Sometimes this coloring stays as a mark on the skin where matter once trapped in the tissues is drawn to the surface. Not a painful bruise, just a mark.

I wouldn't have thought that I'd want to fuss with the accoutrements of this technique. Cups, cotton, forceps, alcohol, water, oil. Oh, and fire. A big wad of fire to create the vacuum inside the cup.

But I love cupping. I love how it feels as a practitioner. I've spent my whole career pressing down into muscles. This lets me lift. And as a recipient of cupping I also feel lifted, as if all the stuck layers were slowly peeling apart, the detritus of my tissue finally tossed to the curb.

Now the hard part: Convincing my clients to let me use this technique on them. Medieval torture comes to their minds or they look longingly, beyond the row of cups, toward the dark, polished stones heating to a perfectly toasty temperature in their crockpot. I don't want to resort to telling them cupping helps the appearance of cellulite. While that might be alluring for certain clientele, I refuse to be the woman who sticks glass cups to people's butts.

Mimosa. Mi. Mo. Sa. Flowers like fans. Leaves like feathers. A scent like an old girlfriend's perfume: Faded and potent, dazzling and elusive. Mimosa, mimosa, mimosa.