Get Me Out of the Box!!!

Several years ago I kept hearing about getting out of the box or just thinking outside the box. Well, I started to think about boxes, how many are in my life and in the world where I live. I mean almost everything is a box: your house, your stores, your car or even your fridge.  And if you're really into diagrams I bet you could create a box for your job, your partner and your cat. The box is a paradign that is just about everywhere.
 
But as I often think about lesbians and our culture, I realized that we have quite masterfully created our own boxes for our own unqiue culture. There's the ordinary boxes of butch and femme, but for our sexuality and our relationships, we even have more labels and their corresponding boxes than the mainstream culture has for straight people. Perhaps it's because we have so much in common with each other and yet so little in common with each other too. Or to put it another way:  just because we are everywhere doesn't mean we are all alike.
 
Many of us look for our lesbian sub-group and often find common interests and identities. We find our box. A few of us create our own boxes. And dare I say, the enlightened ones skip the boxes and just wing it through life.

In and Out of Sync

We all have trouble getting out of a parking space now and then. Somehow it's an act of getting into the flow of traffic. And well, sometimes our timing is off, and then we just can't get out or into traffic.
 
This is also true of life. Sometimes we're stuck like a parked car in a crowded parking lot. And we consider ourselves lucky if our car isn't parked too close to the neighboring cars because all we want to do is get into our car and drive away. Somewhere....just anywhere will do. A welling up of the feeling, "Just get me out of here," often overtakes us. But patience often gets us out of this stuckness. It's more than just waiting, it's being open to the moment, the moment of opportunity to act decisively.
 
So the next time you're stuck in a parking lot, be patient and be open to your moment to move in sync with the traffic. And in between your curses at the other drivers, remember that you're part of the flow of life too.

In My Movie

You know how every town and industry has its own lingo? Well, I grew up in LA and went to UCLA. So as you might guess, I was surrounded by movies and their magic from the time I’d watch black and white movie classics with my mother as a pre-teen to now when I pick up another Netflix movie from the postbox.

When I was growing up movies were my portal to the outside world since I was stuck in conventional suburbia (and just hating it). But I didn’t just watch movies. No, I imagined movies or more precisely my future life as a movie. In Hollywood lingo, this is called imagining your own personal movie.

I guess you could say I have an active imagination. But ever since I left home at 18, I’ve been living out my imagination, whether it was horseback riding on the beach in Baja, Mexico or when I was working in Washington, DC for a progressive professional association that was just a short walk away from the US Capitol buildings.

It seems like life itself needs to be imagined and then willed into being. I know this is a Hollywood philosophy and from people who have more imagination than common sense. But there’s just something attractive and thrilling about being “in your own movie.”

So the next time you pop in a DVD into the recorder, hit the pause button and imagine what’s going on “in your movie” a year from now. You’ll probably be surprised!