Mark and Melanie go to New York. So Melanie can study with SITI Company and write her next one-woman show. So Mark can take kick-ass photos and train for Ironman Canada. And so they can live in a 350-square-foot studio without killing each other. Hopefully...
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10 Tools for Having Really Awesome Stuff Go Down in Your Life
OKAY! It's been a huge freaking month. Things were great! Then stressful! Then REAALLLLY stressful! Then scary! Then miraculous! Then scary again.
Who You Callin' A Slut?
Olympic Update: Keep calm and carry on
So, if you are one of the seven gazillion people who liked and/or commented on my recent Facebook update, thank you and I love you!
Believe. Especially When There's No Reason To Believe.
Something weird has happened. Like, really weird. My fear's gone away. My doubt's vanished. My belief that the harder I push, the more I'll get? That's not here right now, either. It's probably because I have given up. In the good way. In the way where you surrender the outcomes and tend to the only thing that is actually your business: the present moment.
It's a strange feeling, nurturing dreams and giving up on outcomes. It almost seems impossible to do those two things at the same time. The giving up part takes practice and I think we have 'giving up' patterned in wrong. We think that to surrender means to surrender what we long for. Not true. We think we don't deserve our dreams, that they are stupid and frivolous. Not true. Dreams come from the place that is far below fear and doubt. They come from the source and anything from there is not wrong. Period.
But we get caught up in the outcomes, thinking it has to turn out exactly as we've pictured. And if it doesn't, we've failed. Here is the thing. All of this is unfolding in Divine Time, not your time. It's unfolding in Divine Order, not your order. Your job is not to micromanage HOW it happens or WHEN it happens. Your job is to hold onto the vision. That's it. You don't decide how it shakes down. You just hold fast to your dreams and you listen for instructions. And when it feels right to do the next thing, you do it. There's no rush. There's no pushing. But. There's no hiding or cutting corners, either. No sinking into despair. No obsessing over outcomes. That impairs the process. For the past few weeks, I have received not one whisper of external validation that my rather expensive dream will work out. My pattern in situations like these is to freak out, work from dawn until midnight, spin my wheels, crank out emails until I get told to piss off, blame people, accuse them of not being supportive, become paralyzed with overwhelm, catalogue in scientific detail all the other times I've failed. Not this time. This time, I've been incredibly conscious of taking responsibility for myself and understanding that the world doesn't owe me anything. Means if this is going to work out, I need to not slip into panic mode and wreck the whole vibe. I need to calm down and make clear choices. This is why that Wayne Gretzky quote is so amazing: "Skate where the puck is going, not where it's been." I won't get a different result just by WANTING a different result. I get it by doing something different. Simple, but hard, right? It's not the Universe's job to change my patterns of freaking out and stopping the flow: it's mine. Whenever I feel myself going off the rails into fear, into wanting to control, into my tendency to work everything to death, I go for a run, sit in my magic room, listen to a meditation or this song, watch this kickass video, repeat mantra after mantra. I do not, under any circumstances, go to the Bad Place. I consciously look for how I already have everything I need. How people are already helping me. How I've already received what I ask for. Some people call this gratitude practice and it is. It's just that "gratitude" can seem a little too Oprah sometimes. Look for it and expect to see it, all of it. It's there.And then you have to practice the thing that isn't waiting. It's being still within uncertainty. You need to sit there. You need to get comfortable there. You need to not freak out about that place. You need to stop picking at things and worrying them to death. You need to trust and let go.You have to cultivate the trust before you see the results. You have to do it when there's no reason to. When there's no one there. You have to believe when the whole thing seems ridiculous and impossible and you have to believe in yourself. That this is why you're here. That you belong here and you're needed here. That the dreams and the way to do them all come from the same place. These are the things to work hard at every day. Not the outcomes. The outcomes are taken care of. It's trusting and believing and letting go that are the hard parts. Do it like a workout. Do it because it's good for you, not because you want to. You want to wallow. You want to be rescued. You want a magic wand to make it all better. But that's not going to happen and it doesn't happen like that for anyone no matter how many 'dumb luck' stories or 'overnight success' lines you hear. Those people believed. And they worked at believing. I work at believing.Remember: this fall, I thought I was a failure. I thought I failed and no outside thing has told me since that I am, in fact, a success. I just believe. And you do, too. You believe in me and I'm so grateful for it, you can't imagine. I believe in you, you know. That's why I write these things. Because I believe in you and I know you get down about things. You don't need to get down. You need to keep going. Yesterday, we got one offer from a venue in London/Edinburgh and a second is coming in the mail. Right now, a letter is sitting in a mailbox in Calgary telling me the results of a $30,000 grant I applied for. It doesn't matter what that letter says. It doesn't matter how I get there. I just know that I will.
F*cking Phoenix Friday
Today, I made a room (closet) totally dedicated to my Olympic dream. It is the coolest place on Planet Earth. I made a video about that room.
And just as I finished the video, an email came in saying I owe my condo management company $1,300 as of last July. A grand for a top-up to the reserve fund, $300 because they couldn't find me to tell me about the grand. All of this I found out by email. Why they didn't send me an email before charging me $300 in bullshit fees and interest, I have no idea.
Because now, of course, they aren't responding to my email.
So, I went ahead and lost it.
And then I went for a run. During the run I had a minor throat-closing panic attack, but mostly I laid copious amounts of waste to Prospect Park. It was like I was spouting kerosene with every breath and lighting it aflame with every step. I was a phoenix and a monster and, as my friend Karen calls me, a fucking colossus.
Last week, it was something different. It was the first and only $2,000 I've made in, oh, A YEAR and it went into someone else's account. This pattern? This Financially Fucked Friday pattern? Needs to go away.
But the Inspiration Chamber can stay.
<p>The Inspiration Chamber from Melanie Jones on Vimeo.</p>
By the way, the quote in my new room that kept me sane today and held me back from spiralling out into the storyline about how I'm always broke and money is allergic to me and why why why why FOR GOD'S SAKE WHY was this: "I skate where the puck is going to be, not where it's been." Big ups to Wayne Gretzky for that one.
Last Night A Grant Application Saved My Life
Stuff is happening. It's seriously, seriously happening. And most of it I can't talk about yet. But I can talk about this: writing grants is one hell of a lot of work. It's a job. And the more I talk about it with other artists, the more I realize a whole lotta artists aren't doing that job.

