Since returning home from my bender in Minnesota, I’ve had a hard time stepping back into my life as it was before I left. I felt like I had a lot of momentum going back then, with a clear vision of what I wanted 2011 to look like for me. But in the week since I’ve been back home in L.A., I’ve felt sort of lost, unsure of what to do even for the day. I find myself looking for things to do that will fill my time until it’s time for bed…cleaning the house, browsing through cookbooks, grocery shopping, yard work, brushing my cat, going for a walk, checking TMZ obsessively, slowly getting stuff together for the tax guy. These are all things that have to be done (well, except for the TMZ part) but it’s not really doing anything. Things that seemed so clear to me at the beginning of the year now seem unworthy or uninteresting to me now. And I’m very frustrated.
On Monday, Tom Persons from Fruition Organics came over to discuss building a raised vegetable garden in my backyard. Growing my own herbs and veggies (like Emmett and I did back when we owned a home with a lovely yard in Minnesota) has been something I’ve wanted to do here in LA but was never a priority. With all the year-round Farmer’s Markets around here, it was just as easy to get our fill of fresh veggies without having to weed! For whatever reason, however, I decided that the veggie garden thing was going to happen. Right now. Not just this year, but THIS second. This has been the only thing that has remotely interested me since being back and I’ve jumped on it like Gloria Allred to a press conference.
It was so much fun talking to Tom about what I wanted to plant, answering his questions about designs and material preferences, and seeing him get excited about the challenge I proposed: not just an organic garden, but a “veganic” one as well…meaning no animal or animal byproducts. (I’ll write more about this in another post.) He said once we got the beds in (hopefully next week), the veggies will start popping up within a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks!
I’m not sure why, but once I realized that the veggie garden was going to happen, I suddenly felt inspired to get my life back on track…or at least MOVING. And it wasn’t so much that I found inspiration (I wanted to do something. I just didn’t know what), it was more like the ideas and energy I had at the beginning of the year started to suddenly flow again, as if the dam that had been holding them back had been blasted away.
This morning I woke up (with a hangover, mind you…thank you very much EJD and the too-tasty vodka lemonades you make!) and I knew how I was going to re-start 2011. Yes, “re-start,” because that is what it feels like to me. I feel like 2011 was interrupted (damn you Mom’s cancer) and I’ve finally found the remote control and am hitting the play button again. I have a little list, just to get me going, but I have a feeling there will be opportunities and ideas and people that will pop up in my life that may take me down whole other paths. And I’m okay with that. I just don’t want to ever again, even for a brief few weeks, feel like a sailboat without its sails…adrift, powerless, and at the mercy of too many unpredictable factors.
So raise a glass with me and toast to a Happy New Year…again!