Tossing My Bucket

in other words, whole citrus fruits rolling down the compost pile

A year ago my dad and I rented a funny little car and sped it all the way from Brookings to Mendocino to San Francisco. At the time I didn’t have much hair and I felt strong from being in the garden every day. My neighbor said that I looked like a monk and I felt like one. I was reading Jack Kornfield with my buzzed head on a cliff above the Pacific ocean; the Airbnb host noticed my copy of A Path With Heart, so he sat down next to us and said he was going to mail me a copy of The Power of Now. I have some disinterest in self help books, who knows why, and so when I received it in the mail up on Highway 66 I put it in the stack of all my other books—promising myself that I would read it in time, but slightly put off by the cliché title.

Well time is time and it always works the way it does, and so it happens to be that I picked up the book a year later. I’ve learned some things and one of those things is about how problems are actually situations and there are three options for those situations: “remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and you must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep you inner space clear.”

…

Sometimes my dad calls me to make sure my “bucket is filled”. That’s what he calls it. The Jojo bucket. We all have one, and they all need different things inside of it, according to my dad. Mine hasn’t been getting everything it needs and a few days ago I called Adelaide, sitting barefoot on the sidewalk outside of my house, and told them about my dad’s adorable way of asking me how I’m doing. And then unexpectedly it hit me that my bucket has a hole which is a terrible, terrible thing to realize.

I explained it like this: There are nights when things are okay or even good. There are moments in the day that fill me up, but then in the morning I wake up and it’s all gone. It’s alarming, startling, disjointing. Most of all, it is confusing. Fixing a leak is one thing but knowing how to fix it is another.

The truth is that I know how to fix it deep down. We all know what we need but we’re scared to actually fix it. So maybe this is what it is. Fear.

Yes, I’m scared. I’m waiting for news about something huge. I don’t know how to get to where I want to be. I don’t feel fulfilled with what I am currently doing in my life. I know there are some easy changes I could make, but tell yourself that in the middle of where you’re at and god it isn’t easy! I’ve been waiting for the end before I go ahead and leave things behind. But the thing is that we get to decide when the end is. I’ve just been waiting for myself to understand.

Tomorrow I’m going to go on a big sunny hike, and the next day I will dance and hum to lyrics that make my heart ache. All with people I love. And then I will fly to my dazzling home state and hug everyone so tightly and celebrate my best friend as she gets married to a spectacular human. And at the end of it all, I might just toss my bucket. I don’t want to hold anything that tightly. I just want it to be, to flow through everything that is.

love!!

jo

look at this sweet picture of Ads in West Virginia! And I get to be with them so so soon