Moon, You are Huge! My Favorite Inspirational Moments

I don’t know if y’all are noticing this, but it seems like life just keeps speeding up and getting stranger and stranger, more and more connected, more and more intensely entangled. Perhaps it’s simply the centrifugal force of the paradigm shift of 2012 picking up energy and sucking us in to the inevitable Something Else. To the end of the world, or to the beginning of what some visionaries call The Great Turning. Being a bit of an intuitive retard, I’m not sure what’s going on. But I can feel something happening.

Or perhaps it’s a personal experience that I, with the charming narcissism so prevalent in my generation, am assuming has global resonance. Whatevs, as my Generation Y roommate would say. I’m just really excited to tell you guys about one of my recent Top Favorite Spiritual Moments, cause it was so so awesome and I think, if I tell it right, you are gonna dig it.

It’s a beautiful evening in early fall. Just past midnight or so. Earlier, an unfairly huge juicy orange moon has risen up through the sky, threatening to take all of Colorado prisoner with its mysterious looming beauty. Now, although slightly less mysterious, it’s still hanging out, basking in its own perfection, like, “Hey. Yeah. I’m the Freakin’ MOON, fool. What you lookin’ at?”

The air is crisp, clean, cool but not cold. I’m sitting on the balcony of my townhouse, looking out onto the mellifluous night and the quiet street below, free of cars for the moment. The night is hushed, waiting, lurking with hidden potential, and I am one with this night. I am in an unusual state of mind, or rather, occupying an unusual state of being—one that comes to me every now and then.

This state has something to do with meditation, something to do with clearing my consciousness of the Business as Usual Ellen Nonsense that tends to go on. For a moment, sometimes many moments in a row, I am free of my story. True, I have done terrible things. I have also done good things. I have made horrendous mistakes and probably am making more as I speak. (Did I mention that earlier I blew off writing my class syllabus so I could watch VH-1’s 100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s? Yeah, I know. But look, does my class really need to know what we’re going to do in this workshop as much as I need to know the back story behind Kellis’s 2003 “My Milkshake Brings All the Boys to the Yard”?)

But somehow, in this particular state of being, none of this matters.

Nature, we are told, abhors a vacuum. Into the temporary vacuum of my non-judgment, all kinds of strong emotion pour in. I feel myself filling up with something huge, warm, and spacious, something that runs through the center of my chest like bourbon, only better. I look at the moon with awe, and remember another Giant Moon: Athens, Greece, 1987. I am on a European vacation with my art class and Bob, who is from Germany, looks up at the spectacular moon looming immediately over our heads and lifts his drink to it, “Moon! You are Yoooge! (translation: “Huge!”) For those of us present, this becomes a favorite toast for years.

As I sit on my balcony, here, in 2011, I am filled with love for that moon of 1987, for the people who were there with me, people who tonight are grownups scattered all over the world, grownups writing checks for mortgages and begging their children to do their homework. I am full of love for their houses and their children and for this moon, the moon that floats gently above us all.

Actually, to tell the truth, I am full of love in general. Wow. Where did all this come from? For just this moment I can look on everything around me with astonishment and wonder—all surrounding objects have dropped their ordinary pretense of “hey, yeah, so I’m a tree—big deal.” Instead, they shimmer with clarity and possibility and intention, with the power of something ELSE no longer hidden. I look and feel more love. Then more love. My love rises up to meet that love and becomes more than that. I am overwhelmed with love, and I must tell someone.

“I love you!” I whisper to the trees, to the moon. “Oh, I love you! I love you!” I whisper to the night, to the planet, to the Universe. I feel all of us—me, the trees, the moon, the night, my old friends, Bob, the children and their homework—all of us pulsing together as one fluid heartbeat: “I love you! I love you! I love you!”

At this exact moment, a lone car shoots past on the street below. A man is yelling at someone on a cell phone, his window open. “I hate you, you f*****g bitch!”

I love this. It is perfect. I love this man for providing the perfect point of contrast to all this love—and for allowing me to observe that this love is large enough to include the man and his anger and obscenities. I love that the Universe brought us together at this precise intersection of each of our emotional lives. “I love you too, you f*****g a**hole!” I say to the man, now long gone down the street. “I love you! I love you! Thank you! I hope you and your girl make up!”

I’m pretty sure they made up. After all, there’s a lot of love available, some of it from sources you would not expect.

Summertime, Spirituality, and Tanorexia

Greetings, Superfriends! How is this beautiful summertime treating you?

I want to apologize for my long absence from this blog. Terrible things have come into my life since last we were together. There’s nothing worse than when you make a bunch of plans to create things and have success and get people excited and then THOSE THINGS COME TRUE. I’m just saying, I had WAAAY more time to blog when the only other competition for my attention was my next spiritual webinar(love you Vishen Lakhiani!) or MTV’s Jersey Shore.

And speaking of Jersey Shore, it’s probably just as well that I don’t have too much time to watch it because it really exacerbates my condition. As those of you who have known me since high school or college are aware, summer is tough for me because I suffer from extreme Tanorexia.

For those of you not familiar with this condition, let me explain. We who suffer from this debilitating disease report being swept by frequent feelings of “not tan enough.” This condition affects its victims on spiritual as well as emotional and physical levels, and is especially dangerous for those of us who came of age during the heyday of Baywatch.

Oh, sure, for a while, you can distract yourself with new clothes or adorable fuzzy animals or addressing your friend’s latest obsessive outrage (I have a friend who has an infinite capacity for outrage and she really keeps me busy). You can even choose to meditate on the Divine Love whose purple velvety majesty keeps this Universe expanding into ever greater dimensions.

And it works. For a while. And then you see Pauly and Vinny and Snookie and you look down at your slightly graying white legs poking out of your slightly graying white shorts and the compulsion rears its ugly head: “GTL! GTL! GTL!” (that’s “Gym, Tan, Laundry” for those uninitiated in the pleasures of Jersey Shore).

I have another friend who pointed out that I am forty-one years old and maybe it’s time I moved on to more mature obsessive compulsions. And I do my best. The reason I haven’t been writing for this blog for such a long time is that I am now writing for three others which actually have something to do with my getting paid and thus being able to support myself. I am actually becoming somewhat obsessed with supporting myself, which, believe me, is not an obsession that’s troubled me too much in this lifetime.

Mostly I like to be supported by others. First it was my family. Then it was my universities and the Ridiculously Generous Souls of the student loan system (three college degrees can buy a LOT of Nordstrom, Anthropologie, and DSW!). Then it was my former husband. Then I turned to Law of Attraction and learned that God and the Universe wanted to support me. So I decided to let God do that by allowing me to win the lottery. God told me to get a job and He/She would let me know about the lottery real soon.

Sigh.

Oh Well, as my dad would say.

My dad Matthew Melko Jr. died last summer at about this time. He was the ultimate Jersey Shore boy, having grown up spending his summers in Seaside Heights, where the show is filmed. I asked him once whether the Jersey Shore had changed much since his heyday in the fifties. And he said that although cultural norms had changed (back then you didn’t, for example, have sex with people in dance clubs as a matter of course), he was glad to see that Seaside and Jersey were just as tacky and pointless and strangely beautiful as ever.

Whether you are tan or not tan, whether you are on speaking terms with God and the Universe or not, whether you love the beach or the mountains or the mall, I salute you and wish you an amazing summer. It’s good to be back.