PURPLE FLOORS

I left college when I was 19 and took a year off. My plan was to live in town with a friend, work and apply to Naropa University, a small Buddhist college in Colorado. Going to Naropa was one of those of-the-bones intuitive hits, the ones you don’t ever get wishy-washy about. But first, I needed a year to save some money. I had been reading a book called “Creating Your Heart’s Desire” by Sonia Choquette and she suggested journaling. Fresh from a break up, I would lie in my childhood bedroom and write long ideal scenarios about what my apartment would look like, what kind of fun I would make of my year off. I don’t remember the description of my apartment except that I thought that it would be really “bohemian” and it would have purple floors.

Well, lo and behold, the first apartment I looked at — I walked in and it had chipped purple painted floors. I knew a sign when I saw one. I immediately committed to the place and the year. My optimism was huge. I was really stunned by that small thing-purple floors!!! It was a demonstration and I hung on for dear life. So, I moved into the apartment situated behind a bar with a huge dumpster in the front yard and began my charmed year, giddy with excitement.

It ended up being one of my loneliest years, full of time that seemed to lack acceptable amounts of warmth and comfort. I was an administrative assistant who didn’t know how to use email and hated to file. My boss kept a bottle of wine behind the employee toilet and missed a lot of work so I spent most of my time there alone trying to figure out how to send JPEGs (and was ultimately fired as was my boss). Friends had moved away so I wrote cryptic Livejournal posts and intermittent letters to Afghanistan where a crush was stationed. Every moment seemed to be taking wide loops and landing somewhere disconnected. Our furnace broke and the landlord was minimally responsive so I started to wear gloves and a coat while typing abstract posts.

I tried to feel for the grooves to put my feet in along the way. The way we do, groping around in pitch black. I was friendly to people, had weird conversations on the bus, took up weightlifting every other day. I applied to Naropa and got in. My calves got huge from the leg press. It was super lonely. One evening, on my way home from my 2nd job at a grocery store, I stopped to use a payphone to call my parents because I had forgotten the key to my apartment and was locked out. I picked up the phone and felt something mushy and a smell. I looked at the phone and felt my ear. It was shit. Actual poop of unknown variety. I didn’t cry or say anything. Just walked briskly to my parents where my mother refused to let me into the house and hosed me off with cold water in the yard before driving me home. The year had turned into something else, it’s own humbling, difficult thing. I had thought I had a clear connection with guidance, a joyful path and ended up with shit on my ear.

When we want to know the “right thing to do” and use intuition for a certain map of rightness, to avoid loneliness and vulnerability or the cultivation of sterilized joy, that is head games. With clients and in my own life, I’ve found that the most encouraging use of intuition is to follow it, falling face forward towards life or shit, as it may be and weave a narrative as we go on (or in retrospect). Intuition is not for avoiding mistake or making straight lines, lunging into the future, squeezing all the air out of the plastic bag, so to speak. It’s an adventure, with all the mushy, mysterious, groping meaning associated with it.

I had two strong intuitive hunches at the time: purple floors and Naropa. I ended up going to Naropa, meeting my husband and studying contemplative psychology and writing. But in the middle, was restless, impatient, indefinable — lollygagging, trying to leap frog, then resorting to treading water. We can connect with guidance, take lots of inspired action and still end up somewhere unfamiliar and unbidden. Then what? Then comes a necessary unfastening of the hierarchical model of progression. We step out into strange territory with a commitment to opening up and going through it. We know a little bit but not everything. Until the next hit of intuition floats in, sensing that we’ve lost just the right amount of control to make use of it.

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