"You want to do what with me?"
"A burning ritual," my friend Robyn said to me. "We burn things that are symbolic of what we need to let go of."
"And you've done this before?"
"Oh, yes," she replied with a smile. "It's great."
Hello, Criminal Minds? I found that pyro you couldn't catch that one time.
I never pegged Robyn for mentally unstable, but here it was. She's still lovely though, and does a great job of not letting her crazy show as much as mine does. I decided to take this new honesty as friendship growth. "So I prepare these things... and we set them on fire? And watch them burn?"
"Yes. We take turns. We smudge each other first, though," she explained.
Pervert. I hadn't realized she was into me like that. I knew there was an ulterior motive to all this hippy ceremony healing stuff.
But I figured letting someone smudge my pudge would be worth it if I could just unload some of the crap I've been carrying around lately. I've taken on a huge screenwriting project that is, while fun, terribly overwhelming at times. If I thought I was a decent writer before, I now feel like a clueless newbie who's trying to learn the craft at breakneck speeds. I know blogs and articles and facebooking and tweets. I have confidence in spades in those areas. Screenplays? Not so much. But I've taken it on and haven't lost it to the point of running backwards off a cliff in my undies yet, so I think I might be okay.
But the self-doubt, the insecurities, the annoying little voice telling me I'll never make it? All there every time I take on something new, and all things I'd be happy if my clearly disturbed friend could kill in a fire.
I got there late Saturday night carrying an envelope stuffed with a bunch of post-it notes - colour coordinated, of course, because I'm a Virgo and we do stupid shit like that. Purple for fears, pink for people, green for financial worries-- oh, and orange for perfectionism. A perfectly efficient system, if I do say so myself.
Robyn greeted me warmly and lead me outside. "Aaron's going to be joining us," she said of her husband.
Hold the phone. Now we're all smudging each other? A heads up on this kind of thing would have been nice. I might have had a courage shot of espresso first, or something.
Aaron was lighting the fire when we got outside, clearly being an enabler to his pyro wife - which is sad because it just shows how this sort of thing is a family illness. I nervously stood between them, clutching my envelope and wishing I had at least shaved first before the late night smudgefest.
Good news: I found out very quickly that 'smudging' just means waving some incense around someone to clear their aura or some such, and is not pagan slang for "let's lustfully lock viking horns under this full moon before we set shit on fire." This revelation lessened my performance anxiety quite a bit.
The smudging was over before I could say, "I kinda wish I had worn a more comfortable bra now." Robyn handed me a cup to drink from, which I was pretty sure at this point did not contain any roofies. We took turns talking about what we were letting go of and then watching it turn to ashes in the fire pit. As it turns out, letting go of things in a colour coordinated flash of light is surprisingly empowering.
I'm taking big leaps in my writing lately. That's scary. And I went from wrangling little gremlins all day to wrangling lines of dialogue all day. That's also scary. Big changes, big risks, big insecurities. But I burned them all on little post-it notes, so that's going to make everything better, right?
I slept like a baby that night - and the next night, too. I guess that answers my own question.
Mind you, I smudged two people at the same time, and that does tend to make one a little tired.