I think that there is a loneliness that is inherent to the human condition.
And I think that we all RUN from it, as fast and as hard as we can, scattering from one another like tiny creatures in the face of a giant mole monster.
And yet for as much as we try to scatter in avoidance, we still wind up face-to-face with it, the worst of our loneliness, our fear of it, our wrestling with and against it, every day... in our families, in our friendships, in our jobs, in our marriages.
As much as we try to run away from it, we cannot escape it, usually never, not even for much of a few minutes.
Some are better at compensating than others. I am not one of them, I must tell you.
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Wednesday, December 1, 2010
"Jack pines... are not lumber trees [and they] won't win many beauty contests either. But to me this valiant old tree, solitary in its own rocky point,is as beautiful as a living thing can be.... In the calligraphy of its shape against the sky is written strength of character and perseverance, survival of wind, drought, cold, heat, disease... In its silence it speaks of... wholeness... an integrity that comes from being what you are."
~Douglas Wood
"Every summer, I go to the Boundary Waters, a million acres of pristine wilderness along the Minnesota-Ontario border. My first trip, years ago, was a vacation, pure and simple. But as I returned time and again to that elemental world of water, rock, woods, and sky, my vacation began to feel more like a pilgrimage to me--an annual trek to holy ground driven by spiritual need. Douglas Wood's medication on the jack pine, a tree native to that part of the world, names what I go up north seeking: images of how life looks when it is lived with integrity.
Thomas Merton claimed that 'there is in all things... a hidden wholeness.' But back in the human world--where we are less self-revealing than jack pines--Merton's words can, at times, sound like wishful thinking. Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities from each other. In the process, we become separated from our own souls. We end up living divided lives, so far removed from the truth we hold within that we cannot know the 'integrity that comes from being what you are.'
My knowledge of the divided life comes first from personal experience: I yearn to be whole, but dividedness often seems the easier choice. A 'still, small voice' speaks the truth about me, my work, or the world. I hear it and yet act as if I did not. I withhold a personal gift that might serve a good end or commit myself to a project that I do not really believe in. I keep silent on an issue I should address or actively break faith with one of my own convictions. I deny my inner darkness, giving it more power over me, or I project it onto other people, creating 'enemies' where none exist.
I pay a steep price when I live a divided life--feeling fraudulent, anxious about being found out, and depressed by the fact that I am denying my own selfhood. The people around me pay a price as well, for now they walk on ground made unstable by my divideness. How can I affirm another's identity when I deny my own? How can I trust another's integrity when I defy my own? A fault line runs down the middle of my life, and whenever it cracks open--divorcing my words and actions from the truth I hold within--things around me get shaky and start to fall apart.
But up north, in the wilderness, I sense the wholeness hidden 'in all things.' It is in the taste of wild berries, the scent of sun-baked pine, the sight of the Northern Lights, the sound of water lapping the shore, signs of a bedrock integrity that is eternal and beyond all doubt. And when I return to a human world that is transient and riddled with disbelief, I have new eyes for the wholeness hidden in me and my kind and a new heart for loving even our imperfections.
In fact, the wilderness constantly reminds me that wholeness is not about perfection. On July 4, 1999, a twenty-minute maelstrom of hurricane-force winds took down twenty million trees across the Boundary Waters. A month later, when I made my annual pilgrimage up north, I was heartbroken by the ruin and wondered whether I wanted to return. And yet on each visit since, I have been astonished to see how nature uses devastation to stimulate new growth, slowly but persistently healing her own wounds.
Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. Knowing this gives me hope that human wholeness--mine, yours, ours--need not be a utopian dream, if we can use devastation as a seedbed for new life."
~Quoted from Chapter 1 "Images of Integrity" in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life by Parker Palmer
"The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul"
~Leonard Cohen
"There was a time when farmers on the Great Plains, at the first sign of a blizzard, would run a rope from the back door out to the barn. They all knew stories of people who had wandered off and been frozen to death, having lost sight of home in a whiteout while still in their own backyards.
Today we live in a blizzard of another sort. It swirls around us as economic injustice, ecological ruin, physical and spiritual violence, and their inevitable outcome, war. It swirls within us as fear and frenzy, greed and deceit, and indifference to the suffering of others. We all know stories of people who have wandered off into this madness and been separated from their own souls, losing their moral bearings and even their mortal lives: they make headlines because they take so many innocents down with them.
The lost ones come from every walk of life: clergy and corporate executives, politicians and people on the street, celebrities and schoolchildren. Some of us fear that we, or those we love, will become lost in the storm. Some are lost at this moment and are trying to find the way home. Some are lost without knowing it. And some are using the blizzard as cover while cynically exploiting its chaos for private gain.
So it is easy to believe the poet's claim that 'the blizzard of the world' has overturned 'the order of the soul,' easy to believe that the soul--that life-giving core of the human self, with its hunger for truth and justice, love and forgiveness--has lost all power to guide our lives.
But my own experience of the blizzard, which includes getting lost in it more often than I like to admit, tells me that it is not so. The soul's order can never be destroyed. It may be obscured by the whiteout. We may forget, or deny, that its guidance is close at hand. And yet we are still in the soul's backyard, with chance after chance to regain our bearings.
This book is about tying a rope from the back door out to the barn so that we can find our way home again. When we catch sight of the soul, we can survive the blizzard without losing our hope or our way. When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world--in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace, and in political life--as we are called back to our 'hidden wholeness' amid the violence of the storm."
~from the Prelude to A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
"It has been said, 'time heals all wounds.' I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone."
~Rose Kennedy
I just love encountering wise quotes such as this one. I don't care where they come from; when they land into my life, I am grateful.
Wife of rugby captain: "Thinking about tomorrow?"
Husband, rugby captain: "No.
Tomorrow's taken care of, one way or another.
I was thinking about how you spend 30 years in a tiny cell... and come out ready to forgive the people who put you there."
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
by the English poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903)
It was already dark at 5pm tonight, thick and heavy, that inky blackness of Seattle in November after the time change for Daylight Savings. I felt squeezed by it, tightly, as though it had compressed all the air out of my lungs in the few minutes it took for the darkness to descend.
Living here in the Pacific Northwest is like that. It's a little like living inside a giant metaphorical bellows.
During the summer, the world opens up, expanding and inviting one to breathe deeply.
But I wasn't ready for the intake of life this year, still reeling and breathless from the blow to the solar plexus I'd been dealt earlier.
So I didn't expand my existential diaphragm to suck in a big breath to give my life's blood enough fuel and energy to take me through the airless months of winter's collapse.
It reminds me of that time at the church summer school program when I was ten, when someone shoved me from behind into the deep end of the swimming pool. I didn't have a chance to take a breath before I went under the water, and then as I was struggling to come up for air, another kid cannon-balled in on top of me, forcing me down again so that I was sure I was going to drown.
That's how I feel right now, as the darkness squeezes the air out of life again, as the days grow claustrophobic and short and the weather more miserable, as the holidays encroach. Even as I write this, the lights in the house have blinked a few times from the gusting winds outside, threatening to plunge me into blackness even in the safety of my little hovel home.
I used to say at this time of year that the darkness is like being a tiny person standing inside a giant pot, with the shadows growing quickly to darken every inch of space as a lid is lowered to cover the pot.
But the darkness this year has a different quality. This year I'm left fearing that I may never breathe again.
I've spent the last few months (or, more realistically, the last year) trying to figure out how I can avoid the holidays. Where can I go to opt out? I really just want nothing to do with them this year. Maybe never again, but I don't know that part yet.
I hate that it feels obligatory. I hate feeling like I have to participate. I hate that it's in our face in our culture, as just a given, it's what people DO, celebrate the holidays. Why can't November and December be just regular, normal months like all the rest? Why does there have to be all the fuss and hoopla, the expectation and big deal made?
I have zero desire this year to go shopping for gifts. Going to the mall. Trying to pick gifts for people I rarely even see, who already have everything they could possibly need or desire. It was a little easier when the nieces were children, but now that they are teens... and, like I said, they have everything they could ever need or want anyway.
And I don't really want to receive any gifts, either. There isn't anything I need, and nothing even that I really want right now. Not material things, anyway. A family, a home, those things that don't come in a box wrapped up under a tree. But I certainly don't need more trinkets or doodads to further clutter my already overfull and overcluttered little living space.
And then there's the whole other part, the going. The gifting and the going. It's been this way since I left home at seventeen. For twenty-five years, I have had to show up in someone else's life in order to celebrate. I have to go -- to someone else's home, into someone else's world -- in order to have anyone to celebrate with. And I am so beyond burned out on that.
The holidays as a single person suck, and I'm so weary of it. I just don't want to do it anymore. Let all the little families everywhere do their Norman Rockwell scenes and leave me alone; don't force me to participate.
Seriously -- where do I go to opt out?
Monday, October 25, 2010
This evening, three days before my 42nd birthday, I had to put down my beloved twenty-year-old kitty, Mikayah. Formerly known as "Two Bits," the name she had when I adopted her when she was four, she was a beautiful darling who graced my life for sixteen years, a peaceful, devoted, sweet, sometimes overly loud but always loving and gentle companion.
I sit at home more alone, now, than in a long time, or at least alone in a new and different way. It was a blustery, threatening, tempestuous afternoon when I scooped her halfway into a pillowcase and snuggled her on my lap for the short drive to the veterinary hospital. I would never have thought it possible to drive with her on my lap, navigating the steering, the clutch and gas, the turn signals, and the stick shift, all while holding onto her carefully so her old bones didn't get roughly jarred. But she was content to lay against me, trusting, and seeming still curious about the world around her even as she labored to breathe and her shoulder blades angled painfully together, having joined the past few days like friends clasping hands to close the usual space between them.
The vet was kind and gentle. His eyes reddened and moistened perceptably when I said I thought she was "just done." I said it with a strength in my voice that surprised me, maybe surprised him too, given my tears. No wavering or cracking, just pure conviction about my beloved who I've known so well and for so long.
I had arrived early and used the time to snuggle with her in my car, whispering to her of my gratitude for her life's spirit co-mingled with mine these many years. It was harder there because she seemed so alert, her soul still eager for engaging the world despite her body's weariness. Entering the treatment room, though, we were both changed. There was a soft blanket spread on the examination table, and a box of tissues. I was sobbing by the time I walked through the door with her in my arms, struck to near shattering with the memories of that same room a year and a half earlier when I let my sweet Sheltie girl, Naomi, go. Somewhere in my mind wandered the thought that the blanket looked like the same one from that desperately sorrowful day from the past.
The staff was good to me and let me stay alone with her for a long time to cry into her soft and still beautiful fur and kiss and nuzzle her sweet forehead. And from her I felt new signs of readiness to be let go of her suffering. She seemed suddenly much skinnier and more frail than she had only an hour before, and I wondered with sudden guilt and shame how I could have been so blind as to let her suffer over the weekend -- how could I not have seen how far gone she already was, that I didn't let her go on Friday or Saturday?
But I think the timing was all okay. When we arrived at the vet hospital, I think she maybe perceived relief and thus stopped trying to be strong, because even her breathing was perceptably different. I had laid beside her all of last night, sleeping with my hand touching her to bring her calm and comfort, and then I had napped with her this afternoon. It was only as we snuggled in the car in the parking lot before going in that I had suddenly noticed a small strangeness to the sound of her breathing, and that became much more pronounced as we waited for the doctor. So, it felt to me like a sign, another way of her letting me know she was ready, that it was the right time to let her go.
I held her close on my lap after the doctor gave her a sedative injection to calm her. We sat that way for a long time and I said my goodbyes. I knew she was leaving me even then, even though the "official" injection hadn't been administered.
I had learned with Naomi that I didn't want to be holding her at the moment life left her body. Feeling her relaxed and soft from the sedative was enough. To still feel her warmth, her pliability, to have her ear twitch when my hair accidentally tickled it.
I put her on the table for the final injecton. I wish maybe that I had left the room then. She was already gone, even if her heart and lungs were still quietly operational. The vet struggled with the injection site. Using a rubberband as a tourniquet around a hind leg, he couldn't seem to get a good vein in her narrow, thin, tired legs, so he had to turn her over and then I had to see into her jaundiced eyes, formerly a deep blue but now strangely a mix with yellow. Even that, I hadn't been able to see so clearly until that moment.
The final injection was very quick, but she was already gone and I wish that maybe I had been, too. The doctor offered me time with her but I didn't want it. She was lifeless and I remember those were the worst moments with Naomi. There is something so very real, tangible, immortal, unfathomable about the life force within God's creatures. And when it is gone, truly what is left is just a shell. It is a mystery I hope to one day comprehend with more than the human understanding I have now.
I rushed out of the treatment room after giving her head one last kiss goodbye, and glanced back to see the doctor gently scooping her up in the blanket. The reception area was full of people who glanced quickly at my red and sodden face with nervous compassion. Thankfully one of the staff said I didn't have to settle the bill right then, so I hurried to my car and let the tears flow freely.
I came home and sat on the floor and hugged the dog, and as I sobbed and he licked the tears from my face and neck, I thought about that phrase, "God giveth and He taketh away," but I put it in reverse, "He taketh away but He also giveth." He took Naomi from me and then almost exactly a year later He gifted me with Beau-of-the-sweet-temperament. He let Beau and Mikayah bond, and Beau and I bond, and then He said it was time to let Mikayah go. But he didn't leave me bereft. And in that I find gratitude and a strange joy in the sorrow.
I went out to the store and bought a bottle of champagne, some barbecued ribs (that I probably won't end up eating tonight), and a little thing of chocolate cheesecake. I will raise a toast (at least in my heart) to Mikayah and to the beauty of her life and the great gift she has been to me.
As I left the grocery store, I couldn't help notice the change in the weather. The threatening storm had blown through, replaced by brief sunshine, a sky the brightest blue -- blue like Mikayah's eyes on the best of brightest days of her sweet life -- and wisps of clouds with the sun glimmering off of them in that way that reminds me of something celestial or heavenly. The wind buffetted colorful orange/red trees which stood in contrast against the blue, white, and gold in the sky and I stopped in my tracks for a moment to marvel at the wonder of it, to soak in the image and the feeling.
I drove home pondering my own self. A year and a half ago I went through nearly the same thing, with Naomi, but that evening I was much less strong. There was something to going through it all by myself tonight. I had thought it might make me feel more lonely, more sorry for myself, but instead I felt my strength and fortitude. Last year I had to have my Father and my dopey ex-fiance (who was already an "ex" at that point, just a week or two in, after the first time I left him) go with me through it all. And the fact was that, though sweet, they were nearly useless. Granted, when we walked into my house and I saw Naomi's bed and started to freak, they jumped to my rescue to quickly remove it to the trash bin. But other than that, they were awkward and uncertain and I had to hold my grief in so as not to "burden" them. Sadly in some ways it was they who, though trying to help, were the burden.
Tonight, instead, I've done my own thing, taken care of myself my own way, without any dumb men (no offense, Dad, if you ever happen to read this - love you to pieces!) who are not yet open enough in themselves to know how to be open to truly comfort and be strength for me. So I am strength for myself tonight.
Aftre I got home, I spent an hour or so looking through photos and videos from the last couple of years with her (thank God for digital cameras!). It reconfirms how much it was the right, though difficult, decision to let her go tonight. Here she is in so much better days, only a year or more ago (I have a couple of videos I'll hopefully be able to add later):
I will miss Mikayah greatly. Facing that grief will be another kind of strength that I will need to muster. But today I got through the hardest part. I faced up to reality and did right by her, did what I needed to do for her. It was a hard hard thing, a responsibility I would much rather have shirked. But I owed it to her. She was my Beloved. My last living tie to my years in Florida. She was my faithful companion and most constant friend for sixteen years.
Goodbye, my Sweet Pea Girl, Bug, Buggers, Blue-Eyed Girl, Mikayah. "Two Bits." You weren't never "two bits" 'o nothing--you were the real deal, the whole dang thing. I love you, Sweetest. Forever.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
I've recently started reading a book called "Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth" by John Bradshaw. Pretty promising sounding title, no?
Just last night I was talking with my upstairs neighbor, who told me her 24 year old daughter recently got abruptly "dumped" by her boyfriend. In the course of the conversation I said something about how it's still tough for young (and older, ahem) women out there, that while there are more opportunities for women nowadays, ours is still a pretty patriarchal society (and we won't even get into how much so most of the rest of the world is).
Well, so happens that today in Bradshaw's book I read where he talks about how we (Westerners, he's talking to, even presumably specifically Americans) grew up in a patriarchal society and how that affected the homes that we were raised in. He goes on to talk about what, in his view, that taught us about the idea of "love."
He writes about what he sees as some particularly damaging "rules" within a patriarchal system:
"Blind obedience. You obey no mater what the content of the command because the act of obeying is itself virtuous. Blind obedience is the foundation upon which patriarchy stands. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Abraham takes his son to the mountain to kill him in order to obey God. In a pure patriarchy the act of obeying, even if it means killing one's own child, is virtuous. This is the crux of blind obedience. No ruler could ask for a more perfect system of subjugation or devise a better scheme for getting his subjects to conform to his rules. In the religious and parental contexts, individuals are encouraged to blindly obey the leaders' rules and authority. And one of the rules is never to question the rules. The mere questioning of a rule is considered disobedience.
The repression of all emotions, except fear. The emotion of anger is especially reprehensible. Once we lose our ability to be angry, we become doormats and people pleasers. We become so nice that we no longer have passion to fight for the things we stand for.
The destruction of individual willpower. Patriarchy hates willful and exuberant children. They are hard to control. The destruction of a child's will leaves the child with two choices: conforming or rebelling. This polarized state is the core issue for all adult children.
The repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure's way of thinking."
There is sooooo much in all of this for me. I keep finding something new in it each time I reread it.
The first time through, the revelatory "aha!" moment came with the last line, "The repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure's way of thinking." That pretty succinctly both describes and summarizes the relationship from which I extricated myself last year. He was the "authority figure" (on some strange level, even though he's not what you - or I - would probably envision on reading that statement) and he used various techniques from Day One to Day's End to try to repress or correct or change or ignore or overwrite and certainly overRUN my thinking - my thoughts, my emotions, and my actions - whenever they didn't conform to his will. Yikes.
With that "aha!" moment, I read back over the other three bullets to see whether they maybe applied, too. And yeah, they do. Walking backwards up through the bullet points as I did...
Definitely in 4-1/2 years I found my willpower threatened to near extinction. Hell, what finally saved me, or at least started my salvation and the (still ongoing) restoration process, was the waking up I did (started to do, anyway) while reading, "Loving Him Without Losing You" by Beverly Engel. I very nearly lost my whole self. Many days even now, I'm still looking around to find the bits and pieces; I lost - or gave up - way more than I ever realized. He definitely wanted conformation; in the end, I definitely rebelled. I think I have yet to find and reclaim the "willful and exuberant child" that I was, just a tiny bit in a very good, beautiful way, when we met. I miss her. Lots.
He definitely wanted to repress all emotions of mine that didn't conform to his, that didn't match his or serve his aims. I was definitely left with fear after all of his tactics and 4-1/2 years of having them used against me. Fear of abandonment. Fear of loss of everything I'd invested so much in. Fear of losing myself totally. Fear of being wrong or off my rocker. Fear of his next big pout-fest, or next big tantrum, or next big hours or days or weeks or months long campaign to work on the last two bullet points, destruction of my will and repression of any thinking or feeling that was different from what he wanted.
And blind obedience, oh my goodness, yes. He expected me to ignore his frequent double standards. And sadly, I did so very many times and for a very long time. And I definitely learned that I was to do what he wanted or I would be punished. And yeah, there was no space for questioning the rules. No space for open dialog like, oh, I don't know... between two equal partners? No space for negotiation or compromise. (Unless, of course, it was me doing the compromising.)
Ugh. It's just shameful to write all of this out. But it's good, too. I wanted to write it so it didn't just ping-pong around in my head briefly and wind up knocked out one ear so that I eventually forget about it. It's an "aha!" moment that I don't want to forget. Even if some would say I'm "beating a dead horse" or that I "think too much" or that I "should be over it already, it's been almost a year." This is my process.
I'm a work in progress. Progress, not perfection, as the wise saying goes. I was under a pretty thick cloud of F.O.G. (that's Fear, Obligation, and Guilt, for those of you who haven't read Susan Forward's fabulous book "Emotional Blackmail"). I wish that a new weather system had just come through and quickly blown all the fog away, but alas it hasn't been like that for me, I've had to wait (and work very hard) while the fog has very gradually and slowly lifted.
Everything is definitely looking a lot more clear these days.
There's a lot more I could write here, thoughts and other "aha!" moments that the Bradshaw quotes have brought to the fore. Like, for a while tonight, thinking how I'm not so sure whether or if my mom and dad fit the "patriarchal" style, that I need to think more on that. And then later, a big dumb "aha!" smack to my forehead realizing that my stepfather definitely fit the patriarchal model and that for sure all the preceding bullet points were true under his reign. And that I'm sure I could probably find some ties between my life under his rule and my 4-1/2 years in my ex-relationship, if I want to delve into all that. And then there's the whole other subject of the religious blind obedience, not asking questions, not questioning the rules, and so on that I was not only raised under but around which I formed my life for so many years and that I'm still struggling with. Patriarchal much, that? Um, yeah.
For now, I think I want to go back to reading about "Creating Love." Definitely I need that.
I wrote this poem a long long time ago, over twenty years ago. The sad, or maybe scary, thing is that, all these many years later, it still seems about as true as it did back then.
I never quite finished the poem, thus it ends a little abruptly.
Teenage Eye View of Life
Good things change and are gone forever. Friendships die, ties are severed. Bad things, things that hurt remain. Is it possible to withstand the pain? Unhappy days drag on and on. Sunshiny days do not last long. Moods change, tears fall. No one seems to hear at all. Nights are restless, days are cold. Love is needed, a hand to hold. A long embrace to dull the pain. But no one cares, the hurt remains. Hopeless future, if one at all. Questions big, answers small.
When I was in my early 20's, I shared this poem with another human being for the first time, shared it with my first serious relationship and my only relationship up to that point, the "love of my life" as a young woman. He ended up giving it back to me after awhile, with his own addition.
Teenage Eye View of Life
Good things change and are gone forever Friendships die, ties are severed Bad things, things that hurt remain Is it possible to withstand the pain? Unhappy days drag on and on Sunshiny days do not last long Moods change, tears fall No one seems to hear at all Nights are restless, days are cold Love is needed, a hand to hold A long embrace to dull the pain But no one cares, the hurt remains Hopeless future, if one at all Questions big, answers small
The Father whispers of things tomorrow Through all the tears and all the sorrow Take no thought of this dark hour My name is Faithful, a Mighty Tower Questions big, answers small All is Christ and Christ is all
Selah
Beautiful, yes?
Of course, then later because of his own extreme emotional distress he dumped me for the millionth time. And sometime later I penned the following, which also still feels true so many years later.
Quick, hot tears Something inside has died Hope deferred Too long, perhaps Numb Existence on a level of continual dull pain Flat, like the line on a heart monitor Like a paper doll Life in a one-dimensional plane With no feeling but the flatness Going through the motions of daily life No energy left. So tired. Only the tears which come so readily
Friday, August 20, 2010
Living a Better Story A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
A week ago, to the day, I finished reading a book called Blue Like Jazz by Portland author Donald Miller. I'm hardly the first, I am positive, to say that the book was amazing, nor will I be the last, I'm sure. Still, my experience was uniquely my own, and I cannot remember when I last found myself relating so much to an author. In truth, I can't remember that I ever have. I do know for certain that I've not laughed and cried my way like that through any book since I laughed and cried my way through Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott, which I read almost in its entirety on my long flight home from Rome a number of years ago. I don't mention Rome to gloat; I mention it because it was one very big "scene" for me, a notable moment, in my life's story. I know I'm not the first to draw comparison between Mr. Miller and Ms. Lamott, either. So, thus far I'm batting zero for zero in trying not to sound like a cliche.
After Blue Like Jazz, which I finished in about four days, I started another book Miller wrote called Searching for God Knows What. That was last Friday night and Saturday morning. I read late into the evening on Friday and started again as soon as I awoke on Saturday morning. I was actually switching back and forth that day between Searching... and a book I had checked out from the library, one woman's account of her amazing life as a photojournalist and her recovery from a devastating accident that nearly killed her while she was traveling by crowded bus on winding narrow roads in Laos in Southeast Asia.*
Sometime Saturday afternoon, I paused from my veritable reading orgy to capture in writing some thoughts I was having about writing as I read the reflections of these two inspiring authors. I also paused for a Facebook break, and out of curiosity looked to see whether Donald Miller has a Facebook page - which of course he does, as does everyone who is anyone these days, I suppose. It was on his Facebook page that I learned he's hosting a contest with the potential to win tickets for two to a seminar he is presenting in Portland next month.
Usually I seem to find out about such things two to three days after it's already too late, but this time I actually had several days left before the deadline. Tonight at Midnight is now the deadline, in fact! Yikes. I have three hours to write my entry. The challenge is to write about what kind of story I want to live and how I think attending the seminar might help. Ordinarily I would prefer to have more time to write something like this. Well, I suppose technically I have had all week, but I wanted first to read Mr. Miller's latest book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, because I understand that the seminar will be based on ideas he writes about in that book.
I was fortunate to be able to get A Million Miles... on CD from the library (the printed copies have a wait time of like twenty-two years or something! and I'm trying to curb my book buying lately... and I had already bought Blue Like Jazz and Searching for God Knows What in the same week at my beloved Half-Price Books. Sorry Mr. Miller, I have no idea what that does to your royalties, but I think you know something of what it's like to be "self-employed," as I am...). I had the even more unusual fortune to have a freelance job four days this week, more than an hour's drive north of my home, way up toward the Canadian border. So I was able to listen to A Million Miles... (twice, even) in my car as I drove.
So now here I am, last minute, trying to tell how and why I want to live a better story. And earlier in the week I took some time to scope out a little of the "competition" for this contest, and it is stiff! I know there are a few entrants that personally I would vote for before I'd vote even for my own story. I'd post links here just now but I do, after all, only have three hours left and the clock is ticking. :) (Actually I did try to post links to two of my favorites of the several I read, but I can't find the bookmark that I thought I saved for one of the two! I'll try to come back and post those later if I can find the one I somehow lost.)
I feel like I've been trying to live a good story for over thirty years. Pretty much my whole life, really. I didn't call it that, of course. And I've been far from successful a rather large discouraging percent of the time. But intuitively I've understood the concept, even if I didn't have a name for it, for a long time, most of my life somehow. It's like it's in my blood or something. Or maybe it's just my Myers Briggs personality type, INFJ. I've seen claims that Ghandi, Princess Diana, and Mother Theresa were INFJ, for whatever or nothing that that is worth. High and mighty, eh? It's all just trying to figure ourselves out, after all. Right? Some sort of cosmic "pin the tail on the donkey" or something. Donkey. Hah, that's kind of funny. :)
I was a sensitive child (and am still a sensitive adult), emotionally and spiritually, and I have a memory of being about four years old, lying in bed crying into a stuffed dog my Great Grandmother had given me, asking Jesus to please let me come home to Heaven to be with Him. That's rather heavy stuff for a four-year-old. When I was seven or eight, I remember walking home alone from the school bus stop and having an intense conversation with myself in my head about how the Catholics believed they were right, the Jews were very devout and believed they were right, the Muslims were so committed (I'd heard) (they were much "farther away" to our reality back then than 'they' are now) that some of them were even willing to die for their beliefs (which seemed more than I felt up to committing myself to at that tender age), and the Assemblies of God people (which was what I was at the time) believed we were right, and I just knew we couldn't all be right (because my pastor and my Sunday School teachers had made that pretty clear), so I remember coming to the unsettled decision that all a person could do was to pick one and sort of "go with it" and hope it was the right one. I remember having big confusing questions about God as a result of that thought process, but I didn't have the vocabulary back then to articulate it. Nor did I have anyone with whom to discuss such things.
I went on to to be raised in some crazy crazy stuff and to struggle with my faith for at least another twenty years. I wrote about it all in a post I attempted earlier today that was way over the 1,000 words suggested for the Living a Better Story contest. I may still post that blog entry anyway, just in case anyone is curious. Suffice it to say my life included private Christian school for three years, after my father left and my parents divorced, where we marched in formation into Chapel every morning (I can remember being asked to lead a few times and calling out "Left! Right! Left! Right! as we were expected to do, and if we weren't synchronized we were forced to exit the Chapel and march in again so I wanted to call the timing out right) and regularly were laid hands upon and encouraged to pray to receive "the gift of the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues." (If anyone is wondering, I did eventually succumb to the pressure and found my tongue "loosed" and found my "heavenly prayer language." For a while, anyway. I hope I don't offend anyone who is still moved by their prayer language. That's definitely not my intent... but neither is having a "prayer language" anymore, at least not one that isn't me directly and inteligbly expressing myself to God.)
Those years also included my mother and stepfather traveling to Texas for a weekend to become "ordained" ministers through some mail-order program I never figured out. After they returned home, they bought themselves new Bibles with their names inscribed on the front cover as "Reverend" Mr. and Mrs. In later years they were directly center to two church splits, they moved us to Oklahoma to attend Bible school but then decided the instructors were teaching false doctrine, they held regular prayer meetings in our home in which they prayed to cast out demonic spirits... oh, and then I left home when I was seventeen and a half to get away from the crazyness. I could tell you so much more but, 1,000 words here and I'm sure I'm still exceeding that by a margin farther than the ruler of 'grace' might extend (though I never did learn what those exact measurements were.)
I landed in Florida with a friend and got involved in a Charismatic Evangelical church there. I attended services usually three times a week, plus the Saturday evening prayer service. I served in the nursery and taught Sunday School, I attended College and Career events, I joined the Drama Team and presented skits before the church and on the beach to share the Gospel with the Unsaved. (I love how capitalizing something makes it look official or definite or something.) As part of the Drama Team I went on a two-week missionary trip to Guatemala and when I returned, enrolled for a year in the School of Biblical Studies through the church's accredited Bible Training School. When I completed that year of intensive study, I went back to Guatemala for a summer and worked with Youth with a Mission (YWAM, pronounced "Why-Wham" which I find oddly telling somehow) in Guatemala City.
I wanted to be a missionary and thought God had a specific "call' for my life. I tried and tried to hear what the "call" was, what remote country I should go to or what I should do next after I returned home from Guatemala, but I apparently had cotton in my ears or something.
It's a long story for another time (some of it is in that other draft of a post I wrote earlier today), but I grew very disallusioned as the voices and ideas in my head clamored to be acknowledged. The voices from all the way back to when I was seven or eight years old or earlier. I believed I was supposed to be part of the 10/40 window of sharing the Gospel to every nation, tribe, and people group... and yet something in me balked at the idea of imposing Western culture and Western ideals on other people groups.
I had grown up in a decidedly intensely "End Times" focused denomination - and, especially, in an intensely End Times focused household, with my mother and stepfather at the helm. My father had left when I was nine, in part (he later explained) because he was worried about somehow "messing up" my younger sister and I, and in part because he didn't know what to do with my mother's religious fanaticism. I grew up literally believing that I would not live to see my thirtieth birthday because I believed Armageddon or the Rapture or both would occur before then. You really do live your life differently when you think it's going to be very short. And, unfortunately, moreso when you've been very indoctrinated.
So I entered my "adult" life on my own at seventeen and a half with my head and spirit full of indoctrination but with my intellect and a whole other part of my spirit being at war, somehow, with the whole of me. I wanted to do good in the world (I was, and still am, highly compassionate and moved by and connected to the world around me) but yet I was so confused and confounded by the "religion" in my life.
A whole bunch of stuff happened in my early twenties - my mother's second divorce and third marriage, my attempting to confront some abuse my sister and I suffered at the hands of our stepfather (and then my mother's subsequent response of "Just give it to Jesus, He'll take care of it"), my culture shock at my return to the U.S. after a youthful summer in Guatemala, the eventual difficult breakup of my first young true love relationship, my experience of a total lack of support from my supposed church "community."
I found that there was no room for me, my questions, or my pain in my church home. I eventually stopped attending, and grew pretty disallusioned with the idea of "church" in general.
Eventually I moved to the Pacific Northwest, to Washington state, to be near my sister and my two sweet nieces. I restarted my life here, remade myself in my "career" (went from graphic design to technical editing and worked as a contractor for Microsoft). And I continued here to try to search out and make my "story" for my life.
I soon stumbled on a Christian organization that was serving homeless teens on the streets of Downtown Seattle and the University District. I signed up for the intensive training and found myself amongst a new breed of Christians I'd never before known existed. They were ecumenical, and for that reason or some other, were willing to be "real" people. I was most shocked by and attracted to the fact that they were okay using an occasional swear word during training, most often when they were "role playing" as though they were one of the youth I would encounter in the dropin center, but also at other times. They seemed - and were - real people. I remember months later saying to another fellow volunteer that I'd "found my pod" (whatever the heck I meant by that! :) when I stumbled upon New Horizons Ministries at that time.
I served there for six years, mostly seeming to gravitate to the youth who were addicted to heroin and to the young women who became pregnant. I was blessed, personally, to assist with the birth of two babies, but then sadly also had to walk through the journey with the young women as their children were removed from their care by CPS because the girls couldn't rise to the challenge of caring for those babies. I would write that the boys, the fathers, couldn't rise to the challenge either but the sad fact is that too often the girls weren't even quite sure who the "baby daddy" was.
Somewhere in this time, I found myself part of a small church on Capitol Hill where I finally felt "safe." The pastor was a wonderful, truly unique man, who I suspect had experienced a great deal of "brokenness" in his own life. He was extremely humble and sensitive to the hurts and sorrows of humanity. I attended there for two years or more and hardly had a service where I wasn't deeply moved (I cried a lot there). I regularly shared my hymnal with a man who was mentally ill; another man in his 50s who was mentally handicapped loved to talk to me about Lawrence Welk; a gay couple regularly graced the front row, one man in leather chaps and the other, a near dead-ringer for Charles Manson, in a skirt; the pastor regularly incorporated the children into the service and into his visual object lessons; sometimes he would ask me to interpret the songs or his message or Scripture reading into American Sign Language, which at that time I had gathered the courage to send myself back to school to pursue a degree in.
It was John Eldredge's book "Journey of Desire," which I'd read twice, that finally gave me the impetus to figure out how to send myself back to school. American Sign Language had been a passion since I was about nine years old, and becoming an Interpreter had long been a dream. So I did three years of school (I'd already done a year of related classes back in Florida before I dropped that to attend Bible School), and I graduated with a degree in Sign Language Interpreting and started my work.
I thought I would finally feel something amazing, having achieved such a life-long dream, fulfilling such a call or rounding out such a "scene" in my life, or whatever, but mostly what I felt was a sense that I'd finally made it to the other side of the rainbow and found out that there was no actual pot of gold over there. Yikes. So I scratched my head and shuffled my feet for a while and I tried to figure out the next part of the story. I worked to gain experience and skill, and in 2008 I took the national certification exam and passed it, so that I did actually achieve a long-held dream of becoming a Certified Sign Language Interpreter.
And yet ... I realize now it was just one more scene in life. Eventually someone yells "That's a wrap!" and the whole party breaks up, everyone goes their separate ways... and you find yourself waiting pedestrian-like at the bus stop of life, wondering where you're going next.
Shortly after I had graduated from school, I had "met someone" and found myself in a serious relationship, the first one really since my early twenties. And so I thought that my "next big scene" was to star as (or at least to work hard at and learn how to become) stepmom to his two young newly-teen daughters. All I can say now is, "Give me Shakespeare, it would be easier." :p But I threw myself into the role, as I have always done.
But ... I did every costume change asked of me, I memorized every line and gave my best delivery, I took stage direction as well as anyone could, I sought out coaches to help me with the role. And, after four years, after much ongoing professional therapy and much journaling and much reading and much seeking of support and much intentional personal growth (for well more than just those four years), I was finally able to admit... He was not good to me. He never was, not from the start or all the way to the finish. It was a very very sad (and unnecessary) thing. But, for a time, I was like the women Donald Miller mentions briefly in his book A Million Miles... I was afraid to give up the story that I had, I was afraid to choose a better story.
Whether it was the writer of my life finally taking control of the keyboard, or me the character finally acquiescing, I finally made the difficult decision to end that relationship, last year. Some further bad stuff happened, he treated me even worse through the breakup than he had during the "love" part, and I was left pretty devastated. I mean, I had tried to make us a "family," to make him and his kids my family, and I had to give that up and I was left pretty adrift for a long while after that. I had thought the story of my life was going a particular direction, that this whole long section of filming was providing a foundation upon which the future of the story would be based. And then suddenly I found the whole long thing nothing but waste on the cutting room floor. And believe me, that's far more brutal than just deleting some keystrokes while you're writing the screenplay beforehand. When you actually choose the actors, build the props, go on location, memorize all your lines, do a dozen takes to get each scene painstakingly just right or at least almost just right... only to chuck the whole thing... it's expensive in ways that are hard to measure.
But I had once again in my life made the choice to seek out a better story.
So after a time of grieving, I began the recovery process, and began to rebuild my life. I wouldn't say I was necessarily living any great or memorable scenes, though I did do things like take sailing lessons and start to make some new friends (the relationship had kept me pretty isolated, which was one red-flag aspect right there and which ran counter to my ongoing hunger for community). I've been willing to rest in the calm for a while, to carefully tend the wounds, to learn from the missteps. In the post-mortem time after that particular train-wreck I've cemented in my mind (I hope) how much more actions truly do speak than do floofy words of "I love you" someone throws your direction. I've realized that someone can be a nice companion but that doesn't mean they're necessarily being a good partner or even, particularly, a friend. I've learned that if I give up a little of what's important, I might be giving up more than I know. I've learned my own vibrancy in relationship and that I want to be with someone who embraces that vibrancy and doesn't then want to keep it under a bell jar. I've learned that one person cannot fill up another person (no matter how hard I might try to do the filling). I've learned the value in differentiation, in being able to be an individual, one of two individuals, hopefully, and that relationship should support that, should support the two becoming their best selves (to sound all Oprah-ish) and not diminish either by trying to become one single throbbing mind.
With these lessons and more carefully tucked away, I've been trying to move forward in writing the screenplay of my life, but I've been lacking inspiration, lacking vision for what scenes might be ahead. Doing all this gluttony of Don Miller reading the past week and a half has helped. (Did I mention that I also read Father Fiction this week? So that's three and a half Miller books read or listened to (twice) in about ten days time or something. Like I said, gluttony.) Plus I read the book about the photojournalist and her recovery (emotional and spiritual) from her brush with death. I wish that I could capture the "first blush" feeling that I had with the first reading of each of those books. If I could capture that and ride on that emotional high of intellectual and spiritual and emotional stimulation, of awakening awareness and inspiration, that feeling of relating so well to another person and feeling known somehow, even though these authors don't know me, well that would be a nice way to live.
But what I have to do is parse out the message. From both authors I get that it takes something like enthalpy. What do I do to raise the heat temperature in my own self to create the energy to move forward. I've had, I believe, my "inciting incident" that Miller writes about; the end of the relationship seems like it was certainly that. But I'm still warming up, slow like an oven. I guess maybe that's why I'm hoping to go to Mr. Miller's seminar. I'd like the inspiration time to continue for a little longer, to find my footing a little better. Some of the other contest entrants have amazing vision; they already have written the next big scene for their lives, they just need the funding or the right partner to come along to help with the work or to put the scene through a last touch-up revision or two. I'm still sitting here looking at a mostly blank page, wondering how to get started constructing scenes again.
I've spent years doing what Seattle author Carlene Cross calls "Fleeing Fundamentalism" (that's the title of her book, which is my latest read that I've just started). I've had to do so much deconstruction of the "faith" and religion I was brought up in. It's been a grueling process that continues even now and it's been a frightening one, too, because I've often wondered whether, at the end of it, I would be left with any faith at all. That's why I like authors like Miller and Anne Lamott, because they touch something in me that reminds me that a real faith does exist somewhere deep and intimate and (hopefully) untouchable inside of me.
But I've learned that God isn't going to speak in a booming voice out of the clouds, "Thou Shalt Go to India" or "Thou Shalt Go Back to School Again" or "Thou Shalt Get Up Off the Couch and Call Your Friend Susan to Inquire About Her Writing Group."
So, steps I can take on my own are... I've committed to start trying to write more. And maybe I could even look into taking a writing class. And I need to quit just thinking about finding somewhere new to volunteer, I need to actually do it. Working with victims of domestic abuse might be a good area for me, since I now understand with personal experience the how and why involved in women going back to that. There's my new dog that I could train for pet-assisted therapy. I could look into going back to school; I keep thinking maybe I'd like to. I also could do more to move from technical editing into editing other forms of writing that interest me more, especially since I've realized that it's hard to earn a living with only the interpreting gigs. That photojournalism thing... I've always said it's secretly my secret dream job. I'm sure there's more.
I hope there's more. I want to do more in and with and for the world than just going on a hike now and then or occasionally sailing on tiny Lake Union or something. I long for community, for a vision and to be doing something for others, for a partner to share it all with, to be "living up to my potential" and not just sitting around waiting to die. When I die, I want people to feel that I died "too soon." I want to take off my own damn bell jar now and experience my own vibrancy again. I just need a bit more inspiration and a bit more enthalpy, or whatever. I know this might not be "winning entry" material, but it's what I have to work with right now. I'm starting over at this point in my life, along the lines of my blog title, "Second Half Beginnings," since all the previous scenes of my story have concluded. If the metaphor were theatre instead of a movie, I'd be in the pause between acts right now, waiting for the curtain to rise again. And there's value even in that moment, giving the audience a chance to relax and breathe. But my anticipation is growing for that curtain to rise to usher in the next act, the next scene, the next cast of characters in my story.
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Here is information about Donald Miller and the seminar he's hosting in September in Portland, as well as about this writing contest which it is now too late for you to enter, sorry, but I got mine in just in the nick of time I hope (Pacific Coast time! :), though the computer decided not to cooperate with me near the end.
I've realized recently that the essay is one of my favorite writing styles. Well, favorite reading styles, I should say, and this based on a consideration of a short list of favorite authors and books: Caroline Knapp, Anne Lamott, Donald Miller, Elizabeth Gilbert, Judith Viorst, "Why I'm Still Married," and "Because I Said So" (the latter two both collections of essays by women).
And what I'm starting to realize is that maybe I could write that way, too. I mean, maybe it would be okay for me to write that way. That I should give myself permission and then start doing it.
I think I've always thought that, to write, you had to have a subject. I don't mean like in English class where you learn to pay attention to your subject and your predicate, that's not the kind of subject I mean. I mean I thought you had to have something big to say, a whole cohesive fluid story to tell, before you could write. And I've never been much for story ideas. I'm way more an observer of story than I am a creator of one.
But what I've realized is that what's common about all the authors and books I listed, plus so many more on my bookshelves, is that the authors write about their lives. The stories they tell are their lives and, often more specifically, their life's journey. And that's the kind of thing where you can't write it out from the beginning knowing how it will wind up in the last chapter.
It's starting to dawn on me that maybe, just maybe, I could write like that. Friends have been telling me I should write for as long as I can remember. I write emails to friends, and sometimes the emails turn into novelettes, and later the friends gush at me embarasingly that "Christy, you should be a writer! You should write a book! You've got to write!" and I say, "You know, I actually kind of get that alot, but I don't have a subject." I shrug my shoulders bemusedly and look a little lost or something, and sometimes I add, "I've been waiting for God or life or somebody to give me a subject, but it hasn't happened yet."
I wrote poems from a very young age. When I was in first grade I won first prize, in the entire elementary school, for a poem I wrote. I still remember sitting in my little seat at my little desk in Mrs. Brose's first grade classroom and hearing my name announced over the P/A system... to the whole entire school! Shy little me back then, I hardly knew what do make of that. My poem was apparently so strikingly insightful from one so young as I was then, about the "masks" that people wear to hide their true selves, that my Dad still brings that poem up to me sometimes even now if he makes an observation about who I am and who I've turned out to be all these years later in life. I take him to mean I had a capacity for noting the human condition even way back then, though he never say that directly.
When I was a little older, a young teen spending a lonesome few of weeks of summer at my Grandparents' "ranch" in Northern California, I sat out on the deck of the house every evening and composed a poem in ode to the sunsets and the trees darkly silhouetted against the sky. Later, when I was home again, I took a tape recorder and recorded myself reading the poem aloud dramatically while a movement of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture played on the record player. I confess I was a bit morosely dramatic in those days.
For years I've filled journals with my thoughts and observations about life and people and books and experiences. I set up this blog site with the idea of trying my hand more intentionally at writing, to have both the creative and the emotional outlet. But I haven't done much with it, maybe because in a way I haven't given credence to my own writing because I'm not creating a story, like writing a novel, with a beginning, middle, and end. But I think I need to quit cutting myself off before I even get started, quit setting limitations on myself based on misquided ideals. Many excellent writers - with valuable things to say, even - write in essay form, and even have their work published. It's not that I necessarily have a lofty goal of someday getting published (though that would be pretty darn cool). It's just that, I guess, it's a part of myself that I feel like I should explore and develop. The truth is that I often find myself "writing" in my head, while I'm driving in my car or working in the kitchen or taking a shower or walking the dog or whatever. I "write" stuff all time, but I rarely capture it or put it down anywhere. And even when I do, it usually sits in the background of this blog site inn "draft" format and never gets finished, let alone "published" (to the blog). So, I've decided to start trying to do something different about that.
So I'm starting to learn and understand experientially that there is life after.
Life after 40, which is where this blog's title has its roots.
Life after a very difficult ending, one I still grieve daily.
The winds of life bring not only "change," but with it new opportunities and new experiences. Often when you aren't even looking or trying, or sometimes when you only take the smallest of steps.
Like, two weeks ago I stepped into the REI outdoor outfitters store, finally after a month or two of intention, to look for a backpack so I can feel more readily outfitted for hiking.
I ended up hitting it off with the store employee who helped show me packs, and a week and a half later found myself going out on a date! The first date I've been on in five years; and probably only the second date or thereabouts in about ten years! Whether it will turn into anything remains to be seen. Even if I get a friend out of it, I will consider it a success. Heck, even if I never hear from the guy again I will consider it a success, because it was all borne out of my taking a step forward in my life - to buy a pack with the intention of taking more steps (literally and metaphorically) to go hiking - and because it all happened when I was just being myself, at ease with and present in my reality.
In other changes that demonstrate "life after," two weeks ago a new Sheltie suddenly came to share his forever home with me. His coming was a redemption, of sorts, of loss that I experienced last year with the sudden death of my beloved Tri-color Sheltie, Naomi, whose death punctuated a year of difficult losses. Now suddenly I have this very sweet, mellow Sheltie boy gracing my home and my life. Such an unexpected and happy blessing.
As more example of life after - life moving forward in positive ways - I had made a friend in photography (through a random sailing connection that also came about because of my taking a couple of steps forward) who was an unexpected connection and who has become something of a dear friend. She came into my life on the crest of the wave of huge losses, and her grace and care were something of a life preserver for me during the difficult months of the darkest of winters in my life. Now as the stormy seas have begun to settle around me, I find this unexpected connection with this friend has held fast and grown stronger, such that she was even calling me weekly during the entire last month while she was away in England.
And still more, through even tonight as I stepped out once again, to go on a sailing "meetup" to an entirely new location, entirely new group of people, entirely new and unknown kind of sailing than I've done before. I was terrified somewhere inside myself, but yet all the confidence I've been nurturing for so long was like a giant internal insulator against the fear, so I got myself out of the house (with some difficulty), drove to the location, made small talk with a man who turned out to have been the instructor of the sailing classes I took a year ago and who had terrified me so much that I intentionally never signed up to sail with him... Continued to introduce myself with confidence to the other attendees who all seemed super confident and knowledgeable about sailing... while I fumbled around and tried to be helpful or at least not to do anything stupid. Ended up sailing with "Mike" the "scary instructor," who turned out to be really nice and willing to gently teach, and with another gal who was really friendly and easy to be with. After, we went out for drinks and appetizers at a friendly nearby neighborhood pub, where famous local celebrity Cisco Morris happened to be hanging out for the evening with a group of friends. Talk about feeling like I was in the best place to be in friendly Seattle subburbia. We chatted and I made connections with both women for potential future hiking and kayaking together and also for a friendly escort into the scary world of the Seattle Singles Yacht Club that I've been far too shy and scared to attend so far.
Life after.
It's bittersweet. There's still a ton of grief. The losses have been tragic, and there's still a lot of anger because they shouldn't have happened. But the sun keeps rising and setting. The seasons keep changing, such that (finally!) Summer is here in the Northwest. And just like the region and everyone else in it is slowly metamorphosing back into living as the sun shines and the weather grows warmer, I find myself taking tentative steps back into the world of the living, too.
I've been thinking of name possibilities for almost two weeks, since I first saw a picture of "Coco(a)" and realized that, if he came to live with me, I probably wouldn't want to keep that name for him.
I've turned over many options in my mind. But trying to find one that resonnates with the both of us is hard.
Some names that are under consideration:
Theodore (Teddy for short) because he looks like a big teddy bear.
Dakota, Native American meaning "friend, ally."
Samson, with the reference to his hair.
Beauregard (Beau for short) meaning "beautiful gaze."
Yosemite, Native American for "grizzly bear."
Berwyn, meaning "bear friend or bright friend."
Auberon, meaning "noble or royal bear."
Montana
Marley
Napoleon, meaning "lion of the woods."
Gandalf
Stetson
Salem
Cassanova
Cheyenne
Arthur, the Celtic word for "bear."
Scirocco, meaning "warm wind."
Gilroy, meaning "son of the red-head" (that would be me).
Rousseau, meaning "little red-haired one."
I feel partial (at least today) to Dakota, Beauregard, Napoleon... and probably a few others but if I start down that road I'll have largely repeated the above list.
I wish that I could just look at him and have him tell me what his new name should be!
I am learning this. And just now I had a revelatory flash moment of experience of it.
It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon. I was up early this morning, did some last minute cleaning, showered and dressed by 9:30a. The windows are open. Sunlight is streaming in. I've got some lovely jazz playing on the radio. One of my favorite scented candles is burning with a soft glow. It's peaceful and beautiful.
I just finished entertaining a visit from the lady who runs the Sheltie Purebred Dog Rescue. She has matched me with a five-year old male Sable who needs a new home. I'm nervous, but excited (but nervous). The idea of Sheltie love and companionship in my home again is a nice thought that stirs a place in my soul that I thought might be dead - and dead for reasons beyond just the loss of Naomi last year. Dead because of all the rest that's transpired in that year. But there's a feeling of passion, love, excitement, commitment... I feel it all still alive within me. Maybe it can all come fully to life again.
Yesterday I spent the morning and early afternoon with my family - sister, brother-in-law, two lovely nieces, and my Dad. We visited Saltwater State Park in Des Moines to take advantage of extraordinary beachcombing due to an extreme low tide. We wandered the beach encountering beautiful and curious creatures. I took dozens of photos. Hah - "dozens"? Who am I kidding! I downloaded 716 images from my camera when I got home last night. :) My heroic brother-in-law was a terrific amateur field guide, hunting through the water as it lapped up in waves into his rubber boots, looking for creatures to show us. He found two Moon Snails, a beautiful jellyfish that made me think of the character in the movie "Julie & Julia" attempting to poach an egg, several brightly colored starfish, and numerous different species and sizes of crabs. He turned over large rocks so we could see the sea life underneath them, and wasn't afraid to hold anything in his hand so we could examine and photograph it. My sister packed a spectacular picnic lunch that we shared companionably after the tide came in and chased us off the beach and after we were famished from our nearly 3 hours of walking through the rocks and sand.
After parting ways with my family, I decided to pull out my map book and used it to wend my way first to a nearby marina where I was able to photograph a couple of kiteboards (a sport I honestly think I would like to try sometime - I will have to add some photographs to this post sometime later). Next I wandered to a couple of parks, where I enjoyed the scenery and took more photographs.
It was a satisfying day, if a bit sad and lonely, nostalgic. But I felt proud that I had made the most of it.
After the Sheltie Rescue lady left today, I once again pulled out my Thomas Guide mapbook and started investigating where I could go exploring today. I'd hoped to get out early enough to see today's low tide, for a reprise of yesterday's delightful excursion, but that didn't work out. But then I read on Tweeters about birds spotted today at the Union Bay Fill and I grew excited about going there again, given the beautiful pictures I was able to take just a week or so ago when I was there.
It was so great to feel excited about heading out - even all by myself - to go exploring and to take pictures! As I felt that excitement, even as I noted my sadness that is still with me every moment over the losses of the last year, I suddenly realized that it really is true that joy and pain can coexist, that they can be with us simultaneously. I experienced a lot of joy during the weekend, a lot of moments of "full life," and yet there was also a lot of sadness, too. But for the first time I experienced in a truly new way how perhaps the joy and the pain, each separate and whole and pure, can coexist, neither totally compensating for or overriding the other, like holding them both, one in each hand, observing and experiencing the weight of them together simultaneously in this one life.
During this strange and challenging time in my life, I've been blessed to have made two new friends, Susan and Peter, who both like to do photography as much as I do and who have gotten me out several times for photo walks together. I'm so grateful to know them both and for sharing this little hobby with them.
A couple of weeks ago, I was off from work on a Friday (a faculty development day at the college - I'm not faculty, so I had a free day like the students), so Susan, Peter and I met up and drove north to enjoy a photo day together. We chose to head up to a town called La Conner and the surrounding area. We were hoping to hit the very last days of the annual Tulip Festival, where there are farm fields full of colorful tulips stretching far in every gorgeous direction.
Alas, the tulips bloomed early this year (during an early warming period in late Winter and early Spring) and we were late, so we missed the colorful fields - the tulips had already been harvested. But we did find a few pretty patches in the local little garden areas at a farm called Roozengarde, so we played with our cameras for a while there. And then we headed to the charming little town of La Conner which is wonderful for small art galleries, shops, restaurants, and a decidedly Pacific Northwest feel, including the town's "waterfront" location at a delta near the mouth of the Skagit River.
I love all things waterfront, as well as most all things Northwest. Boats, birds, flowers, art galleries of the work of amazing Northwest landscape and wildlife photographers like Lee Mann...
See some of Lee Mann's work at http://www.leemannphotography.com/. But don't look at that until a couple of days after you look at my work. Lol. Hardly a fair comparison.
Here are just a few of the photos I took that day.
On the way to La Conner, there's this wonderful little white church, Fir-Conway Lutheran Church, with an iconic tall white steeple.
(Okay, technically I didn't take the previous shot on our photo outting day; I took it back on an extremely cold day in December when I was in the area doing photography after working an interpreting job even further north, in Mt. Vernon. I liked the sky better in my shots that day than in my photo day with Susan and Peter. I do wish the annoying power lines weren't in the shot. :p All the rest of the images in this post are from the photo walk day, though. All are rather randomnly chosen shots, by the way, not necessarily what I consider the *best* shots of the day.)
I have a few more shots I might add later that were from lunch. Nothing too exciting, just a burger plate, a few shots inside a cute little restaurant/pub.
It was a good day. Afterwards, I finally took the time and initiative to go through the set-up steps for the photo printer I bought (as part of a package) when I bought my SLR camera. So now the ink cartridges (all EIGHT of them!) are in place, the software is installed, and just this week I received through mail the special USB cable I had to order separately so that I could connect my computer to the printer. So... I haven't actually yet been brave enough to try to print any of my images, but I've taken the necessary steps so that I'm ready... about ready, anyway... to try.
An important part of my recent process of growth and recovery has been to establish a minor and simple routine of daily "meditation and prayer."
I've tried this UMPteen times in my life; thanks to my religious upbringing I was well-steeped in these concepts. But I could never find something that even remotely worked for - let alone resonated with - me. Until now.
I'm not sure exactly what has changed or what is different. The materials I'm using are different, as in the books I'm using for that quiet time of reflection and connection with my "Higher Power." I think that's helping big time. I'm using a mix of (quite simple) resources that are both spiritual and also mental/intellectual/psychological. That seems to work for me. :p
But there's also some big change, or a few, inside myself and in my approach to it all. Maybe it's my "desperation"... but I'm not so sure. I've been pretty darn desperate plenty of times in my life up to this point. And I don't think it's necessarily "commitment," either. I've been pretty "committed," or at least "determined," in times past.
If anything, I think it's just something along the lines of being more relaxed about it. If I had emoticons for this blog, I would insert one here for taking a big 'ole breath. Maybe - MAYBE - what's different at this time in my life has something to do with "Acceptance."
I'm not sure, but anyway, I've been, daily, doing this little time of "reading and talking." The talking part is using my in-my-head voice, or else talking out loud... to myself and to my immediate living space... but either way always directed toward my Higher Power. This has become my daily routine of "meditation and prayer."
For the reading part, I currently have three little "daily meditation" books. Two are "secular," and one is stoutly, religiously traditional. I love them equally, and learn from and am inspired and challenged and changed by them each equally. I really enjoy both the contrast and the combination.
The "spiritual" one is a collection of writings/thoughts/prayers/meditations that was first published in 1884! This amazing gem of a daily devotional has endured since then, and for me it has been a spiritual "mainstay" during many years when I found myself rejecting most others.
The book, "Daily Strengths for Daily Needs" by Mary W. Tileston, has the following as part of the entry for the date 4/20:
"It is possible, when the future is dim, when our depressed faculties can form no bright ideas of the perfection and happiness of a better world -- it is possible still to cling to the conviction of God's merciful purpose towards His creatures, of His parental goodness even in suffering; still to feel that the path of duty, though trodden with a heavy heart, leads to peace; still to be true to conscience; still to do our work, to resist temptation, to be useful, though with diminished energy, to give up our wills when we cannot rejoice under God's mysterious providence. In this patient, though uncheered obedience, we become prepared for light. The soul gathers force." WM E. Channing
I just love this quote. It really describes well how I feel and captures where I'm at in life and in my recovery journey right now.
My future feels desperately dim (grim?) right now and I have no vision for the future.
I definitely feel as though I am trodding forward on the path of duty - up every morning for work, go about my day and do my duty at my job and then go home to take care of the details of life there, then go to bed, then get up the next morning to do it all over again. My heart is still pretty heavy much of that time.
But still I am finding moments or glimpses of a new sort of peace that I haven't known before.
I am trying to resist temptation (especially to fall back to former ways of being), and am trying to be useful - though my energy is decidedly and sorrowfully diminished. And I'm trying to give up my own will and to practice Acceptance.
I just love the somewhat subtle yet powerful promise that occurs at the end of the passage: "In this patient, though uncheered obedience, we become prepared for light. The soul gathers force."
The soul gathers force. The soul gathers force. Holy cripes, I just love that! What a miraculous phrase. What a puddle of oddles of hope. That in my uncheered obedience for now, I am becoming prepared for LIGHT and my soul is gathering force!
That is a passage of promise and hope that is worth reading over and over again. Just one example of the value I am getting out of my exercise of "daily meditation and prayer" these days.
