Life

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Midnight Bun Run

Tonight I was just settling down to some work involving spreadsheets (you know, relaxing before bed) when I heard an odd chirping sound, like a bird had gotten stuck in the house. 

Well, turned out it wasn’t a bird, but a baby rabbit, which had not wandered in but been carried (unwilling but also unharmed) by one of our seven cats. My housemates brought it to me because they didn’t know how to get it to safety — apparently just putting it out in the yard would not do — the fate of a previous bunny hostage freed by zealous protectors who nonetheless were not prepared for the second attack was recalled. I offered to carry the bunny, in the basket in which they had corralled it, to a park down the road. 

I was in my pjs and the bunny was crouched waaaayyyyy down in the basket. I had to kneel in wet dew and touch slimy carrots (sent along as an enticement but perhaps not up to snuff) But walking the baby bunny to the park on a cool, humid Colorado night was SO AWESOME! The streets were quiet and the leaves were shimmery green and I actually got to carry a baby bunny. All I can say is O-M-G.

When we got to the park I had to leave it to its own fate, heaped with whatever protection spells I could fathom, still crouching tightly in the grass, ears back so far they almost disappeared. It was such a sweet little being to come into my life tonight and fulfill a long cherished wish. Thank you, baby bunny, and may the force be with you!
   

   

I didn’t get any pictures of bun at the park because I didn’t bring my phone. Y’see, I didn’t have a pocket, since I was in my pjs and all … 🙂 

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Ow, Ha Ha

Today I was injured while getting a haircut. Yes, I waited 3 weeks to get an appointment then drove 50 minutes to see this lady (whom I’ve gone to for over a year) and right at the beginning of the haircut she chopped a big hole in my ear with her scissors! It bled like crazy. Luckily, as she told me, she was Red Cross certified to practice first aid! Which she demonstrated by carefully, gently, and thoroughly Band-Aiding my ear (twice, since I bled through the first one before she was done cutting my hair).

She felt terrible about it, of course, and I mainly thought it was funny (though painful!). So many possible jokes could be, and were, made about it during the rest of the sitting. She said she really just wanted to be blood sisters with me …  I said I wished I had at least gotten a badass piercing out of the deal. She said someone asked her if I had screamed and she told them, “She just kind of said ‘ow.'” For some reason the understatement of that moment was hysterically funny to me and I could not stop laughing!

But when I got home and was telling the story to my housemates, I had the strange realization that this was actually only the latest in a series of bizarre injuries I’ve sustained lately while doing seemingly innocuous things. Yesterday I hurt myself while watching cartoons — I fell asleep in a weird position halfway through an episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender and when I woke up half an hour later I had a spasm in my back that’s lasted all day. 

Just a couple of days before that, I was at a chant retreat in which we had a little body percussion session. The leader, encouraging us to experiment, talked about some traditional practices of creating rhythms by beating on the chest. Well, for whatever reason, it felt really good to me to wale on that area of my body and I did so with abandon, surprising myself with how resonant my, well, upper breasts were when hit with a cupped hand. It reminded me of a technique I learned in massage school for detoxing organs and tissues — the slight vacuum created encourages the release of stuck stuff. And it also makes a cool sound.  

I was even more surprised when, changing my shirt later in the day, I found that I’d bruised that area black and blue! Ok, a little black and blue — and a lot red. And a lot tender! Good grief! 

For the rest of the night, and throughout the next day — during my gospel choir rehearsal and spring concert — I couldn’t help but be aware of the rawness around my heart. I don’t think it was a bad thing; I think beating my chest like that felt good because there was stuff that needed to come out, stuff that was blocked. Nonverbal stuff. And when it was able to flow out through the channel of the physical sensations, it made the general energy flow in that region feel more clear and more free. 

So now I’m sitting here feeling my ear throb and thinking, what the heck is still going on here? Why do I keep incurring injuries while doing what would seem like perfectly safe activities? There’ve been three now, and they haven’t been subtle. Is there a message?

I don’t know exactly why I’m creating these experiences. Maybe I’m just keeping the natural balance of floating a little upwards, then … getting a little chunk of my ear sliced off. Maybe there are more things I haven’t fully expressed, that most closely resonate with cuts and bruises and muscle strains. Maybe. Neither hiding out in my room nor going out in the world seems to keep me safe … 

But in all these instances, I can say without a doubt that whatever I was doing was worth the hit. I begin to feel like a crazy person, laughing while I bleed, but I think maybe that’s really all I need to take away. 

Bizarre hurts happen. And the human situation can be freakin’ hilarious. So when I can, I’ll do my best to laugh it off and keep on going. And when I can’t, well, I guess I’ll break down. And cry until my heart is clear. And then make some silly joke, hit reset, and start all over again. 

  

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Belly Pictures

This from In God’s Care: Daily Meditations on Spirituality in Recovery, March 13:

“Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate action.”
— Brendan Francis

God speaks to us in many ways at many times. If we are spiritually alert, we will know it when it happens. A stray thought occurs; we overhear a bit of conversation; a passage in something we are reading suddenly stands out — and we know we have connected. … The trouble is that we might acknowledge this contact only briefly, and then it slips away. The time to act passes.

And this from Netflix, description of the cartoon Uncle Grandpa pilot episode:

When a kid is sad because his favorite shirt will not fit over his big belly, Uncle Grandpa shows him that fashions pass, but a big belly is always cool.

I’ve never seen this show, I just came across this line and it stuck with me. Then today I was at the Transforming Gender Symposium at CU with Sam and we heard Amos Mac’s keynote talk — he’s a photographer and the co-editor of the trans male culture and lifestyle magazine Original Plumbing. He showed a lot of his work and talked about art and cultural activism and it was just damn inspiring. It made me want to write stuff.

Then I went outside and saw this brick in the wall that said Integrity. And it made me want to freakin’ do the things, already.

So this is the thing that came to me: 30 days of belly pictures.

Self Love is the theme of this year, and I’ve been working with the body aspect for a while, and I just decided, why the hell not, I am going to spend the next 30 days taking pictures that celebrate my belly. It’s spring and the skin cells want to be out in the air. So let ’em out! At least for a few minutes each day.

I’m practicing acting on my inspirations.

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Integrity

 

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The Thirty-Fivesies

Alert readers will notice that I have not posted to this blog since I got my new job this summer. I actually got hired on my birthday, and haven’t really had time to update this blog since then. (Apologies to all of the people who read that post and have since asked “how’s the new job going?” It’s going great, and thank you for asking!)

But since it has been so long and since it is now sort of the New Year (I mean, it’s definitely 2015, but it would be a bit stretch to say it’s still, like, part of the New Years holiday) I kind of feel inclined to look at how my life has changed since last New Year, sort of like those holiday letters that my more organized friends send, only more about the inner plane. And I sense it is going to be a long ass post, so if you get bored and quit reading I won’t be offended. In a sense I’m drawn to write as much for my own integration of the past year as for anything else. With so much head-spinning busyness over the past six months I have been in need of a reassessment: where am I right now? How did I get here? And where the hell am I going?

Well, here’s where I am in time: 35 years old. According to the calligraphy sign hanging above me at the Mean Bean coffee shop right now:

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I don’t know if either of those statements is exactly true for me — I wouldn’t say my head is together and my body isn’t quite falling apart yet (though when it does, there will at least be plenty of cushioning to soften the impact). But I did coin a term to describe this phase of life that I find myself in:

The Thirty-Fivesies.

Sounds cute, doesn’t it? Well, that’s deceptive. It’s an ass-kicker, but somehow a happy one.

For me, at least, the Thirty-Fivesies refers to a change point, and a kind of progression from one set of lessons to the next. Sort of like an elementary school graduation. Like, it’s not like I know everything or anything, but I’m going to a new school now and the desks are bigger and the hallways are taller and longer and I can pretty much trust that the multiplication tables are committed to memory so I don’t have to keep quizzing myself on them. Oh yeah, and since I’m moving to a whole new school I kind of have a new identity, or part of one.

To use a different metaphor, the Pagan perspective tends to view a woman’s life cycle as a progression through the three stages of Maiden, Mother, and Crone. It can be hard for those of us who don’t have actual children to know when we have moved into the Mother stage, but it’s associated with a general sense of competence, of being able to tend to the community’s needs, of being someone who basically knows what she is doing and is empowered to use her creative capacity in a variety of ways — to create her own life, to create that which she wants to see in the world.

It’s hard for me to say “yes, this is me” because of my long-trained terror of speaking well of myself — one of the strongest lessons I took away from my childhood was that bragging was one of the most “sinful”, possibly most dangerous things I could do — so I am almost pathologically incapable today of saying to anyone besides my partner, “Yes, I did a good job.” But here’s the thing: that’s part of what the Thirty-Fivesies and the Mother stage and the elementary school graduation are about for me: completing that lesson, and other lessons, that I’ve been working in since kid-hood, and getting to move on to something new.

It means I’m moving from practicing self-abnegation to practicing self-value. It means that when it comes to creating my life, I’m moving from “What’s the crappiest thing I can stand?” to “What’s the best thing I can imagine?”

And without all the self-hate and self-limiting and convictions of unworthiness, who am I now?

I think it’s no coincidence that I got the new job right on my birthday. It was the first evidence of my valuing myself on an inner level, and starting to believe that the work that I do is worthy of compensation. This has only grown since then. And this is part of the graduation feeling; it’s like I’m not stressing about or pushing for it any more — I’m just creating it. On some level I’ve actually taught myself to believe in my value, at least economically. That’s shocking to me. And it tells me I’ve actually finally learned something.

So maybe there is something to that catch phrase in the picture — maybe I AM starting to get my head together.

But then there’s my heart, and gosh, I feel like all year it’s been getting tenderized — like a piece of steak getting beaten with a mallet. Though not necessarily in a bad way. Tender is good, for hearts. Open is good.

And sometimes to open something, you have to smash it.

I have this heart-and-wings pendant that one of my Sufi friends in Missouri gave me on my 30th birthday. At one point this year I thought I had lost it and felt sad. Then it came back to me unexpectedly — but with a little dent.

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Man, I should have considered myself warned.

If you know me, you know I’ve always been kind of an anti-romantic — even cynical about love. When characters in books or movies fell in love, I was of the opinion that they were just spoiling a perfectly great friendship. As a kid, I never imagined my wedding day, but I had elaborate fantasies about my adventures post-divorce. (Some of these involved moving to Texas on a motorcycle with two Shelties in the saddlebags.) Even when I did get married I was very cautious about what exactly I was promising.

This year I realized how much I have kept my heart in check.

I realized that I had developed such an over-reliance on my brain as the “go-to” source of information, insight, ideas, dreams, plans, analysis, etc. that it was hard for me to even sense my heart at all. And if I couldn’t sense my own heart, it stood to reason that the people and organizations that I loved — probably didn’t know that I loved them.

I realized that because of my fears about letting love in (or out), I’ve tried to fill the spaces with all kinds of other things, not always to my benefit. I’ve refrained from putting my whole self into things. I’ve believed myself to be unworthy or incapable of experiencing all the love that is out there, constantly surrounding me and pouring over me and waiting with endless patience for me to become willing to receive it.

So I’ve started trying to change that. I started trying to pass my communications through my heart instead of my brain. (Or at least, through both. Darn, brain, where is that off switch???)

Here’s what happened:

I asked for Divine help in opening my heart. The whisper said, ask the Angels to help you open the door. And they did. And I was overwhelmed by the feeling of light pouring in … and out.

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I started calling it the energy of the Open Door Heart. Suddenly I started WANTING. And haven’t stopped.

I started allowing the true desires of my heart to guide what I am seeking for in life. And it is changing me.

It means I’m more sensitive. It means that I’m less guarded. It means that since I’m allowing myself to want, I’m more vulnerable to disappointment.

I’m trying to bring my full heart to my relationships and I’m finding that this too makes me want more. I want deeper friendships, I want family bonds, I want more-than-friendships. I want to expand …

And that challenges me to, well, get out of my comfort zone.

It’s chilly in my comfort zone. It’s restrained and controlled and there is not a lot of sizzle or surprise.

But as soon as I try to stick a toe out of the bubble I realize I have none of the skills needed to create something different, and I don’t know if I am brave enough to try. I guess that’s the definition of a comfort zone. Going out of it is like — graduating from elementary school and feeling lost among all the big kids in junior high.

And knowing that at some point I’m gonna get stuffed into my own locker because I’m such a darn dork. (That never actually happened to me in middle school so I know I’m overdue.)

But what the hey. Once you graduate, you’re stuck with the new school and the new curriculum. You can’t just keep doing the same lessons over and over again just because they’re easy and it makes you feel smart. You have to reach for something new.

Last year’s theme was “Year of Art.” This year it’s going to be “Year of the Heart.” We’ll see where it takes me.

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Less Is More!

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This is my mantra for the year.

During winter break, when I was consumed by the desire to change my life, the urge to paint this in enormous flowing red letters across my living room wall was so strong I actually checked in my lease to see if I could do it. (Alas, no. One of the very few arguments in favor of buying a house someday is that I would be able to paint the shit out of it.)

A couple of weeks ago, the engine of my partner’s car melted in a bizarre accident, leaving us sharing mine. It’s been going surprisingly well. When we lived in the mountains, I always grieved that there were no commuter buses (anymore — the metal and plastic shelter only remained, getting more and more decrepit as each winter did its worst). But since moving down the hill, I’ve been pretty much all talk about how “I’m going to” ride the bus and bike places, like I used to do in Minnesota. I have all these happy memories of the flat ol’ Twin Cities where I could bike for miles and miles, and the awesome public transportation that was my only form of motorized transit (since I didn’t learn to drive until I moved away from there, and many unknown people can be thankful for THAT) … Well, now I’m actually doing it. Using shared conveyances or my own muscles to get around. Of course, it helps that it’s spring (almost) and I just want to be outside all the time!

So: one of the things I have less of in my life is fossil fuels. And that‘s a very happy thing for me.

But most of the things I have allowed to fall away are food-related. I’ve been working with the practice of mindful eating. Geneen Roth’s work, especially the book Women, Food, and God, influenced me a lot in this regard — or not influenced me so much as turned my brain upside down and knocked it out cold on the mat for a good two minutes. In part I’m addressing my habits of using food as filler, not sustenance … eating for reasons other than hunger (a complicated topic that can perhaps be more fully explored in its own post sometime). In part I’m paying attention to what goes in to my body, from the understanding that the energy contained in the food (and, as Michael Pollan puts it, “nutritionally worthless foodlike substances”) becomes the energy in and around my cells. That includes my skin cells, my fat cells, and even my brain cells.

Indeed, this is why I became a vegetarian several years ago: in massage school, when I studied and practiced forms of energy work such as reiki and pranic healing, I became increasingly, unavoidably conscious of the fact that when I ate, let’s just say, most of the meat produced in the United States, I was eating the energy of suffering, and that was becoming part of not only my own energy field, but my very body, my very cells. To put it concisely, it started to feel gross.

This year, then, I have felt intensely drawn to further refine my diet, both of food and of other goods, if not to eliminate, at least to reduce my consumption of things produced from energies of suffering, of torture, of harm to the planet or to people. As with meat, once I started asking myself, my body, and/or my intuition what I wanted to put into that system, the answers were startlingly rapid and clear. Many things — things I had previously LOVED, things I said I would never give up until the Apocalypse rendered industrial production impractical — I simply ceased to want.

So here are some things I now have less of floating around in my bloodstream:

  • Sugar
  • Aspartame (gone! shocking!)
  • Refined grains
  • Processed food
  • Pesticides
  • Growth hormones
  • Fertilizers
  • Chemicals in general
  • Excess in general
  • Gasoline fumes

Some of these things I just sense are not the healthiest for me, at this moment. And others of them I deeply believe are detrimental to humanity, to the planet — they are unsustainable. (More to come on this, too.)

And some other things I have cut back on, since embracing the mantra:

  • Homework for my students
  • Arguing
  • Anxiety
  • Trips
  • Days when I work from the time I get out of bed to the time I go to bed

But you know, as great a mantra as Less Is More has been for me in making major health-life changes, I don’t want less of everything. No, there are some things for which MORE is more! And in the spaces created by the things I’ve let go of, hopefully MORE of these things will flow in:

  • Love
  • Relaxation
  • Art
  • Music
  • Kindness
  • Meditation
  • Exercise
  • Energy
  • Fresh air
  • Walks
  • Humor
  • Feelings of abundance
  • Generosity
  • Date nights
  • Comics
  • Restful sleep
  • Support
  • Freedom
  • Reliable employment
  • Creativity
  • Fun!

And, of course, as you’ve no doubt noticed, more blogging! I’ll probably always be a fan of the longform, though maybe someday I’ll get it that less words can also be more. 😉 Some things never change … But you know, whenever I say that, secretly inside I also say “uh-oh,” because let’s just say I’ve been wrong before.

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Lover of Leaving

“Come, come, whoever you are,
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving …
Ours is no caravan of despair,
Come, yet again, come … “

I loved this version of Rumi’s words, sung as a round, the first time I heard it, not only because of the familiar promise of continual welcome it expresses, but because of its address: wanderers, worshipers, lovers of leaving. That’s me. I’m a lover of leaving. I’ve seldom actually moved to a new place from the sheer desire to live someplace new, but I’m certain that my underlying curiosity about the rest of the world conspires with my karma to frequently create circumstances in which I need to make a rapid getaway, set out for parts unknown, with very little plan.

The rain in Colorado started on Thursday, Sept. 12. A lot of water came in through the roof of our apartment in Idaho Springs. The landlords told us we just needed to get used to this aspect of mountain living. By the next week, the mold was visible in the hole where part of the ceiling had fallen in. We decided we needed to move out.

That weekend I was scheduled to help facilitate a Goddess-themed women’s retreat. I went with the intention of sending energy toward our new place, visualizing the perfect place and drawing it toward me. The first night, the women leading the opening circle asked all of us to “take off our masks” and let the face of the Goddess expressing herself within us at that moment be shown. When I did this, the face I saw was Kali’s, dark, grinning, dripping with blood. When asked to listed for an affirmation, I heard “I affirm creative chaos.”

Maybe that’s why I felt more excited than upset at this crisis/opportunity. I had periods of serious freakout, but mostly I felt that I had a vision of where I was going, and maybe even an inkling of why. I felt fairly certain that we were being called to move out of the mountains, down into the Denver area, at least partly because this is a time in which community is going to be important. I’ve felt it coming for a while. It’s no secret that I have a tendency toward hermitism, and living in a mountain village half an hour from the far western outskirts of town doesn’t do much to discourage it. My comfort zone is being alone, maybe with a couple of close friends, but I feel I’m being pushed to develop those dormant muscles of social interaction, and possibly be of service in some new, hands-on way.

I began looking for a place. A few were duds; several more wouldn’t take cats. I upped my price range. I had in mind that it was time we had a bigger place. I found an apartment in a neighborhood I’d never heard of, just on the Denver side of Sheridan. It was the whole first floor of a ranch-style house, including a garage and a large backyard and patio, the latter two being shared with a nice young lesbian couple who lived in the basement apartment. I really liked it. I raved about it to Sam and made him go check it out. He wasn’t in love, but he was in hate-the-world mode, and even still he thought it would do.

I set up more appointments, including a few to look at actual houses. The agents never showed, or messages got weirdly mixed. I saw another crappy apartment. We started getting sick from the mold at home, so we moved (along with our cats) into the spare room of an EXTREMELY generous friend. We applied for the South Denver place. The process was very slow. Days went by.

The weekend of the 28th & 29th we packed all of our stuff (throwing away a large proportion, including at least half of our furniture, which was either mold damaged or rickety to begin with), cleaned out the place, left the keys on the counter, and parked the U-Haul in the U-Haul parking lot until we knew where we were going to take it, which wasn’t until two days later when our application finally cleared at the Denver place. Sam felt nervous about signing, having not actually seen any other apartments, and I also felt uncertain about it, because I didn’t want it to turn out to be a huge disaster under my leadership. But I recalled this message that I’d received from Lynn Woodland’s online oracle:

Sit quietly with your eyes closed and imagine yourself walking up to the edge of an impossibly high cliff. As you look down from the edge you can’t see the bottom, only a swirling, beautiful light. The air is charged with excitement and promise. The view inspires a sense of wonder. Stand here for a moment and declare your willingness to invite the miraculous into your life…. Now, leap off the cliff. Instead of dropping, you are carried gently on currents of air and light. Let your imagination float freely and see where the stream of light carries you.

I actually did the visualization in my mind, and I felt the “currents of air and light” lifting me up. I recalled how I’d posted on Facebook the gist of our situation, and asked for prayers and light — and what an outpouring I received!!! So many friends sent messages of support, and many others silently prayed for us. I felt literally lifted up by all of this energy, very strong, coming from other people, my circle of support. I also had in my car one of the affirming post-it-note messages I’d made for the goddess retreat: Angels surround you at all times. At the base of it, I had to acknowledge that the whole situation seemed to be Divinely guided, and all I had to do was (pack and clean and lift and cry and) go with the flow.

We signed the lease. We dumped out all of our stuff into the garage. We got new Goodwill living room furniture to replace our old Goodwill living room furniture. We designated purposes for all of our new rooms. We are slowly getting things unpacked, cleaned, and set up.

A friend asked if I miss Idaho Springs. I said that it all happened so quickly, it feels very surreal, but if I look inside I realize that no, I don’t miss it, and I’m not sad at all. The experience of living in the mountains for three years was unique and wonderful and amazing, and I am so incredibly glad we did it, but that chapter feels complete. Now it’s on to sunny southern Denver, a largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood, bright colors, flat roads, easy access, and a whole new life.

Click the image to see the artist’s home page for a beautiful and fitting explanation.

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The Box: A Reunion Story

My partner Sam and I moved from Missouri to Colorado nearly three years ago.  We procrastinated on packing, and ended up pulling two all-nighters in a row, emptying out our apartment and setting out in our cross-state U-Haul-pickup-truck caravan, let’s just say, later than we’d planned.  And though I remembered packing it, distinctly remembered placing it in a larger box that held a bunch of other random stuff, one thing that never turned up in the unpacking process was the shoebox I’d had since college, which contained all of my most treasured souvenirs of my travels, beginning with the year I studied abroad in Spain — postcards and small artworks,  bumper stickers, poems, and newspaper clippings, the things I bought or collected to remember places and times, when I was traveling on a very tight budget.  Then there were some love letters, some scenic pictures from calendars, and possibly a scrap of fabric from a certain Taco Bell flag that was minutely vandalized during a statement against cultural imperialism.

During those three years in which the box was missing, I was of two minds.  On one side, I thought I should not be attached to things, even those gathered with passion and tenderness, as presents I bought myself to celebrate moments of perfect contentment or exquisite bittersweetness.  I had a surprising degree of success with this.  I felt wistful but accepting when I thought that the collection was lost for good; even this outcome had a certain romance to it.  But maybe I had such an easy time accepting the box’s absence because, on the other side, I never really stopped believing that it would be uncovered yet, nestled down in some yet-to-be-unpacked box.  (Yes, even after three years, there are such boxes in our house.)

Well, long story short, I did in fact finally find it the other day, and was reunited, with great joy and delight, with a relatively small but personally important bunch of markers from my own history.  And I thought it was interesting that I found this right after I was writing the last post, and going back and actually thinking about the insanity, and also the survival, and also the fun and the learning of those years.  The hands that gathered these mementos, the eyes that selected them, are similar to and different from those with which I see and touch the world today.  I am still in a process of reclamation, of gradually becoming able to face and meet all of those parts of myself that I’ve denied, been afraid of, run away from.  I want to reconnect the electricity flowing to the creative and strange and engaged parts of myself that have shut down for various reasons over the years.  That’s my vision and intention for spring rebirth.

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This box!!!

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What would Wellstone do, indeed???

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I stand by both of these.

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My big shopping splurge was in a department store in Bilbao, where I bought A TON of tourist stuff that said Euskadi or had the Basque flag because I was totally in love with the Basque Country. … That’s just the kind of nerd I am.

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These are some of the postcards; the postcard-shopping experience was part of how I narrated my experiences abroad to myself.

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I received this cloth painting of Kali as a gift at my graduation/30th birthday party — then she was lost for three years. I guess it’s time to really welcome her ferocious energy in! Where will it take me? Let’s go!

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Irish In Recovery

No, I’m not recovering from being Irish, as that title might imply.  I’m not even a “recovering Catholic,” as so many members of my family are – I guess I detached from the mass (so to speak) early enough that it didn’t leave any lasting trauma — just a fond memory of the smell of candles.  But seven years ago, just before St. Patrick’s Day, on a very snowy weekend in Minneapolis, I did give up alcohol for good.

The circumstances that led to this turn did not actually have anything to do with St. Patrick’s Day, though they did have to do with a certain Irish bar on Nicollet Mall and my reckless behavior there and thereafter.  And it did happen to be the beginning of spring break, which was also the week in which I had to write my preliminary exams, based on which I would or would not receive permission to proceed with my dissertation.  That was not a good choice of week for waking up in the hospital, not knowing how I got there, and not feeling (or looking) very good.  Soul searching, meeting going, and eventually essay writing, ensued.  That first SP day, four days after deciding to get sober, was a 24-hour period in which I stood outside myself, unable to touch what I was feeling.

One of the books I read at that time, called How to Quit Drinking Without AA (they had it at my local library in Northeast Minneapolis!), said this, which made a big impression on me: if it’s true what they say, about every cell in the body replacing itself over a period of seven years, then an alcoholic who stays sober will, after seven years, have a body in which not one cell has ever actually had alcohol.  Even though it’s a little cheesy, and biologically misleading, the whole image of a clean cellular slate appealed deeply to me.  Hesitant, as I always am, about any kind of lifetime commitment (somehow tattoos are exempt from this??) I remember thinking, OK, I will make seven years my goal.  At that point, if I make it that long, I can reevaluate the situation.  So seven years was always my big mountaintop in the distance.  And now, as of March 13, I’ve actually reached it, and now here I am hanging out with the view.

I’ve always had little celebrations over the various anniversaries, sometimes a private ritual, sometimes a gift to myself.  This year nothing really came to me in terms of an outward recognition, nothing seemed to appeal; I think I have just been experiencing the moment of attaining that specific goal on a more inward level.  It affects me in ways that don’t really express themselves in words.  I didn’t feel drawn to go to any meetings, because I just didn’t feel like conversing about it.  It’s more like an egg of light that I’ve been quietly honoring within myself.  But finally, one thing did occur to me as an appropriate celebration: I decided to do something to explore my relationship to St. Patrick’s Day from this new perspective.

Even though I only have one grandparent who was actually Irish, it was the grandmother after whom I was named.  She and all of her kids, my dad and my seven aunts and uncles, just seemed to embody that heritage to me.  I can’t really say why I was drawn to it, but I felt a heart connection with Irish culture, and it developed into a whole complex of things within my personal identity narrative.  Maybe I just needed something to organize that narrative, and Irishness seemed to do, but I really did love and passionately embrace and receive creative and spiritual and political inspiration and nourishment from a lot of things about Irish culture.  I didn’t go about it half-assedly; I traveled to Ireland twice in college.  As a leftist nerd into history and literature and folk music and drinking until four a.m., I pretty much found something in my interest in all things Irish for every part of my personality to do.

I don’t mean to be cliché about the connection between alcoholism and being Irish.  I’m not the only one in my family who’s encountered this particular challenge.  I know that historically there have been reasons, and those reasons have led to results.  I also know that I purposely adopted a certain stereotype as part of my persona.  I’m not outgoing by nature, and my childhood and school experiences did not equip me with any confidence or self-worth.  Maybe I thought, if I construct this “hardcore” character, a stereotypical drunk girl who’s into Irish stuff, people would mistakenly think they already knew me.  And they might talk to me.  And that would be a miracle.

The whole thing wasn’t insincere, even if it was partially constructed.  I was drawn to Ireland as a creative influence.  I identified politically with the resistance to British rule; I’ve had a long-standing scholarly interest in the meaning of “terrorism” in nationalist struggles.  And I loved going to live Irish music shows in American Irish pubs and rocking out.  I wanted to write ballads too.  And I honestly thought Guinness was the most splendid and tasty and aesthetically pleasing beverage in the world.  And I declared repeatedly that St. Patrick’s Day was my favorite holiday, because it honored all of my favorite things.  And it really was like a punch in the gut, the St. Patrick’s Day that fell four days after my first committed sober day.  I felt disoriented, realizing how deeply into the foundations of my sense of self alcoholism penetrated, or beginning to.  It wasn’t all about St. Patrick’s Day, but St. Patrick’s Day stood in for a lot of stuff.

In the years since then, I’ve mostly avoided this holiday, with that form of ignoring that is still attention.  To me, it was just so much about drinking, even sober events held the association.  But what I’ve been working on in the past year, as I’ve been revisiting the AA approach to serenity, is dropping the fight, dropping the last vestiges of the fight against things I felt uncomfortable around, like my previously-sober partner starting to drink now and then, or like St. Patrick’s Day.  This holiday, though strongly connected with drinking (for me), had also held other meanings that had been important to me.  But I had a suspicion that I needed a new connection to it; I needed to discover whether or not the holiday held any significance to me as the person that I am now, both the same as and different from the person I was seven years ago.

So I thought I’d begin with paganism; I thought maybe there was an ancient Celtic holiday around that spot on the calendar, over which the Christian conquerors had plopped their saint’s day.  And the sources I read said sure – Easter.  But that’s more often linked to the Pagan festival Oestara.  For St. Pat’s, pagans (and patriots) may wear snakes instead of shamrocks, representing those supposedly driven out by the missionary (for “snakes,” read “traditional Irish customs and beliefs”).  Upon reading which, I thought, as some women in my family might have said, oh hell!  I don’t want to adopt a protest instead of a holiday; although I agree with it, that just doesn’t sound like the kind of extra-positive healing energy I was looking for in this celebratory gesture of rebirth!  And call me sentimental, but I just don’t have much of a desire to observe holidays that commemorate colonization, exploitation, and religious oppression.  So I will probably do, as usual, nothing.  But I guess (or I hope) at least it will be a slightly more peaceful, conscious nothing.

In the end, maybe this was what I needed to “reevaluate” on my seven-year anniversary, as I’d told myself I someday would.  I don’t, after all, need to consider whether permanently quitting alcohol was the right decision for me.  It definitely was.  Even after seven years, the horror and the fear of experiencing another night like that last night is remarkably fresh and real to me.  On the other hand, I still don’t feel totally at peace with my relationship to alcohol in the culture that surrounds me.  My main reason for not drinking is still “I don’t want to die,” and somehow that seems to bring the fear and the resistance and the powerlessness right along with it.  I wish I had a more positive reason for this commitment, but when I think about calling it a spiritual pursuit for its own sake, I know I wouldn’t have chosen it if I didn’t have to, and I’m still too afraid of the substance to name abstinence from it a virtue.  And yet, the journey has been nothing if not spiritual.  It’s led to soul-searching and honesty and lessons and transformations that have been valuable to me beyond fathoming.  I am so grateful to have had this source of learning in my life; so let this, and my blessings to all who read it, be my St. Patrick’s Day tribute.

simbolismo triskellion

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Twice-Told Tales

Last Friday I went to a workshop organized by my department, called “Stop, Write, Reflect–Teach!” They pitched it as a chance to take time out, return to the writing that nourishes us, and think about why we became teachers. I was really excited for this because I’ve been feeling a renewal of interest in and motivation for writing lately, and the opportunity to have community support for my writing is just not something I’d pass up right now.

In this workshop we were led through a process of exploring our personal histories, specifically with regards to teaching, as narratives. The facilitator diagrammed a plot arc on the board and asked us to think about the initiating events, the conflicts, the moments of heightened tension, the crisis and the denouement of our teacherly lives. She had us do little five minute writings in which we would write continuously for the five minutes — a shorter version of what Natalie Goldberg calls writing practice. And as I was writing, I kept thinking about how “these are my stories…” as in, the stories that have congealed over the years into episodes in a narrative that I’ve told, I feel, too many times. These supposed standout points on the plot line of my life — I felt like I was watching once again a VHS tape that had been rewound and replayed too many times.

Natalie Goldberg was one of my first true heroes, one of maybe three writers who seriously influenced my intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development when I was in high school. I wrote about her in my college application essays. I still consider her mode of writing practice to be the foundation of all creative writing (for me), and I share her “Rules for Writing Practice” and “Beginner’s Mind, Pen and Paper” at the start of every single writing class I teach and probably always will. People who take more than one class with me get to read it multiple times.

Maybe it’s because of the ideal implanted in me when I first read her book Wild Mind in tenth grade, or maybe it’s just my own neurosis, but I am always striving to write something that’s not boring. I was afraid my teacher narrative (which is also to some inevitable extent my grad student narrative) had crossed the line from vibrant, illuminating, impassioned, to boring, processed, twice-told. It just felt like the same old stuff, and I felt ready to let go of it.

I think those memories, the “turning points” (in plot-speak) that I identify as part of my “story” of how I came to be an adjunct community college English teacher with a Ph.D. In American Studies, are important, and some of them even make good stories, but it’s just been so long that I’ve been rehashing them. I learned a lot through both living them and analyzing them, and now I’m wondering what it would be like to try on a different narrative. Like trying a new hairstyle, it could change my whole personality. I’m curious what it would be like: a story that would read my past a different way, and maybe thus shed light a little way into the future.

It feels like a story that hasn’t been written yet, and like all blank first pages, it’s a little daunting. But it came to me again that I need to imagine the teaching job that I actually want, and it makes sense to reimagine the context in which it — and I — would exist. A new read on my past; a new theory of why I care about teaching (and what else I care about, and why): It’s so — so — lit analysis circa 1998!

What first comes to mind for revision is this whole category of memories filed under “failures.” These mainly have to do with a. social missteps (large and small) resulting in hurt feelings (mine or another’s) or embarrassment or both, b. social ineptness related to shyness and insecurity, or c. lack of proper career development. Those are, of course, arbitrary interpretations of ultimately neutral material. I would like to free myself from those calcified, crusty stories, with which I punish myself whenever a random reminder causes them to rise in by brain. How I handled myself when a friend moved away. Various lies I told or petty acts of revenge I committed in high school. The reasons why I didn’t get promoted. These and unbelievably many other negative stories about myself, I haven’t yet been able to let go of. But I feel like in this go-round, at the writing workshop, as, out of annoyance, I struggled to find some new interpretations of the material if memory — that grip cracked open just a little bit. As a result, at least part of me feels not just ready, but straining to release those beliefs about what a failure I have been.

I’ll share an example of an episode whose moral I need to rewrite, one that has come up since the workshop: my relationship with my dissertation advisor.

I sometimes have moments of clarity when I realize that in general, I habitually see almost every aspect of my life as evidence of another dismal social failure, or maybe the next installment in one epic social failure that began exploding on my first day of preschool and hasn’t yet ceased to be a continual disaster. As I review my actions and my days, it’s automatic for me to think of how I screwed myself over by not being willing or courageous enough to initiate, or skilled enough to maintain, conversations, friendships, relationships. I just feel I suck at this and always have. It’s, in my estimation of myself, one of my greatest flaws and sources of shame.

Well, when I was in grad school, the process of finding and working with an advisor took me way longer than most people, because I just couldn’t steel myself to ask someone if they would be my advisor. It took me even longer to get a committee; my department actually started harassing me to to get these established already before they dropped me from good standing (it was close!). I ended up asking this wonderful woman, a queer Chicana who’d gone through the same program as me, and who shared my political orientation, to be my advisor in like my third or fourth year. It was really hard to do. But she said yes.

Then, I always felt like a crappy advisee because I never checked in with her about my dissertation. Unlike my colleagues, I never sent her chapters as I finished them, never workshopped anything or got her feedback or suggestions for revision. I barely talked to her except when I had to meet with her and get a form signed every semester. I thought she was great, I really looked up to her, but I couldn’t stand the idea of the possibility of her not liking my work. It had happened enough times — maybe someone thought I wasn’t theoretical enough, or didn’t claim my argument strongly enough. What if she thought my work was unworthy of my program? I literally couldn’t take the thought of it. So I didn’t send her a thing until I was about a chapter away from totally finishing my dissertation — then I sent it all to her and asked if she thought I could defend it in a couple of months.

Unbelievably, I got away with that! She barely had me to any revisions — said she liked it, and arranged for my defense. My committee members were all pretty hard core about what they liked and didn’t like, yet somehow they all gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up. I had never heard of anyone avoiding their advisor, writing their dissertation with practically no input from anyone, and then passing like that! I considered my way of doing things a major failing; I continually berated myself for not taking advantage of the opportunities for intellectual development and friendship that can come with the advising relationship. I simply could not make myself do it.

As a result, I always assumed that she thought little of me — that she didn’t think of me at all. I figured I was a blip on her radar, an unmemorable experience, and I more or less tried to forget about what I thought if as my failure as an advisee.

But the other day, my partner, traveling several states away to our alma mater, actually ran into my advisor, and according to him, she said she really missed me. I thought, how could she possibly miss me, with as little as I talked to her? Yet apparently, whatever I thought of my own actions and appearance, she remembers me as a smiling person who wrote a great dissertation. She said she actually refers people to my dissertation as an example, and that she strongly hopes I will still publish it because some people need to read it, in her opinion.

What does it serve me to hold on to this idea that I was a sucky grad student? So all these writers and academics passionately loved and hated their advisors, were pounded into greatness by their advisors, went to barbecues with their advisors … so what? I always look at that as the standard, and see myself as deviant. It’s the same with so many things involving social interaction. I just feel like such a loser.

But could it be possible to really rewrite my story in a way that values what I did do? I’m wondering if there is a way for me to re-remember those years and determine that the way I went about grad school was just fine, it was just the way I personally did it, and it was a success, and I did everything exactly as I should have, in the right and perfect way for me. I didn’t develop into an academic superstar and I never became truly comfortable or confident in those intellectual-social-collegial circles, at least not in MN, at least not at that point in my growing up. But dang it, I pushed myself a lot; I didn’t hang around in my comfort zone. For as terrified as I was, I navigated the tricky situations and survived, academically and spiritually and physically (and there was some doubt about all of these at one point or another). I did get straight A’s (ok, one A-). I got a bunch of really awesome people to be on my committee. And the author of the book I based my dissertation on loved how I used her work. So maybe I didn’t totally wreck it, my grad school career. Maybe I could start being proud of myself and stop being ashamed.

… And now I have a sneaky feeling that the diss needs to be published. To which I respond: Oh, shiiiiiit. But returning to and finally finishing that project would be the perhaps the best dramatic rewriting of the old advisee story, the one with the sequel, “I’ll Never Publish my Diss.” It requires facing the same things again that scared me before: submitting for approval, exposing myself to criticism, plus revisiting stuff I’m out of the flow with, and my fear that revising that diss for publication would take all my time and I would dangerously overwork myself even more than now, and I would have a mental breakdown of some kind.

But something has shifted lately, maybe because I came to a crisis point in my life recently which has convinced me to be open to any guidance or any possibilities that I feel led to — especially, or really only, things I have not tried before. I just got simultaneously fed up with both the stagnation of my quest for a living wage and the worn out methods I’ve tried repeatedly with no success. So whatever I do, it had to be something different. And I have never seriously tried to publish my dissertation before.

Ok, although I have a whole ongoing string of thoughts and reflections I’d like to post here, I’m aware that this is already a really long post about my mental process — so if you’ve read this far and you really are interested, well, I’ll be writing more in other posts.

If you’ve stopped reading, although you won’t be actually reading this, namaste. And if you haven’t stopped reading, namaste, and thanks.

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Snow always makes me introspective.

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Crying Allergy

Here’s something strange — or at least it strikes me as strange, though it may be perfectly normal. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed more of a physical sensitivity to crying. It feels almost like an allergy — in fact it’s almost exactly like what my allergic friends say happens to them when they eat an avocado, or a pine nut, or whatever it may be. I notice that I can’t cry as hard as I used to without feeling the consequences. Now ok, I can understand things like playing hockey taking more of a toll on one’s body as one gets past one’s twenties, but crying? Come on!

It’s true, though. The other day I was having a cry. It was some combination of hormones and life, and I was just suddenly tired of holding it in. But as I was crying, I actually stopped to consider whether I really wanted to do that or not, knowing that I could expect something like a hangover afterward. It gives me pause, anymore. These days if I cry for more than a minute, I have a headache afterwards, sometimes even the next day. My eyes get crazy puffy and that lasts, too. My head feels like a bunch of heat built up inside that can’t be released — it can only very gradually cool down. An ice pack feels very good at these times.

Maybe this is something other people are used to experiencing when they cry, but I’ve only just started feeling it. Maybe this is making me sound like a crazy person who cries uncontrollably. Is it nature’s way of saying, “Grow up, for crying out loud!”? I do cry when I’m upset, and I just think if that as part of my personality, part of being an emotional and dramatic Cancer-Leo, but now I wonder if it’s just weird.

On this particular occasion I decided to just go with it. For better or for worse. I thought it was ultimately for the good, even though I had very puffy eyes for the next two days. It just felt right to release my emotion through tears in that moment. Did I cry for too long? Why would I ask myself that? I cried until I felt done, and ready to move on, and lighter and more hopeful than I had before.

I guess now when I cry, because I can either feel it or literally see on my face for so long afterward, I really have to be aware that it is my choice to cry. Or maybe it’s the choice to continue to cry when tears arise spontaneously that I am becoming more aware of. I can’t really believe that I am anyone’s victim; I can’t help but remember that I am choosing my feelings. Still, I don’t think these feelings I am choosing are necessarily bad, even though I feel them as pain. I may not know why I choose them, but I accept the responsibility, and I try to value my sad emotions as much as my happy ones. I believe they are both important parts of life.

Hazrat Inayat Khan taught that “The heart is not living until it has experienced pain,” according to the Bowl of Saki the other day. It’s always seemed to me that one of the purposes of pain is that through it, one may learn empathy. I don’t think that’s its only purpose or that there is anything that can be learned only through pain, and I can imagine a future in which we’ve collectively evolved beyond the need for that particular teacher. For me, though, for now — call me old fashioned — I’m still learning from my pain, my occasional sadness, and the difficult feelings still lodged in my heart that have been there, underground, for years. Sometimes those difficult feelings just heal up and leave one day. Maybe they all will eventually. They’re part of the family, though, for now, and so I do my best to accept ’em. And help them pack their things when they’re ready to move on.