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Up Out of a Deep Well

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Waiting.

Time.

Circumstance.

Change.

The decade of the 40s has been interesting because I have experienced many moments of clear reflection. I like to think of them as plateaus of understanding; it’s as if my mind’s eye is climbing mesa after mesa, seeing clearly out to a horizon that, beforehand, I could not see.

Maine has always been a place where I am an artist, first. In Texas, I was always a teacher, first, and had been for years. I am beginning to appreciate the practicality of that choice of vocation, as i am really struggling here with earning a lot less than what I earned in Texas. But, I digress. As an artist, first, I am embarking on an adventure of making more work, finishing a writing project, and hoping to take over a friend’s longstanding artistic business. It is a time of big leaps, and I am waiting for my confidence to catch up.

The deep well, I think, is a series of experiences that have emboldened an already highly-developed struggle with self-confidence. People tell me this struggle isn’t obvious to others, but to people who know me really well, it is clear. The deep well of circumstances like: teaching under-resourced students for almost twenty years, moving a lot from place to place, being afraid of commitment and how that impacts decision-making, focusing more on achievement over joy and balance and contentment, the death of my dad, the death of one of my best friends, teaching during the pandemic, discovering two half-brothers at the age of 45, and landing again in a place that I love but is very challenging to make a good living, have all resulted in this moment of clarity. Ah ha! Here I am, after all these years.

I find it hard to internalize that we are where we are because of everything that came before. But, to me, standing on tonight’s metaphysical mesa and staring at a new horizon, this explanation is the only one that makes sense. What now must be is a decision as to what to do next. I feel in some ways that I am taking huge risks in waiting and seeing if the jewelry store dream becomes reality; most of these risks are financial and right now, financial risks seem bad. On the other hand, with our country in the throes of the changes it is experiencing, maybe this is the time to grab the dreams by the hands and jump. I don’t know? I know what I want, which is to own or co-own the jewelry store, be able to save money and pay for health insurance without total panic every month, take a month or two off in the winter and go somewhere nice and sunny, to be able to buy the land around us and run a campground for people in the summer, to pay off our house within 15 years; all of these are the dreams.

But the waiting, the realizing, the digging oneself out of a series of experiences to find meaning within them; it is hard and it is drudgery sometimes, and sometimes it is joyful, like tonight.

I am still sick with anaplasmosis and Lyme disease. I think that something about these illnesses forces me to think about a lot of things while I am sick; they are thoughtful illnesses, to be sure. This experience reminds me of when I got sick my senior year of high school and could do little else but be sick and hope I would get better sometime. I spent a lot of time sitting on the back porch, thinking about the meaning of life. I think I have some sort of understanding of the meaning of life, for now anyway, but I am thinking about a lot of other things. I think about the preciousness of life and time, how fast it all goes, what I want the next ten years to look like and be like, and what I can do to make the world a better place, a little at a time. It is an active time, this thinking time.

Last year, one year ago yesterday, the world lost an amazing person in Kate Shuster. She was a mentor and a friend and a shero and an inspiration, and she is very missed. She left behind lots of memories, photos, and writings, but her death impacted me so much and especially reminded me of the precious nature of our time on Earth. She made a mark, a series of them, in fact, and she left Earth very quickly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When she died last year, I went and sat on the edge of the ocean and thought about her, and Mary Ann, and Ken, and John, and Meredith; all the friends who I had lost before I wanted them to go. Sometimes I see them or hear them or feel them around the edges of this reality and I wonder what they think or want us to see or understand. I guess we will never know that, and just have to keep on doing the best we can.

What Are You Really Thinking About Right Now?

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I keep thinking about the bigger picture.

At night, I walk on my driveway and look up at thousands of stars, and every night I try to find the Big Dipper. When I do, I then look for Orion, the Little Dipper, and some planets. I find it soothing, and so I talk to them, making wishes for their help on this tiny floating blue dot. I know that they are so much bigger than me, and that there might be tiny floating blue dots orbiting them, and probably nobody there (if there is someone) even knows that I exist. Somehow though, every night I see them as this web of lights, connected across space, protecting me on Earth.

Life in the United States right now is very strange. I am convinced that the government is trying to make everyone afraid and divided. I think that the powers that be are using social media to do this, and there are now so many channels that can capture your attention.

I currently use Instagram and Facebook; I just deleted X because I found it mildly horrifying. I think I am about to delete Facebook, though, as I think my brain isn’t big enough for two social media accounts. It is filled with other things like plants, stars, sewing projects, and making jewelry.

Today is April 21st and it was sunny and cool today. The sun shone on the ocean and it twinkled and sparkled. Through a window, it almost looked like if you jumped in, it would be refreshing. Of course, it would actually kill you. Oh, Ocean – you’re a beast. So powerful; in reality, the most powerful thing on Earth. What a mirage of safety that ocean; birthplace of us all, so wildly different in different places. Where I grew up, in Houston, the water is always around 70-80 degrees. Here it is in the 40s right now and would make you hypothermic in minutes. And yet, this water, this cold water, is warming faster than any other body of water on Earth. All the while the climate is growing cooler, losing 1 degree of warmth over the last 11 years.

A bigger picture – a small and short life. I am about to turn 45. I just started hormone replacement therapy and now wear a tiny patch about the size of a dime on my stomach. I put one on twice a week and am hoping it makes me feel better and gives me relief from night sweats and hot flashes, brain fog, and a crazy hip pain that comes and goes. I am sure there are other things, too, but those are the ones I am most aware of. In a few years, my body will have changed again, as I transition into the second half of my short life.

I wonder why people in government would choose to do bad things, knowing how short their lives are, too, and how if they did good, more people would remember them after they’ve died. But then again, some people think they will never die; they are so afraid of its unknown.

I go back to work next week which is exciting; I am looking forward to seeing people and remembering how to do all the little things that make the gallery work. Every day I look outside waiting for leaves; still waiting. It’s ok. They are coming. There is a fox here who is eating my chickens as if she has access to take-out whenever she wants. There is also a porcupine who climbs the white pine trees at night, scratching with its big nails like a giant spiky cat. I wonder what other wild animal will come soon, the third in the series.

Writing has helped me understand that it is time to detach from the world of the internet and attach to the world of real life; plants, animals, sky, trees, making things to reflect those things back at themselves. I have many seedlings ready to put in the ground. I have already planted roses and made new flower beds for this year. The sound of the road at the end of the driveway is loud sometimes, but the land is pretty. We cleared out a streambed yesterday and planted dwarf willow trees at the stream edge. The apple trees are about to bloom, I think. I can’t wait to go swimming.

I have been listening to Radio Paradise a lot lately. It is really great; maybe you will like it too. I am off to go eat a girl dinner and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Tomorrow is a new day? I think? I mean, it is. How will it feel tomorrow?

Hard Times

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Today the sun came out, big and bright, and warm temperatures melted some snow into water, and you could see it run in the streams for the first time in many, many months. This was such a cold winter. So cold, for so long. Snow banked all over – small snow mountains covering every inch of grass. Frozen hard over the last few weeks to be all but impenetrable except for an errant foot or paw.

But today, it began to melt away, so fast! Amazing how a bit more sunlight and a lot more degrees Fahrenheit can change things.

Times are very stressful, as I am sure (or I think?) they may be with all of us. I have been a student of philosophy, law, and the government for many years. I began as a cross-examination debater when I was 15-16, sophomore year of high school. That year I learned about legal arguments, topicality, philosophical trajectories, speech patterns, structure, order, and logic. Debate was wonderful for me; debate taught me how to speak in front of strangers with confidence, which was a problem I had had for many years. I used to always speak holding my hand in front of my mouth, until I began debate with my friends, hanging out on the outskirts at the end of freshman year.

The government that as inaugurated in January is making striking, strident changes to systems that seemed almost impenetrable in their layers of bureaucracy. I have this theory that people in general are good, and I believe that the layers of that bureaucracy are like the one I am more familiar with: public education. Almost everyone is in the mix for the right reasons, but the structures and inertia can be insurmountable. Watching someone, who I think is on drugs of some kind, speak more than a US President, brandish a chainsaw on the internettelevision, and then use a metaphorical chainsaw on departments all over the government is so frightening.

When my school, which was named Gus Garcia Middle School, in Austin ISD, went under restructuring due to vast failures (more on that another time), one of the things that every teacher had to do was keep a binder at the front of the room, next to the door, so that if anyone from the district, Region 13 Service Center, or TEA could look at data you had collected inside that binder. Data came from assessments. It was so stressful to think that anyone coming in your classroom would look at the binder and somehow “see” something you weren’t doing. The realities of what was happening at the school were complicated and multi-layered and go back to the history of Austin being a highly segregated city. Segregation’s effects linger and can strikingly effect districts perceptions of schools and neighborhood. Resources follow that line of thinking, resources in the form of things, and not people who could really make a difference.

Anyway, I digress.

When I read about the massive layoffs of people, real people with real lives!, I wonder: what are they doing? Isn’t it bad politically to have lots of people lose their jobs when you are president?

I don’t understand what is happening and why and what it means for all of us. We live in a very isolated place almost up to the Canadian border; will anything happen here? If this was 1850, would we even know of anything happening? I just don’t know, and that makes me feel guilty. But is there anything I could do? What would it be?

These are the questions swirling around my mind. There is nothing we can do and yet —

Something big is changing, bigger than anything in our lifetime. The only thing I can compare it to is 9/11 – it feels similar to that time. Everything is uncertain, government are giant jerks, shower, rinse, repeat.

The universe is showing 7/9 (there I said it) planets in a line on Friday night. All year I have thought that the universe wants us to look up. Look up at the stars? At ourselves? In a dream the other night I said to someone that the thing I miss the most when I leave Maine are the stars. I realized that must be true.