Tag Archives: change

7th Grade Girls

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7th grade girls are sweet and funny oddballs who change so much in nine months it’s almost bewildering. This year I have heard all range of things, like:

“Ms Blythe. I was fine until _____ destroyed my life!”

“Ms Blythe, why do you know everything?” answered with, “Because she’s secretly a goddess who has lived for thousands of years.”

“Ms Blythe – do you like me?” I answer, “yes of course I like you!” Answer, “no you don’t.”

“Ms Blythe, Ms. _____ hates us.” I answer, “no, she doesn’t hate you.”

If 6th graders are bundles of raw emotion and sweet happiness, transitioning into teenagerdom, then 7th graders are bundles of raw emotion, anxiety, confusion, tears, and absolutism, albeit momentary.

I have taught 7th graders for most of the years that I have taught. I think, in fact, there has only been one year that I haven’t taught them. My friend Jackie coined 7th grade “The Crying Year” because most of them, at some point, will break down crying, sometimes for no reason. One of my favorite memories of The Crying Year was one day, several years ago, when we were listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s album Bookends while drawing botanical drawings of pinecones. I looked up and noticed a child had buried himself in a fortress of binders. I went over to him, knelt down, and asked if he was ok, to which he replied, “this music makes me so emotional”, in his strange, monotone voice. Later I coaxed him out from underneath the fortress by changing the music.

We just ended our year, my first year of teaching 7th grade girls, as opposed to boys and girls together. I also taught 6th grade girls, but as I said above, they are still bundles of light and joy and excitement. They scamper everywhere. 7th grade girls can be sullen, funny, energetic, silly, disrespectful, lazy, and philosophically challenging. This year, one asked my coworker if she wanted to always be a teacher. She answered yes, and the student asked, “don’t you have any aspirations?”

It is an adventure working with middle schoolers, but in a single-gender environment it is almost as if the daily emotional toil is concentrated and ever-brimming at the surface, apt to boil over. The dramas are similar to the infighting of a small town; alliances shifting and changing daily, for very small and insignificant reasons. It is as if 7th grade girls exist on an emotional see-saw, perpetually tipping the balance in the direction of interpersonal dramas for a day or a week, and then reverting the see-saw to equilibrium once more.

I learned this year that this is the year in which kids stop talking to their parents and they seem to grow an almost adult concept of not wanting to burden their parents with their thoughts and fears. They seem to not want to add stress to their parents’ lives (a mark of their growing maturity) but also desperately need people to listen to the contents of their worried minds. Perhaps this is why we all glommed on to our junior high school friends so intensely, but I cannot tell you the amount of times I said this year to different students: let yourself be a child for a while longer, and tell your parents you love them and need them.

On Thursday, when we all said goodbye and ushered them into cars and buses, there were many, many tears and marker-signed shirts and yearbooks with “H.A.G.S.” written all over the inside pages (Have A Great Summer). I giggled at them and hugged them, telling them they are fine as they are coming back to the school in a couple of months, but it was to no avail: “Ms Blythe! I love you so much. I am going to miss you!”

I am going to miss them, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There Is A Field

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“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

 

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Kate Bush – This Woman’s Work

Doors open, and doors close. There is one door in my life that I seemingly have cared about over all others that occasionally peeks open, as if wedged outward upon its tight hinges and overly-secure lock. Light peeks out, love even, if only for a moment. And then, it inevitably closes, tightly, lips pursed, as if the opening never occurred. At this time in my life, it is the first time that I have felt that its closing is not my fault.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

 

 

 

From Both Sides Now

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It is a strange but comforting memory.

It is made of a wooden door with glass in the front, and squeaky stairs that go up, and then an old jukebox bathed in amber light, and lastly, an ice cream counter. It is a place in Galveston, a town about an hour south of Houston, where my family went together many times when I was a child.

There was a store there that sold imports, I think. It had wooden bins full of little things like beads. It had shelves on the walls with fabrics folded upon them. In this store, just after my grandfather died, I was wandering around and looked up to see a very white haired man in a button up, loose-fitting, short-sleeved shirt, wearing glasses and a camera hanging from his neck. It was my grandfather, and by the time I looked back at him, upon recognition, he had, of course, disappeared.

Galveston has a long, tall, cement wall that stretches along its seashore and was built to protect its citizens from damaging hurricanes, like the one in 1900. Some parts of it are painted with murals. Some parts of it are dotted with seashell shops, which sell lots of seashells not native to Texas at all, and many of those pretty shell chandelier-hanging lamp things. I always wanted one of those.

When we had the dog, Bear was his name, we would take him to the beach and he would run around. Once, my cousin Bruce came to visit from New Jersey, and he took Bear way out into the water. The dog panicked, and clawed Bruce’s back to bits trying to save himself in Bruce’s arms.

We used to stay in a beach house on the Bolivar Peninsula that belonged to our family’s lawyer. It was a brown house, made of wood, on stilts, and, at night, you could go out to the dunes with a flashlight and hunt ghost crabs. One visit, we discovered that the house had been robbed and things tossed about, as if in a storm. The two policemen who came demonstrated to us, flabbergasted, how they thought two people had gotten into a fight and thrown each other around. My parents didn’t agree with the theory, but I don’t remember ever staying there after that.

When I look back at time, and try to piece the story together, as I have been wont to do of late, I have been looking back to see when the family functioned well and when there was evidence of happiness and contentment. I think it ended just before my grandfather died, when my parents lost their house, their car, and many of their possessions. We moved into a small rental house with a duck in stained glass on the door. I lived in a tiny room, which I loved, and I had curtains around my bed. I used to sneak out of the huge window and go and walk in the park, later whilst smoking cigarettes.

Today is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, a time I only remember because I was in a Texas History class at Knox Junior High School when it happened. My teacher was not a good teacher, but did have a slight obsession with Dan Fogelberg of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The only three things I remember from her class were Dan Fogelberg, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and learning a computer software that, I think, was some precursor to PowerPoint.

During that time, I have very few memories of my parents together or apart. I remember being alone a lot. I remember my brother playing with all the kids in the street all the time, and that once we had a massive, neighborhood-wide pinecone war. I remember doing my homework on a blanket in the front yard, and waving every day to the same lady in the same car. After a bit of time, she stopped and introduced herself. She was Irish and lived down the road a bit. I went to her house for tea. She became a great friend to me and we would talk and have tea; I remember she had a wonderful tea towel collection. I remember my mom coming to pick me up there one evening.

That time is shrouded, and soon after, we moved into another house, the one in which we lived when I graduated from high school. Come to think of it, that was the house with the large window from which I snuck out. All I remember of that time, in the house with the duck on the door, is darkness (it was a dark house). I remember my dad being in the bedroom all the time, and I remember not understanding why there was no one home and it was hard and dark, scary and confusing. I remember buying groceries for the family at the grocery store, and coming home to put them away. I remember doing laundry, and making sure my brother was all right. I remember getting into wearing vintage corduroy mens’ jackets. I remember catching the bus. I remember that sweet old neighbor, whose name I have forgotten.

 

This Is My Story

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***This story will make you uncomfortable, it sure does me. I am trying, in my own way, to end a stigma that has affected me for twenty years. In my own way, I am trying to #shoutmyabortion.***

I am fifteen, and a very scrawny one, at that. I have been dating a boy named Chris for about six months.

We met at the beginning of my freshman year, in debate class. Truth be told, I had a crush on his friend Steve, and, at debate tournaments, remember sharing conversations about oranges. “Did you ever think that the little sacs in an orange are like little tiny Capri Suns?” I did.

We started dating because my friend Becca told me, in the lunch line, that Chris had a crush on me. On our first date, we went to Barnes and Noble and chatted with our friend Jeff who worked at the Starbucks inside. We also perused the philosophy section, awkwardly talking. That summer, we convinced our parents that we were volunteering at the library so that we could spend every sunny day together, at the bottom of the hillside behind the Woodlands Pavilion. It was there that I realized I was so nervous about becoming sexual: that I thought the ins and outs of sex were so confusing and icky, I didn’t know what to do about it.

I was very tall, even then, and a late bloomer to boot. Chris and I used to treasure stolen moments on soccer fields, the bottoms of hillsides, and the backseat of his 280ZX. One night, on the jungle gym of the playground behind my house, we first had sex. I had never had a period, so didn’t think to worry. And then, over the next few months, still didn’t. We kept having sex in stolen moments, usually in the parking lots of the technology companies that decorated The Woodlands with cool night-lights. It was the stuff of high school romance: we would party with our friends in the trees that surrounded the Montessori School, or on the paths that wound around the faux lakes.

It was about four and a half months later that my mom began to worry that I hadn’t had a period yet. I was fifteen, and even to her, it seemed strange. So we went to the gynecologist, and I had the first oh-so intrusive exam of my life. Little did I know what would happen. A few minutes later, I was called into the doctor’s office, with my mom, and was told that I was pregnant, and in my second trimester.

What happened next was a blur of shame and confusion. My dad was out of town, as he always was. Chris, myself and our parents met at my house and sat in the fancy living room: the one that no one sat in. We were forced to write a pros and cons list of having a baby. Obviously, the cons won out.

Soon thereafter, Chris, myself, and both our moms went to a clinic off FM1960 and I walked past protesters telling me that I was a terrible person for doing what I was about to do. I remember sitting, and waiting, and being given medicine. I had to go home that night and wait, throwing my guts out all the evening through. I was experiencing what is now known as a partial birth abortion, later made illegal. The next day, we went back to that clinic and back through those lines of protesters, sat, waited, and then I went back with a few other women. I remember being shown a sonagram of the baby, and hoisted onto a table. Later that day, the moms took us to get cake at a Vietnamese bakery. I remember wondering: why are we eating cake? I was in a haze of medicine and confusion.

We went to counseling for six months, and even ran the evening day care at the United Way to “deal with it”. And then, we never spoke of it again. My dad came home from wherever he was, and life carried on. Or so I thought.

My mother never told my father, perhaps to protect me from his rage and his incoherent style of parenting that combined public praise with private punishment. I internalized this and realized that I had done something so terrible and so wrong as it had to be hidden, forever.

Years later, I wrote my mother about these feelings and she apologized saying that she felt she and my father hadn’t shown me enough love, and so I went out and found it with Chris. This isn’t true, and shows a simplistic and dismissive outlook on what family and love is. In fact, I felt such love with Chris, despite our age. I felt a sense of family with him and his family: something I didn’t have with my family of origin. The lack of family with my mother and father stemmed from an intense instability: my dad couldn’t function without anger and rage, and my mother just tried to hold it all together. When I went to Chris’ house, we watched movies and ate dinner, we went on family vacations and drank Kool Aid. We sat in the driveway and listened to Wu Tang Clan and talked about the world. We drove in that 280ZX and visited with friends. We were family. When I went home, it was cold and beautiful: so clean. It was without love: it was no one’s fault. My mother was living in a charade that she desperately hoped to maintain: one that looked like a married couple with two children. The reality of it was far darker, and none of us wanted to look at it. I was a child, and my mom was in denial.

For years, I have wondered where the shame comes from. I have been investigating the shame monster lately: he comes up when I am afraid or threatened, and I have put myself in situations where the shame monster transforms into a pain monster and all the shame becomes emotional or physical pain. This makes me feel at home, as if I know it, and its implications make sense. I am bad, therefore I should be hurt. It is a classic survivor of childhood abuse scenario: I search for another abuser. It is remarkable how easy they are to find. First was an insecure college boyfriend, then came a job working at a school where I was threatened by my students. Then came another abusive boyfriend, so like my father that I interchanged their names during fights. Then came moving to a dangerous city and an equally dangerous school. Then came respite, in Maine, and confusion. In Maine, I was close to my family and looked at their daily crazy life as normal. I began to think: maybe this is what all families are like? I realized: this isn’t so bad, they are getting better!

And then I left. I came to Austin last spring and found myself in a beautiful relationship with a truly loving man. We all know how this story ends up. I didn’t know how to handle what was happening: being challenged in a positive way, being loved, being appreciated. One night we got into a fight because he was feeling insecure about my new teaching job and my time away from him. He chose poorly: I recognize that. We got into a fight, found resolution, but the shame monster woke up. He perked up, like those goblins in The Labyrinth. He said, “here! There is food for me here!” I became insecure about that fight, and over-internalized its meaning. I gave it more weight than it needed. I talked about it in such a way to friends, friends who have long been too involved in my emotional decision making. I had planned a trip to Maine for a week before school started, and off I went.

During this trip, the same old same old happened. Three days of peace followed by…something. I don’t know what I did but it pissed my dad off. He yelled, I felt terrible. I called Cody on the phone, realizing that the situation wasn’t better….it was the same, only I had been away a while. I felt like shit, like dog shit. I hated my family situation. I walked with my mom to the beach, trying to get her to see clearly. She kept saying “I’m fine.” I left, again. I arrived in Austin in a white dress to my loving boyfriend, who had prepared a beautiful reception for me, and I thought, I am fine. The shame monster laughed. He knew better.

I decided I needed therapy because I was having a hard time understanding that one fight and school and being back in Austin. I verbalized this fear and Cody answered with fears of his own. I think he was afraid that if I went to therapy, I would break up with him. This was his stuff. Then I was struck in the gut by a surprise: I had to have my IUD removed because it was lodged in my uterus and cervix. The can of worms that was my shame associated with that abortion twenty years ago reared its ugly head. I had to go and have the one barrier against that fear happening again removed. I had to because of my health. Cody went with me and was loving and wonderful and took care of me for the two days that came afterwards. I remember not wanting him to leave: being afraid of it, even. Now I understand why.

The next few weeks were confusing. I was stressed out at school and also feeling shame, so much shame. So much fear: as if I couldn’t control how I was feeling. I was falling, deep, deep down. So far down I couldn’t see the bottom. I told him I couldn’t go to Thanksgiving. He became very upset. I went with him to get pizza on his way out of town and couldn’t stop crying in the parking lot. I was afraid but I didn’t know what of. He left and I went to a friend’s family’s house. During those two days, her father did what my father always does to me: criticized and judged, yelled and berated. I felt accosted, and I left. I called Cody and he was understanding. The shame monster laughed so loud, but I still couldn’t hear him clearly.

Time passed. It got worse. Cody broke up with me. I went to his house late at night. We got back together. We went camping for my birthday. I kept it all secret. I had booked a flight to Maine for Christmas and wanted so badly not to go, but went anyway. Three days later, my dad screamed at me for cooking a sausage in the kitchen. My mom blamed me for his anger. The shame monster stepped in. Cody picked me up, late in the evening of the 3rd of January. It was so late, and the airport was packed with Christmas travelers. He was not so happy at the idea of it all, and I internalized it and said: he doesn’t want me, he doesn’t love me, he is angry with me. Shame took the wheel.

Since then, I haven’t been able to relax. Every aspect of my life became taken over with shame. Shame that I couldn’t do “this”, that I was failing. I had a man who wanted to love me but I gave him every thing I had to tell him he didn’t, and that it was a bad idea. We went to Houston on Valentine’s weekend and it was fun, but I was avoidant and strange. The next week, I abandoned everything and went to Pittsburgh. He wouldn’t answer my texts and didn’t call. The Tuesday afterward, he broke up with me.

Someone told me a few weeks ago that I hadn’t hit bottom with my feelings yet, and that’s why I couldn’t identify them. When Cody broke up with me, and perhaps even a few days earlier, I approached bottom. I cut off my hair, and after that, I couldn’t stop crying. I cried and cried and cried. I cried at every moment, sparing only my students. When they left the room, I cried. At first I thought I was grieving Cody, and I was, but as my friend Barbara told me, I was also grieving myself. I wrote pages and pages, trying to decipher my feelings. I realized, after that conversation with Barbara, that I don’t think I have lost Cody, but that I lost myself. This is what I realized.

When I was 15 and an abortion, I took the stigma associated with it to heart. I internalized that I was bad. I did not deserve good. It was very simple. I went through relationships, and even got married in this methodology. I married a man who never challenged me, and therefore never had to face this. After my years of introspection in Maine, when I thought I was safe, I fell in love with Cody. Cody, despite his own faults, is a good man who loved me through and through. I didn’t trust this love, or my feelings. I talked about it too much, I doubted it. I lost it. The shame monster came in and said: you don’t deserve happiness!! How dare you even think that??? You are a fool, and an idiot, and if anyone sees you, they will know this to be true. Every relationship after this was affected by these beliefs. I never allowed anyone that close, every again, until Cody. In Cody, I believe in love and redemption. I felt family. I love him, and his son. I love everything about him, even his faults. There was no one else I wanted to be with, but yet, I felt like he would see me and leave me. He would see the badness in me and know it and leave. So I did everything I could to make him see it. And, despite never seeing the bad, he was overwhelmed by it and left.

When I made this realization, one that came after twenty years of internalization, denial, and repression, I couldn’t stop crying, and I still haven’t. The amount of regret that I feel, and the grief that I feel for that fifteen year old girl is almost unfathomable. I reached out to Chris, my high school boyfriend, and we talked at length about how fucked up it is that we haven’t talked about this in twenty years, and that it is the defining moment in both of our lives. He turned to drugs and avoidance: I just turned to avoidance and denial. I blamed myself and thought I didn’t deserve love. I couldn’t figure out why it was so hard for me until right now. Now I realize that that 15 year old girl felt so terrible about what had happened to her, that she had let down her family, was a bad girl, had done something so terrible she never deserved what EVERYONE deserves: compassion and love. During that moment, when I was 15, my mother never asked me how I was doing. She never hugged me and asked me if I was ok. This is not her fault: she was locked in her own prison, however, I was the child. I deserved love and compassion and help. And hope. However, I am angry with her, for compartmentalizing my own pain because it was easier for her.

So, over the last few days, I made some important decisions. One was to cut off contact with my family and with some friends who make me feel judged and untrustworthy of my own decisions. It is too easy for me to trust my own decision making processes to others: I think this is an affect of an abusive childhood. This has been the single most difficult decision of my life to date. The second was to not travel for at least one year, for I have used travel as an escape for too long. When things get hard or tricky, I leave for four or five days. This is something that Cody pointed out to me, and he was right. It is time to stay. Third was to go to therapy, twice a month.

My hopes for this time are multi-fold, and all involve forgiveness. Forgiveness of myself, for I was a little girl and had something so complicated and hard happen to me, I had no way to understand it. I needed love and hugs and time to talk. I want to forgive my family, but that will only happen with time and distance. I want to seek forgiveness from Cody, the first person I have truly loved in twenty years.

Last night, my two friends and I were in the desert. I painted a prayer to the baby I lost almost twenty years ago. I have never described her this way. I also wrote, on a rock, her name that Chris and I had invented all those years ago, her birth and death year, and this:

 

“You are forever loved, and so are we.”

Her spirit is buried beneath a mesquite tree, with a view of the arroyo and Mexico beyond. May God grant me the forgiveness I seek, and may the shame monster who has heretofore defined my emotional life, be starved of food. May he live in the shadows, never to return. May I be able to be honest.

We wear these lenses that through which we see life. I have wiped some shit off some of those lenses over the last few weeks. May I be able to continue to see clearly, and to live in love, with few distractions. May I find my way back to me and to love.

Thank you. I love you. Please forgive me.

Be Honest

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What a loaded phrase.

What a practice. Can we, any of us, be truly honest with ourselves and with others?

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” – Virginia Woolf

Lately, I have been trying this out: this idea of being myself. I now understand that who we are, or what is important to us, is shifting almost constantly and therefore, our expressions of such self will also shift and change. For most of my young life, I felt like I should portray myself in one way, and hide everything else. I think I learned this from my mother, and from growing up in an immigrant family where success means everything and feelings are swept under the rug, or into the corners of coat closets.

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I have some strange health problems, that probably started when I was sixteen. I inherited a strange genetic immunodeficiency disease, most likely from my father’s side, that is named gammaglobulinemia. It manifests in many ways, mostly in my predilection for infections and constant arthritic-like pain in my hands, wrists, and hips. During my senior year, I had to take a rest cure for almost six months, and spent my days watching movies and eating scrambled eggs, wondering what would happen. During that time, the illness expressed itself in its most intense form to date, but here and there, it pops up, as if to remind me of my own delicate nature. I forget, or shove away, my actual nature almost on a daily basis, as if putting forth a calm and strong and independent persona will chase away the inconsistencies, the weaknesses, the sadnesses, the things about myself that I am afraid of.

A few weeks ago, I chose to do something different. I chose to go to a good doctor and to talk to people about how I feel on a daily basis. It is a huge change for me: previous to this, only those closest to me knew about my feelings of being in my body. Very few people know that I experience chronic pain that limits the way my body moves and feels in space. I took a chance recently and spoke about it, and realized, just as a I realized last winter, when I shared my life story with close friends in Maine, that those who care about you don’t hate you when you express weakness, but rather, they see you as more human, more like them. Today I sat in the woodshop and talked about my friends with another friend and talked about how I have an autoimmune illness and that’s why I feel sensitive a lot and have been going to to doctor a lot since the fall. My friend sat there and asked me, “so…your bones hurt all the time?” And I explained it: how my wrists, hands and hips hurt constantly. He told me that it was strange that someone who works with her hands so much has so much pain, and I told him the truth, that activity is one of the only things that helps with it. He said, “well, I suppose you would have given up on it a long time ago if it was the other way around.” I smiled and said, “well, I wouldn’t have been able to give up on it.”

I supposed there are great risks in the opening of the heart. What happens if people lean into you too close and pierce it, sometimes not in an act of malicious vengeance but just peering too close-in? I spoke with a studio-mate the other day about divorce and its long-lasting implications, and about how I feel at peace with it all finally, as if it happened a long time ago, a time I can’t really fully identify with anymore. She told me that her divorce is still taking its toll, ten years later. So we agreed that all of us experience loss, grief, decisions and their implications, in different ways, and no way is wrong or right.

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I feel like being honest and opening my heart, perhaps for the first time, is a great form of risk-taking, but it conversely feels empowering and creates a sense of confidence that I don’t think I have felt before. It’s a feeling as if my old pair of LL Bean shearling boots are on my feet all the time and that my toes are safe and warm inside sheep-y softness. Of course, self-doubt remains. Questions are tossed in my mind that range from: will they like me? What is wrong with me? Why am I so odd?

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I suppose, here, at the age of 35, living in my beautiful little house in Austin, Texas, that I am finally identifying with my special-ness, something that I was afraid of because I grew up in such a way that taught me that expressing my nature was wrong. But now, in baby steps, I am seeing that, what other people have said to me for years, might be true. Maybe I am an okay person.

Two weeks ago, I was eating a goodbye breakfast at Magnolia with my friend Martha: she was moving to Houston in anticipation of moving to Washington, D.C. One day she will be an ambassador. Anyway, I ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen since I left Austin years ago. This friend and his wife and soon-to-be baby moved into my old house in Hyde Park after it worked out so that I could offer them that little place for the same rent that I had paid. They still live there, and he was very vocal at how thankful they are to have it. His daughter lives there, too. A tight fit in that small house with periwinkle kitchen walls and a veggie garden in the back.

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Stranger in a Strange Land

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In life come moments of clarity. This vision is only offered, not commanded. Your choice is to live in a state of grace or continue in normality. No blame. Fear can be an awesome obstacle when a time like this is presented. You will make great advancement and find your truth if you discharge fear and deconstruct your doubts. – the I Ching

The first tincture was of redwood and honey, I think, and the second was a spritz to the face that smelled like roasted poblano and brought me back to San Miguel de Allende’s dusty, windswept streets. In an instant it was changed to a murky, chocolate-flavored stuff that reminded me in some ways of coffee grounds. The last was a smear to the face of something golden from a large jug. This all happened during a story-circle for this month’s Pisces Full Moon: a circle of story-tellers and singers.

Moments of clarity and feelings of grounding have been hard to come by since my return to Austin; I feel like the place that I once called home is physically here, but everything is so different, including myself. Last night I saw old friends who didn’t even know I was back, and it made me realize that I haven’t truly been “living” here but continuing my attitude and behaviors of passing through, of being a drifter in one place or another. This is amplified now by still being separated from many of my belongings who still lie quietly in Maine, waiting for me to bring them here.

Last night’s theme was one of homecoming, and the first storyteller told a tale of being from Austin and just coming back after being a long time away in a very different place. Hers was the desert and mine was a northern island, but the feelings were the same. She said that a place becomes you, and I think she is right: I think I have even written here how I felt that life in Maine made you feel as if you were the environment that surrounded you: everything so interconnected, changeable, beautiful, mysteriously dark. Perhaps she felt the same away about her desert far away.

Homecoming is this idea full of levels of complication that start with the reality that you can never come home again: that home is different and so are its people. In my case, this city has transformed and swelled so that it seems like it is bursting at the seams, liable to just pour outward in a great torrent of people, cars, and buildings. This town, to me, always seemed a little sleepy and slow, not like Bar Harbor of course, but it was a nice feeling to feel at ease in a place all the time. And now the pace seems so fast that it seems likely to get swept up in it and carried along, without knowing which way you want to choose to go.

Is life so full of chapters? Apparently so.

Let’s All Try to Help Each Other Make Decisions

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If everything is temporary, then why do we have to make decisions that sometimes negatively effect some while positively effecting others, or the self?

We have to make decisions because the oxygen mask must be placed on our own faces first: without self-love, self-respect, goals, and an attitude of cheerfulness, we are no good to anyone else.

I have a hard time advocating for myself: perhaps some of you share this. I find it difficult because it means confrontation and the risk that someone may be disappointed, hurt, or upset. Pre-recent times, I did a really good job of practicing my strategy of Avoidance. Avoidance is a magical strategy that someone taught me when I was little; they taught be to look calm, speak intelligently, dress nicely, be incredibly selfish, and when backed into a corner, leap out, run away, and disappear. It is a terrible and sad way to go through a life and this is something that I realized about three years ago, when I moved to Maine.

At that time, I had narrowly escaped a very dangerous relationship with another person, with myself, and with a city that seemed to have Bad Luck for Patience written all over it. But even my very presence in that city and the choices that led up to that move were the effects of that age old Strategy of Avoidance, and its brother (in my case), Rushing Through Life at Warp Speed. I had decided that I didn’t want to deal with the repercussions of divorce in Austin, and so I created a path to reinvention that has taken me here, there and everywhere, finally resulting in coming back to Earth and making some hard, but important decisions.

When I returned to Austin, I interviewed for the job that I was just recently offered. I interviewed twice, and was very encouraged by the interviews. I really liked the school and its students and was excited to be part of such a dynamic and forward-thinking place. After I interviewed and was able to substitute teach for a few days, I was confronted with Avoidance again. When Avoidance walks in, the conversation is usually the same. In my mind, Avoidance says, “but what about your freedom? Do you really want this? This is going to be hard.” And I used to say, as long as it was nothing to do with the heart or my personal life, “well yes, I do, and how hard can it be? I am a very capable person who is good at making plans and carrying them out.” In this specific case, Avoidance said: “but you haven’t been a classroom teacher in three years. It’s going to take a lot. And you aren’t even sure if you want this, anyway.” And I said back, “you know….you are right.”

I was filled with doubts: doubts about what I wanted, and what my abilities were. My doubts were confirmed when I did not hear from the school regarding a position for a very, very long time. I remember one evening when Avoidance was pushed aside by Pragmatism and Peace, who both said to me, “you know, if this is what you get to do, then you are doing something right.” And I said back, “you know….you are right.”

And then I sat, and waited. I wrote a couple of emails. I waited. I came to the realization that maybe Avoidance had let me tarry too long and I had done something wrong either in my Life, or in one of the interviews, or that this just wasn’t meant to be. I sat with that for awhile, and eventually learned to let it go. At this time, I was very nervous about jobs and money being that I have been working at a bakery part-time and not making as much jewelry as before. I felt I was losing my way, somehow, and that even though everything felt right and ok, I hadn’t found my place yet and I was worried about that. In ran Rush Through Life and said, “you have to do SOMETHING. This isn’t going to work.” I debated the options, the pros and cons, of what to do: whether to return to Maine and work for the summer, knowing that at least I would have a nest egg of some sort for fall. I thought about leaving Austin just as it was coming to feel normal, and uprooting myself again. I thought about trusting the Universe that the right thing would open up in my heart and hands. I made the decision that Maine at least made sense financially, and that since I had no other options, it was the best one to do: I knew the ins and outs, and could predict (basically) the path of the summer, and that it would be great to see friends and be in the party-party atmosphere of MDI in the summertime. I decided to go, and leave just after my immigration appointment on June 26th.

A few days passed, and I was beginning to plan how to get to Maine, and the plan for returning in the fall with the remainder of my belongings and some cash in my pocket. I realized there were good reasons to go, despite friends and family, and that I could continue to grow my career in the direction of jewelry and jewelry making. I realized that if I were to open my own space here in Austin, that I had more to learn and connections to make. So, I was going, and soon. And then there was a phone call.

The phone call was an apology and a request to come in to meet the following Monday. Early on that Monday morning, I had a conversation with Avoidance and Fear of Commitment. I thought, in that moment, that I was going to be asked to teach an entirely different class, one I was not 100% behind or necessarily skilled to teach. I sat in the parking lot for a minute, thought about going in with confidence and calm and communicating what I felt, and to Sashay Away. It was in this meeting that the administrators of the school offered me my teaching position of my pedagogical dreams: art-science-engineering. I sat in an uncomfortable chair, bewildered and laughing. I asked them if they were really going to hire me to do what I want to do, and what I have wanted to do for years. They said yes.

I realized, over the next few days, that this point in life is not only a turning point, but it is also a new chapter, and that fundamental changes are taking place. Yes, I made the choice to return in those early days of April, but I wouldn’t have guessed the changes that are here, that were here, and that would begin to happen in my own life. I wondered if other people think of their life in terms of chapters, or matrix points on the crazy flowchart of life. I realized that had I not gone to Maine and worked on all the myriad projects I had worked on, that I would not have been offered this opportunity. I realized that it is a priceless one, and that not only its potential but its long-term application was worth more to me than, well, in truth, any other career-related opportunity that I had ever been given. So I smiled and I took it.

Avoidance, though, being a tricky character, came back in and I delayed in sharing the news, due to wishing to not hurt anyone in Maine that I wasn’t going to come back. It took me a long time, too long, to be honest about that, and that is because not only do I care about all my friends and family up on that beautiful island, but it was also the place where I found myself, where I was truer to myself and grew to understand myself in ways I don’t think I ever would had I stayed here all along. I did what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, and most of the time, was happier for the experience. Occasionally I still felt pent in by my own feelings: especially in the winter. But I worked on understanding the temporary nature of day to day life, I grew to appreciate establishing a sense of calm and equanimity, and I truly began to detach from things and learn to love people and experiences. It is tremendously hard to not go back to Maine for these reasons and others that include comfort and quiet and that special place of peace that we all find on MDI, which is one of the reasons why those of us who know it love it so.

However, I had to make a decision about my Life, and about what was important to me and what would serve me best in the future. I had to acknowledge the changes that were happening and understand their level of gravity and importance. In other words, I had to grow up and learn that I could leave for the summer and let Avoidance take me on another journey, albeit a short-term one, or I could stand on my own two feet, look at the path my life has taken, acknowledge its rewards and its trials, and be here now. I feel like I am being given great gifts at this present moment, and I intend to stay grateful and present with them. I want to not run away from what is scary: commitment, success, long-term friendships, closeness, responsibilities. Despite my fear of that list of Scary Ideas, and I know there are others that I am not including for different reasons, I feel like I am at a time and place in my life to accept my choices, celebrate where I can, and continue to learn from every step along the road that I am lucky enough to pay attention to.

Although it is hard for me to write this, I am very proud of the last few years. Despite the emotional shifts and the intense ups and downs and the instability, the experiences of Philly and Maine made me a stronger, more grounded, and more understanding person of myself. This means that the selfishness is still there, but perhaps that old adage of awareness being half the battle is true. Maybe also is that one about what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Avoidance and Rushing Through Life are still there: perhaps they will be, in some ways, there forever. But part of my subconscious-level new commitments since returning to Austin are to work on those aspects of my life and really try to examine why they are there so that I can be a more content person than I have been. My return to Austin has been full of learning how to commit, be in the present and not the past, and how to share. I feel like it is time to be at home; I don’t want to run away again.

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Going Back

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“You’ll have to excuse me: I’m drunk as a lord…” man on a couch in the studio hallway: 9 on a Wednesday night.

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It has been a long time since I have written any musings here, and my only excuse is a series of technological glitches and a lack of personal spaces. In Maine, I lived alone (with the exception of four months with roommates — that is another story for another day!) and also rented a studio at the Tool Barn: I spent most of my time on my own, in control of my spaces and what I did in them. With the exception of evenings with friends, I was very solitary. Since coming to Texas, I share my time, most of the time, with a very wonderful person who makes me laugh and I appreciate a lot. I live at my friend Jackie’s house, in a guest room, and about half of my stuff is still in Maine. I am separated from my trappings of life, for what they are, which now is very few, due to circumstance.

When I think about the fact that I have not slept in my bed, my comfy, lovely bed, in almost three months, or seen the embroidered portrait of the owls above that bed, or many of my little precious things around, I believe that this separateness led to the feelings of floatiness, of uncertainty at being “back” in the place that was my home until four years ago. It is a funny thing to feel your physical manifestations of self separated into three places. This must be what rich folks feel like, right?

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Twelfth Night

I think, also, that my absence from writing has been an expression of this feeling of not having a place. Turns out that returning to a place, no matter how long you had spent there in the past, is not the same as if you never left. In fact, it is entirely different: mostly in a good way. Mostly, there is the feeling of understanding how to get around while also appreciating each experience as unique and present and new. So although the newness is overwhelming, at least you know how to get to the grocery store.

It would seem as if I have landed on my feet, despite a rusted out old Subaru Forester and no room of one’s own. I somehow have landed a wonderful, part-time (almost full-time but not quite) teaching position creating a course connecting science-technology-engineering-art-&math, am helping renovate an old Spartan Imperial Mansion that belongs to some friends in which I get to live until something more permanent shows up, spending time learning and rediscovering being in relationship, staring at Texas skies and sunsets, and creating where and when I can. Here is where I am wistful (and complain) about the fact that I miss the studio at the Tool Barn: especially late nights or early mornings when I was there alone, puttering around on projects.

But, as life is, if one thing, a series of temporary moments, I know that pieces are falling and settling into place, after what seems like quite a while to wait! My name, of course, is putting me to the test something fierce right now: probably a good lesson. A studio will come, a room of my own, a place to settle in with myself. Until then, I find rooms and doorways and the shady spots under trees.

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Cinema Paradiso

Heart Over Head

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Spring solstice arrives
Lighting the flames of true love
While Pelicans dive

From the I Ching Weekly — reading for the week of March 16th, 2015

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It has been a narrow passage
All is opening
Spirit hails love
A joyous returning

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When a wound has become infected it will not heal unless the poison is removed. This is your condition now. You have been in battle and now you are returning. A bit battered and deeply tired but you are returning and are mostly in tact.  It is your ego that has taken the hits and is feeling the wounding. The ego would have you retreat and be with shame…don’t go for it….there is no shame and no blame, you are human after all and this is part of the process to wholeness and light.

On this return it is simplicity that will salve the wounds and heal the spirit. Old relationships too are being made ready to be healed as you come back to the source, the primal mind, made free of a troubled ego.

It is as if the tides have changed and the tide of change that washed away what you built, desired and cared for is now bringing back the very things you thought were lost. This is a joyous time and a time to celebrate in humility and grace.

These are the winds of change you have felt would come, they have. This time the winds carry no danger, they carry promise; the promise of love, abundance and stability.

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The great forces of Gaia can at one-minute blow winds that devastate the landscape, feed fires that blacken the earth, then comes stillness wherein there is the miraculous returning of life. These are of the universal laws of life and death, leaving and returning.  All is in natural order. You stand now at the point of the freshness of return while behind you lies old useless patterns of behavior and convoluted associations that have been fraught with difficulties.

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Thinking and analyzing will not have summer return in winter; now it is to either trust the energy of returning or get embroiled in an unpopular and unsolvable puzzle of obstacles on a road leading nowhere. So it is with your situation now. Don’t think it through, this is not the time to analyze your situation, you have done that and you are exhausted from it. Give yourself, and those around you, a break.

There is occurring not only a return to clarity of thought and vision it is also a return to innocence; time when what is now returned to your field of energy will inspire creativity and confidence.

Surrender; let this cycle of gradual progress toward love and success happen with no thinking. Know that the coming tide moving you inevitably forward is unstoppable. Let it happen. Allow yourself to ride this wave to the shore, arriving refreshed and rested, not tired and weak from effort. It is your choice., it has always been about choice.

The necessary re-birth will be realized not by pushing forward through the jungle of old patterns and promises. The energy will be found by returning, by following the breadcrumbs left on the path so you could find your way back to from whence you came. In you was a knowing that seated somewhere in the recesses of your monkey mind, the primitive sense of wisdom, where you knew this time would come.

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Your ever so gentle and intuitive primal mind swathed in innocence will guide you back to where success and abundance is waiting for you. When you get there it will feel familiar like remembering some lines from a poem you read or was read to you as a child. It is in that light of innocence where you will find the power of the creative and the strength to bring to completion and welcome that which you most desire.

Don’t be surprised when you find members of your tribe coming your way to fill the gap of aloneness that you have been feeling. They could not find you before; you were behind a wall of self-involvement and judgment that obscured your authentic self. Open your heart and minds ear to the returning souls and beloved ideals; talk story with the tribe; let yourself be loved. You have been so damn good at giving and fixing; now is the time to LISTEN and to receive.

Your mind has been busy and noisy not able to hear or see which way to turn, where to seek the knowledge necessary to extricate yourself from the hold the ego had on you. Now in this returning you are being shown promising bypaths to where self-knowledge will be found and it is this self-knowledge that holds the key to your freedom. Freedom to love and be loved, speak and be heard and the gift of coming to stillness where you can listen…fully listen to the coded sounds of nature as she speaks to you through the perfumes of nature, the calling birds song, the flowing waters and the beating of your true loving heart all in harmony with the sentient beings of this, your home planet, Earth held in the loving grace of Gaia.

Take to heart these words this week:
Be love and teach peace

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The Veil

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It was a pack of cards with optical illusions printed on both sides, it was a stamp of a skeleton, it was a book about a mysterious girl with a colorful cover, it was a gilded leather jewelry box. It was memories: the memories of times gone past, of another life, of being oh so much younger. Held onto for years, they were tucked in the corners of old trunks and the shelves of bookcases.

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Moving, packing, sorting, organizing: de-possessing. Communing with all of the things in this cabin in the woods: holding each item in my hand and examining where it came from, who brought it, what it meant over the passing of time and asking myself, honestly, whether it had a place in the house anymore. For most things, surprisingly, the answer was yes. Over the past few years, I have done a really good job of shedding the errata, the flotsam of life defined as possessions.

What does it mean to let it go? It is a phrase that we often utter ourselves or hear others utter in terms of life and its myriad experiences. Let it go, we say, not really knowing what that may mean to others or to ourselves. This week is the beginning of spring, although you wouldn’t know it here on the coast of Maine where snow seems firmly planted in our landscape everywhere you look, but nonetheless, Friday is the spring equinox and the beginning of the sun’s warmth beckoning the living things back out from under the ground, under the snow. Shortly, Persephone returns to us and her mother will celebrate by giving us flowers and leaves again. Shortly, the days will become much longer and we will be able to celebrate the feeling of the warm air on our shoulders.

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Let it go….let go all of the stuff that is holding growth, feeling, evolution back. That pack of cards went into the fire, that stamp went to the growing free pile, the book went to the library. Such magpies are we: holding on to shiny objects, putting them up on shelves or in drawers to be gazed upon during the dark moments. What does it mean to really glean from our lives those items that have meaning and purpose, and to slough off that which doesn’t? Does it mean we are losing or gaining ourselves? Does it mean that we are better at the growth, or worse at the remembering? Does it mean we shall find ourselves at some future date wondering where that bit or bob went? Possibly, but after all, it is just stuff. You can’t take it with you, as the other popular saying says.

Spring is a natural time of cleaning, sorting, and developing better habits for the warmer days. It is a time of reckoning with oneself and with the earth as we witness the huge shift that is happening beneath our feet and around our heads. It is an antsy time: a time of intense preparation, hesitation, and promise.

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Where are we all going on this tiny blue planet hurtling through space? What will happen to us in this new year, after the beginnings of it have been so slow and so cold and so dark? The only thing I know is that I don’t know: I feel like I know less as I learn more about this game of life we all are lucky enough to play.

Lately, I have been trying to appreciate something about the place in which I live each day: mostly I notice the mountains that I can see from my front garden: the dooryard, as it is called here. In front of me each morning is a line of graceful, arced mountains that are dotted with trees that appear black and stand out of a uniform field of white. Behind them, during the day, the sky is either white with snow or blue with sun. At sunset, the sky transforms into a pink-purple-salmon wonderland that casts the roll of those mountaintops in beautiful relief. The lake at their base is beginning to melt: the ice is going out, again, as they say here.

As we all make this grand transition, again, as our axis posits us in greater exposure to our central star, my goal is to remember something simple, something about being in the present moment, something that goes something like this:

“Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.”

Frida Kahlo