second chances

Are there others of you who practice this ridiculous and addictive habit of self-sabotage? I seem to have almost a fear of succeeding: when I put my finger on it, pin it down, it is because each choice made is an un-choosing of countless other things. Floating around in my subconscious is the idea that if I am admitted to Naropa, if I go to Colorado and become a wilderness therapist, I will not be a midwife, or a rock star, or a nomadic poet, or a neurosurgeon. It seems, also, to be irrelevant whether or not these are even things I want for myself. I simply cannot stand to watch the choices go away. There is a reluctance to ACT in my own life, to CHOOSE, that I do not understand. Recently someone observed that I've lived my life like a multiple-choice assignment, not carving out my own direction or answers, taking only what is handed to me and not asking for what it is that I truly want.

But what DO i want? Oh, isn't this the question! What do any of us want? The story of the Green Knight would have us believe that what we want is to have our own way. But to have our own way is the most dangerous thing of all. As per the Dalai Lama:

"Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck."

And George Eliot chimes in: "And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it." I have been so hesitant to follow my intuition. The last time I went with my gut, I dropped job and love and security to swan off to California. We all know how that ended: stuck in Los Angeles for 7 years in an oppressive, loveless marriage. At least, that's the way I've been spinning the story. But what if I looked at it this way: I followed my intuition and left the world of D.C. and empty politics, became a landscape designer and solar installer and art teacher, made some of the dearest friends of my life, learned kung fu, had two beautiful and miraculous children, and discovered that so far, there is no hardship I cannot survive. What if that were my story? Would it help me continue forward instead of always holding this wish for revision? I see it as both a weakness and a great strength of mine, the ability to meet someone where they are, to give infinite chances to those who have hurt me, or lost their way, or made mistakes. I hope the world will extend me the same allowance----and, usually, it does. But I rarely extend the same allowance to myself. It would be interesting, I think, as an experiment, to try being harder on others and easier on myself for a while. Or maybe nix the harder on others part. Maybe just be easier on myself. I am back in Boulder for a second attempt, the first having gone sour in every conceivable way. I left my work, my children, my taxes and housecleaning and responsibilities in California. Here, I wake and recite my dreams, sip cappuccino whilst murmuring poems back and forth with my beloved, graze on chocolate and salmon, follow my whims and appetites. The mountains are to the west, snowy and sleeping. It is easy to befriend others. When I return, I cannot help but feel that everything will have changed. tides rising here, i am unafraid, expanding. aware of the inevitable contraction. (there is a tide) there was an answer in the sheets a story being told somewhere to which i knew the ending (in the affairs of men) there was laughter for a morning, snow melt, singing letting life in, still, despite the warning, (which taken at the flood) there will be a reckoning, and yet everything has already begun. (leads on to fortune) it is past time. it is time. “There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat.And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.” -William Shakespeare

children and time

it is an endless string of requests. can we stop and play tag? could we pull over and look at the fish in the neighbor's pond? will you tell me a story on the way? where is my cape? come outside and splash in the hose too, okay? i feel put-upon, exhausted, stressed. i see a long tunnel of errands: bus trip, groceries, unpack and put away, laundry, homework, cook dinner, wash up, return phone calls, plan trip for grad school interview this weekend, renew library book. the light at the end of it is me, alone, with a cup of tea, SITTING DOWN. i just want to get to that moment. i ignore and snap and hedge. no, there's no time. we'll see the fish later. i want to concentrate on getting there. i don't have time to look for your cape, keep track of your own things. i've got a lot to do in here, can't you just play by yourselves for a while?

but today xir turned to me and said you are always in a hurry. what are you rushing for? why can't we just have fun?

suddenly i could see myself through his eyes. THAT mom. Somehow i have become THAT mom.

yesterday we biked to the movies, the ones by the lovely lion fountain in downtown culver city, and the boys wanted to run through the streams of water while we waited. i fussed and went on about sitting in wet clothes in a cold movie theater and meanwhile the fellow i've been all gushy about in the posts below laughed and told them yes, be careful, you might have too much fun! oh no, don't have too much fun, get out of there! and ran through with them.

that used to be me. what on earth happened? what am i so afraid of? since when did i care about damp clothes in movie theaters? since when did i pass up a chance to play tag, or look at fish swimming?

i suppose there are no easy answers. dinner, after all, does need to be cooked, and the clothes do need to be washed. but a life that leaves no room for impromptu games of tag or running through the hose is not a life i'm interested in living.

where is the time we thought we would have? the time to sit and look at the moon and work out a song on the guitar, the time to lay in the grass and doze, or browse through several books of poetry, or play long involved games with your children until the shadows grow long and you've lost any sense of the hour? have we really spent it on dishwashing and grocery shopping? but how else could it ever be? i am at a loss.

how i love you, xir, and your ability to cut through your frustration and speak to me clearly. how i love you, anainn, and your laughter and flexibility. i want to take care of you, but not at the price of never really knowing you. what is to be done?

numinous beginnings

"The numinous beginning, which contained everything...." Carl Jung, 1957

A few months ago I wrote this in my journal:

"You just can never tell. Every unfolding day throws life into a new perspective, or adds an ending that turns what you thought was an anecdote into foreshadowing. Things just KEEP HAPPENING. So the past is mutable. There can be no conclusion, so there can be no story, and no story line. What freedom!"

It has been a strange week, a week almost out of time, nesting and dreaming and allowing life to surprise me. Not building up defenses to lessen the shock. Letting myself ride this, to see what will happen. Trusting my intuition, one more time.

So, suddenly, I love someone. It is as though I have known him for ages. I recognize him. And knowing him now throws my entire history of love into a new light: he very strongly resembles my first love. his manner of speaking and his smile are reminiscent of the boy who drew me all the way across the country. and his birthday is one day off from that of the boys' father.

Might these similarities have been what attracted me to all those others in the first place? Echoes of this yet-unknown person that I somehow knew was out there, shadowy reminders of a love I would one day experience?

(Well, as I said to my friend on the phone this evening, you simply cannot talk about things like this without sounding dippy. I apologize.)

And if I am making all of this up--as I feel, sometimes, I must be--well then isn't it wonderful to know that I have the capacity to imagine something this sublime. That it is there, in my heart, the potential to love like this. It gives me renewed faith in myself and in my ability to negotiate a path through this wild world, a path that stays close to the heart of things.

It is a time of great changes for me. This weekend I am flying to Boulder to interview for the wilderness psychology program. My life here in California is drawing, one way or another, to a close. And wherever it is that I may go, I know that I will go with renewed resolve to live this life as if it matters. Whatever else may come of this, I know for certain that the days of setting the stage--living on the surface--are over.

cocooning

this has been a week of poetry for me; poetry and music making and that first desperate blur of falling-in-love.

i spent the morning writing poem after poem after poem, and though i happen to think they are quite good, i am not going to print them here because they are all about sex. ahem.

so this afternoon i sent my new love off in the rain and welcomed my children back home, and here we are, cozy and safe, the boys dreaming, mama processing what the heck just happened.

i so often describe, here, the difficulties of living in a small space that i want to take a moment and list the lovely things.

1) i have such a low overhead that i never feel any financial pressure.

2) a thorough, no-holds-barred housecleaning never takes more than a day.

3) when one is in love, one's beloved is never out of sight.

4) since i need work only a few days a week to cover my bills, the rest of my time is devoted to family, creativity, sunlight, development...and i do not feel limited or defined by the work that i do.

i feel such gratitude lately for this warm, dry nest. and also...

remember the list i made on new year, detailing the three things i wanted for 2011? well, one of them, naturally, was to meet a wild gypsy musician who would adore me and write songs with me and feel the adventure, the poetry of life just as keenly as i.

so: he's here. (next time i maybe won't put quite so much emphasis on the 'wild' part. i'm just saying.)

cabin fever

Reigning changes! has there ever been

a time so quick-moving, cursive--

this is your mind, as you've known it.

these are your questions,

you've heard.

If the rain had come sooner, I'd seen it

the way I saw everything bloom.

In the end there is just one decision:

to love with exquisite precision.

Oh, the beautiful rains. The beautiful, beautiful rains that I love so much when I can cocoon in my peaceful house, listen to Billie Holiday, write letters, drink tea. The beautiful rains that trap me in this tiny prison with a six-year-old climbing the walls and a toddler screeching about his hurt finger...or elbow...or heel...or whichever body part aforementioned six-year-old most lately stepped on.

The morning was a pastiche of me trying to keep the toddler out of the knife drawer, trying to find a square inch of counter space to prepare food, breaking up deafening squabbles over toys or juice or which book to read.

I did get a little more clever toward the afternoon, dreaming up art projects all of us could get into (collaged vision boards: Anainn rips up the magazines, Xir trims and slathers glue, I provide thoughtful artistic guidance like "maybe it would work better to put the glue on the paper instead of on your brother"). And after dinner, while Anainn slept, Xir and I conducted a tournament to see who could fling a rubber band the closest to a valentine we'd pinned to the chair. Somehow, we made it to bedtime with all major arteries unsevered.

As we cuddled in bed reading a chapter of My Side of the Mountain we were startled by a sudden flash---Xir's first lightning sighting. He was beside himself. We turned off all the lights and waited by the window until the next one came: a beautiful arcing streamer of fire across the suddenly colorless sky. I remembered the final couplet of a poem I wrote years ago:

what's the most I could be without being frightening?/I want me to strike you like lightning.

...which reminds me of an unrelated thing that happened to me and upon which I simply must remark although it is entirely tangential.

It turns out, I am still capable of falling in love. The whole enchilada: butterflies and doe eyes and poetry and stomachaches. I had thought that sort of thing was an artifact of teenage hormones, anima/animus projections, time and place and choice. I had forgotten what it could be like, that certainty, that sense of falling not into something, but into place.

My judgement about whom to fall in love with, alas, remains spectacularly abysmal.

a cautionary valentine's tale

I gave my landlady an artisan handmade heart-shaped soap for valentine's day.

she ate it.

(giving your heart isn't enough. you need to provide instructions.)

we don't follow any sensible trajectory.

I'm not even going to try to explain how I ended up in a stranger's car outside my house near midnight, passionately discussing the existence of God and the importance of belief with a Hasidic scholar of the Talmud who is having a crisis of faith. I am a firm believer in seizing every eccentric possibility life presents, never knowing which one is going to be the one I remember always, the one that redefined who, and how, I want to be in this world. This belief has led to many bizarre encounters and situations that, when I recount them to my mother years later, cause her to retire to her room for a 'nap'.

And, sometimes, they give me an eerie sense of disembodiment, as though I'm looking at someone else's life. Because this situation couldn't possibly belong in mine. I wonder sometimes if it wouldn't be better to just have a routine, keep one job and one city and one circle of friends and just be freaking NORMAL for FIVE MINUTES.

All of this was running through my head as I held the hand of a man I'd met an hour before and listened as he poured his heart out to me. And what struck me was: how similar we are. Seeing this man walk down the street in his forelocks and fringes and head covering, I would imagine his life: more productive, more learned, more pious thoughts than mine. Probably a sense of security to belong so certainly and obviously to something. Probably no interest in, say, Wicca, or transformation psychology.

But this man described a cartoon to me, and I laughed at the truth of it: on a New York subway, someone is looking around at all of the other passengers. A thought bubble above his head reads look at them all. staring blankly, reading, not a thought in their heads except getting through the day. I'm the only one who sees the meaninglessness of it all, the underlying truth, who feels the sword of life so keenly!

Thought bubbles over the heads of all the other passengers read exactly the same.

Talking with this man (who does, in fact, have a pronounced interest in transformation psychology, though I'd've been right about the Wicca) I could feel the pain I'd been living with the past few weeks subside: the pain of being shut out of someone's life without explanation, the pain of being rejected by people, institutions, sometimes even children, and how powerless it leaves you. Because the truth is, once you've been rejected, there is nothing you can do or say to win your way back in. The power is entirely in the other person's hands. And that does not sit well, does it? If I can just talk through something, I am always fine. But being shut out cuts that cord and leaves me questioning everything about myself, sure that I deserved it somehow.

But it is not true. The truth is, we all are just living these lives inside our own heads, completely unaware of the thoughts and motivations of others, shielded from raw human interaction by personas and professional roles and pat commentary and pretty outfits. Listening to this man, I realized suddenly that no one knows me, really. I don't even know myself! Nobody knows anyone else! We're changing all the time, and we don't follow any sensible trajectory!

This blog was just the beginning of what is turning out to be a multifaceted, all-consuming honesty project for me. A fitting transition into the study of psychology, no? I am practicing interactions with strangers that have no facade, no roles, no positive spins, no scripts. Not that I think all human interaction should be this baldly brave: I just want to know that I can do it. That there is someone in there underneath all the stories and situations and changing outer forms who remains the same.

And as I find her, it is becoming very clear that she looks just like everybody else. Which is to say: scared, confused, loving, wishful, unsure, lovely.