Getting a leg up

I am dictating this as I am in my car currently and I do not anticipate having ample time before my work shift begins to get in the amount of writing <comma> to lay my thoughts down on paper <comma> as I would like. I'm trying as best I can to speak in the same way that I would if I was writing but I'm finding it very difficult to find that same flow of thought <comma> the same ease of stringing words together one after the other as I would if I were writing.

Now I am experimenting with speaking more slowly as though I were writing. This seems to be one of the main differences between the spoken word and the written <comma> that being the speed at which the words come out.

I have never been an eloquent speaker. I stumble over my words.  I stutter. I have word-finding difficulties. These are problems I do not have when I am writing. Of course in writing you can edit and a fair amount of editing does occur. Still there is a flow, a meditative quality to writing. This is not something I experience when I speak. It is as though the words <comma> the concept that I want to convey is present inside of me like a cloud with the words floating randomly inside like gas molecules inside a container. I have difficulty picking the best words and in the best order.  This is less difficult when I am writing.

My experiment has turned up interesting results. The words are coming more easily. I feel less need to go back and remove periods and add conjunctions. The sentences are forming more easily <comma> in a more pleasing manner. Perhaps this is something I can implement in my daily life <comma> at work <comma> in situations where conveying ideas <comma> thoughts and concepts are important. However listeners might think it odd <comma> the way I am speaking. It is robotic <comma> the slow thoughtful speech. I find it odd listening to myself. Because I have been speaking this SA, it is not the essay I thought it was going to be when I sat down to speak it. I am not certain that I had much to gain from trying to speak my thoughts. As I sit here in the parking lot of the hospital finishing these thoughts I realize that it is taking time away from the writing.

47

At 47 I no longer think of myself as 40-something but rather 50ish.  Time no longer stretches out in front of me like train tracks with the infinity sign up ahead.  Being 60 used to be beyond infinity somewhere out there, in a land far away.  In the land of my 30’s, I was mired in an unhappy marriage with small children to care for and though each day was busy, they were also interminable.  Overcome with the trials and tribulations of parenthood, I didn’t think concretely about what lay ahead.  I lived with the "someday" mentality.  "Someday I'll do this."  "Someday I'll do that.”  That someday was always somewhere out there down the road, waiting for me to catch up to it and I believed I would one day happen upon it like a child finding a penny in the road.

Perhaps it is a natural part of maturing or maybe it is because I have more time on my hands to contemplate these things now that my children are out of the wicked woods of adolescence that I began thinking more concretely about my goals and what it would take to achieve them.   Let’s face it, the amount of time I have left on Earth to do the things I want to do, to go to the places I want to go and to own the things I'd like to own, is finite.  I expect that the last decade or two of my life will not be spent hiking mountains, taking adventurous travels or rowing sea kayaks, right?  I mean,  the end point of my life is nearer at hand than my start point.   The things I dreamed about two decades ago seem like folly to me now.  I want to create new dreams and in so doing, I have to ask myself, what is important to me?  What do I want to achieve, see, experience and what do I need to do to make those things happen?  In asking the questions, I realize that the power to do those things lies within me, and it always has.

************

It was somewhere after 40 when I came to terms with the fact that "someday" was in sight but the things I had dreamed of were not.  I wanted to beat myself up for having not made plans for “someday”.  I was stupid and naive.  If only I’d planned ahead!  I didn’t think these things consciously but there they were, riding the rails of my subconscious and following along in the caboose was the belief that I had my children too young.  I had not lived enough or worked enough.  I had not figured out who I was or what I wanted.  Now that I have allowed them to become conscious in the process of writing them down, I think that it was just as well to have had my children when I did.  Besides the usual health related arguments supporting childbearing during early adulthood, I’ve decided that early adulthood is also preferable because during that time we lack the wisdom, insight or foresight necessary to make meaningful long term plans.  Hell, 50% of us who are married with small children will no longer be married in another decade and we didn’t see that coming when we said, “I do”.  All the better I say, to be self-absorbed, frantic and frazzled in the pursuit of surviving the trials and tribulations of child rearing, parenthood, marriage and the balancing act of our multiple selves - self as mother or father, self as wife or husband, self as athlete, friend, child, employee, artist, member of CHADD, MADD or AA.  Is there still time to soak in the tub? Calgon, take me away!  Yes, what better time is there to be anxious, self-doubting, and to dream frivolously of touring the Canary Islands via yacht than in our childbearing years?  What is the dreaming of someday if not a form of a “Calgon, take me away” moment?  I say, the dreaming of frivolity served its purpose.  Those were dreams never meant to be fulfilled.

**********

When I was a teenager I knew without a doubt what it was I wanted to do and there was nothing my school teachers or my parents or any other naysayers could say or do to convince me that it was a fool’s errand.  I wanted to be a ballet dancer and I wanted to prove them wrong.  I pursued dance with single minded purpose throughout my youth and the dream of proving everyone wrong was realized.   Yet, I wanted more than that.   I wanted to be a soloist one day.  I can’t say that I gave it conscious thought.  This seems to be a trend.  I knew I was not principal ballerina material.  I did not have that extra something, the umami, that makes one stand out above all others.  I was okay with that, but I did want to rise out of the herd of the corps de ballet.  Perhaps my lack of daring to give form to this inchoate dream was part of the obstacle in making it so, but I’d proven the doubters wrong.  I was good enough to make it.  If only  “good enough” had been the only ingredient necessary to endure the pressures of the calling.  A tough skinned psychological makeup was what I lacked and I left dance in the nascence of my career.  

There were many things I loved about ballet such that even in my most downtrodden states, when I thought myself fat and ugly, someone doomed to be past over again and again, I still looked forward to the daily routine, the work in the studio, the progressive perfecting of the body’s positions, the movement through the toes, the building of strength, holding the leg higher and longer, and the control required in the air, on pointe or during adagio.  I looked forward to picking out my leotard in the morning and matching my eyeshadow and earrings to complement it.  I liked the excuse the cold drafty theatre provided to bundle up in leg warmers, sweaters and down booties and I liked the way whistling both echoed and got lost in the rafters.  I observed how the older girls in the company had applied their liquid eyeliner to make their eyes look larger and how they used white to highlight or browns to shade their features.  I’d come in the next day and try to replicate what I’d seen.   Like Pavlov’s dog, I became physiologically responsive to the sound of the orchestra warming up in the pit which was piped into the dressing room through the intercom.  It energized and excited me for the performance ahead.  The ringing, toots and strums of the various instruments was a cue.  It was  time to put the last bobby pin into my hairpiece and to step into costume.  I looked at myself in the mirror as the dresser, standing behind me, connected the hooks and eyes running up the bodice.  I felt beautiful and oh, so privileged.   Though the sum of these things equalled an enormous loss when I left, it was losing certainty of purpose which pained me most.

********************

I have few distinct memories of the following few years.  That period of time exists as a fresh painting wiped through with a wet rag. One snippet of conversation from that time has stayed with me.  I had gone to meet with my teacher of English composition.  It was the end of the quarter.  I sat in a chair facing his desk and he handed me my final assignment.  We discussed my writing and he asked me how it was that I still considered myself an artist now that I no longer was dancing.  I said that I still believed I was an artist.  I just hadn’t found my next vehicle for artistic expression.  The question highlighted for me the fact that I was adrift, searching, but I didn’t know what for.  Even without knowing the object of my calling, I still felt its tug.  

****************

Last August I took a short road trip to Whidbey Island.  I stayed at this wonderful place with gardens and bird fountains.  My routine was simple.  I woke, dressed, made my bed, joined my hosts for breakfast, and then I gathered my laptop and my water and made my way to the Adirondack chairs on the back lawn overlooking the gardens where bunnies roamed in and out of the landscape, bees gathered pollen from the lilies and birds splashed in the fountain.  As the shade moved during the day, so did my chair.  I inched myself farther and farther under a tree until my chair could move no farther lest I wind up sitting in the gardens themselves.  Every hour and a half I’d get up to stretch my legs.  If it was lunchtime I’d make myself a tuna fish sandwich and eat it while I strolled around the gardens listening to an audiobook on my phone.  On other breaks I might venture down to the neighboring dirt road which was closed off to through traffic by a chain which crossed the road at midway.  Large blackberries grew on the bushes across the road from a well kempt property with a large rolling lawn and scattered apple trees.   A broad woman stood on the front lawn raking debris.  Her hair was long and gray.  It was neither pulled up nor arranged in any particular fashion but rather hung there over the back of her dress.  It was the type of dress difficult to differentiate from a nightgown, a muumuu, white with large red flowers on it.  I wondered if she had adult children who would be lucky enough to inherit the property when she died.  She looked like she bought it years ago along with her husband who was now deceased as evidenced by her being the one doing the yard work.  She was capable and loved that home.  Why shouldn’t she stay on after his passing?  She took pleasure in the upkeep even if she was slower than she used to be.  I hoped she didn’t mind my stopping to pick blackberries.  The blackberry bushes were not on her property, still they seemed more hers than anybody’s.  They were on unimproved land across from her house.  Hers were the only eyes which gazed upon the bushes day after day while she tended the lawn or looked up from the kitchen window while she washed dishes.  That seemed enough reason for the bushes to be hers.  Indeed, I felt like a trespasser as I walked up and down that dirt road passing her house again and again during my 2 days on the Island but it was such a good road to stretch my legs on and to prepare myself for another sitting in the Adirondack chairs.  

When I took my break at 5pm, I kept thinking that I’d get one more writing session in before calling it a day but that never happened.  I’d go out in search of supper then take it to the water’s edge to eat where I sometimes watched the people and their small children walk past and remember what it was like to have my own small children.  It made me smile to remember.  I began reading a book from the shelf of the cabin I was staying in and when I returned from dinner I did not want to put it down just yet.  Before I knew it, the sun was setting and it was nearly 9pm.   There was a rhythm and structure in those two days.   I slept well and I exercised my body.  Life was balanced and I, at ease.

************  

Writing is many things to me.  It is  how I tease apart, sort and organize my mess of mixed up thoughts and feelings.  It is where I make meaning of things.  It is a way to know and to be known.  It is intimate in a way that conversations rarely are.  It is something that I look forward to, something that doesn’t have to wait for someday.  It doesn’t require a whole lot of planning or foresight and when my pen hits the page, there is certainty of purpose.       It is a way to connect to the universal.  It is a way to heal.

Sending hello to the electrosphere

That I've just published my first new entry in 6 months may have made you wonder where I've been and have I still been writing?  My latest post was an excerpt from an email exchange I had with a good ole friend whom I haven't had much contact with the last couple of years though she has been on my mind often.  I finally picked up my pen, so to speak, earlier this week and made contact.  I suppose I could say that in doing so I was choosing to power up my space suit, making an active choice to nurture a connection rather than to passively let it fade away.  In doing so, I have reaped the reward of not only a rekindled relationship but also the reward of prose.  So thank you to my Longhorn friend, Jenny, who has doubly blessed my life this week.  My absence from the online page does not mean that I am not still around, nor that I am not writing.  To the contrary, I've been writing.  Oh, I've been writing.  I've been writing something longer, with more grit at this point than gratitude though I think in the end product we will find that gratitude is the glue that holds the narrative together.

While I know that no one has been holding their breath wondering about why I'm not posting or if this  blogging was just a passing phase, something I wonder frequently, I felt the desire to wave out to my friends in the "electrosphere" and say, "Hello!  I'm still here and having fun.  I hope you are too and I hope you will continue to follow me as a commit myself to this journey of the writing life.  I can't imagine my life being well lived without it.  Where ever I am, whatever I do, never doubt that I am writing, too."

Focus

I want to own myself.  I want to be fully in control of my actions.  I want to make my choices deliberately, consciously, not by rote learning or automatic defense mechanisms.

I am often avoidant without knowing that I am being avoidant.  I am unconscious and in-deliberate in it.  Many of my feelings are still instantly suppressed.  This is a new depth of self-awareness.  It is  like journeying to a deeper level of a darkened castle in a video game.  I do not know in which rooms I will find the demons but I know most by name: avoidance, dishonesty, justification, self-righteousness.  They are all defenses of fear.

Bit by bit God is illuminating the rooms in which they are held.  I needn't be afraid of them.  They are known to me.  They have served to protect me.  They have watched me grow.  They are only waiting for me to release them into the hands of God.  Like children who have been separated from a beloved parent, they run from their rooms to greet me, happy they no longer have to be on guard and acting in extremes but are freed to bless my life with the assets they offer when used in moderation.

I am coming to know myself more fully and to appreciate the wealth in my life experiences.   I will never own myself one hundred percent of the time but I can be grateful for the process of self-discovery which brings not only knowledge of my shortcomings but also nurtures the growth of foundling capabilities and transforms old skills into expertise.

Where I focus my time, thought and effort is where I experience growth.  Am I using my time wisely to develop the qualities, skills and expertise that I say I desire?  This is the question I must ask myself again and again.

chapels

What makes a chapel, a chapel, I ask myself?  I come here seeking peace, silence, tranquility.  I look around the room.  I see the stained glass art hanging on the wall.   Beneath it is a long wood table.  A single vase with a dry arrangement rests at one end.  At the other is a guest book.  I recall turning pages in that book, reading some of the entries, the reasons others had come here.  Some were grieving the illness or loss of a loved one.  Some were seeking solitude, answers or guidance.  I recall reading the entry of an employee who had visited on her last day.  She left a testimony of what her work had meant.  She had come to say goodbye.  She had come to remember and to be remembered.  Feeling inspired, I wrote my own entry that day.  Remembering this makes me smile.  I continue scanning the room.  In front of me is a table made from a tree trunk upon which my water bottle sits.  I am sitting in one of five chairs arranged in a circle around it.  There is a couch against one of the walls with a side table and lamp.  The couch and chairs are upholstered in light shades of blue, the walls painted a calming green.  There is a place for Catholics to kneel and pray and a rug for Muslim prayer.  In one corner is a cabinet made of a warmly stained wood.  The upper half contains a historical display of religious texts.  I take this all in and decide that it is not the things in the room, exactly, which make this a chapel.  It is the subtraction of things.  

There are no discussions to be had here, no meetings, no supporting rationals to be given.  Here, I need not be “on”, ready to go, shoes laced.  The decor, it contributes, but its contribution is in that it is almost meant to go unnoticed.  Yet, I notice this.

I ask myself, is it the absence of things which allows for the presence of God?  If I took any particular moment in my life and subtracted what was going on, would I not find this same space?  Would I not find God?  

I come to the chapel seeking silence.  So then, am I not seeking God?  And when I am seeking God, do I not go to quiet places, to the wilderness?  Do I not go alone?  To give God my attention, I go to quiet places and I go alone. 

Meditation is a place of silence.

Meditation is a place of solitude.

Meditation is a place where I can be with God.

Meditation is where I go now, to seek silence, to seek solitude, to seek God.

Physical pain and menopause

I remember being a child standing in our kitchen with the avacado green rotary phone, oblong table and tall kitchen chairs with whicker backs when my mom said, "Dammit, I'm having a hot flash!"

"Laine," she'd say.  "Go upstairs and turn down the thermostat, will you?"

Turning, I'd run and climb the stairs placing my palms down on the steps ahead of me, scrambling like a bear as fast as I could go.  Atop the second staircase against the wall which lay ahead was an ivory trunk and above that, the thermostat.  Placing my hands on the truck I'd jump up and scoot my knees beneath me.  Standing tall, the thermostat was at eye level.  "Just touch it 'til it turns on," I'd hear my mom's instructions in my head.  Gently I'd nudge the lever and like an old engine uncertain of starting, I'd hear the air conditioner turning over.

When I was in my twenties and thirties, I used to live in Austin, TX where it is 100+ degrees in the summer.  When the temperature drops down to 98 degrees in the shade, it feels downright lovely out, "cool" one might say.  I played competitive tennis in that heat where my face grew red, not from sunburn.  No, before each match, practice session or drill group I'd rummage through my tennis bag in search of my Coppertone Sport sunscreen.  It had to be Coppertone Sport. I'd give it a good shake before squeezing its not too greasy contents onto my hand. Starting at my ankles I'd make my way upward, applying it at last upon my face. If I was to be out more than two hours,  this ritual was to be repeated.  My face did not grow pink from sunburn.  It grew pink from the heat.  During change overs I'd pull a rag from a thermos of ice water and place it on my face and neck while downing cold gatorade from another thermos, warding off heat stroke.

Today I live in the Seattle area where more often than not the temperature remains in the 40's or 50's and where I can be infrequently found on the tennis court yet frequently my face is red.  When this happens, the last thing I want to do is exert myself and the only thing I can think of doing is removing my clothing and sticking my head in the freezer.  Should an attack occur while in the car I roll down the window.  Should passengers be on board I know what to expect, complaints, but I have a remedy.  I turn to face them.   The sight of my flushed face qwells their protests.  If stopped at a light, I will stick my whole head out of the window.  I don't care how it looks.  In that moment all I care about is cooling the fuck down.  Yes, physical pain and menopause, what do they have in common?  They are two experiences which cause me to cuss like a sailor. 

The first perimenopausal symptom I had, though you will not find it written as a symptom anywhere, were hot flashes of the ear, typically only one ear at a time.  When this first began, I searched the internet looking for a cause.  Was it related to niacin or some other dietary factor, I wondered?  There were plenty of other people reporting this experience on the web and also searching for answers, but I found no definite known cause.  I was okay with that and let it go.  Sometime, many months down the road, this red hot ear syndrome extended to my whole face. It wasn't so bad, I thought.  I rather liked the novelty of it and it was well worth not having to suffer through monthly periods.  Then the hot flashes grew worse.  They became hotter and they lasted longer.  It wasn't long before the hot flashes spread down my body.  My co-workers pointed out my flushing arms and my girlfriend pointed out that my back was wet with sweat.  Soon it was not only my back but also my belly, neck, chest and legs.  I might as well have been playing tennis on a hot summer day in Austin, TX.  I was, however, strangely grateful.  If I had to suffer through this experiece, at least there was an external manifestation of my inner discomfort, something others could at least see and sympathize with. 

How different this is than suffering from depression where what people notice on the outside is only a hint of the suffering felt on the inside.  It sheds light on the physical acts some will take when they do not have the words to express what they feel inside.  Their acts become their words, their means of expression.  A cut, a burn, a noose, what are these if not visible manifestations of an internal suffering which knows no other way to be pacified, let alone to be accepted?

Turning Over A New Leaf

New post.  What shall I talk about?  Sundays?  Rainy days?  Mondays?  Today is New Year's Day.  In my mind I have a yearly calendar that stretches from January through December like the letter C or the curve of a bow.  December does not connect to January.  To go from December 31st to January 1st you must cross an inlet of blank space.  I have had the opportunity to inquire of  a few others about their internal calendars and none of theirs resembled mine.  Granted my sample is small, but still I find this interesting.  I wonder why my internalized calendar is this way.  

This morning I opened up One Day At A Time in Alanon which is a daily reader.  It has a short entry for every day of the year.  Now, I admit that I have gotten out of the habit of reading from this every morning so it didn't fully hit me that it was January 1st, New Year's Day until I parted the book cover and out of habit, headed toward the rear of the book where December's readings are located.  That's when it hit me that it was no longer December and that I could not read a January entry from the rear of the book.  It was time to start over, time to go to the front.  I closed the back cover, turned the book over and started from the beginning.  I turned a page and then another until I came to the heading, "January 1st".  That's when I got hit a second time.  My internalized calendar is read, like a book! It is turning over a new leaf, finishing a book and starting it anew.   The inlet of space between December 31st and january 1st is the space created when you close a book and turn it over to open it anew. 

To my recollection, my internalized calendar goes back for as long as I can remember, predating my few years of reading Alanon daily readers.  I cannot say exactly why I internalized the calendar this way but I can say that I found feet-up, arms-behind-the-head satisfaction in the epiphany that my internalized calendar not only isn't odd, but is down right poetic.  Indeed, starting your first few conscious moments of New Year's Day with an epiphany is not a bad start at all.