When the Music's Not Forgotten

Some days, when hope comes winging into your heart despite your best efforts at bird proofing, the best you can do is open your voice and sing, try to match the song as best you can, harmonies lifting until there is no difference between who you want to be and who you are.

This, today, is my song: When the Music's Not Forgotten, Deadman

Please come close, for I long for you to hear
Hear the sound
That will rid you of your fears
In a land, where no water can be found
In a place, where there is no fertile ground
Longing for, yearning not to be forgotten
In an age, when the music is forgotten
In an age, when the music is forgotten

In the truth (in the truth)
Speaks of great and mighty things
Teaching us (teaching us)
What the peace of heaven brings
We must give (we must give)
We must give to all the others to those in need (those in need)
Who we fear to call our brothers

Reaching out (reaching out)
So that we are not forgotten
In a time (in a time)
When the music is forgotten
In a time (in a time)
When the music is forgotten

If we stand on a hill and do not touch
How can we do good?
If we wash our hands with all our friends
Where change can really come
If we hide our fears and don't draw near
Have we really lived?
Or are we all just standing here
Hoping there is grace?

In a dream (in a dream)
That I had not long ago
Visions of (visions of)
In a city made of gold
And a sound (and a sound)
That I never heard before
Such a sound (such a sound)
Saturating to the core
Such a sound (such a sound)
One that cannot be forgotten

[x4]
In a time (in a time)
When the music's not forgotten

Cool

I have never been, by my own definition, cool. That term always belonged to other girls, my grade school friend Jennifer's older sister Juie who had Molly Ringwald's 16 Candles haircut, posters of Duran Duran, and a complete disdain for everyone younger than her. Cool.

Or the older girls I saw cruising Fe--Santa Fe St. In Salina--who had thick eyeliner and smoked and had their own cars and seemed untouchable by things that haunted me like wanting to be liked and feeling unattractive to boys.

Or, when I got to college, the kids who were so plugged in to their thing, music or art or whatever, that they really seemed to not even see the rest of us, like we were invisible obstacles on whatever planet of awesome they inhabited.

But, and this is a big one, I think, seriously, that I may finally be sort of, kind of, dare I say it, cool. Possible evidence to that fact: I really don't care what people think any more. I mean, at all. If I want to wear cowboy boots and a dress and a cardigan and sort of look like the love child of Courtney Love and Loretta Lynn, so be it. I think misogynistic rap lyrics are wrong but I rock out to them at the gym and in my car. I'm embracing my multitudes and contradictions for the first time.

Point 2: pop culture references at the drop of a hat that. 4 kids I love hollered "yo ho ho" at me in the hally today--I later learned they'd just left a class where they were reading Hamlet--and my response was "and a bottle of Brass Monkey, when my girlie shakes her hips she sure gets funky.". Yeah. I said it.

Point 3: and most importantly, I can laugh at myself and not just when others are laughing. Today, I said something really dumb about why i don't wear a watch anymore. For those of you who were there, ugh. I stopped wearing a watch because it made me so anxious, I was constantly checking it, feeling like I had to plan and time everything. It made me nuts. But, today, I said I stopped wearing it because "I didn't want to be a slave to time anymore.". Oh, god, even writing it makes me feel like a douche. But, and this is why I may be cool, I immediately said I knew the comment made me sound like an asshole, and we all had a good laugh at it.

Finally, I think I mint be cool because, after all this time of feeling like I wasn't I sort of don't care anymore if I am. And that makes me ultimately cool.

Right? (okay, maybe I still care a little :)

3 Laughs

I have been writing a lot of personally introspective things lately, so tonight I'm taking a break.  These three moments have made me laugh in the past couple of days.  They say a lot about my sense of humor.

I.
Today I misread an email subject that read "Excuse for Gymnastics"--as in please excuse these students who will miss class for a gymnastics tournament--to read "Excuse for Gymnastics" as in these students are our excuse for having a gymnastics program.

I laughed right out loud at myself.  Go me.

II.
Yesterday, after texting a student who was missing from rehearsal, I received a text saying I had the wrong number (I later learned the missing student had incorrectly written his cell number).  I replied "Sorry," and the following text exchange occurred:

Anon: That's okay.  I play the kazoo, can I come rehearse?
Me: Uhh, no thanks, but good luck with the kazoo.
Anon:  Hey, thanks.  My mom says I'm really good at it.

(I secretly wish I knew who this person was so I could tell him/her they made me laugh)

III.
A private joke about "just sitting there and doing nothing" has been making me laugh all day and night since it was first used in the exact way you're thinking it was used earlier today.

Sometimes, a little laughter is all it takes.

I had a lot of it today, much needed, with the friend from III.  Here's to more of that.

Honesty

I have, for a very long time, prided myself on being honest. I tell my students they have to be honest with me if they didn't do or didn't understand their assignments because it's the only way I can help them. I tell them they have to be honest with each other if they want to have meaningful relationships, and I tell them they have to be honest with themselves if they ever hope to live their most authentic life.

I am full of shit.

Well, sort of.

See, I completely believe all of this for everyone else. Sometimes I believe it for me, but not always. And I certainly have a hard time telling the people I love most the truth, especially if it's stuff they may not want to hear. I have this deep need to please, to be liked, and it can get in the way of me being me, of living--you guessed it-- my most authentic life.

So, today, I told the truth. A lot. I said a whole lot of things I haven't been saying, I trusted myself and someone I love to be able to take it, whatever the consequences.

I am too old not to practice what I preach, and if I'm telling my students to practice honesty, I'd better be just as brave as I expect them to be.

Cross your fingers that I made the right choice.

Shoebox

A good friend of mine used to have what he called his 'shoebox of lies.'  He took the name from a Barenaked Ladies song, and his box was filled with old letters and card, gifts from people who had once cared for him, people whom he had once cared for.  We joked about that shoebox thousands of times, but he recently told me he threw it out.  Time to clean house, move on, start fresh.

I have a box like that, not filled with lies, but with the words and music and gifts of one particular relationship.  I have not opened it since I filled it, eyes full of tears and heartsick that I may never see or hear or feel those things again.  I couldn't throw those things out, though.  I couldn't let the artifacts of love, the evidence of joy rot in some landfill somewhere while I wept over their loss.  And I didn't want to be one of those people who thought the love that had existed between us was somehow false or dead simply because one of us made a huge mistake.

I have, of late, been wanting to open that box, to sift and see, to dig and dream.  In my reverse Pandora story, there is no evil to be unleashed by looking, but there are small winged moths of hope that may come flying out should that lid be lifted, and I may be, today, more afraid of those flutters than of any other carnage or chaos because, when hope is shattered, when faith goes, there is simply no other road to travel.

So, for now, the box is buried, the lid latched, and I wait, wondering if there'll come a day to dream again.

Make It, Make Your Way Home

When I was in college, I bought the soundtrack to My So-Called Life.  This song, Juliana Hatfield's "Make It Home," was on it, and it is without a doubt one of the most heartbreaking pieces of music I have ever heard.  Every time I hear its opening strains and then her faint hum before that voice kicks in, the one that manages to be both raspy and girlish, my vision clouds and the world goes blurry, not from tears so much as from a want to believe that we will all find the home she sings about.

I read recently that, when you find true love, it is like coming home.  I imagine it's like entering a house you've never seen but somehow, it's yours.  You belong there.  All the furniture conforms to your body, the bed supports you, the water temperature is always perfect in bath or shower, the sunlight splays across the floor in that way you like that is so singularly yours.  The bookshelves are filled with your dearest loves, the artwork on the walls was made just for you, and no matter what you're hungry for, you can find it in that space because it is where you were meant to be.

Each time I hear this song, I say a little prayer for all of us looking for true love or trying to make our way to the ones we have already found, that we will, before too long, make it home.

Hmm..mmm..mmm...
Mmm..mmm...
Mmm..mmm...
Mmm.....

Deepening night, think on a time
All was bright
Here in this dark place, I see in your face
All is not right

Make it, make your way home
Better than the last
Break it, break the alone
Take a second chance

Open a window, let in the snow
Cold is all I know
Go to the fire, stir it around
There's a warmer place for you to go

So, make it, make your way home
Better than you have
Break it, break the alone
Leave it in the past

Oh, look and you'll find it
Someone wants to love you
Look and you'll find it
Someone wants to love you

Wake it, wake your dream
One forgotten me
Sleepin' deep inside o' you
Heavenly peace

Nothing/Everything

Fay Weldon wrote, or said--I don't know, it's on an old card I saved from someone I don't remember that I found at the bottom of an old hatbox I got from a store that no longer exists--that "Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens."

I want to believe that.

I've spent the past couple of months honing my precious live-in-the-moment skills and now they are sharp as shrink wrapped steak knives, capable of cutting through tin cans, bullshit, mid-thirties heartbreak, and three inch thick candle wax with the same dexterity as slicing a Porterhouse.  I have become an appreciator of sunlight, naps, old movies, new books, all things I have loved in the past but got away from, distracted by life and technology and hopefulness and what ifs and maybe sos and somedays.

I don't want to be someone who says, "I'll be happy if..." and then the litany begins.  I want to be the person who can say, "I am happy now.  As I am.  No changes, substitutions, exchanges or returns."  And you know what, in a lot of ways, seriously, A LOT of ways, I am.  There's just this one thing, this one thing that makes all the rest feel like so much nothing because that one thing has the potential to be the aforementioned everything, so I am sitting here on a Saturday afternoon hoping Fay Weldon in her curvy creamy script on this old red card is right, and that all this nothing that has been happening will soon become the promised everything.

Resurrection

Mary Karr, a writer I devoured this summer like sour candy, sucking on it long enough to make my cheeks ache and then chomping on the last sticky words until I swallowed them, barely pausing to breathe before I reached for another puckery handful, was recently interviewed for the American, a Jesuit magazine. In the interview she talks about seeing God where and when she wants to see Him as opposed to the notion of seeing Him in all things. Much as I love her, and even though I get that sometimes we have to be ready for God to be able to see and hear Him, I disagree with her about not seeing Him everywhere.

Even when I'm not ready to acknowledge or talk with God, I am aware of His presence on earth and in my life. Even in the midst of all the fallout this summer, I still felt Him, but it has been very hard for me to go to church. When i decided to divorce, I attended a new church for the first time, one week after telling my then husband that I just couldn't do it any more. He went with me that day, to the Easter Service at Plymouth Congregational Church, and we heard the pastor speak of being Easter people. He asked the congregation to consider what resurrection was occurring in our lives: what was dying so that we may have new life?

I have thought of that sermon at least once a week since I first heard it, and have listened to it online a few times as well. There was a divinity in the message, a timeliness, a truth and application to my own life that could not have been anything other than God's own presence and voice.

I used to feel stupid talking about my faith. The academic in me, and the intellectual friends I have, have been known to scoff at such open declarations of faith in something many deem intangible. I have had several friends ask me for proof. That sermon, for me, is proof, just as the clacking and singing birds in my trees are proof, just as the sun setting over my yard is proof, just as you, dearest friend, are proof. The resurrection occurring each day in my life is my ability to be born each day in the light of love, to be certain that happiness is my birthright, and to be open to the presence of God in all things.

Descending Theology: The Resurrection, Mary Karr

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in--black ice and blood ink--
till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void
even for pain, he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse's core, the stone fist of his heart

Began to bang on the stiff chests door,
and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now
it's your limbs he longs to flow into--
from the sunflower center in your chest
outward--as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.

From Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins, 2006)

A Reason to Believe

I had a conversation today about soul mates, well, a conversation about a conversation other people had about them. Anyway, I said when I was eighteen, I probably would have believed in soul mates for everyone else, but not for me. In that moment, saying those words out loud, I realized just how screwed up my self-worth was and has been for so long.

I remember watching John Hughes movies and thinking that that kind of love (Blaine and Andy, Jake & Samantha, Watts & Keith) happened to people, but it wouldn't happen for me because I was just too complicated. Of course, those movies tended to conveniently end just as the characters were getting together so we never learned about their dynamic as a couple, band they were all in high school, a place where true love blooms anew each day like mold in a dirty bathroom sink.

But then came Singles, and Steve and Linda, and their relationship, their instant ease and heat, their conversation and ability to reunite after something awful happened between them, made me think soul mates existed outside of high school, but again, where was I going to find that? Where was the man who wanted to listen to music and read poetry and talk about literature and the world and dumb tv and art and all the things that make me tick? Surely that guy didn't exist, and if he did, he was probably with someone else, out of my league, or would like me but only as a friend.

Now, though, I believe soul mates. And not because of some movie, either, but because I have experienced that feeling of having known someone since before you were born, that inexplicable connection that keeps you warm, that causes your heart to beat in time with theirs, that deep knowing that tells you when they are hurt even if you haven't spoken all day. I know how it feels to want to be only one place in the world and that is wherever he is, and I know how it feels to know he feels that, too. And the knowing, this complete certainty that you are, in every sense of the word, meant for each other can be so sweet, so pure and satisfying that you don't need anything else. Just time and that person next to you is enough.

The only thing I don't know is what it is like to actually have that last part. The time, the nearness. I used to have blind faith that two people, once they found each other and felt as we do, couldn't be apart, that the universe wouldn't allow it. Now, it is harder to believe that, though I want to desperately. All I can do is live my life, grateful for the sun each day, the small moments of light that make me lift my head, hoping, even when it terrifies me to do so, that I will be given a reason to believe again.

Ask

Lately I am discovering the power in asking for what I want. It seems such an easy thing, but when you have believed for a very long time that other people's needs are more important than your own, it can be a terribly difficult thing to do. It can be even more difficult when the person you are talking to is someone you love because then last thing you want to do is make him or her unhappy or displeased with you, but again, that puts their feelngs above your own and thus we are back in the teeth-grindingly annoying catch-22.

Another thing I am learning is that I am capable of loving people through any and all circumstances. No matter what someone says or does, if I love them, I love them. I can be angry or disappointed or hurt, but none of those emotions negates the love I feel for them if that love is real. I used to think people could do things that would destroy love, but I'm really beginning to think that kind of belief stems from a fear of being unworthy of love in the first place, and I think we are all worthy of love.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, today I asked someone I love for something I want, and I was terrified to do it because I know that person may read my request as hostile or unsympathetic to their current situation. But, I asked anyway, because what I want is just as important as what anyone else needs and no one can make my life what I want it to be but me, so I have to assert my needs as readily as I try to provide for the needs of others.

Today, I hope anyone who stumbles here and reads this finds some courage to do the same thing. You are valuable. You are beautiful. You are kind and loved and important and what you want, what you need matters. This is your one and only life. Live it on your terms, be happy, choose yourself.

Couple of sleepy things

Have you ever been so tired you can't even begin to think about sleep? You want to sleep, your whole body aches, your eyes itch, but you can't do it. You lay there, worlds spinning out into the blackness of your room, whole lifetimes without people you love in them, or moments of complete joy that you experience alone.

What is it about the night tht does this to us?

I'm not even particularly dark today, I just can't stop thinking in what ifs.
---
A dear sweet girl I love lost someone close to her today. Would that my arms could reach from here to Boston so that I could remind her she is loved, she is not alone.
---
I taught a lesson this morning that excited me. Poetry about gender, a good friend co-taunt with me. I haven't had that much fun in awhile.
---
I've gotten really comfortable being alone over the last couple of months, but tonight I wish someone was here to tuck me in. That would be pretty great right about now.

100

Today is the 100th post of 2011, officially surpassing the 99 of 2010.  It's sort of a milestone for me as I have been able to write, without any real interruption, each and every day for the last few weeks.  I' feeling myself settle into my voice as a writer--not just here on the blog though the daily practice helps--but also in the things I am working on for publication.

This hundred post mark seems like a good occasion to make a list--I love lists--but I've been struggling with what to put on it.  As simplistic as it may seem, I decided on the following.  It's a little self-indulgent, but then again, so is having a blog to begin with.

Things I Love (in no particular order)

1.  my backyard at night
2.  my dog in the morning
3.  myself
4.  my family
5.  my ever impressive circle of friends
6.  you--yep, you.  I do.  I love you.
7.  the number 7
8.  Tom Robbins' brain
9.  Neko Case's voice
10.  the tree drawings of Birger Sanzen
11.  grapefruit scented candles
12.  surprise flowers from friends
13.  being told I am adored
14.  knowing it is true
15.  my unicorn blanket form when I was twelve
16.  my stuffed hippo collection
17.  my mix and match handmedown furniture
18.  birdsong
19.  the smell of woodsmoke in the fall
20.  fog so thick you can't see two feet in front of you
21.  Van Morrison
22.  dark chocolate
23.  high heels
24.  long, close hugs that make you feel safe and protected
25.  my laugh when something really amuses me
26.  Paul Celan's "Corona"
27.  the films of Kate Winslet
28.  Kate Winslet
29.  that my grandparents--circa Titanic--thought I looked like her
30.  orange day lilies
31.  wildflowers (real & the Monets)
32.  old books
33.  good quotations
34.  Rumi
35.  Bethany Lutheran Church
36.  my Nanny & Grandad's house
37.  my mother's dancing
38.  cool pillows
39.  the weight of Zelda in bed with me
40.  messages from old friends
41.  drive-in movies
42.  Willa Cather's Song of the Lark
43.  Lyle Lovett
44.  plaid shirts with western snaps
45.  soy chai lattes
46.  children's laughter
47.  Jimmy Carter's voice
48.  Holly Hunter's voice
49.  my body
50.  my father's laughter
51.  the hat that still smells like my Mimi
52.  prayer
53.  knowing what I want
54.  meditation
55.  love
56.  reading in the sun
57.  reading in the dark
58.  driving with no destination
59.  heartfelt speeches
60.  honesty
61.  the moment a person realizes s/he learned something
62.  Zelda running at the dog park
63.  the sound of cicadas
64.  large bodies of water
65.  the smell of fresh cut grass
66.  Netflix
67.  pictures from my childhood
68.  long hot baths
69.  the sound of running water
70.  peanut butter toast
71.  vodka tonic with lime
72.  communicating without words
73.  kisses on my kneecap and wrist
74.  letting go of my need to control things
75.  Dairy Queen chocolate dip cones
76.  the sky just before it rains
77.  accents (hearing them, doing them, all)
78.  knowing my life can be whatever I make it
79.  Jack Kerouac
80.  Loretta Lynn
81.  singing
82.  dancing to rap music in my car
83.  Ani DiFranco
84.  Jackson Street Booksellers in Omaha, NE
85.  really knowing my students
86.  really letting my students know me
87.  being a teacher
88.  dark blue walls
89.  starlight
90.  harvest moons
91.  burning fields
92.  the way a good book can change your life
93.  Anne Sexton's poetry
94.  star shaped anything
95.  silence
96.  my faith
97.  cooking
98.  choosing for myself
99.  trusting the universe
100. this moment

Sympathy for Delicious

I just finished watching this movie, while also dyeing my hair--get ready kids, it's way redder than intended--and I cannot recommend it enough.  The movie, not the hair color.  Though, I am happy with both.

Sympathy for Delicious is Mark Ruffalo's directorial debut, he also stars in it. I've been wanting to see it since I first read about it months ago somewhere I can't possibly remember.  The basic premise is that Dean "Delicious" O'Dwyer, an up and coming dj, is recently disabled and seeks out the world of faith healing as a means of coping.  Christopher Thornton, who plays Delicious, also wrote the screenplay, and while I had not heard of him prior, I am now completely impressed,intrigued and maybe a touch obsessed with him.

Thornton had been a working actor for some time when, at 25, he was in an accident that took the use of his legs.  He was unsure of his future in acting, but six months after his accident he was cast as Estragon in a production of "Waiting for Godot."  He played the role in his wheelchair and was so astounding that he won a Drama-Logue award for his performance.  In 2000, he played the role of Hamlet and received incredible reviews; he is the only actor known to have played that role from a wheelchair.  As a former actress and current director, I can only imagine the limitations that must have caused, but I am also fascinated by what amazing freedom that would have given an actor to rely so solely on his face, his gestures, his inflection.  Imagine if all you had to communicate your rage, your terror, your love was your face and arms, your tears and hands, your voice...incredible.

It's stories like this one--Thornton's and the one at the heart of the film--that simply humble me within an inch of my life.  I have been through quite a bit of personal trauma over the last few years, but it pales in comparison to the revision of life that must take place when something as fundamental as your mobility ceases to be what you had known before.

The film speaks to me on several levels--it is a story of personal failure, redemption, faith--both losing and regaining it--but it is fundamentally a story of what it means to be on the road to figuring out who you are, not always liking that person, but knowing there is no other damn road you could possibly be on.  Juliette Lewis--who most recently blew me away in the film Conviction (another totally worth the price of rental)--was brilliant as a drug addled musician trying to connect to anyone who would see her, and Mark Ruffalo's priest intent on being a bright light in the lives of his Skid Row congregants was understated and powerful and sexy as always--that part's not integral to the film, but Lord is that man attractive.

I am learning to let my life unfold before me with no plans or expectations because I am learning that no amount of perceived control ever feels as good as the genuine surprise and gratitude that stems from things working out on their own.  This film and the story of its writer both reminded me today of how, even after seemingly horrifying moments, our lives have a way of turning towards the sun unexpectedly, and a brightness is revealed that would never have been visible to us had we not spent so much time in the dark.

Truer Words...

This song is about a close as I can get to what I feel today.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

I have loved The Rolling Stones for years, and this song in particular has held a special resonance because I loved the idea that, if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need, but I never really believed it.   I totally believed in the first part--that things we want get denied us--but it was the second part that tripped me up.  How could something you need grow from NOT getting what you want?  Especially when the whole not getting part is usually bloody and brutal.

Over the last couple of years I have gotten very little of what I wanted.  A divorce, a heartbreak, debt, loneliness, fear, anxiety...you name it.  What I wanted--my marriage to succeed, my love to evolve, and so on--were all things that required me to control something.  I thought if I could control my ending marriage, if I could control where my love was headed, I could somehow reach that elusive okayness that I'd been missing for so long.

I didn't get a thing I wanted, but I'll be damned if I didn't get what I need.  I didn't need to be my ex-husband's wife, I need to be his friend.  We support and love one another in a way that doesn't fit in a marriage but totally fits in a friendship.  I didn't need an exclusive commitment to be able to love someone as deeply and as totally as I find I still do love another.  I need that man and I to be who we have always been: two souls passionately connected in a way that defies description and has no boundaries.  But mainly, I didn't need relationship to define my value or my worth, but that was--all along--what I wanted.  I wanted someone else to love me to prove I was okay--that I was enough--but what I needed was to love myself enough to know that I was already okay.

The process was brutal and--metaphorically--bloody, and I don't for one minute think it's over, but I am in no hurry to plan or control anymore.  I'm content to live each moment as it comes, moving towards goals I hope to accomplish but recognizing that even if I never get exactly what I may think I want, God and the universe and the big beautiful hopeful world at large will see to it that I get what I need.

Hallelujah.

Gold

For the past six months or so, I have been swimming in a river of anxiety and uncertainty, wondering what will happen next, waiting to be happy, expecting the awaited actions of others to deliver the soothing balm of peace to my fear addled heart.  It has been exhausting, and I realize now the truth of Emerson's assertion that "[N]othing can bring you peace but yourself."

For a very long time I have lived my life along the lines of what I thought the right choices were, what could I do that would attract the least attention, how could I hang back and not make a scene.  I have had moments of stepping out of the shadows, but I couldn't live in that light because my gut instincts, my truest impulses and most authentic desires didn't seem to match up with what the world at large seemed to suggest was right--right for the world, maybe, but not right for me.  I have been my own worst enemy, bombarding myself with negative self talk that sought to judge, to berate, and to wear my own self worth down to a fine white dust that choked me whenever I managed even the shallowest breath.

I became terribly good at pretending things were alright.  I carried on jovial conversations at work and in my personal life, I made strides towards professional and personal progress, and I called on friends when I had a rough day, but never when I had a truly awful one because I harbored an irrational fear of being a burden to the very people who love me most.  I know, now, that I am no burden; I am deserving of kindness and love as much--if not more--in my weakest moments as I am in my strongest ones.

And I know now that I have the right to choose my own path, to stop worrying about what others will say or think and do what is right for me.  Eckhart Tolle said "Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no real purpose," and while I have given lip service to that concept many times, I have not internalized it or allowed myself to believe that my choices, my voice, were enough.

Today, I am beginning to learn that they are.  Today, I am beginning to learn that it is.  Today, I am beginning to learn that all of life is a river and my place in it as natural, as perfect, and as valuable as the gold that glinted up at panhandlers who flocked west for a brighter dream.  And if I want to shine in that river, polished to perfection by each swirl of the curling current, I will.

20 years

The other day, I dug out an old journal from my sophomore year of high school.  I figured it would be a funny sort of exorcism of the demons buried in my girlhood.  Imagine my total shock to discover sentences within it that are identical to ones I have written recently.

My fifteen year old self writes of being lonely, of wanting someone to love me, of feeling like I may never find that soul mate, that person willing to put everything on the line for me.  In my adolescence, I was searching for a sense of belonging, for a place to fit in the world and, sadly, I still am most days.

Reading the entries, I was stunned at how often they referenced other lives, the accomplishments and dramas of my friends and family...I didn't think I was a worthy subject, so I didn't often write about myself, and when I did, it was all about which boy might like me, how I could find validation from male attention, what I needed to do to be more attractive to a potential boyfriend.

How, I wonder, does that happen?  How does a young girl--smart and beautiful and kind and interesting and engaged in the world as I was--not see her own worth?  And why, at 35, am I still struggling with it?

This article, Extreme Modesty: The Case of the Disappearing Self, offers some insight into why smart women, praised in childhood as smart girls, grow up feeling the need to prove their worth and ability.  I feel that, and I feel the need to earn praise that comes my way rather than just accepting it, at least in love relationships.

No amount of self-reflection could have prepare me for the discovery that my central desire at 15 is the same twenty years later: I just want someone to love me.  And I guess, for that to happen, I have to learn to love myself.

Why does it have to be so hard?

Itch

My feet, bug bites strung like itchy red pearls across the arches, on the sole, and nestled into the spaces between my toes, throb with the inflammation that comes from being bitten.

Oral Benadryl, gel Benadryl, and a topical spray aren't enough to shut down the fiery burn that rises like steam from hot tea, hanging in a hazy cloud around the floor.

There are neither shoes nor sitting positions that make this any more bearable, even pricking each bite with a needle (all 37 of them) and then sealing them with ammonia did not work.

An oatmeal bath is the last resort as it will relieve the urge to claw and crack skin, to scratch until blood proves there is something inside me besides pain, but that is only a temporary fix.

The only thing to do in cases like this is to wait.  To go through the motions that promise relief and believe that relief will in fact come.

The Rising

Denis Leary called this song the greatest artistic contribution Bruce Springsteen has made, and I am inclined to agree.

While the events of 9/11/2001 were the inspiration for the song, the message that we can join hands and use our collective love and spirit to rise above whatever fear or sadness we are living in is one that fills me with a profound sense of hope.    I believe that the psychic pain many of us are experiencing today is the beginning of a greater healing.  While our minds fill beatific blue skies them with planes and people bent on rewriting the story of us, I think we can take control of the narrative and become the writer rather than the written.

I pray today for all of us, that we may find love that buoys us above our current circumstances.  Love that sets us soaring through a cloudless sky towards a future of unlimited joy.  Love that reminds us no amount of pain is insurmountable.  Love that wants us to be fulfilled and happy.  Love that seeks to give us the strength to rise, again and again, until all our fears are behind us and we are surrounded by the cool blue light of peace for ourselves and for our world.  And I pray that those I love know my heart holds them in a steady, safe place, and that together we are sheltered from the storm.

I pray, as Bono does, to be a harbor in the tempest for those of you seeking light, and I pray to be that same harbor for myself.  It is time to rise.

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me
Lost track of how far I've gone
How far I've gone, how high I've climbed
On my back's a sixty pound stone
On my shoulder a half mile of line

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearin' the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin' down here

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

La,la, la,la,la,la, la,la,la

There's spirits above and behind me
Faces gone black, eyes burnin' bright
May their precious blood bind me
Lord, as I stand before your fiery light

La,la, la,la,la,la, la,la,la

I see you Mary in the garden
In the garden of a thousand sighs
There's holy pictures of our children
Dancin' in a sky filled with light
May I feel your arms around me
May I feel your blood mix with mine
A dream of life comes to me
Like a catfish dancin' on the end of my line

Sky of blackness and sorrow ( a dream of life)
Sky of love, sky of tears (a dream of life)
Sky of glory and sadness ( a dream of life)
Sky of mercy, sky of fear ( a dream of life)
Sky of memory and shadow ( a dream of life)
Your burnin' wind fills my arms tonight
Sky of longing and emptiness (a dream of life)
Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life

Come on up for the rising
Come on up, lay your hands in mine
Come on up for the rising
Come on up for the rising tonight

La,la, la,la,la,la, la,la,la

Safety

There have been many eloquent articles written and films made about the impending 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 tomorrow.  I do not by any means think anything I have to say will compare to what others are writing/saying, but the date has impacted me this week in a way that I never would have expected it to.

Ten years ago, on this day (the tenth), I put in my two weeks notice at a job I hated and then the following day, the world changed.  I knew people living in the city at the time but thankfully no one I knew was harmed.  The events there did not touch my life in the way that they did for so many others, but it occurred to me this week that the attacks that day are a touchstone in what would come to be one of the most difficult periods of my life.

My mom was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in the summer of 1998 just three weeks after I moved back from a two year stint in Florida.  The serendipity of my return at that time is not lost on me.  She received treatment, went in to remission, and then had a relapse in the fall of 1999.  We spent January of 2000 in Wichita at a cancer treatment center where she had a stem cell transplant.  At that time, I was attending Bethany College and trying to finish up my long overdue B.A.  In the fall of 2000, my good friend Jason and I took a trip to NYC.  Neither of us had ever been and it was a bit like walking into a fairy tale for me.  I had always idolized New York, had thought for years that I would live there at some point, and so I was mesmerized while there.  I even have a picture I took standing between the two towers, leaning as far back as I could to try to glimpse the tops.

My younger brother graduated on the same day as I, he went through in the traditional four years while I took a more, um, Bohemian approach.  I realize now how ashamed I was to have taken so long to finish, how much I berated myself for not going through in four years, for being such a--in my terms--fuck up.  No one else would have said this of me, but I said it to myself, and often.  Then, just a month after graduation, mu baby brother got married and I again felt ashamed.  No one was telling me I should have done those things before him, but I told myself I should have, and it led to feeling badly about myself.

What does this have to do with 9/11?  Well, when Mom got sick, I never let myself get really upset because I thought if I fell apart, everyone else would, too. I held it together so others would have a strong model, or so I told myself.  I think I really was just terrified of letting myself feel anything, and so I didn't.  And then the shame spiral of the next year or so followed me around like a hungry dog, getting angrier and more violent until I was living in an apartment in Lawrence and working a job I hated in KC.  So, I quit the job--thanks in part to a lawsuit that settled and gave me a little cash--and had pipe dreams of possibly moving to, you guessed it, NYC.  But, then...9/11.

The legacy of 9/11 for me isn't monumental, it's not heartbreaking or even all that poignant, but that event signifies the end of a dream I'd had for a really long time.  I sat in my apartment talking on the phone to Jason all day (after being sent home from work), and waited to hear other cities were being attacked.  I kept expecting more damage to be done, and I held my breath in a perpetual state of anxiety.

And this whole week, I've been thinking that I'm still sort of in that place.  All glimmers of the world as a safe place flew out the window for me when Mom got sick, when I shamed myself for my long road to education and for my even longer--and still winding--road to love, and then the final support beams were blown out when the towers came down.

A man I work with said we may not be daily effected by what happened, but we are all intimately effected, even if we don't realize exactly how, and I think he's right.  It was a small piece in the puzzle of my fear-based life, and I let all of those events lead me to make decisions motivated by a need for safety, even in the most unsafe of situations.

In this next decade, I hope to move past this fear based thinking and live a life dictated by complete faith in love because where there is radical honesty and true love, there will always be safety.

Junior High

After teaching The Member of the Wedding over the last week and a half, and then reading this article at Rookie, I asked my students to write 500-750 words of advice to kids younger than themselves trying to survive junior high or high school.  They have to be HONEST, use personal anecdotes, and above all say why they know what they know.  It's an assignment they are all really interested in writing, and I'm going to learn far more about them as people than I ever would if I just gave them a test over the book. 

And, since I want to be at least as brave in my own writing as I ask my students to be in theirs, this is my story:

Junior high can be a rancid fishbowl of unchanged water and scummy surfaces.  My junior high experience was so awful that I barely remember parts of it.  I wanted desperately to fit in, to be seen as pretty and popular, but I had this terrible affliction: integrity.  If I thought someone or something was stupid, I said so.  Tact was not a friend I made until much later in life, and even now I don't always answer when he calls me up. 

I have always had a real problem pretending to like things when I thought they were silly or dumb or beneath my intellectual pay grade, and this lack of subterfuge--my refusal and total inability to camouflage my distaste--may make me funny to hang out with at cocktail parties, but it didn't make me any friends in the image conscious world of junior high.

I wore Palmetto jeans which--from a distance--might be seen as Guess! until you noticed the triangle patch was the wrong color and right side up as opposed to the trendy and subversive inverted triangle of Guess!  I had big blue framed glasses and then, later, green colored contacts.  My hair was teased and blonde and I listend to NKOTB as often as I listened to Madonna, and by eighth grade I was hard core into a hair metal phase that spoke to my intimate need for someone to pour some sugar on me.  I liked what I liked and had no time for people who who were too stupid to understand me.

When student council elections rolled around in seventh grade, I was sure I could be elected president despite my total lack of popularity.  In my heart, I knew these small town kids would want a motivated, hardworking, intelligent young woman to represent them, and so I made locker notes and posters and hung them up all over school announcing my run.  It was an epic campaign by junior high standards and the popular kids were none too thrilled.  They tore my posters down, shoved them through the slats in my locker so that all my ahrd work came pouring out at me each morning, they wrote me notes that said, "Drop out of the race, bitch."  If the GOP needs a team of intimidators as we head into the next election, I recommend they transport themselves back to Salina South Junior High circa 1989 and hire CJ, Jamie, Mandi, and Kristi.  Those girls did not fuck around.

On the day of the election, candidates were to give speeches in front of the entire class: 250 seventh graders chomping gum and waiting to be told why you should win their vote.  My opponent, one of four popular boys named Jeremy distinct from the other three only because he had a twin sister (equally beautiful, equally popular), gave his speech--all two minutes of it--about how cool student council was and how cool he was, too.  He left the podium to riotous cheers and applause.  I stood in my gray acid-washed Hang Ten skirt and pink and gray button down shirt and took my place at the podium.  Just before I opened my mouth to speak, the room erupted into an echoing chorus of boos that haunts me to this day.  Two hundred and fifty kids channeling cruel mob energy my way because I, an unpopular smart girl who believed in making a difference through student government, had dared to infiltrate the inner sanctum of junior high coolness.  The first line of speech, co-written by my dear aunt, went like this: "Hi, I'm S---- D----, and judging from that response, you all know exactly who I am." 

They were supposed to have applauded. 

They didn't.

I gave my speech, sat down, and managed not to cry until I was safe in a stall in the girls' bathroom.  I lost the election, and hated myself for thinking I could be something different than what I was, for believing I could be whoever I wanted to be.

Now, at 35, I see that experience as pivotal to my survival in the world.  Those kids weren't angry at me, they didn't hate me, I'd never even spoken to most of them, so they had no basis on which to judge.  What they were reacting to was my confidence.  My belief that I fit wherever I choose to fit, and my willingness to go after what I want even if everyone else is telling me I shouldn't.  They were afraid of someone who knew who she was at twelve in a way that many of them would never know.

If I hadn't been booed that day, if I'd never felt so small and scared and insignificant, I may not be the teacher I am today.  I can look at my students and tell them they are bright and beautiful and capable and deserving because they are and because I know how important it is to receive those messages from the world at large.  And, if I'd never had that happen to me, I wouldn't know how to survive the horrible things that happen in adulthood. 

It is hard to be optimistic and to believe in yourself, but--in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald--"There are no second acts in American lives."  So, if this is all the time I get, I'll stand on stage every time, boos or no, just to say I was living, just to say I tried.

Detach from Hope

I read a phrase today that has been haunting me: "Detach from the outcome."  The central premise is that if you can detach from the outcome of events as you believe they should be, then you can free yourself to live in this moment instead of living in one that may or may not come true.  While I know in my heart this is a smart way to live, it's very difficult for me to do it.

This idea dovetails with something I heard on NPR this morning.  A man was talking about the disappearance of his father from Libya--he was abducted and tortured and kept in Egypt and has not been heard from or seen--and the man said there is of course always hope that his father is still alive.  His body has never been found and there is no way of knowing if he is or isn't.  The man said that while hope is a commodity we now throw around for political purposes--and that is something that has culturally been perceived as good--the truth about hope is that it never allows to live for what you have and are certain of because it implies that there may be something else.  This can lead to anxiety and a general disquiet that never leaves you.

I have always been a hopeful person.  I have prided myself on it in fact, being able to believe that things would be alright, that all would be well.  Now I'm questioning if that has been good for me or not.  Believing that things will be better someday, believing in the idea of soon, believing in the promises of what could be--it's pretty naive, and it is unrealistic since we have no control over what could be.  Even those who claim to love of us most can throw us off like we're nothing, so perhaps living any moment other than this one--living in hope--is childish.  Maybe it's time to just live in this moment now, maybe it's time to grow up and accept that love and joy aren't things that everyone gets in this life.

The thing about now, though, is that it is terrible.  I am sad, and I can't seem to move past it, and while the blurry face of hope materializes every once in awhile, it never quite comes all the way into focus which, I guess, means maybe it's time to stop trying to see that face.

It's going to be pretty lonely around here without it, but then again, it's been pretty lonely around here for a really long time.

Alone

Someone asked me recently what it means to me to be alone.  She encouraged me to write it all out, to explore where it comes from, why it is so scary.

What I've come up with is this: being alone means no one wants to be with me.  It means I am unworthy of love, not enough or too much.  Not enough to satisfy someone or make them feel like I'm worth the effort, or too much for them to handle--too emotional, too intense, etc.--too little or too much.  Unworthy.

I know I am a good person.  I know it because other people tell me so, but I'm not sure I know it for myself.  I think I broadcast my faith in myself so often as a way to hide the fact that I'm not really all that together.  I'm sort of a mess, actually.  And when you get down to all that's left after your plans have burned away, you discover what you're really made of.  For me, the language is pretty much all that's left.  I am realizing slowly how broken I am, and that is really okay considering I think all of us are, though some are better at compartmentalizing than others.  I don't have that skill.  I can't bury my head in the sand and go numb and pretend that everything is okay when it isn't.

Even my performances each day at work--being good in the classroom, being strong for my students--are all underwritten by this weird twitch in my left eye that won't stop and these odd scratches that keep showing up on my face each morning.  I think I'm wrecking myself in sleep.  Lord knows the dreams I'm having don't help.  Dreams of conversations with a man I love who no longer acknowledges that he loves me.

I keep looking at all my past relationships, the other men this most recent one called damn fools for not knowing how to treat me.  Now that he's one of them, I'm about as heartsick as you can get.  I keep thinking about this one that cheated on me or that one that told everyone I was his roommate, not his girlfriend, or the one who stopped talking to me when the girl he really wanted became available.  I used to think it was my bad luck to find all these assholes, but the constant in every situation was me.  It's more likely that I was being treated that way because I was broadcasting that I didn't deserve to be treated better, so if I want better, I have to believe I deserve it, and right now...well, I'm trying.

It's funny, being alone is the thing I have feared for so long, but it's also the thing that is giving me back to myself, slowly but surely.

I know I'm supposed to learn from this, to grow, to come out better on the other side, and I want to, I really do, but tonight, I wish this silence wasn't so deafening.  I wish there were arms waiting to hold me, ears waiting to hear me, hands waiting to smooth my hair and tell me everything will be alright.  I have to do that for myself now, and it's just not the same.

Information

"Play with the information you have and decide what it really means."--overheard in a meeting today

The information I have is written on my body, patterns of freckles and a birthmark that only appear when I've had sun.  When read by the perfect reader, it shows where I've been and who I am on my way to becoming.  My hair, graying at the temples--accelerated these last few months--a white reminder of fears ability to bleach away color, to remove what was once bright and flecked with gold and replace it with absence.  The deep blue ring around my irises that corrals the other colors, a circle of green bright as any late summer field at sunset, the burnished gold of wheat, a rich brown like river soaked soil, has gotten darker.  Today it is almost black in its attempt to keep the riot in, to stop all the light from seeping out.

The information I have won't do anyone any good just yet.  I know what I know and cannot make anyone else know it.  We, teachers, work with an unquantifiable entity everyday and are expected to assess it, nurture it, mold it, educate it, and even feel for it, but the variable no one likes to talk about is buy in.  If they don't buy in to their own right to knowledge, to their own right to power, to their own right to happiness, no amount of Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, or Hurston is going to make them do it.

The information I have about you clings to the soles of my feet. I plant the truth of you with every step, precisely seeding your stories in aerated ground, each raised instep holding a hundred secrets you're not ready to part with just yet, my five toes kissing the earth with words you love, my heels grinding your hurts and sorrows into a fine white dust that blows up and around me with each new gust of early September wind.  When you are ready to hear your own authentic voice again, I will have a grown a garden of you.  It will sing your life in whispered rushes, each new note more graceful than the last.

The information I have means I am a lighthouse, burning in the blackness above an endless crash of ocean sorrow.  Waves breaking like so many birds, silkily rustling up, flushed from their little sanctuary by a force unseen and unseeable.  This water, intent on destruction, will never reach my light so long as the ladder I climb each evening holds.  So, I find my footing and rise, ever vigilant, to prove the promise most of you are terrified may come true: that if you want it enough, if you are willing to brave the rocks, at the end of your journey there will always be light.

The information I have is made not of words but of water, of wind, of color, and of skin.

Gifts

A man once told me he could walk into any store and come out with twelve things that would be perfect gifts for me.  He was right.  Every gift, every word he ever sent my way resonated deep in that place that lets you know you've been seen, known for who you truly are.

Sadly, he's not giving me gifts anymore, and while the gifts themselves aren't things I'll miss, I'll miss his impulse to give me things.  That burning need in him to show me how he feels, to give me something tangible, something to hold in my hands, to thumb through, to admire on the wall--things that would make me think of him even in his absence.  I will miss him showing me how well he knows me, how much he loves me.  And I'll miss it most of all because I know he still wants to do those things for me, he still feels that way about me, but he isn't in a place where he feels he can or should.

I do not think we are at the end of our story with one another.  I really don't.  I've been praying and trying to figure out why this now, why this way, I have been asking God what to do, how to handle this situation, and after every prayer, another sign comes along to suggest that I shouldn't be in too big a hurry to let all of this go.  A song will come on the radio, the kind of song you never hear on the radio, and it will be one he and I shared.  I read a novel this morning, and in it a young woman gives a young man a gift that I gave him once.  These are just two of nearly a dozen little hints that I should let my belief in love guide me through this and stop believing that what is happening now is the end of all that we are to one another.

Would some people find this kind of thinking naive?  Certainly.  But I don't care.  My life is for me to live, and I will not have the way I feel regulated by the way others would react to this situation.  I know what I know, and I know how I feel, and at the end of the day, I sleep with and wake to myself, no one else.

So, I'm not ready to let go yet.  I'm not ready to say this deep, honest, passionate, easy connection between the two of us is over.  I'm not going to pursue it, I'm not going to will it into anything other than what it is right now--which admittedly isn't much--but I do not believe in a world where people who love each other as we do don't end up together.  It may not be today, it may not be next year, but I believe in the power of what we have, and I believe that when the time is right, we will have it again.  Until then, we live our own lives, and I pray we come back to one another sooner rather than later.  But above all, I have discovered that even when things don't go as planned, even when you are hurt and betrayed and feel the world crashing in on you, if there is real love at the center of what is happening, that love is still worth believing in, and learning that I still believe is the greatest gift anyone could give me.

I Just Don't Think...

Whatever Happens, I Love You

No matter how hard it gets, Morrissey always seems to have a song for the occasion.

Until Now

On the television downstairs, River Phoenix is singing a song that breaks my heart, Until Now.  It's from a movie called The Thing Called Love, and if you've never heard it...here it is:

The thing about this movie, about this song, is that I watched it and listened to it over and over when I was in high school, and I always believed this is how I would feel when I finally met that person that changed my life.  You know the one that you feel you've known your whole life even though you've just met?  The one you can talk to about anything, the ugly, scary, horrible things you never even said out loud to yourself?  The one whose voice curls inside you and lights a fire, warm enough to keep you through the coldest nights?  

I was right about that song, about the way I would feel when that person arrived in my life, but I was wrong about who we would be to each other.  Until now, I believed in forever.  

I don't know how I could have been so wrong.

Perestroika

The cicadas are winding in the trees like baseball cards stuck in bike spokes, or the tired teeth of an old machine grinding tightly against each other without oil, years away from its last lubrication, too dry and too fast.  Its hum, coming and going without pattern, chatters away above the air conditioner's sustained breath--this thing never seems to shut off these last few Indian summer days.

It's amazing that I can still be outside, after 8 on a school night, the sky still orange enough from the very recent sunset that typing is possible, that all things are possible...where (as Corso said) if you were a man--possible--as I am a woman--possible--all things could be possible.

But that's not who we are.

We are im-possible.  Im-plausible.  Im-potent.  There is nothing virile or growing about us.  We are a cut off stalk, the flower with no bloom, the thing that stretched toward the sky all summer and seemed sure to blossom but then, when the heat rose a little too high, snapped off near the ground and now the carcass dusts and grays the yard, to be mowed over this weekend, chaff beneath the blade, another sacrifice to the greening promise of what could have been.

I read somewhere that every rejection is an opportunity for grace, that we must take the 'no' of a person and turn it into a lesson of the universe, a momentary window into who we can will ourselves to become now that all we thought would be, won't.  I want to believe in this, I want to learn from heartbreak, from pain, from the years of trying to control and plan and trust and hope, I want to, but it is so hard.

Tonight, I feel foreign in this first of September sway, the breeze enough to lift strands of hair off my neck that tickle my cheek as they twirl past.  I imagine myself a Russian girl, deposited in the middle of Kansas, a landscape nothing like my own, noises in the trees I've never heard before, a heart full of dah in a country of nyet.

In my perestroika voice, I try to explain that the thing about Russians and vodka has nothing to do with being drunk--the r's clipped off against the teeth, my mouth barely opening to release the swampy words--it is not to do with the drinking, the alcohol, the want of escape from the life we know.  It is about heat, the blossom that begins to open in the center of the chest as the white fire slides down your throat, the swelling bloom that makes you feel, if only for a small moment, that you are not now, and never will be again, so cold and so alone.