November 10, 2016

A series of unfortunate events...

...though I am grateful that my things arrived, they did so

in an inconvenient way and time....I am still in the midst of boxes to unpack...

...the remnants of a vicious cold with vestigial sporadic

stuffy/runny sinuses and a tiredness that will not quit are still present and accounted for....

...so much so that I accidentally nodded off while in a meeting...not just any meeting...but a meeting at which there were bigwigs from the federal government and the Provost's office...a place where a good impression is important...and at one point I looked down and saw that

my notes had reduced to a few little marks on the paper.  I am so glad that I didn't drool or drop my pen.

...both the associate dean and the dean herself asked about my health, and commented - individually...at different times...about me appearing to sleep during the meeting,

and that it is better to excuse myself when I am feeling that tired than to sit there and give a poor impression.  Well...too late for that now...the only saving grace is that the Provost will be leaving in May and we are actively searching for a new one...I'll have to be careful about nodding off at their interviews...oh...wait...I think it may be too late for that...I'm remembering how tired I was at Provost Interviewee #2's gathering...can you spell S-H-E-E-P-I-S-H???????

...I took myself out for dinner before picking up a few items at the store...after dinner, I walked into my favorite organic store, and it is empty: the frozen fruit is gone, the meat is gone, the dairy is gone, and - the worst - all of the fresh produce is gone - and the employees have not been told what is going on.  If I have to find yet another shopping place I fear I will go mad.  I just don't want more change...

...and of course the news of he-who-must-not-be-named,

complete with Brexits and Russians applauding his victory  and sooooo looking forward to working with him...The good news is that I won't be moving to Britain or Russia - but I do have friends in Canada...who are willing to let me sleep over at their house and let me do errands for room and board...Ok, that's not unfortunate...that is VERY fortunate...

...finding out today that there are not "two" annual reports

that must be completed each year - but "three" of them...Meatball's "two out of three ain't bad" does not apply in this instance, and I now have another report to write that was due 6 months ago...

...and did I mention the college-level self-study that is

due?  It's different than the one mentioned above that is 6 months overdue...

...today was the first day that I thought, "I don't know if I can do this job..."

I'm thinking...Oy...nothing...there is nothing "in there"...just feeling overwhelmed...

And then a friend calls me on the phone...listens with an open heart...gives me a pep talk...tells me how capable I am...asks me what I'm going to do for myself to help me feel better...

...and I realize that - more than all of this - Grief is rearing

its head.  It has come in for an extended visit - and perhaps has been slowly intensifying over time.  My guess is that when my stuff finally got here, it swelled to its now ginormous size, and is the underlying culprit in how low I'm feeling right now.  

So - that's my first order of business.  

Grieve, my dear one, grieve... 

June 26, 2016

Really nothing to say here...I got into the blog this evening (11-10-2016) and on this particular post it said "Draft."

I opened it, and there was nothing there.  

It seemed important - for some unknown reason - to preserve Draft, so I did.  Tonight, on 11-10-2016, I created a new post instead of using Draft.  

So - what you are reading right this minute was started on June 26th, 2016 - but nothing was really written until tonight....right now. 

That's a long time in between posts - and even longer between the last actual post before Draft, and the one I actually just posted before this one earlier this evening on November 10th, 2016 - but will probably show up after this one, given that this one was Draft, and the other one wasn't.

I do think that I've fallen off the wagon of self-care...my trip back to Wisconsin for my things, and then to San Diego for work has left me feeling asynchronous and off-kilter.  Definitely off my game.  

Damn.  Time for exercise, acupuncture, massage, and radical self-care.  Making the time for it...loving my body and my heart and my soul up as much as I can stand...maybe dancing this Saturday evening...

In the words of a friend from Minnesota: Yuppers. 

June 26th, 2016: Joy Guides

This morning I woke up, and chose a book from the many that I had borrowed at the Library yesterday.  It didn't work, so I chose another.  These first two are going back, I think.  They were written in first person, and the lead character was chattering on...my ears felt assaulted...the person would stop talking when I stopped reading - but would begin the incessant chatter once I started reading again.  Mismatch.  Both will be going back today or tomorrow.

I pulled three cards from a deck that I use to support centering and focus in my life.  The first card suggests an attitude or frame of mind with which to approach an issue, the second points to a way to shift the present energy towards a higher level, and the third suggests what I may be overlooking.  Here's what I drew:

 The first is attending to my physical body.  Duh.  No Brainer.  I have not been nurturing my body - even driving it like a slave master.  This truly does point to the attitude with which I need to move forward.  I am grateful - again - to be reminded of the obvious.

 The second is a "note to self" - a reminder that all of us - me, included -  are children of Spirit, and that "Any self-rejection and self-criticism" I may feel are "wounds inflicted" on me by an "unconscious world."  They are not a part of me, and not part of my Spirit. 

 



 The last brought a query: it represents what I may be overlooking.  Basically, it states that I need to get ready for the party, as all of my efforts have paid off.  I can call it "luck," but it is also due to my hard work over a long time span.



My first thought was, "How can it get any better?"  I have had difficulty getting to my Grief (yes, capital "G") because of the many gifts I seem to have received this past year.  When I reflect back on where I was a year ago January, and where I am now, I can only say that I am astounded and blessed.

And, when I stop to pause, even this Grief is a gift because - in the midst of all of my life's new changes - I am finally "getting to" the things that were important to me in La Crosse...the things that bore me up amid the other necessities that needed doing...and were, at the risk of being a little sappy, the gems that shone in the darkness.  All of those things deserve my attention, now.  


                         This really is "Good Grief." 

                      The very BEST kind of Grief....

I am blessed to have so many things to grieve, and honoring my grief is the very best way to honor those things which are no longer near - Mom inlcuded, with her lack of physical presence felt as strongly and as as poignantly as the good things in La Crosse.

Today, the tears started with a post on Fb.  A former student lost her dear pet Hedgehog - to cancer, she believes.  I met that hedgehog.  She brought him for a surprise visit - a "therapy hedgehog" - for one of the children in our UW-L Peds Play Lab.  He was wonderful.  I ached for her loss. I remember that visit - and it brought me joy.  

So, once again, there is never really only this or that emotion...one or the other...black or white...but those wonderful shades of gray wherein - truly - all of the colors lie.

"If there is any secret to this life I live, this is it: The sound of what cannot be seen sings within everything that can...there is nothing more to it than that."

June 25, 2016: At Last the Grief Comes...

This is the time that I wish I smoked.  I'm sitting here after a decent cry - and still crying, as a matter of fact.  And I am worn out, yet still have more tears to come.  I am spent.  What I would like to do is climb the hill behind my apartment house and sit in the trees - the small patch of woods that lines the Old Croton Aquaduct Trail - and smoke a cigarette.  

I can imagine how it feels....lying up there in the dark of the trees...drawing off the cigarette...

the burning of the smoke through my breath passages and then the slow blowing out after a momentary "holding it in."  There is something lonely in that picture - yet also stoic...relaxing...centering.  Right now, when I take a deep breath in and let it out - slowly exhaling - I just cry more.  There is nothing, cool, calm, centered or stoic about it.  

And I just ran out of fucking kleenexes.  Thank the Gods and Goddesses that I bought toilet paper this evening.  Otherwise I would really be screwed. 



I thought I would go into the city for a show and a contra

dance tomorrow evening - however, there is no dancing.  No dancing until next September.  Too hot, I guess.




I want to get up tomorrow and ride my bike in the marsh.  I want to walk downtown and have a beer and a sandwich at the Bodega.  I want to pack the car and camp at Rock Island and sing in the boathouse.  I want to sleep on Keith's sailboat named Grace and I want to go sailing.  I want to paddle in North Ontario with my Wise and Wild Women.  

                           I WANT 

Because, as Andy Rooney says: 

Familiar things bring comfort to us all. 

This funny space...the only way through it is through it...it is beyond my understanding how surrendering to the chaos (and, well, I was going to say pain but it really doesn't hurt physically) of grief is one of the most grounding things one can do - at least that I can do.  

 The only way to get home, really....

April 13, 2016: No Words

No words.  I am still reeling from the death of one of the characters in All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr.  

The book is small vignettes - the chronology initially out of sequence, but moves forward and backward in time until they meet and move forward from that point on.  The words were so strong that I kept seeing them play out in the way a foreign art film might: images, few words, but images that appear, stay, and then move to others.  The flick of an eyelash, the color of a dulled sky, descriptions that made my heart pour open and left me weak with no thoughts present.  Only emotion.  A sad heart.  Weeping for my fellow humans and the atrocities that are committed.  How can we be so?  It left me aching for those who are victims, and aching that it seems so difficult for us to draw lines in the sand, offering excuses rather than saying no.  And then aching for those who did say "no" and suffered the dire consequences, but perhaps died feeling like they had lived.  I don't know.  I simultaneously felt sick and empowered at the same time.

This left me vulnerable in a way that was good, for I had to meet with a student who verbally went off on one of my faculty in front of her peers in the classroom. 

Oy.  She was so upset and out of control that she really doesn't seem to understand how she was perceived, nor does she remember it the way that the teacher does.  I don't know how her peers perceived it.  All of them victims - her peers and teacher victims of her unharnessed and unregulated tantrum, and she of herself - victim of her inability to reign herself in.  

And yet, her tears...her distress...her anxiety did not sway me.  "I sort of lost it," she said.  "No," I replied.  You did lose it.  No sort of - you lost it."  I wanted her to know that this pattern of losing it, apologizing, feeling ashamed and embarrassed and disappointed, and then moving on was not going to happen this time.  The pattern would stop - or at least not be functional - in this situation. 

I know it was right action.  For me to have smoothed things over - to have accepted her apology and feelings of remorse - was to be less than honest.  It reminded me of the "abused" forgiving the "abuser"...the abuser's remorse is so strong, and they are so busy beating themselves up, that the abused feels there is little left to do but forgive the one that hurt them.   And so goes the pattern...

I know not yet what will happen.  I will be reporting this to the Student Affairs office.  Her behavior broke at least 4 of the 20+ behavioral guidelines for students on campus.  It needs reporting.  All I know is that the book somehow prepared me to stay in an open, vulnerable place - and that coming from "there" was what gave me the strength to say "stop."  

With all of the work that I have done over the past several many years...with my learning and practice in avoiding "idiot compassion" and naming what is there with true compassion...well, I feel like I passed a final exam of some sort today.  And while I still feel the emotion of it all - am still living in that soft tender spot of being human - I feel proud and humbled and human.  I can't think of a better place to be.

And this morning?  My daughter called.  The bunny that lived in our yard last summer, and looked like some sort of adolescent, seems to have had at least one baby, which peeked at my daughter from behind the kyak that leans up against the fence.  

And are you seeing Simba standing on Pride Rock,

lifting his new born baby for all to see?...With the "Circle of Life" playing in the background?  I know I did...it brought me to tears this morning, hearing the joy and wonder and thrill in my daughter's voice at her discovery of the new bunny.  And can I say?  I'm not overly fond of bunnies - yet I still got a lump in my throat when she told me.

And now, I am tired.  Zzzzzzzzzzzz.........

March 30th: Very Early in the Morning - Actually in the Middle of the Night

Went to bed early - fitful sleeping as my stomach was upset. Woke up at 1:30 and ate a bowl of cereal.  When it was clear that I was going to be awake for a bit, I went to my default: reading.

I have been reading The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. Already I want to begin at the beginning and read it again. It spans the history of the McCarthy era, and how people can be crucified on truths that have been twisted into lies...how people in power use fear and ignorance to control so many...how the press and media use and abuse their reach to play a hand in that control. In so many ways it reflects the politics and the fear that still is so ever present in our society now.

Her book has left me feeling "rode hard and put up wet"...somewhat raw...a sign of genius writing and a well-told story. It leaves me overwhelmed with the truths that it tells through its fiction. We, as a species, are so capable of great love - yet allow the slightest bit of fear to rule and we can turn into hateful creatures - worse than other living things because we have the ability and intellect to choose differently, but more often than not succumb to the fear and hurt others instead. For the love of Pete - reading about children being burned, people being killed, reputations being ruined - all by our own hands. Oy.

Nothing much

left to do at this hour but have a good cry and try to get some sleep, and maybe practice some h'oponopono.

March 28th: Note to Self: Remember to Read Old Postings

Ahem-Ahem...

"Well, I just re-read my post of January 30th, where I was trying to bind my heart and head together," she said sheepishly.  

That post continues to be reflective, I think, of this space I am in now - where I am striving to stay in my body and balance this physical vessel with my heart and head.  

The Almighty Spiral of Life, always coming back to remind

and gently poke and prod us forward - or to show us how magnificently far we have come.

Yes...the journey has been far.  And yes, the journey is now - well, NOW.  

And with that thought, along with this ordinary act of taking time (which borders on being a miracle) and putting words to virtual paper (not so miraculous), I can feel myself moving back into balance.  
                                    
                            

 
Yes indeedy - 

Simple Acts

ARE

Sacred Deeds.

With Love,

Deborah