four years!

I doubt anyone reads this blog anymore, for the few who ever did! Even I couldn't find it without Googling the title... my name didn't bring it up. If I can barely find my own blog, I don't expect many others to come across it.

But that's all okay because most of these posts, especially in later years, were more to catalogue thoughts than to communicate anything to The World, and that's still true. I'll keep posting, maybe not more than every four years but who's it hurting? It's nice to write thoughts down when you have a chance to actually hear them. That proves to be less and less frequent in adulthood.

That's right: I am an adult. I'm not sure when it happened; it sure wasn't during those early years of grad school where all I apparently did was bitch about Florida. But - and I suspect this could be true for most people - I mostly just kept pretending to be one until somewhere along the line I started fooling even myself, and here we are.

Having a real job where you're responsible for other people helps toward that whole adulthood thing. For example, the other day I was asked to decide whether a man's catatonia was psychiatric, when it was in fact non-convulsive status epilepticus - so my insistence it was not psychiatric may literally have saved his life. It's those "oh, that thing I did mattered!" moments that really drive home that whole sense of being a Grown-Up. Like, who green-lighted me being in charge of that? They're just lucky that one turned out okay.

Being married is pretty grown-up too, and somehow I pulled that off. I married Blake last year, and he's hands-down my best friend. We're a lot alike, but one thing I've noticed about marriage is that you tend to take for granted all the things you share in common, and the differences can easily take center stage. He's perennially the reasoned, put-together one to my loose cannon, the Jerry Seinfeld to my Kramer, but if we look past that, beneath it we see eye to eye on nearly everything. That makes being partners in life pretty easy, most of the time.

Skills I've mastered in my one little year of marriage so far: Don't be a jerk. Think you know better than he does? Proud of that supremely clever jab you thought of? Keep it to yourself. When your focus in a marriage is on being the winner, that's the one way to guarantee you're not gonna win. Winning's about you both coming out on top, together, as a team, so forget about being right or smart (even when you are, you're so right and smart). Be ready to hear it when you're wrong, and be open to the possibility you might really be wrong. Maybe you'll even learn something from it. Be ready, without hesitating, to say you're sorry. Especially when you were a jerk.

Owning a house is also grown-up. Somehow, I have found myself on a farm in Indiana. This is one of those things that goes back to winning in a marriage being a team thing. Husband really wanted to live in the country. And you know what? Not me really, but there's an adventure I hadn't tried yet. Gainesville ended up being a wonderful place to live - I obviously survived the cultural vortex I thought it'd be when I left Chicago, and got things out of living there I wouldn't have known. So why not learn to live in the country? I've started a little vegetable garden, learned to run our John Deere mower without chopping my limbs off, and next try my hand at beekeeping... once this full body reaction to poison ivy clears up.

I don't know how I got here to this adulthood thing, but it actually isn't that hard. As long as you don't think about it too much. Thankfully you can't - there isn't usually the time to spend navel-gazing like I could when I was writing these earlier blog posts. There's a partner to hang out with, dogs to feed, a lawn to mow, laundry to do. But with this little update completed, I do still intend to drop in with some thoughts now and then, or at least a poem or piece of writing that needs saving. Till then...

fear

When I was little, my family took summer vacations at the Jersey Shore (how different a thing that's come to mean), where we often visited a little amusement park called Fantasy Island. Probably at my obnoxious insistence. I was obsessed with Fantasy Island, especially with the Sea Dragon - a long mechanized boat that swung back and forth, higher and higher. I loved how it made my stomach leap as it swung back toward earth. My poor charitable Uncle Scott rode that thing with me over and over... and over, getting back in line the minute we stepped off.


It began with the Sea Dragon, and then there was the Alpengeist, the Millennium Force, the Incredible Hulk. I fell in love with the feeling that rushes at you when everything is happening too fast to possibly have any control of it.

You might call that adventurous.

But in other ways, I was so unadventurous it's embarrassing to admit. Finishing high school, I thought little about college and basically only applied to the liberal arts school in my hometown. My mother had to practically shove me in the direction of the dorms, or I'd have lived at home to save money. It's not like I was exploring in other ways, like getting into trouble. And it's not that I was afraid. I was just content where I was, and hadn't thought a bit I might be missing anything.

I'm not sure what made me decide to study abroad. Embarrassingly, again, it was at least partly because my boyfriend decided to and it looked like fun. But looking back, I'm just glad something got me out the door.

I drove around the streets of my hometown before I left, thinking how sad it would be not to see them for 6 months. Ha! I forgot them entirely the moment I arrived, and lost myself in the streets (and trails, and pubs, and people) of Leeds. Everything was different, everything was new, and was changing too quickly to possibly feel in control of it. I clung to my sense of order for maybe a month before realizing it was futile, and consented to simply follow wherever it took me - a scary but heady resignation.

Still, I was embarrassingly afraid of adventure. I plotted a 4-week backpacking trip through Europe because the University kicked us out of the dorms for Spring Break, and spent the weekend before sobbing from fear of being homeless in a foreign country for a month. What if I got lost or ran out of money? What if I couldn't find a place to sleep for the night?

As it turns out, I did all of those things. I lived for a month from what fit in a bag. I got lost, missed trains, had no pillow or any clue what people were saying or what the signs meant. I went to the Alps without a coat; I drank too much wine and got in trouble with the Hungarian police; I'm pretty sure I got bedbugs in Prague. I showed up in cities with no idea where I'd sleep, and returned home broke and smelly. I also returned home knowing that no matter what happened, everything would pretty much always be all right.

It's not that I was a different person, but that life was different for me after that. The trip unlocked a part of myself I hadn't known existed (and had previously been tapped only by roller coasters). It unlocked a thrill in exploring the unknown by teaching me the unknown's something I can take on. Probably not coincidentally, shortly later I experienced a big loss, which comes to most people at some point or another. For the third time in a year, I was reminded that although we might feel like we hold the steering wheel to life, often it's life steering us, and sometimes living hurts a shit ton.

It took time (as it tends to do) but I recovered, and when I did, I knew again in a deeper way that no matter what happened, everything would be okay. But REALLY. No matter what. Anything. Okay. And to be honest, since then there isn't anything that really scares me much. I can move across the country alone, jump out of planes, dive deeply, fly down the highway with the throttle open, defend a dissertation, and soon, let bad-ass ladies knock the shit out of me with wheels are strapped to my feet. Whatever.

More importantly, I'd like to hope that fearlessness frees me up to love more radically than I did before. When you realize how little you need to be fine, you're free to give without fear of running out. When you know how little control you can have, how hurt you can be and still get back up, being in charge and dodging blows matters less, while your reserves for giving to someone who needs it grow bigger. Once you come to know what you're capable of, nothing can ever take that from you... and the illusion of being Boss of Life is something you don't want back anyway.

present is not precedent.

I'm reading Milan Kundera's "Ignorance," about a Czech woman who emigrated to France to escape Communist occupation. Milan Kundera is always an engaging blend of history, philosophy and storytelling. This (timely) selection, in which she seeks to express how hopeless her situation feels to her people, is no exception. Read on; comments follow below.

"Irena would quote a stanza from Jan Skacel, a Czech poet of the period: he describes the sadness surrounding him; he wants to take that sadness in his hands, carry it far off somewhere and build himself a house out of it, he wants to lock himself inside that house for three hundred years and for three hundred years not open the door, not open the door to anyone!

Three hundred years? Skacel wrote those lines in the 1970s and he died in 1989, just a few days before those three hundred years of sadness he saw stretching ahead crumbled... .

Did Skacel have it wrong when he spoke of 300 years? Of course he did. All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind. But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment. During what I call their first 20-year span (1918-1938), the Czechs believed that their republic had all infinity ahead of it. They had it wrong, but precisely because they were wrong, they lived those years in a state of joy that led their arts to flourish as never before.

After the Russian invasion, since they had no inkling of Communism's eventual end, they again believed they were inhabiting an infinity, and it was not the pain of their current life but the vacuity of the future that sucked dry their energies, stifled their courage, and made that third 20-year span so craven, so wretched.

In 1921, convinced that with his 12-tone system he had opened far-reaching prospects to musical history, Arnold Schoenberg declared that thanks to him, predominance (he didn't say 'glory,' he said Vorherrschaft, 'predominance') was guaranteed to German music (he, a Viennese, didn't say 'Austrian,' he said 'German') for the next hundred years (I quote him exactly, he spoke of 'a hundred years'). A dozen years after that prophecy, in 1933, he was forced, as a Jew, to leave Germany (the very Germany for which he sought to guarantee Vorherrschaft), as was all his music based on his 12-tone system (which was condemned as incomprehensible, elitist, cosmopolitan, and hostile to the German spirit).

Schoenberg's prognosis, however mistaken, is nonetheless indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the meaning of his work, which he considered not destructive, hermetic, cosmopolitan, individualistic, difficult, or abstract but, rather, deeply rooted in 'German soil' (yes, he spoke of 'German soil'); Schoenberg believed he was writing not a fascinating epilogue to the history of Europe's great music (which is how I tend to see his work) but the prologue to a glorious future stretching farther than the eye could see."

It seems human nature to believe the way things are now is the way they will always be. Often in despair, more despair is all we can imagine. When we're on top of the world, nothing could bring us down. That present-moment experience of despair or joy, as Kundera alludes, is magnified by our perceived promise that our present predicts more-of-the-same.

Most of the time, 300 years of sadness runs out early. Or the glorious future stretching infinitely ahead is suddenly curtailed. Whether the surprise is from bad to good or good to bad, we never, ever know what today will be until we get there. Nothing is promised. Nor is anything doomed.

Yet it's difficult for human beings to live without the context of the past or the future. Today we remember - or repeatedly replay - what has been. Today we worry about tomorrow. We hope to be happy. Nobody easily turns that off, "and nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world."

Stephen Dunn likes to believe that at his eulogy he'll have been able to say, "The truth is, I learned to live without hope as well as I could, almost happily, in the despoiled and radiant now." Some might assign positive value to that lesson, some negative. (Personally I avoid assigning value unless it's real obvious, and here I don't think it is.)

But I'll venture at least that a "now" without hope (said differently, without attachment to the future) might result in less suffering, whether it's experienced in the context of gain or loss. If today is joyful, I'm going to live it for all it's worth, because I don't own tomorrow; I have little say in what it will bring. If today is sad, I'll sit with that sadness because today it is my house-guest... but I won't despair as though it's a permanently-settled-in couch surfer. :)

"The Guest House" (selection)
Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all.
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

everything.

I usually read for a bit in bed before I turn out the light. That's what I was doing a few minutes ago when I found this in an old collection of poetry (I keep folders stuffed with a mélange of photocopies; this was one).

I have no idea how I got it, but loved it enough to run back downstairs to share with you. Enjoy.

A favorite poet, Mary Oliver, writes about a favorite painter, Vincent van Gogh.
He said (which I often think of): "If one intensifies all the colors, one regains peace and harmony."

Mary says:

No doubt in Holland,
when van Gogh was a boy,
there were swans drifting
over the green sea
of the meadows, and no doubt
on some warm afternoon
he lay down and watched them,
and almost thought: this is everything.
What drove him
to get up and look further
is what saves this world,
even as it breaks the hearts of men.
In the mines where he preached,
where he studied tenderness,
there were only men, all of them
streaked with dust.
For years he would reach
toward the darkness.
But no doubt, like all of us,
he finally remembered
everything, including the white birds,
weightless and unaccountable,
floating around the towns
of grit and hopelessness --
and this is what would finish him:
not the gloom, which was only terrible,
but those last yellow fields, where clearly
nothing in the world mattered, or ever would,
but the insensible light.

you must become what you are.

Cities are traditionally cast as loud, lively places where there's too much going on to hear a thought in your head. Small towns and suburbs, on the other hand, are cast as sleepy places where you can hear the crickets chirping, see the stars at night. But I have to say that for me, cities have always been the place for silence and solitude.

Visiting Chicago, I returned reflexively to that mode: walking in silence for long stretches and staring out the windows of trains, a comfortingly insignificant part of the play. It's embarrassingly narcissistic (and unproductive) how long I can listen to myself think. And startling the space a city creates for it. There's so much life that you can be alone and never feel it. So much to see that you can look and look without ever bothering to touch. For me, I spent so much time crammed in with people, I forgot what it was like to let someone in.

The smaller town I live in now has moved in on that spacious silence. At least part of it has to be the South, where everyone seems ready to talk. Another part is the smallness of the sphere, where it is impossible to be anonymous. And I think part must be that when you're not routinely crowded in with others, you start paying more attention to the person next to you.

There is also room to be heard, and therefore someone is listening for you to speak. You can't get away with silent, receptive observation for very long. Instead, you have to enter into the conversation. What you are has to be shared, for better or worse. If you're not sure what you are, you'll inevitably start learning. Whatever ghosts you carry will come awake without the cornucopia of sights to distract them into slumber.

I confess I came to Chicago feeling a little sorry for myself, and Chicago let me keep that up. It was Gainesville that wouldn't let me get away with withdrawal and self-pity. Gainesville made the difference between enduring and flourishing. By then I had stopped using my voice for long enough that I wasn't certain what it sounded like or what I had to say anymore. Not being allowed to be silent helped me find it; after four years, I'm past starting to know.

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Two quotes from this past decade's theme: 1) A dear friend: "Shannon, I try to live with a rough sketch, a framework that leaves space for unexpected beauty to appear." 2) Natasha Bedingfield: "Drench yourself in words unspoken / live your life with arms wide open / to the years where your book begins / the rest is still unwritten." (A pop starlet singing about breaking tradition and being undefined is a little laughable, but it stuck with me even so.)

Erikson's stages are totally delayed for my generation; the twenties are our time of self-discovery. My roughly-sketched friend is now studying Nietzsche, who wrote an entire book on how one becomes what one is. His framework is still loosely structured, but it's building along the scaffolds of his self-discovery. He's going directions he'd been hesitant to take but never stopped loving, and has turned from the paths others chose for him. He is becoming what he is, like an internal compass whose magnet grows stronger as he discovers. And still, as he becomes, the future sprawls wide and mysterious before him.

Five years ago I was enamored with knowing my life could be anything, at ease with a shapeless future hovering somewhere out of sight. I'm still comfortable with - excited about - all I don't know. Still in love with the possibilities of this one wild, precious life. But it also couldn't be anything anymore. Now I know what inspires me, what burns me out, what's a misuse of what I can offer. I've surprised myself by being better at some things than I'd thought, and much worse at others. I better understand who I am, and that means I have an idea of where I'm going, as well as where I'm won't go. More and more these days, my magnet points the same way every time.

It is remarkable to discover you're not floating around full of possibility, but feeling a pull - which is still full of possibility. There will undoubtedly be a host of deviations I don't foresee, and passions I don't know about until I stumble on them and they catch fire. But with each, I'm becoming what I am. And I would bet: as that internal magnet grows stronger, you get better and better at navigating your way down the turns in the path.

man oh man oh man

... were Lester Burnham's last words before he was shot in the head in American Beauty. Moments earlier he was surprised to find himself, when asked how he was, suddenly able to say, "I'm great." And really mean it. Standing under the blue sky and bright sun on this most beautiful of days, I found myself looking up and saying his words: man oh man oh man (and instantly felt the urge to check behind me for a gun).

I write to share the same revelation. I'm great. Anyone who's been around knows there were patches that were decidedly not great (I refer especially to the month of camping out in an abandoned construction site), and there will be such patches again. Making it all the more important to point it out when life is great.

This all came to my attention after encountering situations I honestly thought would have set me to longing for one thing or another. I was genuinely surprised to discover that instead of wishing for what I don't have, I really prefer what I do have to anything else. I'm where I want to be. In every way. I love my family and friends, and find those relationships so fulfilling. I love what I do, and feel competent to do it. I feel good about the food I eat, and the clothes I wear. I don't wish I was richer, thinner, prettier, more or less anything. All of which has nothing to do, incidentally, with being perfect.

Same goes with life. Mine's not perfect... there really isn't even that much to it. When I'm not doing the usual work of living, I'm mostly just bumbling around on the guitar or attempting to cook or playing frisbee with the dog. But some of my contentedness probably comes from welcoming and preserving that simplicity. From loving what I have and allowing it to be enough. And, from being grateful.

I learned my style of gratitude from listening to Dr. Crump teach about the Old Testament Jews. I don't know half of what I perhaps should about Judaism, but I remember learning that all those detailed, particular rituals in the Torah pretty much boil down to being grateful ALL THE TIME. For every moment - getting up, eating meals, leaving the house - there is a ritual that in essence says, "thank you."

I loved that idea, and took it for myself. Gratitude is, really, a good deal about what it means for you. It re-benefits the beneficiary. :) It means you name it when this moment is good, and this one, and this one. Before you know it there's beauty to name all over, and suddenly the whole world offers itself to you (harsh and exciting...). Practicing gratitude opens your eyes to the goodness that's all around, and it makes everything brighter.

Gratitude doesn't only brighten what you see. It helps you see what you might have otherwise missed. Emily of Our Town saw all there was to be grateful for when she returned to one day of her life after she died. She saw every good thing as she had never noticed it in life: coffee, and oranges, and her mother. Clocks ticking. She cried out that so much is happening in every moment, but it happens so fast that we don't notice; we don't have time to look at one another. She asked, "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?"

We don't. And honestly I think if we did, we would all spontaneously explode. But by practicing gratitude, hopefully I'll be able to say that for most of those minutes, I was there... and it was great.

baby be friends with you.

It's a beautiful night, at the end of a frustrating day. The moon is conspicuously hanging out like a bulbous, ill-disguised troll behind too-thin strips of clouds. The air smells like wood burning in fireplaces, and it's cool for Florida, but - being honest with ourselves now - it's still warm.

Bob Dylan is singing "all I really wanna do-o-o-o is, baby, be friends with you," while a certain herding dog demonstrates grave concern about the source of that yodeling. Friends are calling my attention lately. Calling me away, I think, from the inclination to label a given day, or anything, as frustrating.

Like today: I all-out forgot two meetings I had fully planned on the day before. And messing up things for which you can't turn back the clock is frustrating! But a friend commiserated about all the things she's missed too, and reminded me how small those mistakes turn out to be against the backdrop of all you usually get right. Another friend suggested how to mend things with the folks I'd stood up.

Like last week: defending a dissertation proposal is stressful, and is just part of the stream of challenges that keeps coming allll the time. Sometimes I worry the persistent work will erode my sense of fun! What if I forget? But a weekend away with a friend who pointed out her surprise that I "play as hard as I work" (and who should win trophies or something for her own ability to do exactly that) let me have a couple days to remember no matter how many papers I write, I can still bring the ruckus.

Like other friendships. As a girl who's historically thrown her friendship around every which way - to highly variable outcomes - I've spent a lot of time working at people with whom my efforts don't always pay off. I still get frustrated when they don't. But - but. I'm starting to learn. Those friendships that stay have a way of drowning out frustration at what doesn't stay. Where one attempt at connecting fails, there is a net of other connections already there to let me know what I'm really looking for. And how incredibly blessed I already am.

It's fine when it doesn't work out. See, you launch enough of your little filaments (as Uncle Walt put it) and plenty of those gossamer threads will catch somewhere. The ones that need to will. The bridges you'd probably rather not form are usually the ones that won't anyway. And there's a beauty in that. Some strange, benevolent efficiency of loving, maybe. We find our anchors where we belong.

Not to say I won't keep flinging out proverbial filaments at just about whatever crosses my path, including any number of long shots. Some things are entirely ingrained. :) But there is comfort in being reminded that whatever efforts fail, there is a web of friendships ready to hold you if you'll look for it. And if you keep on flinging: well, not everything will work, but there will keep on being something - someone - there to break the fall.