A Subtle Application

"If you were to have ten minutes of my undivided attention, would you want it?"
Husband answers, "Yeeeessss,"  drawing the word out in hesitation.
Genius that I am, I realize that I've put him on the spot.    Part of me couldn't resist messing with his head.  He is the catnip to my Cheshire Cat.  I've got him in my sights.
"The next ten minutes are all yours," I purr.  "Go" I say, smiling a mischievous grin.
I'm feeling the power.   I watch my husband shift uncomfortably in his chair.  The only sound he makes is a puzzled, "ahhhhhhh."

Pitying him, I turn off my laser of focused intensity.  Small talk often bores me and I have a terrible habit of verbally hitting people over the head.  Worse yet, I sometimes enjoy their discomfort.  The best things often take time.  "Patience", I tell myself.  Turning my gaze away from him, I allow the space between us to be filled with an easy silence.

His words come slowly at first.  I listen.  My eyes occasionally look into his but not for too long or too intently.  I don't want my words or actions to stop the flow of his.  This is a mistake I frequently make.  Words come too easily to me.  After years of silence, I seem to be making up for lost time.  I can talk about almost anything and a few things with some intelligence.  Words push against my tongue and tumble from my mouth in a chaotic waterfall of sound.  This waterfall often surges over others, their words lost in the frentic torrent.

I remain quiet and alert.  It takes effort.  Listening is a skill that I need to practice.  I hold my tongue hostage. Slowly, the words begin to fall from his lips.  A steady trickle gives way to a steady stream.   I bless him with my attention, often too rare a thing.  His words bless me more.  They bless the patient waiting, this carving out a quiet space, this simple  time spent together.  The Just 10 project brings many blessings.  Words can not adequately capture my gratitude and the joy that the most simple conversation can bring to an ordinary day.

Fatal Flaws

Books and I have been friends even before I could read.  As I got older books allowed me to escape the reality of being a nerdy introvert in a world in which being popular seemed to be everything.  Over the years that world has been broken open many times.   Each time something new blossomed from among the broken pieces.  Each time the breaking was a painful process.

Today, as I stood in the shower, I thought back to a simpler time in my life.  A time when I was young and entranced by the poetic justice of the ancient Greek playwrights.  I remember the term, "fatal flaw" and thought of the hubris of Oedipus.  I thought about the simplicity of having a fatal flaw and of being able to pinpoint it and save myself a world of hurt.  All the while, I scanned the shower and noted the mildew creeping in the corners of the shower door.  "Out out, damned spot."  Real life is messy.  It would be so nice to apply literary analysis to the events of a life and come up with a neat conclusion.  Something about which one could develop an A+ deserving paper or thesis.  Life rarely cooperates with such simple analysis.

As I rinsed the shampoo out of my hair, I remembered a privotal moment.  I was sitting in a graduate class on the Bronte sisters.  The professor had just given an inspired lecture.  I was daydreaming about the day when I would join a faculty at some small college.  Someday I would be opening up the world of the Brontes to a student like myself.  The dream abruptly ended.  I found it ironic that I could imagine discussing the "life" about which others wrote, without daring to live my own.  In that instant, I saw that I had dreams of being an academic because it would afford me a layer of protection.  It would be a noble vindication for avoiding a real, genuine life.  I could devote myself to the analysis of literary character's lives and completely avoid living my own.  The ivory tower of higher learning would become the tower to my inner Rapenzel. 

At this point in this story, one might say that my fatal flaw was lack of confidence.  I sabotaged my academic career with self-doubt.  Depending on who writes the story that may or may not be true.  Yet, today in a shower plagued with mildew in its corners,  my choice to live an authentic live seemed the best choice.  Don't get me wrong.  I'd dearly love to have the respect and prestige afforded a college professor, even if that respect and prestige is held only in the minds of a few.  I'd love to have the salary, even though that salary is meager when compared to the salaries of business executives.  I'd love to live in a quaint New England town in a house centuries old.  That life, that story belongs to someone else.   

My story is one of hard work, of many failures and disappointments, of friends loved and lost, of desiring things that escaped my grasp, of dark years pierced by an hour or two of light.  In my story,    I've cleaned toilets in Alaska.  I've been forced out of a convent.  I've dropped out of grad school twice due to lack of energy, money, stamina, time.  I arrive at 52 years of age with no retirement, living below the poverty level, in a house I can no longer afford.  Yet, I look at this life and know, without a doubt, that my fatal flaw would be found in not embracing it.  All in all it's been a rather amazing life.  I've served bishops and I've served a table full of old farmers.  I'll take the old farmers any day.  I've moved irrigation pipe in the fields and I've written a much praised paper,  an literary analysis of Le Morte de Arthur.  I felt just as satisfied moving pipe as I did understanding medieval lit. 

At times, I do beat myself with the whip of regret.  Fortunately, this flagellation never lasts long these days. There are too many things to do, dishes to wash, showers to scrub, clothes to wash.  Are these mundane tasks less important?  Might they be more important that literary analysis on days when clean dishes, clean showers and clean clothes are necessary? 

I loved college.  I loved my major.  I love that I can think about Oedipus and Macbeth while contemplating mildew in my shower.  This world desperately needs more educated people, more critical thinkers.  I would have been an awesome professor and yet, I don't regret my choices especially the bad ones.  They were all part of my life, a life that I walked into eyes wide open.  My life is messy.  It is grounded in the mundane, in pain, struggles and disappointments.  Honestly, it doesn't look like much right now.  Yet, appearances can be most deceiving. 

If I were said to have one fatal flaw, then for years that flaw would have been looking for something outside myself to save me from this life.  I awaited the "knight in shining armor".  He, she or it would save me from myself.  With this outside help, I would become all I was meant to be and more.   I thought that I needed saving.  My fatal flaw was failing to see that my life, just as it is, is saving me all on its own.

Death of a Drama Queen

Today, I harbor a murderous intent.  Time to plot the demise of the Drama Queen.  She lives inside me.  She loves to make mountains out of mole hills.  She craves attention like a heroin addict craves smack.  She'll kill me if I don't kill her first.

You can blame a zen priest for driving me to murder.  His name is Marc Lesser.  He wears many hats beside that of zen priest.  It is the zen priest hat that leads to my undoing.  In a simple book called, Less, Mr. Lesser mentions a famous dialogue between two leading teachers in sixth century China.

"One teacher asked another:  'What is the Way?'  This is another way of asking--How can I live a happy, meaningful life?  Or, How can I find real freedom?  The other teacher responded, much to the first teacher's surprise, 'Ordinary mind is the Way."\

I find this to be a wonderful, encouraging answer, as well as a terrific way to cut  through our ideas and assumptions.   This is not the answer that was expected or assumed, then or now. Ordinary mind is the way.  Just trusting, or returning to,our ordinary mind is the way to find happiness and meaning!  To find satisfaction, composure, and results -- we don't need anything extra, fancy or special.  We don't need to do or add more; we need to do less!  We just need to let go of some of our assumptions, particularly our thinking that freedom and happiness lie someplace else, or during some other time, or with some other mind.  Instead let us be guided by our inclusive, playful, mysterious, and plain ordinary minds."

The Drama Queen hates Marc Lesser.  She hates all zen priests with a passion known only to drama queens.  He makes the ordinary sacred.  To the Drama Queen such thinking is blasphemy.  The Drama Queen races on stage full of emotion about what's lacking in life.  The key to happiness just lies beyond her grasp.  She is exiled in a life of sad longing, bitterness and failed attempts.  Her failure and sorrow become a heavy, blood-red, velvet robe that she must wear during every performance.  She hides a dagger in the stage curtains.    Will she use it on herself or on another?

The last few weeks, as I've struggled to adapt to the change in jobs, as I've tried to let go of my sadness at being "force to do something against my will" the Drama Queen as been too close.  She's robbing me of the satisfaction that is present in the most ordinary of days.  The Drama Queen is a wily opponent.  She wears many disguises.   She often fools me with her reasons that sound so logical.  She takes up the banner of causes easily.  They hide a less-than-noble motive.  The Drama Queen must die.  I must carefully plot her murder.  It must be the perfect crime, harming no one.  The ordinary awaits my acknowledgment.  It beckons me to enjoy it.

Motivational Speaker

I feel like Matt Foley today.  Chris Farley's portrayal of the down-on-his luck man who became a motivational speaker makes me laugh no matter how many times I've seen it.  Matt Foley ends up motivating people but probably not in the way he intended.  Most folks don't want to end up "livin' in a van down by the river."  Matt Foley is the quintessential antihero.  He is the loser that lives in all of us.  While I laugh, I also see parts of myself, parts that I'm not eager to see.   I need a heavy dose of laughter before going "spelunking" in my psyche.

Sometimes that loser feeling is a tough one to shake.  It's been following me like an old nasty dog that keeps nipping at my heels.  Maybe the dog has rabies.  Before enduring painful treatment, I've come up with my own little strategy to keep the dog at bay and avoid possibly contracting the dreaded rabies.   During my workday, trapped in high school freshman flashbacks, I'm going to pretend that I'm on a secret mission.  I'm collecting information and experiences to prepare me for what lies ahead.  Maybe I don't need to pretend.

Shaking the stereotypical ideas of what constitutes success in life is difficult for me.  I can talk big but I still often judge a book by it's cover,  my book, my cover.  The last few weeks,  I feel under utilized.  I  embarrassed that I seem to be a classic underachiever.   It's been really frustrating to know that the teachers often make some big mistakes in the classroom and that I don't have the status or the credentials to effectively communicate my concerns.  Ah, this sounds like a very familiar place for me.  No wonder I'm frustrated.  The person who is the biggest source of my frustration is me. 

Maybe being Matt Foley isn't the worst thing that could happened to me.  Maybe I should stop fighting the feeling and just let myself enjoy it for a while.  Saving the world can wait for another day.  So can writing a great novel.  I'm just going to enjoy being me, classic underachiever, antihero, seemingly a loser.  It's sounds like the best place to begin.  I'm not going to fight it.  Tomorrow, I'm going to take every opportunity to just enjoy it for a while.  After all, isn't that the best way to come out a winner?

Who Shall Lead Us?

The cold that my children have is now threatening me.  It wants to take up residence in my head.  Grumpy is barricading the door but the cold keeps on knocking.  In other words, I'm not in the best of moods.  That probably contributes to my developing the one-word theme for today.   That word is "frustration." 

As I struggle to discover what secret formulas will solve the major riddles of my new job, I have yet another concern.  Within the last three school days, I have heard several different teachers make some significant errors in what they are teaching the students.   While I don't expect teachers to never make mistakes, these errors are big enough to create a problem for students who will probably need the correct information in order to past the state-mandated tests.  Here are the errors:

1.  When adding a negative number to another negative number, you get a positive number as an answer. 

In multiplication two negatives make a positive.  Can't explain why, but in addition?  Even I, with a major case of crippling math anxiety knew this one was probably wrong.  I came home and researched the answer before listing it as a winner in this week's major error search.  It's a secret game I'm playing.  The secret has gotten too heavy to carry solo.  I come home and rant to my husband often while researching the correct answer.  After all, I want to have some proof  I'm not the only one thinking it's wrong.  The good news:  It's making me feel  passionate about my job.

2.  In the sentence:  Two brown ponies pranced playfully in the sunny meadow. Two is not an adjective.

The last thing I want to do is shake up the teacher.  They've got a lot on their plate.  I am full of sincerity here.  Still, this grammar faux pas took me by surprise.  I had the word, "two" pegged for an adjective and was really curious why it didn't qualify.  I couldn't help asking.  Teacher said, "No, "Two is some other kind of word."  I asked,  "What part of speech, is it?" He replied, "A modifier."  Intrigued, I innocently asked, "Is that a new category of some sort?"  (In retrospect, I see that this question could be interpreted very differently than I intended it.)    Teacher said, "Yes."

This "new" categories for English language parts of speech bothered me.  I went to the library and found a book on grammar.  A book published in 2001, if you're wondering.  In cases, like this, in which a number further describes a noun, the noun which it modifies, that word is an adjective.  By now, I'm starting to feel ready for Jeopardy!

3.  I was told that the word "I" is a noun.  It is not a noun.   It is a pronoun. 

Today, in at least one small classroom, it became a noun.  I asked,  "If "I" is to be considered a noun why not "me" in another sentence?"   Apparently,  the word "me" was not given noun status because it was a possessive pronoun.  I can't wrap my head around the logic but didn't pursue the point further.  I am not the teacher but I could be.    I've actually taken more college level course work in English, than those English majors who took education courses to earn teaching credentials.  I think that's a secret I best keep to myself, if I'm to get along with people.  All the education method courses in the world won't help prevent errors like these.

I am plagued with a dilemma.  I have to help my students finish homework and do assignments.  Sometimes, the teachers don't know the correct answer.  Sometimes, students are required to put down the wrong answer in order to "get it right."    Worse, yet, I really like these these teachers as people.  They bring a wonderful spirit, enthusiasm and often intelligent sarcasm (a "language that teens speak fluently) to their classrooms.  In many ways, these students are lucky to have them as teachers.  They can't be expected to teach what they don't know.  Who is in charge of the standards that safeguard the quality of the education the teachers are receiving?  Most of these teachers (the teachers in my sample are probably between the ages of 25 and 30) are products of the same educational system that they now help shape.  We've failed them.

I make mistakes every day.  I know there are some mistakes in this short entry.  Editors really don't get paid what they are worth.  You can still be a genius and not know every grammar rule, etc.  I really don't want to start casting stones at good people who've chosen to become teachers.  Teaching is another honorable profession that doesn't adequately compensate the brave men and women who dedicate their lives to help shape the minds of the future.  Therein lies the crux of the matter.  Teachers are shaping the minds of the future.  We need to care.  We need to pay attention. 

Now, if only, I knew what I need to do.  I could really use a Just 10 walk. 

Sunday Morning

After Great Pain

After great pain, a formal feeling comes--
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs--
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round--
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone--
This is the Hour of Lead--
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow--
First - Chill - then Stupor - then the letting go--

Sunday morning:  Before I get out of bed, I feel the weight of frustration wrap around me.  It's a dirty gray bathrobe.  I shuffle out of bed.  My feet wear imaginary bunny slippers, filthy bunny slippers. Sadness mats their dirty pink fur.   I shuffle down the hallway to the kitchen.  Making coffee requires an unusual amount of concentration.  My mind wanders away like a naughty child.  It create lists of all the things I need to do.  Wadding the lists into balls of paper, I shove them into my ratty pockets.  I try to forget about them.  Noisy children scamper by.  Their energy taps into my anger.  How can they be my children on this grumpy Sunday morning?   I growl at them to stop.  The day is already too long. 

The rain is at fault, tapping into my sour mood with its muggy torrents of yesterday.  I grieve the death of summer.  Breakfast sits in my stomach like a stone.  I know what I must do.  Walk.  I want to run from myself this morning.  In my head, I hear "the only way out is through."  I hear this often.  I can not argue.  Truth is often quite simple.  If only I could be so simple.  Another thing to mourn on a Sunday morning.

Leaving the house, I suddenly look up.  Emily Dickinson walks beside me.  She looks me in the eye and says, "First -- chill, then stupor--then the letting go."  You are right, Emily.  I start walking.  Quietly, inside my head I say, "Let go, let go, let go, let go".  It's my walking mantra.  I lose the robe and slippers.  Adorned in comfortable clothes, I enter my day.  This day is new.  The fact that I  don't feel like welcoming it begins to make it even more valuable.  I tumble this idea over and over in my head.  It fits neatly into the spaces between the words, "let go, let go, let go."  Inside I hear the knell of the funeral bell.  It tolls for expectations.
Expectations cut into the heart of contentment.  They make the letting go impossible.  I drop them.  They spill into an oily pile alongside the trail.

Crossing the intersection, I look up and see a familiar stranger, my puppy dog man.  He smiles eagerly and although he stands still to wait for me, he vibrates with energy.  Looking into his eyes, I see the happy elves dance between his ears.  I whisper to myself.  "I bet he's had a traumatic brain injury."  He greets me as he always does.  "How many miles are you up to?"  I do not know.  I know my answer matters not.  This is his way of opening the door to announce his own mileage conquests.  He grips a bright neon tennis ball.  His fingers work the surface of the ball as his words spill out.  He smiles broadly.  Happy dancing elves twirl wildly behind his blue eyes.  I coo politely and complement his stamina while denigrating my own.  He screams happy.  Is he too happy? May be.

This chance meeting awakens a sleepy happy elf inside my own head.  It lunges onto the dance floor and begins a lazy waltz.  Branches of wild berry bushes reach for me beside the trail.  I alter my course ever so slightly, taking in the sweet, wild smell of wet ripe berries.  Suddenly, directly in front of my face, an orange and black-striped spider hangs on a silken thread.  He almost became a quick morning snack.  I veer off course again giving him the room to be a spider on a damp Sunday morning.  I let him be.

This awareness fills me with a hopeful satisfaction.  I know that when I get back to the house, I won't put on the ratty bathrobe of depression.  I won't shuffle through my day in old  bunny slippers.  In letting things be, I've allowed myself the sadness while still allowing myself the freedom to move on, freedom to enjoy happy, grinning strangers, the freedom to allow spiders to hang in my path without batting them aside.  I have learned to go around.  I am letting go.

On the way home, I call again to Emily Dickinson.   "Please walk beside me again.  I want to thank you." Today, her poem took on another meaning for me, a more hopeful one.  I, who in the past had often used poem 341 as an anthem for a black mood, realized that underneath it, hope lies waiting.  Death to self, to a finite way of thinking or being is a letting go that can open the door to something else.  Pain isn't an end, especially not a dead one.  It can give birth to new meaning, if I only learn to let it be, to let go.

I bring Emily into the house with me.  I pull out a chair for her next to my keyboard.  I search through the first lines of Emily's poems trying to find the poem, poem 341.   I once thought I knew it so well.  As I scan the list of first lines, her wisdom leaps from the list and into my heart.  She was a depressive jewel.  She knew darkness and isolation well.  She also walked with God in hope.  She gave me hope on a muggy Sunday morning.  I hope she'll walk with me again.

It's the Wrong Size

On Thursday, I stumbled through the day with a life that didn't fit.  It was too small.  I kept tugging at the edges of it trying to get it to cover me.  Life screamed back, "Fat chance."
Tears threatened my eyes.  I've been working so hard to maintain the proper positive attitude, to keep a "stiff upper lip", to display grace under pressure.  None of that seemed to matter.  Here I was walking around with a life that didn't feel right, a life that just would not fit.  What was I doing wrong?  Why was it the wrong size?  When did this happen?  How long has it missed my noticing?  Questions without answers on a rainy Thursday.

I tried to blame the rain, my hatred of the wet and the damp.  When it rains, I'm transported back in time.  I stand on a crowded city bus, my arms heavy with books.  No one offers me a seat.  Clinging to the strap, I do an awkward two-step struggling to keep my balance.  The other passengers stare ahead, their faces frozen masks betraying only mild disdain for the rainy world outside the bus windows.  Their wet coats and hair smell like a wet pack of wild dogs.  Every time it rains, I warp back through time and space and smell the raw smell of wet humans.  It never makes me smile.

A constant cloud hovers over me.  It haunts my day.  I feign interest in the world outside me.  I'm only pretending.  My life feels too small.  I don't want anyone else to see me wearing this ill-fitting life.  Frantically, I scuttle around, trying to find a place to hide, someplace quiet, dark, safe.  Nothing.  I am exposed for all the world to see.  I doubt the world will be kind.  Already it feels terribly cruel.

I carry this feeling around for several days, like a heartache.  This morning I escape for my Just 10 walk. The trail is oddly quiet and when I meet fellow travelers.  There are no familiar faces.  My loneliness is underlined and printed in bold letters.  Scenes from my week flash across my mind.  I attend freshman classes with my student charge.  He is almost mute.  I study him, reading his body languages.  He has two areas of interest.  I gently wedge my foot in the door.  Slowly, I'm beginning to get through. He is getting used to me.  He tolerates my presence.  He even looks to me for rescue at times, yet he has enough awareness to be embarrassed by me.    He doesn't know how much I can identify with him.  Apparently, while in the womb, I brushed up against the stone of Aspergers.  The chalky grit of its genes latching on to my DNA.  I see my own childhood, my adolescence under a microscope.

On Friday, we find ourselves at a mandatory pep assembly.  My student is a frozen statue.  So was I at his age.  I hated pep assemblies with a passion.    Why was all this noise and stupid behavior expected of the young.  Why didn't I feel what the others all seemed to feel?  I felt embarrassed by my peers and at the same time desperately wanted to feel what they felt.   My soul was an icebox.  I was hopelessly lost in myself and very afraid.  My life didn't fit then either.

Adolescent was insanely hard on me.  Miserable and afraid, I became a cutter before I had any idea of what that was.  I thought I was the only one who eased the pain of being me by carving into my skin with a razor blade.  I desperately wanted to feel something even if that something was pain.  Trapped by responsibilities and expectations, I isolated myself on an island of one.  I look at my student on Friday.  He, too, sits on island of one, a different island than mine but still alone.  Friday, I realized how smart he was under all that silence.  I began to understand what traps him there.  He needs help building a raft.  There is a world out there that he has to live in.  He needs to learn to survive while honoring himself and his unique view of the world.

I left the house this morning wearing an extra large shirt to hide my too-small life.  As I headed home from a walk where everyone was a stranger wearing a new face, I looked up to the foothills in the east.  They beckoned me toward them, a magnetic pull on my iron heart.  "Come walk in our forests, wade in our streams and see what's on the other side.  A new chapter begins."  I struggle to let go of the old, of the familiar.  I struggle to get used to the new fit and feel of my new chapter.    I have felt this before.  In time, things will get easier.  Purpose and meaning will fall out of the chaos of the new and unknown.  The feelings of uselessness and frustration of early this week, fell aside somewhere on the trail this morning.   Life may be the right size after all.