Animal Spirits

Ruled by Fear

2012-01-03T22:42:00.000-05:00

I am coming to the inescapable conclusion that most of my direction in life, most of my choices and times when I have failed to act, have been driven not by wisdom or courage or compassion or generosity - but rather have been the direct result of fear.

Fear is a very tangible feeling that I carry with me constantly, a tightness in my chest, a hard coating around my heart. I am not talking about a metaphorical suite of armor protecting my heart - I mean a very literal feeling of hardness in my chest like one feels at the initial moment they are confronted with a situation that will, in the following moments, generate a strong emotion like anger or pain - that initial intake of a sharp breath just before the next emotion is about to become realized. It is in that breath where I constantly live.

When I am truly in touch with myself, I feel this hardness in my chest. My heart chakra has almost no life.

What am I afraid of?

Most of all, I am afraid that despite my best efforts, I will lose my tenuious ability to provide the basics to survive - to keep a roof over us, food, clothing, shelter, medical care etc. Never in my life have I known enough abundance to feel secure in this. Instead I have always just managed to hang on. I fear, among other things, that someday my luck will run out.

I also fear that I will never grow deeply enough into the world of the mystery that is the connection to all-that-is. I have tried so hard, first with my mind, and then later, realizing my mind is a hinderance, not a help, with my heart, to grow into the person I should be. But despite all my best efforts, I feel I haven't made much progress. I fear I will never become more than the person I am right at this moment - and I know that is not good enough.

I fear that the space in this world where I live, where I am allowed to live, will grow continually smaller, until there is no place at all for me.

It is not a comfortable thing, to know this about myself. There is a small bit of comfort though, in understanding that I am able to at least understand this.

Looking back

2011-12-31T21:36:00.001-05:00

This past year has left me with far more questions than answers.

One of the most bewildering experiences was learning first hand of the duplicity or multiplicity of my existance - learning I can be living simultaneously in two (or more) places at one time. I had already had some idea of the duality of existance - being both of human form in a human body with all its biology and limitations, but also knowing I am at the same time more than that. I had learned that I and my spirit guide, although distinct, are yet One. This year I experienced a serious fracturing of my spirit, with much of my spirit leaving my human form and living for almost four months in the land of journeying, in the company of my guide and other elders. I know she was there as I was able to go there and visit with both she-who-was-me and with my guide, who is also me.

Honestly folks, what in my middle class, protestant upbringing, ever, EVER prepared me for wrestling with such a paradigm shift? What human teachers can I find that can help me to understand what I am to be learning of all this? Thus far, save one, all my teachers have been of non-human form.

Another experience that leaves me at a loss is the fracturing of a friendship with a soul I had learned was my twin in another life. I have no answers as to why after finding each other twice in this life time, we are left only with broken pieces, silence and nothing more. What was the purpose of all that pain?

My career is in shambles at the moment. If it can be fixed, I know not.

I look back over the past year and am ashamed to realize how fully I allowed myself to be pulled off course, forgetting what was truly important, and instead putting my focus on unimportant things, the net effect was that of being dragged by the currents and repeatedly dashed against the rocks.

I should have done better in so many of my endeavors.

So much of what transpired this past year I could have never predicted. It gives me pause then to wonder what the next year holds. What painful lessons are just around the corner? What new revelations will unfold that will forever change my understanding of reality? What opportunities for growth will I fail at and what ones will I finally understand and rise to meet as the person I am supposed to be?

My wish for myself for this coming year is that I will have wisdom to recognize my learning experience as I encounter them, fearlessness to meet the challenges that arise, compassion for those that challenge me, and an open heart to guide me.

Why are you here?

2011-12-27T22:34:00.003-05:00

"Why are you here?"

This was the question put to me tonight by someone..... I can't exactly say who, that had joined me for my fire ceremony this evening. A male voice is all I can say.

"Why are you here?" This is the question I am supposed to answer.

"Why are you here?"

My first reaction was to want to ask for clarification....what do you mean by "here"? Here in front of the fire? Here in this point on my life? What?

I quickly realized that part of my work to answer the question was to provide that clarification myself.

"Why am I here, sitting in front of a fire, quietly drumming?" That's the immediate answer and the easier one. I am here tonight to try to connect with elders, to ask questions, to listen, to open more the gateway between this world and where the elders reside, to work at growing into a better person, a richer spirit with access to wisdom and companionship of the elders, to learn to be more than I currently am.

"Why am I here, as a greater question of, why am I here at this point in my life?" This is by far the more difficult question to which finding the honest answers could be hard work indeed. I am where I am, in part, (a large part really) because of my failures - failures at having the courage to take chances, failures of not believing in myself, failures of not letting go of fears. I am also here because of some successes, even if they took a long time in coming - success at learning how to go from "sleeping heart" to "waking heart," to learning how to listen to messages in the wind, trees, rocks, earth and animals, to understand that holding to ego is like holding to a solid wall that will block any meaningful path forward.

I struggle with finding a path forward, professionally, personally, spiritually - fully feeling that I have not "arrived" at any of those desired destinations.

"Why am I here?" This is a good question for me to examine further for each and every aspect of my life, for, in understanding the answers, I might do better moving forward - and after all, that is why I am "here" in front of the fire tonight: to become a better me.

2011-12-12T22:23:00.001-05:00

Its been only a few months since my soul fragment returned, but the time of living without her in me is already a distant distant memory. (I wonder if the memories of the empty time have faded fast because most of me was not here to experience it?) It is good, I guess, to not be able to recall easily how it felt to be only a hollow echo of myself.

She-who-is-me stayed away as long as possible, and came back just as things in my day life were starting to change, and she needed to be back to manage through it all, to keep me/us on tract.

I still feel great sadness sometimes, but it is not the grief of a bottomless pit. I feel much more solid, even through the new (job related) turmoils that are now arising.

I miss the idea of my old friend, although I think that person never existed. I miss believing that connections in my life were expanding. I am back now to the place of knowing I am the outsider that needs to simply be comfortable with that and not struggle against it.

I miss my guide, who for reasons I cannot begin to understand, will not show up unless my exfriend's guide is also allowed to be present.

It is far far to confusing for me to manage through, and I have decided to consult with the one true shaman I know - in order to get some clarification and to see if I can reestablish a connection with my guide - who is another part of myself.

Holes

2011-11-26T22:43:00.001-05:00

I am sitting next to the fireplace watching the the tea candles, one by one go out, and can't help but think that this is how my life had been these past few years. One by one, the parts of me that fed my flame have disappeared from my life.

There was the zoo (National Zoo - Washington DC), where I had volunteered for 17 years, (moving to this area in part to become a zoo volunteer). My connection to that taken from me by an uncontrollably angry keeper and an institution that turned its back instead of doing the right thing (seems this is what institutions do). Seventeen years of commitment and support, seventeen years of my life's work, suddenly meant nothing at all.

There was the storm that took my new car from me.... not completely because it was rebuilt, but it will never be the new car I once had, the first and only new car I had ever purchased for myself. No amount of care I took for the car could protect it from others negligence.

There was the friend that turned ex-friend, not at all the person she advertised herself to be..... who took with her perhaps my last chance at being willing to trust other people as much as I wish I could. Her betrayal was so brutal to my spirit that it left me for four long months - an experience I never want to know again, an experience that has left me beaten and quiet.

In the aftermath of dealing with a lost soul part and its return, my ex-friend's guide appeared and stayed constantly with me for a number of weeks. While I tried to be open to what that experience was suppose to teach, it was finally too much for me and I sternly sent her guide away.

To my astonishment, and grief, my own guide left when I sent the other away. I have not felt him since that day. As I was just learning to feel him and know he was with me, the loss left yet another hole in me. I am stunned he abandoned me.

I think I am nothing left but holes. Even if they are silent and far less painful than the lost of a soul, holes are holes. Too many holes and there is nothing left but quiet emptiness.

Early Warning Signs

2011-11-05T13:18:00.024-04:00

Had I paid attention early on, the warning signs were all there. Had I listened to voices that were trying to get my attention, I would have never ventured so far down the road of the friendship that ended up devastating me. The warnings were all there, I just didn’t want to acknowledge them.

To not make the same mistakes again, I first need to understand my mistakes. This is a painful process of reexamination, and a process I have no choice but to take, if I have any hope of moving forward in a life not completely closed down. If I cannot understand what I did wrong and how to avoid it again, my only other choice is to keep the world at arm’s length (and honestly, that’s where I am right now).

There were signs. There were times when red flags went up. Each time instead of paying attention, I excused them away. I wanted my friend to be more than these moments. So I excused them away the same way heterosexual women continually excuse away the bad behavior of men.

One of the first flags was her telling the story of a man that worked in her shop (a salon that caters to “high society” people – not the likes of someone like me). She was complaining of his bad behavior and how he had not been the same since his home burned. I know nothing of him or the details of the house fire. What I know is only what she told me. She complained that he should be “over it” now because (her words) with the insurance money he was able to purchase a better home. He even had granite table tops and (here is the red flag), “[she] didn’t even have granite tabletops yet!” I can still hear her voice escalate as she declared this. She didn’t even have granite tabletops yet. There are so many red flags in her statement: one’s happiness is determined by the value of their home, she pays attention to what others have and aspires to meet or beat these benchmarks, and that she expected that of course, I would jump in agree with what she was saying – no embarrassment saying this in front of me.

I believe I remember that moment so clearly, even today, because it was a moment the universe wanted me to pay attention to. Much later, when I called her on it, she denied ever saying this (yet another red flag).

The very first day we got together again after so many years, there were red flags I ignored. After having shared so much of my nature-centric spirituality with her, she proceeded that day to pretend a tree was talking to her. This didn’t feel right, but again I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. That she said the tree was “full of itself” (ego) only points to her acting for show, instead of having a genuine experience. “Full of itself” is a human reaction. All-that-Is has no need for ego.

We spent part of that first day at a mountain lake, visiting my uncle’s home. Multiple times she would say something about “lake people” (people who live in homes by a lake), telling me how lake people behave, lake people do this or that. She recently married a man who had a family cottage by an upstate NY lake and they spent summer weekends there. Therefore she was in the “in” crowd of lake people, and being “in the know” she now could instruct me in how lake people behave.

I grew up learning to swim at this mountain lake, learning to canoe there, spent many many days on the dock letting fish nibble my toes, of learning how to use a snorkle and flippers, and visiting my “aunt and uncle” who were not my aunt and uncle at all but were such close friends of the family that I was about 12 years old before I understood the titles of “aunt” and “uncle” were honorary. Never once did I feel the need to define “lake people” as a special class or make sure I added myself to that category. I don’t pay attention to social class.

She had told me that she essentially bullied her husband into marrying her. He agreed to under ultimatum. Either marry her or she was moving out. He acquiesced. She bragged about it to me. Red Flag. My partner and I are together out of mutual respect, not any coercion or ultimatum.

She told me that while still with her ex, one night he got violet in the home. I can’t remember if he hit her or only if he damaged property. She told me she made him sign a confession for all he did in that incident. She also told me she once struck him hard right across the face with her fist and knocked him to the ground. She didn’t tell me she signed any confession later. Double standard. Red Flag.

I lost count of the times she told me how her weight was once up to 180 lbs and how horrible that was and expected me to chime in with a “poor poor you” note (and I guess I was expected to give some complimentary commentary on her body image now). I did not. I stood quietly each time…. all 182 lbs of me. I should have spoken up for myself. I did not. Shame on me. She had no sense that saying this to me was inappropriate. Red Flag. Shame on her.

It was clear anytime we drove through neighborhoods she was keenly aware of all the homes she felt were better than hers. She had ambitions to ultimately get to this or that neighborhood. This was far more a driving force in her than I understood until the end. It was an obsession. That she would rant that she could not live in the house she was in because her husband had lived there with his ex, this was so disingenuous. It was just an excuse to feed her “need bigger, need better” illness that drives her in most thing. Her two story home, with a garage and pool in the back yard in a fine neighborhood was not good enough for her, even though it was better than anything she had ever had before. She expected me to join in the “poor you” mantra she had worked up for herself. I refused. I lost track of the number of times she would say, “every women I have talked to agrees that I cannot be expected to live in a home where my husband’s ex once lived.” I had to say, you either are denying my womanhood, or you no longer can make that statement - because I disagree.

So many people have so little. I do not have a home. And yet she, not being born in high society, felt perfectly fine complaining in front of me that all her new found riches were not good enough. She told me exactly how much money her husband makes. Red Flag. No one else in my life discusses salary. Its rude to do so. But for her, she has her eyes focused on that money. I am sure that if her husband didn’t have such a good paying job, she would not have moved in with him.

The toxicity of being around her was eating me but I didn’t realize it for a long time. She is the only friend I ever had that managed to make me feel poor and ugly. That’s how out of balance I became.

Finally it all became too much and I called her on all of it. I am not at all proud of how angry I became. I am sure she felt completely blindsided. She has built a world where she is the center and no one tells her she is wrong, and I came along and told her she was wrong. The incessant discussion of needing a better home, of social climbing, of her weight, of trying to carve out a more “perfect” body, of needing to always be the center of attention….. it was all too much.

Judi has said to me that it was not inherently bad of me to want to believe in the good in a person. And I do believe there is a good person inside of my (ex)friend. However she isn’t doing anything to nurture that good person. She has instead taken on the values of, what I can only assume, are the women that visit her high-end salon. She has a need to be the big fish in the small pond.

I had made too many excuses for the bad behaviors. This is what I need to understand in myself – why did I do this and how can I avoid doing this again? Why did I not listen to my wiser self?

Why did I do this? My need, or maybe my hope, to be less on the outside of life, and to instead be more connected, to believe that maybe I have enough value that someone (in addition to my partner) actually sees value in me, actually likes me for me, that I am not so much an outcast but rather just another person worthy of consideration – this need I think blinded me to too much. I wanted to hope the friendship was real. I wanted to believe in it very much.

That she never once lifted on finger to fix any issues that came up in our friendship is the tell-tale sign that the friendship was never real. “Her way or no way” is not the basis of a friendship. I don’t know what it was. I don’t know what she thought she was going to get from me. I don’t know at all what her motives were. I had nothing to offer that would advance her in any way that she valued. I only had friendship to offer. I was not good enough.

I think for now, my best plan is to simply come to some sense of peace with being the outsider, the unloved one in a society I see as shallow anyway. I need to find peace with being alone and being with myself, and understand that looking for acceptance in someone else’s eyes just diminishes me.

2011-10-27T14:51:00.002-04:00

I am extremely sad. That's just the way it is.

Its not the same as this past summer, with much of my soul gone. That vacancy resulted is this massive hole in my chest, a completely "empty tin-can" existence from which I could barely function, barely breath, barely hold a thought.

I am not in that place anymore. The can has been refilled, the soul has come home.

However the hurts that sent it away still remain. Nothing on the ground has changed.

I am not bowled over by the pain. I can get up, move, function, even laugh.

But, I am still extremely sad.

The destruction of that friendship really did me in. Understanding I was less important than a lust for material things, that I was so easily disposable in the want for "more more more" ..... understanding that I didn't make enough money to be considered a friend.... this was a devastating blow, devastating, as I had invested so much of myself in that relationship. A large part of me still cannot believe what happened or that I had believed in someone so shallow. I guess the pull in wanting to believe I was valued was too much for me to pass up, and I overlooked to obvious warning signes. There is no way to work toward resolution now except within myself.

I had always tried to explain to Judi, but could not find the right words to express, how very trapped I feel in my life. I used to say "there is just no room in the world for me, or "someone like me"." I came to a better explanation of that feeling recently - taking the high level view. Each time I have really tried to stand up for myself, move toward something that I want for me, to have hope and hold to that hope, etc, life comes and hits me hard, a sledgehammer assault.

When I was a kid, a young self aware lesbian in a small conservative town, the way I survived was to stay off everyone's radar, become invisible, the person no one remembered to think about. It did help me avoid trouble (for example I managed to never get beaten up). But as an adult, my life experiences have only reinforced that way of living. Whenever I have tried to step outside of living in a small place, tried to improve my life, tried to believe or hope or do - these are the times I have been hit hardest by life - struck to the ground hard. If I stand up, I am on the radar of the universe and I get knocked back down.

Why don't I dream of anything for myself anymore? When I step back and see it in this context, it is really no surprise at all. To dream and hope is to raise myself onto the radar of whatever this negative force is that keeps hunting me.

In a way, I have been right all along. There is no place in this (human) world for me.

Its no wonder I prefer time in nature.

Being Woman

2011-10-24T22:18:00.002-04:00

I am female.

I am a woman.

I an NOT an anomaly.

I am NOT an outlier.

I have spent most of my life living on the fringes of many things, including allowing myself to be fully female in my rightful way.

I succumbed to the messages from our sick society that tells women there are very narrow definitions of pretty, of feminine, and thus of value.

I could never meet, and more importantly never had any desire to meet these brainwashed vapid definitions of female.

Wear your hair a certain way. Walk a certain way. Talk a certain way. Limit your body size because smaller is always better. Spend money you do not have on hair, nails, jewelery, clothing, makeup, accessories etc. to ensure you meet the minimum standards. (I spent my money instead on books, art, adventures, experiences, binoculars, cameras etc.)

I had to reach my mid-forties before I could very clearly see how drastically twisted the narrow definition of acceptable has become, and to understand how fully pathetic it really is. I only recently started to understand that I let others take from me my own definition of value, my own defintion of what it rightfully means to be a woman.

I have hands. They are meant for work, for creation, for helping. They are not meant wear fake nails that disable their ability to function.

I have legs. They are meant for taking me places, for kicking someone's ass when necessary (even my own), for connecting me solidy to mother earth. They were never meant to be objects for other's visual indulgences.

I have eyes. They are meant to allow me to see the world. They have no need for fake lashes, for paint, nor are they meant to always look to the ground and be humble.

I have a heart. Its meant to connect me to all-that-is, to dear ones, to the whisper in the wind. It was never meant to lust after shallow and vapid pursuits - shopping, social climbing, materialism.

I have a body that houses all the organs I need to survive. It was not meant to be starved, to be cut into simply for reshaping it to a mold, to be judged by its dimensions.

I have a mind. It was not meant to be filled with the images of soul-empty models found in countless meaningless women's magazines. It was meant to spend hours at the library (pre-internet), to sit and listen to masters teach, to explore the world, challenge the experts, dream of new ways of living.

I have anger sometimes that a small fraction of shallow women hijacked for the rest of us the definitions of woman, and that they took it in such meaningless and demeaning directions, and that there has been very little opposition to this. Who is it that told women they are not perfect JUST THE WAY THEY ARE? Why have we allowed young girls to be taught that it is their responsibility for the rest of their lives to look in appearance any way other than simply the natural way that they are. Why do we hate a natural woman so very much?

Being woman means being fully myself, connected to the earth, looking to the sky, knowing my true worth in every step I take. I make no apologies for my looks, my refusal to wear makeup or shoes impossible to walk in. Beauty is in a way a person exists, in the way they move through space, in the way they consider others, in the way their eyes laugh, in living without leaving carnage in their wake. Beauty is not a physical definition, it only shines out from one's spirit and soul.

When young girls are taught that the only thing that matters is their mind, their spirit, their heart and their soul and in knowing their self worth, only then will our society begin to heal.

in the night

2011-10-20T06:47:00.001-04:00

There was a time not so very long ago where climbing into bed at night was my very favorite time of the day. I felt blanketed by more than just the bed covers. I felt I was covered by the comforts of all that was good in my life - a safe gentle place to be.

Now, having passed through great loss and working on coming out the other side, night time has become the most difficult time for me, and I dread each night those long hours when sleep escapes me and the losses and failures are what keeps me company. The hurts and pains that I have come to manage through in the day still visit me at night. Certainly it all is not as bad as it once was - that's what healing does. But I cannot say I am "healed," I can only say I am better than before.

I wonder, through the long hours of the night, if I will even find again the peace in my heart that for a time I thought I had. I suspect that instead the hole will always remain, that it is a permanent part of me, and that healing really means to just move forward anyway.

Still, I miss the times I felt more whole and more at peace.

More on Reintegration

2011-10-02T20:35:00.003-04:00

Its been more than three weeks since a voice woke me up in the night, calling my name - a voice I have come to understand was myself, announcing my return. It is too soon to tell the whole story of what it has meant to have my soul split and leave for four months, sit with the elders, and then return. The full measure of that story and its consequences may take years or a life time to understand.

I have only initial impressions at this point.

While I have read a good amount about soul retrieval, both from the shaman's perspective and from the people who gained back the parts of themselves that went hidden away, I have never read a story of someone who had their spirit walk out, and be fully aware through the whole process that their soul was missing, fully aware of where he/she had gone, been able to travel to this place (in an attempt) to engage them (and to come back empty handed).

Just as I have never heard, before my own experience, anyone telling about the knowing that their spirit guide is actually themselves, just another chapter of themselves.

It took a day or two after my initial announcement before I began to suspect who it was that spoke to me in the night and what she was announcing. I did not begin to feel differently immediately. The change grew gradually, like a sun rise before the sun comes over the horizon. The change is subtle but persistent and undeniable.

Then the full measure of her return was realized - the sun came over that horizon and it was almost too much to bear. I described it as having had all the "lights out" for my heart for many months (my heart chakra has been long dead) and suddenly having "full power." I was whirling through a whole collection of emotions, each seeming more intense than the last. I was feeling everything. It was almost too much to bear. At times I was literally grabbing at my chest because the intensity was just too much.

Luckily that intensity has subsided some now. It had too.

Now I feel . . . . full. Hard to describe. I had tried to explain before, before she-who-is-me returned that I was nothing more than an empty container. The hollowness inside was vast. The space inside was dark and empty. Although I tried hard to explain to some close to me that most of what was "me" no longer resided inside me, I truly don't think anyone actually understood in a literal way, what I meant. I truly was not here, except enough to keep the body and the responsibilities running on auto pilot.

Now, she-who-is-me has returned. I wish I could say that four months with the elders resulted in four months of knowledge that I brought back and have instant access too. I believe pieces of that will come in time and that all at once would be too much to take in without causing shock to the whole system. I would like to believe anyway, that more wisdom and knowledge will come in time.

There are some small nuggets that are just "there" in my mind now that were not before, some pieces of wisdom or knowledge that weren't with me before the break. That encourages me.

Now the harder part: living here for four months with the best of what was me gone means I now have four months of damage I have done to those around me that I need to own responsibility for and make right. This is not a small hole to climb out of. This is the biggest "threat" to what still feels like a delicate healing process, this large task. Nothing to do but face what has to be done and face those who I have wounded while being a wounded empty being and own my responsibilities.

I can still feel the pull of negative thought patterns that had pulled me down a road my soul found unbearable and ultimately left to avoid. It scares me when I recognize them. I also hear a voice inside me telling me to recognize them and to do things differently this time. Stand up straighter, stronger, face my own demons and tell them to "be gone." Easier said than done some days but so far, in these few delicate weeks, I am winning most battles.

Another (more hopeful) indication that a new chapter has opened: a few nights ago I laid in bed pondering on the meaning of the encounter I had with some visitors who showed up in a recent journey. I had decided to try a "spirit activity" (too much to explain here). I concentrated on the visualization and suddenly I had an extraordinary (for me) physical response. As I lay there, my muscles began to gently twitch... not just one or two muscles that may have been too tired from the day, but it was happening randomly all over my body. My initial reaction was that I needed to stop what I was doing, but a calmer voice took over and assured me all was well and convinced me not to flee but to just stay with the moment. It felt magical. When it felt right to be done, I ended my visualization and all my muscles stopped their dance. I had never experienced anything like that. I was delighted and hopeful a new chapter has indeed started.

I or I"s", Me or Me"s"

2011-09-24T17:46:00.002-04:00

One of the many ways my world view has been changed recently is on the how I think of myself, or more accurately now, how I think of myselves. The idea that I am one singular entity that exists only in this place and this time and in this body no longer holds.

When I say "I" or "me" I am not quite sure what that means anymore.

I am me, the person in this body, sitting at this computer typing away.
I am "she-who-was-me" now become "she-who-is-me" who left this body and spent almost four months in the company of elders and then returned.
I am the male shaman guide who comes and sits with me during our fire ceremonies, and even while I was drumming last night. I felt him sitting on my left, fell the fullness and warmth of a being beside me, a being who is .... me.

Yesterday when refering to having she-who-was-me return, I said, "when WE came back...." then paused, having no idea at all why I said "we." I still don't. I am sure I am supposed to pay attention to that.

I was asked recently, if she-who-was-me was gone, how does she know about everything that happened here with me while she was gone. A fair question. I am not sure I have a solid answer, except to say that I believe everything is connected in ways possibly too fantastic for me to imagine.

If I can be both here, and somewhere else in another reality and as a separate spirit all at the same time.... If I know I can be this much, how much more am "I" that I am not yet even aware?

Why Shamanism?

2011-09-20T21:18:00.001-04:00

I have had more than a passing interest in things "shamanistic" in the last decade or so. I have taken numerous weekend workshops and a few extended courses, read a number of books and made acquaintance with few gifted individuals.

I am not a shaman. I don't ever envision ever calling myself by that title. I think we westerners have in a way bastardized the term, made up a uniquely western way of thinking of shamanism, and then pretend in our typically arrogant western way that we are connecting to ancient ways.

I have been a trouble maker in most every class I have taken. I question anything that doesn't resonate with me. I refuse to accept anything simply because someone else said it was so. Still, even filtered through our flawed western eyes and understandings, I find nuggets of truths that resonate as universal. It is these nuggets of truth that I continue to pursue.

But why?

I make little to no distinction between the animal communication activities and the shamanic activities. Animals, you see, live daily in the truths that the shamanic practices bring us closer to knowing. I find it very interesting that most animal communication workshops are attended only by women. Shaman classes have a significant number of men (although still dominated by women). What's the difference?

I have been uncomfortable with a few people I have encounter at shaman workshops. I think some people look at shamanistic practices as a way to gain "power" - power over people, power over situations. For true practitioners, it is power to deliver healing to those who ask.

I am not looking for power at all. Knowledge and wisdom yes. Power, no.

So why am I still interested in shamanism?

I have a sense, through the connection with animals and plants and rocks and wind and the earth, that there is a tremendous grace in which all things exist. There is a connectedness throughout all-that-is that is beyond our human ability to know.

I have also am quite aware that I do not walk in this grace (most humans don't), that my actions, my thoughts, actually destroy and run counter to the harmony in which all things live. I would like to learn to walk more gently on my path so that not only do I not leave carnage in my wake but I may actually one day find a way to be a contributor to this greater grace, instead of a bystandard.

Maybe the "power" I am looking for is simply the power and wisdom to improve myself.

conversation

2011-09-18T18:27:00.001-04:00

Me: "If I could live my life over, I would do so many things differently. I have made so many mistakes."

Companion: "Don't you think most people feel that way?"

Me: "I don't know."

Reintegration

2011-09-12T21:41:00.001-04:00

She's back.

I wasn't sure for a few days and didn't want to get my hopes up prematurely - but the voice in the night was me, calling out to me to "pay attention," to "wake up."

I think its important now to nurture this reintegration,

I am excited to learn more of what she has learned while being with elders.

All in time.

Someone called last night

2011-09-10T12:04:00.000-04:00

Sometime in the middle of the night last night, while lost in some inconsequential dream, I woke with a start when I heard my name called. A woman's voice that I did not recognize spoke my name, called me in a "pay attention to me" gentle yet serious voice. The story line of my dream quickly faded away and I lay awake with the echo of what I had heard in my head. I do not believe I dreamed this voice. It was completely out of context to the dream at the moment (which I have completely forgotten with the light of morning, but her voice calling out I can still recall clearly). There was of course no one in the room save Judi, sleeping away.

Ok, you have my attention.

postscript

2011-09-06T16:29:00.001-04:00

To my old friend who is now gone from my life.

Leaving abruptly and never once looking back, never once trying to work through the difficulty that came between us left no opportunity for repair, for forgiveness, for growth, for turning a bad situation into something better.

Its unrealistic to think that a relationship will never run into difficulties, especially ours, since you and I have such a different set of values and way of living. Your issues and my issues collided head on, two freight trains headed in opposing directions. It was inevitable. You and I both know that.

What was not inevitable was never doing anything to pick up the pieces. Instead everything froze in time at that moment. Doors closed and only silence remained.

I was left only with the hole ripped wide open through me and no path to fixing it, to fixing anything.

Its hard to forgive myself in a vacuum. Its hard to put the memory of our friendship in any good context when it was so easily terminated.

Lost was the chance to heal and grow and forgive. Lost was the opportunity to learn and do better next time. What you may have never understood was that if you had chosen to try, you would have found me there with you. But I could not do it alone, and you were nowhere to be found.

Too bad you are not around to hear this.

2011-08-31T09:52:00.000-04:00

A question that has been very much on my mind lately is what to do about the greater part of me that has left. Do I call her back, do I let her go, do I just sit patiently by and wait to see if the situation resolves on its own? Who am I in the absence of the larger part of myself, and is it reasonable to think of moving forward without her, or am I in nothing more than a holding pattern until she returns.

People talk about soul retrieval as bringing back a part of one's soul. For me, it feels that a majority of mine has left, not just a "part." I think of myself as an empty tin can. No one seems to notice I am empty because they are looking at the front label, which has not changed, and assuming the contents are still inside. No one sees that the can is actually empty.

I think my soul held out as long as she could, trying to find some way to stay, until there was just no holding out anymore. I know exactly why she left. I know exactly where she is now. I know she is in a good place with good company, including "one-who-sees-in-the-dark," my guide, who is also a part of myself. What better company could she keep?

Its my feeling that it is not right to ask her to come back. I think that would be an act of selfishness. Although I need her, the situation here "on the ground" has not changed. What drove her to leave, that there was no place in this world for someone like her, has not and will not change.

So, its my responsibility to set her free.

I laid in bed this morning (sleep escapes me too often now) and it came to me that I should write down a list of each pain that she had here that made living here too hard, write each down on a slip of paper and then burn them in a fire ceremony. Truthfully I would prefer to tie each to a stick and burn, but the weather is still too warm and humid for a true fire in our fireplace. So, write each on a slip of paper, and one by one, burn them all, then carefully collect the ash as one would have ash from a cremated loved one, and and scatter the ash somewhere. Release it all back to nature.

In essences, its time to acknowledge the loss of her, the passing.

Then move on with what little bits and discarded pieces that make up "me." I have no idea what "me" is, who "me" is, or even if there is enough left inside with which to move forward.

That's a problem to figure out later.

2011-08-23T11:52:00.002-04:00

I had a dream the night before last that the friend I lost called me on the phone. As soon as I heard her voice I just started sobbing. I woke that morning with a terrible headache.

In my dreams I can cry, but in my waking hours deep emotions (other than anger and frustration) just aren’t in me. I listen to music that used to move me and I sit now feeling almost nothing at all, sensing maybe only a echo of a feeling.

I think of all I lost. I think of she-who-was-me who is here no more. Thinking on that should be enough to bring out an emotional response. Instead I feel like I am just looking into a void. The only feeling in my chest is that of each breath I take.

I can’t justify bringing her back. If it was too much for her to bear that she had leave, and nothing has changed in circumstances here, isn’t it the most decent thing to do to simply let her be in peace where she is?

Quiet times ...

2011-08-21T06:55:00.001-04:00

... are the hardest: mornings where I still wake to a pain in my chest that can only be relieved by distractions of a day not yet started, and late evening hours when I am the only one still awake, dreading to surrender myself to the stillness and quiet of bed, where it can be a long time before sleep (and as always) bad dreams find me.

my new reality

2011-08-17T21:39:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday was full moon, and as we do with every full moon, we found time to sit in front of the fireplace (candles in the summer months) and have our quiet fire ceremony. Part of the time we spend drumming and journeying, sometimes purposefully with questions, and sometimes just being open to see what comes.

Last month my journey clearly laid out for me the explanation of why I feel so empty, of why my heart chakra is dead. I saw the place where she-who-was-me has gone to - leaving here after one too many heart pains.

Everyone reacts to pain differently. What is the threshold of too much for one could be easily overcome by another person. I don't know where I fit on that scale. All I know with any certainty is that the best of what was me has left.

I have considered that I could find a skilled individual to go to that place and find her and bring her back (soul retrieval). I suppose that not too many people around me who have lost bits (or major chunks) of soul even understand what has happened to them, let alone be able to journey themselves to find their soul fragments. That I know exactly where she-who-was-me is, and know what she is doing, even if I do not have access to what she is learning, is an odd thing.

I knew that with this fire ceremony I would have to go visit there. I cannot remember too many fire ceremonies that I wasn't looking forward to, but this was one.

I didn't go with the expectation of bringing her back. At this point in time my feeling is, if she doesn't want to come, who am I to say she has to? However I didn't expect the reception I received in my journey to her place.

She not only would not talk to me, but she would not even look at me, and turned her back to me every time I approached her.

Um... ok.

Nothing to do but leave her there and come back here.

2011-08-16T22:53:00.002-04:00

time stands still

2011-08-07T18:02:00.000-04:00

There are a lot of things I would like to say here but know I should not, so I will leave today's thoughts simply at this:

with all I have done in my life and all I tried to do, that I sit here now as a life wiped completely blank and nothing at all to show for myself or for my life - clearly this is a life that is measured much more by failure than anything else.

Uncharted Ground

2011-07-23T19:55:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago a message came to me that was simply this: “If there is no room in the world for someone like me, then I have to be someone else.” Certainly my experiences recently have pointed out very painfully that I cannot find a place for me here – everything is a road block, and all my good efforts, at projects, at volunteering or at friendships, have all only resulted in diminishing me more. Where does one turn when there is no flow? So, when I got this message, it came as no surprise.

The idea that we all exist as separate individuals is well accepted within our culture. I was raised with no different belief than this. One spirit, one soul, one being, one body – separate from all else – singular individuals.

This paradigm is changing for me, changing to the point that I don’t even know it means to say “I” or “me” anymore.

Not that long ago, I came to understand that the elder spirit, a tall lean man with long dark hair who shows up for our fire ceremonies is simply “me” from another life, another chapter of myself. Never before had I heard or read anywhere that we are our own spirit guides. It was a startling revelation, but after a time, it started to make perfect sense. Who would be more motivated to watch out over me than a part of myself?

I am now working through the next paradigm shift for me, that “I” can actually leave and yet there is an “I” that remains. I have seen “myself” through a journey as someone who has left the “me” that is still here and gone off to be in a more gentle place. The greater part of “me” is gone from here.

And then there is the “me” that remains. This “me” is far less than the one who left. Without her I can barely get through the day. I need her, but she does not need me. To ask her to come back, back to this life that doesn’t work for her, would be an act of selfishness on my part. It was pain that caused her to leave, I should not ask her to come back to that.

So what is the “I” that is left? I honestly feel like an empty tin can, discarded on the ground. When I look inside I don’t find anything – no hopes, no dreams, no motivation, just emptiness.

There is no one to talk to about this, as there is no one in my world that believes in fragmented souls, of a multiplicity of being.

I am unsure that the scraps of what remains of me are enough to piece together another person and continue and even if I continue, who will “I” be. If I water and fertilize the scraps, will they grow into another person? I don’t know who I am any more. I am sad that there is no one to even understand the person that I was has passed on.

I am on uncharted ground.

Ouch

2011-07-16T21:53:00.000-04:00

We stopped by a large sunflower field today to see how well the flowers were doing. It was a beautiful day and the sunflowers were at their peak. To stand a the edge of the field was to take in a beautiful sight.

I automatically pulled out my blackberry and took this photo. Without thinking I set up to email the photo to my ex-friend and only after I had the email open did I realize what I was doing.

Shit.

It was such a natural response, to see this beautiful sight and wanting to share it with the person who was to be a life long friend. I had in that moment, forgotten, that there is no life long friend to send it to.

I slowly put the blackberry back in my pocket.

Full Buck Moon

2011-07-16T21:30:00.002-04:00

There is a practice known as soul retrieval, based on the idea that in a response to bad experiences, one’s soul can fragment, and parts of it leave the person to seek out safer places, places in the “non-ordinary reality” where one can journey to find answers, meet guides etc. – a place that is simply a reality outside this reality. The person left behind here is then less than whole. A shaman, as a practice of healing for a person, can travel to these other places and look for bits of one’s soul and bring them back to the person, in order to make them whole again.

For what has seemed like a long time, I haven’t felt much inside. This full moon’s fire ceremony and journey time was the first time in a long time I have sat with a drum and experienced any journey at all. The first thing that came to me again was the feeling of being bigger than my own body, where the boundaries that separated my body from the environment around me melted away. It was comforting to find this place again.

A journey is an experience different than a day dream or one’s imagination. The experience of it is more crisp and real and the memory of it stays clearly in my mind and does not fade with time as do other memories. I can easily recall details of journeys from ten years ago, when I can usually not even remember what I did last week in my ordinary life.

The journey experience that followed was short but clear and emotionally intense. A lot of information was made clear to me in a short time. I saw myself, or I should say, a large part of myself, the part of me that was the total of the person I used to think I was, sitting with a collection of elders – wise spirits. I understood immediately that part of my soul that was who I used to be had passed, had left now, as one leaves a body when it dies. She-who-was-me passed over to the spirit world and was sitting with, in communion with, a collection of elders. As I saw her sitting there, she glowed with a gentle but bright light, brighter than the others - the light of a young fresh being, new to this place.

I immediately felt a great grief. She-who-was-me has passed on. As this heart still beats and this body still moves, no one but me actually understands she passed on, she is here no more. Thus there is no one but me to grieve for the loss of her. I thought that she deserved more than that. She deserved to have her absence recognized.

As I sat drumming, I almost started crying.

I looked more at this scene, of She-who-was-me sitting with these elders, covered in the soft bright light and I understood she was at peace. The struggles of this life, the constant confrontations of “you are not good enough,” the constant struggles against so many things, the failures and never finding a smooth path – all of this was done for her, and she was at peace. She looked happy. I could feel happy for her.

I immediately fully understood why I feel like nothing more than an empty shell, why I cannot feel hopes or dreams anymore. She-who-was-me that would have been the source of all that is gone. Whoever “I” am that is left here doesn’t have that part to draw on anymore.

I don’t know who or what I am now in the absence of her. What is a person anymore when the best of them has left? I know that when people look at me, they think they are looking at her. Only I know differently. I am blank and completely without a compass or a purpose or any clarity. I am the discarded pieces left behind, not really enough to make up a whole one. This question of who am I now is really too big for me to contemplate.

I looked at our candles in the fireplace, and wondered what request I was going to put into the fire. I thought of all the wishes and hopes and dreams I have put into the fire each full moon for the last decade – wishes of good things to come, wishes for healing and growing, for myself and for others. I looked at the direction I had hoped my life would have gone, and I look at the direction it actually took. While I wanted to grow strong and good and wise and prosper, instead I have grown smaller and lost so much of myself. The universe has had different plans for me, and I have been not able to influence any of it.

I placed my little paper into the flame of the candle and resigned myself to whatever new loses the universe has planned for me. I had no wishes tonight to put into the fire. All I could say was, “let’s just get on with it.”

this space left intentionally blank

2011-06-25T16:16:00.000-04:00

I stare at this blank screen and think, yes, this is me, this is what I have become: Blank. Inch by inch something has come along and erased me, erased from me most of who I thought I was. It didn’t happen overnight, nor was it the result of a single event. It has been a series of happenings, both big ones and small ones, taking from me my hopes, my dreams, my passions, until there isn’t much of me left from which to draw a breath.

I can’t help but consider that I must somehow be personally responsible for my series of losses over these past few years. It must have been of my own doing, as I have hardly ever been much of anything that the universe would sit up and take notice and spend any time considering me.

But if I am responsible, I am not sure how. I am not sure what I have done such that doors keep closing. Time after time, when I thought I brought the best of myself to a situation, the message has been my best not good enough. Not good enough for others anyway.

This is a harsh harsh message to live with… each time I put my heart into a situation, put the best of me into something, be it a friendship or an activity, it has ended up causing me a lot of pain. One time too many and now the parts of me that have been injured, the vital parts of me that are my passions, my dreams, my hopes, no longer come out to play. Most of the time I can’t even find them anymore.

The message that I am not good enough has accompanied me my entire life. It was a horrific experience to be a self identified lesbian growing up in a small rural town in the 70’s. The only way I could cope was to keep myself off everyone’s radar. I learned to be invisible because to be seen was to be measured, and in every way I did not measure up. I earned good grades in school, stayed completely out of trouble, always went to the library when I said I was going to the library, earned a scholarship for college, maintained a solid grade point average through college and then set my sights on graduate school (where I eventually earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry). I never drank alcohol, I never smoked cigarettes and to this day have never even seen, much less used illegal drugs. My postdoctoral research ended up being featured on the front cover of the most prestigious scientific journal in my field, and was important enough that another highly regarded journal published a news blurb about the research article. (“Cell” and “Science” for those who may be wondering….).

Was that good enough for my father? My father measured me by what I was not. I was not tall, I was not pretty, I was not popular, I was not female enough, and I didn’t go to medical school. (Not that I came from a family of higher educational achievers to begin with….. so wtf re: medical school?). I also was not heterosexual. Some friends know that for me, the last time I was home that my father was alive, we fought over the disparate treatment from my parents between my brother and his new girl friend and me with a long term partner. The short of it was that my parents never saw me for all that I was, they only saw me as a lesbian daughter they did not want. I was told I was no longer welcome in their home, and I never returned until my father’s funeral. (My mother now conveniently forgets.)

My ex grew to also see me as not good enough. In the end she kept trying to change me into someone else, tried to get me to wear makeup and jewelry. It became painfully clear that I, as the person I was, was not good enough for her, in her measure. While it was appropriate for that relationship to end, it cannot be helped to have more scars when you give your best to someone and they literally look at you with disgust.

I poured myself into volunteer work, believing to live in balance meant to give something back. There was a time when I was volunteering 40-50 hours a month between different positions. Again, I gave my best to this, believing this to be a part of my higher self. Yet that too was ripped from me, and with that loss a part of me died. That part of me I haven’t been able to find again. (There were no repercussions to the abusive zoo keeper. I have to live with knowing that too.) Just the other week I was talking with an old zoo volunteer who tried to get me interested in another organization he also volunteers for. I had to explain to him that my experience was so devastating that there isn’t anything left inside me that wants to volunteer for anything now. He had known me for over a decade at the zoo and my message stunned him. I could see it on his face.

The tree accident with my car, while only the loss of a “thing” also took its toll. Being one who does not own much, having what little you own taken away due to negligence of others is tough to live with. It took tremendous amounts of time and emotional energy to work through the insurance process, the completely incompetent body shop who continued to damage my car are they “repaired it” and now the legal process I am engaged in, going after the property owners for their negligence in allowing car after car after car to get destroyed in our parking lot while they turned their backs on their responsibilities.

For all my efforts, I never seem to be able to move forward.

In this environment of “my best is never good enough” I should have known better than to believe an old friendship could be rekindled. There were far far too many differences in our core values, differences that I should not have even tried to overcome. My common sense must have left the building, no, left the country – what was I thinking. We were drawn together from what I later learned was bonds from another life (twins), but it is not another life I am living right now, it’s this one. I lead with my heart, not my head. I am a fool. If my common sense would have been in charge, it would have reminded me that to the rest of the world (save Judi, as always), my best is not good enough. My head would have told me to “not go there.” But, I did and was damaged again. My heart was ripped from me.

My life is far emptier now than it has ever been. I get up, go to work, literally sit in a dark room with no windows or sunlight all day long, doing a task that pays the bills but not only doesn’t inspire, but instead kills my spirit a bit more every day. Whoever I was is slowly disappearing. In my free time, which I have now in more abundance than I have ever had before, as I no longer volunteer, I do not do things that feed my passions. I do not because I can’t find passion anymore. I am blank.

I am not only more quiet on the outside, conversing much less than I used to, but I am more quiet on the inside, as if there isn’t much of anyone home inside me anymore. I just am. I wonder sometimes that if I make myself small enough and quiet enough that maybe the universe will not notice me and continue to take away from me.

I have learned a curious thing. One can be an empty vessel and still function, and as long as I continue to do what is expected of me, it goes unnoticed by the entire world around me that I am internally just a vacuum, empty of passion, empty of dreams and hope. Smile, do your job, don’t complain. No one looks or cares to know more than that.

So here I sit. Blank. Watching time go by. Unsure what if anything I do next. If I ever get a remotely small feeling of wanting something for myself or wanting something to do that would feed my soul, something for me simply because I would want it to be so, as soon as that small feeling or hope dares to sneak out and into the sunlight, fear of more pain overwhelms it and it goes running back to the dark places where it spends most of its time trying to hide unnoticed.

What is a person without passion or hope or dreams? The more appropriate question might be, is someone a person if they have no passions or hopes or dreams?

A measure of time

2011-06-23T09:14:00.000-04:00

As I laid in bed this morning working through the pain in my chest that I have most mornings, it dawned on me that its only been about a month since the friendship I held so dear ended. Only a month. It seems like it was forever ago, and it seems like I have had this raw pain for longer than I can remember. How can it be only a month?

I guess when time is measured by each breath, a month can seem like a lifetime.

"You just have to trust me"

2011-06-17T21:03:00.000-04:00

I can't think of too many words that I like to hear less than that. Trust. Today this exact phrase was spoken to me by someone when I questioned the authenticity of his story - which changed with the day. It was on a matter of great personal importance. I was unhappy that the story changed. His reply: "You just have to trust me."

Um...no, I don't.

I am short on trust this year as it is. Too much has happened. Too many disappointments. Too many hurts, from foolishly having hope and trusting, that are now too deep to heal.

I feel hard on the outside. Flat and lifeless on the inside. Heart chakra has no movement - completely absent. Long moments of quiet inside as I hold my breath and wait for whatever comes next, wait without vision or hope, just wait for whatever comes next.

Who I am becoming

2011-06-11T07:32:00.000-04:00

I was composing an email the other night. I was responding to, among other things, the information that this person was struggling with car problems (as am I this week) and is now stuck needing to travel by plane to make a medical appointment.

I had typed in an immediate response of an offer to use some of my frequent flyer miles if she needed help to get to her doctor. It was a natural response.

After I typed that offer, it sat on my screen for a good long while as I thought through this offer I was about to make.

Now, I have given away flights in the past to others. Once I actually won two round trip airline tickets to any continental U.S. destination. It was the biggest thing I have ever won in my entire life. Actually, it was about only thing I have ever won (not counting a turkey for thanksgiving while in high school which resulted in my family having three turkeys that year - two of which we gave away of course). I held on to those free tickets for a while, feeling rich and wondering where I was going to take myself. Being single then, this actually represented two different vacations for me.

I never used the tickets. In the months that followed a good friend was diagnosed with late stage cancer. Her family made many trips from Indiana to Maryland in a desperate attempt to stand vigil in the hospital, and then later as they made plans for two funerals, one here and one in Indiana. It was the easiest thing in the world to hand my tickets over to her family to help them through this very hard time. I did it and never thought twice about the decision.

I have a small pile of frequent flyer miles that I have accumulated over the years from business travel. I have never exchanged them in for any adventure trips for myself. I did fly a coworker out to San Diego during a week I was there on business and her mom was actually also visiting San Diego while the husband was at a convention. So my friend had a free flight, shared my hotel room, and had a vacation week with her mom in sunny southern California.

I also flew another friend's husband to New Mexico so he could accompany her as she was traveling there on business. I was glad to do it. She was and continues to be a good and trusted friend and it was something I could give back.

Only once did I use any of these miles for myself. I did purchase an upgrade to business class for a trip to Germany. My nephew's birth date was predicted on the weekend I was supposed to leave for this business trip, so I scheduled a last minute flight to Germany in an attempt to be home as long as possible, as I was supposed to be in the delivery room for my nephew's birth. Planning to fly overnight to Germany, land and be on my feet teaching a class all day is not for the faint of heart, and I hoped an upgrade to a seat with more room would allow me a little bit of sleep on the plane that night. (Turns out my nephew was born in the early morning hours that Saturday and I had the whole day to be around, and that choosing to leave on Sunday was the right choice.)

Back to the email I was composing... So when this person was sharing her life challenges, and I was sitting on a pile of frequent flyer miles, it seemed the natural and decent response to offer them.

But, something in me has changed. Even though all the other flights I gave to people were to people who had more financial resources than me, and I never thought about it, I am thinking about it now. This person has three sibling who all have more than I do (one sibling even has a beautiful home that she felt compelled to complain to me was not good enough for her....the same ex-friend who ironically I had at one time offered my frequent flyer miles to in order to make a Mexico vacation possible for her and her husband, and she considered taking me up on my offer even when it turned out her husband was sitting on more frequent flyer miles than I had.....but I digress). These siblings all own homes and live well, far better than I do. It is the job of this person's rich family to step in and help. And if they don't, then, well shame on them.

The automatic generous response that I would have had in this situation is dwindling, fading away. I am becoming a different person.

I looked at the screen again, all these thoughts in my head and then deleted my offer before sending the email. I instead suggested she may look to her rich (this home is not good enough for me) sister for frequent flyer miles to make her trip possible. I am no longer that generous person I used to be.

Hindsight

2011-06-11T06:52:00.000-04:00

These past few years have been rougher on me than any recent time I can remember. A string of events added up to making me feel unlucky, bruised, discarded and of no value. Over and over the message has come in, "my best is not good enough" and "there isn't any room in the world for someone like me."

Now, I have certainly lost many friends in the past. Most people fall away over time, either simply because of moving away or just losing interest in maintaining a relationship. It is the way it is.

However when this old friend appeared again in my life, I tried with all I had, to do what was for me a very very courageous act: I chose to believe that I did have value. I chose to believe in this friendship and hold to the faith that if I brought my best to it, it would be reflected in what came out of it. This was a huge huge leap of faith for me. I thought this one time, it was safe enough to do that. I thought this time it would be different.

I was wrong.

After investing so much of myself, to only then receive such callous and thoughtless treatment in return, and to be so quickly and easily discarded......

This is why this lost friend has been far far more devastating than all the others. I had invested myself and I had believed.

Enough of this.

Its really just time to disengage from most of humanity if humanity is going to keep telling me I have no value, as I refuse to believe that.

remove your shoes, you are walking on sacred ground

2011-06-05T12:31:00.005-04:00

This blog is the little corner of the universe where I use writing as a way to organize my thoughts and feelings, so that I can sometimes wrestle the beasts that I encounter and do the harder work of trying to find new perspectives on a situation, to examine myself and find ways I can do better (I can always do better).

I am not a great writer. I am not even a mediocre writer. I never claim to be a wise or insightful person. I am just simply me, struggling along in life, trying to make sense of what happens to me and around me. While I could write only on the privacy of my computer, to post it here where someone might stumble across the words forces me to a higher level of honesty and makes me strive for clarity in my thinking.

When I am injured, injured badly, by life (in this past month, by one who was my closest friend), I initially thrash around wildly with pain, as one would if a limb was torn off - thrashing blindly because I cannot do anything else when the pain overtakes me so completely. Wild blinding pain never lasts, it continues to transform and with it transforming the person bearing it. I am not thrashing now, the metaphorical stub where the limb was torn from is now bandaged and some "heart" pain killers have been applied. I have not been discharged from the healing place yet, there is still more medical intervention to do, but I have still times now to sit and think about what I have lost, to stare at the emptiness where something once was and to wonder what my transformed self will become as the days and months come to pass.

As I am want to do, I examine what has transpired, looking for the lessons I am supposed to learn, looking for ways to make sure that as I move forward, I do it as a wiser person than I was in the past in order to avoid making the same mistakes over and over and over again. If I can't do at least that, I am not growing. I wonder, all too often, if I will ever attain enough wisdom to walk a better path. Life, you see, is a very complicated thing.

I think back on all the things my (ex)friend did that made me uncomfortable at the time, and how I chose to overlook or rationalize away the situation. While I am very good at beating myself up over these mistakes in retrospect, my dear wise partner reminds me that it was because I was trying to be a good friend and wanting to believe in the best in this other person, and that isn't inherently a mistake.

One of the more off-putting experiences was our first day of seeing each other after so many years. By then we had shared a good deal of each other through many phone calls, emails and computer chats. Anyone that knows me well knows I have strong believe in a connection with "all-that-is" in the natural world around me. While the times when I have been lucky enough to "hear" for myself the "voices" of the elders all around me have been far fewer than I wish they would be, each time is a sacred and powerful experience. I do not share them lightly.

So when this person decided that she would jump on the "me too" bandwagon, and insist that she was getting a message from a tree, it felt very disingenuous, and treated frivolously. To be sure, it is not my place to say what another does or does not experience. But to say the tree was "full of itself" did not resonate at all. "Full of itself" - ego - I haven't ever encountered from a tree, or from any non-human elder. Ego seems to be mostly a human fault, as we do not know our place in the greater web. I have never encountered from a rock or a tree such a thing. In fact, one way that I know the experiences I have seem genuine is that connection with "other than human" is just that, connection to another culture, an alien culture, another perspective, another way of being, other than human. An elder tree does not respond as a human, but rather is a Being connected to the knowledge and wisdom of the ages as foreign to we human as if from another planet.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt, that day, and many days after that. In retrospect, I can see that day as a "me too" day for her, just as the "needing" a new home is a "me too" for her in reaction to spending every day with wealthy female clients coming into her shop. I am sure she hears all the bantering of spoiled rich people and decided a "me too" reaction was appropriate and deserved. "Me too" give me all the things these spoiled elite society women have.

I cannot say what other people lust after. We each have to make our own mistakes in life. However, when it comes to the sacredness of connecting to "all-that-is," the honor of sometimes getting snippets of wisdom older than the human race, the gift is sacred. I have no room for anyone trivializing the experience. This is sacred to me, and although I am willing to share what I can of it to anyone who truly is interested, you must first remove your shoes and walk gently and respectfully, as you are walking on sacred ground.

class

2011-06-02T13:15:00.000-04:00

A friend shared a story with me last week that was amazingly timely for me, although my friend was completely unaware.....

My friend was recently stuck at a business dinner with a client, and the client had absolutely no sense of appropriateness. The client went on and on and on (and on apparently for the entire meal) about all the places they had traveled across the world and that they are really stuck now because they had run out of new places to visit. They had "done it all." The ironic twist was they were trying to get everyone else at the table to feel sorry for them, because they have no new vacation spots to discover.

Now, no one else at the table had anywhere near the money or resources to even imagine such a life - just hard working people trying to get through the days, pay the bills, and hope for a camping trip or the like for a yearly vacation. The client was either blissfully unaware, or uncaring how rude they were to their audience, flaunting all they had and all they had done in front of people who will never know such riches.

My friend told me the story of their dinner experience with great disgust, feeling bad and embarrassed for everyone else at the table. Apparently once the client left, everyone gathered to discuss how rude the evening was.

I grew up in a small town where my parents made more money than most, and the class divide was obvious. I was greatly aware of who had and who did not and strived to always treat all my friends equally (- even as my father raised me to considered the kids with more money as more important). I remember once having a friend in our home who asked if it was actually acceptable to sit on one of the chairs in our formal living room, she was that uncomfortable in our house. I remember feeling pained for her and worked to alleviate her discomfort quickly.

I grew up knowing how to conduct myself when my father held business entertaining in our home, carrying out the trays of hors d'oeuvres with a smile and not speaking unless spoken to. I knew how to act in a formal setting. I also knew how to blend in well with families that had very little, as many around us did. Many of my cousins grew up on farms, some in trailers. I was appreciative of any meal a family fed me.

No one had to explain to me how to conduct myself appropriately in the context of other people's lives with respect to their economic status. When my father (who I was never close to) off-handedly dismissed a house fire that destroyed a family home as "just a box in the woods," I was completely disgusted with him, because I knew that, although it was a simple home, it was a home, and all they had, and to that family the loss must have been devastating.

People are people. Their value is not measured by the size of their bank account, or the size of their waistline, the cars in their driveway or even if they do not have a driveway or a car at all. You treat people with respect in part by never bringing up ways in which you may have been more fortunate than they have been. Meeting people where they are and making them comfortable and welcome is what grace is all about. I always new this. No one ever had to teach me.

I never consider myself poor living in this rich county. I struggle, in this very high cost of living place, to make all ends meet. But as Judi always points out, we have a roof over our head, food, and clothing. We also have two cars that both work great and premiere AAA accounts in case they ever don't, fantastic health insurance, and, most of all, we have each other.

So it was very difficult to find I had let the ground get completely out from underneath me when my closest friend did not extend to me the basic social graces that shouldn't even need to be taught. That she could have a beautiful home (from the income of her new husband), she should have considered herself extremely lucky. If she wanted even more than the riches she has right now, her need should not have been in my face constantly. She should have never tried to force me to vocalize a "poor poor you" to her about her home. It was rude beyond belief. It was even more rude that after we stumbled through this last fall and it almost destroyed the friendship then, that she never learned the lesson and started it again.... "Poor me, I am cleaning today while you are out in the sun.... Poor me, I am cleaning because I am going house hunting, please feel sorry for me."

On my better moments, when the aching hole in my chest isn't taking my breath away, I do feel sorry for her. I feel sorry that she will never learn to be happy with what she has. I feel sorry for her that she doesn't know how to be graceful in front of those who have less than. I feel sorry for her that she has completely lost her way, looking toward "climbing" as a way to heal the wounds of her life. And I feel sorry for both of us that it creates a gap too wide to reconcile.

the morning(s) after

2011-05-31T09:25:00.000-04:00

it is clear to me, with all the anguish and pain i am still struggling with, that this is a pain that will take a long long time to resolve. i feel sorry for judi as she will have to witness, experience and walk along with me through this. she had warned me long ago this day was coming with my friend. i didn't want to believe her. i wanted to believe in this friendship. i wanted to believe my friend was more of a person than she really was. my fault i guess. my mistake. i put expectations on her that she could not meet. if i could roll back time, i would go back and make the other decision, the decision to never contact her after all these years. i should have known then that our differences would be too great to overcome, our value systems too different to find any common ground.

with every fiber of my being i want to recoil from all of humanity, find a place to hide for the rest of my time on earth, the pain is too great. why i am a fool over and over, i do not know. this is what i must come to understand. why i am so easily disposable, over and over again, i do not understand. i do not want to be in a position to be disposable again. i have had enough of that.

quote

2011-05-27T15:55:00.000-04:00

"A heart can be broken, but it will keep beating just the same."

Ninny Threadgoode in "Fried Green Tomatoes"

Reflections

2011-05-25T22:29:00.001-04:00

I have a tremendous partner. She is wise, kind and very patient with me, and supportive as I work through the issues of the very broken heart I am carrying this week - trying to make sense of it all.

I have been sitting with all the emotional aftermath, looking for any path out of the hurt, trying to understand why I have the feelings I do. It is coming as a surprise to me how much negativity I was experiencing from the messages I was getting from my friend. I was seeing myself in a lesser and lesser light. This is not right. This is not the influence a friend should have.

I am sorting out the differences between my emotional reactions to what was happening and the issues that my friend must have that put her in the broken place she must be in.... trying to differentiate what messages came from callous disregard for me and what happened that had nothing at all to do with me, but are just her issues from the ways she is broken (and we are all broken in some way).

No rational person would insist that they cannot live in a perfectly beautiful house because it was purchased by their spouse while in a previous marriage. So many people have lost their homes in these past years, due to the financial crisis, and floods and tornadoes (some tornadoes across the country tonight as I write this), that those who have a very beautiful home should not and cannot be anything more that just grateful for what they have. No rational friend would express all the anguish she has about her house to a friend who has never owned a home. That is against basic common good sense and decency.

My friend must be broken in a way I cannot begin to imagine. All I can say is whatever the issue, it has nothing to do with the house and has more to do with any history of her spouse with other people or something to do with her self esteem. As most people I know are on second (or more) long term relationships, its to be expected that we all have histories. That is just the nature of our existences and our paths.

She was very angry with me that I refused to jump on the band wagon of support, to agree with her that her situation is intolerable. I was very angry that she was so insensitive to the fact she has more than I ever will and felt it was appropriate to complain about it in front of me without any sensitivities to my reality.

I do not have the material possessions of most people around me. I have worked very hard with my emotions, my priorities and my spiritual path to not focus on this, but instead focus on the paths and accomplishments are are truly important: (what I said to my teacher today) "the path to becoming a true human being."

After giving me some time on my own to start to get grounded again, my tremendous partner reminded me tonight of how rich we really are - how we have a way of appreciating life and each other in a way that few people ever get to understand. We fill our lives with experiences, not things. We fill our lives with the love for each other, not the love of conquest or consumption. We do not measure ourselves through anyone else's eyes. She reminded me that we are far richer than my friend will probably ever know.

Inch by inch I will work to bring the ground back under my feet and learn again that no one should make me feel less than - that no one should have that power over me.

I cannot say what will happen to my friend. I believe she is missing (running from?) an opportunity for growth and healing, choosing instead to feed her broken state instead of address it. Had she chosen instead to do the hard work of healing, I would have gladly been by her side the entire way. I am sad for her, but her path is her own. For now, we have gone our separate ways.

friendship lost

2011-05-23T15:17:00.004-04:00

Had a friendship end this week - like a divorce, it is a painful thing, even if the right thing. I could no longer sit with how I was made to feel. A friend should not make you feel “less than” (by direct or indirect intent), but that’s what was happening to me for some time now.

What is the measurement of the value of a person? While we all know the right answers have to do with heart, spirit, intent etc…. our society has other measurements that we all get sucked into - whether we intend to let it happen or not: body image and size, bank account size, property holdings, cars we drive, hair and make-up, popularity and “normalcy.”

In all of society’s measurements I am quite definitely a failure. There is no question on this. Why this is so will have to be the subject of other essays yet to be written – but for now the questions haunt me and the answers continue to elude me.

I have tried hard, oh so very hard, to remind myself that the true measure of a person is their character, their heart, their good actions and intentions and that nothing other than that matters. I have tried hard to find comfort and refuge in this, while living in the land of arrogance and pretention and climbing.

It’s one thing to get a message from a stranger that you don’t measure up as it is easier to dismiss their attitude. It’s quite another thing to have the dear friend sitting next to you spouting these same external measurements of value. It is much harder to sit comfortably and dismiss and keep wearing the awkward smile to say all is well when it really doesn’t feel that way.

As a tangible example, my friend would constantly tell the story of the time her weight got high… describing it in terms of what a terrible experience it was….. and I was left wondering if she was completely unaware each and every time she recounted the story that it is exactly how much I currently weight. What does that mean about how she sees me? While I have been pretty comfortable in my body, and spend little to no time on worrying about body image, for the first time in many many years I was squirming on the issue of my weight, wondering how to emotionally manage through the situation, trying to understand if the situation arose from complete lack of consideration of her audience or if it was a message directly to me. If it was complete lack of consideration (the gentler answer), and thus unintentional, then I wonder why I was not important enough to be considered.

The breaking point was discussions of her home. She has a beautiful home and a vacation home as well…. far far far more than I will ever have in a lifetime. I cannot find a way on the income I make to ever afford a home in this expensive place, and my career path only provides jobs in high cost of living locations – a catch-22 I have not been able to resolve. So I live in an apartment with all the downfalls of that – lack of privacy never knowing when maintenance might come into my home, lack of peace as neighbors can be very loud, stealing from me the silence I crave, lack of feeling safe (we have had two bad bad fires in recent years and just hearing a siren in the distance sends my adrenaline pumping as I run to the window).

Absolutely I wish I had a home, a place where I could not worry about walking loudly on the floor, where I could turn the TV up loud enough to actually hear the dialog instead of reading the closed captioning with the volume low. I wish I never had to hear domestic disputes in the hall and occasionally have to call the police because of someone’s activities (which I have come to learn the routine for now). I wish I had a garden, I wish I had a driveway where I could safely park my car anytime of the day or night, instead of the constant battle to find the best option for parking and hoping my car won’t be crushed the next morning (which it once was – costing me a lot of money and tremendous amounts of time). I live 95% of my time in one room – sleeping, eating, entertainment, etc. leaving the back room for storage and clothing etc.

Those people who live in their own free-standing home have no idea the struggles or the lack of quality of life one has in an apartment. I ache more than anyone can know that this is the best I can do for my small family. It is the single greatest reason I lose sleep at night.

My spouse’s gift to me is that she never complains but instead lives in an attitude of gratitude for what she does have instead of aching for what she does not.

What I have done for my family is keep a roof over our head, utilities paid, cloths in the closet and food in the fridge, cars running, insurance for everything, access to medical care and on occasion, even when it is our last dime, a small vacation or two.

I cannot find a way to make anything more than this. A friend, if they are to be my friend, must understand and respect this and honor my life as it currently is.

So what did my friend do, on more than one occasion? Complain to me about her beautiful home with a yard and a swimming pool – complain it is not big enough, not good enough, not somewhere she is willing to live because her husband originally bought it with his now ex wife. Because the ex wife once lived there, it is not good enough for my friend.

It never once dawned on my friend that it might have been inappropriate for her to complain about her riches in front of me. It was very embarrassing and painful to be on the receiving end of this situation. I felt small both for what I didn’t have and for not being considered. For the first time in my life, I felt poor.

AND, I was supposed to support her in her crusade, jump on the band wagon of pity and say “yes of course, poor you, it is unbelievable you have been asked to suffer this way. Yes of course you deserve a much better and bigger house for yourself, of course you deserve at least that much and your husband, who is working very hard to provide for you, is really just being unreasonable and should spend many thousands more dollars.”

I couldn’t do it. For many reasons I couldn’t do it. My friend who once went through bankruptcy, who knew what it meant to have to use a food kitchen, has forgotten completely, or never got the real lesson at all from those experiences – which is to simply and humbly be grateful for what she does have: a new a loving husband who takes care of her family so she wants for nothing, who has a home where they can play music extraordinarily loud at night without the police knocking on their door, and a place to park their cars each and every night, with a washing machine that doesn’t hook up to the kitchen sink so that one has to plan laundry around dinner, and where the television can be heard over the washing machine.

Each and every time she started on the “poor poor me” routine, I felt the ground beneath me start to fall away – my attempt to "be grateful for what I do have instead of losing myself to the ache of everything I do not have" would start to fall apart – because this is my weakness and my shame that I have not been able to do better.

If I can move beyond the pit in my stomach and the huge ache in my heart, I know I should feel sorry for her as there is something seriously unbalanced and off center with her on this issue. I have to acknowledge though, that this is too big a hurdle, I cannot support her in her request that I should feel sorry for her lot in life that her home is not good enough. I cannot support her insistence that her husband is in the wrong that he didn’t want to move (I suspect in the end she will bully him into moving).
We danced and struggled with this for some time and the rift this weekend became too great and she dismissed me. I will not do anything to counter that.

Yet another life wound I will have to work on healing (far too many of these in recent years). I had invested very much of myself in this friendship and the hole leaves me devastated and lost. I know I won’t be the same person when and if I come out the other side of this ache.

Connections

2011-04-29T16:27:00.008-04:00

With May right around the corner, my thoughts and my spirit are already, as they are every year at this time, on the shores of the Delaware Bay, anticipating the coming together of again of so many old friends.

Timed with the full moon of May each spring, the horseshoe crabs are called to leave their water home and come up on to the land, an environment foreign and hostile to them, to lay the eggs of the next generation. Timed with the horseshoe crab spanning, small birds, participating in the longest migration of any animal on earth, come to the bay to feed on those nutrient rich eggs, feasting on the eggs that were never completely buried in the sand but left instead scattered across the beaches. As the horseshoe crabs and the red knots are drawn each spring to these same beaches, I too, as I have done year after year now, answer the call to join them, as witness to this coming together, this interconnectedness of life.

I visit and know these beaches in all seasons: summers when the biting flies leave trails of blood down my legs and the grasses are high and dark green, fall when the grasses brown but still sing sweetly in the wind as they did on the hot summer days, winter when the wind bites at my face as I walk the beaches in search for ocean smoothed pebbles, and of course, spring when migrations and spawning of our animal friends bring them to these shores.

No one can say for sure exactly how long the horseshoe crabs have favored these particular beaches as the epicenter of their spawning. Known as “living fossils,” they have existed on our earth since long long before the dinosaurs. Only a few years ago, newly discovered fossil records from Canada moved back the date horseshoe crab ancestors, who look remarkable like the animals of today, where known to swim the ocean from 330 million years ago to 445 million years ago. Horseshoe crab ancestors lived in the oceans when plants were only starting to cover the land. What an astonishing and reverent thing that they are still here today.

I have found that animals have both a strong sense of themselves as individuals as well as a “knowing” of their species, of who and what their species represent. While in a sense we are all connected to the ancestors that lived in ages past, the horseshoe crabs, having lived as horseshoe crabs almost since the beginning of life on this planet, may have a knowledge through time of the earth and all of us on it that we couldn’t begin to imagine.

The red knots are not large birds, and seeing them, you would never guess that a mature bird that has seen sixteen seasons, through participation in their incredible migration, has flown the distance from here to the moon. Each spring they move from the southern tip of South America, up the continent, massing on the northeastern shore of Brazil in preparation for a non-stop flight from Brazil to our humble shores of the Delaware Bay. Four days and three nights they fly non-stop to land, starving, bodies completely used up, just in time to feast on horseshoe crab eggs.

The abundance of highly nutritious eggs on the beaches is what calls these beautiful little birds to these shores. This is a critical feeding stopover if they are to complete their spring trip it to the arctic to where they hatch and raise their young. If there are not enough horseshoe crab eggs on the shores during their short few week stopover in Delaware, they will not have the energy to complete their migration, or to withstand the cold temperatures they will find in the arctic when they arrive, and a new generation of red knots will not be born.

The arrival of the red knots at the Delaware Bay is critically timed to the spawning of the horseshoe crabs. As delicate as this relationship may seem, it has worked well for many thousands of years, until humans stepped in and overharvested horseshoe crabs. The resultant decline in horseshoe crab eggs available for red knots to eat has caused a catastrophic collapse in these birds’ numbers in a few short decades. Scientists and environmentalist and concern citizens are desperately engaged in a race against time to save the red knots from extinction. Fearing that all our good efforts now may be too late to save these birds is like ice running through my veins and a heavy weight in my heart pulling it to the ground.

I was first called to the shores of the Delaware Bay many years ago to witness the migration of the Red Knots. I wanted to see firsthand these small birds that came from Argentina and Chile. In the early years, I saw beaches full of these rusty breasted birds feasting with other shorebirds: ruddy turnstones, sanderlings, semi-palmated sandpipers as well as gulls. Viewing the collections of these birds feeding and the abundance of horseshoe crabs on the beaches took one’s breath away with the wonder and amazement of it all.

Now, only fifteen or so short years later, it is increasingly hard to find the red knots when they come, as their numbers are only a fraction of what they used to be. It is the first time in my life I have witnessed for myself the precipitous decline of a species from abundance to the brink of extinction. The horror of witnessing this I have no true words for.

While I first came to the shores to honor the red knots, I now have grown to know and love as well the horseshoe crabs. I believe both these creatures are fearless as they answer their respective calls to reproduce. The horseshoe crabs leave the safety of the water and clumsily pull themselves on to the hostile environment of dry land, risking their very lives to bury their eggs on the warm beaches. Many lose their lives in this process. With limited mobility on land, an errant wave can knock them upside down. If they are not able to right themselves again, the sun will soon take the moisture from their bodies and take their lives. This potential lethal outcome does not stop them from coming onto the beaches to spawn, answering their call, “life’s longing for itself *.”

The red knots travel literally to the far reaches of the earth to the most favorable breeding grounds, where insect food is plentiful and predators few, to lay their eggs and raise their young. Their long journey is perilous and harsh and not all survive the trip. But every season they also answer the call, “life’s longing for itself *.”

I am compelled each spring to answer the call to join them. It is a pilgrimage that feeds my soul in a way I cannot completely understand or explain to others. I leave behind the human world I live in and travel to this place of life-coming-together. It is a few hours journey by car to get there, and I take that time to work on shedding from me the burdens of my existence. By the time we turn off the hard road onto the first gravel road that takes us to our special beach, I have released most of the troubles of my life that weigh on me heavily. Another turn from the gravel to the dirt road and the last remaining burdens, like a heavy, dusty, torn and ill-fitting jacket of the wounds and failures of my human existence are cast off and left behind. All that I am in the human world that defines me as failure and outcast doesn’t exist here, those measurements of value have no meaning here. When I arrive at the beach I am like a naked person, existing only as the core essence of myself, bringing only my mind and my heart and my spirit, the best of what I am, to this place.

I wait patiently for the high tide and the first signs of horseshoe crabs coming on shore for the next spawning. I walk the tide line slowly, my heart singing as one by one, then dozens at a time, they start to come on shore. These gentle unassuming creatures have no fear of humans and barely notice my presence as they crawl on shore and dig holes and lay and fertilize the eggs of the next generation. I watch, I greet and I smile in appreciation for the opportunity to witness this spawning frenzy. At its peak one can look far down the shoreline and see horseshoe crabs as far as the eye can see. Look a little bit farther than that and perhaps you are looking back in time, back, back to almost the beginning of time, 445 million years ago, when their ancestors may have also been answering the call to come to similar beaches.

I stand on this beach, this place of all-things-coming-together, where earth and water and sky meet, where avian and arthropod and human have all answered a call to come, where the past and the present meet but where the future is far too uncertain, and I experience the great connection to all things. I look down and notice a stranded horseshoe crab, caught by a wave and left belly up to the sun. Gently I reach down, pick her slowly up, right her and return her to the water, sending with her my best wishes that she lay many more eggs, as I have done with hundreds, if not thousands of other stranded horseshoe crabs - my gift to the red knots and the horseshoe crabs yet to be because this one has been returned to the water to live and to breed another day. In doing this, I too have joined as a participant, even if in a small way, in these great cycles of life. I am transformed. What I cannot find for myself in the human world, I can know for myself in this place. I have touched eternity. I have come home.

* From "On Children," by Kahlil Gibran

Looking in the mirror

2011-04-08T22:24:00.005-04:00

I have been on a rollercoaster this past year, alternating between having my feet underneath me and being knocked totally to the ground. While it’s easy to point to outside events to blame, in the end I am always fully responsible for myself and to my reactions to everything that happens around me and to me.

If I ever hope to get off the rollercoaster and find a more even path, I first need to look hard in the mirror, not sugar coat anything, not deceive myself, but instead own all my weak spots that allow me to lose my footing, again, and again (…. and again and again and again)…..

Time to know myself better - here’s what I see as I sit tonight:

I live too much in my head, and not enough in my body. I think and think and think on things but don’t put enough value on feeling, physically feeling, physically experiencing, or even just living in my body.

I have lived my life feeling the outsider. No, more than feeling the outsider – I have been disconnected from most of what goes on around me, of most of the human culture around me. Part of this may be just from the person I am. It is inescapable though, to not acknowledge that growing up when I did, and where I did, as a lesbian, had a lot to do with keeping me separate from much.

I cannot kid myself. I have been “separate from” and as much as I had told myself, “oh, it was ok, as I had my own path,” truthfully there was damage done. I cannot just pretend there was not. Even if there were gifts from a path less traveled, there were also sacrifices and injuries that aren’t all healed.

I am NOT comfortable around alcohol. Choosing to not drink is one thing, but I have never been comfortable around others when they are drinking. I have tried to act normal and to say, oh, yes, its fine, but inside me there is a tenseness when I am around alcohol – as if it is itself an evil presence. To watch friends drinking and trying to manage through into the situation, it is as if I see creatures attached to everyone drinking, sucking life from them, and none of them know it but me, and I am supposed to pretend I don’t see. Yes, it’s that awkward and hard for me……

I have no idea what gender I am. I only know that when I walk into a woman’s clothing section, I cannot find myself there. (Nor do I find myself in the men’s clothing section across the isle, but I admit, men’s pants fit over my hips and rear end much better than women’s pants.). I have yet to find a clothing store the sell clothes for my gender.

Biology may be a bitch sometimes. When I can gain 10 lbs without trying this last month, I know there is something underlying…… and with mental-pause around the corner (or already here) any thought that my mind can override my biology will go right out the door.

I am 46 years old and have still not found my path, have still never felt a “home” anywhere, and am more puzzled than ever on this.

I get too easily angered. I am smart enough to know that anger is usually a secondary reaction to a primary pain – whether the pain is from injury, or embarrassment or disappointment or abandonment or other unpleasantries. I am too easily hurt, and the only mechanism I have for dealing with the hurt is to get angry.

I have been disappointed a lot.

Probably my biggest problem to overcome is that I have no ability to dream good dreams for myself. I have no ability to look into the future and imagine myself accomplishing anything wonderful. I have no ability to look into myself, identify a desire or dream, and hold firmly to that, define it as a goal, and more forward in life in a direction to make that come true. I cannot say exactly how it was that dreams were taken from me, but can say for sure that they were, and it has been so since I was very young. I have no belief that I can accomplish anything. I have no belief that “life will work out.” I worked so very hard to be numb in this area, that pretty much all I find now is that numbness.

Being a person without dreams isn’t being much of a person. Being a person without dreams guarantees I will be a failure.

Knowing all this does not then give me the ability to dream.

I live in fear of life taking a turn for the worse and becoming homeless. I lay awake at night worrying about holding everything together.

I remember everything bad thing I have ever done, every time I failed, every time I let someone down, every time someone has seen me fail. I carry all these memories with me every day. They, not any good I have done, have defined me.

Every time I fall, when I get back up, I am not quite as tall as I used to be.

I long to experience a feeling of home, but don’t think I will have it while still in human form.

I think sometimes the universe made a mistake and my mother’s first child was meant to live (in which case I would not have been conceived).

I live between two worlds, never a part of either one.

I can’t begin to imagine at all why any woman would want to be with a man. Really.

I have avoided men as much as possible my entire life. To say I distrust men is an understatement.

The contradictions in this society perplex me greatly.

The loss of the zoo volunteering killed a part of me. It was devastating. I have not "bounced back" from it, and probably never will.

I greatly admire the Buddhists, and my internal anger makes me feel very separate from their teachings, makes me feel much less than who I imagine a person on a Buddhist path would be striving to be. As long as I am angry, I cannot fully walk that path. (I know my reasoning is wrong, but it’s my feeling.)

I am not quite smart enough to figure out my next step, and not intuitive enough to find it, and not lucky enough to have it come hit me on the head.

more loss

2011-02-10T10:59:00.001-05:00

I have been left the past few weeks contemplating my latest loss.... the 40+ foot tree that broke off at the base (no root ball came up - can we say tree that had been weakened by previous damage and previous loss of limbs) and crashed onto my car. The latest word is that they will try and fix the car. Its within hundreds of dollars of being a total loss, and if they find any further damage than what has been quoted already, it will be deemed a total loss.

This is our Adventure Mobile that I took very good and loving care of . . . .

Rockville is a very unfriendly place for renters, we are less than or invisible to the decision makers of this place. A few years ago the city cut our access to the highway to leave for work in the morning. Their study of the impact of this traffic change never even mentioned that we existed at the end of the dead end street and need a way to get out of our neighborhood. We were not considered to be living in our neighborhood. Completely invisible.

For years I have tried and tried and tried to get someone to care about the fact that trees keep falling all over in the parking lot of our complex, on to residents' cars. No one cares. When I said to the regional property manager that as many as 10 cars may have been damaged or totaled in the past year alone, she told me simply that was a reasonable and acceptable rate. The city will not enforce anything to make the parking lot safer. My initial conversations with them have been, well.... unbelievable. The management company cares not about the continued property destruction, as long as they do not have to spend any money maintaining trees, as long as there is no out of pocket expenses to them, all is fine.

The residents bear the brunt of everyone else's disinterest and neglect. We are only renters. We matter not at all.

I had always worked very to park my car as safely as possible within the constraints that exist. I have put a great deal of attention and energy to this matter. I have spent years carrying my groceries and other heavy items long long distances up hill to my door, in order to leave my car in as safe a place as possible.

In the end, all my efforts to get someone to care, and all my efforts to keep my car safe (as Judi says, being good stewards of our resources) all my efforts were for nothing, and my car was smashed anyway. This was the first car I had ever bought for myself new and had made the last payment just 48 hours before it was smashed.

While I feel that I deserve to have a safe place to park my car, apparently neither the city of Rockville, nor the property managers, nor the true owners of the property, in NYC believe this to be the case. As long as none of these parties have any out of pocket expenses themselves, status quo will remain. I have lost thousands of dollars of value in my car. That was just my loss. Compounded by everyone else's loss, the money is huge.

In a way, this is stealing from the poor to give to the rich. As renters, our most valuable property is our cars. The "rich" property owners save money by not doing tree maintenance and we lose money - and this is how our society works. Everyone, apparently but me, is quite comfortable with this.

I keep trying to put a good face on this, but truthfully it takes my breath away how everything of value, either personal or financial, continues to be stripped from me. I honestly feel like the universe is trying to crush me. I feel that I have no control over keeping myself and my belonging safe. I feel I have no ability to improve my lot in life. And I honestly feel like I let my car, my good friend, down.

measurement of value

2011-01-23T18:02:00.000-05:00

I decided today to "calculate" my value for the years of volunteering, putting a cash dollar value on all that I did.

My contribution to the organization: calculating my time (at minimum wage), my membership fees, other out of pocket items I purchased for the exhibit ..... came to over $17,000.

My personal out of pocket costs: purchasing of uniform shirts, commuting costs etc..... came to well over $3000, not including all the gifts purchased at the gifts shops and food at their concession stands, not including gas on the days I did not take the metro but rather drove into the city, all of which would come to over thousands more......

As a Ph.D. in the life sciences, who's professional career has been completely as a science trainer and instructor for adults, I would suspect my time was worth far more than minimum wage. (Ya think?!?)

No dollar value can measure the professionalism and enthusiasm I had for the opportunity to open people's eyes in new way to help them connect with the natural world that is a part of our earth. No dollar value can measure my ability to work a room of 50 people in such a way that they leave with a sense of wonder and awe about an octopus...... or in helping someone lessen their fear of a spider.

......and for all that, they could not once say, "hey, you are the type of volunteer we don't want to lose. Can we talk about what happened and see if we can find a way to keep you?"

6 month loss

2011-01-23T11:31:00.004-05:00

A letter from the vice president of FONZ on Friday was like a kick in the heart that has sent me backwards about six months of my healing process.

There was really no purpose for this letter, it offered nothing for healing or resolution. It said only this: FONZ greatly values the volunteers (except me I guess) and the educational volunteers are critical to their mission (except me I guess), and that they are very sorry that I had the experience I did but rest assured it was dealt with properly, and "nice knowing you...."

What I would say back, except that for the past year FONZ has made it very very clear they don't want to listen to anything and they just want me quiet is this.....

The situation was NOT dealt with properly because:

a. No one bothered to proactively speak with me or engage me in any way with regard to resolution of this issue

b. No one said, a volunteer should have more options than to just leave the zoo entirely to avoid potential physical harm from a keeper (I HAD NO CHOICE for my own safety to walk out of the individual program I was in but I also said repeatedly to FONZ I did not want to leave the zoo...... )

c. No one said, we would like you to stay, your service for 17 years was exemplary, and we would like to discuss with you ways you could continue a relationship with FONZ

d. Clearly the message to the aggressive keeper that her actions in a workplace could jeopardize her employment did NOT get delivered, or she would not have so causally contacted my family again after this whole incident

e. The head of FONZ, after I contacted him, should have never left me a message that he would "make it right for me" and then be never heard from again.

FONZ's definition of "dealt with properly" was to simply make sure I disappeared, to make the issue go away.

In retrospect, I should have gone to the Office of Personnel and filed an official formal complaint of threat and harassment in this government workplace. That, I guess, would have been the only way all involved would not have been allowed to brush the incident underneath the carpet. They would have been forced to actually do their jobs.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in all the places I have worked, if I had acted in a threatening manner, fists on hips, screaming in someone's face, I would fully expect to be walked out the door. Termination of employment would be an immediate and expected result. In this case, getting rid of the volunteer was easier than doing the right thing.

They, apparently, run on a different standard for acceptable workplace behavior than the rest of us.

I fully regret ever having set foot on zoo grounds (did I mention being a zoo volunteer was the reason I moved to the DC area?). I regret that I dedicated 17 years of my life to this program, only to be so easily cast aside. I would like back the thousands of dollars I have given FONZ over the course of almost two decades, both in annual memberships (which I kept paying even at times when I barely had enough money to eat) and with all the purchases I made in the gift shop over the years (always my first stop for present buying), the money spent on metro fares and gas to get to and from the zoo, the money spent on volunteer shirts, the money I spent buying items for the exhibit, and all the thousands of hours I spent volunteering, commuting to and from the zoo, attending volunteer meetings etc.

If FONZ could not bother to work to retain a 17 year volunteer, if they could not put in just enough effort to do the right thing by me, then they need to at least acknowledge that their lip service to their commitment to volunteers is only that, lip service - with nothing of substance behind it and give back to me everything I so freely gave of myself for almost two decades.

I feel like a fucking fool to have ever volunteered. After this experience, I have no desire to volunteer for any organization again, and I will be guarded in how and when, if ever, I give of myself ever again.

Free Fall

2011-01-02T22:26:00.001-05:00

I have made it no secret on this blog that this last year has been a really tough year for me. Bit by bit, I have been losing my grip on the things that I would cling to in hopes that by holding to them, it would keep me afloat.

The universe has other plans for me. I can't say I have been going along quietly. Instead I have been flailing and desperately reaching out to grasp onto something solid, something that might keep me from sliding into the abyss. I have also been rallying against the losses with pain and great anger.

Of course, the more I tried to grasp and hold to some anchor, any anchor, the more everything slipped away.

I needed to pay attention to that - but the obvious lesson right in front of me was completely escaping my notice.
The pain I have carried in my chest this past month has been real and many times I found myself with a hand on my chest trying to rub away emotionally induced physical pain. Why is it that emotional torment causes a physical pain in my chest? December has been marked by many sleepless hours in the middle of many nights, of an angst that could not be comforted no matter the effort, mornings I could barely face and hours I just longed to be over.
The universe knew I was still not understanding the big lesson right in front of me, so decided to step in and be a bit more direct. I heard it loud and clear.

"You are in free fall" a voice said to me.

As soon as I heard and comprehended the message, my stomach dropped out. Initially this meant to me that I was going directly into the abyss, a one way ticket to complete destruction. No hope left. I wanted to cry.

"You are in free fall." I sat with this message and the great sadness it brought. I was overwhelmed.

I sat some more.

Yes, if I was going to be honest, I had to agree. I am in free fall. Nothing to hold to.

After a time, a thought, more like a memory started to tickle. Free fall, this is not so different at all from what Buddhists would call "groundlessness." It has been a great deal of time since I have sat and read and listened to my favorite Buddhist teachers. What was it about "groundlessness" that they taught? Memories stirred.

"Groundlessness".... not holding onto anything secure, having the ground removed from underneath you. Isn't this an opportunity to step into the unknown with the bravery that only the Buddhists can embrace?

The initial fear of this message started to lessen.

I sat with the "feeling" of "free fall," of "groundlessness." In time, it started to transmute into other feelings.... such as the simple freedom of flying. Another voice said to me that "free fall" can also simply be thought of as "untethered," another way to view freedom.

I was getting much calmer accepting that I am in fact in a state of having nothing solid to hold to (save my relationship with my beloved, and slowly repairing the relationship with my closest friend). As I did, a tremendous wave of compassion and gentleness for myself flooded me and I started to feel a real peace that has escaped me for most of this past year and even more so for this past month.

Definitely my life is in a state of groundlessness right now. I can decide to react to that in fear, or I can take the opportunity, as Buddhism would suggest, and wake up to new paths and new understandings. I can embrace the lesson and the opportunity to be transformed by it.

I am not sure what the next steps are. What I am sure of though is that for the last few days I have felt a peace that has escaped me for so long, and have enjoyed sleeping soundly through the nights.

not good enough

2010-12-19T02:35:00.000-05:00

Its the middle of the night and I can't sleep. Food not agreeing with my stomach I guess.

More than that, life not agreeing with my head and with my heart.

Its been a rough couple of weeks which has taken an emotional toll.

New Years will be upon us soon enough, the time when we are conditioned to assess the year that has passed. For me, 2010 will go down as one of the hardest years in recent memory for me.

It has been a year of loss. It has been a year of clear messaging for me - that message being: "I am not good enough"

My best has not been good enough in so many venues, so many ways, that the message sits painfully clear in front of me. Not good enough to find a job good enough to provide well. Not good enough to be valued as a volunteer, even when I gave it my all. Not good enough to be remembered or considered. Not good enough in many ways I will not list here.

Its as though 2010 has tried to simply, step-by-step, to erase me.

I have no goals anymore, no reason to ever hope I can change things for the better, no reason to believe that if I work harder, believe harder etc. that I can make any substantial, or even just small changes. Nothing I do effects my life for the better.

Right now, all I can say for my life is that I am killing time.

They took even this from me

2010-11-21T10:38:00.000-05:00

During our recent trip to San Diego, I did what I have done every chance I get for the last decade - visit the Wildlife Park.

What I experienced is about what I expected - it was pressing a thorn deeper into my heart. The events of this last year have taken from me one of my greatest joys. It is a wound that never heals. I am coming to understand it is not a hurt to "get over" but simply a hurt to understand has become an integral part of the fabric of who I now am.

I have decided to compose a letter to the board members - not that I think it will make any difference for me. But truth must be spoken and maybe for the next volunteer who finds themselves in a situation no volunteer should find themselves in, maybe FONZ will actually be compelled to do the right thing.

Just one more thing

2010-11-08T20:13:00.000-05:00

Ever feel like if just one more thing piled on you, it would be the thing that breaks you because you are at your limit?

What do you do if that "one more thing" was like four things ago... and it just keeps coming?

empty breath

2010-10-31T10:49:00.001-04:00

I have found lately that the secret to survival day-to-day is to simply keep myself distracted from the reality of my own life. Keeping something on the calendar to focus on keeps me from sitting with the painful truths I try to keep running away from and the painful process of self-examination.

To say that I have not lived up to my potential is an understatement. Professionally I never found my path, and the result now are days so full of compromises just to survive that there is barely any self-esteem left inside.

Where I did pour my passion, in personal pursuits to "contribute" to a greater good, the universe has kindly returned to me a gaping hole in my chest that never heals.

I would set my course in a new direction and build something new for myself, except that finding any direction completely escapes me, no matter how hard or how earnest or sincere I look. When I look deep inside to see if I can find any passion to tap into, any place I can go that would stir the embers of a life again inside, I find only a vast plain of emptiness, save the hurt. No belief, no passion, no hope for anything more than the hole I am currently sitting in.

I have never found a place in life for someone like me leading me to an inevitable conclusion that I was a mistake - this life I chose this time, I greatly errored.

Mornings are especially hard, the first waking moments the pain in my chest is real and gripping, and I have to spend time talking myself down, finding some lie to tell myself about how it will be ok. Night times are also hard, laying awake for hours sometimes, examining what I have, what I don't and knowing I am and will always be helpless to change that.

I live paycheck to paycheck, just managing to get by each month, running numbers in my head all night long to make sure we can survive one more month. While others have homes and vacation homes, and the luxury to "take off from work" whenever they want (I am so sick living in this rich place of entitlement) we have a small and old and not really so respectable rented place, which, at any point, if I fuck up what little is left and functioning in my life, we could easily lose and be out on the street.

There is no point of hoping for better, because there is no point in hoping for things you can never have. That only adds to preexisting pain, and I have enough pain to drown in already.

When my life is over, and I look back, I will have little to say about my life's accomplishments. Professionally I bombed, personally I never learned how to engage life and never found a place for me.

I don't drink or do drugs, but I think I can understand people's need to reach for something to numb their pain. I have never had anything to numb mine. I sit with it and we have become very familiar with each other.

empty

2010-09-23T17:24:00.000-04:00

I saw the email in my inbox and knew I had to read it and also knew I didn't want to. A wound that just never heals. A reply to my letter sent after contact from the threatening person, an "assurance" that the issue was dealt with seriously.... do I believe that? No. Nothing went right this whole time, why would this instance be different.

The second paragraph is what took my breath away.... an attempt to erase from history the wrong that has torn a hole in my chest that just never heals. I am not the same person I used to be through the whole experience. I will never be that person again. I do not like the person I have become.... a walking empty shell of my former self,not enough of a person left to build anything new with. Can't go backward, nothing to go forward to. I don't trust enough to want to engage the outside world much anymore, mostly just keep quiet and to myself. No belief in something better. No desire to try to look forward to things... just keep on pretending enough so I am left alone.

How does some one think they can just pretend that an injury done to me with such huge consequences to my very being didn't actually happen.

No sense fighting it. There's nothing left to win.

Falling under the category of UNBELIEVABLE

2010-09-17T10:22:00.003-04:00

I left a 17 year volunteering position when a keeper was so aggressive to me and the threats of violence were right in my face (rolled sleeves up over her shoulders, fists on her hips, and leaning over to scream in my face) such that I had no choice but to walk out the door for my safety.

I reported the whole incident and was told it was dealt with appropriately (although making right by me never never happened).

My assumption of "dealt with properly" would include employment probation, or at least the threat of probation, stern HR processes etc. that would let this employee know this type of aggressive behavior in the work place cannot be and would not be tolerated.

Now, I am not so sure anything happened, as this aggressive (bi-polar?) keeper send an email last month to my partner... "hey how's it going..." getting back in touch email, as if NOTHING EVER HAPPENED.

Clearly she never got any message that what she did was wrong, or she would have never tried to get back in touch.

Considering the carnage that was left in my life, this was pretty devastating to me to learn there were no serious repercussion to the perpetrator.

Friends suggest I should look for another volunteering opportunity, and while I have seriously considered this, I cannot find it in myself to put myself out in such a vulerable way again. Too much has been taken from me. I am not the same person anymore.

Take home lessons from 2010 . . . a personal walk

2010-09-16T09:09:00.004-04:00

With the events that transpired this year that totally shook my foundation, that took from me a part of myself, and separated me from many animal friends, there have been many painful lessons I have taken from the whole experience.

First, right does not always "win".... evil, wrong doing, aggression, cruelty - they all tend to be pretty strong forces and hard to overcome when confronted with them from another. This is not the first time I have learned such a lesson, that "not having done anything wrong doesn't mean that bad things won't happen to you anyway" and that those who do perpetuate "wrong" are not always, (actually usually not) held accountable.

(Having said that, the person that stole thousands of dollars from my elderly mother's checking account is currently sitting in jail - and for that I am completely delighted. Hope the criminal sits in jail for long time.)

The second major lesson I have learned, and probably the harder one, is that when your path takes you though a very dark and difficult place, you really walk that walk alone. It doesn't matter how many people love you and support you. They cannot reach inside you chest and take from it the stabbing pain. They cannot walk into the darkness with you and carry you along. They can only send their best wishes from the sidelines and hope that you come out the other side in some recognizable and still lovable form. When you stand up to do battle with the beasts of depression and despair and heart-felt pain, you stand alone.

I perhaps waste too much energy and time looking for external resources to help me through my internal dark path. There is nothing anyone can do, except myself. Only I can pick up the sword and slay the beasts.

Our culture teaches us a hundred ways to avoid pain, to run from pain, to deny pain. They teach us nothing about slaying it.

This is for me a lonely battle on a dark foreign land.

Sometimes

2010-09-10T09:06:00.001-04:00

the grief over the loss is just too much.

Dragonflies

2010-09-05T07:25:00.004-04:00

(male widow skimmer - photo taken last weekend in northern PA)

I commented to Judi how surprised I have been at the number of dragonflies I have seen this summer. It has been my observation that they have been around in great abundance - a real dragonfly summer.

While yesterday, spending time at our secluded beach, Judi would have to agree that it was a dragonfly day as dragonflies and butterflies were EVERYWHERE yesterday! However, Judi commented that she hasn't really seen dragonflies much over this summer.

Huh, odd that our observations were so different.

So, with the practice of "paying attention" to what shows up, the next thing I did was reach for our well worn books by Ted Andrews.

"Dragonflies: The Power of Light"

"If a dragonfly has shown up in your life, you may need some fresh air in regard to something emotional. You may need to gain a new perspective or make a change. It may even indicate that you are neglecting your emotions. Are you being too rational about everything? Are you not keeping the color of emotion alive?"

"The dragonfly and the damselfly reflect and work with the sun and light. the light changes throughout the day. The dragonfly and damselfly undergo their own transformations. If they have shown up, look for change to occur. Are you resisting change when you should not? Dragonflies remind us that we are light and can reflect the light in powerful ways if we choose to do so."

"Life is never quite the way it appears, but it is always filled with light and color. Dragonfly can help you see through your illusions and thus allow your own light to shine forth. Dragonfly brings the brightness and transformation and wonder of color vision."

"Butterfly: Transmutation and the Dance of Joy"

"Probably no animal or insect has come to represent the process of transformation and shapeshifting more than that of the butterfly. For those with this totem, the process of metamorphosis should be studied closely."

"When butterfly shows up, make note of the most important issues confronting you at the moment. This is probably why butterfly has shown up."

"Butterflies bring color and joy with them. When butterflies come into your life look at how much or how little joy is within your life. Lighten up. Look for change. Don't forget all change is good. Butterfly medicine reminds up to make changes when the opportunities present themselves. Transformation is inevitable, but butterfly will help teach you that growth and change does not have to be traumatic. It will teach you that it can occur as gently, as sweetly, and as joyfully as we wish."

- Animal Speak

Singular Existence

2010-09-03T17:39:00.004-04:00

Heading home after work today, I paused when the silence of the day was broken by a loud cicada call. I stood in the parking lot and grinned. I always love to hear the cicadas. As the call slowly wound down, my attention became focused on the silence that followed. I started to do some mental calculations, remembering that September had begun and the season for the cicadas will quickly becoming to a close.

I stood in the silence that followed, gazing in the direction where I had heard the cicada and listened. No other cicadas were calling. Now, if a female had responded to this male's call, I would not know, as only the males sing. But no more males were singing.

I wondered, what if he was the last cicada? What if all the others had already come and mated and laid their seed of the next generation and had already passed on. My grin faded.

What would it feel like to be the very last cicada, calling and calling and finding no response? What would it be to experience that measure of isolation?

As a human, a social animal, the very thought of being on a land where no other humans remained could crush a spirit completely. We need connection to survive. I imagined standing on an empty barren planet. The feeling of isolation that arose from that stark image tightened my stomach.

Other experiences of isolation came to my mind. I walk between two worlds, never fully connected to either one of them. I have not found my way among humans, have not found a place. I hear the call of the wilds, but, while in this singular and separate human form, I do not know how to reach out completely to answer this call, to go home to the web of greater connectedness. I have an echo of a memory of being part of a greater existence, of knowing no separation between myself and all else that is. But it is only an echo now and I cannot reach out and firmly grasp it.

I felt a connection between the isolation of this lone cicada and the isolation I feel most of the time.

Slowly, from a more distant place, the silence was broken as another male cicada started his mating call. My grin returned. The cicada party was not yet over, and my new friend was not all alone in his world. While someday soon there will be a "last cicada," today was not the day.

With a bit of hope and balance returning, I continued my journey home.

Where time used to stand still (part five)

2010-09-01T21:17:00.008-04:00

(This is the last post in an installment about natural gas drilling in northeastern PA. Please scroll down to Part One to start the story, and work your way up.....)

I had a lot of mixed feeling about what we saw on our quest. I do understand that our way of life demands energy, and this energy must come from somewhere. The oil well disaster in the gulf reminds us all of the dangers of off-shore oil drilling. A preponderance of scientific literature demonstrates the dangers and damage of climate change. While natural gas has been marketed as the "clean" alternative, there is enough evidence to know that the process of obtaining the gas from shale deposits is dangerous to the environment. The potential for ground water contamination is real and has happened repeatedly wherever hydraulic fracturing is performed (even as the industry denies this very fact). The potential of environmental contamination from the chemicals used in the drilling process is also very real.

Is this really our clean alternative? Will these farmers in rural PA really reap the windfall profits they imagine from all the drilling on their land?

I have no answers to this. The only thing clear to me is that the land where I grew up will never be the same. It will be forever changed and torn apart by this drilling and this onslaught of activity and new people.

With heavy hearts, we ended our quest and decided to head for our home in Maryland.

It was at that point that we looked up and saw on the mountains a surprising addition to the energy industry's influence on the land - wind turbines.

We drove up the mountain to get a closer look.

It may seem small but this vision gave me hope. No heavy trucks, no water and land contamination, just clean wind energy.

Maybe we humans will find a way out of the mess we are creating. Mabye. Just maybe.

Where time used to stand still (part four)

2010-09-01T20:40:00.007-04:00

The quest to view an active gas drilling site was a lot like tracking an animal. You can find evidence that you may be close. The evidence we encountered, in no particular order was:

destroyed blacktop on roads, destroyed to the point where it is difficult for an average passenger car to pass over

passing water tanker trucks at a rate of trucks/minute on country roads

finding roads newly build up with 8-10 inches of new blacktop, to support the heavy and frequent truck traffic, marked with miles and miles of warnings about "low shoulders" and temporary lights to support the 24/7 truck traffic

strange signs with no words, only symbols and arrows

bridges under repair to support loads they have never known before

plants along a blacktop road so covered with dust and dirt they look like they just emerged from a flood

Modified roads with dangerously low shoulders and night lights to allow truck traffic 24/7

8-10 inches of blacktop added to roads to support heavy truck traffic - with dangrously low shoulders. A passenger car going off this steep shoulder could end up in trouble quickly.

Tanker trucks per minute. The volume of truck traffic was astonishing.

Most bridges were under construction or being replaced. The old country bridges are no match for this "development."

This bridge stood a few miles from my childhood farm. It stood for many decades but cannot survive the onslaught of gas drilling activity. Good bye old bridge.

Plants covered with dust from all the traffic.

Out of state drivers hired for this drilling frenzy have no sense for driving on country roads. This one just about ran us off the road, slowing not at all around this curve. We had to pull off the road to not be hit.

Another bad driver for the gas drilling industry. This guy almost hit me in the parking lot of the gas station were we has stopped for directions to go up a mountain. Even as I yelled, he never noticed me.

Pipeline being laid across farm land to move the gas that has been recovered.

Gas pipelines. Enough said.

Cryptic signs to direct out of state drivers to remote drilling locations.

You know when you are getting very close to an active drilling site when you find a sign telling you to go no farther.

End of another road.

We did get to see one operation close to a road but didn't feel we could stop and photograph it. By now it was clear they were working to keep as much out of site as possible and we had already stirred up too much interest when we brought out the camera.... so here is my only view of a drilling site that day.

From the car window - a gas drilling site.

Where time used to stand still (part three)

2010-09-01T20:25:00.009-04:00

It turned out to be harder than I thought to find and view a gas well drilling pad. The actual pad is not very large, it doesn't need to be. The drilling goes vertical to a certain depth and then turns and goes horizontal for tremendous distances. Once the well is drilled, a combination of underground explosions and water (mixed with many chemicals) pumped into the well under high pressure break up the shale layers and release the gas. The gas comes out of the well, as well as much of the contaminated water. While the gas is a desired product, the contaminated water is a hazardous by-product. It takes millions of gallons of water to frack a well, and the result is millions of gallons of contaminated water, which if the process is done correctly, is stored in holding ponds until it evaporates.

It seemed that most wells are positioned out of site of the road (on purpose?).

The millions of gallons of water used to frack these wells starts out as fresh water, taken from the Susquehanna River, which runs through our small town.

Millions of gallons of water are needed for each well fracking process. Each pad can have as many as seven or eight wells. Each well can be fracked multiple times. The amount of fresh water used in this process is staggering.

The fresh water taken from the Susquehanna needs to be transported to these well sites. This is done by hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of tanker runs, a process which is completely destroying many of the country roads where the wells are found. (Just up the road from my childhood home, parts of the blacktop were completely gone - and the well these trucks were servicing had barely begun operation - shut down briefly as the well on one neighboring property has already gone bad.)

We tried to find an active well site that we could see but miles later we had not found what we were looking for. We did experience an "explosion" and it was our best guess the ground was shaking and the explosion we heard was from a "fracking" - but the road where the well was likely located was posted for no entrance. We could not travel down it. With the end of the day upon us we gave up, sent our dear friend on her way home with our best of wishes and the hopes we would cross paths again soon, and Judi and I decided to continue our quest in the morning.

Where time used to stand still (part two)

2010-09-01T19:42:00.008-04:00

Last weekend I had reason to go back to my hometown to attend a family matter. Once that was done, I had a day to play, truly play in the outdoors. My partner and I, accompanied by a dear dear friend who I had not seen in decades, went searching for smooth river rocks to be the subject of an upcoming work of art. It wasn't hard to find a stream to wade through, full of smooth rocks to examine and discover. Some of us went barefoot in the water, others didn't mind wet sandales as we criss-crossed the cool water of the stream. While looking for "just the right" rocks, we also poked around to see whatever else we could discover in the stream. We may have been three women in our mid-40s, but we were also three young kids, playing and discovering as we had done in our youth. My dear friend commented on the stream, that it appeared clean and healthy. Yes, she was right. We all agreed that we needed to return to this stream again. I wondered, with all the talk of water contamination potential with the gas drilling, if wading through this stream will be possible next time we return . . . I didn't want to speak my fears out loud.

(photo courtesy of my dear friend)

After a morning of stream wading and with lunch in our stomachs, we headed to a mountain lake to visit old family friends. I grew up learning to swim in this lake, learning to canoe in this lake, sitting for many many evening hours on the dock, talking of this and that and nothing in particular. It has been a second home for my family since my childhood and a favorite choice for swimming when we were kids.

After a stroll around the entire lake, we sat with my uncle and talked about the gas drilling activity. He gave us directions to an active drilling site. I decided I wanted to see a gas drilling pad for myself. I wanted to witness first hand this activity, which, for better and worse, has become the center of most activity in my small rural home town. He brought out a map that showed all the active drilling sites in the county. The map was covered with well sites.

Before we left, he talked about the lake association's attempts to keep the gas drilling away from the lake. I imagined what I thought was the worst case scenario, that the lake could become contaminated with the toxic "produced water" from the drilling process (water mixed with hundreds of chemicals, many of them toxic). I shook my head at the thought of the lake dying.

My uncle then corrected me. He said hydraulic fracturing, what everyone calls "fracking" could actually create a crack in the bottom of the lake and it could completely drain the lake. The lake could go away - forever.

It took me some time to take in the magnitude of what he was saying. I looked up again the lake in front of me, this simple body of water that was central to my childhood, and found it beyond my capabilities to imagine it gone. Gone? My stomach tightened.

With that, and some verbal directions, Judi and my dear friend and I headed out to see one of these gas drilling pads for ourselves.

Where time used to stand still (part one)

2010-09-01T19:13:00.007-04:00

I grew up in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, a place of more dairy cows than people. Dairy farming was a way of life for most of my relatives, and I grew up being sent off to the farms during haying season, learning how to scrub the tank that held the milk before it was picked up, knowing where to stand to help get the cows across the road from the field to the barn at milking time, playing in the hay mow, teaching young calves to drink from a pail and knowing not to wear my barn clothes into the house. We spent many many hours out in the woods, our parents unconcerned as to where we may be as long as we showed up at home again in time for the next meal. We climbed up trees and through the streams, catching crayfish in the water and always searching the forest floor for indian pipes (plants with no chlorophyll), believing them to be magical plants.

I have long since left the rural life and have found myself, for better or worse, stranded in an urban, almost city life - a life of frenetic human craziness, of concrete and brick and little air to breath. From time to time, I still head north to visit relatives in northeastern Pennsylvania. The land of my childhood has remained relatively unchanged my entire life - until now.

I have heard and read all about the Marcellus Shale formations of the northeast that supposedly contain immense amounts of natural gas - the Saudi Arabia of the US they say. This little tapped resource has been said to be America's key to ending our dependence on foreign oil. I have heard of the gas wells that are popping up at a frenetic pace, with my little home town at the epicenter of this new drilling activity. I have heard some scary stories as well, of drinking wells gone bad after the drilling starts, of methane in the drinking water at "near explosive" levels, of truck traffic destroying roads. The more I researched, the more I read, the more concerned I became

During my recent visit up north, I needed to see for myself how the land of my youth is being transformed.

A sweet being

2010-08-21T21:24:00.007-04:00

I met this wonderful lady (I think it was a hen) at the fair. She had the most sweet face and personality to match. I think she was overlooked a lot because of all the large and very fancy roosters all around her.

I stood and talked to her for a while, told her she looked a lot like my crow friends. I told her of the medallion I wear that has a crow image on one side and pulled it out for her to see. I am pretty sure some people saw me talking out loud to her, and I know that only rarely do I encounter someone else that truly understand animals as the sentient spirit-filled beings that I know them to be. I did not care. I enjoyed my encounter with her. She was very sweet.

In the end I thanked her for her time and have these photos to help remember her.

No good deed goes unpunished

2010-08-16T18:36:00.004-04:00

Alternate title: Epidemic of lying

I have some records in my life that I am pretty proud of:

I have never been drunk. (While I "tasted" alcohol a few times in my early life before deciding to permanently stay away from alcohol, if you pooled all that consumption of my life time into one drink, it would not be enough to get anyone drunk.)

I have never seen illegal drugs with my own eyes in real life (and then it goes without saying I have never used illegal drugs. Heck, I am not even fond of the legal pharmaceuticals - just ask my doctor how much I avoid medications!)

I have never been in trouble with the law. I am a very "straight" citizen, always trying to be a good member of society. I was the kind of kid that never got in trouble in school either - except for that one day in sixth grade for talking in class (serously....).

I have never had a speeding ticket nor parking ticket - oops. Can't say that anymore.

Last week I got a parking ticket.

I can't tell you how disappointed I am - and while most people would say a parking ticket is no big deal - what really really really sucks is that I actually DID pay the meter, planning ahead to make sure we had enough quarters for parking, fed them all in the meter, then set my blackberry alarm to remind me long long before our time expired.

Only problem was . . . I fed the wrong meter.

The spaces were angled and the meters at the corner of the space, not in the middle. I fed the meter closest to my car. It never dawned on either Judi or I that it was the wrong meter.

Now, I have been advised that I may be able to go to court and fight the ticket. I thought through that, and instead just paid it.

Part of the reason I didn't want to go to court - I didn't want to look like just another liar. Too many times, even in recent days, I have had people lie to me, right to my face, without any trouble or remorse. Lying seems to have become epidemic, or maybe its just what so many people have come to believe is acceptable human conduct.

I didn't want to stand in court and have anyone think that in any way whatsoever, I could be bundled in the mass of people who find comfort and convenience in lying about this, that and everything, simply if it would benefit them at the moment.

So, I paid the ticket. I can no longer say I have never had a parking ticket.

The ironic thing is that I really didn't even want to attend that event that night. Judi and I would have been very happy to have just stayed home. But we went out to support a friend. No good deed ever seems to go unpunished in my life. (On the fateful day where I encountered the aggression at my volunteer position that ended a 17 year legacy for me, and has really destroyed a lot of me - that day too Judi and I could have stayed home. A snow storm had closed the zoo in the morning and Judi was feeling ill. However, we were good and dependable volunteers and made our way into the city when the the zoo finally opened, and our reward for being good dependable people going the extra mile was the gaping wound in my chest that never heals, and is still the first pain I know when I wake in the morning.)

Do you think I could at least have back the $1.75 that I pumped into the wrong parking meter?

If I could, what I would tell the world

2010-08-13T21:25:00.004-04:00

I have found that life is way more about accommodating other people and of dealing with imposed expectations than of receiving the same generosity in return.

If I could, this is what I would say to the world:

DO NOT TOUCH ME.

I do not like to be touched by most people. This makes most social situations extremely difficult.

Is it funny? Some people seem to think so, and have a laugh at my expense.

I do not like to be touched. I do not want to shake someone's hand. Really, I don't. What do you say when someone extends their hand? Sorry, no, because if I have to shake your hand, I will then have to go wash with soap and water and truthfully that's not even enough to get the residual uncomfortable feelings to go away.

Please don't put your hand on my back, or your arm over my shoulder. Long long after you have even forgotten you have done so, the spots where you made contact are still burning for me. The residual energy imprint you leave is very uncomfortable and leaves me unsettled for hours.

Do not ask me to handle things a hundred people have handled. I know far more than you do already about disease transmission and how bacteria and virus replicate. Got a Ph.D. in that - really.

Do not think my discomfort is amusing and funny. Do you laugh at someone who is handicapped, at someone who has PTSD, etc? No. Then don't laugh at me either. It is unkind and cruel.

If you want my company, respect my need for some space between us. Respect my comfort level. If you don't have room for that, perhaps we should not be in the same room. Perhaps you are not my friend.

That is what I would like to tell the world.

Instead, until I get to leave the room and start to deal with the personal aftermath, I just smile.

There is no room in the world for someone like me.

What does it mean to have a Ph.D.

2010-08-12T22:25:00.000-04:00

How do I feel about having a Ph.D.? There are many people to do not believe my honest answer to that question.

On a good day, I am simply indifferent, knowing it really has no meaning, knowing it isn't a measure of any scholarly accomplishment. I have met complete dullards with Ph.D.s. One is given the letters for simply being willing and stupid enough to work for cheap wages for many years to further someone else's career. They take in just about any warm body they can get to do that. Have a pulse and you are accepted in grad school. Once accepted, odds are good they will keep you, because the cheap labor is what keeps the university engine running.

On my not so good days, it represents to me a measure of yet another failure in my life. I have a Ph.D. in a field I have no passion for, due in large part from my bad life choice to let a bad partner dictate my future. I never stood up and took charge of my own destiny.

To this day, I have still never learned to take charge of my own life. I am just bounced around with the current. I am coming to realize that is all I will ever be.

The Ph.D. represents to me my complete lack of being able to own my own dreams for myself and have any belief I could accomplish them. I have, for my entire life, only done what others expect.

It has so broken me that, even if I want to, I cannot pursue any of my own dreams at this point in my life. I cannot begin to remember what they might have been. Even the idea of imagining my own future of my own making - it is too foreign. I fundamentally cannot imagine anything for myself or any way to be a person that believes a future is theirs to design.

I am nothing but blank.

The Ph.D. - I would give it away if I could. I would give it away just for the chance to be a person that dreams and a person that knows hope.

Big Water

2010-08-11T19:13:00.004-04:00

I was given specific instructions that during our recent short escape to the beach, to stand at the edge of "big water" each day and listen to get a word.

Here is what I came home with:

Allow

Expanse

Life

Grow

Dreams of Transformation

2010-08-10T21:35:00.000-04:00

I had the strangest dream last night. I discovered that the skin on my body could be peeled away. Below the layer of skin was some dark muddy stuff. Once that layer was wiped away, there was another layer of human-like skin below. I kept removing the outer layer, section by section, and cleaning to expose the new layer underneath. It was almost like human skin but not exactly the same.

At one point I got a cut on the new skin and as I looked at the cut, I watched it close up and heal completely and leave no trace of the wound.

Only then did I start to understand the magnitude of this transformation.

Unfortunately I woke up before the story ended....

Nothing Really Matters

2010-08-09T07:16:00.002-04:00

When I lay awake at night and contemplate my life, and stare into the empty future, all sorts of thoughts come to me.

I think about my jobs, and how each one has been a step down from the last one, until I am in a hole with no way out. I think of a hundred ways I should struggle against this, planning and plotting for some new way to overcome to move forward. The more I examine my position, the more hopeless I feel until I reach a point where a loud voice interrupts all this internal conversation, and wipes it clean.

"Nothing Really Matters"

I think about the sum total of my life, which I had tried to fill in a balanced way, but for reasons I do not understand, with the exception of having a good life partner, nothing else remains. The ache and pain of this void is enough to swallow me whole. The voice returns.

"Nothing Really Matters"

I lay in bed in the morning with no reason to get up, nothing to look forward to, no plans, no goals, no hopes - just go through the motions of the day because that's what's expected, and that is what leaves everyone around me with the comfortable impression that I am ok. I look at the only choices I see in front of me..... overwhelming despair, or a numb resignation to knowing that,

Nothing Really Matters.

Resignation to the void hurts much less than the futile ineffective rallying against it.

Someday, long after this particular life is over, I would like an answer to the purpose of the big void in this one, of the lost dreams and lost hopes and lack of realizations, of why nothing I have done has been good enough, of why I have completely lost my way, of why there is no place for me. Maybe there is no answer. Maybe its just that it doesn't matter.

What I SHOULD have said was . . . .

2010-08-02T21:08:00.004-04:00

I was checking out at a drug store while on vacation, and among my purchases were some glucerna shakes. These are a nutritional shakes made especially for folks with diabetes. They have been a tremendously helpful resource for me, especially when traveling, as combining a diabetic and vegetarian diet is never easy - even on a good day.

With Judi standing by my side at the register, I was very put off when the clerk decided to ask which of us was the one that needed the glucerna shakes. It truly was none of her business, essentially asking which of us had diabetes. This is personal information that I choose to share or not share in any given situation. It is not for anyone to ask, even for a (non-pharmacist) drug store clerk to inquire about my personal health information.

I told her in an unfriendly tone that it does not matter who they were for. She didn't apologize for her offense but instead was snotty back to me. (I am still thinking about calling the manager of the store...)

I don't think quick enough on my feet when confronted with inappropriate behaviors. What I WISH I would have said back to her was:

"Its none of your business but since you are asking about my purchases I will tell you that the PERSONAL LUBRICANT is for BOTH of us!"

Who Told Women They Are Not Beautiful Just The Way They Are?

2010-07-24T14:20:00.004-04:00

For much of my life I have lived around the fringes of society, not really belonging or finding a place that was comfortable for me, that fit my way of being. In choosing to be true to myself instead of choosing the easier path of fitting in, I have had the opportunity to "watch" what goes on around me in a different way than I would have otherwise.

One of the biggest puzzles to me is watching all the things women do to themselves in order to make themselves more attractive, more appealing, more . . . I don't know, but other than what they are at the moment.

Now, as a life long lesbian, I have an opinion of what makes a woman beautiful and attractive. So let me start there.

My "attraction" switch is admittedly not wired the same as most people around me. I do not find any stranger attractive based on appearances. It doesn't matter how they look, if I know nothing about their personality, their spirit, their being, there is simply nothing to be attracted to. In the absence of a real meaningful interaction, they are just a blank canvas.

What makes a woman beautiful and attractive? For me, beauty comes from the expression of their spirit, in true and kind and honest and exuberant ways. To see true gentle warmth in their eyes when they greet someone, to unexpectedly hold their breath when an amazing sunset catches them by surprise, to choose actions based on honest compassion and selfless generosity, to be sensitive and aware of the needs of others around them, to laugh easily, anger slowly, find joy in almost anything they do, to act with genuine integrity, to bring all of themselves to a moment, to allow themselves permission to be silly and free, to extend love in all directions.

Its in seeing these things, experiencing these things in a person that makes them beautiful and attractive to me.

I contrast this to what I see when I look around me.

The faces of female models in magazine advertisements frequently frighten me. I look and look and look and can't see anything of the real person in their faces. The emptiness is haunting. I see women doing all sorts of things to themselves in what I understand is their attempt to make themselves more attractive. They starve themselves. They paint their faces. They wear shoes impossible to walk in. They spend money they sometimes don't have on hair and makeup and cosmetic surgery. They hide all aspects of aging. They even move and gesture in ways that seem completely unnatural to me. And the worst part of all is the subset of women that will then be condescending and mean to other women that are not striving to meet the same impossible (and completely unnatural) standards they are striving for themselves.

I assume most women do all this to themselves to make themselves more appealing to men. As I have given no thought at all as to what men think, this hasn't been a part of my world or my way of thinking. However, if this is what men think they want and need in a woman - shame on them!

It is all so foreign to me that I have thought long and hard about gender concepts and have come to the conclusion that I am just not the same gender as most women around me. (Seriously.)

I would prefer a natural, relaxed, happy, loving woman, with a completely natural face, and relaxed hair that is allowed to blow freely in a gentle breeze. No make up needed to cover their face, if they are beautiful on the inside, then their beauty just glows on the outside. It cannot be contained.

I may be a simple person. What I know is that what I see as the real true beauty of a person is their spirit and when you can see a beautiful spirit, there is nothing more than can be done to augment what is naturally already there.

Killing Time

2010-07-19T09:43:00.002-04:00

I am becoming more comfortable now with the idea that all I am really doing in life is killing time.

I have stopped trying to make things better. All my efforts have been fruitless.

I had hopes for many things, but am coming to the realization that, for me, hoping for things I can never manifest is simply a continual source of pain. Only a fool keeps on trying when nothing ever works. I am unable to manifest anything better for myself.

I grew up using the strategy of making myself small and invisible to be able to survive. The result was that I did survive, and that I am now small and invisible. I am invisible to the universe.

What I can continue to do is be the best partner to Judi that I can be. She deserves at least that much.

Other than that, I am just killing time.

Singing off key

2010-07-12T11:22:00.002-04:00

I have always felt it is a human birth right to be able to sing loudly and off key while driving in your car. No one can possibly be bothered and it seems an appropriate way to spend time and energy while on the road. I have even made some custom collections of songs specifically just to sing to while driving in the car.

So when I suddenly lost the volunteer position, and no action by the organization involved was done to make things right by me, (and I came to understand that 17 years of my volunteering meant nothing at all), I found I could not sing anymore. For months I couldn't utter a note, even when I sometimes really tried. The music inside me was just gone.

It took a good number of months to get to a point of wanting to sing along again with the collection of favorites that I play in the car. Even then, it would be a line or two, and then I would trail off, because it felt like a sharp object was being driven through my chest.

I still haven't healed. There may be a day or two, esp when Judi and I are on an escape from our world, where a tune finds its way from my chest through my throat. But most days it still hurts too much to sing.

It doesn't feel like its really ever going to come back completely. I think I am no longer that person, that person is gone.

Summer is over

2010-07-12T10:50:00.001-04:00

If feels for me that summer is already over. I haven't anything planned, there are no events or activities to look forward to, so it feels as if summer is already over. Fall is already gone too, and winter is upon me.

That's how it feels, anyway.

Middle of the Night

2010-07-10T09:49:00.003-04:00

I woke in the middle of the night gasping for breath. Not a medical condition, just a mental condition. Hard to articulate in the light of day, but the essences was.... "this is all there is" and "all there is" for me will eventually just go away. With that I had seen the walls that surround and protect me fading away, until there is nothing left to hold to, that the sum total of my life, nothing remained and with no home, no where to be.

What is the source of HOPE and DREAMS?

2010-07-05T13:23:00.007-04:00

What is it in a person that is the source of hope, the source of dreams?

This isn't just an academic question for me. It is a critical question who's answer completely escapes me.

I have spent my life "holding my breath," but why or for what I do not know. I haven't ever felt the permission or the allowance to simply step forward and claim my life. I cannot say why this is so, but the roots probably go back to my childhood (although I hate to blame my here and now on things that happened long long ago). I do remember my father ridiculing any dreams I did have and the message was loud and clear from a young age to not speak of anything I might hope on (and that I was undeserving).

I am on the wrong path now, but as I look back over my life, I cannot say, even with the perfect vision of hindsight, where I made the first or any of the following wrong turns. (Well, yes, the person who is now only referred to as "the ex" was certainly a wrong turn and far too many years where spent going down that wrong road, where my self esteem was more destroyed and my own needs in life marginalized by my then "partner" even more than I had already done to myself.)

So where I am now? I am lost. Completely lost. I know I am on the wrong path. I know I cannot find the right path without tapping into my inner passions and hopes and desires and this is the essential problem. Upon much introspection over the recent years, I can't really find much of myself anymore. I don't know where I went, but most of me has, over time, disappeared. Too many times putting my ideas on hold, talking myself out of dreams I may have had for my life, too many times convincing myself I didn't have what it would take and could never get there, too many times convincing myself I didn't deserve to get there.

What kind of damage is done to a person so that they no longer hold any belief in their own abilities? What was done to make all the dreams disappear? What does a person do when there is no hope, no belief that a better future is possible. Hope is the strength one taps into to hold onto dreams. The absence of hope is a vast empty space.

I would point my boat in the direction I want to go, if only I knew what direction that was. All I can say with great certainty is what I DON'T want in life.

I am completely lost. And, I am tired.

a natural person

2010-07-03T12:17:00.005-04:00

What does it mean to be a natural person?

I always feel between worlds and never really at home in any one. Anyone that knows me knows I prefer to spend time outside under a large sky, in quiet and remote places, exploring the landscapes, meeting those that live there, listening to the songs of the day (or night) and fully breathing in the place.

Then I come home, to an urban environment, full of cars and people and politics and buildings and concrete and congestion where we all bruise each other as we climb over one another. The sky here is quite small.

I am most myself in the wild places. I know with all my senses the day as it changes, the light, the air, the breezes, the smell of the earth - all different between morning, afternoon and evening. I feel myself in these places and it is as natural and comfortable as I have ever know.

But I am human, and humans have in many ways pulled ourselves away from the rest of the natural world. We have set ourselves apart. I have become also part of this separateness and own some of it as my own. We are separated from the predator/prey cycles of existence - making ourselves top predator and never prey. We use indiscriminately. We seek comfort and convenience at all costs. I too am guilty of this.

So I sit here, in this body, in this lifetime, trying to figure out what I really am, who I really am. I am of the earth. That makes me part of the natural world. I am of the urban environment. That makes me a top predator of all of the earth and her resources and separated from the natural world.

I look in the mirror, not really pleased with what I see. Then I wonder why I have accepted the values of the society around me in measuring my appearance. I was born into a dyke body. There is no way to meet me and not know I am a dyke. Short, stocky, even hands that don't look female. Then I pause and wonder why I even have these thoughts. This body is a body, it works. Its what I was born into. Why do I cringe when I see the "dyke" in it?

When I sit on a deserted beach listen to the changing of the tides, enjoying the rushing river sounds when the tide starts to come in across the long shallow approach of mud flats, and let the cycles of nature wash over me and give me joy, what does my body matter as long as it is healthy and works, right? I wonder if sea gulls look at each other and judge their appearances the way we humans judge ourselves and each other?

What does it mean to be a natural person? What does it mean to connect with the natural part of myself? Who am I and what am I when I acknowledge the connect between my biology and the trees and the grasses and the birds and the insects.

I am trying to grow old as naturally as I can - and for this it means to accept the aging process as it manifests. My hair is more gray than not, wrinkles are growing on my face, my bones tire more easily and surprising and inexplicable pains will sometimes stop me in my tracks. My culture, my human culture, would tell me to work hard to deny all these things. I don't. This sets me apart. I have never come to a comfortable acceptance the dyke that looks back at me from the mirror. (I have been thinking hard on this and believe that part of it comes from my stereotypical perceptions of many dyke-like lesbians that display a tough and gruff persona, which I don't want myself associated with. It isn't how I try to be in my world. This is my bias to overcome.)

After this life, I hope for a few lifetimes as a non-human animal, so that maybe I can gain some balance again in what it means to own the biology of my being instead of living so much of my life separated from it. I feel so out of balance in this one.

Talking Grass

2010-07-03T08:04:00.002-04:00

I could listen to it all day.

Going Home

2010-06-30T21:32:00.008-04:00

When my spirit is used up
and my direction completely lost,
when my place in the world
completely escapes me,
I image a field on the side of a small mountain,
a clearing
I can see while standing at the edge
of open woods.

The grass is just shy of waste high,
and a few wild flowers can been seen
in the light of the midday sun,
some red,
some blue,
growing between the blades
of green and brown grasses.

I step into the sun
and let myself gently float above the grass.
I surrender myself
and slowly dissolve into the gentle breeze,
and let the wind carry and spread the dust that is left of me
across the grasses and flowers.

I am no longer myself,
I am completely the field on the side of the mountain.
I am the blades of grass. I am the flowers.
I am the breeze.
I am the light of the midday sun.
I am the mountain.

Then I know all is well and I have found my place.
I have gone home.

Empty promises

2010-06-27T14:04:00.003-04:00

In April I wrote a letter to the executive director of the place where I had volunteered and detailed why I thought a 17 year volunteer deserved better than what happened to me.

Below is part of my letter after detailing the specifics of the very personal attack I was subjected to, that was severe enough I needed to leave the building for my own safety (staff person had rolled her sleeves up over her shoulders, put her fists on her hips and leaned over to scream close in my face, escallating her attack even more when I was in tears.):

"I had no choice but to walk out of that [building] and program (because there was really no “going back” after being subjected to such a personal attack). However, the purpose of this letter is to communicate to [the organization] how very disappointing it was, after such a devastating and undeserved experience, to not have any communication with [the organization] indicating that I would be welcome to continue volunteering in any capacity. What should have happened was a communication saying “We are sorry this has happened to you and we do not wish to lose such a good and experienced volunteer, and hope that you would consider working with [us] in another capacity.” Instead the message to me was simply, “we are sorry that happened and it was nice knowing you” (paraphrased).

If the bar for a volunteer is that they must be able to manage through a personal attack (literally being screamed at) from [staff] [your organization] would have few to no volunteers in their programs."

What was the "crime" the staff person decided to "go off" on me for....? Nothing to do with my execution of my volunteer responsibilities, but simply a statement I made that I choose what images I am exposed to and avoid disturbing images. Not something worthy of being attacked. Not even an argumentative statement. The attack had nothing to do with me, but everything to do with an out of control staff person who has anger management issues and perhaps a statement of the management of the facility that paid staff felt permission to act this way in their work place to begin with.

The executive director left a phone message for me a few days after I sent the letter, saying all the right things, how yes, a 17 year dedicated volunteer deserves more than how I was treated. He promised to "make things right."

That was mid-April. This week the calendar flips over to July. Clearly his promises were empty promises. Clearly he has no intention of "making things right."

It dawned on me this week that I may have been swept under the rug to protect the job of the manager of the facility as managers can be held accountable for harassment and hostile actions of their employee if they were aware of such behaviors and did nothing. If so, this would be the second time in my life I have found myself in such a situation - taking the hit for others' shortcomings to protect their jobs.

For 17 years I gave of my time and my money. At times I even renewed my membership when I barely had two nickels to rub together.

I wonder if I will ever stop playing the fool in this life.

While friend have wished for me something new to fill the void - I can only say this experience has changed me, broken me in a way where I have no desire at this time to volunteer for anything, to give of myself to any organization.

Summer Solstice

2010-06-21T20:47:00.002-04:00

I find myself in a very odd juncture in my life. Here on the summer solstice, I look at the calendar that hangs on my kitchen wall, and, save for the hand written entries marking each full moon, there is nothing, absolutely nothing at all on my calendar that I have put there as events to look forward to, goals to focus on.

My calendar is completely empty.

I have zero plans now for the rest of my life. Neither big plans nor little plans.

Nothing.

How very very odd to find myself in a place like this. I used to have things to do, volunteering to do, things. Now, nothing.

A few friends have suggested things to get something, anything on my calendar, so I don't just stare at this abyss. I have decided to pause and try and figure out why I am in this place.

Another kind of father's day post

2010-06-20T14:11:00.005-04:00

I woke up this morning debating whether or not to write this post, as in all likelihood, it will make me look mean-spirited. Here goes anyway.

Today is Father's Day - and while others are busy celebrating and honoring their father, I have really no such feelings.

I do believe that we choose our families ahead of time and I do believe that we come back in lives multiple times with some of the same groups of "people" in different combinations of relationships. It is my highest hope that I have danced my last dance with the one who was my father.

In this life, he passed away some 18 years ago, and with brutal honesty I have to say that there has not been one day that I have missed him, and not one tear was ever shed.

My memories of my father are mostly of fights, of disappointments, antagonism and judgements. To say I was not "the apple of my father's eye" doesn't come close to the disappointment he always expressed in me. I was not what he wanted in a daughter. I was not pretty, my friend's parents didn't have enough money, I didn't do things that gave him bragging rights with his cronies. I was worthless to him and he made that clearly known.

What I did do was be a kid that never got in trouble in school, came home with good grades, when I said I was at the library I was always at the library, and mostly I just disappeared into the background in life. My parents stopped going to the parent teacher conferences early on when it was about me. Their excuse was that all the teachers always said the same thing, "good kid, always does her work, gets good grades, never gets in trouble, wish we had more like her." Now, I have never been a parent, but I would think that parents would WANT to go to and listen to these compliments being said about their kid. I was so far off their radar that they never noticed that I never got a high school senior photo and never appeared in my senior yearbook.

Instead of good grades and good behavior being good enough, my father was always critical and mean-spirited. A good deal of that probably came from the fact that for my entire life he was an alcoholic. The repercussions of having an alcoholic parent still run strong in my family.

When I was young, I was a Brownie (prelude to Girl Scouts). After school on the appointed days I would go to the local church basement to attend the regular brownie activities. After it was over, it was my father's responsibility to pick me up on his way home from work. Far far far more times that I can remember, I was left on the outside step of the empty and locked building, waiting for my father to come pick me up, long after everyone else had gone home. My father was not able to remember to pick me up after work because the only driving force he had was the need to get home and get to the refrigerator and start drinking his beer. Sometimes my mother would remember and turn him around at the door to drive back into town and get me. Sometimes she too forgot, and only as the family was sitting down to dinner did anyone remember the little girl sitting on the concrete steps, sometimes for hours, miles away, hoping someone would remember her.

Now, why do I tell this story and hold this grudge? Not so much because he always forgot me, but because after two years of being forgotten on those steps, I quit the girl scouts, and for the rest of my years at home, until I graduated from high school and left, my father called me a quitter. He never owned his responsibility and influence on my decision. I have come to learn that alcoholics usually blame everyone else rather than look in a mirror.

I did participate in one extracurricular activity - not a high school sport, but something very close to that. While I was not particularly skilled, I worked hard at it. Our little group did amazing things.... best in the state my senior year (ranked in the top 15 in the country the year I had left for college). But in the five years of these performances, rarely did my father come to watch (only once after I went at him because he would take vacation from work to watch my brother's football scrimmages, but would never watch me perform in a competition). He was mostly just embarrassed because the families involved in running the organization were not the "country club" crowd. He told me, as I graduated from high school, that it was too bad I didn't get involved in some "sport." Kindness just was not his way.

My father loved to tell a joke - the only problem was that the public jokes that he told always were constructed to ridicule his family. My father was an extremely racist man. I can't say outright I knew he was also a homophobe, as gay and lesbian issues were never even discussed in our home. Gay and lesbian people did not even exist, even while it must have been apparent to everyone there was a lesbian daughter in the house.

There are far far too many painful stories to share in this short essay.

My father did not dislike all his children equally. He was much harder on the girls than the boys. I found it very interesting how people outside our family could easily notice this, and sometimes even commented to us.

I studied science in college and decided to pursue graduate school in the sciences rather than a professional path. This was also a great disappointment to my father, and about the only redeeming value I might have had would have been if I pursued an M.D. rather than the Ph.D. that I did obtain. The Ph.D. was not good enough for him and he also made that clear.

The last time I was home when my father was alive, I was visiting over the winter holiday. I had some interviews lined up in very early January for postdoctoral positions at the National Institutes of Health, and I brought with me a pile of research papers from these labs to read, in preparation for my interviews the following week. Unknown to me, my older brother was bringing home a gf and they were going to announce their engagement. When my brother arrived at my parents house, I did not immediately run down the stairs, I wanted to finish my studying for the night before the social time started. As my brother could not wait for me to come down stair before he announcement his engagement, my parents became enraged at me for being so cruel. I was completely blindsided by this - and by how apparent it was that, while my parents were so very excited my brother had a fiance, they also did not care at all about the person (woman) I had been with for many years at that point. Our argument brought out the double standard - to which I called my parents on. Their response: I was no longer welcome in their home. My father had no need for a lesbian daughter. My mother stood by his side on this.

I left and never returned until his funeral. I have really no feelings about his passing. Death is most painful when it marks the end of a relationship. For me, there had been no relationship to lose. About a year after he died, one of my sibling commented that they could still "hear him criticizing them in their head." Yep, I understood. It was the same for me.

So, if we choose our families ahead of time, why did I choose to be born into this family? One realization that came to me only this week was that being forced to grow up in an environment where I was continually told I had no value, to survive at all, I had to learn to stand on my own and decide for myself what my value was. I had to come to an understanding on my own that I was a worthy being. I can't say I have fully been able to do this in this lifetime, but I have come pretty far.

Sometimes a miracle does happen

2010-06-17T22:04:00.003-04:00

I have always said, even though I know I shouldn't, that it seems like bad stuff can at any moment fall out of the sky and hit you on the head (figuratively!) but it seems that almost never do good things just fall out of the sky and hit you on the head (figuratively! .... in case the universe is listening).

So I have to say that something very good did fall out of the sky and hit me on the head (figuratively!) and I guess I just have to eat my words.

For reasons I could not explain at the time, I got the itch to look up someone I had not seen in about 25 years. Now, to put that in context, other than biological family, I am not in contact with anyone from my hometown (well, Judi is the exception), nor anyone from my college years, nor anyone from my grad school years. No connections with people have ever been permanent and I have just come to accept this is how my life is. No point in looking backwards as there isn't anything there - no attachments, no connections. I have trained myself to just expect this and not let any disappointments associated with the sad feeling of being so disposable get to me.

So to look up this person, this isn't something I normally would have done. But I just couldn't ignore the feelings. So I looked on the internet and did not find her. I looked some more, still did not find her. Finally I came across a newspaper article about her and realized I was looking under the wrong name. I next found link to a short movie that she was in, speaking about a life changing event. I showed the movie to Judi, who turned to me and said, "You ARE going to contact her, aren't you?"

Contacting her went against the way I have been living for decades - not looking back, not stirring up the past. But this sat in front of me, and I was paying attention. So I did. I sent off an email, fully expecting it to be received as an annoyance, nothing more. I didn't really expect a response.

I didn't expect any response, much less the very warm response I received. I didn't expect a connection and thus have been completely taken back by the feeling we are picking up a conversation as if we hadn't spoken in a month, not the decades that it actually has been. For a person who has felt like I have had no past, this is a strange and wonderful place.

I am completely humbled by this experience, and over-joyed to have a friend back in my life - someone who was pivotal to me surviving my "lesbian in a small town" growing up experience. Her friendship and the warm reception I always received from her family was a safe haven I needed as a teenager, managing through tough stuff without any other real support.

I am still at a place of being very surprised by this and have no answers as to "why now" but I assume that answer will become clear in time. Sometimes its ok to just sit with the mystery without having the answers.

In trying to catch up on the decades that have passed, its given me a real chance to sit and assess my life, think about what I did right, what I did wrong, what were the things that made me grow, and where is it still I want to get to. Its like a good house cleaning.

There are very few things in life I would call miracles..... "miracle" is a term I associate with religion, and although I am a spiritual person, I am not a religious person. Having an old friend "come home," or as it feels to me - finding a family member again that had been lost to me, is about as close to a miracle as I have ever experienced.

Turtle visits

2010-06-02T14:47:00.011-04:00

Over just one week we encountered four different turtles, each a different species: a mud turtle, a Eastern box turtle, a painted turtle and a diamondback terrapin. That's a lot of turtle encounters. Two were in the road and we removed them, one was on a rarely traveled dirt road and on his way, so we left him in peace and one was headed across the beach to the bay water, pausing only for our encounter, then scooting as fast as turtle legs could take him to the water.

I have worn a turtle medallion on my neck for about four years now. The reverse side has a crow. No one asks why turtle and crow. I don't live in a culture where it would dawn on anyone that my choice would or could hold significance. As I rarely have jewelry on - only my wedding ring and this medallion every day - folks here must simply think of me as unimaginative in my dress.

Turtle reminds me of greater connection. Turtle has appeared and talked to me more than once (always with a sweet voice). A turtle at the zoo requested that Judi and I come to visit him (a hard task to find him and to explain to non-believers why we were asking the questions we were asking in order to find him). Judi and I had a shared journey experience with a grand grandmother turtle spirit who appeared in our home one evening - notably on the very first day that I put a little colorful stone turtle around my neck, purchased at Sedona months before. There has been a turtle on my neck every day since the day of that visitation.

There is a wonderful native story of how the turtle swam to the bottom of the ocean and brought dirt up on his back and that is the land that we all live on - Turtle Island (a symbol for Mother Earth).

Curious and gentle mud turtle that greeted us on our way out to our favorite nature spot.

Beautiful Eastern Box turtle who was determined to cross a busy highway. Took all the breath out of me to get to him in time.

Shy painted turtle also removed from the road.

Large diamondback terrapin returning to the water.

From the late Ted Andrews book, Animal Speak

Turtle is the oldest symbol for the Earth. It is the personification of goddess energy and the eternal Earth itself.

If you have a Turtle totem, you must be mindful of returning to the Earth what she has given you. Honor the creative source within you. Use water and earth energies to create a harmonious flow in your life. Ask the Earth for assistance and her riches will pour forth.

If a Turtle totem shows up in your life, slow down the pace of your life. Bigger, stronger, faster are not always the best ways to reach your goals.

Turtle is fine teacher of the art of grounding. When you learn to ground yourself to Earth's power and strength, you place focus on your thoughts and actions and use the Earth's limitless energies rather than your own to accomplish your will.

Turtle: motherhood, longevity, awakening of opportunities

Night and Day

2010-05-24T22:18:00.003-04:00

I have spent a good deal of time away lately, in nature, watching life pushing forward, seeking itself, the cycles continuing. It was a wonderful place to be. It was not a time of escape from my life, it was a time of going to life, going home. Coming back now to where I live really makes me understand how my daily existence is “being-separated-from” life.

Where is home, really? The answer to that is intricately linked to the question of who am I really, or what am I really?

While in our wild places, every molecule that is me felt alive, and the life and energy of the place flowed through me. The constraints and darkness of my daily life melt away and are nothing more than a quickly fading memory. This is what feeling and being alive really means to me.

I had a thought, while standing and taking in the beauty and breathing in the life of the wild places, that I was very grateful to no longer in my life find myself constrained by any belief system of human construction. There is none that I have encountered that would allow me to know my true self and my true place in the universe of "all-that-is". The freedom of knowing every molecule of me, and feeling and knowing my connections to the grasses, to the winds, to the sand, to the tides, the trees and the rocks, to the birds and the horseshoe crabs, and knowing them all as brothers and sisters - no limiting man-centric religion has room for this knowing. If fact, I would say all religious institutions would be threatened by the idea that every individual is directly connected to "all-that-is" as that knowledge takes away the power the institution has over the individual, and fundamentally, institutions are about power over the individual.

Where is home really? For me, home is with the grains of sand, the soft head on a stalk of grass, the heron flying overhead, the afternoon rain and the turned over leaves announcing its coming. Home is where reeds sing with the wind their song of the season. Home is where I can stand with outstretched arms and feel the wind on my flesh, and more than that, feel the wind go right through me, as I am one with the wind. The physical boundary that defines my flesh from the rest of all-that-is is simply an idea of an illusion propagated to keep us separate. Home is where I can feel the birth of the morning, and see the light of the day changing until dusk is complete, and know that life does not stop with sundown, as a new chorus of voices sing through the night. Home is feeling the cycles of life in my bones, embracing and welcoming all seasons, knowing I am completely connected to all that is around me, completely a part of the greater all, and knowing I will continue to be for many lifetimes to come.

My spirit needs connection to this as much as my lungs need air to breath. Without this, I am nothing more than an empty shell.

I have left home, to come back to this place where I live so much of my life, where finding connection is harder and where most people around me are asleep and beckon me to join their stupor. This time back, I have found it jarring, too hard a transition. I ache to go home.

How NOT to Bird Watch - Continued

2010-05-23T20:12:00.004-04:00

We met this sweet guy on the side of a dirt road only days after the obnoxious bird watchers sped down this very same road far too fast to be considerate of the wildlife that call this area home (see two entries ago). I am glad he wasn't on the road the day they came blasting through.

We stopped the car and approached him gently so as to not alarm him. After his initial hesitation, he seemed to relax and just consider us. After taking his picture I talked to him some and as I did, he would turn his head and look right at me. I explained to him that I wear a medallion with a crow on one side and a turtle on the other and I held it out for him to see, even though I do not believe turtles have great eyesight. He stretched his neck moving his head closer, again, as if considering.

We debated moving him out of the road but we feared if we did not move him far enough out, he may encounter a car that didn't seem him in the grass. To move him even farther off the road would mean going into a bed of poison ivy. We decided, since this road is rarely traveled, and he was pretty big, and also on his way, that he would likely be gone on his own long before another car came by. So we bid our good-byes and got back in the car. As we slowly drove by, he turned his head to watch us go.

I "heard' no words from him, but got a strong feeling of gentle curiosity from him, and a very sweet personality. Perhaps our encounter was more than chance and perhaps I will try to talk with him again sometime soon.

Volunteering

2010-05-21T06:15:00.000-04:00

We have been having as much fun as possible this month enjoying that which May brings. This has been a necessary distraction for me, trying to forget the loss which has left a gapping hole in me.

Last night was a night where the good of our days was not enough and I couldn't get away from the hard emotions.

I had written a letter to the executive director of this organization, detailed what happened, and expressed my extreme disappointment on how his organization address the whole incident, and how 17 years of my commitment to them and the greater cause came to mean nothing at all. Within a few days there was a message on my machine from him promising he would make this right.

That was the last thing I ever heard.

Don't make an empty promise.

Its been four months but this morning the pain is as if it were yesterday.

While kind people have wished that I will find a new opportunity to contribute, the real truth of my reality is that, after this experience, I can not imagine ever wanting to volunteer for anything ever again. That's where I am and that won't change any time soon.

How NOT to Bird Watch

2010-05-15T17:01:00.004-04:00

I have spent many many days with binoculars in hand watching birds and any other animals that I am lucky enough to cross paths with..... flipping through the pages of my field guides to understand better who I am watching.... and I will continue to do so.

However I no longer call myself a bird watcher. I no longer maintain a life list. I have thrown my life list away.

Bird watching, nature watching can be an immeasurably pleasant experience, if done correctly, not loosing sight of the entire joyful experience and adventure.

Too many "birders" that I have encountered, have transformed what could have been a spiritual experience instead into a trophy hunt. The need to expand their life list, to get another lifer on their list has replaced the experience of watching and learning and being out with nature.

If I have seen a Red Knot one time, if I place a check on the list next to Red Knot, am I now done with the Red Knots and moving on to another trophy bird? Is making visual contact an end unto itself? This is what I see too many people doing. I had a birder once tell me she did not have a good day, after spending all day out looking at birds. Not a good day I asked?? No, not a good day because she did not get a new bird on her list. So instead of being filled and recharged with all the wonderful visions of the day, she only measured her day by her lack of collection of new sightings.

How very sad.

I saw another example of how NOT to bird this weekend. Judi and I were out in a nature preserve, a spot we frequent a lot because so few other people do, a place where we walk slowly and take in the entire experience, spending hours just being and visiting with the inhabitants of that land. After hours there alone, an SUV came roaring up the very dirt path to where we were parked and four men jumped out, binoculars in hand. They had driven in too fast to be careful of any animals that might have been in the road. Their energy was frenetic and disturbing. Each of them looked quickly in a different direction. They did not stay more than 10 minutes before they jumped back in their car and roared off.

Good riddance.

I suspect they were participating in a birding competition. I have heard of these, where teams of four people go out and and see how many species they can "bird" in a twenty four hour period. Those with the most spottings in that time are the winners.

Actually I think they are the losers.

I want nothing to do with that behavior.

To me, turning bird watching into a competition is an obscenity. It is trophy hunting, even if without guns, pure and simple. It is driven much more by testosterone than of any desire to connect with the natural world. Those four men knew nothing of the land they were standing on, of the insects you meet if you walk twenty feet down the path, of the fish you can see when the water comes close to the path, of the music the reeds make in the wind, of how the feeling of the day changes as the sun burns off the morning mist.

Once we were on an organized bird walk to see the Red Knots as they were feeding in May in the Delaware Bay - this very critical feeding. These birders knew more than anyone how critical these two short weeks of feeding are for the Knots and how important it was to not disturb them - and yet they completely cleared the beach of feeding Knots as they kept creeping closer and closer to them, even when they could have stayed in one spot and watched them from afar without ever disturbing them. We left this group very soon after we realized they had no care of the birds, only their "birding" and I called the refuge that sponsored the walk and gave them an earful about ethics.

No, if that is what it means to be a birder, I am no longer a birder. I don't need a life list to measure my day.

I still take people bird watching, and when I do, I have one request of them - that they bring a poem to share, to read out loud, sometime during the adventure. You see, bird watching, nature watching, can be as perfect an experience as a beautiful poem.

Just seeing a bird once and checking it off a list has little to no meaning. Getting to know the birds and all the other creatures that live in a place, getting to know the details of a place, watching the ebb and flow of life through the seasons, doing all this, even then I am only beginning to know.

Citizenship

2010-05-15T16:24:00.003-04:00

With Memorial Day fast approaching, I have been thinking a lot lately about the very common phrase "Support Our Troops." I have always wondered exactly what should be a person's response to this request. How do I "support" our troops? My father was in WWII, stationed in the Philippines. My grandfather was in WWI, a stable sergeant in the Cavalry. I understand the sacrifices made by many many people during times of war. How does that translate into "support our troops"? As a citizen, how do I respond?

I am grateful to be a citizen of the U.S. While as a lesbian I do not have access to all the privileges my heterosexual friends have (don't get me started) I do believe I am safer in this country than in many places in the world where women are regularly abused and gay people killed. Even with the limitations still imposed on gay and lesbian people in this society today, I still have more opportunities than most people in the world.

For me, the only response I can think of to "support the troops" is to vote for reasonable politicians that would only choose military action as a last resort, exhausting all humane and non-lethal options first. Putting our young people in harms way should be only a last resort and should never be done for political or financial gain. And when the decision is made to send young soldiers into harms way, they deserve to be equipped with the very best tools available to keep them safe and get their job done quickly so that they can come home safe and alive to their families. To me, that's supporting our troops.

But I am a citizen of more than just this country. I am a citizen of the world and need to think more broadly. I understand that most people on this earth to not have even the simple pleasures that my very simple lifestyle affords me. I have a roof over my head, I never go hungry, I have access to good medical care and leisure time. I am not destitute, I want for nothing.

I am a citizen of Mother Earth, and not only the two leggeds, but all living beings are my brothers and sisters, on one home that we all share. I have a responsibility to live in a way that limits my impact on all my brothers and sisters.

The responsibilities of citizenship actually have no boundaries smaller than the whole earth.

Once Again

2010-05-07T07:31:00.003-04:00

Years ago, when the diabetes first took hold, I dropped a lot of weight quickly. Other people around me noticed the weight loss long before I did. Even after I started to understand what was happening, the weight loss continued, to the point where the old clothes no longer could be worn.

The diabetes is relatively under control now, mostly through diet changes. The complicated dance of a low carb and vegetarian diet has always been a challenge when I am eating away from home (some friends have been very kind in helping to accommodate this), and I always tell people my favorite restaurant is the grocery store where I can read labels and make wise and informed decisions on my food.

I have tried very hard to keep the glucose under control so that I can avoid taking pills (the first pharmaceutical intervention in type 2 diabetes control is not insulin but rather pills such as metformin). I would like to avoid medication for as long as I can, and thus avoid hypoglycemic challenges.

So I was worried that this past winter when my morning fasting levels were rising. In addition, I was getting light headed and dizzy a lot, many times needing to sit down until the episode passed. Then I started waking in the middle of the night, every night, and loosing from 2-5 hours sleep each night.

I stepped on the scales and realized that 10 lbs had gone unaccounted for. Oops.

I went to the Dr for blood work, and told her fully how I was feeling and that I was absolutely sure that the control over the diabetes is failing and my numbers would be bad. We laughed as I pointed out to her that I was preparing her for bad results, not the other way around.

But, fasting levels were ok and A1c was not bad either, the upper end of my typical range (above normal but far below the threshold recommended by the ADA for control). The problem, it appears, is the thyroid. THS levels were unmeasurable (aka hyperthyroid). As the doctor and I agreed, its at least an answer.

I like my doctor, in part because she is not a pill pusher, and understands as I do the drug development process, how money influences decisions and how holistic alternatives will never receive FDA approval not because they are not valid but because there isn't enough money associated with them to sponsor clinical trials. She did put me on a statin for cholesterol levels, but the side effects for me where awful, everything - muscles and joints, all ached. Just getting out of a chair made me groan. I felt like I was eighty years old. We decided these side effects were not worth the potential gain of the drug and I quit taking it.

However, my primary care doctor felt I needed to see an endocrinologist for this new thyroid issue, and even with my first visit I can tell this new doctor does not have the same perspective on pharmaceuticals.

Drug companies develop drugs. They put tremendous amount of money into this process. It takes many years to move a drug through the pipeline and through clinical trials - and many many millions of dollars. In the end, the companies need to recover these costs, not only for the development of the drugs that are a success but for all the other drugs that dropped out of the pipeline at some point due to toxicity or lack of efficacy. Once their drug is approved on the market they need as many people as possible to take their drug so they can recover their development costs.

There are many wonderful drugs that have provided many people with a second chance at a normal, pain free, symptom free life. I am not fully against pharmaceuticals. I do approach them with great caution.

I am against thinking that pharmaceuticals are the only tool in the tool box one can use to obtain a better and healthier life.

Against this new doctor's advice, I am trying some nutritional supplements designed to normalize the thyroid. They may work, or maybe not. There is nothing in these pills that would cause any harm, as far as I can tell, and I have a family member who has responded well to this therapy for hyperthyroid. I think if my hyperthyroid is going to be a transient problem this therapy has a chance of providing some improvement. Time will tell.

There will never be an FDA approved clinical trial to test the effectiveness of this alternative because the supplements are common nutritional components that cannot be patented. Thus, there can be no downstream windfall profits if the expensive trials proved effectiveness.

Drugs are only one tool in the tool box. As a society I think we have given too much control of our health over the insurance companies, the drug companies and the doctors, who at times seem to just be an extension of the insurance companies.

My first doctor who gave the diagnosis of diabetes immediate wrote a prescription for metformin for me. We had no discussion of lifestyle changes etc. After doing my own research, I returned to her and said, NO, I will not start with metformin. I will start by taking control of my diet and exercise and will monitor my glucose and know what I can do on my own to help myself. That was four years ago and I have been successful thus far with my more educated, more holistic approach. While some day I will end up on meds, the longer I can successfully keep it away the healthier I will be. I switched doctors soon after. I needed a doctor who would work with me, not talk at me, and one who believed in my own ability to take care of myself.

Holistic options used to be considered far outside the cultural norm, but I am pleased to see they are becoming more mainstream. The first drug option for me for the hyperthyroid will be one that is known to damage the liver. While I may end up having to taking it, why would I want to start with that?

The good news is that I am sleeping better through the night and the weight loss has begun to stabilize. Whether that came from the supplements or would have happened anyway, I do not know.

Happiness is . . . .

2010-05-02T10:56:00.004-04:00

...a beach cleared of stranded horseshoe crabs - all gently returned to the water.

Horseshoe crabs stuck upside down in the sun.

A female and male unable to flip themselves were exposed to the sun of on this unseasonably hot day. The risk to horseshoe crabs on the beach is that they get turned over and then can't get back out with the tide and are stranded in the sun where they dry out and die. A simple act of flipping them over is enough to allow them to crawl back to the water and survive. We do a bit more, we carry them back to the water to get them wet again faster and make sure they can swim away.

Some say this is interfering with nature. I say this is giving back a bit because we have interfered (over harvested them) too much already.

But what have I really done?

2010-04-14T12:52:00.002-04:00

Recently I got back in touch with an old friend. We haven't talked in well over twenty years, so there is a lot of catching up to do.

Its a very interesting exercise to try and sum up twenty plus years of one's life. Which points are important and worth mentioning and which are not? How does one paint a picture that represents twenty years of changing and growing, of false starts and failures and meaningful changes? This has caused me to really pause and ponder. Introspection is a room I am comfortable visiting.

Twenty plus years ago, I was a young person, on a science career path, with a partner on a similar path. Dancing with religion but not really beholden to it, I was more attuned to the negative messages religion had toward me, and coming to realize the institutions and the judgements were all wrong.

So much has changed since then. I obtained an advanced science degree, without ever truly being enamoured with the idea doing that. I lived for six years of graduate school in the mid-west. That made me so uncomfortable that even into my sixth year there, I would wake up in a panic when I remembered where I was living. Later the partner disappeared and took most everything "we" owned with her.

I moved from christain to atheist. Then from atheist to explorer, walking gently in circles around buddhism, only observing from the outside but learning to appreciate. Meanwhile I bounced from job to job, sometimes an advancement, sometimes just an escape. I committed myself to volunteering activities.

Truly, there was nothing remarkable about my journey.

Many times we define ourselves by our jobs or our hobbies or for others, their religion. If I had to define myself today, right at this moment, I would be at a complete loss.

As I think and as I measure, truly the most important part of the journey has been the communication with "all that is"..... animal communication, shaman studies, all of it.

In the end though, I have not grown in to the person I was probably meant to be. With all the animal communication (which is communication with more than just animals really) the most I can say that I have accomplished has been simply, from time to time, but not too often, the ability to listen, to hear what they have to say ("they" would be the animals, the rocks, the trees, all that is).

And listen I do and wonder and ponder. Listening has completely changed my view of my life, of of life, of purpose, of knowing.

That's isn't really enough though, is it. Just learning isn't enough. Putting what one learns into practice is the fulfilment of growing, isn't it? And to that point, I haven't grown enough, maybe not much at all.

I know beings that can heal with a touch. I know beings that can heal even without touching. My spirit guide has the medicine of shape shifting.

I simply listen.

It is time for me to find the next step, to put into practice what I am learning.

I don't know where to start.

wonder and loss

2010-04-01T21:41:00.004-04:00

This morning I noticed a carpenter bee attached to my windshield wiper. He wasn't moving very much, but enough for me to know he was still alive. I suspected he may be near the end of his life and passing while on my windshield just did not seem right. I found a leaf and gently coaxed him onto it.

Once on the leaf I decided to take a closer look at him. Carpenter bees, after all, are known as the "gentle giants" of the bee world. Although they look a lot like bumble bees, they behave nothing like them. Males don't even have stingers. Females do, but must be extremely provoked before they will use them.

So it wasn't risky at all to look close into his eyes, and when I did, I was very surprised at what I saw. Unlike what I have seen in photos, his eyes were not dark but in fact were a brilliant beautiful iridescent green that changed as I slowly twisted the leaf he was on in the sunlight. No one every told me how beautiful their eyes are!

I gently placed him at the base of a tree far out of anyone's path.

You can easily tell the difference between a carpenter bee and a bumble bee. Carpenter bees have shiny butts and its easy to see the shine in the glowing sun. Bumble bees, by contrast, have fuzzy butts. (Both are important pollinators.)

Carpenter bees dig holes in wood, creating long tubes where the female lays her young. We have some park benches that have been taken over by the bees, and in the evening, if you go lean close, you can actually hear them digging away inside the wood. The males frequently hover around the benches and everyone is afraid to go near them. I am actually delighted to watch them. Sometimes one will come over and hover right in front of my face. Maybe he is being territorial, maybe he is just curious. I grin and say hello.

I was telling someone today all about the beautiful green eyes I had seen. I continued my tale of the carpenter bees by sharing the amazing developmental biology story of the growth of their young. The first eggs the mother lays then seals in the very back of the tunnel are then trapped by the newer eggs that are laid in front of them. Thus the eggs laid last are closest to the exit. This would be a problem if they all developed and hatched at the same rate. But they do something amazing - the first eggs laid in the back of the tunnel develop the slowest. The last eggs laid closest to the exit hatch first -they develop in reverse order to how they were laid.

How did nature ever work that amazing process out? Even as a biologist, I can say this is a wondrous feat.

As I was completing my tale of these insects I so enjoy, it hit me, hit me hard, how I have lost my volunteer position of sharing this joy I have with the "unloved and misunderstood" creatures whom which we share this earth. I was truly good at my volunteering, my "interpretation" came from the heart and I had always considered it a privilege to speak for these animals, because not matter how big or small, I respected them and considered them all my brothers and sisters.

I suddenly felt the floor beneath me give way and falling into a vast space of nothing, just a big aching hole. There is no way to describe to anyone how much I have lost.

Note added: I have come across an expired carpenter bee and his eyes were decidedly black. Now I am confused by the green-eyed carpenter bee.

Better than Television

2010-03-29T13:32:00.001-04:00

Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge Eagle Cam

Go here to watch the eaglets grow!

So Far, not a banner year

2010-03-19T08:29:00.003-04:00

I could just scrap 2010 right now. Its really been a lousy and rough year so far. February was a month trapped in our home, not just from bad weather but from bad management that never cleared our parking lot long long after the storm was gone. Being the recipient of someone else's bad behavior and dealing with the destructive aftermath, coping with loss that should have never happened. Coming to terms with no acknowledgement that wrong was done to me. (Ok, the bare minimum, I deserved an apology. Yet even that seems too much to ask of the universe.) I am not in a place where I trust people. The theme of "no good deed goes unpunished" resonates right now.

I have run out of reasons to ever want to go outside the door of my home.

I know spring is coming, the weather is beautiful. Yet I can't seem to feel it. I feel mostly just numb (when not feeling irritable or sad).

I seem to have lost the ability to manifest good things, if I ever had it to begin with. I don't know what to do next, nothing is obvious.

A month and a half

2010-03-12T19:31:00.003-05:00

after filing a complaint, no satisfactory resolution. No resolution at all.

I don't know if I have ever been as sad as I feel right now.

I know its going to be a hell of a long time before I would ever consider volunteering for anything again.

I know its going to be a hell of a long time before I think I will trust anyone again (outside my immediate circle).

Am I being dramatic? Don't know. I am being honest that the hurt is very very deep.

At least I don't have to put aside my beliefs anymore and pretend for the public that animals are less than I know what they really are. As I don't speak for anyone but myself anymore, I can always speak the truth about the world around me:

Animals are sentient. Animals have spirit. Animals remember their past lives. Animals have sometimes been human animals, and we humans have been other animals.

Some animals are shamans. Many have more heart than most people I know.

We can communicate with animals, although most humans have forgotten how.

Animals have a grace that most humans lack. They never forget their connection to "all that is."

Animals are intelligent. Animals have personalities. Animals have emotions. Animals are not "beneath" humans.

I know that science and christianity disagree with me. They are both wrong.

No longer do I have to pretend, while volunteering to try and do some good in the world, that these truths are not truths.

And the point is........?

2010-03-10T07:56:00.004-05:00

What to do next when the universe says my best isn't good enough?

I haven't any answer to this.

I am tired of hoping for and trying for something better with no results.

Had an argument with my mother on the phone last week. I made the mistake of actually talking about what's going on in my life instead of sticking to her topics of the weather and whatever else she is doing to kill time in her life. I should have know better as my parents have never been a refuge from the world. Instead they have been my biggest critics. They were of a generation that had children because they were expected to, not because they had extra love to share.

So after being stupid enough to open up and share part of my life, my mother's only reply was, "intelligent people don't use curse words" (a slam at me)..... and "women can't be managers" (I am a manager). I had never forgiven my father for saying 'women can't be managers' to my sister, who has always been a manager. I never expected it from my mother. I had enough and hung up the phone.

Yep, I am depressed. A constant pain in my chest, a hole really, there from the very moment I wake in the morning. My head feels heavy and like someone is repeatedly kicking it.

What do you do to get out of a hole when your best isn't good enough?

Traveling while sick and other ramblings

2010-03-06T14:11:00.004-05:00

One thing worse than business travel is business travel with a really bad cold. Top that off with having to teach an entire day while trying to suppress the urge to cough (who wants to sit in a class while the instructor is hacking up pieces of lung? gross.)

I did what I normally do not do - loaded up with pharmaceuticals to keep my ears from being too clogged to adjust to the pressure changes of take off and landing on an airplane. (I didn't do that once when sick and flying and thought my ears where going to explode during landing - the pain was awful.)

It wasn't a great trip although I did deliver my responsibilities pretty well regardless of how I felt. Not that in the end anyone notices or cares about the extra effort. I can tell you that teaching is never valued as a skill, regardless if done in the public or private sector.

Business traveling is difficult for me in part because of all my food limitations. While at home, I can get whatever food I can eat at the grocery store, and its not so much a problem. Finding food while business traveling is always very hard for me. In business travel your time belongs to someone else and many times I have to coordinate with others, and the others are most times unaccommodating and unconcerned as to what I need.

I looked all over for a drug store and when I finally got directions and was going to head over, my coworker bluntly and rudely asked "what do you need there anyway?" christ. I am much much happier doing business travel alone than with anyone else from the company along. What I wanted was some glucerna shakes - meals in a bottle designed especially for diabetics. The simplest convenient food, even if not natural food, solution that meets diabetic vegetarian needs. I would just pack a whole bunch of them for my trip but I wouldn't be allowed to take them on the plane. They only tolerate enough to get you through the flight, and since I was crossing a country boarder, I didn't try to take any at all.

Coming home I had trouble at the airport parking lot when paying my ticket. The machine processed my credit card, spit out the receipt but did not return my ticket I needed to leave the lot. While I was still trying to read the screen and figure out what to do next, the man behind me reached right over my shoulder and hit the cancel button on my transaction. I was furious. He invaded my personal space, he mess with a transaction with my credit card at a machine without my permission, and even as I was verbally tearing into him for his bullying and male arrogance (assuming he had any right at all interfere), he was indignant that I questioned his right to do whatever he wanted. His aggression was because he simply wanted me out of his way so he could pay his ticket and move on.

There are days, more than not, that I really don't want to interact with any man.

Its not any surprise that almost all animal communication workshops I attended are all filled with only women. Even shaman classes are about two thirds women, and honestly some of the men that show up to those workshops are people I want nothing to do with. They seem to show up for different reasons, looking at shamanism as a way to have "power over" whereas women tend to approach both these studies from a place of wanting to connect, wanting to provide understanding and healing to others.

Really men and women are made differently. My spirit guide is a man, and I admit I was not too happy for a long time to learn that. It made me uncomfortable. Recently he had said that he approved of my choice to be female in this life, that due to the way men are in this society, it was a better choice to be female (specifically he said that men are not taught to listen to and trust their intuition). I was surprised by his statement and have thought a lot about it. It was added in another conversation that I have been male more times than female. Not sure at all how I feel about that knowledge. I try to put it in a perspective that male in a different culture at a different time may have been less out of balance than what I see around me today.

Who knew they had a word for it?

2010-02-25T08:35:00.003-05:00

Each morning I get the "word-a-day" email in my box.

This morning's email read:

ad hominem

MEANING: adverb, adjective:

1. Appealing to one's prejudices, emotions, or other personal considerations rather than to intellect or reason.

2. Attacking an opponent personally instead of answering the argument.

Yep. That's what I experienced. I was personally attacked, even when I was asking "Why is this an issue?" "Why are you yelling at me?"

There was no reasoning . . . . thus I could not comprehend what was happening as she was attacking me.

(And still can't comprehend how someone else could have taken so much from me, and still can't get to a place where it doesn't hurt terribly.)

Who knew they had a word for it?

Surprised

2010-02-22T16:54:00.002-05:00

I was surprised to get comments on my last two posts. I thought that I mostly write here for myself, to get things released and out of my head and heart, so I can move on. I didn't realize people were listening.

Thanks.

Wearing religion on the sleeve

2010-02-21T12:56:00.007-05:00

While I may get in trouble for saying this......

hmm..... probably not a good way to start.

Is it ok to speak one's truth when it sounds very un-PC? Yes or no, here I go anyway.

It has been my experience that the more a person "makes their religion known" to everyone around them, broadcasting it even when unnecessary, the more likely they are to be someone that will end up treating me or others badly, with stunning lack of generosity, compassion and gentleness.

As the majority religion in this country is christianity, the majority of my negative experiences (but not exclusively) has been with those who vocally and publicly clutch to their christianity. Those who would be in your face saying "Well I am christian, therefore blah blah blah" while they proudly disagree with you with great certainty, in knowing they are in the right because they have the correct banner on their sleeve. They are members of the "good and right" club.

I will insert my disclaimer right here that there are definitely thoughtful generous christians, who express their faith in their quiet actions instead of loud proclamations. I am not talking about such people here. In fact I wish I knew more people like that.

I doubt there are five people in my life that have not read this blog that would be able to point a finger me and say Virginia's an animist. Although I do write about that here, I don't have that banner on my sleeve. I hope the idea of it comes out in actions, such as taking the time to move an insect out of harm's way, or to untangle garbage from a young plant to give it a chance to grow to its potential or in greeting a tree and waving to the crows as they fly overhead.

It has always amazed me how many people I encounter who just assume that by announcing they are christian, live with the presumption that they are advertising themselves as a good and positive force. In fact, from my experiences, these are the people I have come to avoid as much as possible. I don't need to be the recipient of any more of their faith. Really. Life beats me up enough as it is, thank you.

I don't think of myself as a religious person, but rather a spiritual person. For most of my life I didn't have a real idea what "spiritual" meant, but I am starting to understand. Our culture is very limiting, defining the divisions by that religious club armband they wear. Very few people around me talk about spirituality. While most people don't know what it means, the animals do, the plants do, the rocks do, as does the wind and sky.

One time in an education workshop we were asked to come up with the ideas and connections people needed to inspire them act in a way that supports conservation of the natural world. I raised my hand to say that people need to have a spiritual connection to the animals and resources to be moved to protect them. Not only do I believe this, but I had read this in a scientific journal that described a study of human cultures across time where instances of sustainable harvesting were actually practiced. The workshop facilitator (an armband wearer) listened to my contribution and then wrote "theology" on the board. My groaned. Theology has nothing at all to do with spirituality, and thus my contribution was completely negated. To this day I am still troubled that I was not heard when sharing something that is part of my core belief.

I am at a pretty low point right now in life. One of the big blows was loosing my 17 year volunteering position due to someone else's aggression and rage that was rained down on me. Her bad day turned into a major destruction in my life. Ironically, had I not gone the extra effort to make it to my volunteer shift even with the snow that came, had I instead just been lazy and stayed home, safe and warm and comfortable, that unfortunate day of loss would not have played out. As is true too many times, no good deed goes unpunished. I have lost what I felt was the only positive contribution I was making with my life, a chance to speak for the animals, the unsung and unloved animals, to teach people to know them in a new way, and in doing so, hopefully trying to make the world a better place. I was very good at this.

The person that did this to me - what responsibility or accountability do they bear? None.

Where am I now? I don't have any venue for contributing to the world at this moment. I am just taking up space, still far too wounded to think about moving forward, still asking myself "why?" and trying to come to terms with the knowing that there is no answer.

I can say though that more than ever, my survival instincts tell me to say far away from the armband wearers.

Fading Away to Nothing

2010-02-19T19:18:00.000-05:00

Little by little all that I once held to is going away. I am not sure why this is so, I can only say it is what is so.

As each part of me takes its leave, all that's left is an empty aching hole. The ache is the first thing I am aware of as my eyes are not yet open each morning. Each evening I fill my mind with meaningless distractions in failed attempts to forget, at least for a time, staying up as late as possible to make sleep come more easily when I am finally ready to try.

I am fading to non-existance.

When will the tide turn? Is there a chance it never will? I have learned that struggling against this loss is futile. The universe will do what it will.

I am reminded of the initiation journey that shaman are said to go through, where they are taken apart, piece by piece, until there is nothing left of them. Those journeys end with the shaman reassembled, and given the gift of the calling to be a shaman.

I don't think this is a calling. It just feels like loss.

Still Trapped

2010-02-14T12:39:00.002-05:00

Although the second storm ended days ago, because our parking lots have not been really cleared of snow, there are not enough parking spaces for everyone here. Thus if we opt to use our cars and drive somewhere, the odds are good that when we come home we will not be able to park, without first digging a new spot. Days after the last storm with the snow packed and frozen, digging a new spot is literally not possible for us.

Until a bobcat gets in here to clear the lot, we cannot use our cars.

Thus we are still trapped at home, and I am about brain dead watching movies and trying to just pass time until we are free again. Our cars were last moved a week ago Friday.

I have had enough of this.

Calm before the storm

2010-02-09T23:13:00.000-05:00

We have done all we can do to prepare for the next impending storm. Fresh batteries for the flashlights and radio, logs for the fireplace, canned food that can be eaten without additional preparation, manual can opener, comfort food for when the canned food is not enough, bottled water, charged batteries, shovels and ice scrapers ready, laundry done etc.

It wasn't easy to prepare for storm number two, with no means of self transportation, (snowed in), but we were lucky enough to catch some rides to the stores in four wheel drives.

It is quiet tonight as the fresh snow continues to fall - over two inches already and the night has barely begun.

The weather people don't know what to tell us. Their accululation estimates are all over, with a low of four inches to a high of twenty. Judi laughingly said that if they say all the numbers then at least once on tape they will be recorded saying the right number. We don't laugh when we comment that there is no room left for more snow.

Before this time tomorrow we are supposed to be experiencing harsh winds. I can heard them already in my mind, even as the outside is blanketed in white silence.

The storm will come. We are quietly waiting.

For me only to decide

2010-02-05T18:16:00.004-05:00

I was (rudely) confronted recently because I made a statement that we consciously sensor some of the images we are exposed to.

I am a firm believer that we are affected in ways we don't always realize by what we watch on TV, listen to on the radio etc. For many years now I have tried to limit my exposure to marketing as they are experts in altering how we think, manipulating our perception of what we need to be happy, telling us that the only way to happiness is spending our money in pursuit of the more more more.

We have no need to see realistic depictions of violence. I can tell you without ever seeing for myself that war is a horrible thing that must be engaged in only as an absolute last resort. I can tell you that Haiti has suffered severe devastation without having to view people with missing limbs. I do not need harsh exposure to have compassion and understanding. I do not regard the rest of the world as "out of sight, out of mind."

I don't listen to programs, disguised as "news" that are nothing more than political rants. They don't educate me. I don't want to listen to any rants at all. Nothing in that would feed my spirit. I subscribe to email alerts from the Humane Society of the United States even while knowing that some of their investigative videos will be too tough for me to watch and I skip watching them.

I take more of my news in text than I do on the TV in part because this allows me to pick and choose the stories I want to know more about. NPR is my source of choice for radio news, as I can count on NPR to not make trite quick sound clips, but instead challenge my thinking, taking the time to tell a story properly.

This does not mean I "don't live in the real world." Opportunities for educating one's self comes in many forms. I proactively choose my ways.

No one decides for me what I should be exposed to. Only a fool would turn over such important decisions to anyone else, turn over control of their life and their mind to someone else.

My mind is a sacred space and no one but me gets to decide what I am exposed to. I am solely responsible for the nurturing and care of my spirit. I take my responsibility seriously.