The Real Deal April 30, 2008

So I logged onto my myspace account today, which I rarely, rarely do. I generally have no reason to be on myspace. I largely view it as a tremendous waste of headspace, but it does have it’s good points. I like that I can check in from time to time on a few friends and family members and see what they’ve been up to. Although, if I only log on once every couple months, I suppose it’s old news at that point. Oh well. Better late than never, as I always say.

 

Today I absentmindedly read my profile description and found myself thinking I’d better double check it for accuracy. I thought it egotistically prudent to make sure it reflected the current goings on in my own life… especially since I know there are oodles of people out there that would be so disappointed to discover I’ve become lax in myspace management. (I mean, who says “oodles”? Really?)

 

So, in double checking my profile, here’s what I barely remember ever having written:

About me:
I’m an energetic, driven, creative, sentimental, reflective, humorous working wife & mom. I love gatherings with friends… enjoying food, fun, laughter and rockin’ out to 80’s metal. I cherish friendships and opportunites that foster creative expression and fearless ambition. I am a graphic designer and copy writer. I am also an aspiring author, currently pursuing self-publishing avenues for my books.

Who I’d like to meet:
Alice Walker, Jane Goodall, Lance Armstrong, Julia Cameron… and the Dear Lord.

 

Ok, so now that we see how great I am, here’s where I start to have a good day. My profile requires absolutely zero updating! I think that’s a good thing, right? It means I’m consistent, deliberate, committed. But where it gets really exciting is in the “Who I’d like to meet” department. Of the five people I said I wanted to meet, as of two weeks from now, I will have met two of them! Oh, and if you count my near-death experience a few years back, three!

 

Thanks to my best friend Jen, I seized the opportunity to meet Jane Goodall two years ago when she gave a “Roots & Shoots” presentation at the Houston Zoo. Roots and Shoots is a grassroots organization that encourages social and environmental awareness and activism in local communities. She was the most graceful, sweet, quiet, articulate, dignified woman I’d ever met. I wouldn’t say I was star-struck, exactly, but I was definitely in the presence of greatness and I basked in it. Jen and I stood about 4 feet away from her as she spoke in a private VIP room of sponsors from Whole Foods Market – where Jen works. We easily could have shaken her hand, asked for an autograph, posed for a picture… but honestly, we were locked inside a beautiful moment in time that felt too sweet and privileged to cheapen with fanaticism. Standing next to us was the UN’s own Ambassador for Peace. It was just so real and so wonderful.

 

Two weeks from now, I’ll be in the presence of greatness again. Julia Cameron, the author who will never know how much her words have helped to transform my life, is offering a weekend workshop at a retreat house in Massachusetts. Once again, one of the highlights of my life will be shared with my best friend Jen, who is flying in from Texas to join me. Back when we were roomies in Mount Holly, we’d sit on the kitchen floor eating adzuki beans and butternut squash and chat about Julia’s book, “The Artist’s Way.” We’d talk about what we wanted out of this life, our hopes, dreams, aspirations, goals, how much we’d stumbled, how far we’d come, and the unknown roads we’d yet to travel. Time and again, year after year, we’ve gone back to the writing exercises and wisdom of The Artist’s Way, and made her enlightening course a lifelong companion. Her lessons have taught us to accept that synchronicity can and does in fact exist, that God wants to grant us our heart’s desire – and that that’s why we are here to begin with. I tout the brilliance of her course to pretty much everyone I meet, and am actually already set to personally facilitate it this summer for a group of local women.

 

When Jen and I lived together, I bought her a present for her birthday. It was a framed print of a picturesque, flawless winter landscape. The verse is what left a lasting impression for me. It said:

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path… and leave a trail.

 

This is a path we’ve been on for 12 years. It connects us even across 2000 miles. I’m happy two friends will be traveling it together… once again… to ultimately each go our own way and blaze a few new trails. I’m so grateful for a beautiful friendship that started at the swim club 25 years ago, and has remained solid, grounded, nurturing, supportive, hilarious, and totally… completely… real.

Step Aside, Ladies April 29, 2008

New creative thinking often takes new creative people. You have to be willing to replace yourself. It makes room for the next generation of leaders. I’m not asking you to go. I’m asking you to grow. 

- Nancy Brinker, Founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation

 

I watched Nancy Brinker’s keynote speech online the other day on the Komen website. It’s amazing how far that organization has come over the years. I’m sure Nancy’s sister, Susan, is beaming as she looks down from her heavenly perch. Komen For The Cure, as they are now called, brought in billions last year, with the profits being divided to create a new brand identity for the organization – new name, new logo, new marketing. The rest of the money paid some pretty fat salaries and covered operating expenses, and whatever was leftover was placed into the hands of the researchers. Although they seemed to make some strides on the scientific side of things recently, the mysterious “cure” still continues to evade and elude. Komen has clearly faced a fair amount of criticism for their appropriation of funds. Skeptics and cynics question whether such a corporately driven mega-nonprofit is all they in fact claim to be.

 

Regardless, I’ll be doing the Komen run this Mother’s Day in Philadelphia. It will be my second time participating in the event, and it’s been 12 years since my first race for the cure. Our whole family got together back then to honor my mother-in-law, Dolly, who lost her battle with breast & liver cancer in 1995. It will feel good to run for her again.

 

I will be running with an intention. I have a prayer for myself and for all mothers. May we choose to understand the willing sacrifices our own mothers have made for us throughout our lives. May we honor the values they instilled in us and accept their flawed humanness. May we be bold enough to forgive their mistakes. May we recall the ways our mothers taught us what it means to be charitable, kind, loving, tolerant women – women that move with poise and grace, while standing up for what is right and not succumbing to pain, inferiority or injustice. May we absorb through these reflections, a gratitude to urge us forward with vision and purpose. May we use the talents we possess to build a life our mother would be proud of, a mission of compassion and perseverance. May we pass along the values and virtues held by our strong, courageous mothers to our own daughters. May they always know they are loved beyond limits and can do anything they dream possible with our fierce, ferocious love tucked gently beneath, beside and within them. May we lead a life that grooms and prepares us to consciously… intentionally… step aside, and make room for the next generation of gorgeous possibility.

ap·a·thet·ic April 22, 2008

     According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, apathetic (a-pə-the-tik) means:

Having or showing little or no interest or concern

     According to me, apathetic is: a pathetic way to feel.

Blah, blah, blah. You know you’re apathetic when you have to compute your age using a calculator. (Am I 36?) Hmmm. Maybe that’s just plain pathetic.

I think it’s more the apathy thing, because I feel like I’m spinning my wheels – at work especially. Nothing seems to be clicking right now and I couldn’t care less. Add that to a few run-ins I recently had with a mother of one of Lina’s school friends, and you’ve got yourself a pretty apathetic chick.

No, maybe that’s resentment I’m feeling. Maybe I’m pathetically referencing the wrong adjectives.

Spiritually, I’ve seen better places. I think I’m angry. Disappointed and discouraged for what I wish I saw around me. I long for deeper connections, kinder communications, compassionate extensions of unconditional love. Most of what I see is greed, personal agendas, grudges and power trips.  Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong places?

I do know I’m watching myself turn old. Yesterday, our friend Scott was over, and we had a very delightful discussion about the benefits of soluble fiber and psyllium seed.

I do know I feel like I’m wasting time at the daily grind. If we only have one life to live, how am I spending 40 hours of that one and only life every week?

I do know there ain’t a damn thing I can do about my newly-emerging wrinkles, progressively descending boobs, and Big Foot feet.

I do know that friendships wax and wane like the moon, but my best friend living in Texas can send me a text message and make me feel as if not a single day has passed since high school. That only makes me miss her more.

Every once in a while I go through these funks. It’s days like this I want to curl up in a ball and coccoon myself. If only to emerge feeling bolder, wiser, and not quite 36.

To sprint, or not to sprint April 16, 2008

So I found a sprint triathlon I want to do. August 30th. Erika and I have been going to the gym fairly consistently, but I’ll need to up the ante if I want to enter this race and actually finish. Last week I strained a muscle in my right inner thigh. I don’t even know what muscle it’s considered – hamstring or quad? Yesterday, I pulled out my right hip while I was stepping out of the shower. I’ve also been getting charlie horses in the arch of my right foot, as well as my right calf. My massage therapist told me several years ago that my right hip rests significantly higher and more forward than my left. Most likely came about by the way my babies were positioned over my pelvis during my pregnancies. It affected the way my spine curves, (which my scoliosis only exacerbates) and naturally influences the way my head now rests upon my neck and shoulders.

 

(Man, no wonder I always get headaches. No wonder I feel stress in my right shoulder.)

 

I envision myself this lopsided, limping mess of a lady on a treadmill. What an eyesore I must be. But no matter, I have a goal to strive for, and I hope to reach it this time even if I’m dragging my twisted, uneven body across the finish line. Last time I registered for a tri, I discovered I was pregnant with Giannibob, so I had to drop out of the race. It feels good to be back in action again, but with all these sudden challenges developing in my musculo-skeletal system, I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t try to sprint at mach speed to the tempo of Ernie & Neal’s “Make Up A Dance” anymore?

 

Stranger Things Have Happened April 9, 2008

“I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.”

 - Alice Walker, Author of “The Color Purple”

 

Long before reading word one of Alice Walker’s riveting brilliance, I’d been unwittingly writing to heal myself. After seeing this quotation of hers when I was about 17 years old, I immediately felt validated and rather connected to her on some intuitive level. From there on out, I approached each private moment spent with my journal as sacred and restorative.

 

I write in earnest about the human condition. I pursue my anger, my rage, my disappointment and grief, in an attempt to get it all out of my head and onto the page. I cry when I write about things that deeply disturb me. It’s often the only way the tears will come – a release my soul wouldn’t otherwise know – and I depend on it as a barometer to measure the sincerity of my values. I can take pieces of this crazy life, and look at them within the pages of my journal, literally from a birds-eye view and see what may be amiss. I evaluate what’s truly behind the hissy fit. I ponder the propensity toward perpetual sap. I challenge what it looks like to hold oneself accountable for the things we do and don’t say. After a bit of time passes on a particular subject matter, I then go back and reread previous entries in an effort to track my progress, or lack thereof. When all is said and done, I write seeking clarity. I ask questions, seeking answers, understanding, truth. In the words of author Julia Cameron (and not unlike why the chicken crossed the road), I write to “get to the other side.”

 

The way I see it, I’m riding in the passenger seat of a curiously therapeutic vehicle. Sometimes I share my therapeutic conclusions, either via my blog or an article in my local newspaper. I publish these musings not so much for personal gratification as for a sort of public service. I figure whomever may stumble upon this road that is my personal process of discernment, may they always feel free to come along for the ride. Should mere words somehow strike a reflective nerve of a total stranger, then perhaps this train has reached one of its many destinations.

 

Speaking of total stranger, here’s what I can say about my paternal grandfather…

 

My dad and his younger brother were abandoned by their biological father when my father was 4 and my uncle was an infant. My dad spent his entire fatherless life (mis)managing rage, coping with the fear of abandonment, and reconciling himself to the fact that he was basically unwanted from birth. He drowned his sorrows in booze for the first half of his life. After falling off a roof, breaking his back, then practically losing his wife and kids to drunkenness and ¾ of his stomach to ulcers … he finally gave a half-hearted shot at sobriety.

 

As the story goes, he failed miserably and often. Time and again he fell off the wagon, then would incredulously pull himself back up by the bootstraps and get himself to a meeting. My mother and two older brothers witnessed the horrors and abuse of alcoholism. They lived it. But by the time my younger brother and I were born, my dad was sober and there to stay. He was 23 years sober when he was killed in a freak accident at work.

 

It goes without saying, I never knew my dad’s dad. Never met him. Never saw a picture of him. Never even heard his name uttered. I don’t know who he is or if he’s even alive. I do know that all our lives he had always lived one city over and when my dad died, my mother thought it appropriate to contact him and let him know. I can only imagine her anxiety as she picked up the phone to dial. Her heart must have been pounding when she heard him pick up. She mustered up enough composure to announce the horrible news and his response to her was, “Yeah. What do you want me to do about it?” She swallowed whatever rage of her own enough to say, “I just thought you might want to know your son died” and hung up.

 

I have so many questions. Every once in a blue moon I feel sort of like a curious adopted grandchild that wants to find a birth grandparent. Who is he? Do I look like him? Have I ever passed him on the street? Sat next to him in a restaurant? Said “Peace be with you” and shaken his hand the one and only time he dragged his guilty conscience into church? I wonder what it was that was so painful in his life that he couldn’t find it in himself to love my dad and my uncle or at least try and visit them on weekends? Maybe my grandmother was a tough woman to live with, but is that any excuse to desert your children and never even make the effort to reconcile such a crime of humanity?

 

Why did my grandmom have to die before I could ask her what her first husband used to be like? Why didn’t I ever think to ask her before? What were their conversations like when they first met and fell in love? How and why did they fall out of love? Did she kick him out for being an abusive drunk or did he really run off with that tramp twice his age? Why didn’t he want to maintain a relationship with his sons? Did she insist he get out of their lives and never come back? Why did her babies have to wonder why they were so unlovable? Why did my dad have to become head of household at age 4? Why did my uncle have to be raised by his brother? Why did my dad have to go through his life angry and scared that he lacked the capacity to meet his wife’s and children’s emotional needs?

 

Why did I have to comfort my big, strong father on one unexpectedly cathartic day, as he sobbed like a baby into my 21-year old shoulder and confided that he was absolutely terrified of being alone. Why was it his only daughter who was the one to tell him he was loved beyond limits, even though he couldn’t even fathom that concept and didn’t feel worthy of that love anyway?

 

Why did I have to kneel at my dad’s closed casket and wonder if this was all manifest destiny? If my father had always wanted to go out like the superhero he was (to me) that day in the explosion – saving several people’s lives before the fire claimed his own. Would he have had it any other way? Why did his mother have to bury a second child? Why did my uncle have to identify his big brother’s body? Why did my brother have to spend months meticulously cleaning off the burnt skin from the cross shield he had worn that day, so he could present it to me on my 30th birthday? Why did my mom have to bottle up all her grief and etch yet another horrific chapter into her already epic story of unspeakable pain?

 

Who played the lead role in the tragic backstory? A man I never met and will probably never know. A man I’d probably hate if I did. But I sometimes wonder if he cries. Occasionally I find my mind lingering on the thought that he wanders this earth, a battered shell of a man. I wonder how many aunts and uncles of mine he went on to father after he left my grandmom? How many cousins do I have that I’ll never meet? How many of them feel as wounded and spiteful as my siblings and me? Have any of them ever called him out for who and what he was, the heartache he brandished, the malevolence he represented? Did anyone ever muster enough courage to have him answer for all the pain he’s at least partially responsible for?

 

Or was there someone who sat beside him, bewildered and confused as he sobbed on her shoulder and came to terms with his own broken self?

Better late than never April 8, 2008

I am unwritten, can’t read my mind, I’m undefined
I’m just beginning, the pen’s in my hand, ending unplanned

Staring at the blank page before you
Open up the dirty window
Let the sun illuminate the words that you could not find

Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your inhibitions
Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else
Can speak the words on your lips
Drench yourself in words unspoken
Live your life with arms wide open
Today is where your book begins
The rest is still unwritten

- Natasha Bedingfield, Unwritten

I have heard this song a few times, but it never struck me the way it did last night. Erika and I were discussing the wonders of the Emmaus Retreat. She went on hers this past weekend. I went on mine 12 years ago.

I was filled with sheer sincere joy listening as she replayed for me the connections she had made on her individual journey. I was also filled with longing for that grace that washes over you, so subtly, so simply, as the retreat cracks open corners of your soul and you let Him in.

I asked her what her most pivotal moment was on the weekend. We all have that one moment when the clarity is so lucid, the truth so plain as the nose on your face. For me there were many of those moments, but confession was absolutely the defining moment where everything broke through and I was filled with such intense longing for peace and love, to forgive and be forgiven, it I felt as though I were dying.

It’s a dramatic description, but that’s exactly what it was. The journey breaks down walls, strips you of your ego-driven desires that often go undetected, and brings into focus the pure gratification that comes from walking the simple, humble road less traveled.

The song above was playing in the ambient background last night as we talked about our individual experiences. I didn’t give it much thought. I just sort of mouthed the word absentmindedly. All of a sudden, I heard it. I mean I HEARD it. I experienced that same moment of crystal clear understanding I had received at my first Emmaus. The words that my priest comforted me with during confession 12 years ago were almost exactly, word-for-word, these song lyrics. It was the dirty window lyric that caught my attention. Fr. Tom had told me I needed to take my shirt sleeve and wipe clean a little portion of the window pane that had gotten coated over the years with muck and mud. He went on to tell me to write down all the painful memories, capture it and get it onto the page. He said I had a blank slate and that there was a story there that would remain unwritten unless I made the choice to write it. I hadn’t made the connection until Erika and I spoke last night and that song burst through the cracks in conversation. 

Over a decade later, I finally get the message – plain as day. The Road to Emmaus allows God to take hold of your heart and He never lets go, even when you may choose to forget. As I always say, “Emmaus is Emmazing!”