08.02.16

It's been a minute since I've written here.

Life's been full, and I don't have as much time or energy to sort my thoughts into words these days.

It is good, for sure.  Forrest is almost a year old, and being a mama has been the most intense and awesome experience of my life so far. 

Many parts of motherhood have in fact been easier than I'd expected.  I had no idea how natural it would feel to fall completely in love with my baby, to protect him, care for him, put everything else on hold for him.  It's hard for me to remember anymore, but I think I'd thought at one point that prioritizing Forrest and motherhood would somehow require effort on my part.  That's laughable to me now.  He is, without any doubt, nor any volition on my part, the center of my world.

What I wasn't prepared for was how much effort it would take to keep all the roles I play in life besides Mama gracefully filled.  I know- no, I don't know, and that is much of the difficulty.  But I think I want to and even need to do these things, both for myself, and ultimately for Forrest too.  I think it's likely that I will be a better person for having healthy relationships, a career that's meaningful to me, a couple of hobbies that stretch and bend my mind a bit, and some time for personal reflection.  I hope- sometimes desperately- that the various things I choose to spend my time doing complement one another, and somehow, in combination, create the fabric of a good and meaningful life.  But I am often overwhelmed by how difficult it feels to be anything other than Mama.

I wrote shortly after Forrest was born about the kind of loss of oneself that inevitably- but perhaps, as was the case for me, completely unexpectedly- occurs as a sort of rite of passage into motherhood.  It was almost a year ago, and I guess I'd imagined the sting of that loss would have faded by now.  Instead it seems intensified.

I feel like I'm constantly second-guessing myself these days. I had no idea that the surety I worked so hard for- that I earned- in my first 30 years, would crumble when I became a mother.  Surety of what?  Of who I am, what I want, what I should be doing, I suppose.  I remember knowing, even when I had it, that surety was rare.  Maybe I never really had it.  Maybe it was just that when there was less at stake, I was better able to squelch the doubts that inevitably rise up as one sails through the seas of life.  I don't know.  I think I believed in it though, and maybe that was all that mattered.  Maybe that's all there is to it.

I remember once having a very vivid dream where I could fly.  I was standing in a room, and someone kept telling me I could do it if I just concentrated enough, and I remember dreaming that that was as ridiculous as it sounds now, but lo and behold, when I flexed my back just so, I lifted off the ground.  It was one of the more real feeling dreams I've ever had.

I miss so much being sure of myself.  I miss feeling free to make mistakes, and I miss the lightness of my 20s.  I miss picking a new country out and moving there, because I could.  I miss buying overpriced coffee and sitting and people-watching, because I had nothing else to do.  I miss falling in love and being careless, especially alongside the one I love, because that was the point of life.  I miss the excitement of the ever present sensation that life laid before me like a blank canvas, with limitless potential.  Seeing that, knowing that, was magic, and more than even the magic itself, I miss embodying it.

It feels different these days.  Today I started medical school.  It's what I've wanted and worked toward for years upon years, and I couldn't ask for a more supportive partner, or a better life within which to do it.  I can't figure out why, then, it still feels so scary, and that, in it of itself, scares me more.  I have had an amazing and fulfilling life so far, based mainly upon leaping somewhat wildly from intuition to intuition.  I know I don't want to drift aimlessly for the rest of my days, but it's difficult to trust that I know enough to set my course.

And I am, of course, not ignorant of the potential impact of all sorts of factors beyond my control.  In fact, I feel confident that obstacles and hardships I haven't planned for will come, and instead of feeling ready, as I once did, I dread them.  There is so much more to lose now.

I feel like I have to keep writing until I can come up with some resolution, because that's always been kind of the point, but I'm at a loss.

Maybe, for right now, that's just it.  It is a loss.  I have gained tremendously in the past year, more than I might ever have dreamed I could.  The gratitude I have for what I have gained exceeds anything I could try to express.  But it is not without loss.  The losses I feel are real, and I have the right to mourn them, even as I move forward- confidently- to embrace the gains.

30

A year ago, I turned 29.

Much of what I thought about that birthday was the ever increasing imminence of this one.  Numbers are just numbers, etc., etc., but still.  30 seems kind of monumental.  I've been mentally preparing myself for a few years now.

Last year I felt far from 30.  I have to laugh, because I remember that for years and years, I felt older than the calendar said I was.  At some point, I realized that the reverse was true, but I really have no idea when some point was.  This confuses me, and I find myself wondering if identifying 'some point' would be somehow informative to me.  Alas.  For now some point rests somewhere in between my 25th and 30th birthdays.

Today, however, I feel like I'm catching up with myself.

Shortly after I moved back from France in the summer of 2013, I crossed paths with a guy I went to grade school with.  We sat outside talking all night, had coffee when the sun came up, and didn't spend more than 48 hours apart for the next ten months.  I had the strange feeling that I had always known him, and I started feeling older.  Not in a bad way.  But decidedly older.  Or maybe I just confuse contentedness with oldness.

We rented a little house out in the country, and I felt pretty happy there.  My desire to do things like run ultra-marathons and travel the world waned.  I was, and am, glad to have had these experiences.  But they're not always tugging at me the way they used to.  Last summer, I went to a meditation retreat, and left early.  I sat silently for about two days, and know I could have stayed for the eight more that were planned.  Instead I had this kind of sublime realization.  What was I looking for?  Metta, compassion, joy, equanimity? I had everything I needed: the only thing missing was me, and for some reason, I was in the woods in the middle of Wisconsin.  I laughed and cried, thanked everyone, packed my things and got back in my car.  It took all night to drive home, and as I pulled onto our gravel road just as the sun came up, I took a moment to give thanks before going inside.

Later that summer, I applied to medical school.  Meanwhile, I got a great new job, and gave thanks for health insurance.  Matt and I started talking more about future plans and trying to buy a place of our own. In January, my beloved grandfather began hospice care.  In February, I bought the first car I've ever had that wasn't a family hand-me-down.  I told the salesman, who kept trying to talk to me about cuteness, that I really wanted a dependable car that got great gas mileage.  Driving away from the dealership in my Honda hybrid, I felt older.  A week later, we got a call from my grandfather's caregivers.  We gathered to hold his hands while his priest came and delivered last rites, and that afternoon, he took his final breaths.  I spoke at his memorial service about the one time I ever remember him losing his temper with me, when I'd asked him if he thought it was really important to have children.  The day we buried him, I found out I was pregnant.  I waited to tell Matt until the next week, after the opening of his first solo art show.  The same week, I was invited to interview at the medical school I'd told Matt a year ago I most readily saw myself at.  At the time, I was so overwhelmed I considered not going.

In the end, I decided I had nothing to lose.  Two weeks later, I drove to Des Moines, and fell in love with DMU.  I asked my student tour guide if any of his classmates had families, and he smiled and told me about his wife and 6-month old daughter.  Everything about it felt good.  On the way home, I threw up in a cup in the car while driving down the interstate- morning sickness, which is not remotely relegated to the morning.  I was thankful I hadn't thrown up during the interview.  A week later, I was accepted.  Of course, that meant I was right on track to take my first exams of medical school right around the time I delivered our baby.

I wrote a letter to basically beg for a deferral.  Fortunately, the dean of my new school is as reasonable as I'd hoped, and granted me permission to begin in August of 2016.  This year, I'll have the baby, take a long maternity leave, and work with Matt to prepare our little family to begin a new adventure.

Life, it turns out, happens whether you think you're ready for it or not.

I laugh at having worried.  I am not leading the dance.  The best I can do is try to make it look graceful, and sometimes I do better than others. As it rolls ever on, sometimes the hardest thing is just getting your balance long enough to catch your breath and give thanks: this journey is good.

Happy Birthday to me, and thank you friends, family, and yes, even foes.  Thank you universe.

The Road, Reprised

The melody of migration, sweet and winding, alluring and insistent, ever new but always old, still sings in me.

I suspect it always will.

I persist in failing to resist the urge to approach the edge of lands I know, peer dreamily into the distance, and fantasize about the promised land that's surely just beyond.

I ask questions when others have long since become accustomed to not knowing the answers.  They pull me ceaselessly onward, endlessly seeking.

I find myself in The Great Plains:

I stare at a tumbleweed, whooshing by. At first, its strange and lonely way of traveling fills me with a sort of awe. I wonder where it has come from and where it will go, and I realize that I have always gazed upon such entities as friends, fellow members of my motley tribe.

But suddenly I see its distinct deadness.

Suddenly I see that the tumbleweed has no choice, no life, no needs, has nothing at all, save 'freedom.'  But how can freedom be freedom if one cannot choose it?

If the tumbleweed were to cease tumbling, if the tumbleweed were to wish to plant itself somewhere and blossom into something beautiful...

I am overcome with sadness. I pity the tumbleweed, and I wish desperately that I could do something to make it live, to give its tangled tissues a chance, even while I am terrified by my very real comprehension of the essentiality of its lifelessness, a complete and utter surrender to the will of the wind.

I kick at the dirt beneath my still feet as I watch it tumble on, slowly shrinking; a basketball, a tennis ball, a little speck and then nothing. When my eyes fail me, I turn away. A longing I know will never go away wells up in my heart, and suddenly there are tears spilling from my face.

I watch them fall out of my eyes and pool upon the ground for some time before I notice that they are moistening the dirt where a tiny green sprout, no doubt planted there by some errant tumbleweed, is beginning to rise from the ground. The tears flow more strongly, eagerly now, my face embracing its role as some surrealistic sort of watering can, a participant in something much bigger than I've dared to comprehend, subtle and beautiful, coming and going, rising and falling, endlessly dancing all around me.

I draw in my breath, as I hear something faint, but growing stronger. A bass line that accompanies, holds together, gives depth to, the melody that endlessly calls me. It is steady, gentle, wise. It is whispering, “Get home. Get home. Get home...”

[Addendum on January 21st, 2015:
the greatest love poem ever written (or the plight of the divine feminine); a brilliant pearl the universe foisted upon me last night:
you can not choose to not choose can you.]

12.25.14

I remember an instant, close to eighteen months ago now, wherein I observed something extraordinary happen in my mind and spirit.

As is often the case, I found myself at a loss to communicate what I had experienced. Instead, I stuttered something to Matt about 'this being the part I hated.' We were beginning to fall in love then, and what I said confused him, understandably.

It was this though. At that precise instant, I felt an emotion that had been nothing but complete joy and awe before another human being begin, ever so slightly, to intertwine itself with the fear of losing said joy. It was 'grasping' at its most pure.

Last May, I left a retreat. Early, before it was over. I wanted my life. I, with all that I am, balked fiercely against being absent for one more moment of it unnecessarily. I could have stayed, I told myself. But I certainly didn't want to, and I couldn't think of any reason to. Sometimes I still second-guess whatever happened there.

Now I find myself here, alone at home with the worlds' sweetest hound dog for the week while Matt is in Florida with his family. I am waiting to hear whether or not I'll be admitted to medical school next year, and wondering about any odd number of things alternately looming in or brightly dancing in, depending on my mood, the future. But it is inescapably clear to me that the single thing I want most, and likely control the least, is for the love I feel when I am with Matt to continue forever.

I am acutely aware that I would give up any of the rest of it to hold on to that one thing- love.

Losing it terrifies me, and my fear terrifies me more-so.

Some president once said that there was nothing to fear but fear itself, which is all well and good, except that it's true, and then, if that's where it ends, we're stuck with fear anyway.

How does one love without fear?

How can I still be scared of losing something I feel all around me?

Love is not attachment, nor is attachment love.

The fear springs from attachment, always.

I want to love without fear, but I find great security in attachment.

I have on occasion experienced moments with a semblance of detachedness, not myself from them, but each of them from one another, as if they belong in no particular order.

I do not much enjoy this experience.

There is something, I suspect, about our attachment to others that gives the moments a meaningful sequence as well, or something about our desire to give the moments a meaningful sequence in our attachment to others.

The notion of 'bearing witness' has long struck me as something special.

I have not written much for the past eighteen months.

I think that writing more often allows me to experience life with less fear.

In the meantime, I miss my witness. Maybe just because he keeps half the bed really warm.

11.07.14

Existence does not exist.

Proof: as a noun, this first word, 'existence,' must be a place, person, or thing; an object.  We will say it is "the state of existing."  But the change is so rapid.  This is life, fluidity, and nothing exists beyond a moment, or whatever is the smallest unit of time we can contemplate.   It is there and it is gone, 'it' being everything, before it is any state at all.

Life is not static.

§§§§§§§§§§

Imagination is key.  

If you insist on interrupting your imagination 
as one is wont to do

to remind it constantly that it is not real 
since you fear it more than anything else

you will never think of anything new.

(and you will have failed to contribute)

§§§§§§§§§§

You are being awfully heady,

          I think.

                                        Which confuses me,

                                      because I thought:

We exist as nothing but thoughts.

                                                             So who is being heady?

09.21.14

No sooner said.

Universe,  I just love you.

Mindblown.

Show up [for life] ready to have a good time.

What you give reverberates right back.

a realization.

as i grow older, the appeal of having my mind 'blown' steadily decreases.

i do not know whether this is good or bad.  it is probably, like most things, a little of each, and probably also necessary, natural and inevitable.  but what do i know?

regardless of anything else, it is.