catelin

I am having lunch next week with someone who was a dear friend of mine in the past. I had troubles, she had troubles. They were spaced over different times and quite different in some ways, but very much the same in others. It was a long time ago and the details of everything probably don't even matter much to either one of us anymore. I concluded long ago that I behaved, for the most part, like a self-righteous boob at a time when I should have been supportive and patient. She did right by me when it really mattered. I didn't do the same. I know that I let her down in ways that were tremendously hurtful and I've been ashamed about that for a good while.

Now we plan to lunch. This is significant, not in its planning--for the invitation was extended and accepted very spontaneously, likely surprising the both of us a little. The significance of it lies in our shared understanding as southern women of what lunch means. In this particular case, it means that my southern sister has shown the forgiving grace of accepting the intent behind the invitation. It means that, even as many things have changed and will continue to do so, we will meet and share a common comfort in the familiar patterns and nuances of a ritual observed by generations of women before us. We began our friendship with lunch. I am grateful to be able to lunch again.

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.—Alice Walker

I have been thinking a lot the last few days about expectations and the nature of desire. I have long struggled with both concepts and sitting here on the edge of one year looking to another seems a good time to shake a few things out of my head.

I have always lived, as I guess most others have, fueled by varying mixtures of cynicism and hope. Even as I made my peace with what I could not or would not have in my life, I still always kept some secret little seeds of hope to myself. I could never bring myself to truly expect nothing. I did the next best thing. I learned to expect, for myself, very little. Note that I say for myself, not from myself. From myself, I expected everything. From myself, I expected the super human. From myself, I expected to never fail or be afraid. From myself, I expected to never be weak or let anything hurt me. From myself, I expected to be everything that those I loved ever needed or wanted me to be, with seamless perfection. This was my nature, cultivated from being one of those little Lebowski overachievers, performing feats of daring-do and wonder so the people I loved would not stop loving me.

I found my peace in learning to expect next to nothing from anyone or anything. It freed me from the disappointment of being let down by people or circumstances that were not what I’d happily but blindly perceived them to be. I had to do this because I took on each of these disappointments as my fault—as proof that I hadn’t been smart enough, pretty enough, or whatever enough in some way. The dulling of my desire for things made my day-to-day life much easier. I did manage quite well to live frugally on surprise. In fact, I was the frugal gourmet of surprise. My life has been, in so many ways, a lovely banquet crafted from all sorts of unexpected delicacies.

Still, I never brought the secret seeds to the table. I never showed those tiny bits and pieces of desires I had for myself, the things that I felt selfish for even daring to want at all. The crumbs were what I’d done without, what I’d never complained of missing—each full of such terrible wanting and fierce hopefulness. After I met my man the secret seeds grew into all sorts of unruly blossoms and vines. They escaped the confines of my inner heart and sprouted out of my mouth, swirling around my head and being given voice. He built a garden for me, from his own heart, and let all the things that I’d never had much of a place for in myself grow. I began to think that maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing…wanting. The first tentative steps I took toward believing that I could let myself desire something out loud transformed into joyful leaps and bounds of naming everything I wanted to have and do.

I’m sure the more experienced among you probably know what came next. While I was blissfully floating around giving voice to my desires, life intervened. People and circumstances turned out to be different than what I had blindly perceived them to be. I felt a little like Wiley E. Coyote hitting the bottom of the canyon. It hurt as much as I remember anything ever hurting. I cried and cried. I felt stupid. I told myself that I was such an idiot to ever think that I could have anything. I knew better than to expect anything. What could I have been thinking?

Everything that had taken root and bloomed in me over the last few months quickly began to wither. I prepared to collect the husks of my secret seeds so I could put them away again, probably for the last time. The keeper of the garden, however, held on to me. He refused to let me take my secret seeds back and he whispered to me at night to keep everything I’d grown alive. He whispered until I finally quit poisoning the garden and I began to contemplate the possibility that my hopes, even the most secret and delicate ones, might be able to survive outside of my own heart.

I am struggling to find a way to balance the things I have wanted for so long with the realities of the world. I am going to take small tentative steps again, and he’ll hold my hand as he has from the first time I knew I loved him, reminding me that I’m never far from my secret garden and he’ll be there to tend to things when I cannot.

I am going into a new year trying to be as brave as I’ve ever been. I will expect to be beloved and happy, I will expect to be disappointed and hurt, and I will expect to find my legs each and every time so I can brush myself off and move on to the next wondrous thing. I wish you all a brave new year and a crazy quilt garden grown from your own secret seeds.

"I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.... My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.... and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken."
Audre Lorde

This is for my dear friend lacyunderall, one of the greatest silence breakers I have ever known. Warrior, artist, and all-around gorgeous badass.

Do yourself a favor and check out her work. I won't even go off on my rant about how important it is to support the creative members of our tribe, how giving the gift of original art has benefits to everyone involved, about how much I loathe the shopping megacorporatesuckmeplexes. I'll let Donna's absolutely beautiful artwork speak for itself and I'll hope that it speaks to you.

Happy birthday, Double D. I love you with super-powered-warm-yer-tummy love. You have made my life joyful by your presence in it and you have sustained me in ways that I will never be able to explain or repay. I am forever indebted to you and I am grateful to call you my friend.

Your feet will bring you to where your heart is. –Irish proverb of which my grandmother was particularly fond.


I have been guarded about writing in specifics about my personal life for quite some time, as keeping a journal over several years will eventually embarrass the shit out of you when you look back at how earnest you were every time you thought something was a certain way only to find out you were mistaken. I’m not one for deleting or privatizing entries. I always leave them. Whether this is from a sense of duty to live my life as openly and honestly as I can or simply a way to secretly punish myself for the stupidities of my past, I cannot say. I like to think it’s the former, though. Still, I have learned to write about things in less concrete ways, so as not to risk committing myself to yet another publicly documented blunder. It's taken me a while to decide what I've wanted to say about this. Even when I decided I should say something, I wasn't sure how to express it in a way that would do it justice. But here goes...I’m going to write about this beautiful place to which my feet have brought me because I can't imagine not documenting the one time I've finally gotten it right.

Movement has been a theme in my life, in ways both big and small, since I was born. I come from a family of nomadic people, immigrants of both choice and necessity. I moved around a lot as a child, and I kept that movement going even as an adult. I would light in a place for a few years and then pick up and begin following the trail to something better again and again. Something better. I was always looking for that. I had love in my life, my two beautiful children, my friends, my family, my funky little house in the hill country. Even with all that, I was lonely. It sounds awful and selfish to say that, but it’s the truth. I had always grown up believing that there was a mate to my soul out there. The whole corny enchilada of lover/best friend/meant-to-be…I held tenaciously to my faith in his existence for years and years. And then, after years of “close but not quite” and especially after my divorce, I gave up on that notion for the most part and put it away.

I figured that maybe I was wrong, maybe there wasn’t really anything or anyone out there that could make a person feel universally answered and justified just by showing up and opening their arms. Even if there were such a thing, I thought, I’d missed it somehow. I was too old. I was simply going to have to be grateful for all the gifts I had in my life, which were no small thing by anyone’s estimation, and get on with living the best way that I knew how. I hated whiners, so I didn't want to be one. I would have to make my peace with being by myself. I knew I was up to the task. I’d always been a loner, from the time I was a child. Being by myself was a skill that the movement in my life had taught me. I was good at it. I was proficient at not needing anyone but myself, and it was something that I did even when I had lovers. I never let myself forget for a second that I was alone. I never felt “not alone” even when I was in love, and the movement drove me away from those loves because it was fed by that tiny but persistent desire for the silly, impossibly romantic enchilada.

Then, when I least expected it, he showed up and he opened his arms. I won’t write about him in specifics, as he is a much more private person than I am in all sorts of ways; but I will tell you that he is the person I was missing. What I have ever thought or written about love has suddenly become so small. Because it’s so much bigger than what I ever thought it could possibly be, and it makes so much more sense than I could have ever previously imagined. And I knew it from the second I looked at him and he looked at me. It was just like that. As goofy as it sounds, it was exactly like that. I knew that I would never leave him and that I would love him for the rest of my life. My dad asked me how I knew. I told him that, from the first time he’d held my hand, I’d never felt like I was by myself. It’s as simple and wonderful as that; the whole corny enchilada is real and infinite. So the movement in my life makes sense to me now, because it was always to this place where my heart is, to this place where his arms are open and he is smiling at me, to this place where he holds my hand and we always move together.

For my friend S., the man who sometimes cannot see his own magnificent wings.

Compass

I have watched your journey from a distance,
marveled at the movement of you, sweet traveler,
blessed and cursed with the burden of the
changing landscapes of your own body.

I have held my breath as you wrestle
with deep waters and dangerous currents,
always with such an acute sense of the cost,
marked with sacred heart, bone, and gristle
of how you are finding your way to shore.

I have hoped for you to see yourself
as twilight—the most beautiful and brave
time of the day, where the world would quietly
give way to you without question or judgment.

I have silently applauded your steady navigation
through streams of self-doubt and longing, never
being so vain as to see yourself—a bona fide prodigy,
to have become the man you are without ever having
had the chance to be the boy you should have been.

I have a quiet joy this solstice, and a certain kind of balance between wanting and having that is new to me. Not to be cryptic, but it's raining men. Ok, so that's not cryptic; but it's nice to have rain once in a while. Quality rain, even! I'm still stretching my legs and running my toes through the grass of this new and improved year, so it's especially important for me to give thanks for the sun on my face these days. I am going to be outdoors this summer solstice, like a good little naked baby of mother earth. I feel the sunflowers sprouting from my head just thinking about it!

It's the sun's birthday. I love you, n0tw01f.

I am forty-three today. Holy shit. ; )



An Older Woman

I am not that girl.

I tell you this and what I mean is that
I am not 36 and I don’t stay up late much anymore,
I only wake up at four a.m. for no apparent reason.
What I mean is that the last joint I smoked is now old enough to vote.

I am not that girl.

I tell you this and I mean that I am wise
Enough now to see the value in being patient with you,
Even you, with all your flaws and fears and troubles.
What I mean is that I understand the terrible ache for things we can count on.

I am not that girl.

I tell you this and I mean that I am faithful,
To myself and to the truth as it reveals itself to me over time,
I have shed the need to proclaim my purpose so loudly.
What I mean is that I grow more quietly subversive and fierce each day.

I am not that girl.

I tell you this and I mean I may have been her
Or a variation on that same theme of false bravado and fuck off,
Sometime before I learned to be rather than to appear.
What I mean is that I am already what you can only hope she might become.

He apologizes for smelling like gasoline. She just smiles and says, "Don't worry about it."

What she doesn't say is that she loves the smell of gasoline on a man's hands because it reminds her of being six years old and hiding behind her dad's legs every other week at the garage while he and his friends revved engines, talked shop, and smoked Kools. It reminds her of the racetrack, holding her brother's hand and stuffing her mouth full of Bit-o-Honeys while her dad snapped photos of dragsters and greasers for the magazines. It reminds her of the one boy she probably ever loved enough to have stayed married to forever if he hadn't died on the road before they had a chance to find out. What she doesn't tell him is that the smell of gasoline on his hands reminds her of every single best kind of love she's ever had or hoped for in her life.

It’s funny how sometimes the things of most consequence to us happen so slowly that we hardly notice them. I lost my voice and I can’t even remember when it happened. I just know that I reached a point where I had nothing to say. I suppose it was not so much nothing to say as nothing that I wanted to say out loud. I didn’t want to say out loud how ashamed I was—about my failed New York minute marriage, about the fact that I’d walked away from my life here so cavalierly and gave up a job I loved for something that quickly turned into nothing at all. I was working so hard to get back to being myself again, but it never seemed to get any better.

Being a defense attorney for the last two years was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I did the best I could, but my heart was never in it. I turned down more work than I took, some by choice and some because I was simply conflicted out of it. Most of my best friends are cops and prosecutors and there was a lot of work that I couldn’t take because I still had people calling me for advice on cases in the middle of the night. I still worked teaching cadet classes at the Sheriff’s academy. But because I was on the “other” side, I nonetheless endured the slights and snubs of a lot of people who’d once had nothing but good things to say about me. I had no benefits, no health insurance, and no steady income. I woke up every morning worried about money and dreading the work I had to do to make ends meet. I finally cashed in stock that had been a gift to me from my grandfather—money that I had earmarked for my kids and sworn I would never touch—just to pay the bills. I kept telling myself that I was learning from this, that difficulty is always a test of character. I had been through harder things before and come through just fine, but over the last couple of years I felt the buoyancy that I’d held to so tenaciously through other hardships slowly seep out of me. It was a slow leak that came dangerously close to leaving me flat.

For months, there had been the possibility of going back to work at the D.A.’s office, but it was never a certainty. There were elections to get through, changes to be made no matter what the outcome. The worst part of it all was how badly I wanted it, how badly I feared not getting it. If it had just been me, I wouldn’t have been so worried; but with kids to provide for and no safety net, it was difficult to practice any sort of detachment from the desire for a place that was home to me for so long. Starting up the roller derby league probably saved me. I took a leave of absence this season. I was worn out, both physically and emotionally by all the work I’d put into it. Still, I was glad for the escape it offered me from my problems. I am proud of what it has become and the fact that I created something that is still going strong without me, like a child that I managed to raise well enough in spite of all my bumbling.

Aside from my children, the cases I deal with have been the focus of most of my days. I work exclusively with persons crimes now and I love what I do so much. I look forward to Mondays again. It’s no wonder I missed it as much as I did. It’s still hard for me to believe that I’m back, even now that I’m settled in to my new office and have been gleefully slogging through the mess of cases that were waiting for me.

I went to lunch with a friend the other day whose path has mirrored my own in a lot of ways, though for very different reasons. He’s finding his way back to the fold as well, hopefully sooner rather than later. We talked about how I learned a lot of hard lessons over the last three years. I almost lost everything that means anything to me—professionally and personally on a lot of levels, but I am finally feeling things settle back into place.

I still get the occasional flashes of fear that something will come and take it all away—that having my life back again is just temporary. I have learned from this, though. That seems to be the one thing that I can always do in any situation. I endure and I find ways to be better. I’m much more measured in the way that I see change in my life now. I hold more to the things that are precious to me and am not so quick to sacrifice familiar rhythms for the transient rush of the next new thing. I am still fearless in the ways that matter, and I still believe in myself. Every day fills me up now and confirms what I have always known...that my particular odd combination of tenacity and hopefulness will always be what saves me in the end.