Courage

Every day, without looking very hard at all, I find amazing examples of courage in every corner of my life: 

My best friend cousin, Sal, who has survived two bouts of lymphoma and the chemo treatments that were worse than the disease itself. My hero friend who keeps living with integrity and purpose in the face of a body chemistry that seems determined to make her life hell.

My student whose parents' marriage is shredding before her eyes, and who still comes to school smiling and cheerful and ready to learn every day.

My best friend since seventh grade, Marcia, whose  incredible parents are aging, fading, dying as she does the best she can to support, love and nurture them. The role reversal is a costly one, and she bears it with such grace.

My husband who sticks with a marriage that looks nothing like the one he thought he was getting, and who lives calmly and mostly happily with the challenge of a spouse who cannot sit in the status quo quietly - who actually can do nothing quietly.

I just spent the weekend with a man who is among the most courageous I know.

My brother Mark.

Mark is the middle of the three younger brothers I grew up with. We are all in our fifties now, but I still think of them collectively as "The Boys". My sweet, tender quiet baby brother - the one I remember as being most adept at avoiding  our parents' wrath and snares, the one whose interests most paralleled my own, the one whose approval meant the most to me - that brother lost his way a few years ago.

Without telling his story for him, the time he spent in the wilderness cost him a high-powered career he loved, the wife he still adores, and his treasured status as grandpa. He has spent the last year rebuilding his life. He spent this weekend with me, in part to reclaim from a friend's house the last of his possessions from his life before.

There were many times this weekend that I blinked back tears as I watched him sort through photos of a marriage that is no more, artifacts of a life that he loved and destroyed, treasures that he accumulated in happier times and that will always be a reminder of what was and is no longer. Every now and then, he would stop after turning over a particularly poignant picture and say, "That was hard." Then he would go on.

In an odd way, the time we spent sorting through Mark's things was like being at a funeral. He said goodbye to the life that died. We said goodbye together. We celebrated the glorious and the mundane. We grieved the losses and the pain. 

And we laughed. At the stories behind some of the pictures. At us in the pictures - Mark grinning, wild and woolly; me wild, defiant and oozing sex. At the weird things he saved when he packed his possessions for storage - plastic spoons? post-it notes? an apple candle? 

In this last year as I've watched my brother rebuild his life from ashes, I have been continually amazed at his lack of self-pity or anger or bitterness. He accepts responsibility for getting to this place, believes that God is holding him in His Mercy and Love, and is grateful for the life he has. My brother Mark is a wonder. 

He has a blog, The Other Closet , which he has given me permission to share. His story is amazing, his writing powerful, his life a gift to anyone lucky enough to know him. He has come such a long way from the cave of his childhood. The Cowardly Lion has found his courage at last.

Photo from Flickr

The Road Between

I'm driving to work along narrow country roads with no shoulders. The school year is no longer new enchanting infant, not yet settled and comfortable adult. I'm bleary-soul tired from the weeks of full tilt preparation; the switch from elastic free-flowing no-clock time to blocks of tightly scheduled time crammed too full; my resistance to the current state of my life.

The almost full Harvest Moon lights my way from the western horizon and beckons its Sister Sun who is just beginning to send emissaries of light up from the eastern horizon. Old moon, at the end of its cycle. New sun, birthing a new day.

Flanked by softly misted fields where earnest ginger hens graze under the feet of placid ginger cows on one side and regal russet horses graze on the other, I travel alone between old and new. 

I love the moon and its ability to color night into dusky day. I love its tidal pull that calls my blood even though I am years beyond the evidence of those cycles. I love its unhurried exit from the stage that is soon to be flooded by fresh new light.

I think about the parts of my life that are old and full and on the brink of  waning into darkness. I love them, too. But I am achingly ready for them to settle beneath the western mountains.

The eastern sky grows brighter and brighter, dimming the moon's borrowed light with its brilliance. Faint blush of hinted day expands into softly translucent red that bleeds vibrant violet life into the gray between. 

I am ravenously hungry, deeply impatient for the light of my new life to dominate the sky. I've exhausted and frustrated myself in fruitless efforts to push the moon down and pull the sun up. As I continue along the road to school, held softly in air that contains both the lingering warmth of summer and the encroaching coolness of winter, I am grateful for the companionship of contrasts. 

The cycles have their own rhythm. Sun, Moon. Day, Night. Summer, Winter. Birth, Death. I can dance along or be dragged along. I cannot change the tempo or the tune. They will not - cannot - forget me or leave me behind. 

The moon will set soon enough. The sun will rise when it does. In the meantime, I travel a narrow road with no shoulders, kept company by chickens, cows and horses the color of earth, held in the arms of light and shadows. 

Ghosts

The three story school house sits in dark brick implacability, as it has for decades,  square in the middle of a town block. The perimeter is lined by buckled sidewalk, tired grass and ancient horse chestnuts. The flag pole is off to the right of  deep steps leading to  double doors that open onto acres of scuffed hardwood floors. For five years, from second grade to sixth,  I  sit with my classmates on these steps to have our group picture taken with our teacher. I am always the one with short bangs, long braids, and a smile I wish desperately someone would see through.

Whenever the wind blows, the metal clip that holds the flag in place clangs in a syncopated beat against the metal pole. My mind tells me that there has to be more than one clip, but it is only one that I ever hear. I don't know why that is. It is the constant song of the clip and pole that keeps me steady company for those five years. 

Some wind ghost has been playing the music of that flag pole in my head all week. Sometimes it's a real sound. The wind chimes in my back yard. Something banging against the old milk can welcoming visitors from my front porch. Even a particular metallic ring of a car door closing. Sometimes the only vibrations are happening somewhere deep inside of me.

It's lonely, this sound. When I hear it, I'm the only person on the playground of that old school. A lost little girl for whom life is bleak, and who waits for a time when she can be free. Being alone isn't all bad.  It means I'm safe from those who will hurt me. It also means I have no hope of being close enough to anyone who might love me.

It's compelling, this sound, full of longing and urgency. It promises something more, better, safer - if only I can hold out. It tolls like a bell marking the hours of my life, a life that can't start until I'm somewhere else.

It's heartbreaking, this sound. 

It's the heartbreak I feel now. The heartbreak of a child who will never know clean, unconditional parental love, and who will believe it's because of something wrong with her. The heartbreak of a child who survives the desolation of that loveless life by believing she can make someone love her that way - when she's older and in charge of her own life. The heartbreak of a child mind contained in an almost old body just beginning to realize that there is no way to have that unconditional love. The window closed long ago.

That child will always be alone in the schoolyard, imprisoned, and kept company only by the lonely music of the wind playing metal against metal.  Unless she can finally accept that her loss is real, and permanent, and in no way her fault. She's tired of the schoolyard and the lonely company of its ghost children and ghost music and ghost hopes. She longs for substance. 

I hear you, my dearest school girl. I'm here for you, with you, enfolding you. It is time to release the ghosts, to grieve the loss, to face yourself. You're ready. I'm ready. The wind is ready to carry us both up and away and into. Love. Life. At last.

This is my third  or fourth grade picture. I'm in the second row from the top, fifth from the left.

One More Year

A new school year is about to start. For parents this means regained hours of freedom as kids go back into classrooms for a big chunk of the day. For those of us who are about to welcome those kids into our classrooms and into our hearts, this means a sudden and severe curtailment of freedom.

For the last two weeks, I've been going in to school to get my room ready, and to try to get myself ready - to ease myself back into the confinement of a tightly scheduled life. Two days last week were spent sitting in math training - to prepare us for the latest I (and we're told the absolute last) pendulum swing of math instruction. The first two days of this coming week will be spent sitting in staff meetings and welcoming my new charges at open house. 

My room is ready. I've reconnected with my team and other colleagues. I've written twenty-five new names at least a dozen times - welcoming postcards, bookmarks, desk names, rosters, lunch chart, on and on and on. If the kids came tomorrow, all systems are go and the room is ready to receive them.

I'm about to welcome my twenty-first class. 

I don't want to. 

I don't want to spend the next two days listening to the long lists of new things we're expected to do with not enough time or resources to do them with. I didn't appreciate the two days of training that were just like the last two decades of trainings I've sat through - the latest new thing to solve everything before we've had a chance to really learn the last latest new thing. I don't want to spend the evening before the first day of school meeting my new families and receiving the piles of school supplies they're all out buying as I write this. I don't want to spend my prime energy in this way any longer. 

It sounds so harsh to say. If I were one of my parents reading this I would be concerned. My heart is not in public education. My heart has headed in a whole new direction in the last couple of years, and it's not happy to be held back. We, my heart and soul and I, were going to be done with teaching elementary school last year. Life and economics decided otherwise.

And so for one more year, I am an elementary school teacher. I don't know why. I do know it's where I'm meant to be. I believe - I need to believe - that when I learn the lesson this job has to teach, I will be finally be freed to travel where my heart is leading me. I pray that this will be the year.

Here are my teacher goals for this year: To love my kids. To do all I can to help them feel that love. To be kind, compassionate, forgiving - even (or especially) when it's hard. To have fun. To find a way to get more energy than I lose. To be. To not work so hard. To not worry so much.

Here are not my teacher goals for this year: To fix anyone. To get good scores on the state assessment. To impress anyone with anything. To fit in and belong. 

I had my first student encounter last week. Joe and his sister Maddie, who was in my room two years ago, came by while I was working in my room. I got great hugs from both kids and they came in for a visit. Maddie is one of my all time favorite people. Joe is mine this year. 

"I burp a lot." This out of the blue, and offered as a friendly challenge.

"Well, I hope you won't be burping during class."

"But I can't help it. The burps just come out."

I've had this conversation a time or two before, with boys much like Joe. "Sure you can help it. My youngest brother is the world's champion burper. He swallows more air than anyone I've ever seen." 

"Do you want to hear me burp?" I've got him now. The challenge has been reversed.

"Sure!"

The burp is nicely loud, but short in duration. I tell Joe this. "My brother can burp ten times louder and longer than that."

"It was just a practice burp. I can do better. Listen."

He does in fact double both volume and duration, and I praise his efforts. By this time he's done with the whole burping thing. I'm having fun, delighted that I've been able to surprise him, and for the first time feeling a spark of something resembling anticipation for the year.

During the sleepless and restless nights that consume my last hours of freedom relentlessly, I try to replay  that conversation. It contains all I want for the year. Now if I can only do that with all twenty-five of my new babies. And come home at the end of my days with enough energy to give my heart its deepest desire.

photo by another sergio from Flickr

Lace

I'm awakened by the face of the perfect full moon peering into my bedroom windows. Windows left open for hope of relief from this dying summer heat. Coyotes sing in the distance, taking up the night chorus from the owls who sang me to sleep.

Sleep is gone for good. My head is filled with thoughts of lace - a picture that came to me a couple of days ago that persists and seems to have a message. I get up and stand at the living room window, absorbing the moon's gentle light, aware of the lace being created in my yard by its shadows. The giant fir boughs, the water from the sprinkler, the more delicate patterns of my flowers  - all part of the tapestry of  moonlit lace. Light and dark. Full and empty. Life and death.

Tabasco has been gone three weeks. He is gone. Dead. Not coming home. The power of my grieving has caught me by surprise. But the power of grieving always does. I am never prepared for the unique pain and emptiness and relentlessness of it. 

The hole left in his stead is perfectly Tabasco shaped. His furry bulk, long tail, marmalade coat. No other can fill that particular shape, or the place he filled in my life and heart. I keep checking to see if he's back, and continue to find the hole where he once purred under my chin.

As is my pattern, losing Tabasco has touched other losses  in my life. Some old, some new. Some resolved, some not. Some being illuminated more clearly by the pain of this loss, much like the illumination of tonight's full moon. Each loss leaving a pool of darkness, a hole that cannot be filled.

The losses started early - too early. There is a hole where an accepting mommy should be. There is a hole where an adoring daddy should be. There is a hole where innocence should be.

I've spent a lifetime trying to fill those holes with substitutes. And it's only now that I realize truly that they can't be filled. Each has a unique shape, like Tabasco's, that cannot be filled by other love or more attention or fame or success or words or food. There is no comfort for their loss. There is only time.

And the life that happens around the empty places. The silk threads of relationship and love that give shape to the holes and that create a fabric that is whole and beautiful.

On my walks in the park this week with Toby, I've been running into spider webs spun clear across the four foot span of the trail. More air than silk, they are startlingly strong. If the light is just right, I'll see one and avoid walking through it, stopping to admire its symmetry, strength and resident weaver.

Holes are lace. Without the empty places, the shadows, the holes - without those things, lace would be thread. Nothing more. 

That offers me comfort. Knowing that the losses are part of the tapestry of my life. A beautiful and satisfying life. A life where a perfect sunrise over Lake Quinault, the return of a friend I thought lost to me, and the memory of a giant orange cat are  silk. Silk and shadows. Lace.

Photo by Lynn from Flickr

Pavlov Would Be Proud

I'm fixing my usual summer breakfast. Whole grain toast with peanut butter. Standing at the counter, my mind on the million things that fill it on a morning at the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year.

Toby is sitting quietly, expectantly, and eagerly behind me, as he usually does. He likes peanut butter. Once, maybe twice, (alright, maybe more than that) I've globbed some on my finger and given him a taste at the end of my toast-preparing routine. I love seeing his happy face and I'm entertained by what his tongue does with the peanut goo.

This morning I'm so lost in my thoughts that I screw the lid back on the peanut butter jar without getting a glob for Toby and turn around to cross the kitchen and put it away. I've completely forgotten that he's sitting there and almost run into him. 

His golden eyes are beaming hope at my face. He's in a perfect sit position and his tail sweeps the floor, sending tumbleweeds of his fur scurrying for the corners. One long string of drool travels from the corner of his mouth to my kitchen floor - unbroken, thick, viscous. A pool forms at Toby's feet, even before the drool detaches itself from his lips. I reopen the peanut butter jar as he scoots forward over the puddle.

Lake Quinault

We're otter hunting on Lake Quinault in a small plastic two-man kayak. When we arrived yesterday and took the kayak out for the first time, exploring this cove full of drift logs and skeletal branches, we got our first brief glimpse of otter. 

At first it was a noise that was not bird or branch or waves tickling the shore. Then it was movement in the water, then two movements, then three. Small dark turtle-shapes on the surface of the lake disappearing into its depths as sleek serpentine shadows. We froze and watched as those odd forms shaped themselves into three very real and very skittish river otters. From a distance we watched as they dove and surfaced, munching on the small fish that frequently broke the smooth surface of the lake as they jumped for food of their own. Walt tried to paddle us closer, but the otters maintained their distance from us by swimming away, and far too soon by scurrying up onto the shore and disappearing into the brush.

We're here again tonight in that same cove, hunting and hoping but not really expecting. This vacation has already surprised us with such gifts that hoping for another otter sighting seems almost greedy. 

We were supposed to stay at a resort a couple of miles  up the lake, a generous gift from my older brother. Walt and the owner of the resort had been talking for a year about our staying in a cabin at the resort which was supposed to be completed by the time of our vacation. The cabins didn't get done (or even started, but that's another story) and the owner overbooked, which meant he had no place to put us. He called a friend who owned a rental cabin and she just happened to have four free nights that coincided with our vacation. 

So instead of a cute resort room in a direct motel-style line with eleven other resort rooms with a lake view but a long flight of stairs down to the lake, we found ourselves in a small rustic house just steps from the lake with a free kayak at our disposal and no through-the-wall neighbors. A red wooden adirondack rocking chair sat on the deck, from which I could watch countless birds feed on cascara, salal and huckleberries. Before sunset on the first day I had seen Osprey, Bald Eagles, three varieties of warbler, Cedar Waxwings and my first Townsend's Solitaire. This place was a dream that I didn't even know I had, become a reality more appealing than any dream could be.

We've passed the area where the otters made their appearance last night and are almost beyond the clutter of old logs that line the beach of this cove. A noise - small, splashy, and out of rhythm with the other early evening sounds - makes me look behind us. Walt has heard the same thing and has already begun to swing the kayak around.

And there they are. Four tonight, although it takes me some time to count. They are rarely on the surface at the same time and they never hold still. Walt paddles us as close as he can without spooking them. Tonight, however, they don't seem as concerned. Each of the otters at one time or another has popped its head up and stared directly at us. One dove, and bubbles came straight toward the kayak for several heart-stopping seconds before they veered off.

They take turns diving, eating, rolling around in the water by twos like boys wrestling in a school yard. The unexpectedly loud sound of tiny otter teeth crunching tiny fingerlings is unsettling. The blowing sound they make as they surface is reminiscent of the blowing of whales, and very slightly sinister. A sharp bark from the shore makes us stop breathing for just a moment. Are we being warned to stay away, or are the otters in the water being warned about us?

 The otters start to swim away from us, parallel to the shore. We follow with as respectful a distance as the otters demand by their movement. They dive under the logs into a large drift of floating forest, and I'm sure we've lost them for the night. Walt, ever more patient than I and in charge of paddling, stays and we wait. Before too long we see them playing on the logs and hear loud energetic splashes in the water behind the logs. Otter faces continue to check us out from time to time. Whenever one looks our way, I find myself willing an invisibility cloak around our kayak. I don't want to give this up, but neither do I want to mess with their evening routine. 

Another space of time passes with no movement, no telltale bubbles on the surface of the water, no sound beyond the creaking of old tree bones. I'm so full of the wonder of this evening I don't care if the otters are gone for good. The skin-kissing softness of the summer air, the rare and tangible connection I'm feeling with my husband, the gently nurturing rock of the boat on the lake - I am full of enough, I am overflowing with gratitude, I am perfectly happy.

Walt has angled the kayak within ten feet of the old growth graveyard where we last saw the otters. More time passes - enough that I've begun breathing normally again and released the trying-to-be-invisible tension in my body. We've been silent for most of this time, occasionally hissing excitedly, "Look!" to one another, but mostly sitting in reverential stillness. During this last longer wait we begin to celebrate our wonder in whispers. Until movement on the logs catches our attention once more.

One by one, the otters pull themselves up onto the logs and begin to groom. They transform themselves  from sleek shiny sea creatures into soft furry land mammals. There is much writhing and wrestling and nuzzling.  One otter rolls over on her back and  two of the other three approach her. We can't tell if they're nursing or grooming, but all three seem to be thoroughly enjoying the contact. She is the first to become still. The other three continue to move like leaves on a tree after the wind has stopped, but before the energy is completely spent. Eventually even that movement slows and only one is still unable to release the day.

What was four distinct shapes has now become one very large blanket of lush inviting fur quickly fading into the shadows of the logs as the day darkens into dusk. We decide to leave them to their rest and Walt begins to paddle us back. One otter head pops up from the pile. He looks directly at us with piercing intelligent eyes; his whiskers twitching, testing the air. I look directly back, hoping he's gathering the respect and awe and gratitude I'm sending across the glassy waters of Lake Quinault.

Otter photo by Loud Pics from Flickr