pronoia

Emerging from the fog

I'm beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel -- and to trust that it's not just an incoming train.

A few weeks ago, I got treated for a sinus infection, and I'm wondering just how long I'd had it, because as it faded, I could feel my energy getting better. Not all the way to well -- no, I've still got appointments with both an allergist and an endocrinologist in the next ten days -- but better. Well enough to take the odd short walk. Well enough to actually attempt to garden the other day. (That ended with a strained back, which was annoying, but hey, I did something!)

I'll take better. Really.

As better is happening, I'm finding myself returning to things I'd gotten away from -- I've read more books in the last two weeks than I had the previous two months. We did garden, and we're planning a new perennial bed in place of a stupid chunk of yard in front of the house. We cleared out a lot of old clothes, and I've got plans to keep getting rid of junk.

It's nice to get glimpses of myself again.

End of an Era

Today we discovered that Luna, the last of my water turtles, had passed away. At one point I had eight water turtles, but in the intervening years they had all either been released into the wild or passed on, and she was the only one left, gliding through her tank and begging for food.

She was also my first turtle, with Hal. She was the one who, as a hatchling, was ill and didn't eat. The vet laughed at me when I brought her in, because she was just so tiny (only an inch long) that he couldn't take vitals or look up her nose or anything, but he wormed her and she improved and started eating and growing. At the very beginning we feared for her life, so the fact that she outlived everyone else was notable.

So now, after all of the ponds and tanks and filters and rocks, I'm going to live in a house without falling water. It's going to be very quiet.

Family, Family, Family

A month or so ago, my mother emailed me to ask if I'd consider flying to Texas for a weekend to help get my sister and her twins there for a visit. Apparently you can only have one lap child per lap, and anyway, the twins were only two months old or so, and while one pair of arms will do usually, traveling really needs two.

Of course, I said yes. Besides just wanting to help out my sister, who's doing amazingly well, all things considered, I hadn't seen my grandmother in years, and she's already 98. As it turns out, I ended up being how my sister got home again, instead of how she got there in the first place, so on Friday I swooped in for a quickie visit.

In many ways it was the perfect length of time for a visit. I got in late enough on Friday that I could say hi, steal my laptop back from my father, and go to bed. Saturday my grandmother came over, as did my favorite cousin and her husband and kids. Sunday I spent visiting my coaching buddy and my best friend from my academic job. And Monday we packed, ate lunch, and left.

All in all, it went well. But now, afterwards, I've got all kinds of conflicting emotions. Sadness and frustration with my dad, who can't seem to figure out how to actually talk to me and so tends to accidentally insult me from his position of the-lack-of-the-gold-standard-is-the-cause-of-everything-bad. Feeling glad I got to see my grandmother, who gave me her copy of a geneology of her maiden name, which Ms. P and I took as our legal last name. Happy to see my cousin and meet her kids after far too many years (seriously, the oldest is finishing kindergarten). Alienation from these people who spend a lot of time seriously discussing Survivor.

While I was there, I was so aware of my actual energy levels, of how drained I was by the late afternoon each day, how what I needed more than anything was just to sit quietly and read or surf the 'net. I managed it, mostly, but I was also aware of how little my family really gets my health stuff, no matter how much they ask about it and I tell. I don't look sick, so they don't think I am.

But then again, I've spent how long trying to act like even if I am sick, it won't matter? It's not entirely their fault.

Still, it's good to be home, to be surrounded by all of the stuff that matters to me.

I need a schedule!

Because wow, blogging in two places is really hard to keep up with. Must structure myself!

I kind of left you hanging there with the dog story, huh? Well, here's what happened next.

As time passed and no owner showed up, we kept on loving on the dog and talking about it -- round and round, truly -- and decided that if no one showed up, we would try to integrate the dog into our pack. We were nervous about this, because Grace doesn't like other dogs, and because three is often the number at which dogs become a true pack, and we were worried about the cats. But we were going to do it.

For help, we asked our lovely pet sitter -- who fosters animals all the time -- to come over and help us introduce everyone. We figured she had more experience than we did. But she was out of town until Tuesday, so she would come over then.

But Monday night, we were supposed to get a HUGE line of thunderstorms. It was all weather warnings and such, and there was no way we felt comfortable leaving the pup outside in that, however comfy he was any other time. So Ms. P hauled him off to the vet to get checked out and vaccinated. The vet thought he'd been out a long time, by the looks of him, and he had a massive ear infection. And he kept marking the exam room, which neither of us was overly thrilled about. But she brought him home and we made plans to keep him in the basement overnight until the lovely pet sitter could come over. And, I kid you not, 30 minutes after she got home, Animal Control called because the owner had called them and they finally put both reports together and came up with a match.

So Duke, as it turns out he was named, got to go home with his totally adorable owner, and we didn't end up with 3 dogs. But our animal karma is pristine.

In other news, my endo is acting up, so I've got an appointment on Wednesday. I've pretty much resigned myself to birth control pills, but oh, the irony! I'm also doing acupuncture, and that's helping unbelievably much.

The life coaching stuff is going well and I'm still madly excited about it, so that's awesome. I've been actually coaching people, and their positive responses are helping get me through the paralyzing fear I get periodically. Me, opening my own business? Gah!

And finally, I'm flying to my parents this weekend to see my grandmother, spend some time with two friends, and help my sister get the twins back to town. So that should be ... interesting!

Breaking my heart

Saturday evening, while Ms. P and I were draped over various bits of furniture, trying to keep down the head-cold-induced moaning, the lovely young man who mows our lawn showed up with a dog in tow.

He'd found the dog wandering around the neighborhood, collared but without tags. His mom wouldn't let him bring the dog home, even to try to find owners, and he didn't want to take him to a shelter, so we stashed him in our fenced-in backyard and proceeded to put the word out.

We posted to Craigslist and our neighborhood listserve. We trolled lost and found websites. We faxed a Found Animal Report to Animal Management, so if someone called looking for the dog, they'd know where to go next. This morning Ms. P took him to our vet to see if he's microchipped (he's not). I called around to all the vets in the area to leave a description and our phone number.

This dog is the sweetest dog ever -- friendly, well socialized, gentle-mouthed. When I took him his breakfast this morning, he jumped around in circles when he smelled what I had in the bowl. When we heaved him into the car for the trip to the vet, he stuck his head between our seats and licked my cheek.

It's not much of an exaggeration to say that I, and we, love pretty much all dogs. We're always pointing them out to each other as we drive around, making silly dog-specific cooing noises at them through the windows.

But it's also true that this dog, this is a dog that is Our Kind of Dog -- of lab extraction once upon a generational time, medium-sized, black (and black dogs are really hard to place), gentle, friendly. He is the Ur-Dog for us.

Ms. P has named him (Scooter) at the same time that she says, sobbing, that we can't have a third dog. We're diligently looking for his people, and we really, really hope we can find them. If we can't, and if the neighbor who has expressed a little interest in him doesn't, actually, in the end want him, then we're in a bit of a pickle. He doesn't fit our plans or our budget.

I want to say, "but what life ever does?" Right now we're holding the line while our hearts break, over and over. Wish us finding him his people or, barring that, a home we feel really great about. We need all the help we can get.

Has my calendar been flipping pages again?

I am losing track of time at a truly alarming rate.

Part of it is that I am happily, ecstatically, even, getting this life coaching business off the ground, and working what is essentially two jobs at the same time is, well, time-consuming. Not to mention attention-consuming, emotion-consuming, and just generally consuming.

Add to that my sister's babies, visiting Midwest Really Big City to check out the seminary Ms. P wants to go to (and meeting Frog!), planning various trips to various places, and I can't believe it's the middle of April already.

All of which is to say, you are all on my mind, and I am still reading blogs like crazy. And I will try to be better about letting you know what's up with me, and quite a lot is. And if you want to know more about the life coaching, including its website and very own blog, just email me.

Mwah!

Us, unleashed.

So, I believe I mentioned a while back that Ms. P quit her job. She's been looking for another one, but nothing is manifesting yet, and the difference between how she was with that job and how she is without that job are so profound that, unless we absolutely can't pull it off, neither of us think she should take a job "just because."

I mean, she's in school now, and she'll be full-time starting this summer, and the long-term plan is for her to go to seminary. Anything other than a job that is totally aligned with this plan is going to slow her down.

A moment from When Harry Met Sally. Harry and Sally have had a falling out, and he's been trying to apologize and repair things, but she's just too angry. So he corners her at a New Year's Eve party and tells her he loves her. And when she tells him that he can't just tell her that to make himself feel better, he says, "And it's not because I'm lonely. And it's not because it's New Year's Eve. But when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

She's figured out the vocation she wants to spend the rest of her life with. And she wants the rest of her life to start as soon as possible.

My fears about this have been twofold. First, money. Duh. We like it. Our bank likes it. Our landlords like it. But second, I have worried that her being home would turn into the Depression Chronicles: all sleeping the day away on the couch.

But it hasn't been like that at all. Oh sure, there's been the odd nap on the couch, but the odd nap on the couch doesn't worry me. She's done homework and housework and research and crafted a really great morning routine for herself, one that prioritizes spirituality and attention to her self.

In the month since she's been out of the office, I've seen her blossom, and I want this for her.

And so we're looking at our finances again. My take-home salary has gone down a little bit because I put her on my insurance -- and because, being queer, we're taxed on what the company pays for her insurance (don't even get me started!). I'm less and less interested in doing financial writing, mostly because I'm being utterly entranced with the life coaching business that is rapidly happening -- much more rapidly than I was anticipating, actually!

It's not a given that she won't have to take make-work for us to make it all work, but we spent some time today talking about what we could get rid of / cut back to help. And it occured to me that we could get rid of our cell phones. We're 1.5 years into a 2 year contract, and I seem to remember there being something about being able to cut out of the contract early without penalty assuming we made it past six months or something. So we're going to look into that.

And I have to say: the very IDEA of getting rid of the cell phone is filling me with joy. Visceral, embodied joy. No more being leashed to the temporal demands of others! No more having multiple people on the phone at once! Once upon a time, the cell phone enhanced my life -- and now it's just another leash to a world I don't want to be part of.

When, only two months ago now, we said we'd try paring back our expenses for a month and see how we did, we had no idea that it would catapult us into being this much closer to the lives we want to live this fast. It's mind-boggling. It's beautiful, and mind-boggling, and utterly expansive.

Mirrors

Yesterday, on my way upstairs, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and I stopped short. How is it that I looked more like myself in that moment, given that I was unwashed, ungroomed, and on day three of some strange illness? And so I grabbed the camera and attempted to document, in the double-mirror of glass and lens, how it is I look to myself.

 

Sometimes impromptu art is all it takes to make me feel content.

Signs of the Times

One of the things that, in retrospect, it was clear should have tipped me off to the whole overactive thyroid problem was my inability to do relatively minor or moderate physical activity without falling apart. I mean, yes, our yard is not small, but it's pretty damn flat. And using our electric mower, which is self-propelling for goodness' sake, should not have felled me after doing a quarter of the lawn inside our fence.

But even when we got my thyroid under control, I didn't suddenly have a reasonable energy level. I mean, keeping up with even the lowest level of housework was more than I could manage, not and do things like work a full-time job.

Today, however, I felt well enough to shovel a six-inch snowfall off of our very, very, very long stretch of sidewalk.

Yes, I'm tired. Yes, my muscles are kind of protesting this newish activity. But I felt well enough to do it, and I did it, and I'm feeling quite proud. Go iron supplement go!

Seeing

I've been thinking a lot about discernment, as you might imagine.

It's not a subject most people know anything about. It's not something I knew anything about until I started hanging out with Ms. P, who at the time was all up in the nuns, who were themselves all up in Ignatian discernment. And since then, I've gone through Quaker practice, read books on meditation and Buddhism and spiritual enlightenment, attended meditation workshops, jumped into spiritual direction twice, and sat my own butt down on the cushion.

Until I started accreting all of this experience and until I started living out of it, I made decisions -- and believed decisions should be made -- mostly on the basis of "what made sense." There were certain "bottom line" responsibilities that created the ground of all decisions: the expectation of a career instead of a job, the need to be financially solvent and prudent, the general bounds of good sense and good taste. In the space that was left, desire certainly played a part, but it was desire tempered by "being practical."

And wow, did that not work. Oh, it got me external trappings of success. I got that PhD. I got that tenure-track job. I bought a house and got a dog and settled into what was supposed to be the rest of my life.

And I hated it.

On some level, it did match the vision I had somewhere inside of me of my right life, but only on the surface. I wanted domesticity and working from home and peace, and to some extent I had those things, but I didn't have creativity, I didn't have passion, I didn't have deep connection with Spirit, nor with myself. Academic work didn't feed me, and I never did connect with that community on a deep level. I felt lost and alone and desperate.

But discernment as a lived practice entered my life slowly. First it was articulating the concept of the "next right thing" -- the idea that we never need to see more than the next stepping stone. Then it was the experience of getting together with Ms. P which, although many years in the making, went from kiss to throwing over the nuns (her) to her moving in with me in three short weeks. (Yes, we are the poster dykes for the u-haul stereotype.) Then we noticed how quick and easy our move to DC was -- the job, the house, it all fell into place perfectly and suddenly. It was synchronicity in action.

In the last six months, we've been able to be more discerning, more attentive. We spend more time on the cushion, we spend more time journaling, we've been living the questions more often.

And it's discernment that led Ms. P to quit her job even though she doesn't have another one lined up yet. It's discernment that makes me believe that the adoption plan is not where we're being led right now, despite the fact that we were one nearly-completed report and a big check (okay, and some large number of months) away from being parents. It's discernment that brought me to signing up for the life coaching training, and it's discernment that has Ms. P aiming for seminary.

Yet none of this "makes sense" in a way my parents would recognize. Hell, none of it "makes sense" in a way my friends would recognize. I'm struggling with that very thing right now, not because it makes me doubt what we've discerned, but because it feels so fragile and tender that I don't want to have to defend it to people who neither understand nor believe in discernment. I'm living largely out of faith right now, and that's hard to explain to people.

Maybe it doesn't make sense. But it's how I've gotten to all of the very best things in my life. And so I'm taking that leap of faith, I'm trusting in the process, and I'm trying to keep breathing.

It's hard. But no harder than living a life that's not my own.