What is Faith in Ambiguity?

Faith: belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit,etc.

Ambiguity: doubtfulness or uncertainty of meaning or intention

Photo by Mike Adams

"What do you blog about?"

Again and again, at my first writer's conference, I was asked what my blog was about and what kind of writing I do. I tried answering this question multiple different ways.

"Oh, I write some funny stuff and some think-y stuff."

"I write about ducks."

"I write about my kids. My kids all have ADHD. I guess it's a blog about ADHD."

The most surprising thing to me was that when people heard "Faith in Ambiguity," they usually asked me if the blog was about my faith.

"No," I would say. "It's about my faith in ambiguity."

Obviously, this wasn't clear, even to me. I learned many things at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop, some of them tactical, some of them inspirational, that will make me a better writer and a better blogger. None were more important than this:

I am funny, but I am not a humorist. I am a writer who writes about an idea. That idea is faith in ambiguity.

What is faith in ambiguity? Faith in ambiguity is about asking questions, questioning assumptions and taking a second look. It is about carefully listening to both sides of an argument and then throwing both of them out the window to look for the truth that neither side has found, in the dirty, dark place everyone forgot to look. Faith in ambiguity is about making the joke that gets the laugh of recognition but that no one was brave enough to tell.  Faith in ambiguity is about owning every part of being human, every part of being alive–the illness, the pain, the addiction, the embarrassment, the fear, as well as the love and inspiration. It is about showing up, fully human, not knowing the answer to anything, and saying so, and then laughing until you wet your pants because it is all so ridiculously hilarious.

Why, you might ask, would all this uncertainty be good? People find great comfort in answers and the faith they hold that there is a reason and order underlying everything. Ambiguity–faith in ambiguity–seems to fly in the face of that comfort. And I really think that it does. People who want their bee hives to remain unprodded will probably not like this blog as much as people who are strangely fascinated by a sudden exodus of bees. That is OK with me. I stopped being comfortable years ago with the answers that were served to me like bland porridge, and started seeking my own. But, apart from personal temperament, I think there are some excellent reasons for having a little more faith in ambiguity, all around.

Not knowing means we can experiment. If we are already sure that the earth is flat and traveling to the end will cause a person to fall off into an abyss, there is no reason to circumnavigate the globe. It takes a doubter to come up with that. All explorers are, by nature, doubtful people–the ones who want to see evidence with their own two eyes–our kindred souls rejecting their breakfast pablum in search of more savory fare that may conceivably exist, if only they look far enough.

Science is a function of uncertainty. Whether or not you think you like science, my strong guess is that you enjoy electricity, access to emergency health care and Starbucks WiFi, all of which are the products of somebody at some point supposing that a) this is not really all there is and b) it could actually be better. People who push the boundaries of the world forward, causing creation to unroll in a direction heretofore unimaginable, are not contented souls. They have itchy minds, full of wonders and doubts and problems to solve. I write because my mind itches something awful and the only way I know to scratch it is to inflict the questions I have on the rest of the world.

When we don't know, we can ask. Asking is a profoundly powerful act–one that binds communities together in humble service and mutual respect of one another. In a family, in a church congregation, in a classroom, in an office, if you want to empower the people you find yourself traveling along with, ask them. Ask them for advice. Ask them how to work the TV. Ask them what they really want from their community. Then listen. We cannot ask if the answers sit on our tongue, melting like lozenges that make everything taste like oranges. Our mouths have to be clean. I have learned to ask children for help and to tell them I am not sure and, because of this, they see that they can become a person of importance with me. They are dying to be asked for their assistance, and I find adults to be no different.

When we don't know, when we are not sure, we can have compassion. I may think you were rude to me just now, but what if really you are in terrible pain? What if I misunderstood? What if your intentions, all along, have been aimed toward helping me and I could see you as nothing but a bully? Ambiguity makes me pause. The data is not clear. Is that child behaving this way in class because their parents are bad parents or because the delivery of my curriculum is not working for them? Is it ADHD or boredom? A terrible attitude or perhaps a crippled sense of self? If I am not sure, I look again. And again. Doing so makes me a better teacher, mother and friend.

The long arc of justice is and always has been a function of the shedding of our collective assumptions. We don't think black people are lesser creatures deserving of bondage and abasement. We know they are. We know gay people are crazy. We know what kind of parents are the wrong kind. We know so much of which we have no experience at all. We are never free from the repetition of the same cruel injustice over and over until we stop knowing. If history is any guide, we should be very, very concerned about the things that we think we know.

Faith in ambiguity is the doubt of the mindful, the practice of asking "Why?" of everything, but most especially, of ourselves. Faith in ambiguity, is not, however, a license not to choose. The worst thing we can do, in my opinion, is fail to choose. In the absence of choice, Life drags us along by our ankle and we hit our heads repeatedly on the concrete as events fly by us, which we have observed but never been the author of.  Life presents you with decisions, and, if you are like me, you consider everything from the polarity of the earth to the astrological signs of the people involved, and then belabor that decision until it is worn down to a tiny nub of a thing, chewed through with agitation. And then you just select and live with the result. Every time you do, you end up upright, able to say, at least "Oh, well, that was not the best decision I ever made."

Faith in ambiguity is also not ignoring the facts. It is not sticking your fingers into your ears and saying that nothing is clear so you are going to ignore overwhelming evidence in favor of whatever inclination it is easiest to bear. Not knowing leads the scientist to conduct her experiment, a mathematician to find his equation, a philosopher to observe and enlarge on our views of humankind. It does not, on the other hand, alter the course of history in any meaningful way to throw out the controls, pretend that two equals three and suppose a new and implausible kind of human. It's just make-believe.  Faith in ambiguity is about facing the facts. If there is crap on the living room floor, it is about saying so, not imagining that really there is a Tootsie Roll. What is in question here is really the motivation of the dog.

I need to write to soothe my itchy brain, and I am so grateful that you show up and apply aloe. What I really want for this blog is to create a space on that internet that holds apart the crushing walls of surety and ill humor and allows us to laugh at silly, stupid things and to speak our mind respectfully without fear of retribution. I want to have this be a place where people come to take a second look, and sometimes to stop and giggle between those hard glances. So, I have this mission to spread a little faith in ambiguity out into the world–just cast out my little whirling dandelion seed of an idea upon its breezes–and see what happens.

Are you in?

Home is the Place You Don't Want to Burn Down: The Story of the Las Conchas Fire

Picture courtesy of  U.S Fire and Aviation Management

On Sunday, June 26, while I was sitting outside the local bagel shop with my friend Shana, we first noticed the smoke. Smoke had not been unusual during this summer of Southwest drought. In fact, a few weeks prior, smoke had traveled approximately 300 miles from Arizona to make the skies of Los Alamos a bleary brownish haze which had me busting out the nebulizer repeatedly in the early weeks of June, to overcome the overwhelming sense of being suffocated by gaseous soot. We had seen other columns of smoke appear above nearby mountains for week. Our unseasonably dry winter had made the area a tinderbox.

I was the one seated facing the sky, and I realized later I had probably been looking at that damn smoke for close to half an hour before Shana uttered the should-have-been-obvious-to-me statement: "That's close!" Obviously what we were looking at was a fire up in the Jemez Mountains, just above us.  As we got up and walked a couple of blocks downtown, smoke suddenly began to take up half the sky. It was a very odd thing to look at the familiar sky-scape of my town and see that half of the usually turquoise sky consumed with what essentially (and ironically) looked like a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Photo Credit: Flickr by John Fowler

I arrived home, turned on my computer and discovered quickly that a wildfire had started near the Las Conchas trail-head. This particular trail-head, is in my family, almost synonymous with "Eden". In fact, it was less than a week prior that we had last driven out there in search of the lush green landscape that surrounds a clear and perfect stream teaming with tiny fish and macro-invertebrates. Las Conchas is where I go to save my soul, when the pain of missing Northern California is too great, and I am filled with resentment at the poverty of flowing water and the intractable stubby brown saginess of New Mexico. My heart sickened with the potential loss of this place.

It took me the greater part of an hour to register that the fire presented an actual danger to us.

However, as smoke continued to fill the sky, at a certain point, I began to get nervous for something other than the loss of my favorite hiking trail. Filled with the kind of nervous energy that demands one do something, I called my thirteen year-old son, who he was at the pool snack bar to warn him to be careful of inhaling too much smoke and to make sure he had his inhaler with him. I called my husband, who was at the hardware store in Espanola. I called my ex-husband, with whom my older two kids were living that week, to make sure he knew what was happening, and to offer a second nebulizer for the kids to use if needed. I started streaming the local radio station on my PC. With a certain well-controlled intensity, the DJ described the intensity of the fire, which had already been dubbed the Las Conchas fire. Repeatedly, she stated that this was not currently a threat to the town of Los Alamos...not yet, but that it was sparking, crowning and running at unbelievable speed. In fact, at the speed of an acre a minute.

And then, anti-climatically it was time to go meet the other members of my church's religious education committee to clean out a large storage closet that needed to be converted to a classroom. So off I went. If we were going to need to evacuate, we didn't now. There was nothing to actually excuse me from pawing through boxes and boxes of old crafts. At this point, the sky looked totally surreal. I called my Dad on the way to the meeting to let him know what was happening and tell him to send on any national news on the subject he might be able to get.

My father-in-law John Faucett posted this picture to Facebook on June 26, the day the fire began.

 

Two other RE committee members showed up, and there was lots of crap in the storage closet. Decades of extra buttons, boxes with samples of stone tiles, bags of antiquated flour for play dough, swaths and swaths of cloth. I was pretty distracted for a couple of hours sorting through all that. Other than a few stray comments on the smoke, we remained pretty focused on the task at hand. I wonder, retrospectively, if this happens all of the world, as terror draws nearer to groups of people. Villages go fishing. Mothers gather to darn socks. People tell children to clean their room just as toxicity rains down on a population.

On leaving church, I became re-focused on the fire. KRSN started to suggest that we think about what belongings we might want to take with us in the event of an evacuation: Six P's. Pets. Papers. Personal Computers. Prosciutto. Prostitutes. Peonies. I can't remember now. I started assembling various papers, in a nervously scattered fashion. Intermittently, eclectic mixes of music were played.

The evening was spent  listening to increasingly alarming radio reports while making lists of items with which to evacuate. We locked my mildly schizophrenic ginger tabby in the house, in case we had to get him suddenly and go, and he subsequently kept my husband up all night. I gave a great deal of thought to what the appropriate course of action regarding my five ducks might be. I had horrific visions of evacuating to a hotel with them. Additionally, our neighbor residing in the other half of our shared duplex is a firefighter, so we told him we would take care of his two dogs in the case of an evacuation. (I guess I should be grateful that I was no longer fostering the two additional cats, with whom my cat had a less than totally affable relationship.)

Photo Credit: Kristen Honig U.S. Forest Service

We wondered aloud about whether we should leave, in order to avoid health problems due to the fact that we all have asthma. The decision was complicated by the fact that my husband works for the local county government, and by the five ducks and all the furry mammals, and the fear that we hadn't gotten everything done yet that we needed to do. At some point, it came to light that this was the biggest fire in New Mexico history–bigger, in fact, than the Cerro Grande fire which eleven years ago had burned away some four hundred houses in Los Alamos. I worried about my kids, who were with their dad, just because I didn't have them near me, and that felt uncomfortable. I kept telling myself that their dad was once a volunteer fire fighter, and that he would keep them safe.

We closed all the doors and windows and hooked up one of our forty year-old, yellowed swamp coolers to operate without sucking in outside air. Perversely, my husband was at work finishing up installing a red brick patio in our back yard and setting up sprinkler systems, in case our house didn't burn and we still wanted it to look nicer. I continued to bustle about, gathering important belongings and making lists of what we needed to pack. And we just waited to hear what we needed to do.

I was afraid to go to sleep, in case the fire came into town in the middle of the night, but I did anyway. At some point the following morning, when I turned the radio back on, they started to emphasize the need for people with health conditions to voluntarily evacuate the area. Ashes began falling from the sky. And we decided to leave. Mike started calling hotels, I looked up the Santa Fe animal shelter to see if they would take our cats (mine and my mother's) and our dog and our neighbors two dogs.

Nobody really wanted the ducks.

Photo Credit: Kristen Honig U.S. Forest Service

Over a period of an hour, Mike loaded every expensive tool in the shed into his Mazda, and, then considered that he would need to be parking this vehicle with thousands of dollars worth of tools in a hotel parking lot in Albuquerque. He moved them all back into the shed, over the course of another hour.

We decided to load all our music, documents and photos onto an external hard drive and take that with us. It kept failing to load, and then Mike had to unplug the computer and load it into the car instead. I resisted taking down all the photos hanging in our hallway, wondering how much time it was going to end up taking to put them back. My six year-old emptied out his clothes drawers and attempted to pack all of his Legos in an overnight bag. At this point, I had deserted him completely to my mother's loving care, and I huffed around checking my list, putting items in a pile and disturbing my husband's train of thought constantly with "What-if" questions.

Mike re-installed a large pond in our duck's yard that we had previously removed, deeming it to hard to clean. He placed heaps of feed in various locations. I started to urge speed, so that we could get out ahead of the other 18,000 people in town, before a mandatory evacuation was ordered. And then the radio announced that the evacuation was now mandatory. We had to leave.

While Mike continued moving objects around and there was nothing more I could do, I decided I would make sure all the neighbors on my cul-de-sac knew of the mandatory evacuation. I ran around, knocking on doors. Some people seemed annoyed, which I won't even go into here, but most were grateful I had thought of them and said they knew about the order. Then I came to the house where the drunk people live.

There, I found a lone woman, brittle, suspicious and red-eyed, surrounded by copious pets, in a house reeking of urine and staleness. She was unaware of the order, but not of the fire. "I am staying here," she told me. "I don't know where my husband is. I have no car, and no place to go." My breath caught. "I'm sure we can find somewhere for you to go," I said. I said several more comforting things, repeatedly expressed my concern for her safety and ran back home to retrieve a piece of information about the shelter provided for evacuees. When I returned to her, her suspicion had evaporated, and I turned my attention to the problem of all her pets, trying to help her determine what to do with them. I found myself offering to take a cardboard box full of kittens with their eyes still closed, and their mother, to the shelter along with my own animals, to which she agreed. I moved each kitten into a carrier and this went fine. However, when moving the mother cat, she and I had a slight disagreement which resulted in a deep, bloody raking of my arm and chest and in her running off.

At this point, several things happened. A nicely dressed woman arrived, explained that she was here to help the woman, who was her sister-in-law, that she had already booked a hotel for them, and the absent husband, a man I recognized as the drunk who had attempted to grope every woman on the dance floor at my friend's retirement party, came home. It was determined that the kittens should be left on the front porch in case the mother returned for them. The drunk woman hugged me, with tears in her eyes, and I left.

Shortly after, we got into three cars with four animals and drove out of town. I had the radio tuned to the local news, and it unrelentingly played the instruction to evacuate immediately lest we face imminent danger to our lives. Tears welling in my eyes, I drove, clutching the steering wheel. A terrible, acrid smell wafted up to my nose. I reeked of the drunk woman and her stale house and her tiny kittens and despair and compassion. I reeked of fear. I cried some more. I left my damn ducks there to burn with my hard-won house. I left with two pairs of underwear and all of my important papers. I left with all of my photo albums and without all my toiletries. I sobbed and wanted to divorce my husband for failing to listen to me while he was packing. I sobbed and hated my ex-husband for having two of my children, so that I couldn't hold their hands. I drove, listened and sobbed.

I drove to Albuquerque and stayed there until they said I could come home, a week later, to a place where, instead of watching fireworks and parades, we gathered for Independence Day in a parking lot to watch our mountain continue to burn, and helicopters, like strange dragons, paced the sky, spitting fire retardant. I came home to find ducks no worse for wear, a neighbor grateful but missing all her kittens, and coyotes roaming the neighborhoods in broad daylight.

I came home.

Photo Credit Flickr: Jayson Coil

A Mirror Held Up to Our System of Education

When I first arrived for work at an elementary school in the late summer of 2007, the thing that surprised me were the lines. In all of my life, I had never fully recognized the pronounced importance of an ability to walk in this specific way, one child behind the other, in order that a system designed to educate 500 of these creatures might function. At the time, I felt slightly as if I had been tumbled into a video documentary on the societal stifling of the Individual. I quickly learned, though, that 500 children allowed to prance the halls like merry goats, singing loudly by open classroom doors would not a tenable situation make. I began, in fact, within the months that followed, to experience enormous agitation at the sight of lines that were out of order, lines that an adult failed to properly constrain, loud lines. However, somehow the lines–the necessary, quiet, orderly lines stuck with me. Maybe this is why. Children–and the systems we use to instruct them–hold up a mirror, which if we dare look in, might show us who we really are and what we really value.

The mirror says we value order more than we say we do.

I am confused sometime. I am confused about worksheets. The way that some parents speak about them you would think that they were talking about crack pipes or dead rats. On the other hand, I have this child that is, perhaps dysgraphic, or for some other reason cannot make his vast mental landscape confine its wealth to the small line where a word or sentence must be written on his first grade worksheet. His work is pretty crappy, but he is capable of an ingenuity and imagination, a sort of corvine-like facility with his thought life that won't translate to the damn worksheet. It makes me hate worksheets. I want to gather them in a great pile and burn them like the library of Alexandria. Honestly though, how the Hell would would we be expecting all our teachers to teach without them–lessons aligned to standards, appropriate to each of twenty-five children in her class, all composed with the eight or so hours of planning time she has a week for teaching every subject she is responsible for? We don't give enough time for a teacher to thoughtfully create dynamic lessons, we don't provide materials that support it, we think it can be tossed off.

The mirror says we think education is a recipe or a science, when it is really an art.

I am also confused about standards. It keeps landing for me like this. I am 5'6. " Perhaps the standard for my age, decided on by legislators, is that I be 5'8."  I'm not. I'm just not. There is so much wrong with an education that is focused entirely on standards that it makes my head spin. I don't think you can throw them out entirely. I actually think that human beings become lazy quite easily, that we are happy to sit around, chewing gum and letting the kids have extra free time while we check our email. If we don't have a goal, a target, a ribbon to run through, then we often putz around. But the standards need to be based on each individual child. If you are 5'4" now, you might reasonably gain two inches and be 5'6" by the end of the year. That growth should be celebrated. A sixth grader who begins the year reading at third grade level and ends it at fifth should be congratulated. Within the system we have now, he is going to feel "low" no matter what. A fourth grade special ed. kid who I worked with one year was rewarded at the end with a certificate that said he had made "the most progress in creative writing," something of which he was extremely proud, but he was later confused and disappointed that he still had to attend summer school. "I thought I made the MOST progress, Ms. Adams!" How do you fix that situation? How do you even answer that question authentically?

The mirror says we want sameness, however much we say we celebrate diversity.

I am confused about what we are teaching. My child's sixth grade book report instructions read like the instructional manual for a washing machine. If one could only understand all the elements of fiction–identify the rising and falling action and regurgitate them into a bland essay, surely one could say one has mastered English. The writing he is taught is terrible. It is as if art were taught by instructing students to sketch a person, using the crosshatched lines artists compose to define space, and then leave the lines in place on the finished product. The writing is all schema. It lacks breath. Last Sunday, I stood in a room with four middle school students, two of whom are actors, while they were instructed, in pairs, to devise their own short skits illustrating a bias scenario that was given them on slip of paper.

"Do you want us to read it?"

"No, I want you to create a skit. Make it up."

"I don't understand."

And this went on for five minutes or so. Although incredibly bright children, all of them, they were more or less incapable of taking a known thing and translating it into something original.

The mirror says we value skills, but not knowledge or ingenuity.

My observation is that this isn't personal. This isn't specific to a classroom, to a school, to a district. It is suggestive of a society that has certain values.

The mirror says we are losing our way.

What is Not Simple

"Lovely Weed"

Easy as ABC. Simple as 123.

What could be simpler than setting pencil to paper, than cutting and pasting a letter in the proper position? What could be simpler than standing and walking in line, than sitting in a seat?


These things are so easy when a child is equipped to do them, it is hard to imagine that they could be difficult for anyone. Almost as simply done as flipping a light switch, the proper instruction is given and the light will turn on. This seems to be the hope and expectation of almost every teacher.

Frustratingly, though, often we flip the switch and the room remains in darkness. The child, though obviously intelligent, sits fiddling with his pencils and the worksheet is incomplete. The temptation is to flip the switch again. Again. Again. Now the child, although he has not completed the worksheet, has still learned something new. He has learned that there is something wrong with him. The light switch is simply not wired to work in this way. It cannot be cajoled or punished into triggering. It will not light until you discover the secrets of its wiring.

Children are not simple.

I work in education and what I know of teachers, generally, is that they work harder than you know, and that they care more than you suspect. Teaching is more difficult, more draining than you think and classroom dynamics quite different than people outside of classrooms understand. The comments left by parents on some blogs I have read, criticizing teachers for what seem like completely ordinary acts of discipline–which I have observed in every classroom I have worked in–leave me puzzled. What do these people want exactly?

I have two children with IEPs and have worked in a school for five years, and I will tell you that implementing an IEP, as it is written can be extremely difficult, in a room with twenty-four other students and limited staff. Sometimes it will dictate that a student have a scribe, but there will be only two adults available to the entire class. Sometimes a student needs a quiet environment and the classroom is small and crowded. They need additional time to work, but from where should this time come? From their play time? From recess? Often IEPs are written in ideals, and when translated to reality, things look entirely different.

Teaching is not simple.

My six year old son reads at third grade level. His handwriting is illegible. He demonstrates higher order thinking skills but can't fully understand the difference between reality and make-believe. He understood how to increment a digit in hexadecimal when shown by my husband, but has trouble completing addition worksheets because...they are worksheets. His teacher knows he is incredibly bright and grasps the concepts she has taught but has very little physical evidence to demonstrate his mastery of material.

Mikalh (MEE-koll) spoke late and didn't string sentences together at the typical age. He received the services of a developmental specialist which were, at one time, almost entirely focused on encouraging him to play imaginatively. This, for a child who now, has more costumes than clothes and spends every unscheduled moment of his day involved in make-believe. I felt then that none of this "help" hurt him, but I hardly felt that the diagnosticians had really seen my child, in all his beautiful complexity, for who he is.

Development is not simple.

Throughout all of Mikalh's years of being watched and diagnosed, notes have been made on his tendency to wiggle, his inability to "pay attention", his general spaciness. To anyone reading his file, flashing red lights appear around the obvious truth that Mikalh has AD/HD. Mikalh can't pay attention. It seems perfectly obvious.

Is it?

If there is one thing you should know, it is that I am not opposed to diagnostic labels. I also am not in any way categorically opposed to psychiatric medications. I have only somewhat jokingly written that my entire family has AD/HD. Two of my children currently take medications for this condition and I am the person who asked for the team meetings at school on the subject and who asked the questions that led to these diagnoses. My intuition as a mother told me that this was the right thing to do. 

With Mikalh, I just don't feel so sure. There is, at this point, no resounding "clunk" of recognition within me when it is suggested that my youngest child has AD/HD. He may, but I don't know how much of who he is can be explained by that particular label. My intuition tells me to be skeptical but still cooperative.

Parenting is not simple.

Mikalh is so young that no one really knows fully knows what makes him who he is. He is currently being served at school for language processing, fine motor and sensory issues, and is also seeing a therapist to deal with the fall-out of his extreme emotional sensitivity. He has a high IQ and a tendency to think creatively. How all of these factors complicate what we are seeing in him is impossible to tease out.

This child, who is apparently paying no attention, will walk up to his teacher, as the other children are leaving for recess and recount for her the most interesting portions of the story she read while he wandered aimlessly around the room. After a day of completing no work on a science unit on liquids and solids, he will come home and conduct experiments in our sink, chattering happily about why the table is solid and why his soy milk is liquid. In a quiet classroom with the attention of his sweet teacher or in our own kitchen, he blooms.

My deep suspicion is that the world comes at Mikalh undistilled. He seems to be attending to the sound of his teacher's voice, to the motion of classmates in the room, to the rhythm of the noisy heater, to the graceful ballroom dance of swaying branches in the wind, visible outside the window. The world gushes into him, full of beauty and horror and confusion to attend to, and he vibrates with the sensation of its touch. The endless worksheets shift like pieces of a Rubik's Cube, meaningless as clutter. The seat beneath him confines him.

He is a song composed of golden riddles and velvet images, forged to evoke instead of explain. The world wants not music, but a simple explanation from him.

Mikalh feels intensely the softness of fleece and the hardness and scratchiness of a plastic school chair. He stops to examine the beauty of individual snowflakes. He feels, with eyes wide and full of contemplation, the pain of toiling slaves, who lived and died one hundred fifty years before his birth, and the fear and bravery of Helen Keller. He wonders why it is ethical to put an injured animal to sleep, whom we cannot heal, but not an injured person. He is fascinated by the intricate design on the back of a spider.

Who is not paying attention?

My child is not simple.

Simplicity can be the ultimate truth and essence of the world. The room free of clutter, the Japanese garden, the raw and uncomplicated gorgeousness of a sunset over mountains. A moment of quiet meditation. Many things have been written in praise of simplicity, and they are beautifully true.

But simplicity can also be a shackle. When your heart is full of poems and the world wants neat demonstrations of knowledge. When creation settles on you in a bedlam of rich color and detail and you are asked to name the thing most important, but perhaps, not most interesting. Simple plans and objectives fail the child who is a swirl of lovely chaos.

He is a rangy, delicate wildflower in a garden of orderly tulips, and I am dumbstruck by his beauty.

I do not want for him to be more straight and tidy. I want, instead, for the world to love wildflowers as much as I do and renounce its blind devotion to simplicity.

Not funny.

Photo Credit: Flickr

I am having this horrible fibromyalgia flare and I keep vacillating between walking around trying to act like everything is fine and just wanting to let my body fall onto the ground because holding it up is hurting so badly. I am so tired of being tired. This is not really how I wanted to see out NaBloPoMo. I feel like I can't do anything that needs to be done and things keep on needing to be done and I keep doing them.

I look like I have suddenly decided it would it would be fun to dress up as a zombie for a mid-winter Halloween. And parent-teacher conferences start tomorrow so I have all this data I am supposed to compile and various notes to type. I am not even sure if I remember how to speak or write in English.

I am not, right now, finding this funny. (Except for the zombie guy.)

What Sanity Looks Like

Photo Credit: Flickr

I seem to have entered a new phase in my relationship with my chronic illness.

For the four or more years that I have been continually battling bad health, I have maintained an attitude of hopeful expectation. I have been looking for solutions and expecting my illnesses to be resolved and for my normal life to resume. And, in fact, one by one, many conditions have been brought under control. My asthma is now almost asymptomatic, my allergies well-managed and my migraines improved. But one condition after another has just popped up in the same way that carnival moles emerge suddenly demanding to be whacked before disappearing and reappearing again. The result is that for all my efforts, I am now as sick as I have ever been.

I am tired–tired of dragging my sick body around and making it act like a healthy body, and more than that–I am tired of the cognitive dissonance.

My "faith in ambiguity", the heart of my spiritual practice is about asking the hard questions, facing the facts and charting a path based on Reality and Choice. I have lately realized, with a mixture of horror and the relief that comes with distinguishing a problem, that I have been at the effect of my illnesses and the circumstances surrounding them. I have a commitment to be the author of my life, and I haven't felt that way of late.

So, I have had to ask myself–given the inescapable reality of my being chronically ill and needing more rest, more care and more help than I have ever wanted to admit that I would–what would I now choose for my life?

The labor of relinquishing this notion of who I was going to be, and what I thought I was going to have was painful. But in the moment of really letting go of my insistence on being a healthy person with all the things a healthy person can have, I felt free again. The unmet expectations of my former self burned up like ashes in a bonfire, simply and cleanly. Life became something I could invent again.

I am not saying maybe doctors won't find a way to fix me up, or that my body won't mend itself, my fibromyalgia won't become tolerable to me, or that my my attitude won't change. I'm not saying I am not keeping my doctor's appointments, or that I am not going to work tomorrow.

I am saying that right now, in this moment, sanity for me looks like letting go. Once, when I was seventeen, I first admitted that I was powerless over my alcoholism and powerless over my bulimia and the world changed on its axis and became a new place. Now I must admit that I am powerless over my health and my life has become unmanageable.

Every time before that I have ever had the faith to let go and fall into the arms of the Universe, something has caught me.

Let it be something beautiful.

Thoughts That Go Bump in the Night

Lately, I feel a little bit like I have been hiding in the closet.

So, this blog post, written late on a Saturday, when no one really reads my posts anyway, is intended to bring the ugliness and confusion of what is going on for me under the overhead lights, where maybe it can be made less frightening by the of scrutiny of others, like the closet zombies of my childhood. (Confession: I am still a little worried about the potential presence of closet zombies, but that's another post.)

Another thing. Maybe–more importantly–I hope that my writing what feels true in my heart right now can strike a needed chord with just one person.

Photo Credit: Flickr

Tick tock.

I have found that in life, it is useful to know that things happen in a linear way, that the world doesn't just persist the way that it seems now, that it isn't all pain, all the time, forever. Everything begins at a definite and specific point in time.

This time–although my experience of pain seems more or less like a sort of endlessly re-playing fold in the time-space continuum–what actually happened was that a cycle of increasing pain was set off by a sinus infection triggering migraines triggering fibromyalgia flares and leading to jaw clenching, which then caused terrible jaw pain.

I have already been living with pain. Enough, even, to feel like kind of a bad-ass. But this pain is Big-League pain. It is currently kicking sand in my eighty pound former pain's face and humiliating it in front of cheerleaders on the beach.

So, what I want to put down in writing are the thoughts that have me–that make me see monsters when I hear small noises. I do this because it sucks to be alone. Because somebody somewhere feels this way too. Maybe it's you. Or maybe they need you to reach out to them today.

Do with them whatever seems important to you. Call a friend with MS with whom you've fallen out of touch. Don't forget to enjoy that fact that you can run, if you can run. Hug your kids. Pet your cat. Whatever means something to you.

Thoughts That Go Bump in the Night

People Say to Ask for Help-but How?
Practically speaking, am I supposed to call my rheumatologist or my primary care physician? Do I prudently wait it out until my fifty recent lab tests are all in and they know what might be wrong with me or do I miss work (again) to make an appointment now simply to say "I hurt. Please help?"

Do I go lie down, when I know I will feel just as bad after I get up, or instead just get dishes done, so that Mike won't have to? How much help do I ask of family members, and how much is burden unfairly placed?

How much do I tell people? There is so much weighted into the words "How are you?" when how you are is on the knife edge of a scream, holding panic at bay in favor of duty or stubborn will. Any way I answer this question makes me feel crazy.

Do you really want to know, or not? Even if I don't have a brave face to put on it?

How Much Worse Can It Get?
This is a very scary thought, a Zombie Apocalypse-level thought, in fact:

If this pain dwarfs the pain I was in before, how much worse can pain get in the future? And how much can I live with?

When Do I Stop?
Will I know, if and when that time finally comes when the right thing, the sane thing to do is to say:
"I cannot work."
"I cannot drive the carpool."
"I cannot be on the committee."

What will be left after that?

Until then, or until things get better, is the right thing to do to just keep dragging my body through day after pain-ridden day of work and responsibilities, hoping for the best?

Is it Worth It?
Every day, every hour of this last week I have had to remember that my children need me, remember that my husband and parents love me, remember that I actually love my life, because my mind keeps asking

 "Is it worth it?" 

Is it worth it to go through all these motions day after day when every breath in and out carries an experience of agony with it? When the only salvation from the pain is to distance myself from my experience of everything so that I can survive, but that, in so distancing, I feel farther away from love, from pleasure, from laughter, as well as from pain?

Yes, yes, yes, it is. 

It is, because my husband sent me flowers on Friday at work just when I felt I might easily sink into the earth and no one would really notice, and, for those few moments, I felt loved and seen all at once and I knew I had the strength to go on because of it.

It is, because my six year-old's hair smells like sunlight and is warm against my cheek.

It is, because the world still needs me. (Who would put toilet paper on the shopping list for God's sake, if not I?)

Tick tock.

Life is like this game of chance. I can place my bet, at higher risk, on the side of getting better, thinking everything will work out soon. Or I can fold, and lose everything I might have gained if I stayed in the game. There is no way to know when is the right time to fold, so I am staring at Time, trying to decide how to place my bet.

This would be a good time to comment.

Photo credit: NASA

It is easier to send news from outside the eye of a hurricane. It is also easier to write blog posts after a fibromyalgia pain flare has passed. Inside the storm–inside the flare–everything just feels like thoughts flying by with the violence of gale force gusts, jagged bits of reality that might just impale me. There is nothing but confusion and a blur of wet, fast-moving color. Moving, breathing, thinking and feeling HURT.

And nothing is really getting done but this: Go to work. Breathe in. Wash this dish. Lift this hamper. Breathe out. Don't cry. Make food. Breathe in. Check email. Breathe out.

This is not one of those "Pain is providing a resource for her art" sort of things. I don't think people want to read posts day after day about what specifically my pain feels like or what sorts of depressing thoughts I am having about life as a result of my pain.

Horrifyingly, I think I listed this for NaBloPoMo as a "humor" blog. And none of this is occurring as terribly funny to me right at this moment.

So–here's the question. If I can get past the "just surviving this day" part of the cycle, what do you want from me? How can I somehow use this fracked up experience I am having to amuse, inspire or educate other people? If I know someone is reading me and that people actually want or need something from me, it will help me immeasurably.

This would be a good time to comment. Deafening silencing will probably depress the Hell out of me. No pressure.

This too shall pass.

Some days I am inspired. Some days I have a crazy, bold, colorful vision for life, and that vision propels me with a kind of beatific, superhuman force, allowing me to scrape up patience or humor or love from places that were empty before.

On those days, I can comfort three sons, teach six classes, write my blog, make a bad-assed dinner, help with three kinds of homework, and remember I love my husband all at the same time. Some days nothing can fuck with me. Some days no one can take me down. Some days I am an avatar of what I care about. Some days I am someone I'd want to be. Someone I look up to.

Other days, Life is like a piece of sand embedded in a wound. Some days I have no patience, and I can't even remember what it felt like to have patience for my kids. Some days I don't think I even like them.

Some days I resent the Hell out of my chronic illness, and my deep resentment of its constant, never-ending presence makes me irrationally angry at all the people who pass by me, just trying to live, who happen not to offer to set the table or move the laundry over. Some days that resentment gets the better of me, and I quietly hate myself for my bitterness.

Some days the pharmacy that doesn't have my Lyrica and the workplace that demands so much of my energy and the children who have left lights on all over my house and the cat meowing at the door again and the migraine that still won't go away feel like a conspiracy to take me down, and I want to yell at some Superhuman Force of Nature that it is an asshole.

But I don't believe in God, so I get mad at my husband because his shoes are in the hallway.

I have forgotten a lot of what I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. I have not forgotten this:

"This too shall pass."

Photo Credit: Flickr

Letter to a child's therapist, teacher, counselor: Remember my kids.

Dear Therapist,

Dear Teacher. Dear Mediator. Dear School Counselor. Dear anybody whose job it is to labor largely unthanked on behalf of children day in and day out, trying to find some way to help the ones who no one can help, to patch up garish wounds that gape large and ugly and bleeding with small Band-Aids, to take a child with no background knowledge and no winter jacket and teach that child to read, to teach that child to think and imagine; I have to talk to you.

I have three sons. And I don't know about your children, if you have them, but mine come with some of their stitching showing on the outside. Some of that stitching is faulty impulse control, faulty attention-paying wiring, faulty mood-control, faulty auditory processing. These three boys are the most beautifully wrought works of art I have ever cast eyes on, and part of that beauty is this faulty thread-work. Like the lazy line across a Navajo rug, it makes each of them more authentic. It can also make them first class pains in the ass.

Let me tell you a story. I have to tell it so that you will understand me. It is my story. This story is the reason I am writing.

I was a gifted child. I brought smiles of indulgence to the lips of every teacher that had me, teased by the delight of having met a child who could take what they taught further than they they imagined. Teachers; you know the tickled amusement I mean. I can appreciate it now that I have felt it myself teaching, now that a kindergartener has asked me politely how to spell "ocean" correctly. It is the unparalleled delight of knowing that, for once, you are not needed, that this child has bettered you, and you can bask in the delight of their blazing unfolding.

But when I hit middle school, I moved to a cruel and image-driven community, my family suffered a divorce and alcoholism, and a flaw that lay hidden in the weft of my own stitch-work (clinical depression) was pulled. 

The thread unraveled. My grades plummeted. The child that had once been a source of delight for teachers became, when considered at all, someone to sigh over. I skipped school, spending days hiding six or seven hours under a blanket in my own bed, concealed, rather than face the confirmation of my personal worthlessness that was middle school. My English teacher would read my creative writing with pride to the class in my absence, but he didn't call my parents to ask why I wasn't there. No one pursued me into the darkness to try to get me to come out. I fell hard from great heights.

The world that had only cast its approving light upon me up til then, in expectation on my greatness, turned away from the embarrassment of my broken body on the ground. I made a lame suicide attempt, resulting in a traumatic trip to the ER, one psychiatrist visit and nothing. I made countless visits to a school counselor to tell him that I felt I was slipping off the cliff of sanity while he quietly nodded his head. Attempts to talk to talk to friends resulted ultimately in having no friends. I was twelve and I was alone in the dark, in a world suddenly changed from what it had been.

I spent six years of my life in active clinical depression, daily losing the battle fought with a darkness that consumed the edges of Truth and cast Life in shades of bloody, lonely pain. I developed drug addiction and later, bulimia. There were angels along my way who reached out to try and  do what they could, but, for the most part, the world in general was more than willing to lose me. Most of my angels were losing their own battles with Life. The people who were winning were too busy looking away to grant the gift of seeing me.

At the age of eighteen, I fought my way crawling on my stomach with my bloody fingertips to Alcoholics Anonymous and taught myself, with help, to live. I am still learning. But I have learned a lot, if only through having made such absolutely prodigious mistakes. I have recovered from problems and events that many people cannot say out loud without a shudder, and I have stitched them into the fabric of my life, so that they have made me stronger and more flexible.

I have this to say to you out of all this experience: We cannot afford to lose children. Not without fighting. We need to stop acting like it is OK or it is inevitable that children suffer unbearable pain in this world. If, in truth, we can do nothing to stop or ease this pain, we need not let them suffer it alone. If we lose them to drug addiction, to illiteracy, to mental illness, let it be only after we have unleashed the Spanish Armada on their behalf, after we have shot every bit of ammunition in our stores, after we lie out of breath, exhausted from the effort. Let it not be for lack of imagination, lack of focus, lack of compassion.

Think about the times you have suffered the greatest pain. Maybe you were injured. Maybe you were giving birth. Maybe you lost a loved one. I hope that you did not do this alone. I hope that someone held your hand and kept holding it, and that this person looked you in the eye and did not look away. I hope that they did not get up and leave while you were most afraid. 

Please do not tell me my child is just going through a phase. Please do not tell me that all we can do is wait. Please do not imply that their failing to reach their potential as human beings is just OK, somehow inevitable. They may be one of many to you, and you may be tired. You may have seen so many, so many that you could not help and for whom the future was lost. Their faces may pass by you in a collage of hazy images. I understand. But let my child never become an item on your calendar, a name on a  list.

I don't need you to have the answers. I need you to look me in the eye and tell me you are willing to fight with me, for the life of my child. It is all I have ever wanted from you, for all these years, when I stood here talking about my child's ADHD, my child's language processing problem, my child's depression. Fight with me. You may have weapons I do not know how to use. Together, we can give my child what he needs.

Remember: These boys are the most beautiful things ever wrought. They are born to inspire. They are born to be inspired. I brought them forth out of pure possibility, knowing nothing of how to parent and without a cent to my name, with nothing but the power of my unspoken promise that they would never go without a single needed thing that I could fight for them to have. They never have. And I will crawl again on my stomach, my fingers bloodied anew, for as long as it takes, to see any of them safe and empowered while there is yet breath in my body. 

I woke this morning and heard this song (below) on my playlist. Judy Collins' son killed himself in 1992 after years of alcoholism and depression. I don't know his story. She wrote this song long before his death. You can hear her trying to hope for his future in the lyrics. I can't stop listening to it. I need to do more than hope. 

Compassion and persistence are my promise to my children. Can you help me?

Sincerely,

a mother

Now I remember.

Today's #ReverbBroads11 prompt:   Post a picture of you that you like, write about yourself, post a video - what do you want your self-portrait to say about you? via Kristen at http://kristendomblogs.com/

I was a creative kid, and I always thought I was going to be special. 

My family taught me to believe that I was brilliant and I could change the world.

I had my first son when I was twenty-two. I was a very young twenty-two, but I was a good mother. 

I just didn't know yet that the most important thing in the world was not going to end up being whether or not my kids played with wooden Waldorf toys but whether or not they could learn to make lives worthy of their putting their socks and shoes on everyday; lives that make them catch their breath and forge onward, even when it hurts, because the pain is not as big as the feeling of inspiration that they have learned how to summon.

Photo by Samara Graham, 2010

I had Mikalh when I was twenty-nine, after my divorce and before Mike and I got married. I wasn't expecting to have any more kids, and I had just traveled right into the fiery heart of Mordor and, in a convulsion of mingled despair and blind faith, tossed in everything that had gone before. 

Mikalh made room in my heart for the faith to believe that I could do it all over again because, despite anything else, he was going to be the most loved baby in the world. 

His love of literature and creative pursuits has touched the part of my soul that remembers knowing I could do whatever I wanted and be whomever I chose. He has made me believe again.

Photo by Samara Graham, 2010

My family is the cornerstone of my life. I am not a career woman. I don't think that there is anything that argues with genuine feminism in saying that I choose to focus on the raising of my family, both for economic reasons and for personal ones. 

But for many years, I felt so defined by their needs that I could not really answer the question, "What do you enjoy?'

Now I remember.

I love ridiculous humor.

I love the naked truth where others want to obfuscate.

I love the human capacity to transform.

I love music that shatters the peace and music that holds my aching soul in its arms and tells me it understands.

I love garden soil.

I love to write.

The Poetry of My Last Twenty-four Hours: Words that Cut to the Bone of Truth

I invite you to re-visit this post from last December as part of A Writer Weaves a Tale's Old-Post Resurrection Hop. Check Sandra out. She's a brilliant writer and her blog a way-station for talent.

Words that cut to the bone of truth, sawing away muscle and fat, leaving bare the skeleton of what it means to be human, in all its starkly bloody glory.

Words that take me to the heart of who I am and what I feel.

Photo by Mark

The Poetry of My Last Twenty-four Hours

5 AM. The pain of my fibromyalgia has woken me up to send ripples of flame that spread down my forearms and lick the web between each finger, bringing me moment by moment further from the sleep my body desperately needs. A deeper, hotter fire pours down the column of my spine and fills my sacrum, making it a vessel of aching cramp. A persistent nausea pulls at my insides. 

In the war between discomfort and exhaustion, discomfort has won. I will get up. I will write.

Photo by Jilly

2 PM. The baby that my arms still remember, who smelled of a fresh sweetness as bafflingly ambrosial as a morning bakery, the boy whose soft possibility touches the core of my longing to want good in the world, that boy is sobbing on my couch, having been physically and mentally wounded in his daily battle with Life. 

His cries feel like jagged glass, like punches to my stomach.

At this moment in time, his soul is a crushed tin can beneath the foot of the world. His body curls inward, protecting himself. He is a fetal image again, a sprouting bean, or something bent-maybe not yet broken. I catch my breath, and beg myself for the capacity to remember that this is just a moment in time that can pass. 

If I let myself live inside that strangled sob, inside that inward-bent body, I may soon be crushed again myself, as I was when I had to pass through Scylla and Charybdis to become a grown woman myself. But I will not let him pass through alone, if he could know someone is with him and that he is loved. 

Something is always torn and bloody when a child is birthed. New tears rend me as they grow and I let myself feel the disquiet of Life as it shapes the men they will become. Sometimes all I have to offer these children is an outstretched hand.

Photo by Jenny Downing

6 PM. My church community has gathered in the darkness of December around an elaborate double spiral of pine boughs in our icy church parking lot, to usher in the winter solstice. 

The planning for this has been halting, filled with confusion, miscommunication, and emotional exhaustion. Leading up to this moment, I have felt more than once like stepping away from the project. 

Community is never what you think it is. It is always unkempt, filled with unintended power struggles and accidental slights; with the tireless wars we launch daily in the practice of attempting to live together.

Chanting begins, led by teenagers with a chant they have learned at a youth con, "Spiraling into the center, the center of the web, we are the weavers, we are the woven ones, we are the dreamers, we are the dream..." The background is punctuated by the sounds of the reverse signal of a backhoe that is moving snow nearby into great useless dunes by the roadside. 

Our community-elders, young children, teenagers, adults are moving into the center of a spiral, holding tiny pine cones to drop into a fire as an act of letting go. Upon reaching the center, they receive a candle and place it where they wish among the boughs on the arm of the spiral leading out. I am directing a child on crutches in an icy parking lot, listening to a persistent beeping, but, more-so, I am enveloped by the intention of the ritual. 

I desperately need to let go. I need to leave the self I thought I was in the light of summer in that fire and walk out with a new self, strong enough to meet the challenges Life has chosen, in its dazzling randomness, for me to face. I will do this, even if I must do it while prodding a crippled child whom, unbeknownst to me, I will later learn has already fallen with his crutches on the ice and suffered a concussion.

Photo by Kristine Coblentz

"Return again. Return again. Return again. Return to the home of your soul. Return to who you are. Return to what you are. Return to where you are. Born and reborn again. Return again..."

The comfort of the truth of these words washes over me. Where sweet encouragement to cheer me would sour in my ears, the beauty of darkness juxtaposed with light, the Truth of Nature and of being human holds me like a child in a mother's arms, comforting me with reality.

Litany. In the greatest darkness. Response: The light is reborn. Out of winter's cold. The light is reborn. From our deepest fears. The light is reborn. When we most despair. The light is reborn.  The light is reborn. The light is reborn. 

To end the ritual is my part. I lead the crowd inside, where seven children, fourth grade to ninth, guide us all competently, confidently, and gorgeously in the act of welcoming in the four directions and putting the ritual to rest. 

They say, finally, these words that I have written for them:

"The wheel of the year spins inward toward dark and quiet, outward toward light and creation. Again and again, it spins, and our lives spin with it, through happy times and sad, new inspirations and times of letting go.

Our lives mirror the beauty of the turning of the wheel.

We hope you will stay with us for cider and social time and that you will take with you the collective light of this community into the dark places you must go this coming year, and use it to germinate your dreams." 

I am bursting with pride in my community. We are raising bold children who know beauty, who can lead, who can think. We have wisdom among our elders in Los Alamos that would be the envy of any convocation of sages. Our families are vibrant, seeking, and strong.

In this moment, it is worth it to be human in a community, to suffer through emails that I don't understand, to bake a dozen cookies while getting ready for work, to attend meetings at the end of exhausting days, to struggle with how to live in beloved community.

I think that it is worth it to love the poetry of dark and light, to love the shadows that play around the edges of our lives, for the depth that they add to living.

If I live with more pain because I take the time to see them, I say I live, too, with more beauty.

Photo by Patrick Kelly

 This song makes me catch my breath and remember.

Notes on photos: The first three photos are creative-commons licensed searchable images that I found on Flickr. The fourth is a photo taken by my incredible, inspiring friend Kristine Coblentz at the Solstice ritual last night. She should also be credited with taking a huge leadership role in creating that ritual and having it be what it is. Her vision inspires me. The fifth photo was taken by me of my son Devin at our church's UU Nativity Pageant last Sunday, when he was a sheepishly smiling Caesar Augustus. The last photo is used with permission by my talented friend Patrick Kelly, whose gorgeous photographs can be found at http://photos.pmkelly.com/. Go look at them.