Fainting Goats

Ever since I first heard about them, I have wanted to have a goat that would pass out. It seems to me it would provide hours of entertainment, and you also would get the milk. However, rather than receiving a fainting goat, I have become one—and in the worst setting possible.

In my small town of 12,000 souls, we have one grocery store. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that everyone is there at once. If you have exchanged terse words with someone at the MVD, they are in the freezer aisle. If you have taught a child at the local elementary school, that child is in line with his mother at the pharmacy window while you go to buy spermicidal lubricant. If you bump your cart into someone, the person in question is a respected member of your church. And so on.

The most public part of this store is the part with the check-out aisles. It faces the door and the pharmacy, and 90% of the people you know are always lined up and checking out. It would be easy to do without Facebook, because you can always just go and buy applesauce.

Yesterday, I went to the store after church. I hadn't eaten for several hours, but I wasn't hungry. I had a bunch of unpleasant paperwork to fill out at home and I just wanted to get my shopping done and get back to get it over with. I had accidentally left my cell phone on my desk before going to church and I knew my husband, after leaving his church meeting, was going to arrive home and wonder where I was. The store was busy, but everything pretty much went fine. In the produce section, I waved at two women I knew from the school I had worked at and visited with a fellow soccer mom. In the frozen section, I ran into a friend who also homeschools, and we talked for a bit about the possibility of a homeschool field trip to a pumpkin patch. My cart was extremely full, and I was thinking that after I shopped, there wouldn't be any money left in my account, but reasoned that I was planning on baking bread and so that this fact balanced out my financial irresponsibility with the assurance that I was the right kind of person—which is the kind of person who bakes bread for her kids. Whole wheat.

I got to the check-out line and had placed everything on the belt except some toilet paper in the bottom of my cart. In leaning down to pick it up, somehow I jammed the cart into the end of the aisle and whacked my knee, in that tender spot just below the cap. It hurt. It wasn't terrible, just the kind of pain that accompanies a smack of the funny bone, not the sort that accompanies burning alive or giving birth. However, I immediately felt light-headed. Lights, like glowing asterisks, punctuated the air. I could hear only as well as if I was underwater, which is to say that there were sounds, but that they seemed distant and muffled, as if ushering from another world. Most concerning, I felt like my body wanted to fall down. Fine, I thought, if I can just get through check-out, I will go out and sit in my car until I'm OK again to drive. I can do this. I have persevered through worse. And indeed I did. Staying upright demanded quite a bit of energy, but I seemed to be doing OK. I replied to the polite checker—yes, I was fine today and how was she—and swiped my card, wavering only slightly and feeling more than a little disoriented. So far, so good. I even remembered to withdraw allowance in cash for my three kids. The problem apparently came when the checker asked me if I had a Fresh Values card. I did have one and had already placed my keys with the green fob onto the little check-writing dais in front of me. But no sound came out of my mouth. In fact, I only know that she asked this because she reported it later to the paramedics when they came.

Time seemed to be punctuated by periods of strange blankness, like pages missing from a book. The next thing I knew, I was being settled into a chair (right there is the check-out lane) and given orange juice that wasn't mine. A woman who I know vaguely as a substitute teacher was talking to me and a lot of people, one after the other, were saying, "Are you OK, Ma'am?" "I'm fine," I assured them, while wavering more alarmingly and then starting to retch. A plastic shopping bag was handed to me and I retched into that. Nothing came up, but breathing into the bag seemed to make me feel better, so I did that for awhile. Then, some men that I think must have been policeman suggested that I be moved over to the little in-store Wells Fargo area just across from the check-out line. They asked to see my ID, wanted to know if I knew what today was, and if I was diabetic, and then they let me know that they had called the fire department.

It was then that I realized that from now on I needed to find a way to shop at the very-expensive health food store on the edge of town, because I was never going to be willing to darken the door of Smith's again.

The thing is I have been at Smith's with intolerable migraines. I have been at Smith's with fibro flares so bad that I felt like I wanted to collapse in tears on the floor of the paper goods aisle. But, up until now, I have never made any scene that has caused anyone to notice my having a problem. And, today—which was a day that I had felt basically fine during—I was finally and irrevocably making a spectacle of myself.

Then the paramedics came. All twenty of them. And they talked to me for a while before insisting that I get on *A STRETCHER* and go out to their ambulance. This was not what I was hoping would happen. The nice substitute teacher lady had called my husband on her cell phone and I indicated that I would really like to just have him come and get me and that everything would be fine. I had no desire to the local emergency room and have them tell me that I still had fibromyalgia and also a fainting goat gene. One paramedic looked with interest at my cuticles and asked if the injuries therein were due to anxiety or a medical condition. "Bad habit," I told her. "So you pull the skin off your cuticles?" she asked. "Yes," I told her. Everyone nodded and looked at one another. They took my blood pressure, which is always low—this time being no exception—and my blood sugar and said I should go to the ER. "No thank you," I demurred.

After signing a refusal of service against medical advice, I ended up leaving with my husband, who installed me at home in a bed and then went back to dealing with the groceries and the laundry, without expressing overmuch concern about this new wrinkle on the ongoing saga of his wife's physical frailty. This, he thought, was the most helpful thing possible. And perhaps it was. However, after all of the attention and concern from the good-looking firefighters, I couldn't help but feel that this was not exactly the reaction I was looking for: "Oh, it's just my wife. It's one thing after another with her." I began to wish I had gone to the hospital where people actually cared about me. *

At any rate, I used to joke that it would be intolerably embarrassing to actually buy condoms in the pharmacy window at Smith's and that this was most likely the cause of the multiple teenage pregnancies in our town. Now I know that doing this would not be nearly as embarrassing as being hauled like a sack of dirty laundry from the most visible section of the local Smith's. And so I would now say to any teenager who is worried about publicly purchasing contraceptives that they should rest assured—at least the fire department would not be called.

Lest you worry, I have diagnosed myself with a vasovagal reaction and determined that the thing to do would be to avoid clocking any tender nerve centers, at least while in public, in order to avoid future embarrassment. From now on, I will simply remember to wear knee pads and a bag on my head before going to shop at Smith's.

And everything will be fine.


*This is not me making fun of my husband. This is me making fun of myself.

Twelve Years Later

Twelve years later, I can still remember my horror on the morning that I heard. Horror both at what had happened and at what would happen next, which already loomed like an oncoming storm in the sky of the day's pain. I held my baby in my arms and listened as Amy Goodman, from Ground Zero, played the terrified voices of people on the street. I held Devin closer and kissed his hair and wondered what the world would be like now.

Glennon of Momastery had this to say this morning. It says everything I might hope to say and more, so I will save my words and recommend it to you.

I also want to tell you about a book. It is called Acts of Faith and it is written by a man named Eboo Patel, an American Muslim from India and a leader in the youth interfaith movement. This book has transformed my understanding of what is going on in the Muslim world, especially for the kinds of men that end up committing terrible acts. It has expanded my empathy and my commitment that we all need to learn to know one another and live together and that the best place to start is with our youth. I cannot say enough about it. It is one of the most important books I've read in my life. I sincerely hope you'll consider checking it out. It's not an apology for anything. It's a rallying cry for us to create a world of cooperation and pluralism.

On this anniversary, my hope is for all of us to be at peace, all over the world, safe from violence and misunderstanding. I pray that we all find freedom and that we can learn to live together in this fragile world. And I hope and pray especially for the Syrian refugees who are right now, in the millions, living in uncertainty as the world decides their fate.

The Smell of Rot and Orange Rinds

Hello there. It's been a while.

I only intended to be off of my blog and Facebook for 40 days, and that 40 days ended over a week ago. When the time came for me to come back and tell you all something about my time off, I found I didn't really have anything to say. I wrote blog posts and discarded them because they were trying to hard to prove something. So I waited some more, becoming increasingly concerned that inspiration had not struck.

Inspiration still has not found me, so I guess I'll go ahead and just give it a go.

I don't have any deep thoughts for you. Time out of the internet social network was the same as time in it, except quieter. I honestly expected that I would have some kind of spiritual epiphany, as if I had gone up into a cave for a month and waited for God to speak. That didn't happen. Sure, I had several useful thought-processes and made what I think of as some discoveries, but I remain very much as I was.

More so, in fact. I find that fact a little embarrassing.

Right now—as I am writing—something in this house has gone terribly bad. I can smell it every time I inhale through my nose. It is, judging by the odor, either some very rotten milk or a dead cat. I have searched for the source of the smell in vain for several days and I can't find it, so instead of looking, I am boiling orange peels and cinnamon on my stove.

And this sort of sums up everything.

The things about myself that I don't like just keep on stinking up the place. I am insecure, self-involved, and prone to fits of anger and depression. Still. I wonder, all the time, if I am hiding this well enough, underneath the smell of cinnamon, and if it smells as bad to you as it does to me. I have frequent moments of peace and I think I have found The Answer, but, once the water boils away, the smell still lingers on the air.

I am stuck with it. And I think it might be fear.

Writing a memoir is very unsettling. Or, at least it was for me. I don't regret having done it, but it hasn't been easy to do. Taking the intimate truth of my humanity and putting it down for others to read takes something like courage, and I am not sure yet if it's a courage that I want. I'm not sure yet if I am ready to be criticized—not just for how I write but for who I am. I am not sure I am ready to read internet reviews that make me feel like all the cinnamon and citrus in the world cannot hide the odor of my truth.

This fear is not unreasonable. The internet can be a bit cruel, don't you think?

In my book, I wrote a chapter about middle school. (Remember middle school?) It is called "Forsaken," and it is about feeling that no place in the world was safe, that everything about me—even my trying to be different and better—was fuel for others to torment me. It is about losing my faith in a world that loved and wanted me. Perhaps it's about losing God. When I was twelve and thirteen, there really was nowhere safe for me to turn to. There was no real respite from the pain. It lingered on me, festering, until I learned how to treat myself with alcohol and drugs and then later with the 12 steps.

This is relevant, because I find that the social media world often feels a great deal like middle school to me.

In dealing with this, I have focused entirely on the notion of courage, on boldness, on shameless truth-telling. I believe in all those things. I truly believe that there is nothing in that memoir I need be ashamed of and that it contains a great many things  to which others will relate. So, I have plunged forward, over what felt like a quietly mounting hysteria, and prepared to give it to the world. I have thought about selling it, about revising it, about making it the best version of me that it can be. I have buckled down and striven to do my best.

It occurs for me only now that this may not be very healthy.

I find that the person who wrote that memoir needs a safe place she can turn. Before she opens herself up to the universe, inviting anyone—no matter their intention—to take a look, she deserves for her feelings to be known. There needs to be a spirituality that can hold her, a circle of friendship that can sustain her, and a real choice to go forward.

She needs permission to turn back.

I find it's easier to empathize with my own needs when I think of myself as a daughter, someone whom I love unconditionally and whose feelings, no matter how large, remain important to me. And if I had a daughter and she was scared and vulnerable and hoping for courage she wasn't sure she had, I'd give her permission. I'd give her space.

So, I am doing that.

I am waiting and I am learning whether I can be with myself, whether I can see all of I have written, and all I think, as the story that is and not as the one true case about life. I am not going to send it out into the world until I can sit with myself in silence and be comfortable with what I find. I think I owe that to myself.

So, thanks for being patient with me. Right now, my work as a writer requires more mediation and less courage, more quiet, and less of my own commentary.

I need to divest myself of my fear-based desire for acceptance and popularity.

I wonder if any of you can relate. I wonder if anyone else is learning to have self-compassion and sit still. If you are, and you are willing to share about it, I'd love to hear from you.

I have other things I want to share with you, but, for now, I will just say: I missed you. Drop by and say hello.

Drive: some thoughts on anxiety

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Today, the only thing I can find to write about is fear. And I don't want to write about fear.

I am sick of fear. I don't want sympathy. Instead, I want to hear the strike of metal against another person's truth so that the room fills up with the hum of Tibetan bowls. Fear, I've found, tends to elicit something else: a desire to comfort, along with its attendant Hallmark cards and pep talks and "you're-too-hard-on-yourself"s. I have a had time with these acts of kindness. They make me feel...exposed.

But fear it is.

I am scared to death, really, to be a real writer. I was once told (and I think I have said this here before) that if you want to look at what you are committed to, look at what you already have. This is true. I have exactly what I can handle. I want to write and, in the solace of my living room, I want to think that what I have written may be meaningful and good. I want to imagine that I could be successful, am about to be successful.

The list of things I do not want to do associated with being a writer is somewhat longer and it involves any kind of public embarrassment and openness to criticism and rejection, any kind of standing in front of people looking prettied-up and confident, any kind of telling people all about what I can do.

Because—at my core of cores—I don't think I can do anything.

This is what this is really about. Perhaps most of you will not know what I mean, because perhaps most of you are not sexual abuse survivors who are recovering from alcoholism and bulimia* and have spent most of your lives out of the work force raising kids. But—maybe, maybe, some of you, despite not being all the same kinds of messed up, will still know what I mean.

I don't think I can do anything. I am surprised I can cut apples. I am thrilled I can sweep floors. When I applied for my job as an instructional assistant at the local schools six years ago, I was terrified. I had run a daycare, twice, taken child development classes, and had been raised by a mother who worked almost all my life in the schools, but I still didn't really think I could do the job. I couldn't make copies, I thought. I didn't know how to use the die cut machine, I thought. I was sure I would not be picked.

After I expressed all this, my husband looked at me like I had spouted several additional heads.

"You're worried that you're not qualified to be an IA?" he asked. I was.

They hired me anyway.

Now, I tutor and I don't think I can do that either. The parents of my students think I can. I act like I can. And I seem to be able to go through the motions of planning and teaching an individualized lesson for each child, and they seem to learn, and everyone seems to be pleased, but I'm still, on some level, utterly sure that I can't really do the work, or that someone else could do it better than I do.

In my solar plexus—I know.

One of the things I wrote about in my book is that I didn't learn to drive until I was 26. I just felt safer letting other people do it. When I finally learned, I took only a month and I had to learn to do it while having full panic attacks. Once I'd been driving several months, the panic attacks went away (except for when I drive in heavy freeway traffic, or in high winds, or late at night, or on the side of very high cliffs).

I think writing, for me, is a bit like that right now. I have my foot on the gas, but I am tapping the brakes constantly and trying to keep from crying as my adrenalin surges, telling me I need to get off the road RIGHT NOW. And I seem to be off in all directions: updating my LinkedIn profile, trying to get freelance work, researching magazines to submit to, getting help to update my blog and create an author page, ordering books on queries and agents. Trying to figure out what I should do with beta readers. I cannot focus. I just get up and do something every day. Take some action. Drive somewhere. Take notes. Tap brakes. Breathe deeply. Start again.

Before—I was just writing. I know how to write. I do not know how to be a writer.

I did learn to drive, and perhaps I will learn to be a professional writer, too. Perhaps something will yield. Perhaps all this garbage in my head about platforms and business plans and writer's groups and publishing will form itself into something actionable.

Perhaps.

But for right now, again, fear is my teacher. I have the opportunity not to run but to stay and confront it, to put my feet on the pedals. Or to take a break and ask what I am doing and why I am doing it. Or to ask for help. Most of all—to show up and tell the truth. It's all I have: the Truth. It's why I like writing. It's why I am doing this. It's why I am telling you. Not because it's sad (it's not) or because it's interesting (it isn't really). Because it's true.

Not just for me, but in some way, for someone else.

Life was never the same after I learned to drive. Suddenly, I could go where I wanted to, when I wanted to, drive as fast or as slow as I wanted to go. I could choose the grocery store I shopped at. I could drive my kids out to the beach. I was in control of something that before I was just the recipient of.

I don't feel ready, but I'm ready. I'm ready to drive my career. Where, and how, I do not know.

And it may take months  before the panic subsides, during which I will have to take action anyway. That seems to be how it goes. Yes, I've done therapy and yes, I once took anti-depressants for a long time (and I still panicked while driving) and yes, now I meditate virtually every morning. But none of this gets me out of being who I am, which seems to include a certain amount of panic and hysteria to which most people are just not prone.

The other side of this coin is that I kind of like myself: panicky, over-wrought, tense, and complicated. I know that seems impossible, given what I've said, but it isn't. I've spent a year writing my whole life down and I am now intimately acquainted with Me.

I kind of admire her. She has guts.

My youngest son, who has auditory processing disorder, has not yet been able to earn his first belt in Tae Kwon Do. When called to the front to do his forms, he tends to forget them. He tends not to notice he's been called to the front. He tends to be doing the wrong thing. He tries very hard and so he feels bad about all this.

"Listen," I told him one day, "You are working harder than anybody else."

"I am?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said. "Your brain has to work just to hear them calling your name, to hear them call out the count. You have to work harder and it is going to take longer than others to do the same thing because of that. It's not because you're not as good. It's because your job is harder than theirs."

"Oh," he said, relieved. "Ohhhh."

And it's no different with me—with people like me—I suppose. If it takes me fifteen nervous emails to friends and a thousand scatter-shot web searches and thirty mornings of meditation and that many days of feeling like I am crawling out from being crushed under a rock—all to figure out one thing I really need to do next for my writing—then that is what it takes, and it is not because I am not as good. It is because my job is harder than the people who woke up this morning confident in who they are and what they do. It is because I have put in the work of a PhD in order to get an associates**.

I am not less because I struggle. I am more.

So, today, in honor of every woman I know who has stayed up late with flashcards well past when she knew the material for her test, and every teenager who has dressed and primped for a party and then realized at the last minute that she's too ugly to go, and every woman who doesn't even apply for the job because she can't bear to hear the words "You are unqualified." I say:

You did good work today. Carry on, and fight another day. Breathe in, breathe out, foot on pedal, inhale again. Exhale.

Now drive.



* I am grateful to say 20 years of recovery now.
* *This is a metaphor. I don't even have an associate's and I am not dissing anyone who's earned a PhD.

Into the Tidal Zone Part Two: Making Justice

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Welcome to part two of Into the Tidal Zone. Part One can be read here. This is intended for audience participation, so please comment, and comment on comments, and follow comments, and otherwise keep things interesting in a respectful way. This series is intended to explore in a variety of ways those areas of our lives that we might call spiritual, religious, ethical, or whatever name you have for the magma core of who-you-are. I call mine my spirituality. Today I am delving into the issue of obligation to make justice, or change, in the world.

*

At the church of my childhood, there is one religious teaching I remember most: Make justice. This is the thing that got stuck on me.

It was the 1980s and the government of El Salvador was killing its own people (10,000 by 1980). My church was part of the Sanctuary Movement at the time. After long deliberation, the adult members of the church had decided to harbor a family from El Salvador in open defiance of federal law. The family had two children: Marta and Jesus. When they first came to us, we played a game with them and, all the other kids, where our names were drawn out of a hat.

"JEE-SUS?" my friend Karuna whispered, holding a slip of paper in disbelief, before someone corrected her.

Marta was around my age. She was taller than I was and had long dark, wavy hair and a broad-lipped smile. She seemed shy without more English, shy out of her world, but likable and kind. This hiding of people was an important secret that had to be kept, or Marta might be dragged away to blood-covered jungles, I imagined, where, taken by the military, she would be turned into black smoke. Disappeared. One day we went with her and her brother to the county fair, and I was scared the whole time that she would be recognized and dragged away with the cotton candy still sticky and pink in her hands and teeth.

This was how I learned that justice was something that real people needed and real people provided, that it was imperative, and that it included risk.

I wondered why we didn't do more.

"Would you give up your TV if it would save a starving child in Africa?" I asked an adult friend one day, when I was twelve. (All the starving children were in Africa in the 1980s.) She thought about it and answered honestly.

"No."

This drove me crazy about the world. I gave up eating meat when I was seven, but everyone else ate it. If I asked questions about why, they tended to say that they thought it was wrong but that they did it anyhow, which bothered more than the people who said they thought it was all right.

When I was fourteen, my friend and I walked into Macy's and, examining all the make-up, left it with stickers that said "This product tested on animals." When we were caught, the store clerk was kind and gentle and didn't yell at us, but simply asked us to stop. We did. Having walked in as nonviolent protesters, we left as reprimanded kids. We walked on to the food court to order a calzone.

When, at twenty-two,  I was getting ready to have my first baby, I was hearing about the conditions of workers in China in factories. No baby things from China please, I asked everybody.

"Here," said my grandmother, proudly, handing me a stuffed animal for my coming child. "This seal was made in Sri Lanka."

"You're not realistic enough," people told me. "You can't make them stop."

"I know," I told him. "I think I'm still supposed to try."

There were no diaper bags that weren't from China. At least not in our price range. So we bought a Chinese one anyway. Would you give up your TV? Maybe I wouldn't... Maybe not...

Having been presented with no more refugees to be friends with since middle school, my heart ached for something meaningful to do. How do you make justice? I wondered. Does it always mean making someone mad? The kind of justice I was trying to practice seemed to involve $5 cookies from Whole Foods, made locally with all-natural dyes. It seemed to make shopping harder, make life harder and bring no obvious reward. Thinking in terms of justice, without getting next to injustice, was like walking around barefoot on hot and rocky ground.

*

Today, I look at the world and ask myself the very same thing.

Today, I buy ethically-questionable meat along with ethically-questionable rice and sometimes the only thing I can be sure of are the bunches of lettuce from my yard. I sob inwardly at the mountains of fire and the young firefighters killed and think, Surely, we could do better than this. Surely I could do more to prevent the climate change of the world! I become exhausted by the need for action and justice-making and do nothing, too often, when something would be the thing to do.

But still I am moved by the need for justice. I let my heart be engaged. I watch the films posted of children who, having grown up in America, then face deportation because they cannot get the right paperwork*. I wonder if Marta ever became a citizen. Did she go back to El Salvador? Or was she deported, after learning to love cotton candy, and learning to speak easy English, and calling this nation her home? I wonder.

I carve out small spaces and do what I can: I give up paper towels, plant a garden and learn to grow food in a way that does not make war with the earth. I eat eggs from chickens that I keep and tend myself. I strive to teach and love and honor each child that I am given to teach and love—mine or someone's else's—in a way that makes both of us larger than we were. We make small donations. and read and try to stay awake.

It does not seem enough.

When my teenage son came back from Mexico this April, where with his own hands, he built houses for those living in dirt-covered shacks, I saw the face of justice-making: he was exhausted, nauseated, dirty and, getting in the van, he told me:

"I want to go home and take a shower and eat real food and go back to Mexico again."

*

How were you raised to understand justice and action to the change the world? Was this part of your religious upbringing?

Has this understanding changed?

What have you lost? What have you gained?



*You should really try and find time to watch this moving film. Gather tissues first.

Not Today.

My mountain, back in 2011, after we came home, as we watched it instead of Fourth of July fireworks.

Two years ago today, I was at a hotel in Albuquerque, spending down all our emergency savings while evacuated from a wildfire threatening my town. Back home, ashes fell, smoke choked the air, and, hopefully, my ducks were still alive. Mike drove back and forth from Los Alamos to work for the county, we went to the pool, we watched the news, which said nothing useful, and stared at Facebook, which had up-to-the-minute updates on what was really happening. Friends, having evacuated as far away as Colorado or Oklahoma all connected online to find out about each other's well-being. I missed my underwear back home.

Photos were released of the fire. It was gorgeous, in the way that Balrogs are gorgeous: beautifully rendered power, indomitable. In the midst of the plumes and walls of flame and the mushrooms of smoke walked firefighters—hotshots—running straight into what we had packed up and fled like so many cockroaches fleeing the scene of a fumigation. They were sooty and sweaty and they looked absolutely like gods. No one could have been more potent, more heroic, more good.

On July 3rd, we got to go home. They saved our town.

Today, I woke up and found out that 19 hotshots had died in a single devastating fire. 19 heroes snuffed out all at once. I felt sick. On the nearby main thoroughfare, cars and trucks drove by all morning, and all morning they have sounded just like skycrane helicopters: big, orange birds dropping retardant on the flames. I keep checking and they're still just cars. But, inside again, I'm sure I hear the helicopters once more.

I held my breath and Googled "Granite Mountain Hotshots" and "Las Conchas Wildfire" and—yes, they are the same ones. The same ones that saved my home, my town, my ducks, my garden, my patio, my savings, my memories. The very same team, among others, that did that. I can't bear it. I can't bear the incessant drought and the endless wildfires and the loss of homes and now the deaths and the slow-turning consideration that perhaps we should address global warming and perhaps we should fund our forest management and perhaps we need to understand nature better. It's not soon enough. Not today.

Not today.

I wrote a book.

I have written the ending to my book. Or, rather, I have written it again. I have now revised each chapter 20-40 times, until the language, sentiment and plot of as interesting to me as watching Koyaanisqatsi without the aid of any hallucinogenic drugs. It is too long. Far too long. And I wonder what parts of my life I will ultimately deem "unnecessary to the plot." This is the story of my life so far—a memoir—because certainly what the world needs most is more memoirs, you will agree. I can do nothing but give the world what it needs. I am called to serve.

I have passed through the predictable stages of writer's schizophrenia which have first caused me to suffer from the belief that what I have here is a work of shocking genius ready to be set on the shelf next to my favorites: Lamott, Sedaris, and Melton; to take its place in the canon of literature which, in a bold, new way, illumines the human soul. "A victory," the review will say. Next, I have realized that what I have here is the carcass of a toad: stinking, in a state of ego-fueled, narcissistic decomposition, an embarrassment to everyone around. Then, I have thought: "Meh."

But—here's the thing: I have finished something. Until my eldest child reaches the age at which he can be, at least legally, said to be adult enough to leave my home, I have otherwise finished nothing of length or import. I have dropped out, left early and quit everything without fulfilling on what some especially kind people have called "my potential." Now, you see, I have finished a book. Out of respect for those of you with more sensitive natures than mine, I will be polite and refrain from calling it what I truthfully meant to call it, which was a mo$#erf&&king book.

I finished a book!

Sort of.

It is, as I have said, too long. And I want to run it by what they call BETA readers, which are the people who will read my manuscript and tell me exactly and specifically in which way they think it sucks. I did this once and was promised a copy of the book when published. As a volunteer gig, it was kind of fun; like eating pizza and saying "Push!" at someone else's birth.

After the BETA reading bit, I have to try and convince someone at a publishing house, who has sold his soul to Satan in exchange for a red pen, that this is something someone would want to buy. I am not, to say the least, looking forward to this. My relationship to promoting myself is similar to Ted Kaczynski's. I like to deliver my words in plain-looking packages and separate letters explaining what I am about. I hope these will have an impact on the world, but I like to maintain my privacy. The thought of a book proposal makes me physically ill.

Besides, I'm not sure anyone would want to buy it. Why would they, when they could spend their money on thneeds?

Privacy is a concern. It is all good and well when you are sitting at home writing your innermost thoughts onto Microsoft Word, but it is not so well when you imagine several thousand someones reading them. And the criticism! "The author cannot seem to make up her mind about who she is," I imagine that they'll say. "Profoundly full of herself." "Pretending to be wise." I can only imagine that I will have to plead guilty as charged.

Of course, more likely, I will simply receive a form letter: "Game Over. Thank You For Playing."

At any rate, like all achievements, the book was more fun when it wasn't done than it is now.

That said, I am doing this anyway. Because—

I wrote a mo$#erf&&king book.

Homes for Tomatoes

The arugula has already bolted.

We spent the weekend making homes for tomatoes. Digging nice, deep holes, spaced a bit too close, and slamming in stakes in the ground for makeshift cages. Running baling wire 'round the cages for horizontal support. Buying clear plastic to frame them in for added heat; then realizing we really needed Walls of Water instead. Sowing bee balm, calendula, Thai basil, oregano, and nasturtium in the plot so that, when finished, this one piece of earth is a verdant eruption of vining Scarlet runner beans and Lemon Queen sunflowers, hot peppers and green and black and red tomatoes; an Eden awake with blooming and buzzing and the pungent taste of herbs.

Makeshift tomato cages in progress in the new garden area.

From this fenced plot I can see my chickens sorting through the straw, scratching every square centimeter of yard in their patient search for bugs. Running with pieces of thrown dandelion, pursued by other chickens, because nobody wants to share. Blissfully napping under the big lilac, in abnegation of the sun. I have never seen them from this view before; they look cuter than usual.

Sasquatch the Brahma

To my left, in another bed, I have lettuces in untidy rows like the bustling organdy of a recital of small green tutus. Varieties run from spiky to solid, smooth to soft, and my favorite Black-seeded Simpson is dressed in wavering lines. Next to them, onions and leeks have become tall princesses, wearing tiaras of static-shocked electric white, their feet emerging in white and red bulbs in the rich dark soil of the covered bed. Among the edibles, a single columbine has bloomed and hangs a flower like a lantern for fairies lost among the peas. White pea flowers sit next to forming baby pods, sugary and innocent. Undiscovered asparagus spears have shot up to tickle the atmosphere, spreading in ferns and hanging berries, which drop into the mud. Carrots do their work deep beneath the soil, sending only their punk hairdos up.

Carrots, onions, lettuces in the cold crop bed.

In another bed, Egyptian onions have set blossoms next to chives like firecrackers—green sprays tipped with purple asterisks. Cucumbers volunteer from last year and poke their leaves out of the straw mulch. Jerusalem artichoke is everywhere, but still earthbound, nothing more than leaves spreading just above the soil. I have to use my imagination to remember what it is.

This is a Welsh bunching onion next to some Jerusalem artichokes in my perennial edible bed.

All of these plants live here. In a way, it doesn't look like much. Just a bunch of beginnings. Very little now that you can eat. And yet, there is nowhere I am happier than here, with my husband beside me, armed like Thor with his sledgehammer, putting the stakes just where I say. The two of us, in the shadow of my crabapple and my honeysuckle, making beginnings, putting work to hope, with faith that things will grow.

Ready to be planted! Northern NM nights are cold. The full bottles behind the peppers are for thermal mass.

Mother's Day: Just the Way it Is

Techno music is blasting at Chili's. The clatter of stacked plates on trays erupt from the nearby kitchen. A cacophony of voices; plates glancing against each other with the force of swords in battle; glasses set on tables like mallets against sheet metal. Lights vibrating like strobes. Silently, I rest my head on the table. It is Mother's Day. 8 PM. Three hours of driving from Durango and we are in Española where the streets are lined with fast food Walmart chain link desperation poverty, and nature has been tucked away behind the concrete asphalt—just far enough away that it is lost. Forty-five minutes from home. They have to eat. My body is screaming, dying, assaulting me. My legs are going numb. A pain from my lower back rises up, wrenches my neck, twists my jaw and binds my head. I cannot cry in Chili's and so I keep my face still, impassive, expressionless, vacant.

"Happy Mother's Day," Devin says and smiles at me, checking.

And so I am struck again with the brutal reminder of what I'm doing wrong. Carpe Diem. I am supposed to be having a good time. I smile and the stretched, thin smile just makes it worse. I hate myself in this moment—for being the wrong mother. The mother of whom it is said constantly by one child to another, "She has a headache," the mother who needs it to be quiet, the mother who isn't having a nice Mother's Day, the mother who wishes she wasn't in Chili's, who can't eat anything normal at restaurants, who needs to support her neck—and can someone get her a place to rest her back, the mother—the only mother—who is too tired from watching soccer games to walk steadily to the car, the only mother in the world who gets frustrated at the sound of her children's laughter because it's like a bomb going off in her head. (There was a time, wasn't there, when laughter was not like a bomb going off in my head...I wish I'd known then how lucky I was.)

And I've just had it. I'm through with myself. I give up. I am supposed to be able to accept this pain. I am suffering because I resist it. If I could accept it, then it wouldn't hurt so much. If I could accept my children and their loud, bomb-blasting laughter and repeated getting up from the table into the walkways and the path of servers, then there would be no suffering. If I could accept that I can't accept it, then there would be no suffering. But there is suffering. There is tremendous suffering. And it is contagious. It infects everyone at the table as they hang by their fingernails on the expectation of my delight in Mother's Day, making small talk and glancing at me nervously. I am so—disappointing.

There is one job given to me worth doing—to be a mother—and I am screwing it up. And I cannot seem to figure out how to do it better than I am.

I think there is some lesson here, just out of reach; just behind a corner, that I can't see yet. I tell myself I am not supposed to see it yet. I am supposed to hang out here, increasingly desperate, until I am ready to learn something. Meanwhile, my ego is having a temper tantrum: throwing blocks and spitting, pulling hair, refusing to accept reality—just wanting anything other than the body and the familiar set of thoughts and emotions I've come to know as "me"—wanting to cut to the chase, come out on top; be crowned as a winner, able to laugh at my former idiocy, and have laurels set upon my brow. I want very badly to be an inspiration to everybody, unearned, and I don't want to spend time with the ugliness of pain and fear and disappointment and wanting things I cannot have. I want to to have survived.

This is what I'm like: I am not good with pain. But I like the after. I like the accomplishment of having lived through things. I feel elevated by the times I've spent with darkness, the prayers I've prayed in desperation, the emptiness I've stood in and stayed with and learned from. But I don't write much to you from there. I write from the after: the bliss where a child is suddenly handed to me, wrapped in warm receiving blankets—not the moment when I'm screaming that I cannot do this, that I want you to shoot me, that I don't have what it takes. I want you to see the victory and not the sobbing, bloody slog that took me there. I don't want you to see me scream.

But here I am anyway. When I am in pain, I shut down. I focus my eyes on a nearby tree through a window and I wait for the pain to go away. I pretend that I don't have a body, that I am astral projecting somewhere else. Every time someone speaks to me, asking if they can do anything, it disrupts my small sense of relief. When I am in fear, I press it deep down like a seed, far into the soil, so deep that the light can't get there, and I stand on top of where it's planted and bite my cuticles. When I am angry, I breathe deeply and focus on a stillness that I think is inner peace. I am shocked when fire blazes out of nowhere—anger out of nothing. Because I really wasn't angry. I was sure I was doing fine.

I think—have thought all my life—that I can get 'round myself; that I can cheat, that there's some way to get quickly to the moment of glory without paying the price of pain. Maybe this is why I get to have fibromyalgia and migraines and TMJ. I don't really believe in divine plans per se, but I do believe that the Universe just keeps presenting us naturally with opportunities to master things we haven't yet been able to learn. (The more I think about it, the more I think these two ideas are basically the same thing anyway.) If I have failed to learn how to live with myself while recovering from alcoholism and bulimia or getting divorced or having three kids or falling in love, then I get to keep developing chronic painful conditions, so that I can practice noticing that I can't really escape suffering. The Universe is boundless, generous, infinite. I get every chance I need to learn again.

At least, true or not, cast in that light—I'm doing this exactly the right way. I'm just a child being raised and making mistakes as I grow up. I'm up in the walkway of the restaurant again and I'm causing a disturbance, but I still get a chance to sit in a restaurant once more. No one ever takes the chance away. I still have my menu and my drink and my fork; I am taken here again and again, no matter what kind of scene I make.

"Suffer, Child," the Universe seems to say kindly. "Suffer your physical frailty. Suffer the pain of not being who you think I want. All these ideas are yours: 'Should be happy,' 'should be well,' 'should be calm.' Suffer as long as you need to. I will wait for you. There's all the time in the world."

And so my instruction is to suffer and really do it well; really notice it; to not give it short-shrift—to suffer so well and so authentically that I'm right there with myself—to finally just give up and let the suffering be there.

I can't do it yet. But I'm trying.

So—all this is to say: Happy Mother's Day. It's fine just the way it is.

Brooding

Another black australorp, brooding

"Where is Ninja?"

For a good five minutes, I examined the different parts of my yard: the lilac bush, the smaller hen houses, the garden beds, the underneath of the trampoline. Nothing. I started peering anxiously over the fence into the yard where my neighbor's eighteen year-old greyhound lives, scanning the ground for torn feathers or the unidentifiable lump of black that might turn out to be my missing bird. No Ninja.

I looked back at the hens again. There was Henny Penny. There was Sasquatch. There was Ostrich—all of them, eating scraps of kitchen leavings in the mounds of golden straw; very definitely three and not four birds. My little black chicken, I concluded, had been abducted by aliens. Mild panic set in.

After a minute of helpless contemplation, a thought occurred to me. I opened up the side panel of the hen house and there she was in the nest box, laying her egg at an unscheduled time. I thought first, Whatever, Chicken and then, Thank God. Problem solved. My heart slowly dropped backed down to a normal rate.

"I thought the chicken was lost!" I told my husband as I came in from the yard.

The next morning at scrap-time, the chicken was in the nest box again.

"Why are you laying your egg at breakfast time?"  I asked her. "You're missing strawberry tops and asparagus stems."

She looked at me, with that particular black australorp gentleness, like a chicken empath, and then settled back to her business, ignoring my intrusion on her work.

The next morning was the same. When I went out to clean the coop later on, I finally wised up. The chicken, at 1 PM, was still in the nest box.

"Devin!" I yelled. "This chicken is brooding!"

I reached my hand into the nest box to pet her and all the feathers puffed out in a ridiculous porcupine-puffer fish-chicken show of maternal protectiveness. A guttural percussive warning uttered from deep within her belly.

"Good grief," I said. Devin and Mikalh came over to look.

I lifted her up, just slightly, and saw that she was sitting on a clutch of everybody's unfertilized eggs, which we hadn't picked up since she'd been on them every morning I went out.

"Will she have chicks?" Devin asked me.

"Devin," I explained "we have no rooster."

"Why does she need a rooster so she can sit on her eggs?" he asked, thoughtfully.

Somehow, my children's understanding of human procreation has never quite extended to the avian world. I explain it repeatedly and yet it just won't stick. There is an egg, you see, and from it should come chicks. This is just basic knowledge. They are highly skeptical of my attempts to convince them otherwise.

"Let's get a rooster!" suggested Mikalh, helpfully.

Yes, because there is no situation that cannot be improved by an aggressive, strutting rooster who will crow and wake up the neighborhood in the wee hours of each morn.

Something smelled. Underneath the eggs Ninja was sitting on, one had broken and, with the warmth of her body, was emitting quite a reek.

"I have to get this chicken out," I told the kids. "Poor chicken."

Since no chicks were imminent, they lost interest and ran off to play basketball.

I lifted up poor Ninja, who had torn her belly feathers out and lamely placed some of them around the eggs all streaked with drying yolk. She made the guttural sound again and puffed up like a blown-up chicken balloon but did not peck me. She is just too gentle a girl. I set her in the straw where, right away, she began looking for an insect to eat without laying her feathers down.

I cleaned out all the broken egg and set aside the others for tossing while each of the other hens climbed into the nest box to personally find out what I was doing and see if they could be of any help.

"You're in my way," I told them.

This was in no way a problem for them. Coop cleanings are just about their favorite things.

The rest of the day, Ninja wandered the yard, eating and drinking normally and otherwise doing the chicken things she'd neglected recently but all the time puffed up to twice her normal size. The other hens followed her like a Greek chorus and offered commentary. I guess this must have gotten to be a bit much because later on, I found her having hopped the fence into my backyard, where she was wandering around with my dog.

"Poor Ninja," I told her.

She looked at me thoughtfully, with her usual Bodhisattva quality.

It took a couple of days to convince her that she wasn't going to hatch out eggs. She would seem to be broken of the habit and then somebody laid an egg in the nest box again and there she was, settled on everything.

You will sometimes hear people say that so-and-so "is brooding" over something. I never fully appreciated this before. This is quite what we are like. We are distracted perhaps for a moment, by a familiar touch and the possibility of an insect in the straw, but then something just seems to be missing for us. We are crying for meaning. So back to the nest box we go—to our self-imposed fast and dehydration and we'll sit here on this damn idea until something living comes from it! If someone tries to offer comfort, we'll puff up in otherworldly shapes, utter strange cries to tell them to get out of here. We think something important is happening.

But, no, it's just us—sitting on a clutch of ideas that will never break their shells.

Mindfulness with the Meth-Addicted Spider Monkeys

Photo Credit: Morguefile by mariocom20

Mindfulness. Doesn't that just sound like a good idea? I've had mindfulness on my mind. It's on my to-do list: become mindful—perhaps later, after I finish getting the house the way I like. Just before spring break, I went so far as to go to Tara Brach's website and poke around a bit. I liked what I saw, but I didn't have any time at the moment to watch any of her too-long videos because I was very busy checking my email and watching my children do all the things that they shouldn't do. So, I bookmarked it and added it to my list of things to accomplish over the vacation: clean out chicken coop thoroughly, de-clutter, become mindful watching Tara Brach.

Guess which thing I didn't do?

I had already spoken to my mindful friend Kristine about sitting with the Buddhist group at my church the week before. She was very encouraging and excited that I was interested, but also let me know that all of them mediated for half an hour at the beginning of each gathering. Half an hour. I still have very unpleasant memories of attempting sitting meditation in the past. You are, in fact, supposed to meditate if you are sober. I believe the step says: "We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out." The prayer part I've had down for years. The meditation part, I'll admit, has been a bit bumpier.

In my attempts to mediate properly over the years I have discovered these three things: breathing deeply is not necessarily relaxing when you are prone to panic attacks; spider monkeys on meth-laced Frappuccino regimens have less energy than my own ongoing narratives about myself, which run constantly and at full volume in my head; and sitting in meditative poses is as comfortable for me as being folded into a box. And now, I had fibromyalgia on top of all this.

Kristine encouraged me to tell the Buddhist group leader about my concerns. For some reason, this made me feel a great deal better. I would do this—after.

So, then it was the week after spring break. And Kristine had just gotten back from Mexico, so certainly she wouldn't be going and my kid and husband needed me to be home with them because they had just gotten back as well, so I didn't go then. I needed to go with someone, and there was no reason to be selfish about it either.

And then this last Sunday arrived. This time, I had emailed the leader and told him that I had very little experience with meditation and that I had fibromyalgia and wasn't sure if I could stay in one position for thirty minutes. He'd encouraged me to come and do what I could and said they'd help me to be comfortable. So, early, I texted Kristine to see what time it started and she said she wasn't going this Sunday but it started at 8 AM.

"Oh, OK then", I texted back."I'll wait until next week. I have a terrible headache anyway."

But she wasn't going to be able to go next week either and, it occurred to me, neither was I.

"Maybe I'll just go," I said.

I had a half an hour to decide. I'd been in some of the worst pain of my recent experience this last week. That was a very good reason not to go. And I'd have to walk in by myself. And what if my body freaked out immediately, or I had an attack of PTSD or something awful? I know me, and so I know I would just stay there, miserable, afraid to draw attention to myself.

Then I had this thought: This is you. This is your life. It's not about to be some other way. If you want to do this, bring the you and life that exists with you and just go and try.

So I went.

I did myself proud. I walked in, smiled, said yes I was Tara, and that I was going to need to lean against something so my jaw didn't go into spasm. The leader spent a good ten minutes thoughtfully setting me up on pillows and explaining exactly what would happen. Someone had a chime on their cell phone and, with all of us set up, it chimed.

My eyes were closed and I was in more or less the correct posture as I tried to focus on my breathing. The first thing I noticed was that there was a sharp pain in the center of my solar plexus when I exhaled which pulled through my chest to the center of my shoulder blades. It was probably costochondritis , which I already know that I have, but immediately I remembered an article I'd recently come across while sitting in a waiting room—the story of a marriage that survived MS.  In the article,  the foreshadowing of the husband's illness came when he experienced a symptom known as the "MS hug". I decided that this was what I was experiencing and began wondering how many of my symptoms were consistent with MS. All the while knowing that none of them were. This continued for some time before it became hard to think because the pain involved in maintaining my position became so large that thought was more or less impossible. Whatever thoughts I did have became largely focused on wondering how much longer this would last.

Meanwhile, over the top of this meth-Frappuccino chattering, there lay a very thin layer of stillness, like the membrane inside the shell of an egg. The thin-membrane of stillness hovered, unconcerned with the MS or the pain and compassionately resolved itself into remaining seated until the chime rung out again. The meth-Frappuccino spider monkeys began to notice this.

"Wow, I'm so deeply spiritual," one said.

"I'm actually not. Here I am thinking when I am supposed to be breathing," said another meth-addicted spider monkey.

They began an argument and made cases to prove their opposing points.

The membrane of stillness just paid attention to the pain increasing in my legs and chest and back and tried to locate a consciousness large enough to contain both the pain and the stillness all at once. My body started beating drums to let me know that we were done here and something terrible was happening and this needed to stop right now. The monkeys rambled on about my spirituality and Multiple Sclerosis and I continued to sit.

And then the chime rang. I opened my eyes and shifted my position. "Hallelujah!" my legs said. And I noticed that the pain, while still there, suddenly seemed smaller, and the consciousness around it seemed larger, despite the monkeys and all the arguments about MS.

And at that point I realized I was hooked. Just like the spider monkeys on their meth.

Love We Don't Deserve

Photo Credit: Morguefile by imelenchon

I have fibromyalgia. Because I don't write about it a lot, I think that I have some readers who don't know this. I have fibromyalgia and chronic migraines and TMJ, and this week, it was bad—all of it, at once. If you have people in your life who manage chronic illness, you may want to know that the reason they look like they're doing so well is because you normally don't see them when they are not doing so well. We tend to stay in, and we tend not to want to broadcast our pain into the public world because what we get back when we do doesn't always make us feel better, even though we are also dying for people to know what it feels like, in some weird, childlike way.

I wrote this because I decided that I was going to go crazy if I didn't, but I am sharing it, because someone else may feel like they are going to go crazy because no one feels the way they do. If you know someone like that, share this with them. They may feel better, if only because they are doing better than this. And, so you don't worry, even I am doing better than this. I am doing awesome. I am a great mother and I am still continuing to get up and care for kids and, in fact, educate them, and I have been nice twenty times for each time I haven't been. But this is how it feels to be in so much pain that you have to to do something and to find that there is nothing to do, and this is what it feels like to receive love inside of that space—at least for me. So, please use this piece to find compassion for yourselves—because we can all relate, on some level, to a pain too large to bear—and for others you come across in life who may behave like wolverines with their leg in a trap when you are just trying to be nice to them.

Tara

It took a while to notice that the pain had become a balloon inside which all the air was trapped and everything was expanded, and nothing could get out. For five days, it had been there, getting louder, and I had been enduring, and doing nice things, and now there was no endurance for it left. Now I was furious. I wanted to smash the breadth of it against something hard and watch it shatter, yelling “How do you like that now?” but there was nothing to shatter but my own plates and cups and ornaments and relationships. I wanted to scratch it and watch it bleed, but it didn’t have a body. It just had me, and after all these years, I am tired of watching myself bleed. I gnashed my teeth at it, and—mirror-like, it gnashed back.

As all this went on, my husband sat in the living room relaxing and my children watched something on an iPad that I’d told them they couldn’t be on until all the homework was done. And cups and dishes and coats and papers and shoes and cat hair and sounds were left all over the house, hanging onto and nullifying the neatness I can remember having won.

So, I got up to clean dishes, because if I didn’t I was going to have to smash them, and my husband said, “I can do that later, hon.” And I ignored him because the cups and the dishes and the coats and the papers and the shoes and cat hair and sounds were there now, not later, and later never fucking comes anyway. And then I decided that I wanted to smash my relaxing, not-helping family and watch them break against the wall like pieces of china just so that they would be silent and stop ruining everything. But I could remember having loved them a great deal and having hated myself for hurting their feelings before. And I felt sorry and ashamed and beaten and still-destructive all at the same time.

So, after the dishes were loaded, instead of smashing my family, I went to my bedroom and tried to focus all of my concentration into the part of me that could be still. I became a rock on an expanse of sand, just lying there on my bedspread, with no muscle pain tearing my body apart, and no jaw pain ripping open my skull, and no headache that bored into the thinking part of my flesh. I am just a rock, I thought. And a rock feels no pain…And my husband came and went like a timid mouse, bringing pills and putting up with me and suffering silently and distancing himself emotionally for his own protection but being good, and I just lay there and I just wanted someone—anyone, but especially him, to break the balloon and come in and get me or at least squeeze into that space and nestle beside me, for just a minute, so I didn’t feel so alone.

Instead, though, everyone stayed away and ignored me or did their best and always remembered that the balloon in question is where an angry, volatile, hurting person lives. And, instead, I went to sleep on waves of physical agony and despair and woke up still hurting and wanting to smash things.

But I also remembered that I didn’t want to spend the day in the balloon alone again, where the pain bounced off the latex walls in echoes and hit me again as it came back, so I sat down and wrote this, and then I gave it to my husband, who was going somewhere, and asked him, “Do you have time to read this now?” and he did.

And then, as his arms reached around me and the softness of his always-warmer caramel flesh pressed up against mine, all the pain still ripped through my body, but the aloneness slipped out like air through a tiny hole made by a pin in the balloon. And, because of this, I think I can get up and go take a shower now and, because of this, I think that I can get through at least one more hour. And because of this, I think that the Universe might love me, too. And I am so glad, because it is when I am most unlovable, when I am fighting and spitting and raging and sobbing inside, that I need this assurance the most. 

Sometimes, we all need to have access to that love we don't deserve.

The Human Heart

I am just a little frightened by the violence of the human heart.

I am out here on a road, with human hearts veering out of all reason, with no seeming sense of the power of the vehicles they drive, splashing twisted metal across the news as they break themselves and everyone around.  And I am in here: in this body, behind the wheel of my own human heart, where, occasionally out out on the road, I think, "Damn, I'm not sure how to drive this thing." I seem to lurch suddenly, when I was sure I had this down. Smooth sailing it is not.

And, reading the news with my morning cup of coffee, raising my family, I don't want to keep watching the world or myself make the same kinds of mistakes. I want us to grow up and learn something. "I can't bear to live through anything like another post-9/11," I think. I think it and catch the edge of bitterness in my thought.

Right now, I am teaching two of my children history. I believe in honesty. I believe in honesty, because lies about history are dangerous, dangerous things, but I also believe that I need to pass on a world that my children will ultimately believe can be good. To do this well requires thought. "The Americans...," my Native American son has taken to saying with a certain tone of anger in his voice. And this may well bother somebody, but that fact that he feels this way, to my mind, simply means that he is paying attention, that he is imaginative, and that he has absorbed compassion and can place himself in the shoes of  people living long ago. I think this reaction speaks well of him.

"But you are American," I told him."America is all of us. It is the descendants of the white slave owners and the the slaves and the Natives who lived here first. It is the descendants of all the immigrants who've landed on this shore since then. It includes the parts of America that used to be Mexico, and the Mexicans that have come here since looking for a better life. It is everyone. And the history of America is not just the history of what was done to the slaves and the Indians. It is the history of their resistance and their survival and the history of the abolitionists that said this wasn't right. This country began as a slave-holding country and soon, we will recognize gay marriage. We are getting better as our country gets older. American history is the history of that. And you can be very proud of that history."

"OK," he said, and he looked a little less piqued.

And yet, the fits and starts as we jerk around can make me a little ill. I am older and I am done being horrified by history, but I am not being horrified by the present. And I am not willing to be done, because the fact that I'm horrified means that I'm paying attention, that I'm imaginative, and that I have absorbed compassion and can imagine, at least in part, what it is to be a Newtown parent as Congress squelches discussion of gun control or a bystander watching the world explode at the Boston Marathon. I don't want to stop looking, and I don't want to lose myself. I am not always sure what it is in my power to do. Sometimes, it feels like not a lot.

I have decided that my primary sphere of influence is my own community. So, if I'm to learn to steer this human heart, my primary work is here, where I already am. That is why I try not to look away. I let myself be moved by the world. I let myself speak about being moved. I try to listen. I try not to make wedges but bridges, when I can remember to do that. I am, every moment, practicing my values to my children and to my Facebook friends, to my family, to my cat, if he will listen to me. That is all I know how to do. When I don't, I get a little smaller—make a self that's a little narrower and has a membrane that is designed to keep invaders, and a lot of beauty, out. So, I try—at least I try not to look away in the face of suffering, and I try not to let it make me hard, but to let my heart be soft, which means that rather than being angry, I am sometimes sad.

This week, I am sad and horrified, just like my son. And I think that's what I'm supposed to be.

Last week was golden. This week is sad. It's just that it goes this way. I have the luxury of saying this, since no one in my life has died or had their leg amputated, and no one in my life died in Newtown either and so I can walk away from the news and go back to chickens and children and things that seem to have stayed the same. But nothing stays the same. Not even here. Last week was golden, and this week is sad. And it goes this way, and I will not turn away.

The world—and my world, too—can keep on having my human heart.

Mexico

They are back—the husband and my eldest son, back from Mexico, where they went to build houses, back with tents and foam sleeping pads and dusty, dirty laundry and grime deep in their hair. They are back with gifts for the family: a chicken planter for me, some t-shirts, and a wonderful wrestling mask from Rowan for Mikalh.

They are back with inspiration. They left as pioneers—the first large batch of members from of our church to go on the  mission trip with the local church just down the road. They have come back having touched the sacredness of shared purpose and accomplishment.

In the parking lot, the vans pulled in, and out came teenagers, dazed and weary from the road. Behind  and around them were the shadows of even more tired adults. The kids wore t-shirts with lots and lots of tiny words, almost too many to read: "I want to have billions in the bank. I want to be successful. I want all of my endeavors to turn to gold." "DISRUPTED" was written through these words all across the front.

"It says sex on this shirt, Mom," Rowan demonstrated.

In the dark, the kids couldn't stop hugging each other. They piled around one kid and cooed his name. They jumped on each other.

"I want to go home," Rowan said. "I have to pee and vomit and take a shower." Fast food—road food—doesn't agree with him.

"You can pee and vomit in the building," Mike told him. "But the shower will have to wait. We have to unload and clean up."

Rowan, unperturbed, went off, hauled tools, put his belongings in the van. Minutes rolled by and I stood and watched the kids, glowing like fireflies in the dark.

"Are you all packed up?" I asked Rowan, as he passed by.

"Yes, he can go now," Mike told me.

But I watched Rowan, watched all the kids. In the dark, they hung together like insects clustered onto life-giving plants. As soon as they started leaving, it would really be over and they'd never all be together again. They hung in hallelujahs, in hugs, in glorious filthiness—together.

Then, finally, they started to disperse. All at the same time.

"I'm going to go home, take a shower, and go back to Mexico to build three more houses," Rowan suddenly said.

"Mom," he asked me as we got into the van, "I'm going again next year, right?"

"As long as you want, babe," I told him.

"When we handed over the key," he told me animatedly "I felt something in the place where I should have a heart."

So, I've decided that I really don't care if my son earns a lot of money or makes really great grades or does really well in his sport. Those things are nice, and sometimes helpful, but what I want for him—more than anything—is what he just found: his spirit somewhere, a reason beyond himself to be alive.

It's really all you ever need.

The Purpose of Weeds

Photo Credit: Morguefile by Heirbornstud

Last fall, I double dug a garden bed, shaped like a triangle, and seeded it with native flowers. Perennials for pollinators—their seeds spread too thickly, in hopes of some good luck. I want a new flower bed, one riotous with buzzing bees, dancing with butterflies—a flower bed of hyssops and prairie zinnias and the magenta of hummingbird mint, crowned by the nodding heads of purple coneflowers with their yellow coronas dipping reverently to earth. Something multi-colored up against the small expanse of blue grama grass and yellow-flowered yarrow that is my front yard. In fall, the seeds set and were fortified by chills in winter, settled under snow, and thought.

In spring, I am starting to see dandelions. Purslane. Pigweed. Clover. And a leaf or two of what I think might be zinnia.

These infernal weeds! What are they doing, encroaching on my tasty soil? Wetting down the area, I sit thoughtfully, pulling—grabbing up as much root as I can. Always weeds; like the unbeckoned thought across an empty mind, the shopping list that arises in the moment of a kiss, the ad for Viagra during family movie time. Weeds with roots that won't let go, that break off leaving bits of themselves sunk in mire. Weeds that tease me "Nanny-nanny boo boo," and pop up again once I've looked away; like the never-ending pile of papers accumulating by my keyboard, ever begging to be filed; like the disappointments I put away each night that wake up with me the next morning, fresh as if I've never told them to be gone. Weeds like the flaws in my very nature that spoil the pretty show I hope to make. I do the therapeutic work of yanking at them, then covered in dirt, I come in to teach my child about ecology.

This subject is my favorite; the science of sacred wheels. Nutrient cycles. Carbon/oxygen cycles. Food chains. Food webs. Life cycles. The world breathlessly passes energy from one hand to the next—from seed to mouse, from mouse to snake, from snake to hawk. The hawk's body decomposes on the earth, consumed by tiny organisms, made food by saprophytes, and it becomes a source of nitrogen for the tree that bore the mouse its seed. For me, a biology textbook is no less than the holy word. I speak as if in church: "photosynthesis." Everything has its purpose inside Nature—to maintain or restore balance to the system of which it is a part.

Purpose. These weeds in my holy triangle are there, of course, because I invited them in, by heaving up the turf and turning soil, disrupting vast colonies of microscopic life, turning in compost, and leaving the earth bare in wait for plants that would come later to a home I made for them. In moved the nitrogen fixers, to do the magic of making sugar out of air, the dandelions—bringing up nutrients and moisture with their deep tap roots. The earth, eschewing the vacuum I've created in a small pocket of her world, has gifted it with exactly what it needs to be healthy—the mother's milk of disturbed land. She will turn it, if I leave her, into forest, eventually: fixing nitrogen, stabilizing soil, holding moisture, creating a home for shrub-land then eventually for trees. It will never need to be watered or fussed at or fertilized. It will take care of all of that itself. And feed the pollinators, too. When will I ever learn?

Lying in bed with the thoughts I pull like weeds, I wonder what is their purpose. Are they out of nature, unholy, things to be cast aside—or are they instead the ugly nursemaids of my own nature, bringing up, from the deep, faint echoes of a source of truth I may not want to hear? Resentment, sadness, regret—seen in the correct light, are these not the pioneer plants, only first in succession to the restoration of a disturbed piece of mental land? Pull them out again and again and they come back, still trying to fill the emptiness that is always left behind. What courage and stillness would it take to allow them to spend their time, bringing life back to a damaged corner of my heart? To trust that later would come fuller plants, the shade of trees, the singing of birds—a system that was whole again?

Sometimes, I can feel the rightness of that still waiting in the bones of my mammal frame. And sometimes, that trust is too expensive and with a thrust of my spade, I dig in once more and pull out another weed.

Potentiality

Last summer's garden mid-June

You will find, now that it is the season, that I write about gardening a lot. I wrote about it a lot last year—my seeds, my soil, the inspiring mycorrhizal fungi building relationships in the earth. This has inspired some of my readers at various times to exclaim with admiration, "I garden too, but not so masterfully as you!"

Were any of these readers to visit my home they would find a woman whose counter is covered with bowls of soil and testing equipment, the maps of carefully planned garden beds, their crops all rotated from years before. Gardening books and notes are heaped upon the table. Ah, yes, they'd think, she really knows her stuff. But then, at length, they might notice that I have grass growing into my perennial beds and that my catmint is wilting, desperately in need of division and re-planting, which I keep putting off. They might notice that my Russian sage has spread its suckers and is taking over the world of soil within its grasp: an empire of unwanted xeric plant.

In the backyard run chickens, next to pieces of sodden cardboard I once thought I'd use for sheet mulching, and are digging themselves dust baths in what once long ago was turf; there is another garden bed next to dog poo, an abandoned light-saber and one single dessicated unmatched child-sized sock. The home of a master gardener is probably not the description that would come to mind. The usual comment is something like, "And this is legal here?" with a nod to the chickens and ducks.

Yet they would sense that my yard has the potential to be wonderful. And that is what I'm masterful at: potentiality.

I took a course some long years back—a seminar of sorts—in which we were asked to write down all the commitments that we had, everything small and large that we had a vested interest in bringing forth into the world. My list was longest, and so I won. After having done all this and stewed on it a bit, seen the commitments we had, which we hadn't acted on yet, and gotten all inspired by the largesse of our hearts, the seminar leader then informed us that we could easily winnow down our lists by considering them thus: the only things we were actually committed to were the ones we were acting on.

I find I often think of this. "You don't have a commitment, Tara," I hear the seminar leader say. "You have a fantasy."

If anyone is insulted on my behalf, they needn't be. I have, in the twelve intervening years, failed to bring one single thing into being from that list that I was not already acting upon then. I have not built a geodeosic dome or started raising dairy goats or become the leader of a seminar myself. And I have come to accept this commitment/action business as the gospel truth.

My life has long run like that list that I made when I was twenty-five. Become a writer. Get a career. Save humanity. Run a half-marathon. The noise and distraction of interests, like commercial breaks, which run across the screen that is my brain. What, I have been asking myself lately, is the program? What is the purpose? What is the desire? What unity is the rest of it all there to serve?

The answer, of course, is found where my hands are already dirty, in the evidence on the ground. It seems I want to be a student. No matter what I am trying to do, I surround myself with books. I experiment, my face streaked with soil as I mix test units to find and record the level of phosphorus, nitrogen, potash. I like to teach only because I'm learning as I go. In the yard, full of chickens with mysterious ailments and psychological quirks, seed beds ready for planting, years of experiments to try, I find my purpose, something worthy of my life.

Conversely, the pretty, kept-up house and yard I dream of will probably always remain a fantasy, as I walk by the sock yet one more time on my way to pick up a chicken in my arms.

Bones in a Bag: the Reduction of the Human Soul

Photo Credit: by T.Voekler Wikimedia Commons

On my kitchen counter: a half-gallon of vanilla soy milk, two cookbooks, an empty cup for coffee, a naked paper towel tube, and rodent bones in a bag.

I pour myself the cup of coffee, pick up the tube and, looking through it like a telescope, wonder about voles. An interesting fate, that—to have ended up inside an owl pellet carefully wrapped inside tin foil, crowded together with the skeletal remains of other voles. Then to be slipped into a plastic sleeve and stapled together with a minute magnifying glass and plastic forceps, sold as a hands-on element in a literature unit on Poppy, a book which has no voles.

Much later, after waiting all winter in a drawer, to be found, in pieces. "Oh, yes! Here is a complete skull!" Vertebrae choked with digested grey fur laid out like beads in a row, alongside slender ribs like tiny Cs which opened their jaws too wide. A jawbone complete with yellowed teeth, hipbones like odd spatulas. "Look, honey! It's a vole!"

This vole is old now. Its great-great-great-great grandchildren have probably already been raised and have bred and are now, as we speak, being consumed by hungry owls. The vole is archaic. Alive, he'd be a relic, a Civil War re-enactor in the streets of the lively now. He could tell us tales of the ways voles used to live—the simple, idyllic days of vole-ish harmony that went before. Instead, though, he's been scraped off my counter and placed carefully into a sandwich bag.

I am forced to wonder: what would I be, once reduced to my components, laid bare and labeled according to a chart? This metatarsal laughed uproariously at The Big Lebowski, no matter how many times it saw the movie—it just laughed and laughed aloud? The third vertebrae up loved lilacs. The lower mandible made Christmas cookies with its children every year. This rib cage, intact, provided the nurturance that raised three sons with all its heart.

It seems ridiculous, to be so reduced. And yet we do reduce each other. Right down to the bones.

I had, this week, a most unsatisfying set of conversations with some of the staff of my son's school. It has been difficult to put my finger on what was so insidiously soul-sucking about these exchanges, why they felt like entering a strange land in search of allies and leaving instead at war. Looking at this bag of bones, I know.

In the reflected words of the school counselor, I felt myself made small as the spit-up vole—felt my heart picked up and examined, laid down and labeled; one word applied, unsaid but loudly shouted, for all the fierce love for my child, my desperate desire to see the world do right by him:

"Difficult."

And so the label will be stuck. Ranks closed, rude politenesses were offered, the smug certainty of barely-restrained scorn was held in check until the counselor could get off the phone and tell a colleague what a pain in the ass this woman was.

I am sorry that it went that way instead of how I hoped. I look in this bag. Bones, devoid of flesh and meaning. Devoid of motherhood or fatherhood, absent context—swallowed and spit up. I do not know this counselor, whether she is a mother, whether she ever lost a child. I do not know the mistakes she thinks she made or the wars she is fighting to preserve the children placed under her charge. She is nothing to me but the woman who is treating me like a problem while I am trying to help my child.

Perhaps I will write her a thank you note. Or, perhaps, I will just remember that I know less of her than nothing—her name and her title, as meaningless, after all, as old bones in a bag.