On stillness and mud…

I tend to be in motion a lot. My beloved dog Ariel who died two years ago lived in 13 homes during her 14 years with me. I love moving: discarding unused things, stripping down my possessions to nearly nothing, cleaning the old space and locking the door behind me, filling the new space in new and interesting ways.

And I love travel: If you were to ask me about the happiest time in my life, I would describe the two weeks I drove alone across country from North Carolina to my new life in Oregon in 2003. I think I could live quite happily in an RV.

But like all of our personal qualities, there exists a shadow side to my exhilarating need for movement. A friend close to me suggested recently that I skitter away when things get tough rather than staying through the hard times. Ouch. I don’t want to think that my adventurous spirit is perhaps protecting me from something darker and scarier. One thing I know for certain is that we grow through the hard times. I hate to think I’d denied myself opportunities for growth out of fear or ignorance. Ouch again.

Here’s a metaphor for you: If you want to look into the clear waters of a pond, to see the tiny minnows and crayfish who live there, if you want to witness your clear, true reflection in the smooth surface of the water, you must sit very, very still and wait. Clarity in water and in life cannot occur if we jump in to the muddy shallowness of it and thrash about.

Another: Parker Palmer (in “Let Your Life Speak”) says the soul is like a wild animal in the forest. If we crash along through the woods making all kinds of noise, shouting into our I-Phone, the wild animals disappear. They know better than to relate themselves to that kind of disjointed chaos. But if we sit quietly, letting the rush of the wind through the boughs of trees lull us to mindful peace, the animals will emerge and join us. I once had a raccoon walk right up to me while I practiced this. He never knew I was there until he was practically in my lap. It was magic.

Our souls are like those wild animals. When we crash through our days mindlessly, the soul stays well hidden. Facebook is not a friend to the soul. So days, and weeks, and a lifetime can pass by in a blur of activity and movement. It is only in those moments of perfect stillness that we hear the small, still voice inside of us gently directing us to what is true and right.

As winter presses in, my fourth in Minnesota, I’m scaling back on my movement. My freezer is stocked with soup and homemade applesauce. I spend one hour every morning quietly, meditating and then writing. I’ve got a solo retreat planned during the Thanksgiving holiday, a time to be alone and quiet in the woods, to reflect on the winter to come and on the 37 years that have already passed.

I invite you to find your own quiet place. There is a small, still voice inside of you as well, longing to be heard.

Nobody says it better than David Whyte. So I leave you with his poem, The Winter of Listening.

On marriage….

What I’m about to say about marriage is going to anger some people. That’s fine, I can take it. My disclaimer (in an effort to cut down on negative feedback) is that 1) I think marriage as an institution is generally a good thing. I like the idea of standing up with another person and saying, “You know what? Life is hard. And if we can pull together to support and care for one another and make our time here a little easier, then let’s do it.” And 2) I know a lot of people have great marriages and are very happy. Yay for you!

But here’s the thing: I see a lot of the opposite. And frankly, a I see lot of marriages that make the couple involved happy, but that would make me want to jump out of a window and run for the hills.

There’s a lot of love gone bad around me these days. Not so much in my own life, but within a lot of marriages between people I know. In the past year, I’ve heard stories of abuse, closet alcoholic husbands, anti-depressants, and general dis-ease. A lot of these couples got married young, in their early to mid-20’s. Now as middle age settles in, the flaws and cracks are becoming ever more apparent.

In my 20’s I envied these couples. I admit it with some reservation. I envied their evident love for one another, the big party thrown by their parents, the matching china and silverware. Eating at home alone off my chipped stoneware china from Wal-Mart seemed kind of pathetic after the elaborate commitment ceremony of a wedding.

But now, 10 or 15 years after that magical day, many of these couples are floundering. Some say a covenant before God has been made and must be honored at all costs. While I agree that relationships go through up and down periods, and that making love work can truly be work, mostly I wonder if we’ve set up an unrealistic standard for ourselves.

Let’s take, as an obvious example, Jon and Kate Gosselin. She’s become the martyr, he the devil who left her. I think both of them have displayed some pretty silly behavior in recent months. But maybe the reality is closer to this: two people meet, they fall in love, they live together for a while. Sometimes they grow together. Sometimes they grow apart.

It’s a radical notion, but what if instead of blame and lawyers two people could look at each other, thank one another for what was good in the relationship, and go their separate ways in peace to write the next chapter of their destiny?

On a personal note, nothing galls me more than family members of mine who look at me with something akin to pity that I haven’t married. Here’s the thing: beyond fleeting yearning after weddings, getting married has never been a goal of mine. Having children even less so. I am wired for movement – my goals in life have been to travel, expand my mind and my heart, meet as many people as I can, and to become the person I am meant to be on this earth. For me, this path has not included marriage to this point.

And what’s crazy is these same relatives who pity my contented singleness are in pretty lifeless marriages themselves. It’s insane to me that people living within a system that no longer works for them want desperately for people like me to join up.

Being conscious is hard. I’m not going to lie. But given the choices of following the status quo just for the sake of appearing “normal” or living an authentic life, I’ll choose option 2 every time.

Scared…

I was talking to my guru-esque cousin Kathryn last night about life and stuff. We are Olympic-caliber life-discussers. I attribute about 92% of all the good advice I’ve ever gotten directly to her, typically while sitting on her couch eating popcorn and drinking baby Cokes, the kind in the 6.5 ounce returnable glass bottles. They’re the best. If they stocked baby Cokes at the UN, those clowns might make better decisions.

So I called Kathryn in the midst of a mild existential crisis, predicated by the end of my relationship with my boyfriend of the past four months (a spectacularly fiery blowout, really impressive) and onset of winter. Feeling stagnant and kind of frustrated, I longed for her brilliance. For clarity.

I’m torn right now between my responsible self (see previous post) and the part of me that wants to buy that pink RV I saw for sale by the side of the road. That part of me wants to see the sun rise over the Grand Canyon in the morning and set over the Pacific Ocean in the evening. The wanderer, ever restless.

The wandering part of me wants more than a safe, academic life. It wants me to be a writer, someone who eats cereal at 2am while pounding out a chapter, who rejects conventional ideas about an appropriate bedtime for a 37 year old adult.

At the same time, this scares the shit out of me.

Because by golly I could fail miserably after months of slacking off, end up living in my parents basement watching TV at 2am and wondering where my life went tragically wrong.

I tell Kathryn this and she gently says, “Have you ever done that before?”

Well, no.

“Do you think you’re a slacker?”

No, probably not. I have a PhD and I ran a marathon and wrote a textbook and everything. So just maybe I’m a hard worker. “So what do you think I should do?”

“I think you need to do the thing that scares the shit out of you.”

It’s powerful medicine, to think of life this way. To turn it upside down and realize that what excites us and what scares us are just two sides of the same coin.

I still don’t know what the next phase of my life is going to look like. I have it good here, and I like my job. But it’s an enlivening thing to be open to that which is terrifying, to know that that which threatens and scares us might actually be the path, the way.

So what about you? What scares the shit out of you, and what are you going to do about it?

And when you feel scared, why not turn to Michael Franti?

Responsible to who?

I’m going to admit it. I’m a responsible girl.

I want to be punk. I do. I really, really want to be a crazy, hippie, free-spirit type. I want to not care what anyone thinks about what I say or do. But I do care. I care right now what you’re thinking about this as I write it. And I may not even know you. How weird is that.

I blame my genetics in part. My grandmother (let’s call her “Nana”) is the most responsible person on the planet. In fact, she believes she is responsible for everything. She worries incessantly about me. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration. Her worry is unceasing. In my family, if you’re late for dinner it’s because you are dead by the side of the road in a car crash or you’ve been abducted or attacked by tigers. Common causes for mild lateness are discarded like used tissues: stuck in traffic, lost car keys, or late meetings are never considered as possible causes. Only death and dismemberment will suffice. Nana believes her worry will keep me safe. In fact, all it does is keep her safe from accepting that I like to travel and move around a lot. She would really like me to live near her so she can keep an eye on me. You can imagine how little I fancy that idea.

So I feel responsible to my family (all of whom are worriers to different degrees). I want to lessen their concern, I do. But I keep doing crazy things like moving across country and getting graduate degrees and dating strange men. I feel guilty sometimes, but at the end of the day, when choosing between making them happy and making me happy, I choose myself most of the time.

I used to wonder if it was selfish, this single-minded quest for fulfillment and self-actualization. Whether in the pursuit of my dreams I was accidentally screwing up someone else’s. Like Nana’s dream that I will settle down, marry a nice man, and have babies.

Brace yourself, because I’m going to propose a radical idea here. What if we were all a little more selfish? I’m not talking about walking out on your family or stealing from corporate or anything like that. I’m talking about higher-order selfishness. The belief that we each have a significant contribution to make during our short lives here on this tiny planet, and if we don’t get around to it, our contribution to the symphony of life will be lost forever.

See, I’m torn by my responsible nature. I want to work hard, save money, do the right things. But often what is “right” for me is confusing or downright threatening to someone else. Nana doesn’t understand why I travel to a third world country every summer. It scares her pantaloons right off. But it’s what I’m supposed to be doing. I feel the responsibility in my bones to contribute what I can to create greater equity in the world.

At the same time, I fear destitution. I fear living in the van down by the river. So even though other paths call to me (writer, poet, wandering muse) I keep them tucked safely into an hour or so each day until I’m strong enough to leave the safety of these shores and begin an even larger journey. This is my struggle. What is yours?

To whom are you responsible? How do you keep yourself trapped? What keeps you from selfishly liberating your dream from it’s tiny box and letting it roar into life?

If you’re not responsible to that dream, to your calling, then what are you missing?

Dating – a Memoir…

This is a piece I wrote about dating post break-up, about seven years ago. I am happy to say that my current dating life looks like this: With Oscar, sometimes in Las Vegas, sometimes in Rochester, sometimes in Guatemala, sometimes in…

Read on! Enjoy -

The Thing About Dating

And here’s the thing about dating: I hate it.

I hate it so much I think there must be something wrong with me, so I buy books on how to do it so I can feel less like an ass when someone asks me out on a date.
And all these books, they have the same message: that dating is fun and everyone (i.e., me) has the wrong attitude about it.

According to this book, I should have two, three, four men in rotation at any one time. I should create a graph to help me track my many, many dates, and to note where in the courtship process I am with these many, many eligible men.
Here’s how my graph would look right now:

Scott – Had first date. Terrible. Nothing in common. No desire to ever spend time with him again (yet the books say I should give it time, not to judge too quickly). Will avoid his calls for the next couple of weeks until he finally gives up.
Joe – Does not want to date me. Has other relationship that seems quite serious. Yet will drop everything and run to him the minute he calls and begs forgiveness.
Security Guard-guy on campus – Came by office and asked for my number. Found out later he’d just been fired for dating an undergraduate student (not allowed). He stopped by my office just before being escorted off of campus. Does not look promising.

My graph sucks.
And then there’s the whole flirting thing. I can flirt if it is planned and expected. So for example, if I am at a party and see a cute guy with no wedding ring at the buffet table, I can take a moment, gather myself, come up with a pithy, witty line. I’ll walk up to him and it will go something like this:
“Hey, you gonna eat all those cheese cubes, or are you gonna share?”

Seriously. This is the best I’ve got. Most guys just look nervous and shuffle away, but at least I got to flirt on the offensive. In bars or other settings where I don’t have a chance to gain the upper flirting hand, it’s even worse.
He approaches me: “Hey, how’s it going, my name’s Jim, what’s yours?”

Me: “Oh, hey. Umm (spill some wine, now it’s running down my chin onto my shirt). I’m Cyndi. How’s it going?” I mop red wine off my white shirt and by the time I look up, he’s moved on.

The thing is, see, I don’t want to have to do the work it takes to weed through most men I might date. Most of them aren’t right for me, really. Most don’t give a crap about poetry, or these little stories I write, or politics, or determining the nature and existence of god. Most aren’t enchanted by my collection of Audrey Hepburn movies. Most don’t understand my existential need for acres and acres of psychic space, or my anti-social behavior in the morning. Most won’t understand why I want to travel alone sometimes, or my deep need to make a difference in the world.
So now the books sit quietly on a shelf, read and understood but not implemented. Because I don’t want to date, frankly. I want to find myself on a quiet Friday night, sitting in comfortable silence in the dark shadows of my back porch. I want to sit next to him, an inch or so between us, so we can feel the heat of one another without actually touching. I want us both to look up into the night sky and marvel at the stars, the sound of city traffic reaching us through the trees, crickets and cicadas singing and reminding us that summer is fleeting and this moment was created for just this very purpose, just for us.

On bathrooms and life…

This week has been such a roller coaster. It’s my last week of summer vacation and I decided to remodel my bathroom. It occurred to me on Monday that perhaps this wasn’t the most relaxing way to spend this last glorious week of freedom. But I had 1) money (from teaching at the University of Iowa last week) and 2) help (Julie’s saintly father). And I’ve wanted to redo that awful outdated bathroom since I moved in three years and four days ago.

So it started out easily, beautifully, I was full of energy and hope. I sanded and scraped and painted and pretty quickly everything looked changed. Satisfaction filled my heart. The outcome (entirely positive) seemed assured and inevitable.

Then came yesterday. I screwed up one precious plank of vinyl flooring, which left me short for finishing the closet floor. My thumb hurt from working the box cutter. I measured and measured and still screwed up. Suddenly it wasn’t so easy.

I had an iced tea with vodka and tried not to cry.

Then I decided to install the new light fixture. I’m good at this – I’ve replaced a half dozen light fixtures in my house. I figured a boost of confidence was all I needed to get through my slump. But the light fixture wiring is off center. The old fixture had a coarse extra hole cut in the back, off to the left to accommodate. I don’t own anything to cut metal with, plus I wouldn’t know now to do it if I did. So stuck again.

More spiked tea, more tears.

Then I thought “The faucet!” Easy! Comes with instructions! But again, the plumbing is off center and I don’t have the necessary parts or tools. At this point I gave up, watched some South Park, and ate chips and guac leftover from lunch at Chipotle. I was filled with self-doubt and anxiety. I could hardly sit still. I had a hard time figuring out how all this would work out….

And then I got it. This is life. This is my life right now. I’m searching and listening for my true calling. I’m searching and listening for clues, hints, of where I might live or what people I might meet. I’m wondering if I want to write more, teach less, or vice versa. I’m wondering about love, and what it holds for me in the coming months. I’m wondering, wondering.

The thing is, I don’t have all the tools I need yet to figure it out. There are people to meet, conversations to have, and places to visit before I can find the next step. I need to keep writing, even through the stuck places, and carve out time each day for listening, for silence, so I can hear the still small voice inside of me that has the exact answer I am seeking. And it will come in its own time. Not on my schedule, not at my command.

So thanks to you, freakin’ bathroom, for reminding me about the importance of process. Thanks for forcing me to trust myself to find the answer. Thanks for making me ask for help, to ask questions. And thanks to all of you for your support and compassion as I sort it all out, plumbing and life.

For exciting photos (really! exciting!) of my remodel, see my facebook profile.

Alone…

I found this quote today:

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; … if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.” [Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Idea," 1818]

Aside from the obviously outdated gender references, I love this.

I have always been a person who loves solitude, time by myself. I don’t just like it, I crave it. I need it. I wallow in it and luxuriate in the grand scope and scale of being alone. When I am alone I can be totally myself. As a child it was the only time I could truly be me.

As an adult, I’ve expanded myself more into the social world… I’ve come to also love being in rooms crowded with people, sweating beer bottle in hand, laughing at random jokes and admiring the colors of the clothes we wear out to impress. And after the party, there is nothing more lovely than the utter silence left in the wake of all that activity. Cleaning up after a party is one of my favorite activities. Restoring order to chaos. Returning to a place of aloneness.

I spent most of the past year very intentionally alone. I cut way back on my social calendar. I salsa danced less. I did not date, with purpose. I wrote and cooked lots of elaborate meals and joined Netflix and visited the library often. I took trips alone to cabins deep in the woods, to see who I was without the white noise of my professional life as a companion.

I’ve come out of that aloneness stronger, calmer, and wiser about what I need to thrive in the world. I also emerged from that long dark place ready to bring the “me” of my solitude to out into the larger world. It’s time to speak up, I know.

Since then, my first book has been published. The second is underway. A third is lurking in the back of my mind. I’ve been hired for my first consulting job. And my goal for this next year is to follow my calling, whatever and where ever that may be. And during my travels in Guatemala last June, I crashed headlong into romance with a man who is decidedly not like anyone I’ve ever met before. So great change is afoot.

And none of it would have happened without my year of aloneness. It was necessary for the journey to unfold.

Why I hate cell phones….

I hate cell phones. H.a.t.e. them.

So a quick disclaimer – I think the I-Phone is kind of neat and the apps are spiffy. But I’m a Mac user, so I’m biased to begin with. But in general, I think cell phones are complete crap, and I’m here to tell you why. And now, I bust out the list.

1. HUMANS ARE NOT MEANT TO BE ACCESSIBLE ALL THE TIME. This is really my main argument. There’s, like, entire religious movements based on the principles of mindfulness, clarity, peace, and stillness. Cell phones and their bastard children, text messages, promote none of these. My friends (credit to J. McC.), there will never be a religion built on the practice of constantly barraging each other with cutesy emoticons and abbreviated vernacular. And frankly, I trust my man the Dalai Lama more than I trust Steve Jobs.

2. I love you, but back up off my grill. I love my friends. LOVE them. And I would do almost anything for the people I love. But when I finally get home after a day of constant contact with my students, coworkers, and affiliated others, I need a little space to be quiet. I’m an introvert you see. Space is necessary for me to be a functioning human being. So I DO want to talk to you, I do. But just not every minute of every day. Mama needs some peace, dig? So I need a phone that I can walk away from and leave far behind. It’s not you, it’s me.

3. Cell phones are really NOT a necessity. How many times has this happened to you? You’re in, say, the grocery store, buying your mac and cheese or chevre or cocoa puffs or what have you. A cell phone rings -typically the ring tone is Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack and the terrifically unsexy person who answers it has a conversation that goes something like this:

“Hello?”

“I’m at the store”

“…in about an hour. I have to go by the drycleaners.”

“Yes, I have the cocoa puffs and the chevre.”

“In the dryer.”

“Yep, I’m still a jackass.”

“OK, love you.”

I mean seriously. How necessary is this conversation? The answer: not at all. It’s annoying to me, to others, and probably to the person on the other end of the line. I would wager that about 95% of the conversations we have on cell phones, on the fly, are totally unnecessary. And these little buggers are supposed to be time savers.

4. Finally, the misc. section of my rant. First, texting and calling while driving are stupid, irresponsible behaviors and we all should just stop. Please, stop. Second, I saw a piece on the Today show this morning about teenagers who gave up their cell phones for 10 days and they all reported the CRAZIEST behaviors emerging as a result. Stuff like doing their homework, exercising, and talking to their families at dinner time. Can you imagine the social revolution that might occur if we just shut the damn things off for a few hours each day? Radical.

OK, enough of my old man rant. I’m off to watch Matlock.

HOME

Re-entering the blogosphere after a long absence…

I’ve had myriad technical problems at home – at one point two weeks with no phone or internet – the details of which I won’t bore you with now (maybe later). I have to be honest, I found the total absence of technology really liberating for the most part… I’m not a phone talker anyway, so the silence of no phone ringing and no electronic buzz made my find feel clear, ready for new ideas.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about homing pigeons lately and the string that binds our heart to a certain place or places. I’ve been thinking about those pigeons who know with certainty where they are going and where they belong… their destination is clear and they will fly themselves literally to death to realize it. My life feels more and more like it’s unfolding itself in a similar way.

“Home” has always felt elusive… I didn’t like the town I grew up in when I lived there as a teenager (though now I think it’s one of the great underappreciated cities in the South – go to Roanoke, Virginia everyone). I didn’t feel comfortable in my high school or in my house or in my own body. I left for college hoping to find a fit, my spot.

Since then, I’ve had varying degrees of success in finding a place that felt like home, in relationships and geographically. My house now is truly my structural home, but not because of it’s location in Rochester. My house is home because of the lilac bush that is blooming now in my back yard, because of my sweet puppy who snores quietly beside me, and because the walls are in bright colors that sooth me and remind me of my other home in Central America.

There’s another layer of home that has been pulling on my heart in the past few months. Home for me is the Atlantic Ocean, gliding in a kayak through the marshy creeks of the Intercoastal Waterway, peeling and eating shrimp on the back porch, skin sticky with sunblock, walking on the beach on a balmy night under a full moon hunting for crabs. Home.

Home is also the Blue Ridge Mountains – the cool, damp patches of air that mysteriously appear when I’m hiking alone, bringing to mind haunting spirits and the deep history of Virginia; the way they give my eyes a place to rest when I look toward the horizon; the utter, complete silence that descends at sunset. Home.

And more and more I’m coming home to myself. I stayed at home last night, on a Friday, all alone, watching a movie. I didn’t mind at all and didn’t feel the least bit lonely. I wonder if I should be getting out more to meet that boyfriend my 91-year old next door neighbor keeps asking me about, but I just can’t work up the energy to care. Not that I don’t want to date, but just that I’m so content with my own company I find myself mostly failing to worry about it. Home.

Summer has started for me officially. I’m in my “shake down week” when I allow my body to detox from the stress of the academic year and let it fall back into it’s natural rhythms. I feel certain this summer holds the key to my next step home, and I’m not sure what it is.

So I’m clearing the space and calming the weather so that homing pigeon can find it’s way. So that string attached to my heart can pull be back to where I am meant to be.

Birth Day!

It’s here. The day I look forward to all year. My birthday!

Think about it – we have two days in our whole lives that are permanently etched in stone for the ages: the day of our birth and the day of our death. It’s pretty powerful, yes? I’m not trying to be morbid here, but this is our reality. These are two inescapable days.

I think there’s something magical about the calendar rotating back to the exact moment of our introduction onto this planet. Today it is cold and kind of snowy here in Minnesota. What was it like the day I was born in Virginia? Daffodils were blooming, forsythia was out in force. I wonder what kind of mood my mom woke up in… did she know that April 1 was the day? Was she grumpy and sick of being pregnant? Was she ready and excited? What else was going on in that hospital that day? People were coming in, going out, being born, dying, getting sicker, getting better. The whole tapestry of life was unfolding and I was one small part of it. Amazing.

Birthdays are not so welcome for many. My mom hates them. She began saying “I’m too old to….” when I was about five (at that time she was 33, four years younger than I am now). There are indeed a few things I’m too old to do. I’ll never be a professional gymnast or an astronaut. I’m too old to try out for American Idol. On the flip side, I’m not flexible, scientific, or vocally gifted enough to do any of these things anyway, so no big loss.

The things I’m really passionate about I’ll never be too old to do: to travel, meet new people, write, read, love. The things that really matter are available to us all the time, regardless of age. This is why I love birthdays. Because every year I grow less fearful about stepping out and doing the things that REALLY matter.

So happy Birth Day to me, and to you.