Last week, on my drive to work, I was seized by the power of spring. The experience hinged on the up-close sighting of a majestic osprey in a location where I had never seen one before - a place I cruise by at 40 MPH two times a day, five days a week. Fit to burst, I struggled to squeeze the experience into words during my lunch hour. Since that day, spring's wonders have continued to unfold daily in the desert-prairie cusp-land we call home, and that osprey has become my daily companion. Today, I captured the bird on its perch, fish in claw, and in flight. I wanted to share these glimpses of this fierce and lofty creature, who cawed at me and my zoom lens, even causing me to duck at one point, under the impression it was preparing to reward my curiosity with its talons. As accompaniment, I share below my feverish dispatch from the morning of my first encounter with the bird. Rounding a curve this morning - farm fields to my right, Pecos River to my left - I saw, of all things, a massive osprey out my open window, just 8 feet away, atop a telephone pole on the river-side of the road. Sufjan Stevens’ song “Jacksonville” played in the background...It was a surreal, cinematic moment that swelled with all the migratory restlessness, fecundity, and green-gold fringe of spring. It was as though the road were a fern’s spiral unfolding into bloom as I drove, and at the same time, that the fern’s unfolding was a song, with the osprey as its crescendo. Every morning lately, my drive to work through farm fields on the Eastern edge of the Chihuahan Desert has been punctuated by moments like this. Cinematic moments filled with glimpses of wild creatures (coyotes, hawks, rabbits, and all manner of migratory birds) roaming freely, and perfumed by the smells of the desert coming back to life – grass shoots pushing up through hard ground, pollen-bearing tassels releasing from dry limbs, soil overturned and mixed with pungent manure. I am witnessing the great greening after the browning (of winter) and before the browning (of summer) – the brief excess of green between the desert’s more austere seasonal bookends. No matter where you find yourself, spring – in its time – intoxicates, with its waves of pollen, its infinite resurrections, its nests laden with eggs, its tides of animals and insects crawling, galloping, flying over the earth in search of food, mates, warmth, relief from heat. Spring enchants with its delicate clouds rimmed in silvery light, calls us out of our hibernation by inching up the volume on the Sun’s intensity, stirs our animal natures with the desire to bare skin to sun and touch bare foot to earth. It pummels us delirious with cool, humid wind, inspiring us to come a bit unhinged and sip the silky air like an undiluted spirit. It is good to take note of this fleeting shift, to drink unabashed from it and to be suffused by its promise of newness. Spring is a hopeful season – foolishly so. I drink hungrily of its hope and of its quixotic energy, on the premise that these elements might sustain me through more monotonous and entrenched seasons. I cannot, but want to, capture spring’s essence – squeeze it into a nickel-sized truffle and offer it to you to melt on your tongue, to savor.
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Two weeks ago, on Mother’s Day, the 50-something woman at the checkout line asked me, “So, do you have kids?” When I smiled and responded, “No,” she tried the next-obvious test of a woman’s nurturing instincts: “How ‘bout a dog?” “No,” I laughed, “I don’t have any pets either…just a lot of plants.” This week, the same check-out lady – who has the warmest smile with the loveliest wrinkles at the outer edges of her eyes – tried again: “So you don’t have any kids, still?” It’s like she was trying to recall if I was the same woman from two weeks ago, and at the same time, expressing her confoundment that a woman who looks to be between 35 and 40 and seems in reasonably good health, has somehow defied the inevitable fate of becoming a mother. Today I reminded her again of my many plants. “Why so many? What are you going to do with all of that stuff [the pending vegetables, she meant]?” I imagine if I had answered that I had 4 or 5 kids, she would not have expressed surprise, just a kind of mutual understanding. But to have no kids and yet a lot of plants struck her as odd to the point of requiring an explanation. My grandfather, Elliott, was a scientific and gifted gardener. He kept journals, taping photographs into their pages and jotting notes even in the rain, so that the ink on his journal pages became spotted and bled – its own visceral record of that day’s conditions. He possessed both skill and passion for cultivating the fruits of the earth, and took great delight in his annual delivery of pungent fish-based fertilizer. My father also gardened at times. There are memories of a lovely garden at our home in Pittsburgh (a favorite home from a gypsy-like childhood that took us from Niagara Falls to suburban Atlanta). I would venture out to the garden that sat atop the retaining wall at the base of our steep back yard in Pittsburgh's Carrick neighborhood, and examine the rich black soil beneath the lettuce leaves each morning for snails. I was was thrilled to find them both in and out of their shells. I imagined the garden as a labyrinth from the snails’ perspective and savored my early-morning communion with these mysterious creatures. I particularly loved seeing their whole bodies seize up as their antennae yielded in my direction, sensing the presence of my 6-year old human body. As an adult, however, gardening eluded me. I always enjoyed fresh, local produce, and noticed how my body seemed to hum after eating tomatoes, squash, or cantaloupe just plucked from the vine. But for years I was far too busy and far too transient to consider gardening. The few plants I attempted to keep – often in my art studio or kitchen – usually died from neglect. In 2013, when my boyfriend Jason and I were in our first year of living together at an apartment in a congested part of Atlanta, Jason decided to claim four of the raised beds in our apartment complex’s community garden (he had little competition). Having grown up with parents and grandparents who faithfully planted and tended big gardens each year as a matter of subsistence, Jason was eager to create his own garden as a way of putting down roots and feeling more at home in our strange urban landscape. While he worked out of town as a geologist doing field work each week, come the weekends, he’d invite me to join him as he sowed new seeds, plucked weeds, or erected a trellis for pole beans. His eager invitations were almost always met with the same response: I was too busy to join him. As a ceramic sculptor and art instructor teaching college courses and classes at several different community centers across Atlanta, I was the least fun girlfriend ever. When not teaching or commuting to and from teaching, I spent the bulk of my time crafting lesson plans, grading student work, applying to teaching jobs, or working in my studio. I was slogging through, waiting to land that long-sought full-time college art teaching job, at which point (I told myself), my “real life” could begin. Meanwhile, Jason conjured carrots, eggplants, green beans, and peppers from the soil of our community garden. He took over another bed and then another, triumphing over plunderers and vandals, and taking a young boy named Zalen – who often played unattended – under his wing as a sort of garden helper. Jason tried to mask his disappointment at my lack of participation in his gardening efforts (which he hoped would be our gardening efforts), but I could see the secretly crestfallen look in his eyes every time I declined his invitation to join him for weeding or harvesting. Fast forward two years, and much has changed. More than can be summarized in a few short sentences. Gardening, for me, has emerged as a call (at once instinctively human, ancestral, and personal) to slow down, to cultivate and tend, to practice patient effort, and – perhaps most obvious yet most significant – to literally put down roots. Jason and I have struggled lately with the notion of where, how, and when we envision putting down roots in our lives together. We keep bumping up against questions we can’t answer as we consider the complicating factors and desires that differ and run at cross-purposes to our circumstances. What I feel God is showing me in this season of my life is that surrender yields the clearest path to peace. There are the stories we tell ourselves about what will make us happy, about where we want to be, about who we are and what we “should” be doing with our lives. And then there is our life, as it unfolds day by day. Even with the clearest aim and firmest commitment to what we believe we are meant to do, life takes its turns – upending the fragile architecture of our identities and personal narratives. Is the loss of these matchstick-and-glue constructions really the end of the world? For me, it has marked the beginning of a new life. One in which I am compelled to live not by what I think I know, but by where I feel led by the Holy Spirit, moment by moment and day by day. And for me, right now, I feel led to mix rich black soil with fertile manure until my fingernail beds are lined with dark crescents and my cuticles fray. I feel led to sow seeds – miraculous capsules of infinite life and intelligence – in tiny cups on my windowsill, and to tend them as they grow into fledgling plants. I feel led to transplant these fledglings into containers on my porch, and into our raised beds, to feed and monitor them daily as they grow or don’t grow, as they flower, yield, go to seed. I feel called to spend as much time as possible in communion with these growing wonders – outside – drinking in the same sunlight and fresh air they thrive on. The fulfillment found in marveling at the daily changes and unique designs of the life unfolding in my back yard has displaced my need to sacrifice daily joy in pursuit of a larger, more “noble” goal. This newfound calling to tend the earth seems to be a study in rhythms, in the quiet power of slow and steady growth and nurturing. I am learning that, as humans, we are not architects of our destiny so much as agents of a much larger intelligence, in a much more profound unfolding plan. I am happy now to be still, to take this unfolding one day at a time, to not know or fear or force or push for what lies around the next corner. In this space of surrender, suspension, stillness, and slowness, I am experiencing a peace and contentment I have never known. I am more aware of the goodness that abounds in my life, and am less concerned with explaining myself to myself, or to anyone else. I feel like someone who was imprisoned for years and now is free – as though the world were new to me. Like a seed that has just cracked open after a long incubation in the dark, damp earth, the tender green sprout of my being unfurls now up and into a bath of sunlight that has been there all along on the other side of this dark horizon, awaiting my emergence. I don’t want to argue, don’t want to explain, don’t want to pretend to have any answers. I don’t want to cheat the present by getting lost in guessing at what shape I may take in the next stage of my becoming, or imagining how strange my unfolding must look to anyone else. I just want to bathe in this sunlight, drink in the rain as it falls, and let this growth happen as it will. I surrender, I trust, and I see that this garden I tend, tends me.
As I get older and as my life strays farther from what I once imagined it might be, I find, curiously, that I need the holidays more than ever. Not necessarily “The Holidays” as the dominant culture would have me experience them (Black Friday "doorbusters" and all...) – but in some more specific, internal way that involves intense incubation of deep-seated holiday nostalgia, coupled with fervent tending to the hibernation instinct, and a longing to strum the chords that connect me to my clan. I suspect you are familiar with this primal urge of which I speak? It is ancient intelligence and profound desire, ignited by shortening spells of sunlight, plunging temperatures, and the death that turns leaves to dust and grass to clacking straw and bleeds the color from all things. The twitchings of this inner divining rod tend to drive our unique strain of mammal to draw close to a hearth, turn the lights down low, beswaddle our bodies in woolen layers, sip steaming beverages from cavernous mugs, and decorate our homes with lights, light-reflective things (ornaments, mirrors), and with plants we’ve reclaimed from the increasingly-foreboding outdoors. At this time of year, moreover, I feel called to count and account for my loved ones like beads on a rosary. This act of accounting allows me to draw a circle only I can draw – a circle of divine and chance connections that conspire to shape the truest home I know. As much as my work and circumstances have isolated me from friends and family over the years, I have always valued my relationships far above possessions, professional achievements, or supposedly-definitive investments such as a house or a car (neither of which I own, anyway). More, even, than I suspect my closest friends and relations know, my relationships with them have sustained, buoyed, and redeemed me. They have pulled me out of myself – beyond myself – into a dance and a communion in which I have had the vinegar-and-sugar, deliciously messy privilege of becoming part of something larger than me. The self can grow so tiresome. It is both an entity we must love, befriend, and honor if we hope to seek sanity or peace, and a real bore and tyrant if it ends up being the only real company we keep. I think we were designed as social creatures by a trickster-like intelligence that wanted us to find ourselves between a rock and a hard place: unfulfilled alone, and yet deeply challenged by our attempts to navigate the Rube Goldberg machine of human relations. And while the joke may be on us, our awkward, frustrated fumblings toward each other serve to elicit the nectar of divine laughter, which showers the whole affair – the fumbling, the connecting, our spirits’ straining like taffy or taut wires in the mix – with the strangest kind of grace. It can be hard to spot the secret shimmer of this grace from within, say, the boisterous arena of a large family gathering – especially when you find yourself cornered by that one relative who spews sarcasm with every exhale, or who drops passive-aggressive judgments on your life like crumbs from the cream-cheese-and-cranberry crostini they’re gumming as they speak (scarcely two inches away from your face). It can feel onerous to crank open the rusty handle on the pipeline of this grace as you force yourself to lift the phone to call that loved one you know you need to call, even though you don’t feel like being anchored to a phone for the next, precious hour of your life. The very notion of this grace can seem like ersatz pie in a madman’s sky as you venture out to check the mail and realize your irrepressibly chatty neighbor has spotted you, and is making a beeline for you while shouting what is no doubt only the first chapter in a dense, multi-volume saga regarding the family drama of another, recently-deceased neighbor. I didn’t reeeallly need this student loan bill and faux scratch-off ticket from the local car dealership right now, now did I? you think to yourself, realizing it’s too late. But even now, as you succumb to the lengthy neighborly chat you were not at all in the mood for, you catch a glimpse of this grace in the softening corners of your maddeningly charming neighbor’s eyes, and spot it again when, twenty minutes later, she tells an unrelated story about pulling over to urinate at night on a rural road outside of town, only to be joined – precisely at the moment of scrambling to pull up her pants – by a patrolling policeman who figured her for a motorist with car trouble. There’s this place her face goes as she looks into the grainy distance of her memory, crinkles her nose, and cracks up all over again – at her own embarrassment as she scrambled to finish her business as the headlights approached, at her husband’s disbelief at the timing of their police encounter, and at the policeman’s awkward response as he rushed to normalize and dignify the moment. There, in her bemusement and admission of her own awkwardness, you see – of all things – this grace suddenly flicker and dance like a thousand, unexpected fireflies across her face. Suddenly, something in you softens and floods with warmth. It is as though some strained emptiness in your chest (of which you were, until now, unaware) has just been pumped full of melting caramel by angelic pastry chef-ninjas who somehow managed to ambush your annoyed resistance, transforming it into heartening goo. You no longer regret your cumbersome detour to the mailbox. It is out of some kind of deep faith in this relational grace that I feel called to account for my friends and family at this time of year, and, moreover, feel called to devise tokens of appreciation for many of them. This is no small feat – at last count the list toppled 60 (and still there are 20 more I’d like to add if I had more hands, means, and time). But this is sacred work and I know it, even if I must continue to apply tremendous discipline and discernment as I field the cultural pressure to equate “showing holiday love” with “buy people flashy crap”.
Whether I buy or make a given gift, I am working to forge my own approach to accounting for each inimitable bead on my rosary of traveling companions. For me, this ritual has come to involve a modest offering that shows the recipient not only that I love and appreciate them, but that I wish to gift them with something that has a little bit of them in it, and a little bit of me – with, in other words, a sort of material shorthand for our bond. I hope for the gift to be something that delights the recipient, and I want it to reflect something of what I uniquely know and understand of them, and, perhaps, what I am uniquely able to give them. As I assemble and craft these gifts over the months and weeks leading up to Christmas, I feel as though I am erecting an altar to the people who have sustained me, helped me to know myself, and who have shown me redemptive grace and kindness across the nearly forty years of my life. It becomes clearer and clearer that this yearly ritual, labor- and resource-intensive as it can be, is a spiritual necessity for me. I dare say it enriches me more than it does the recipients of my no doubt humble and, at times, misguided gifts. The goal of this ritual, above all, is to call each of my loved ones vividly into consciousness, and then to transmute my love and appreciation for each of them into material form. This conversion of heart-centered energy to matter takes place - at its best - by virtue of a process I can only describe as a sort of earthly reverse-transubstantiation: instead of the humble bread and wine made sacred flesh and blood, the sacred understanding and appreciation of another is converted into a material vehicle for these transcendent sentiments. Whatever humble vehicle I conjure, in each instance, the form will not matter so much as the gesture and its intention: to retrace the thread that connects us, and to honor the place each connection – through choice or chance – occupies on the prayer bead necklace of my one and only life. Here’s why the wafting of institutional chicken soup from the ducts of my elementary school’s kitchen had the power to steamroll my soul: because it reminded me that I was not O.K. with the watered-down, sheep-in-the-herd experience to which I was about to be subjected. Even at age 7 (heck, even at age 3!), I knew – even without being able to name it – that I was a “Highly Sensitive Person”, or HSP, in the parlance of Elaine Aron, who has devoted her life’s work to researching this distinct personality type, found (according to Aron) in 15-20% of the general population. Telltale traits of an HSP are acute sensitivity to stimuli, and a profound need for personal space and time in which to process “input” from one’s environment and daily experience, along with a rich inner life. As someone keenly aware of other people’s energy, even riding the school bus – let alone getting through the school day itself – was, for me, an exercise in deep anxiety. The dynamics of public education make it very difficult for any one adult (teacher, bus driver, principal, school nurse) to pay close, individualized attention to the large number of children in his or her care. Nowhere is this truer than on the school bus, where the brave bus driver must focus first and foremost on navigating a large vehicle filled with scarcely-secured young bodies through crowded streets, while managing to hit all the designated stops along the route. Busses are notorious platforms for bullies and mischievous serial-teasers, because such perpetrat-...ahem...kids are skilled at striking while the resident authority figure is otherwise preoccupied. These gremlins-in-kids’-clothing possess an uncanny faculty for homing in on introverts who deliberately avoid engaging them, and, upon marking their prey, stealthily move in for the kill, often unbeknownst to the authority figure on duty. For children who possess such a rabble-rousing streak, scenarios like an hour-long ride on a crowded bus, or the parts of a school day that are unregulated (hallways between classes, recess, lunchtime) are like Petri dishes wherein the bacteria of their harassment can flourish. While much of what they do would be considered “harmless” by many, to a Highly Sensitive Child, not only does their behavior itself leave a deep impact, but so does the ramping up to the harassment, and its aftermath, as well. The HSP is often acutely aware of the entire process by which the taunt-er chooses her, gradually attempts to get under her skin, and then overtly strikes, and throughout this approach to the strike, the HSP grows increasingly tense while bracing against what’s to come and trying not to evince any sense of being flustered. Then there’s the harassment’s aftermath, in which the HSP is overwhelmingly conscious of the taunt-er’s acknowledgment of his or her effect on the HSP, as well as the responses of surrounding children who witnessed the taunt. After finding herself the butt of such an incident, an HSP needs personal time and space to process the event, and to slowly slough off the embarrassment and sting of it. The public school day, of course, does not offer such opportunities, save the occasional 2-minute solace to be found in a bathroom stall. So there is a social dimension to the soul-crushing potential of a day in the life of an HSP public school student. But the malaise is far more nuanced than just the social piece described above. Being shuffled through a highly structured day of lesson plans and activities designed for the masses in a crowded, intensely stimulating environment by adults primarily focused on crowd management and compliance with state and federal curricular mandates, runs counter to an HSP’s soul. To be fair, school was far from pure misery for me because there were moments when my specific engagement with an assignment, or with a teacher or classmate, transcended the watered-down, mass-appeal quality inherent in the very premise of public education. Given sufficient time and a quiet environment, I could find ways to make an assignment my own – to take it further than perhaps it was designed to be taken. I would become deeply absorbed in the process, and would be able to block out external stimuli, which were typically overwhelming and distracting to me such that I counted the minutes until the school day's end. At times, a heartening connection would happen when I saw that my teacher saw how I had transformed an assignment from something rote to something intensely fleshed-out and expansive. In such moments, I could see something in the teacher herself (or himself) come alive – a spark. Such a shared moment of recognition would serve to encourage me, anchoring my experience, and making it feel more specific, less prescribed. On the flip-side, though, there were so many hours and days like those spent in Mr. Hutto’s fifth grade classroom, when I could clearly see that he was passing along the barest-minimum from his teacher’s edition of our textbook, leaving us to complete our lessons in self-directed silence. Rather than focus on bringing the material to life, he focused on getting it neatly out of the way so that he could sit at his desk and do whatever, in anticipation of the moment he truly cherished each day: when a female student would raise her hand and ask for permission to use the restroom, and he would narrow his eyes, slowly curl his lips into a Grinch-like smile, and say, “O.K., but first, you have to come sit on my lap and give me some sugar, “ which was something he managed to say multiple times each day, to copious awkward chuckles and sidelong glances of disbelief. While this may be an extreme example, it perfectly represents how agonizing school could be for me – and, I am guessing, for many students. I did not always fully trust the adults in whose care and under whose tutelage I was placed. And yet, I was subject to a system that was much bigger than me – a system designed to solve the problem of mass education. Such a system did not have the capacity to be responsive to individual students’ needs or preferences, at least not by design. As a Highly Sensitive Child, I was keenly attuned to behaviors that were less than professional on the part of some of my teachers (like Mr. Hutto, you dirty so-and-so), but, as a mere student, I did not have the power to call out those behaviors, or to refuse to follow a teacher’s orders on the basis of any such objections. This led to a practice of trying not to see what I saw – of trying to hide in my external affect any inkling that something in my environment was troubling or deeply disappointing to me, and internally, of trying to ignore the feelings that made it difficult for me to accept my present circumstances. This practice, unfortunately, became a habit, and it is one I continue to work to unravel to this day. I had far more warm, dedicated, inspired teachers than I did duds, or at least, the gems stand out in far greater relief than do the creeps and slackers. But even the best public school teacher is faced with a seemingly impossible problem when it comes to the question of how to gear mass lesson plans toward individual students’ skill levels and capacity for engagement. The sheer math of the situation (one teacher, 30+ students) renders this challenge beyond daunting. I often felt, in the context of a public school day, like there were so many part of myself I had to silence – parts I had to let die, even – in order to reduce the cognitive dissonance between the education and educational environment I instinctively desired, and the lesson plans, text books, schedule, and school environment to which I actually had access. It became less painful to simply allow parts of my true nature to be crushed, than to allow them to flutter and pulsate inside of me while their every twitch reminded me of how excruciating certain dimensions of my public school environment and experience were to my sensibilities. It’s funny. When you’re an HSP – even if you yourself, and those around you, don’t know what to call it – you will often be told, as a child or young adult, to “buck up!”, “deal with it!” and “get over it!”. Well-intentioned adults try to brace you for The Real World by coaching you with such statements, as a way of sort of sand-papering off your sensitive outer layer so that you can meet the world scuffed, calloused, and less apt to absorb its stings. But attempting to erase or quash what makes you you, is a recipe for soul sickness of the highest and most dire order, as the gifted Parker J. Palmer has so beautifully articulated. Further, our greatest “weakness”, as they say, can also be our greatest strength – or at least, our weakness holds the key to our strength. Cut off oxygen to your weakness, and you prohibit the full flowering of your highest potential. So what is an HSP to do in this world? Perhaps it is unfair to refer to acute sensitivity as "weakness". However, any HSP/introvert can tell you that keen sensitivity makes navigating many aspects of daily life an intense adventure. It can make us feel like paranoid freaks, since we constantly pick up on things that others seem to miss entirely. It means we need more time to ourselves, to process and recover from the day. It can make certain environments seem all but untenable for us - environments most simply take for granted. It can make relationships a challenge, since others struggle to understand why a passing remark impacted you so deeply, or why you would rather spend time alone than do something "fun" with them. There is an art to learning how to flourish as an HSP in a world that notoriously caters to extroverts. All of us – HSP and non-HSP's alike – get a lot of mixed messages in our culture. As children, we are encouraged, on the one hand, to “be ourselves.” We are told that we are "special", and that our uniqueness is the very seat of our value. Meanwhile, many of us are pumped through a public education system designed to cater toward the "average" child. Many of us find we must shave off the finest points of our uniqueness – or, at least, cover them in copious amounts of packing foam and duct tape – in order to survive this system. Should we fail to grind down or conceal our uniqueness, we risk being labeled as troublemakers (for asking too many questions, or for being made restless by a glut of desk-bound, book-based learning), or risk being ridiculed as "nerds", "brainiacs", or "artsy freaks." Most students ultimately cave to the pressure to "pass" as average and simply go along with the system out of sheer exhaustion and psychological fatigue. Take a generation of such children and follow them into adulthood, and you will find an equally confusing professional environment. So many professional workplaces seem to require, or at least implicitly expect, a willing “standardization” on behalf of potential and existing employees. Take that uniqueness of yours – the parts of you that house the best of what you have to give – and button it down, shave it off, bleach it, dress it up in mascara and heels, and make sure it fits neatly into the larger mold of the business and profession in question, and that it does not draw undue attention to itself. So you buy those khakis and wax that facial hair and learn that professional jargon and hope it will give you the "in" you need...And then you apply for jobs (a whole ‘nother can-of-worms subject in the age of the online application vortex), and find these same companies asking you – khakified, bleached-out, buttoned-down you – to demonstrate what makes you stand out from the crowd! While you will be asked to substantiate your one-of-a-kind edge to land an interview or nail a job, you will ultimately be evaluated on the extent to which the persona you project and the abilities you claim align with the company’s image of itself. I have often gotten the impression, in my many job searches, that companies are looking for someone they can plug in to their existing system with as little friction and as much ease as possible. Which leaves you, the inherently idiosyncratic applicant, with (it would seem) one of two choices: take a fierce rasp to all the pointy bits that give your profile its distinct shape (warning: it’s gonna get bloody – have you ever seen a rasp?!) until your horizon line starts to resemble the shape of the company or industry to which you’re applying; or, craft your application so that it expresses the best of who you uniquely are, and search tirelessly for companies or fields that might actually be interested in what your un-rasped self uniquely has to offer (and then pray God they give you the time of day – these well-suited companies and/or this field that you hope against hope exist – based on your existing level of experience and credentials). Liz Ryan is someone I have been paying attention to as I wrestle with the above dilemma. Through her company, The Human Workplace, she asserts that we are in need of a professional revolution, one that puts people first by asserting that businesses will reap the greatest benefits by encouraging employees to bring the best and most vibrant parts of themselves to the work they do. Ryan asks, “When did the workplace become so ‘black and white’?”, and offers constructive guidance for bringing the color and vitality back to its sullen cheeks. As a former “corporate HR VP forever”, Ryan knows the corporate recruiting climate of which she speaks. She has worked successfully with businesses as well as individuals to create more people-centered workplaces, and to encourage a more colorful, more narrative-centered, and more fiercely individualized style of presenting oneself throughout the job search process. While I find Ryan’s work incredibly inspiring, I must also acknowledge the painful reality of my own demoralizing experiences with job searches to date, and with working for workplaces that are far from human (or at least, functionally so). It can be hard to find workplaces progressive enough to entertain an out-of-the-box resume or cover letter. So many fields are steeped to saturation in formal requirements regarding the form and content of a resume or cover letter, and regarding acceptable methods for applying for jobs. Further, as someone who is currently engaged in the messy throes of a career transition, it can be extremely difficult to get companies to give a hoot about what you uniquely have to offer if you don’t have the specific degree or exact laundry-list of skills and years of experience in X-Y-Z they are looking for. While I may come to my job search able to articulate my strengths, credentials, and value, the more I consider where to set my new career sights and how to re-package my goods to fit new contexts, and the longer I sift through the job prospects and job descriptions at my fingertips, the more I am filled with that institutional-chicken-soup feeling once again. The more I feel like I am being asked to prove myself as a passable member of an alien herd – to prove that I belong in a world that I feel no affinity for whatsoever. I want to find a way to give the best of what I’ve got in a place where it is needed and appreciated, but at present, I am stumped as to how to make that leap. As I go about work-a-day life in my current workplace, and as I continue my vision-quest for a more apt career path, any time I catch a telltale whiff of the gray, sour-mop-water broth that signifies “death through mediocrity”, a tiny bell deep within my HSP soul begins to rattle. This bell is made of delicate stuff: a shell of porous bird-bone, with a hummingbird feather for its clapper. The sound and vibration of this bell’s ring – inaudible to the outside world, yet cacophonous to me – fills me with the urge to run in the opposite direction – to an expansive place where I can breathe, create, relax, be me without artifice or constraint. I feel like the baby bird in the classic children's book, Are You My Mother?, wandering endlessly in search of a professional niche where I belong, and will be recognized as kin. Those mornings were the worst. As the giant yellow tank lumbered and lurched toward its inevitable destination, a dread gathered in my stomach like cold, grimy runoff from city sidewalks gathering in the pit of a sewer. During the bus ride, I’d escape deep into my mind, silently contemplating my homework, daydreaming about the lives of imaginary characters or a drawing I was working on, or replaying scenes and imagining faces from a book I was reading. I would study the passing scenery, sucking every ounce of mood and tone I could from the natural elements of my suburban landscape. If the sky was overcast, if the air was damp and cool, if the tree limbs were bare and quivering, if we passed an expanse – a field, a forest – I’d revel in it, and would long to be out in it, rather than on my way to a place of consummate confinement. But all of this, even this acknowledgement of my impending limited-ness, was bearable. Bearable, that is, until our Velveeta-colored ferry launched into that fateful round-about, and its ventilation system inhaled the ambient stench of institutional chicken soup. With all due respect to those hard-working cafeteria ladies, the smell of one of their industrial batches of chicken soup sounded a death knell in some delicate, secret chamber of my soul. Of course, most of us can, and would, testify to the healing, comforting potential of even the smell of a homemade batch of chicken soup. Whether made by your mother, your grandmother, your father, your spouse, or your kind neighbor, homemade chicken soup has the power to throw a fleece blanket around the soul, and then to envelop that soul in a warm, gentle hug. Homemade chicken soup represents the pinnacle of comfort food’s alchemical power. Take that same basic premise, however, and dress down its ingredients, blow up its quantity several hundred-fold, and set it in the context of an industrial kitchen (and, perhaps, a rainy school day), and you’ve got a recipe for deep existential dread – at least, according my palette. Somewhere between the oversized #10 cans of generic chicken stock, the bulk sautéing of (likely frozen, pre-cut) carrot-circles and celery half-moons, and the simmering twine of chicken flesh (also likely frozen and pre-shredded), an aroma is conjured that bears unexpected undertones of sour mop water. This aroma lacks the kinetic pith of a small batch of such soup – lacks the herbal vibrancy of freshly-chopped celery or the boisterous smolder of copious black pepper, or the earthy sweetness of the beloved carrot. Instead, on an institutional scale, and as pumped through the ductwork of an institutional kitchen’s ventilation system, chicken soup takes on the fragrance of flaccid mediocrity, foreshadowing a near-future in which its ingestion will demand a willful suspension of one’s disgust and indignation. Soon, this institutional olfactory tidal wave signals, you will have to swallow that which kills you. You will have to smile and allow to become part of you something to which everything in you vehemently objects – something whose weight silently crushes a delicate yet vital structure somewhere deep within you. You won’t be able to explain it to anyone – not even yourself. It will take you decades to even dare attempt to put words to it. But the knowledge of the grey death the smell of this institutional chicken soup signifies will be undeniable to you, even at age 7, as you step off the bus and toward the school’s brown double-doors with an increasing sensation of lead in your legs. That smell is telling you to run – to get back on that bus and be carried away from here, far away, until the zombie-like tendrils of this fragrance can no longer creep up your nose, down your throat, through your lungs, and into your soul. You will be shocked back into recollection of this sense memory many times in your life, and most recently, on a rainy morning as you walk across the parking lot and open the heavy glass door of your workplace, which includes a cafeteria where, you suddenly realize, they are cooking chicken soup today. It will all come back to you so clearly, it will almost knock you out: the view from your window seat on the bus as it lumbers toward the school’s entrance, the catch in your chest as the first whiff of the dreaded contents of those industrial cauldrons invades your nostrils, the acrid undertones of sour mop water, the visceral oppression that overtakes you as the smell fills your senses, the sensation of some hidden, essential trap door spitting open deep beneath you while something essential within you slides through it, down…down…away, and beyond your grasp. You hear the “thud” of the glass door behind you and feel your steps moving toward the time clock, toward the source of the smell. You are acquiescent. You have succumbed. This secret, soul-erasing grayness is a hidden loop repeating itself across time. To Be Continued...Till then, there's this gem. In the “Comments” section of my recent blawwwg post “On Giving Up: Part II”, two friends with husbands in academia responded with echoes of recognition regarding my own harrowing account of a pursuit of a full-time college teaching job. Each of the husbands in question holds a PhD, is a published author and book maker, and has been slogging away for years in pursuit of a full-time gig in academia. Each of these men has a family, and each of their wives can attest to the toll the job search and adjunct/whatever-it-takes lifestyle has taken on everyone involved. Bloody Fingernails, Shredded People: The True Ravages of Life in 21st C. Academia As I wrote a response to each of their comments, and as I considered two other responses from those with full-time jobs in art academia (who said things like "I have a hard time accepting that I may be a success story considering the blood underneath my fingernails" and "This field shreds many people"), a more universal narrative emerged, reminding me of one of the founding goals of this blawwwg project: namely, to speak the truth about my own and others' baffling experiences as highly educated, arse-busting creative professionals running the adjunct, etc. gauntlet in pursuit of a career in a field that has oversold its goods and falsely represented its job prospects to unsuspecting graduate students. The goal was not to belly-ache and wallow in commisery. Rather, the goal was, and still is, to contribute to a conversation regarding one of the cruelest and most well-disguised elephants-in-the-room of the American economy and job market, and to bring exposure to this dirty secret in the interest of effecting change. I will confess that I am not polemical by nature. I have little desire to stand on a soapbox and lecture passersby on how one side of things is all wrong while the other side is all right; that’s just not how I see the world, and I know that being on the receiving end of such vitriol immediately shuts me down. However, there is a larger conversation brewing in our culture, not just around the injustice of the use (and abuse) of adjuncts in higher ed, but around our effed up economy and the many forms of institutionalized poverty that destroy lives while plumping the coffers of the elite. People hear “poverty” and picture some grizzled man in rags on a street corner, a five-day stubble covering his gaunt, pock-marked face. But, as people like Bill Moyers are bringing eloquently to light, there is another face of poverty – the working poor – and many of these people, believe it or not, have advanced degrees, live under roofs, drive cars, bathe regularly, and don’t miss meals. And these people, like many on the street, are not poor for lack of effort. Part of my own astonishment during my journey through graduate school and in pursuit of a job in academia, has been the growth of graduate programs and the growing numbers of students (myself among them) investing in Masters and Doctorate degrees. Schools are willing to sell these degrees to students like me even though many fields are rapidly changing, rendering these degrees increasingly risky investments. Moreover, colleges and universities profit outrageously by using underpaid adjuncts to staff their classrooms. This allows schools to hire fewer full-time instructors, to require existing faculty to do the work of 2-3 professors, and, most unethically of all, allows these institutions to pocket more of each student’s tuition while the majority of those who are actually educating these students live on the brink of bankruptcy. Does it strike no one else as criminal that the very same institution that sold you a $40,000 (or more - likely much more) degree will turn around and pay you $1,000 a course (that’s $71 a week and between $2-$4 per hour depending on how much time you invest in planning, grading, answering emails, and contact hours with students) for the skills they sold you (and continue to sell your students) at a much higher cost? And, is it criminal that any adjunct will be expected to do all of this to the best of her abilities each semester without any guarantee of future classes, and without any benefits whatsoever? Picture your alma mater’s white columns, its marble hallways, the glossy magazine it sends out each quarter touting the achievements of its esteemed students and faculty. Picture your school’s annual fundraising campaign, asking you to fork over your hard-earned dollars to improve the institution to which you surely feel great allegiance. Then, try to imagine where that institution’s money is going. Certainly not to the 40-75 percent or more of its instructors, who are adjunct and who make $2-$4 an hour to educate your beloved children, whose degrees will no doubt cost an arm and a leg. Here’s a ball-busting quote from a BillMoyers.com interview with Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director of the Center for Community Change: “We need to stop talking about the economy in ways that make it seem like the weather. The economy is a result of the rules we create and the choices we make. The people who are struggling to make ends meet do so because we have built — through intentional choice — an economy that produces inadequate incomes for more than one-third of all Americans. So we need to have a real debate about what to do to build an economy that doesn’t produce such misery.” When I read Bhargava's words, I picture myself standing across the mahogany desk of the Dean of XYZ College of Arts and Sciences, waving my neck and head like a pit viper, slinging my pointer finger in his or her face, and saying, “Hell YEAH, Dean So-And-So! And you KNOW this!” ...But of course, real change on this issue will require a constructive dialogue, intelligent research and ongoing works of high-profile journalism to draw attention to the reality of the situation, and to get people fired up enough to call “bullshit” on how these institutions do business, and at what expense. I want to be part of this conversation. Meanwhile, many driven, hard working people like me, who have invested years of professional development and tens of thousands of dollars in tuition on an academic career, will have to decide whether doing what it takes to stay in the running for a full-time teaching job is really worth the personal cost. ______________________ If any of what you have read here has resonated with you, please consider: 1. Sharing this post. 2. Checking out one of the articles I have linked to in the text above. Here's a list: http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-latest/2014/2/6/adjuncts-fight-foralivingwage.html http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/28/10-poverty-myths-busted/ http://billmoyers.com/2014/07/25/why-cant-make-ends-meet-trumps-poverty/ What are the benefits of giving up? For one, I have found time to explore boredom. I have wallowed in the luxury of not having to squeeze every possible drop of productivity from every waking moment of my life. I have made a serious study of careless TV watching and Slacker-esque web searching (where one topic leads to another, then to another, and another…). I have allowed my studio life to languish. I have refocused my creative efforts on cooking (regularly), writing (intermittently), and picture-taking. I have dared to ask a question I never dared ask before: how does “the other half” live? How do those who don’t have everything at stake in every living moment, spend their time? What does it feel like not to want anything, not to care about the future? I can’t say I’ve been gob-smacked by shimmering revelations of great meaning and significance. I cannot say I have been visited by a definitive answer as to what this time means for me or where on earth (or beyond) I am headed. I can say that I have been able to put down the yoke of deep anxiety under which I have lived many of the past twenty years – at least, that is, the yoke of a very specific species of anxiety (since there are others I still shoulder): namely, the anxiety produced by the stress of amassing debt for years on end, while living at or below the poverty line for years on end, while working one's butt off for years on end, while believing that all hope of transcending the stress of this mounting debt, stifling poverty, and endless toil rests on how much “doing” I do or don’t manage to squeeze into today. Living under this yoke has involved playing a constant mental game of high-stakes choice-making. In this game, I have sacrificed short-term comfort time and again in hope of a hard-earned, long-term benefit. Thing is, I have come to find I am terrible at living this way. Or – maybe I used to be really good at it, but just got burnt out. Or, maybe I only had so much talent for this way of living and I used it all up too fast because I never learned how to balance it with rest, pleasure, and ease. I don’t know, really. What I do know, and can describe in vivid detail, is what living under the crushing weight of this anxiety has looked and felt like for these past many years: a series of gnawing, soul-shrinking, common-sense-defying decisions. After 2.5 hours spent working, do you close the damned computer already and watch dumb TV with your boyfriend, or do you turn your back to him and hunch over your desk, using your remaining energy to turn passable lesson plans into stellar ones for the coming week’s classes? Consistent high-quality lesson plans could be the thing that makes or breaks that next job opportunity, you know? After a blinkless session spent grading student process journals, do you shun limb-numbing fatigue and spend 4 more hours (2/3 of your allotted sleep time) grading their research papers, when you could do a half-assed job in just 1 hour’s time? Just think: your true quality as a teacher will be revealed in your student evaluations, which you will be required to submit for the next slew of job applications: any shortcut you take now, will bite you in the backside later. Do you squeeze in an hour (or more? – really, it should be more) in the studio, even though this hour will have to be deducted either from sleep or time spent catching up with your boyfriend? Do you spritz and spray and wrap that increasingly crusty clay sculpture in hopes of keeping it moist and pliable enough to (hopefully) finish it some day, or do you say “Screw the triage-rehydrating!” in the interest of devoting more time to the classes you’re teaching? Do you wake up at 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning – your only chance to sleep in – to spend an hour scouring the latest college art job postings, and then 3 hours more working on new applications? Do you wake up 30 minutes early one, two, or three days a week (after only 3, or sometimes 6, hours of sleep) in order to coax your tense muscles loose on the yoga mat, in hopes of preventing serious back injury from loading and unloading all those kilns, and before rushing off to a 2-hour commute by car and subway train to one of your three or four teaching jobs scattered across a vast metropolis? Do you dare to buy a new tinted lip balm or pair of cheap pleather boots (the girlish-luxury versions of necessities), and if so, do you dare to first consult your bank account and honestly calculate your liquid balance minus the next student loan, car, and insurance payments, knowing that groceries and other essentials will have to go on the credit card once again this month? Do you make one giant meal from mostly dry goods (lentils, rice, carrot, garlic) to get you through the week, and then force yourself to eat it for lunch and dinner even on the third and fourth day, when its taste disgusts you and its texture feels like lumps of paste on your tongue? Do you leave a class you just taught feeling great about the PowerPoint you presented or the critique you led, only to crash head-first into a wall of shame over the fact that you have spent 3 times as much time working on your classes as you have on your own studio work, and do you wither as you see yourself through the eyes of the “art world” gate keepers who will judge you harshly (or disregard you altogether) for not having managed, by some sorcery, to maintain a prolific studio life alongside teaching stellar classes (no worry about how you, also, managed to pay your bills or sustain human relationships, mind you)? The truth is, the “life of my dreams” turned into a living hell for me. Maybe a life coach or a career counselor would say, “You were just thinking about it all wrong…” Numerous people near and dear to me have said (and still say), “What about just focusing on teaching art? Surely there is a way to do just that successfully (like, say, K-12)?” I cannot fully explain or justify my response to these questions – particularly the latter. I can only confess that, right now, an attempt to answer either question fills my head with visions of the hell I have just described (and have lived), and fills my stomach with a sensation akin to sandpaper and Velveeta cheese being slowly churned by the off-kilter blade of a blender. My experience has been that, to land a college art teaching job, one must produce work prolifically in her studio, get that work into national and regional exhibitions, and teach substantially at the college level for three or more years. The toll that striving to hit these marks took on me was dramatic. I started out – during and just after grad school – feeling so capable, so full of fight and fire and ready for anything. I felt the people I respected and trusted most truly believed in my odds for success in this field that I felt chose me, as much as I chose it. But the balancing act this pursuit demanded became too much for me to bear. Pardon my French, but it is fucking expensive to make ceramic art, let alone ship it. It is difficult to sell ceramic sculpture, and God help you if it’s not small ceramic sculpture you’re hoping to sell, or show. God help you if that ceramic sculpture is not easy for someone on the other end to pop out of a box and plop on a pedestal. Because then that means you have to be there to install your work yourself, and that is simply out of the financial and temporal question. Speaking of time, making ceramic sculpture takes soooo much time. There are so many layers of process. Clay is a living thing, a diva, sensitive to the slightest change in temperature or humidity. And then there is the firing process – most pieces must travel twice through a kiln (at least), and for most of us, that kiln is one we’re sharing with other people’s work, one whose firing schedule we may not have absolute control over. To anyone who makes ceramic art (and perhaps to others alike), this is all super-obvious, mind-numbing belly-aching. But after years of striving to make ceramic art while also striving to forge a career teaching art while also trying to scrape by financially and also not have a nervous breakdown, I have come to believe these “obvious” details are worth itemizing and carefully considering. Perhaps my biggest wake-up call in pursuit of my “dream” of a career making and teaching art, was the college job search. Oh boy howdy. Thinking back to the three years and roughly 120 applications I submitted in my quest for a full-time college teaching job lands me just about 45 seconds away from a serious case of dry heaves. I can say with confidence, and with humility, that I am a really good teacher. I am at my best when I am leading a classroom of college kids or adults through a creative exercise, a PowerPoint presentation, a discussion, or a critique. I love the anarchy of the creative process, how it wakes us up to life and to the magic of discovery within ourselves and within the world we share. I love helping a student unlock and tease out his or her own voice, and guiding – and, at times, pushing – students past their known limits. I am good at this. It is in my blood. But what I found was that this meant very little – almost nothing – in the face of college art departments’ bigger concerns like, how many big shows have you had in the past 3 years, and, how many important art people do you know? The closer I got to actually landing one of these fervently-desired full time jobs, the more clearly I saw the reality I would be signing on for should I clinch one. First, I’d be taking on the work of 2-3 people. That’s just the way it is now in college art departments, as they downsize and as art budgets get slashed. Second, while teaching four to six courses a semester (some on evenings and weekends, and at different campuses), I’d be expected to maintain a thriving studio practice, pumping out brilliant sculptures and, of course, getting them into loads of regional, national, and international shows. It goes without saying that I’d simultaneously be maintaining the college’s ceramics, and possibly sculpture, facilities, including being a studio monitor after hours. Plus, of course, I’d be finding time to recruit high school students for our undergrad program, recruiting undergrads for our grad program, and raising the national profile of our ceramics department to boot. I’d also be expected to serve on academic committees and to help write grants for departmental funding in my spare time. Oh, and did I mention all of this would be done to the tune of, say, 32,000 or maybe 38,000 dollars? If I’m lucky and drive a hard bargain? I didn’t even balk at this avalanche of responsibilities and commensurably paltry compensation, though. No – what got me was this: my willingness to attempt to do all of these things – to live up to this superhuman fantasy of what any self-respecting college art teacher should be able to chalk up to a “good day’s work” –, coupled with my genuine skill and experience as a teacher, and with my innovation as an artist, was still not enough. There was always some impossible (for me) combination of skills and experience required, on top of the above laundry-lists of “musts”, in the face of which I never failed to fall short. You can sort of weld and more or less man a woodshop, and pretty much fix an electric kiln, and you can teach drawing and composition and mixed media and figure sculpture, in addition to Level 1, 2 and 3 ceramics courses?? Wellll, can you also operate the latest 3D printing software and throw Yixing teapots and saggar fire with dog food and banana peels as your fuel with consistent results every time, and also teach analog “Intro to Photography” as needed? No?! Well, never you mind, li’l missie; you simply don’t cut the mustard in this art department. In all fairness, this is what it felt like. What it looked like, in practice, was this (an example of an actual, current college art job posting): Duties/Expectations: · Teach a wide range of courses, typically regular sections of studio courses, including two- and three-dimensional design, drawing, digital design/photography, and painting, as well as art history survey courses. · Monitor and effectively manage the campus art gallery, curating exhibits, hosting visiting artists, collaborating with the So-And-So Arts Council and making other important connections to increase our campus visibility and enhance our profile in the community · Demonstrate continued commitment to scholarly activity in the discipline and/or the scholarship of teaching and learning. · Participate in campus, institutional and community service, in the shared governance structure. · Participate in the recruitment and advising of students into the Art program consistent with the goal to build and sustain the program. · Commit to flexible scheduling of classes to meet the needs of varied student populations. · Support and coordinate, with the So-And-So Foundation and the Office of Marketing & Communications, fundraising efforts, as necessary, to grow the Art Department. · Maintain campus art equipment and facilities while ensuring safety in their use and operation. What I’m saying is, for me, there was always some elusive one or two extra skills that I simply could not fudge my way around – things I simply didn’t have in my arsenal. Whether it was sophisticated wheel throwing, 3D printing, knowing how to teach conventional painting, or digital arts, I always came up short. And while I tried for a while there to brush up on skills I felt were, in some small way, within my reach, I could never really find time to develop these ancillary skills, what with teaching 4 classes, working 2 extra part time jobs to make ends meet, trying to eke out studio time, working on job and show applications, and, of course, trying to occasionally devote time to exercise, sleep, and those luxuries known as personal relationships. I simply could not fathom how I would ever be “enough” for this professional world I had chosen. I was an overachiever, but not in the right ways. I cared too much about my lesson plans and the quality of the feedback I gave my students. The art I was making just wasn’t consistent or compelling enough to garner national attention. Making it began to feel like a chore, and a losing battle. And I guess my age and the psychological toll of so many years of burning the candle at all ends and living in pursuit of a better tomorrow had rendered my today an empty, exhausted mess. I see quite a number of people succeeding at the life I sought, and quite a few who continue to struggle in pursuit of it – or who have given it up in pursuit of new goals (family, peace of mind, spare time, financial stability). I know success in that vein is possible, but maybe not for me, and at least, not via my previous approach. I basically snapped under the weight of “not enough; never enough”. I couldn’t stand to live in the light of this judgment anymore. It was exhausting. I gave up both by virtue of circumstance, and by necessity. I saw 55,000 dollars in student loan debt staring cold and hard at me in the distance, with a smile of reckoning on its grey-green, lumpy face, and I decided there had to be a more sustainable way. So, am I happier now? Sort of. I have a lot more time on my hands. It fills up all too easily, of course, but I continue to recognize this “free time” as a privilege and a powerful resource. Do I know where the h-e-double-hockey-sticks this train is headed? Not really. I am working on sharpening skill sets that sat semi-latent for years, rediscovering strengths and potentialities beyond those I touted explicitly in my attempt to sell myself into a full time college art teaching job. I know I have value. I know there are a lot of things I can contribute to this world. What’s hard is pouring so many years into one track, working harder than many, and still coming up short. What is also hard and what sucks slimy boulders, quite frankly, is being deemed both over- and under-qualified by a mystifying job market that wants you to be hyper-specialized, but then only lets a chosen few in through that narrow gate. In my attempts to either augment part-time teaching work to pay the bills, or, to dive headlong (back) into lines of work in which I do have experience but have not focused solely for the last 15 years, I have been punished for having too much education and too specialized a skill set. Just two years ago, I sat in a small, sterile, dimly-lit room across an awkwardly low table from a cocky 23 year old who represented a tutoring firm where I had applied for a 10-hours-a-week job. Flanked by a mute forty-something administrative assistant, this young man entered the room with a vaguely suspicious and pitying look, and proceeded to lecture me on my shortcomings on an extensive math test the firm required all applicants to take (even though I made clear from the start that English, rather than math, was my high-school-tutoring strong suit). This green-eared upstart - no more than a year or two, at most, from his most recent encounter with algebra or pre-cal, took pedantic delight in explaining to my 35-year-old ass how I had failed to use this process of elimination or that jot of reasoning to solve a series of math problems, even if the numbers themselves had eluded me. You made mistakes, he implied, rubbing my nose in it, that a high school student would have easily avoided. He then went on to preach fanatically about the brilliant and innovative founder of the tutoring firm, who had "unlocked the real secret to learning." The subtext of this fresh-faced boy’s sermon was that I didn’t have the mental chops to hack it as one of this genius-founder’s tutoring disciples. I wanted to reach across the table and punch the peach fuzz off this kid’s smug, jutting-jawed countenance. I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and list for him all my achievements, my degrees with honors, describe my glowing letters of recommendation and praise from students young and old. I wanted to quiz him on complicated ceramic processes until he stuttered and turned red and bit his tongue. But instead, I sat quietly, my mouth set in a hopelessly menacing “poker-face” horizon line, and gritted my teeth and pushed down the nausea that sprang from my belly to my throat, and waited for him to say his last condescending word to me, and then dismiss me with a mix of thinly-veiled disgust and ridicule. I wanted to invite him into the parking lot and run him over with my red Toyota Corolla, like they do in cartoons, where the bad guy pops up and re-inflates afterward – no real harm done. This was only one of a series of withering experiences I had and will likely continue to have in the name of a “job search”. My master’s degree in art has without doubt been a handicap in many cases, and in others, it is simply not enough. My new goal – out of spiritual and psychological necessity – is to find a role in which all that I am and all that I have to offer is enough, and, moreover, is desired (at least some of it), and rewarded. The catch is, the path I choose has to jive with my temperament. It has to be sustainable work that allows me to also have a life. That seemed like too much to ask in my previous pursuit, so I gave up. I don’t consider this a failure, really. I consider it a concession to my humanity – to my limited-ness. At the start of my life’s path, I vowed fiercely (to myself, to the Universe) to find my own way, and shuddered to think of falling into the trap of retracing another’s footsteps. In point of fact, my pursuit of an art teaching career became just that: a desperate attempt to stuff myself into someone else’s mold – to become “enough” by someone else’ measure, on someone else’s terms. I think what’s happening now is a meta-process of individuation. Time to throw out the maps (O.K. – they were burned in spite of my desperate clinging) and set out into a new wilderness, but with far less romantic goals than those with which I began two decades ago. Peace, sustainability, and an inner, subtler species of fulfillment are my new North Stars. Rather than live a life I can write home about, I now simply seek one I can abide day in, day out. In my late teens and early twenties, I was deeply ambitious about one thing above all: giving up. I yearned to cut the cord that tethered me to the lead balloon of my ego and desire for personal gain. I sought to transcend my selfhood, in order to live in service of some worthier need. Not knowing what shape this service might take, I threw myself into acting, writing, psychology, spiritual studies, and a stint working with mentally ill homeless people in New York City. I traveled, and made a point to be open and intently present to whomever I encountered, even when this landed me in awkward situations. I knew I didn’t need or want much, materially speaking, and, professional ambition held no real allure for me, either. I just wanted to find “my place” – a context and role in which I could fully surrender, a place where whatever I had to give was needed, was enough. Then, and only then, could I finally extinguish my self upon the fire of a need greater than my own. Then, and only then, could I escape the pain and confusion of my personal history. Then, and only then (I thought), could I find peace and true security. Though I was still struggling to identify just what it was I had to give, I was convinced there was a need that fit my gifts like a glove. Further, as I emerged from a childhood of chaos, tragedy, divorce, and financial unrest, I came to believe that security was a futile, perhaps even impossible goal. Conventional visions of predetermined career tracks or substantial salary and benefit packages could not have been further my idealistic young mind. I found more reason in the life of a monk, who offers his devout service in exchange for the modest necessities of shelter, food, community, and time and space to reflect. Take the struggle for material gain out of the picture, I thought, and you free up more time and energy for spiritual growth and for serving as and where you are needed. Through the humbling lens of hindsight, I can see just how much of a role my own physical awkwardness and discomfort with my femininity played in my desire to detach from the world of worldliness. I did not understand how to handle my sexuality, and did not feel in control of my body. My identity as a woman, and as a physical being, was a shrouded in shadow and shame. I dwelt more comfortably in the spiritual and mental realms, and secretly sought a role that would relieve me of the burden of my stunted womanhood. Fear also drove my search for a life of service. I had seen my own parents strive for financial and material abundance, only to wind up in debt, distanced from one another, and surrounded by a material wealth that felt empty against the backdrop of the stress, anxiety, and leadenness that lurked at the fringes of it all. We, like so many American families, lived beyond our means in pursuit of what we were taught was our inalienable right to a home of our own, two cars in the driveway, and a life of modest luxury and enjoyment. Everyone else seemed able to pull it off – never mind the mounting credit card debt or discrepancy between the money going out and coming in – so why couldn’t, why shouldn’t, we? In direct reaction to this object lesson, my 18-year-old self had decided she didn’t want to want material things. She didn’t want to want to accumulate wealth or goods. By setting my sights on service, in a context that could provide for my basic needs, I would liberate myself from the hell of worldly greed and desire, which had yielded so much pain and emptiness in the lives of those around me. Life, as we know, proves far more complicated than it appears through the eyes of an eighteen year old. There are so many things your 18 year-old self cannot see, because she does not comprehend them – things she has not yet learned to recognize. I struggled for years with the tension between my desire to surrender to a life of service, and my dawning awareness of my embodiment, my worldly needs, of my physical, mental, and psychological limitations. I wrestled internally, semi-consciously, with shame as my own physicality and femininity emerged, demanding attention. I wondered – still wonder, at times – whether I was intended for a life of partnership, or whether I would be of greater service to humanity and myself by journeying solo. I pushed through guilt and past years of self-imposed asceticism to discover that I find joy and self-expression in what I wear and how I adorn myself. My inner ascetic still rages against my inner goddess when I schedule a haircut or buy $40 worth of clothes from Target. These things may seem trivial, but they have been part and parcel of a search for my rightful place in this world. Up until a little over a year ago, I was still hurling myself on the pyre, by and large, of my chosen path of service as a teacher of art. I spent nearly every waking hour either teaching at one of four venues, working on lesson plans, promoting upcoming classes, working on applications for full-time teaching positions, working on my own art, promoting my own art, submitting applications to regional and national art exhibitions, and doing whatever part-time work I could to scrape together a feeble living. After 15 years invested in the path of an artist and art teacher, I had surrendered to this particular life of service, and I was determined to endure any amount of sleeplessness, pennilessness, and indignation if only it could land me, at last, in my rightful place – a full-time teaching position that I could fully surrender to, at an institution that valued what I had to give and would pay me enough so that I could “get by.” That was truly all I hoped for, and all I asked. I will never know what combination of factors conspired to bring about the events of last summer. But after being a finalist for three college teaching positions, and really believing I had earned one of these outright, I was not chosen for any, and something in me snapped. This marked another instance of the worldly me rushing in where the idealistic me had held us aloft for so long. Suddenly, my limitations came closing in like walls in an epic earthquake. A surrender of a different nature came over me. This time, rather than giving up my attachment to my worldly self, I was compelled to give up the delusion that I was magnanimous and without limits. I was forced to surrender the belief that I could endure any number of sleepless, workaholic nights, any litany of months barely scraping by, any plethora of missed opportunities for spending time with my partner, Jason, or with family and friends, so long as I was devoted to the selfless goal of finding gainful employment as an art teacher, which surely would come to pass if only I remained wholeheartedly surrendered to the path. Here Life was, shaking me by the shoulders, demanding that I give up this mental “martyr” construct whose fumes I had run on for 15 years, in exchange for a new kind of surrender. Life was inviting me to stop, first and foremost: to stop long enough to acknowledge the reality, the needs and limitations, of my own embodiment; to stop long enough to recognize and accept the choices I had made, and to live up to the present-moment reality of those choices. I was in a relationship, living with a man I loved, but I gave so little time to him, feeling justified by my endless pursuit of a goal I felt was essential to my, and to our, future well-being. I sacrificed the present in exchange for some hypothetical future that continued to elude me. He felt my absence, and my mood swings, tired and overworked as I so often was. I began to see how I’d been giving the best of me, often, to my students – doing work I loved, but alas, cheating my partner of the love and presence he deserved. When, half a year later, I read the following words by teacher and author Parker J. Palmer, pangs of recognition resounded in me like peals of a monastery bell during the daily call to prayer. While Palmer uses this passage to describe his bouts with depression, and while I am not certain my own experience involved clinical depression, I can describe my experience as one of my life and misguided sense of identity imploding in a short span of time, and the bewilderment I felt as I attempted to find the will and way forward from that devastated place. In the end, this sounds an awful lot like what Palmer describes here: “The altitude at which I was living had been achieved by at least four means. First, I had been trained as an intellectual not only to think – an activity I greatly value – but also to live largely in my head, the place in the human body farthest from the ground. Second, I had embraced a form of Christian faith devoted less to the experience of God than to abstractions about God, a fact that now baffles me. Third, my altitude had been achieved by my ego, an inflated ego that led me to think more of myself than was warranted in order to mask my fear that I was less than I should have been. Finally, it had been achieved by my ethic, a distorted ethic that led me to live by images of who I ought to be or what I ought to do, rather than by insight into my own reality, into what was true and possible and life-giving for me. I never stopped to ask, ‘How does such-and-such fit my God-given nature?’ Eventually, I developed my own image of the ‘befriending’ impulse behind my depression. Imagine that from early in my life, a friendly figure, standing a block away, was trying to get my attention by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing truths about myself. The figure calling to me all those years, was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls ‘true self.’ This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us, not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self planted in us by the God who made us in God’s own image- the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be. True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one’s peril.” - Parker J. Palmer, from Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation To Be Continued Keep up with the latest posts, and get insider news and bonus content - Subscribe!
It is late January 1996. Manhattan; rush hour. A sour, metallic damp-cold permeates everything – the morning air, your muscles and bones, your black pleather boots and the toes within them. Within a larger vessel of concrete, steel and sky, you are surrounded by humans. Only fist-sized pockets of air and space separate you from the nearest bodies in an endless sea of bodies, most of which have hoisted game-faces like sails into the cutthroat daily gauntlet of packing one’s person into overcrowded subway cars and jockeying for just enough space to feel discrete, unpenetrated, unthreatened (though ever-wary…). And even as you strain the awkward reaches of your periphery toward whatever might be nudging with increasing insistence into your right buttock (a sensation that summons both your drowsy inner prude and latent Rottweiler), a subtler, more interior dimension of you is being alchemized, like it or not, by the psychic clouds emanating from the bodies that flank you on all sides. You are enveloped, helpless, like a sand grain sandwiched between sand grains caught in the cyclone of a wave. It is as though you are made of sponge, and each of these people in your midst is also sponge, and each of these sponges is soaked to saturation with story, energy, inner chatter, so that the liquid of each personhood seeps through and over the threshold of its cratered, rectangular mass, passing seamlessly across your own threshold, plunging deep into your fibers. For this hour, while you yourself are immobilized, you become part of a massive, mobile Venn-diagram-chain of stories and inner lives, surging through the city’s veins like blood. You arrive to work two trains, two boroughs, and a six-city-blocks’-walk later sopping with impressions, every once-vacant pore besotted by intimations of other fears, other desires, other lives, other frequencies than those you alone contained when you stepped out the door of a yellowing one-room apartment on Greenpoint Avenue this morning. Yet your day’s work has just begun: wring it out and start again. We have been patient. So patient, in fact, that we forgot - about color - about the fact that it can exist here in this dry, brutal environment. By the time it rained in late February - the first rain in literally 3 months - I remembered how much I missed green...how much I longed for green - a sign of life, a sign of growth. But that was as far as my mind allowed me to go. And then, about 3 weeks ago, a ridiculous thing happened. Jason sent me a text message while I was at work one day, with a picture of the horse crippler cactus from our native species garden attached. This garden, made up mostly of cacti and succulents scavenged from the surrounding landscape last fall, had been a drab, if sculptural, place since December. Our majestic ocotillo had shed every one of its lovely green leaves a week after being transplanted. And then its bark went from yellow-green to grey. We were sure it was dead. But we loved its 8-foot-tall, sea-creature-like shape; it was without doubt the cornerstone of our cactus garden. And so we left it, both of us harboring a secret curiosity about its ability to resurge in the spring. During the winter months, the vibrant green color had bled from the paddles of our pancake prickly pear cactus, as well, leaving a hypothermic-looking purple in its stead. Our lechuguilla's grass-green prongs had developed white splotches and it, too, appeared well on its way to demise. Even the unflappable rainbow cactus looked pale and a bit deflated. And then, 3 weeks ago - this text came through from Jason with a picture of our horse crippler cactus attached, bearing a lavish pink bloom 3 inches in diameter! Suddenly, this place of dormancy and death became a place of resurrection and wonder. Since then, the surprises continue to unfold. We have received several rain showers - uncharacteristic for this time of year here. This bit of rain seems to be coaxing the cactus flowers to open their recalcitrant buds. Our prickly pear has brandished 20 or more such buds for over 3 weeks. These tight little cones have withheld their contents for so long, we were not certain if they were flowers at all, or if they might simply die before opening - or grow into paddles instead. And then just this morning, after a little fishing and bird watching excursion on the Pecos River, we returned home to find two of these buds unfurled in all their chromatic and sculptural glory. I could hardly believe it, and had to press my head deep into each bloom, inspecting them from every angle, to fully comprehend what had emerged. The most amazing part is that there are so many more buds where these came from. The spectacle has just begun! Also this morning, as we drove along a desert bluff just above the Pecos River, I hollered at Jason to stop the truck: in the middle of a bunch of dead grass and creosote scrub, there stood a lone cactus crowned by a mammoth pink bloom. Once again, I had to inspect this apparition up close in order to believe it. We have yet to identify this cactus - it is unlike most we have seen out here. It may be a "fishhook" cactus, or some kind of "hedgehog" variety, whose proper genus name, Echinocereus, derives from the Ancient Greek for hedgehog - "echinos", and the Latin for candle - "cereus": effectively adding up to "hedgehog candle"! Something about being in a new environment and encountering so many remarkable plants and animals has filled us both with an insatiable desire to put names to faces and shapes. Learning the names of things here in the Chihuahuan Desert feels, in a way, like an act of devotion to the imagination that dreamed up and engineered such a stunning breadth of living beings. It is not lost on us that such unadulterated beauty emerges from such foreboding plant-life. Cacti are famously hardy, perfectly designed for survival against the harsh desert climate and against predators who might seek their flesh as a water source. No specimen illustrates this paradox of treacherousness and beguiling beauty more vividly than the horse crippler (also known as the "devil's pincushion"), whose long, rigid thorns really are capable of felling horse and human, and of puncturing even the most rugged set of tires, and yet whose blooms are ornate miracles of 3-D design. Its flowers attract not only admiring human eyes, but pollinators necessary to produce the bright red fruit that yields the small black seeds that hold the key to its species' future. In this sense, as in many others, the desert seems to be a place that rewards patience - one that reveals its surprising complexity only over time. One must endure the parched brown months in order to behold this season of fertility and pageantry. These stunning blooms, moreover, prove important work has been taking place beneath the seemingly lifeless surface all along. I find myself tripping over metaphors at every turn in this rugged, prickly, surreptitiously stunning landscape.
Oh, and guess what? That ocotillo we were convinced was dead?... |
Adrienne LynchIn the spirit of Rilke: living the questions. Archives
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