Spring is altogether the worst time for me to consider moving from this place. Granted, there are a dozen good reasons, and several flimsy ones, for me to do so; but all those reason existed over the winter, and that would have been the time to make the leap. Now everything is budding up and blooming: the apple tree, grafted with three different varieties of apples, has that certain complexion that it gets this time of year, whispering promises of bumper crops that will last from lat spring to early winter. I always have both the earliest and latest apple crops of anyone I know. The asian pear is filling out so nicely this year, and coming into it's own. Thr fig tree in front yard is already making noises about the first of the two crops of sweet, decadent fruit it will produce this year; if I move on schedule, I will miss both harvests. The raspberry canes, which had their first crop just last year, are bursting forth with new growth and spring leaves, all fresh and new and brimming with both the memories of last years crop, and hints of an even better one this year, the grape vines are just beginning to stir and shake off the winters dormancy, like the raspberries, they had their first harvest last season, after years of tender nurturing, how can I leave now when I am literally just beginning to see the fruits of my labor?
The wide expanse of sunny garden space beckons, mocking the postage stamp yards I have seen in the co-housing group's real estate search. Even in it's naked, unplanted state, it rivals anything I have seen elsewhere in the city.
Sure, the neighbors suck, the location is too far away from everything else I do, and the rooms are haunted by years of lies, deceptions, and betrayal; my marriages is buried here, along with a number of beloved pets. But here, too, is the herb garden, bursting with medicinal plants, that I put in when I was first learning to make salves and remedies. The fledging native plants edging the Northern side of the house, planted to support local wild life, here too is the soil, black and teeming with furtility forged by my two hands. The walls my son and I painted together. Here is the place I came to believing it to be the place I would grow old. It is just waking up from it's long sleep, to find me thinking of being on my way.
Sure, there are a dozen good reasons, and several flimsy ones, for me to go, but it would be much easier to considier doing so if it wernt spring.
Showing posts with label musings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label musings. Show all posts
Sunday
Saturday
Thoughts on Transformation
After spending the better part of the past decade in pursuit of the credentials to be an Art Therapist, now that I am closing in on the goal I find myself loosing faith in the whole notion of therapy. Well, not therapy itself, because I know it can be a powerful tool for change; nor do I doubt the potential people have to change, grow and evolve. But heres the thing: in my experience, they just don't want to.
We all develop defense and coping mechanism that, almost invariably, turn against us. We have all seen it, in our own lives and in others: we all know people who grew up being hassled by bullies and thugs, and are still doing battle with them today ~except, the perpetrators are decades gone. Today the innocent folks who trip their hair triggers are mystified and confused by their defensiveness. Far from protection, this pattern of behavior serves to alienate potential allies and friends. I know so many people who, rather than seeking to evolve, insist that others except them exactly as they are, anger issues and all. They want everyone else to change, so that they dont have to. I have been such a person. This seems to be the possition taken by the majority of folk. Like the man I know who is so scared and debilitated by being abandoned, first by his mother and then by a girlfriend, that he is unable to commit to any woman. He makes any woman who wants that commitment feel wrong. These issues are by no means insurmountable ~unless one refuses to change; and that is what most people choose to do.
Far be it from me to foist transformation on anybody. Though I believe that humans are not only capable of change, but that these transformations are an essential part of what makes us human, I am not interested in forcing anybody to be fully human. I don't want to play the heavy, and I don't want to be useless. There is precious little I can imagine worse than being useless ~being a serial killer perhaps, or a fascist, but not much else. My skills as a therapist would seem to be exactly that. The cure only helps if you take it.
Into this tangle of darkness and doubt, a fair-haired young man ~or he was a young man~ has appeared, like a beacon. He is not a young man now, but he was, and a wild one at that. He was the Kurt Cobain of my high school, our very own Drug Store Cowboy; the boy most likely to crash and burn, a boy who had experienced more tragedy and loss in the first decade and a half of his life than most people experience in a lifetime. He was a boy who struck fear and sadness in the hearts of the staff, not because they feared him, but they were afraid for him; as he was hell bent and single-minded on his path to self-destruction. There was literally every reason in the book for him to fail, and no reasonable hope of him living to adulthood.
But live he did. He lived, he grew up, he spent time in the desert. I don't know if he got therapy, art or otherwise, but I do know that he chose transformation, and in doing so chose life.
Twenty years after high school, through a strange and complicated series of events, he and I found ourselves in a local coffee shop, with our kids. The out of control 'bad boy' who used to bring orange juice laced with vodka (given the relative proportions, one might better describe it as vodka laced with orange juice) to school, now cradled his youngest son in his lap, with an tenderness and presence that nearly moved me to tears. While his older son played Yu-gi-oh cards with my son, we caught each other up on the past two decades.
He is happily married; he is in collage, and almost as passionate about his studies as he is about his family. He could have insisted that the rest of the world work around his issues and change to accommodate his wounds, but, if he had, he wouldnt have this amazing life, and he and I wouldn't have been sitting in that coffee shop, sharing insights about school, parenting, and creating one's best life. He has owned, and changed, his “stuff”; and in doing so has found wholeness and happiness in this personal transformation. I believe doing so has saved his life.
If it could happen once, in a life as unlikely as his, it could happen again, and next time I want to be there when it does.
We all develop defense and coping mechanism that, almost invariably, turn against us. We have all seen it, in our own lives and in others: we all know people who grew up being hassled by bullies and thugs, and are still doing battle with them today ~except, the perpetrators are decades gone. Today the innocent folks who trip their hair triggers are mystified and confused by their defensiveness. Far from protection, this pattern of behavior serves to alienate potential allies and friends. I know so many people who, rather than seeking to evolve, insist that others except them exactly as they are, anger issues and all. They want everyone else to change, so that they dont have to. I have been such a person. This seems to be the possition taken by the majority of folk. Like the man I know who is so scared and debilitated by being abandoned, first by his mother and then by a girlfriend, that he is unable to commit to any woman. He makes any woman who wants that commitment feel wrong. These issues are by no means insurmountable ~unless one refuses to change; and that is what most people choose to do.
Far be it from me to foist transformation on anybody. Though I believe that humans are not only capable of change, but that these transformations are an essential part of what makes us human, I am not interested in forcing anybody to be fully human. I don't want to play the heavy, and I don't want to be useless. There is precious little I can imagine worse than being useless ~being a serial killer perhaps, or a fascist, but not much else. My skills as a therapist would seem to be exactly that. The cure only helps if you take it.
Into this tangle of darkness and doubt, a fair-haired young man ~or he was a young man~ has appeared, like a beacon. He is not a young man now, but he was, and a wild one at that. He was the Kurt Cobain of my high school, our very own Drug Store Cowboy; the boy most likely to crash and burn, a boy who had experienced more tragedy and loss in the first decade and a half of his life than most people experience in a lifetime. He was a boy who struck fear and sadness in the hearts of the staff, not because they feared him, but they were afraid for him; as he was hell bent and single-minded on his path to self-destruction. There was literally every reason in the book for him to fail, and no reasonable hope of him living to adulthood.
But live he did. He lived, he grew up, he spent time in the desert. I don't know if he got therapy, art or otherwise, but I do know that he chose transformation, and in doing so chose life.
Twenty years after high school, through a strange and complicated series of events, he and I found ourselves in a local coffee shop, with our kids. The out of control 'bad boy' who used to bring orange juice laced with vodka (given the relative proportions, one might better describe it as vodka laced with orange juice) to school, now cradled his youngest son in his lap, with an tenderness and presence that nearly moved me to tears. While his older son played Yu-gi-oh cards with my son, we caught each other up on the past two decades.
He is happily married; he is in collage, and almost as passionate about his studies as he is about his family. He could have insisted that the rest of the world work around his issues and change to accommodate his wounds, but, if he had, he wouldnt have this amazing life, and he and I wouldn't have been sitting in that coffee shop, sharing insights about school, parenting, and creating one's best life. He has owned, and changed, his “stuff”; and in doing so has found wholeness and happiness in this personal transformation. I believe doing so has saved his life.
If it could happen once, in a life as unlikely as his, it could happen again, and next time I want to be there when it does.
Monday
Giving up the meaningless for Lent
I heard a very interesting piece on NPR recently about the notion of Lent, advocating that -rather than giving up chocolate or the like - that we give up for the inconsequential and meaningless in order to focus on things of real importance.
For a number of reason I find myself applying this notion to my own life,
It is less about "spring cleaning" and more about reflecting on that which I surruound myself with, and reconnecting to those things that truely resonate with me, and those people people who reflect and support my core values. Finding what resonates with me and letting the rest fall away. Because the problem with clutter isnt is not so much that it covers the good stuff, but it interfiers with one's connection to the good stuff, and thus our connection with ourselves.
I have been looking into several Co-Housing opportunities, a couple of which would offer far less personal space than I currently have. Although the one that would reduce The Boy and I to sharing one room is doubtless impractical, in looking at the space I am using, and how I am using it, I see that I could do with far less space and stuff. Like so many Americans, I am a bit of a pack-rat, and much of the stuff filling my current space is not truely meaningful to me. I am becoming aware of the extent to which clutter (whether pysical, mental, psychological or metiphorical) impeds our ability to enjoy the precious things we have, and blocks the arrival of truely meaningful things (be they material objects, people or ideas). The treasures get burried, and new things we might treasure have no place to land, literally or figuritivly.
Not sure I will ever qualify as a minimalist, and that may not be te point, but I believe there is value in weeding out the superfulous and unnessisary, and tending the roots of what really matters.
For a number of reason I find myself applying this notion to my own life,
It is less about "spring cleaning" and more about reflecting on that which I surruound myself with, and reconnecting to those things that truely resonate with me, and those people people who reflect and support my core values. Finding what resonates with me and letting the rest fall away. Because the problem with clutter isnt is not so much that it covers the good stuff, but it interfiers with one's connection to the good stuff, and thus our connection with ourselves.
I have been looking into several Co-Housing opportunities, a couple of which would offer far less personal space than I currently have. Although the one that would reduce The Boy and I to sharing one room is doubtless impractical, in looking at the space I am using, and how I am using it, I see that I could do with far less space and stuff. Like so many Americans, I am a bit of a pack-rat, and much of the stuff filling my current space is not truely meaningful to me. I am becoming aware of the extent to which clutter (whether pysical, mental, psychological or metiphorical) impeds our ability to enjoy the precious things we have, and blocks the arrival of truely meaningful things (be they material objects, people or ideas). The treasures get burried, and new things we might treasure have no place to land, literally or figuritivly.
Not sure I will ever qualify as a minimalist, and that may not be te point, but I believe there is value in weeding out the superfulous and unnessisary, and tending the roots of what really matters.
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