Plucking the Best from the Mess

It is morning and I am not due anywhere until three today which means 1:30 pm in travel time. Lately, my world has ramped up with increased work hours as an ESL teacher for a great organization and a tutor at a local college. I am finding this rapid pace laced with pockets of time is calling for me to pull together and be vigilant with all my acquired sense of a spiritual center if I am to get through and still remain balanced, positive, hearty, and in harmony.

There was a time I would have run so fast from such a challenge all while telling you the reasons why this just never could work, but my running days are over.

Being a military brat (love that term, as close a group with roots as I get), I learned to pick up and go and to release any ties with whatever or whoeverI had grown attached to in the current land where we lived. My father's Air Force career took us to delicious rural areas and two solid recognizable cities. And when we or later after my father retired, and I left, I mourned these surroundings whether they were the forests and fields of Alaska, the skies and deserts of Texas, the long sandy, wet shores of Lake Huron, or even the pungent midwestern cattle smells of Omaha.

I didn't grow attached to the folks around me, though, or else I learned as a child that you just had to let go. So now that I am a nearly 15-year resident of New York City and before that a member of El Paso for almost 30 years with a two year stopover in Dallas, I am understanding I have lived longer in two cities than I ever did as a kid with a dad in the military. So why am I still so shy at forming and keeping deep grown friendships with my community?

And now I see that it is because I am the one I've run the farthest from and until I sit down and make friends, heal, and hold Sheela, the other half of the delicious pie of life in having close and strong friends outside work and beyond is not going to be tasted by me. I am grateful for the friends I have made in my professional life. I am healthier because of them. And I want more of this wellness. I want more.

So I am going to stay with my outrageous, but doable schedule and work through my fears of attaching and enhancing my life with relationships. And I won't become self effacing or riddled with low self esteem. I will find real and effective solutions and I will heal. , I will work and manage my time, and write and pursue my goals. I will not run thinking if I can get away from the madness, I can do what I need to do. Because this logic - for me - means not finishing what is in front of me, not gathering the lessons from it, and not receiving the benefits that come with sitting with the uncomfortable and finding the truth and release from it.

Flying and being free, I see now, is sitting on a train, and being thankful. And not letting the notebook I'm holding as I close my eyes while doing a quick meditation, fall from my hands. It is staying put, fighting the good fight within and fortifying it. It is being grateful and appreciative of what I can gather from my situation just as I used to pick the best blackberries from the bushes in Michigan, placing them in my basket, daydreaming, and in nirvana, not worrying or wondering what tomorrow would have for me.

I am eating what I have sown.

Bluest eyes

Aronia on the left and Maria on the right. Both now have flown.

I saw the email and saw it was from one of the activities directors at the senior residence where I facilitate a memoir workshop. And in the subject line, I saw the name of one of my charter members of the workshop: Aronia. Oh no. That could only mean what yes, I was to discover, Aronia had transitioned. And my first thought was "I will never see her at my table again." And then I realized I have to teach an ESL class to 25+ adults in two hours and how would I do it? Be high energy and happy now, knowing what I know?

So I wrote back to Katie and this is what I said, and this is all I can say right now. This line of work means knowing you may not see a writer the next time you come to facilitate. And this is why I vow to speed up the production and reality of Elder Campfire: What I Want You to Know Before I Go.

I do not have Aronia's voice recorded.

Aww, Katie, I was dreading the day you had to tell me. Aronia is very special to me. She is the one who showed up and kept it going. She started out making things up in her stories and she made me laugh so hard with her writings. A hoot. And even though she could be cross, she loved the writing process and held it up high and kept memoir alive and well at Flushing House. I will miss her blue eyes and sharp, funny one liners. I will never forget the day she said, "They think we are children," and that's when I knew memoir was rich and purposeful. For none of them are children. They are wise and carrying a wealth of stories of resilience and love of life.

Most of all, I owe Aronia my continued strength as a memoir facilitator for one day she turned and looked at me (you know when you think, uh oh, what's she going to say?) and she asked, "Do you come up with these ideas?" and I meekly answered, "Yes," and she looked me in the eye and said, "You have a talent for this." I sat there, humbled and thankful.

I saw her two weeks ago, sitting outside, thin and subdued. I knew then the chances of her returning to memoir were slim. I carry with me a felt tip pen that she wrote with because of her eyesight. I will keep it and think of her every time I see a similar one. I am so glad I got to tell her that day how memoir was not the same without her and how she made it so special. "That is very nice of you to say," she said, and I meant it with all my heart.

I will never forget her and I must think of clever and hardy ways to invigorate our workshop to keep her love for it going.

Thank you for telling me.

Much regard and sadness,

Sheela