Mes Amis

Friendship

–noun

1.

the state of being a friend; association as friends: to value a person's friendship.

2.

a friendly relation or intimacy.

3.

friendly feeling or disposition.

Some would say that you could define a person by their relationships with other people. Most especially with their friends. Because while we can't choose our family, our friends are people that for whatever reason, we have picked to be in our lives in some degree of intimacy and relationship. The way that we treat and relate to them says something about who we are as human beings both as a collective people, but more so as individuals.

I don't feel like I've been a very good friend to very many people in my life. The friendships that have been deep and meaningful in my thirty years I can count on one hand and the ones that I currently have in my life that mean everything to me number about half of that. I admit it, selfishness is in my nature and at certain points more than others, it can reign supreme... sometimes to the neglect of friends. During periods of difficulty such as during my parents divorce or when I lost my mom or the past year when my relationship of ten years ended, I became at times an exceptionally selfish individual. In spite of how it may appear on this blog, I am generally a very private person. I don't display much emotion with others and tend keep most of my feelings and emotions to myself. And during times of great stress or sadness or when I'm feeling most broken (and probably need to give and recieve love from other people the most), I tend hide away from the world and prefer to process my thoughts and emotions in private. Not intentionally, I pull away from the world and from my friends in the process. This past year that has happened quite a bit, me spending months at a time either at work or holed up in my house with my dog and stacks of books around me. I read, I write, I pray, I process and hopefully, on the other end, a changed me will appear. The problem is that sometimes during these periods of chrysalis in my life, when I feel content to be working on my own insides, I become selfish and forget about people I care about, leaving friends sometimes feeling overlooked and hurt. It's sometimes been an exceptionally hard thing for myself, being such an introvert, to balance maintaining meaningful friendships while also carving out much needed alone time to regain my sanity after being surrounded by hundreds of people five days a week at work. I suppose this is why as I've gotten older and realized my own need for quiet time by myself, I have become much more selective about the people I spend my limited time with and the friendships I invest in. That being said, there are friends out there whom I miss, whom I wonder about, whom I think have lost quite a bit of respect for me in the past year and this continues to be a hard reality to live with.

I have recently reunited with an old and true pal of the greatest degree. She and I had a falling out many months ago after I made assumptions about her feelings towards actions I had taken in my life and said something very hurtful and unfair to her. And so she let me fade from the fabric of her everyday life. Occasionally I would text or call and leave a message, tell her I missed her and apologize and wish her well and she would always respond politely but I knew, or at least I thought I knew, that deep down she was done with me. And it broke my heart. It's rare for me to find a friend that I connect with so succinctly, that I can both laugh my ass off with and with whom I can also share my tears and my regrets and my deepest sadnesses and in this diamond of a friend, I had that. And then I didn't.

This fall the waves of life came crashing down on me hard and in unison and I found myself broke, busted and alone and not knowing who else to reach out to, I reached out to this friend I hadn't spoken with in many months. And she responded. And she asked if I was okay. And despite the hurt I had caused her so many months ago, she forgave me and she loved me and continues to do so selflessly for exactly the big old nerd that I am. When I think about her I feel so blessed and happy to have this kind of support and when good things happen to me I want to tell her because I know she will be happy with me. When bad things happen to me I want to rant and rave and complain to her because I know she will either support my cause, or call me out if I'm being irrational. She always listens to and supports me and she tells me she is proud of me. Nobody tells me that. And I believe her. She encourages me to follow my heart and my dreams and believes in the possibility of my life having a great impact on the world. That's a lot to believe in someone, I still am not really sure why or how she does it. In reflection upon my feelings towards the importance of our friendship to me, I have recently come to the realization that all of these things and so much more mean she is my family to me. I don't have any idea if she feels the same and that's okay. She is like my equally gay sister. When I get married I hope she will be my maid of honor and will be the big gay god-mommy of my children. I hope that when she gets married I will be the one performing the ceremony (and wearing a fabulous linen suit). I hope when we are old and gray we will be able to sit on a porch together and drink chai tea and laugh about what big nerds we were back in the day and that our wives and our children will be great friends. And mostly I hope that whatever many changes life surely has in store for us in the future, that we will always be able to come back to this place of ease and happiness that exists between us and that where love has been between us, love will remain.

In my life the people who are close are few and far between. I suspect this is the case for a lot of us. Some of the people I admire most in the world are everyday folks I meet or know who live life so openly and unabashedly that they not only let anyone and everyone in, but they invite them into their world and their lives and create this beautiful ripple effect of love out into the world. Learning to be better at letting more people really see me and trying to really see others is one of my 2011 goals. For all of us, partners and pets and jobs and even our families come and go in life and sometimes simply just go... so thank God for the love and communion of friends. Although I have two blood-related relatives in town, the friend mentioned above and a few others amazingly giving and open souls feel just as much like my family too. When I feel frustrated about not having a giant gaggle of friends to parade around with, or a "crew" as it were, I try to remember the great blessings of the presence of the close and amazing friends I do have in my life; quality, not quantity. I only hope that I can be half as good of a friend to them as they are to me and that in my presence, they may always feel comfort, peace, and happiness inside their own skin. May we all go through our lives blessed with the love and company of at least one good friend with whom me can be our most beautiful and our most ugly selves and may we when we leave their presence, go out into the world and pass on the love they have given us to others. I am lucky to have that and to be inspired by these women and many more. May you too be so blessed.

Namaste.

Portrait of Beauty

There's a couple at my church named Jason and Jaime. They appear to be in their mid to late thirties. Jaime reminds me of every great art teacher I ever knew, with dyed frizzy red hair and crepe-y flowered skirts and leather boots and beaded dangling earrings and this kind of chatty, spunky personality. I can tell she's a free thinker, a lover of all that is beautiful, a giver. Jason is tall and hunched over, quiet, epileptic and sometimes, visibly intoxicated. During the service they sit in the back row of the balcony, their belongings strewn out next to them. Before Jaime's purse got stolen from behind her feet as sold Street Roots on the side of the sanctuary a few months ago, she would place her purse on the side of her too. When I usher, they always give a few dollars to the offering. When they are outside on the street selling newspapers, many of their belongings in tow, people come up to them and bring them wool socks or old coats or hand knitted chartreuse and turquoise hats. People hug them, they ask how they are, they know their name out there on the street. But inside, Jason and Jaime sit up in the balcony in the back row alone, isolated. Sometimes they don't even go upstairs at all but go down underneath the sanctuary to Fuller Hall where we have social hour after the service and they sit and drink hot coffee or tea and they get warm.
 
 About six months ago Jaime told me they had found a cheap place to live but expressed frustration about being unable to find a job. She was worried she didn't have much nice to wear to an interview and that she wouldn't find a job in time to pay the rent at the end of the month. For a housewarming present I got them a basket of laundry detergent and quarters, and iron and some hangers with the hopes that having clean and pressed clothes might give her that boost of confidence she needed. She thanked me profusely and did end up finding a job as a waitress but it didn't last long. I don't know much about her history other than that she has a few children who are not in her custody and she spends a lot of her time not selling newspapers shuffling around town with Jason trying to find him free or reduced health care and medication for his epilepsy. She has shared with me that she is bi-polar and I wonder if this, coupled with all the other struggles she is faced with, has made finding and keeping employment difficult. I can tell from her nature that she's nurturing, always hugging me hello and asking how I am when in the grand scheme of both of our lives, I have very little to worry about.

A few months ago I could tell that Jason and Jaime had lost the place they were renting and were back on the street as Jaime didn't have her makeup on as usual and she seemed exceptionally melancholy. Her spunk was gone and she seemed tired, downtrodden and Jason appeared intoxicated as he sold newspapers. Inside on the bulletin board I saw a small note on a ripped piece of scratch paper saying that they were looking for a donated used computer to help them with their job and home and health care hunt. It just so happened that I knew my dad's office was getting all new computers because my brother was getting a used laptop from him. I asked if there was any extra and my dad said they were going to sell them but that he would give one to me if I needed it. I told him that while my computer seems to catch one virus after the next, and has to be plugged in to work because the battery died about two years ago, that it wasn't for me that I was asking.

The Sunday before Christmas I asked Jaime if they had had any luck with the computer hunt and she said no. I told her that I had one for her and you could tell by her reaction she thought I was pulling her leg. I told her I would bring it the next week, the day after Christmas, but I fell through on my promise. Instead I went and got a tattoo with a good friend. I felt terrible all this past week that I had made a promise and not delivered and hoped when I saw them today, they wouldn't be upset or disappointed in me. To be completely honest, I did for a moment earlier in the week worry that in need of money, they might just sell the computer, but then I realized that it didn't really matter what they did with it, that that wasn't the point. As a giver of a gift, it's unfair for me to give it with strings or worries attached. All we can ever do is give what we are able and hope it is valued and valuable; to give with faith. When I saw Jaime today, computer in a bag under my arm, you could tell she was bursting with curiosity of if I was going to deliver on my promise. I pulled it out from under my arm and wished her a merry, belated Christmas and she just kept saying over and over, "I knew you would bring it, I knew you would! Jason didn't think you would but I just knew you would." I felt really embarrassed as I hadn't really done anything to give her this gift; I hadn't spent any money or shopped for anything, I had simply lucked into something that she needed and was getting undue credit. I brushed off her thanks and she went to tell Jason the good news. As I turned to leave, hoping that I had made her day at least a little bit more joyous, she came to give me a hug, tears in her eyes. She said that she was so grateful for me and for the gift I had given her. She held me and she looked me in the eyes and as tears streamed down her face she told me she just wanted to get a job and a home and get her life back together so badly so she could give back to other people too. And I believed her. She said for her, having no or very little resources or means, makes it impossible for her to give much to others and that this is what is most difficult for her about being homeless. Unsure of what was the right thing to say to offer her comfort, I told her that for me and I'm sure for others, that her presence in the world is simply enough. I said that her smile and her friendliness and her spunk are a gift in an of themselves and I meant it.

Isn't it funny sometimes how we can go through the world not really realizing the affect we may or may not have on other people? I know for example, that I will go to church each Sunday and she will be one of the first people I see. Unbeknownst to her, I am newly single and generally exceptionally lonely and starved for human contact and she is one of the few people who will hug me each week. Her smile and the joy that she generally radiates are a gift to me and I suppose sadly, in the tradition of my family, instead of me just telling her this, I have given her gifts. I feel like I've done very little for Jaime and other homeless people when you consider how great my wealth is and privilege are when compared to hers... and yet she was showering me with thanks and compliments that I didn't at all deserve. In reality, between the two of us, she's the survivor, she's the brave one.

This interaction got me thinking about the people who mean the most to me in the world and how they aren't those who have given me lavish gifts, but how they are those who have said or done small, thoughtful and genuine things for me... those who have recognized me for who I am and appreciated it. Those who have really seen me. I think in the end, this desire to truly be seen and appreciated for who we really are is what all of us want. This and to be able to feel like we are giving back or contributing something positive to the world just by being here. What a shame that so many people have to go through life either pretending to be someone they are not to be accepted or who because of their lack of privilege, are only seen for their "difference," their Otherness, rather than for who they really are. To most of the world Jaime probably appears just another Portland homeless woman selling newspapers on the street corner; someone who is dependent on the gifts of others for survival rather than someone who also gives to others despite her lack of material wealth. I saw part of Jamie's soul today and damn, it was beautiful. In the shedding of tears her heart was exposed, and her desire to care for and make other people happy shined brilliantly through as her life's calling. I hope that my small gift helps her to find her way back to stability just a little bit quicker or makes it a little bit easier and I hope that in my witnessing her presence as a gift enough, she felt for at least a moment, visible and needed. May we all go through our lives with the fortitude to lay our hearts bare for others to see as Jaime so courageously did today. May we give the gift of genuineness and love to others as our greatest offering and may we recognize, in all of those around us, that whatever the state of our lives, we are all in this moment and will be in all of those that follow, worthy. 

Namaste.

Yee Haw!

Don't ask, don't tell was repealed yesterday! Woo hoo! I have so much more to say but I'm laying in the dark in my bed typing on my phone and the dog is glaring at me for his breakfast and morning stroll. Needless to say, yesterday a few good things happened in our country and I woke feeling hopeful and felt the need to purge my joy onto the page. Give it up for Obama and all my gay family who can now be open about who they are in the military! Because without being able to be yourself, what's the point anyways? May we all go forward boldy, unapoologetic of our own skin and all tha lies underneath it. Namaste friends.

On Living and Dying

Death came knocking on the door to a house in Chapel Hill, North Carolina today. Inside a woman of 61 left this place due to liver failure, a side effect of cancer which she had been fighting for six years and which having originally started in her breast, had spread to her hips, lungs, and lymph nodes. Around ten this morning, with her the recently estranged husband of several decades, her twenty eight year old daughter and other family members by her side, she bowed out of this life with undeniable grace.

Elizabeth Edwards was originally known to the public for being the steadfast wife of  good looking southern Senator who would later become a presidential and then vice presidential candidate. During this time she also became known for fighting breast cancer as she campaigned for her husband and for being eternally optimistic and yet honest about her disease. In more recent years her family was made famous again in the press after it was discovered that her husband John had an affair and then a child with another woman. Although dying of cancer, Elizabeth left her husband but said in a television interview not too long ago that she would not bad-mouth him despite his infidelity to her because he was the father of her children and that she wanted them to still love and respect him just as they always had. Many years ago Elizabeth and John lost one of the two children they had at the time at the tender age of fifteen in a car accident. Knowing what strength I have gained and wisdom has been absorbed through and toughened my skin and my resolve to be in the world since the death of my mom, I wonder if having lost her son earlier in life and carrying on with her head held high in his honor and memory helped her fight her six year battle with cancer in such an astoundingly brave and lucid way. I would venture to guess that she will continue to be admired for her frankness and for living as fully as she could all the way up until today.

Just about the time Elizabeth Edwards was taking her last breath today I was at work wondering where one of my employees was after she had not shown up for work or called to say she was sick or running late. I called her and got no answer, leaving a message. A few hours later still no word and at this point I figured if she had slept through her alarm earlier, surely she would have awoken by now. Soon after another store manager approached and told me that this employee, who is normally exceptionally reliable, had called in tears, her grandmother having fallen yesterday and the employee had quickly driven to Bend to be with her. I learned later today that this employee is very close with her grandmother, her mom's mom and that the fall was bad. As I sat with one of my assistant managers training her on schedule writing we talked about this employee and she said to me, "You know she had to make the decision to pull her mom off of life support." I asked if her mother had been sick and she said  no, that she had been critically injured in a car accident. My assistant doesn't know that I lost my own mother the same way and I tried as hard as I might to not let the shock and sadness register on my face. All of a sudden, with one sentence I found myself relating to this employee in a whole other way. I have never known anyone under forty five or fifty who has lost their mother and feel quite isolated sometimes around my friends who see and talk with and talk about their moms often. It's a reality that most people my age haven't had to live or deal with yet. And so my well of compassion for other folks, other daughters in particular, who suddenly find themselves motherless at a young age, runs deep.

Speaking about the death of her son in a speech once several years ago, Elizabeth Edwards said that often times people don't want to ask about those you have lost because they worry it will make you sad. She told the audience that these people are already sad and know very well in most moments of their lives that their loved one is gone. By us asking people about their lost loved one, we are showing reverence for the fact that they themselves are still here. I hope that even though people know the public image of Elizabeth Edwards and what they have read about her in her own memoirs and in the media, people will always ask her children to tell them about her as a way of witnessing the loss they have experienced, the love they still have for this person, and as a way of acknowledging their survival and still presence in the world. Out of the people in my life who never know my mom, very few have asked about her. I believe only one has asked her name. I will never forget exactly where I was, driving on the highway with a newer friend in the passenger seat by my side, when she asked me to tell her about my mom and about how she had died. This was only a few years ago. In the five years before that, nobody had dared and I of course, hadn't volunteered. I will love this friend until the end of all time for braving the possible discomfort she might experience or create to get to know the thing that has happened in my life that is dearest to my heart and that most of the people in my life never address with me.

Death is so taboo. We don't talk about it, not really. The funny thing is, in one way or another it has affected all of our lives. Earlier today veterans and those who love and respect them honored the men who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor on this day so many decades ago and stood witness to their lives. Those men who lost their lives will always be revered and I hope the same can be said for Elizabeth Edwards, and for the mother of my employee who died too young too. In talking with her children about dying after word had come from her doctors that her cancer was no longer curable but only treatable, she asked her children at the dinner table to raise their hands if they weren't going to die. Of course, no hands went in the air because we are all going to die someday. It is the one and only true and solid fact of all of our lives and perhaps the one and only thing that each and every person on the face of this planet shares in common with each other. If this is indeed the case, why is it also the subject so many of us are scared to broach? Because it reminds us of our own mortality? Because really we are all dying right now and have been doing so since the day that we were born? It is only the speed at which this happens that differs from one person to the next really. I admire Elizabeth Edwards for choosing to live the fullest life she possibly could until today came just as I admire my mom for doing the same even when she didn't know death was hovering near.

Sometimes I worry that I talk about death to much here on these pages. I worry that I write inky pomes about it too often in my drawing sketchbooks. I worry that people think that I am morbid... or worse yet, that I am utterly obsessed or unable to get over the loss of my mother. The truth is, I think, that I don't talk about her much not because I don't want to but because even though I know they care about, nobody much asks and so as a way of processing my feelings, I write about it. But when I'm thinking about her I can't really say, "hey, so I was thinking about this one time when my mom did such and such or I couldn't sleep last night because I was having nightmares about the way she died." Those sort of things can be conversation killers. And so I keep her inside of me mostly, close to my heart and I write about her and about losing her here on these pages. I hope that I don't come off as morbid or unable to progress with life and I hope that for the children of Elizabeth Edwards and the spouses and children left behind by their fathers after Pearl Harbor and for my employee who unbeknownst to her, lost her mom the same way I did, that the world has and will continue to let us grieve however much and however long we want and lets us celebrate and discuss as often as we want to without passing judgement.

What lessons can we learn from the people we know and don't know who have died? How can we let their lives and in some cases, more importantly their deaths, serve as a roadmap for how we might live our own lives? What can we do to honor them in their absence and ensure that we don't take the opportunity of a death that takes a lifetime rather than only two or three or four decades for granted? How can we honor those who are gone who we may not have known but who have shaped the lives and being of those we love? What lessons can the universal experience of living and dying teach us about the interrelatedness of all people and about the interconnected web of all human kind? Tonight I poured myself an orange oil bath and I slinked down deep in the tub until only my face peeked up above the water and I thought about these questions. I laid there in silence and I watched the steam billow from the surface of the water, rolling and curling gently until it dissipated into thin air. I put my ears underneath the surface and I ran my finger down the outside of my earlobe and heard a noise like a trombone playing under the water. And then I closed my eyes. I asked the Universe, the great universal Spirit of Life to be with the family of Elizabeth Edwards, to be with my employee as she sits watch over her injured and ill grandmother, her last living link to her beloved mother, I asked that families of those lost in Pearl Harbor felt comfort and hope in the communion of each other today as they commemorated and I said a silent prayer for myself too that my life may be worthy of my mother's living and dying. That I may live in a way that would make her proud and that I don't get lazy and forget to grab ahold of opportunities that come my way and get greedy and fail to recognize all blessings offered me daily.

None of us know when it will be our turn to go. And none of us really know what is going to happen to us when we do. I hope for all of our sakes that when we are still here we feel love and that when we are gone people ask those who loved and survived us, to tell them the story of our little lives and to honor the spirit inside of us that will live on inside of our kin and friends. May we all in each of our days be able to find the courage and motivation to live in the most colorful and wildly loud ways we can muster, even with death on our shoulder as Elizabeth Edwards did. May we be courageous enough to follow our hearts and live fully our purpose, reaching always more heartily towards our dreams. And may we, in choosing every day to live so boldly, pay homage to the great cloud of witnesses who did the same before us and so bravely paved their paths and our own. In the name of all that is good and holy, namaste to you and to those you have loved who are gone. Let us always remember and honor the divinity that resided within them and that of them which remains inside of ourselves too.

Why I Write

I can’t sleep. It happens a lot. I am always able to fall asleep, I just have trouble staying asleep. After my mom died I don’t think I slept three straight hours for a few years. I always thought that was what it must feel like to have a newborn baby in the house, not that I had to do much of anything when I woke, just that during the day I felt endlessly exhausted from never getting more than a few hours rest at a time. That time in my life was also about when I started working for Starbucks and getting up at 3am. No matter what time you go to bed, 3am always comes to quickly and an afternoon nap is usually inevitable. Again, eight hours of sleep proved illusive again for many more years. The past year I have found myself waking up a lot in the middle of the night too, the bed feeling strangely empty and expansive. I try to wrap myself tightly in the covers but it still can always feel that great big cold expanse spread out next to me; like I might just roll over into all that emptiness and fall of the side of the world. Sometimes I try to hug a pillow for comfort but in the end it just usually leaves me feeling reminded of my own aloneness. In any event, the point here is that 3am and I are perhaps better friends than I am with most other hours in the day. And if we're going to be completely honest, I suppose maybe all these excuses for why I've been sleep deprived for years on end, are to cover up for the fact that I’ve just got too much going on in this damn head of mine to sleep restfully. So much anxiety and stress that it wakes me up in the middle of the night. I am hopeful that maybe if I start writing everyday and letting out some of the thoughts that are swimming circles in my brain, they will stop bumping into the concious side of my brain at night and waking me up. Maybe by speaking, or writing as it were, my thoughts down on a daily basis I will get a solid eight hours of sleep!!! Yes, it really is a that-kind-of-exciting, three exclamation points worthy, kind of thought.

In any event, the positive side of being unable to sleep is I get to read. Or write for that matter. Often times when I read before bed, or even during the day after work, I always fall asleep about two pages into the whole endeavor and it takes me forever anymore to finish one damn book. Lately I have been reading any of Anne Lamott’stuff of the non fiction variety that I can get my hands on. Right now I am reading Bird by Bird, Some Instructions on Writing and Life. It appears to have been published over a decade ago and before any of her other non fiction books, those about her thoughts on faith, were published. She seems to have been, at least in the publishing world, only a novelist at this point. In any event, there is one chapter called “Looking Around” which is my favorite and it is all about why she writes, the purpose. There’s so many wonderful things she says here and here are just a few...

“Writing is about learning to pay attention and communicate what is going on... Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this you have to know who you are are in the most compassionate sense possible. Then you can recognize others. It’s a simple concept, but not that easy to do... I honestly think in order to be a writer you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you’ve read poetry or prose that has been presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least have meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers I think; to help others have this sense of- please forgive me- wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious... There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsorthian openness to the world where you see in everything the essence of holiness, a sign that God is implicit in all of creation. Or maybe you are not predisposed to see the world sacramentally...anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain of the natural world.... Mostly things are that way, not that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as it sings itself. But that kind of attention is the prize. To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind...”

Not since reading Emerson for the first time have I read someone who so perfectly captured the way I felt about something, about everything. And Lamott does this consistently. I find myself reading her books and thinking, “Exactly!” and wishing there was someone else here to be experiencing this revelation and assurance with me. In my own humble observation, Lamott has many a great thing to say, many a keen observation about the oneness of the world, but I particularily like her thoughts on the purpose of writing, of why we do it; on looking at the minutia and ordinariness of the world, and seeing meaning there. About seeing and describing in whatever clarity we can muster, the divinity in everything and everyone around us and making others who might not ordinarilly see it, recognize it too. Or making those who do, exclaim internally with wild excitement as I do when I read Lamott, that someone has finally described so acurately with paper and ink, a thought inside their very own head. I suppose all of this in the end, this desire to create meaning from the mystery and to startle people with beauty and awe of the world around them, to make them feel part of something greater than themselves and make them feel a deeper connection to the world and with others, is why I write. What makes me qualified to do any of that, I don’t know. I’m not really qualified at all I suppose, not anymore than anyone else out there... but for some reason it just feels right. And so with the advice of Rumi, I am following what feels right, letting myself be drawn by the strange pull of what I really love and trusting, or maybe, hoping desperately, is a better fit here, this strange pull will not lead me astray...

Namste

Taped

I have seen my family the past four days in a row. If you know me at all, you know that this is like, a world record or something. On my mom's side of the family my brother and I are the only people left and on my dad's side, in Oregon it's just he and us, plus the stepmom. Most holidays either my brother or I or both of us have to work so usually there is three, maybe four of us at best, celebrating a given holiday together. Well, needless to say, this Thanksgiving was different.


My dad's mom, my grandma Lou, lost her husband and my dad's stepdad this year at the age of ninety nine. This is her first holiday season without him and so she came out for two weeks for Thanksgiving. As a surprise, my dad's two brothers and their wives came out to from Colorado and California to surprise her. They have all been here, along with one sun-kissed, Justin Beiber-looking sixteen year old cousin from California as well and Los Angeles to be exact. We had Thanksgiving dinner with them at my dad's house and then Friday night all met at Meriweathers (my favorite restaurant, score!) for dinner and then on Saturday night went downtown for dinner and then took my aunt to get a now nationally famous, maple bar with bacon on top at Voodoo Doughnuts (she saw a show on the food network). Yesterday afternoon I met everyone for a big exciting Max and Portland streetcar ride around town so my grandmother could see more of the city and needless to say, she loved it. 


Family, its a funny thing. I've never known much of it and have always a sort of awkward relationship with most of them as I'm sure many people can relate to. Other than my parents and grandparents, three out of the four of them who are now deceased, the rest of my relatives I see every five to ten years and don't really know at all. They don't seem to understand or want to believe that I am gay and there is always awkward conversations about why I don't have a boyfriend. Politically and religiously we are on far extreme ends of the spectrum so any current events and politics are usually also not good topics to cover. One of the things I have always wanted most in the world is to create a family of my own. To have a spouse and children with them and to, although my upbringing was pretty darn good, create what I had and then some, giving my children every ounce of love I can squeeze out of me and helping create people who grow up to help make the world a better place. Perhaps much of the depression I'm facing at thirty has to do with the fact that I worry that I'm getting older and there isn't even a glimmer of hope at this point that I will ever have those things. In any event,  something happened yesterday that reminded me to be thankful for this odd bunch of family that I do have even if it's not the family tree I would have imagined myself to be clinging to at thirty. 


After a few hours riding around town the sun had gone down and it was starting to rain and we were on our last leg of our big exciting public transportation tour of Portland, headed back to Lloyd center to get in our cars and go our separate ways, and a man got on the Max and sat down near my family. My dad was seated next to me and my grandma and stepmom next to him and across from him my aunt and uncle. He was probably in his late fifties, early sixties and was I think, homeless. I could see he was thin and dressed in many layers but only when he sat down was I able to see the boniness of his knees jut out through his jeans and his thighs seem to be non-existent, burring themselves in the small scoop of the seat. He had grey hair and was balding in the back, his long hair slicked back away from his face. His checks were sunken in and he had deep wrinkles in his face and rough skin on his hands. His nails were trimmed short but there was dirt under them. I was glad at least to see he had a newer, comfortable and warm looking pair of shoes on and a giant down jacket. The most interesting thing about this man, at least from outside appearances, is what he carried, a suitcase. Most homeless people you see around Portland have sleeping bags or blankets or garbage bags or backpacks or rolling suitcases but this many had something that almost looked like a stage prop. It was smallish, about a foot and a half by two feet and boxy, completely square in shape. Each half, the upper and the lower were exactly equal in depth and it had a hard plastic handle on the top. It was a dirty, dingy brown in color and dented, the sides curved gently in. All of the corners and edges were covered with layers and layers of frayed duck tape indicating that this suitcase has probably been around as long as it's owner has and that he had taken great care to patch up it's sores and cracks quite diligently over time. In any event, the suitcase looked like something I've seen a hobo carry in a movie or a clown would pull flowers out of at the circus; I'd never seen a homeless person with a suitcase like this until yesterday. I don't know what this man's story has been, what unexpected heartbreaks and decisions brought him to be homeless and riding the train with my family yesterday, but his suitcase indicated to me that they had been on the streets together for many years, he and this small square bag. 

The part of this experience that really stuck with me, and the part that I really wanted to tell about this man, was how he looked at my family. Seated next to him was my blind uncle who wears glasses as thick as two coke bottles and squints incessantly and my overweight, disabled aunt who spent three months in the hospital this year after a bad car accident and now walks with a cane. This is at least how I'm sure they are often described, how the outside world sees them but they, just like all of us, are much more than they would seem to be from outside appearances and hold beautiful things inside of them. They are an odd couple indeed, both living outside the standard societal norms of what good people, valuable, worthwhile people look like. But they love each other dearly and have for over thirty years and I'm sure see and appreciate in each other all of the things the rest of the world may and probably does find flawed about them. As they sat on the train and rocked back and forth with each stopping of the car, they held hands and at one point my aunt rested her head on my uncle's shoulder and you could see her whole body exhale in the comfort of him. I watched the man with the suitcase sneak glances at them. I wonder if he had love like that in his past that he was recalling. I wonder if he was thinking that looked nice and he wished he had the same or if he was thinking about a woman he used to know in such a way. Mostly though, more than looking at them, he looked across the aisle at my dad. I'm not sure if my dad noticed, I think not, but I did. He watched my dad, who ran most of the conversation during the train ride, quite a lot. He and my dad are probably similar in age, both gray in the same places. My dad however, has less wrinkles because he's been well fed over the years and his cheeks and the corners of his eyes are plump. My dad was sporting some sort of fancy gortex winter coat from REI that probably set him back a few hundred and equally expensive clothes and shoes. He had around him a cadre of family that looked at him and listened to and responded to him. His mother and wife on one side, his child on the other, and his brother across from him. And although when I look around at these people I know the issues and struggles we all sometimes have in relating to one another and trying to figure out what being a family really means and should look like and find myself wondering what the hell any of us have in common besides blood anyways... I suppose to many people looking down onto this scene of six seemingly happy people, my dad would look like a king on a throne. I wondered, as the man with the suitcase watched my dad and studied his outfit and how he spoke and how we responded to him, if this envy or admiration for my dad's obvious wealth in life, not only materially, but more familialy (if that's a word), is what he felt. He seemed to have a curious, longing sort of look on his face. Not one of anger of of jealousy even necessarily, but one of wonder and almost... one of awe. 


This fall has brought quite a bit of heartbreak and disappointment to my life and I have felt at times like I am floating around the world in a bubble. Like the world and it's people, like color and sound and vibrancy are out there... and I am in here, wherever that is, invisible. I feel onside of myself, alone, quiet, watching and listening, but not participating. Like I'm waiting for the right moment to rejoin the world somehow if I can only figure out how to manage this. I go to church some weeks and I sit in the back and look at all the people around me and as the minister speaks my mind floats off into other places and I watch the congregants around me focusing intently on the music or the sermon and I wonder if they feel connected to the earth and each other in that moment, if they feel grounded in community, in love... or if they feel sort of like they have ear muffs and swimming goggles on and walls of plexi-glass around them separating their muffled and lonely reality from the rest of the world like I do. As I watched the man with the suitcase the other day study my dad and my family, I wondered if he felt the same way in that moment because I'm pretty sure I saw in his eyes, the reflection of myself. I saw those feelings of separateness and of longing for something more, for a deeper more meaningful human connection, for a yearning to be visible, to be seen... for what I think so many of us sometimes in moments of struggle believe everyone else but us has.


I wonder metaphorically speaking, we are all a little bit like this homeless man with a suitcase at many moments in our lives. On the outskirts of the world in our head and in our hearts. If we have so much going on internally that we find it hard to take off our swimming goggles and earmuffs and break through the choked bubble we live in to join the rest of the world and really live. For the man with the suitcase, I would assume many of his struggles are physical in nature; finding a warm place to sleep at night and a hot meal, on top of all the more mental struggles that people like myself face. I am blessed more than most people in the world simply to have a roof over my head, and yes, even a family of sorts and heck, I have a job and food in my cupboards and there are ten percent or more Oregonians who can't even say that right now. And while I have these things, I still have longings and dreams and desires for my life and have often as of late like I am watching the rest of the world live from the sidelines while I sit here in my quiet, invisible bubble racking my brain to figure out how in the hell I'm going to just survive until the next day, let alone thrive. 


To use an oft quoted saying, nobody ever said life was a walk in the park. And isn't that the damned truth. Some days, weeks, years, probably even decades for some of us, it can feel like one God forsaken struggle after the next. Why some of us are blessed with a family to go on Sunday streetcar rides with and some of us are not, I will probably never know. In my own assertion, there isn't explanation for a lot of the things that happen to us although we are absolutely the captains of our own ships and to much extent, are able to steer the course of our own lives. The trick to life is not what happens, but how we respond. This is the part we can control. I suspect most of us are just here trying trying to tape together the cracks and fissures that appear from time to time in our lives in an effort to hold ourselves together, just as the man on the train has appeared to have done so dutifully with his suitcase. By the end of our days most of us will have so many layers of tape holding us together that the person we once were or people we have been throughout or days is barely visible, each new layer of tape a fresh start, a new attempt at piecing back together our lives and closing up a wound after life throws us a curveball. We will likely be dented and bruised and battered looking... but we will have stories and memories and a lifetime of some extent in our hands. I wonder the stories and the memories that the man on the train's suitcase could tell, I wonder what memories are underneath each layer of his tape. May we all go forward with gratitude, recognizing all of the many blessings that we do have, the things that we have folded nicely and put in our life's suitcase and stop focusing as much on the things we feel like are missing, the things we used to carry along with us and miss dearly or the things we have always longed for, but haven't as of yet had. May we see in ourselves and in other people, beauty in all those neatly folded and rumpled things inside of ourselves, in all of our the many frayed layers of our existence and in the dents and bruises underneath it all and be thankful for them having made us who we are. May we try to be conscious and aware of those who eye the beauty of our lives from the sidelines and appreciate them for pointing out the blessings we may have been previously unable or unwilling to see ourselves and may we go forth with thanks, always trying to share with others in our abundance. 


Namaste.

They are saying it supposed to snow today. Light this evening and then more through the night and day tomorrow. School children and people that don't have any responsibility to the outside world or need to commute long distances are excited at the possibility and being surrounded by the quiet and peaceful glory of all that soft downy white. There's a certain sense of calm that comes with snowfall and around here it can be a welcome reprieve. Normally I would take extreme joy in being surrounded by soft blankets of rolling icy white dunes but this week I'm quietly begging God to hold off for a few more days so that I, and my employees, can get to work and feed a lot of very wealthy folks Thanksgiving dinner.

Yesterday I went to work at three thirty in the afternoon and finally left at four thirty this morning; I had to fight to keep my eyes open driving home. With the exception of three phone calls from work throughout this morning, I slept from five thirty until noon. Normally subsisting on a breakfast of a piece of fruit, cup of coffee and a few slices of toast, today I decided it high time to have a heartier sort of meal to nurse my achy back and the bloody feeling soul I'm sporting these days. I fed my bruised and broken heart a giant mound of pancakes, four of them to be exact, grilled slightly crisp with butter and drenched in a downpour of real maple syrup. I drank two mug-fulls of lemony french pressed Ethiopian coffee, some of my favorite, and watched the oil swirl in the top of the cup. I sat in silence and listened to my little red dog breath quietly, inhaling the world in and out slowly, and wondered what he worries about, what it is like to live a life in his body, in his world.

I have cried more in my life this November than ever before. I have probably shed more tears in the past four weeks than in all my other years combined in actuality. When my mom died I didn't cry much. I would have occasional breakdowns, only when I talked about her with anyone so I've mostly just tried to never do so, the showing of emotion always feeling horribly embarrassing and shameful on my part. I tend to be one that hides her true feelings from others most of the time and drowns her sorrows in something like a giant plate of pancakes with real maple syrup. But this November it seems that all in the world that can go wrong has and feels like whenever I manage to scrounge up a small spoonful of faith that it will get better after some upset, something else troubling occurs. The saying 'when it rains it pours' feels an understatement these days. I guess every cloud has a silver lining and one small lining amid this month's heartbreak has been the blessing of the reemergence of an old and endlessly true friend in my life. Yesterday she came over and she brought me pizza for lunch and we watched my favorite movie, Sleepless in Seattle. And at least three times during the movie, feeling swept away with my life's own recent love story gone horribly wrong, I sat silently and cried, tears billowing in the corners of my eyes. She sat gently beside me and rubbed my back and let me feel and be without question. The end of my nose is terribly sore this morning, flaky and red from having run so much from all the crying I've been doing. I look sickly, my face badly broken out and I've had three cold sores last week and my back has been killing me. I think my heartache and stress about all that's gone wrong this month and in the past thirty years really is starting to catch up to me as of late and show symptoms externally. A friend told me to breath in and out, to take it day by day and to have faith that over time, things will get better and I will be stronger. This is exactly what I would say to someone and I know that it was said with the utmost authenticity and love... but I'm having trouble having faith in anything these days, much less myself and my own ability to rebound and grow stronger.

I could write a novel here about all the failures and stresses that have made this November pulsate with sadness and heartbreak but I'll refrain. I'll simply say that it's bitterly cold outside and its supposed to snow. Its two nineteen in the afternoon and I'm still in my pajamas and I look an absolute disaster. I'm snuggled up under a blanket of down in bed with one of the few loves of my life curled up against my leg. He hasn't had a bath in weeks and sheds badly and normally I wouldn't let him sleep up here with me but today it's cold outside in the world and inside of me and I need the gentle comfort and warmth of his silent love perhaps more than ever before. I'm feeling more hopeless than I can ever in all my days recall feeling and find myself trying to just survive from one day to the next and not think about beyond then because then the tears and the stress and the feelings of unworthiness ensue. I wonder, isn't if funny how in the matter of a month, in love gained and then painfully lost, the world can seem to swell with joy and then so quickly after, seem to ring so loudly with sorrow? From my October 28th entry when all in the world felt happy and hopeful, how in the hell did I so quickly, arrive here? I suppose today rather than drown in my own feelings of inadequacy and disappointment and sorrow about what has transpired in my life between now and then, I will get up and I will take a shower and I will bundle up and walk the dog and I will drive to work and eat an apple in the car and I will serve the world and all the while I will be waiting anxiously to see if that soft, quiet blanket of snow returns early this year to quiet the world and blanket all of our hearts with familiar memories of home and if in its return, it will gently cleanse my soul and melt away some of this sorrow and heartache with it when it goes...

Namaste.

Where the Books Are

Books: the tradition of my people. Currently on my nightstand are the following:

Standing in the Light by Sharman Apt. Russell
This I Believe, a compilation of essays on people's personal philosophies
Three books by Anne Lamott; Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies, and Grace (eventually)
Never Far From Home, stories from the radio pulpit, by Carl Scovel
The Barn at the End of the World by Mary Rose O' Reilley
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larson
and last but certainly not least, Singing the Living Tradition, the UU hymnal which I always keep close by.
Oh, and also close by are four to five issues of New York magazine, one US Weekly (yes, I am currently bowing my head in shame), one Poetry Northwest, and an old New Yorker.

Two of these books I go back to time and time again, three of them I have recently finished reading, and the rest are all in the process of being read or haven't been started yet (since six of them were just purchased yesterday). In the top drawer of my nightstand are about fifteen to twenty more books, most of whom have been shoved in the drawer because I am out of room on my bookshelf in the living room and have nowhere else to store them. Books and I have a long and sordid history. I usually am either completely obsessed with them and devour them in multiple numbers at a time like some literary drug addict, every chapter and book completed the next hit, or I find myself in a complete state of boredom; nothing seemingly able to catch my attention for long. Its gotten harder as I get older to spend as much time with my nose in the pages as I used to because I always seem to fall asleep two pages into the damned thing no matter what it is I'm reading. In college I had two dreams for my life after graduation: one, to get a dog (preferably a golden retriever) and two, be able to read for pleasure again. I was so excited to find my way back to non-text books again that I'm pretty sure instead of going out to celebrate my graduation with friends and/or family, the night of, I could be found in bed, stacks of books of every genre piled up around me, a deep grin on my face, and a light shining down upon me from above; after five years I had returned to my own person heaven.

I was thinking the other day about tradition and about the things we carry on with us from generation to generation. Unfortunately, much of my family's traditions died right along with my mom several years ago and there's not much of anything in my life these days that I would consider a tradition, except perhaps reading. My favorite memories from my childhood are of bedtime. Not only did they included the coveted backrub, they included the reading of a story or chapter in a book. My favorites were Mother Goose and Grimm at an early age and later Ms. Rumphius and Anne of Green Gables. Of course when I was quite young my parents would read to me but as I got older the tables turned and I would read to them. I still love reading out loud and am always, desperately and usually in vein, looking for a reason to do so. I used to silently pray in class that the teacher would call on me to read aloud, making secret promises to the Universe do all my chores for one day without complaint or to finish my homework early if only I would be called upon to orate to the class. At home when I read aloud at bedtime my dad would fall asleep every damn night and I used to get so frustrated with him that I would shake him and yell at him for falling asleep and he would drowsily apologize and perk up only to get heavy eyelids again a few minutes later. Only now can I understand how it was so hard for him to keep his eyes open as I, at ripe old age of thirty suffer from the same affliction of being unable to keep my eyes open after work on many days. In any event, this patter of him falling asleep and me trying to keep him awake long enough to listen to me went on until I was a teenager and I can't really recall if I did much reading during my adolescent years or not; most of them I have tried to completely block from my memory for multiple reasons including but not limited to my brief addiction Hagen Das bars and susequent weight gain in the eighth grade, bad (no seriously, really bad) hair that decided it wanted to be curly all of a sudden during puberty, and well, all the other usual trauma and drama associated with being ages twelve through eighteen.

Growing up my house was a quiet one. I can't remember how old I was before we got a television and when we did, it was a small black and white one. Of course by the time my brother and I were both teenagers we each had a television in our bedroom, I think this was a tactic our parents, who probably beyond frustrated with our smart mouths and surly attitudes, used to rid us momentarily from their lives. But the years before that television was never a focus in my house and it's watching limited to something silly like an hour a week. I think Saturday mornings may have been the only time it was ever on. And in it's absence, we learned to love books and to grow big imaginations and keep ourselves entertained with hundreds of other creative and active endeavors. And at night, if I couldn't sleep I always knew where to find my parents; in the living room in their assigned seats (more on that in a minute) reading together in silence. Today, this to me feels like home. When I think about them sitting there by lamplight, the sun having gone down a few hours earlier, sitting in the chairs my mother had re-stuffed and re-upholstered herself with a striped maroon fabric, quietly being in the world together, I can feel everything in that moment as it was. It was safe and warm and well, it was as much home as I've ever known, as much home as I could drink up in one giant sip. You could always tell my dad's chair because the seat was permanently lower than my mom's and I remember my brother and I used to tease him endlessly about this (funny the things you think are funny at eight). Sometimes after dinner but before bedtime my parents would sit in their chairs and draw us pictures of clowns and my brother and I would lay at their feet in silence, intently focused on coloring in our clowns just right. And my parents would sit and read the newspaper or the New Yorker or whatever book they were working through, occasionally lifting their heads to say something to each other and then quickly going back to their reading. I crave this quiet comfort, this safety, this long lost feeling of home today unlike I crave much else in the world. I miss being able to hear my parents quiet conversation from their reading chairs from my bedroom as I lay newly tucked in at night. I miss, oh god, I'm gonna say it... I miss... simpler times.

I feel quite anxious on some days that I'm thirty and don't have children or a family of my own yet; I always thought and assumed I'd have a couple of kids by this age like my parents did. I stress out that I don't want to be having children at 35 and be too old and un-nimble when my kids want me to play with them. I don't want them to be embarrassed about having the mom with all the gray hair (although, my mom wasn't old when she had me and still had lots of gray hair which I was endlessly embarrassed about so maybe this shouldn't be a concern really). But when I think about parenthood really, I think in the end its not about gray hair or what I'm sure will be my tacky clothes that embarass them or our house or anything else that my children will think of fondly in their adult years about their childhood, its the traditions we will share together. I think about the traditions that I want to pass on to them, whomever they might be, and top amongst the is the love of books, or reading I suppose I should say. I don't really care what they enjoy to read, so long as they enjoy reading. I think having a child that didn't like to read would be worse to me than just about anything... and I'm sure now that I've said that aloud, I will probably have one that doesn't. Damn. Anyway, I can't wait for bedtime stories, and to spend Sunday's laying on the floor in front of the fireplace with them in the winter reading and to see which books are their favorite. I crave endlessly the comfort of that quiet and safe place where all is as it should be and I can't wait to provide the safety to my children of  knowing where to find me after bedtime if they can't sleep; sitting contently with the newspaper or a magazine or good book (and hopefully, a spouse!) in my assigned seat. Yes, there in the company of my books and my family I will have in at least one way, come full circle and found my way back home.

Namaste.

Long Time Comin'

It's been months since my lost blog entry, literally. It's a strange thing for me, having gone so long without writing. Well, to be perfectly honest, on a few occasions over the past several months I sat down with a determined spirit and attempted to write something worthwhile but what it became on each occasion instead was just a long, random, uninteresting, rambling page of thoughts. Thoughts that I didn't post in the end, knowing that nobody would likely be interested in much I had to say and particularly not much about the comings and goings of my life as of late. In any event, here I am and here this entry is and here it will probably end up being much the same as the failed entries I described above.

But here's the thing, my fingers have been getting itchier by the day to reconnect with their long-lost keyboard friend. I have been reading like a fein lately and whenever I read more, I write more as well. It gets the old juices flowing I suppose you could say and this past month has been spent devouring every book I can get my hands on... and has resulted in me missing writing. A lot has been going on in my life in the past several months and I suppose the reason I've had such an incredibly difficult time capturing anything in words is not because I have nothing to say, but because perhaps I have too much to say. Too much to fit into a few neat, focused blog entries. Too much to say that might cause more hurt.

This is my life today: there's a sink (and countertops) full of dirty dishes in my kitchen. My toilet is about ready for a scrub... and the dog probably too. I am swamped at work and the to-do list grows longer by the day, the bare minimum ever feeling like it gets accomplished. I have exactly $1.19 in my bank account currently and have eaten more PB&J in the past few months than I care to admit (or desire to ever eat again). The dirty laundry is piled in the hamper in my corner and I am down to my last clean bath towel, my last few clean pairs of underwear and my last clean (matching) pairs of socks. Sadly, I couldn't tell you the last time my carpets were vacuumed, which is a frighteningly scary thought considering I'm pretty sure my dog sheds about ten pounds of dog hair every day. Oh, and speaking of the dog, I think he's been wearing his cone, or as I like to call it, Elizabethan collar, for months now. His allergies and OCD and chewing and skin infections have cost me hundreds of dollars at the vet and I live with endless, endless guilt about how much better his life used to be when he had two mommies caring for him instead of one who is alway burning the candle at both ends and feels on most days life she's almost, almost about to completely unravel. Speaking of hundreds of dollars, I think I am up to about $1500 in car repairs in the past month and a half. The holidays are coming and I am trying to get a team of about 50 people ready to prepare, package, organize and sell hundreds of thanksgiving dinners. Oh, and then there's Christmas after that. My hair is getting shaggier by the minute and sticking out of the back of my hat that I wear about six days a week, is what appears to be a mullet forming. I literally haven't had any sort of social outing with a friend, or group of friends, in several months and on many days, find myself quite possibly lonelier than I've ever been...

And yet, despite all of these things... on many days... hope abounds. I have fallen, quite unexpectedly, in love you see. It all happened at an alarmingly quick rate, one which several people in my life find unbelievable, but which nevertheless really did happen almost overnight. It's amazing how when the heart is able to love and give love in a free, trusting, and joyous way, how all of life's other trials and tribulations can seem to shrink down just a little bit. It's amazing really; I think God knew that I was on the verge... on the edge of something... of a breakdown of some sort... and that I needed and intervention to give me something, anything, to redeliver a few small bits of hope, a reconstitution of faith. And as luck would have it, grace reared her beautiful head when I least expected it as grace so often does, and along came love. A friend of mine and her husband just had their second child earlier this month but not so many years ago they met for the first time in the Peace Corps and eloped only a few months later. When I first told her about my new love she said to me that people at the time she met and married her now husband, people thought she was crazy but "when you know, you know," and she just knew. And well, as did she, so do I; I know. Of course, this is real life however and real life well, is generally not easy, nor that neat and tidy. Especially the things which are most important to us. We have to work for them, we have to wait for them, we have to pine for them and pray for them and work some more for them. As for this new love of mine, I wasn't looking for her or anyone to love really; I was quietly working on my own insides, on my own spiritual growth and really, still reeling from the ending of my previous relationship and reeling from the friendships I lost along with the lost partner and reeling from the negative numbers that came to my bank accounts because of said loss and reeling from a gaping loneliness and reeling from feeling abandoned or discounted or judged by some friends because of said divorce and there, out of the blue, in a completely unexpected time and place, came this person who seemed to know me and understand me in an unspoken way... and I her. And well, the rest is history. Except of course for the fact that she lives in another state, halfway across the country; this is that part about life never really, even in it's grace-filled and joyous moments, being completely neat and tidy. The past three months have been us making the trek back and for to see one another and today I am counting around 58 more days until I will see her again; she's coming for Christmas. Because of both of our career and housing situations, its virtually impossible for either one of us to pick up and move our roots to where the other is and so we survive on text message and phone calls and facebook chat and Skype and we miss each other and we have sad hearts and we ache and we cry... and yet and still we love and we say thank you to God and to the universe for the gift of the other and we keep the faith that someday a sign will come and the cards will fall into place and we will know what we should do and who should go where and how we should proceed so that we can (what feels like finally) begin the rest of our live's together.

This blog entry... and many others... has been a long time coming. I was scared to write a word about my life these days and about my new relationship for fear of being insensitive to the woman from my past relationship whom I still, despite her absence from my life, love and respect dearly even if she no longer does me. But at a certain point we all must, with our crumbled hearts in tow, move on in honesty and in forgiveness and in hope and in faith and in compassion for those we love and have loved. My life has changed in the past few months and in the past year in ways I could have never and would have never imagined even only a few years ago and aside from the sudden death of my mom, nothing I've gone through has been so heart-wrenching and lonely and feels as guilty and as not guilty, as right and as wrong, and as sorrowful and as joyous and as everything this past year has.

Perhaps one of the most unfortunate things about being alive and one of the things that I have learned again in technicolor this year, is that in life, weather we want to or not, sometimes we hurt people. That in order to truly fight for ourselves first, sometimes we have to be selfish and sometimes we hurt people we love and adore even when we don't want to. I am not perfect and I know that I have hurt people, I know that I have caused pain and sorrow and confusion in the hearts of people I love and that I have caused them to not love me anymore and this is a hard reality to live with. About a year ago I tattooed something on my arm where I could see it everyday as a reminder and as a way of holding myself accountable to myself. It is a Hindu meditation mantra that roughly translates to "honor the divinity that resides within." To me this meant following my own inner voice and heart first and foremost and taking steps in my life to realize the potential and possibilities of my existence. To get out of or adjust relationships both personally and professionally that were not healthy for myself and others and to search for new ones that were; to continue my religious and spiritual studies and work toward becoming more humble and honest and courageous in my words and my choices. And so my relationship ended. I left a job I was relatively successful, but grossly unhappy at. I changed my diet to reflect my personal ethics. I made it a point to fight for more work-life balance and to spend more time with me myself and I and less time with the rest of the world for awhile. And in doing these things, I hurt people. And it was hard... and it still is. But here's the catch; I can see a light today that I couldn't a year ago. My dreams for my life have slowly begun to reappear. I feel on (most) days like I am living again rather than just surviving. I am living my life on my own terms and I am being the best person and the most compassionate person I know how to be. And I know that the person I am today, and the person I was a year ago or three year ago or six years ago, isn't good enough for some people... but I am trying to be worthy of more than God's love; of the love of the people in the world around me, the people that I do love and care about. When I feel downtrodden and like I have disappointed too many people and lost too many people who were and still are, even in their absence from my life, dearly important to me, I think about my mom. I think about her leaving her marriage of 26 years to chart new territory for her life. I think about the selfishness of this decision and the hurt that other people experienced in it's wake... and I know without a shadow of a doubt that it was the right decision.In hindsight, years later it was apparent to everyone upon the sight of her glorious blooming after having made this choice to search for new ways of being in the world, how silently stifled she had been. I don't say this to justify my own actions but merely to remind myself of the happiness that having such courage to change herself and her world brought her; to remind me that when she died she left this world deeply admired and respected for being so truly authentic and true to herself... even from people she had hurt in the past; to remind myself that staying true to oneself's heart first, or honoring the divinity that resides within, almost always pays off in the end. Sometimes I think about what she would say to me today as I make minor and major choices in my life and I know, I know that despite the hurt some of my choices have caused in others, that I was at a point where I had no other choice than to chose to live differently. And so I did and even if there's not a soul on this earth proud of me, or even really pleased with me, somewhere my mom is quietly smiling.

I have been reading a lot of Anne Lamott's writing lately about her life and about finding Jesus and about grace happening in our life. And while I don't personally follow Jesus as my lord and savior, I respect many of his teachings and his words as prophetic as I do many other religious and spiritual folks of the past and present. I appreciate very much Lamott's vulnerability and her courage to say how very un-perfect and sinful she can be and also her recognition of those moments we don't have words for when the music of the world seems to come together in one unanimous, lovely note and sing something, if even for a moment, more beautiful and true than we could have ever expected for hoped to hear; those moments when grace happens. As in Lamott's life, I have found it equally true in my own that many unexpected moments of grace are experienced during or after some of our lives most heartbreaking times. The death of my mother has been, thus far, my life's biggest heartbreak, the failure of a ten-year relationship I thought would last forever, a close second. And yet when I look at these two things, at what I have learned from each experience, at the courage and strength I have gained as a result of them, at the stretching my soul has been able to do and the spiritual growth that has happened as a result, I see grace. It's hard to appreciate and recognize life's greatest and simplest pleasures unless you have been witness to some of life's greatest tragedies and survived them. In reflection I also look at my former partner and at, despite what I'm sure have been moments of heartbreak and sorrow and of deep sadness over our absence from each other's lives, I feel greatful. I feel happy and I feel encouraged by my choices in seeing the happier and healthier ways that she is living her life... even if it's without me in it. And as much as I miss her sometimes, I feel so grateful to God that she is getting to blossom and bloom in such a lovely way and I feel so proud of the courage and strength that she has shown and can only hope that she feels as strong inside as she appears to those of us who know and love her from up close or in my case, from afar.

This year I have felt sad a lot. I have felt depressed. I have felt melancholy and hopeless and fearful and exceptionally lonely. I have felt guilty and I have felt ashamed. And I have felt humbled. But I have also felt strong. I have felt deeper wells of compassion than ever before in my life. And yet, at the end of the day, after all has been said and done, in many moments I have just felt brave because I have survived. I have been through the valley and have waded through the world's and my own ugly muck and have at times thrown myself in the mud and wanted to quit... yet I have always, somehow, gotten back up on my feet again and slowly, slowly continued to trudge along. I am not out of the woods just yet and many days are still hard and are still sad and are still lonely... but I can see a future, a happier, hopeful life out there for me. I can see possibility again. I can see the absence of some people I was sure would always be cheering me one, but I also can see a few folks out waiting for me to come back to the world, mainly ones I never would have expected like my father and stepmother. And I have survived.

May we see in all of our lives, amid beauty and brokenness, surprising moments of sparkling, heart-stopping, joy-inducing, soul-filling, divine Grace. And perhaps more importantly, may we see inside of ourselves and each other, amid our ugliest moments and in those of beautiful humility, that just by being here, we are all survivors. I think after this past year, in the loving spirit of life and all that is good and holy and redemptive, all I'd really like to say is, we made it. May it continue to be so.

Namaste.