Travels in Ann Arbor

I am not a travel writer. I find it difficult to write when I am away from home. I write most freely from a settled place and travel is the opposite of settled—to travel is to purposely unsettle oneself.

But in a month I will make a pilgrimage to Kinshasa—yes, I’m thinking of it as a pilgrimage—and I want to write every day on that journey. I have traveled often and have never written well about the places I have been. As a result, I can barely remember what happened, what I saw, who I met, even how I felt. This is very strange because I love to travel and I love to write but somehow they don’t go together.

I don’t take a lot of pictures either, but pictures don’t count for what I’d like to do, which is to write a journey more deeply into my life. I write my life—I write it into being. I discover by writing that I want to go to Africa, for example, and then it comes about. I write about quitting my job and then I actually do it. I also write about my life as it is happening. If I do not write about the trip to Kinshasa as it is happening and afterward, it will be like be like a very engaging movie or book—a flood of experiences and then whoosh, back home as if it all never happened. But I am calling this trip a pilgrimage because I am prepared to be changed by it. Why else travel that far? And in order for that to happen I must write every day, if possible.

This post, then, is practice in writing away from home. I am not far, just three hours away at my daughter’s house in Ann Arbor. I come here nearly every month to spend a few days with the little precious schnookums. (Stop me before I get grandmother-gushy.) But I am tired and I am not at home and so I am not writing from a settled place. Even though Hazel is asleep and her parents are out and I really want to be here, it is not the same as being at home, you understand what I mean.

I took Hazel off her mother’s hands for the afternoon while Joanna napped (though Hazel didn’t) and made dinner. We went for a little ramble to a playground, I am tired because I had to carry Hazel on my shoulders on the way back. She had refused to go in the stroller, and the way back from the playground was very long because I got lost in the quaint nearby complex of one-story post–World War II row houses that all look alike. They share an enormous grassy commons that nobody seems to use. I’ve never seen any other children at the little playground in the middle of the field. Instead, I see little play sets here and there tucked up against the houses. People keep to themselves.

I was thinking how the structure of those rows of small houses with their huge common backyard seemed to invite community but it wasn’t working out that way. It seemed lonely. As I wandered around, looking for the way out of the complex whereby I had come in, I got a little panicky. A strange woman and child trekking over this expanse of grass that was everybody’s backyard but at the same time a kind of no-man’s land.

Maybe I can manage one scene a day like that…. I am reading Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia. Now that is travel writing.

Emotional sustainability

Yesterday I did something I loved until I hated it. That is, I overdid it. I started out on a task that I was eager to take up—reading through a whole stack of stories that had just come in from the Congo story project I’m working on, doing a triage on which ones had promise for including in the book. There were a lot of them—this project is ballooning out of control. And they were still in French. The translators working on this project are, understandably, running out of steam.

I really wanted to look over this final enormous batch of new material ASAP because publishing deadlines loom. And I do love this project. So I set everything aside and started reading and sorting. By late afternoon I had a headache. I was seeing less merit in each story I skimmed. But I really wanted to finish so I pushed on. In the end, it was yoga class that forced me to quit, with only 5 stories to go,

By the time I got back from yoga I couldn’t bear to look at those last stories. Even this morning I was reluctant to take them up. It seems that, in pushing myself at the end, depending on sheer willpower, I squandered the joy that had fueled me earlier.

Joy is a precious commodity. This experience made me think about the importance of something my daughter brought up the other day: emotional sustainability. In all our talk of sustainability for the earth, which requires both personal, lifestyle changes and major political changes, we forget what is needed to fuel those changes. It all requires a great deal of emotional energy. How do we sustain that kind of energy?

For some the energy may come from anger, but long-term anger eats at the soul. For me the energy must come from love and joy. However, what it often comes down to is guilt and duty. We do what we know we should do, and we depend on willpower to power us through.

Recent studies have shown what we all know from our own experience: that willpower is actually a limited commodity. If you use your willpower on one task you will have less for another. If you force yourself to do something you will eventually hate it and your efforts will backfire.

Instead of depending on willpower when the joy runs out, we should carefully protect and enhance the joy, never squandering it—especially when it fuels work that is right and good.

Here is Joanna’s example. She was doing laundry. It was a beautiful day and she normally hangs clothes outside to dry. This gives her pleasure on many levels—kinetic, aesthetic, and ecological. But that day she was tired and stressed and the thought of carrying the wet clothes up the steps was a last straw. She thought she really should—it was, after all, a beautiful day and this practice was good for the earth. “But if I had hung the clothes out then, I would have hated doing it and I didn’t want to hate it,” she said. “So I threw them in the dryer.”

I’m making a list of the things I love to do that I know are good for the earth, myself, my family and friends, or future generations—including writing this blog. And I am going to carefully protect the joy that surrounds those tasks.

I, too, love to hang clothes out to dry.

Liminal time and Real Church

I’ve been depressed recently. Can you tell? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t qualify as clinical depression. My low moods come and go. But I have been more down than up.

I don’t want to inflict too many depressed blogs on my handful of readers, just like I don’t like to talk much to anybody when I feel down. I prefer to go silent. But writing often helps and besides, I have always found other people’s honest writing helpful to me no matter what the topic, no matter whether I identify or not. So let me get a little clinical here and describe my symptoms and the suspected causes.

I’ve been crashing in the middle of the week when Vic is away in Chicago. I don’t exactly depend on him for happiness but having him around, quiet as he is, keeps the gloom at bay. I have someone else to focus on. I have appearances to keep up. I can’t just lie down and be sad. If I did, I’d have to explain myself and that would be too much bother. And it really does help to have to pretend to be ok. You can talk yourself into a lot, good and bad. Self-pity is self-perpetuating.

I’ve been wondering whether this down time is a response to my December health crisis. If so, it is not a conscious one. Thinking about that doesn’t scare me or make me feel vulnerable. There is an indirect connection to that event, however. It was truly life-changing.

I have written before that it left me impatient with a lot of things, such as having to handle logistics and multitasking. It also left me impatient with doing large parts of my beloved, longtime part time job. I simply can’t stand to write grant proposals and reports any more. I also became aware that I see lots of things that I should be doing, or that could be done in my work, and I have no interest in doing them.

I decided that this plum job should go now to someone who would really treasure it as I once did. And so I gave notice. And we immediately found someone eager and qualified to do a large part of my job probably better than I ever did it, ways to redistribute other responsibilities on staff, and I will probably keep doing a few things I love to do. This all happened, remarkably, within a week.

I don’t think I gave notice because I am depressed. Nor do I think that giving notice has made me depressed. The health crisis simply made me focus on what I no longer want to do—what no longer serves me well, and ways I no longer serve well.

It was less successful in showing me what I want to do over the next phase of my life. I can figure out the day to day, but when I think about the future I draw a blank and that, dear friends, is a little scary. This, I believe, is a major source of my recurring low moods.

Yesterday at church I received surprising gifts. First, the service of this fourth Sunday in Lent ended with the offer of anointing with oil for healing. I was among the first to line up at the altar. Then I found myself speaking of my situation in the second-hour session I’ve been attending called “standing on sacred ground.” One friend in this small group, Deanna, named my situation as “liminal.” I am indeed in the place of the in-between, the unknown, the changing, and it is a vulnerable place to be. And then Deanna and her husband, who are Zero Balancing practitioners, invited Vic and me to lunch and a session of this energy and bodywork. I found it restorative, cleansing, and, yes, balancing.

When things come together like this I do feel like I am on sacred ground, and sometimes it even happens in church. My friends and I have a term for this. We call it Real Church.

Today I feel tired but in a good way. Like things are shifting and will be shifting for some time to come, but I don’t have to worry about where they will come out.

Top o’ the morning

Hepatica hill

It wasn’t until I stepped outside and saw spring beauties blooming in the yard that I thought about hepatica. Spring has come on so fast that I’ve barely had time to yearn for the first wildflowers.

Most years the honors go to hepatica but sometimes, when there’s unseasonal warm weather, everything pops out at once. The hepatica bloom on a west-facing slope off our beaten woods path, which I haven’t walked for months. I discovered that parts of the path were blockaded by fallen trees.

Bloodroot

Along the way I encountered more spring beauties and a few bloodroot. Even the false rue anemones were starting to pop out. Soon the woods will be carpeted in pink and white and yellow but these little show-offs were out ahead of the crowds. Way up high, fat tulip poplar buds caught the sun.

Tulip poplar buds

I had obviously missed the earliest of the hepatica, however, because by the time I visited the slope on this mid-60s, sunny St. Patrick’s morning, the hepatica were out full force, cluster after cluster of white, pink, and blue blossoms nodding on their fuzzy little stems, right under our neighbor’s No Trespassing sign.

Hepatica

I did not need to trespass to visit the hepatica. I would have if necessary, however. In a few weeks I will trespass to harvest the first woods nettles, which are more abundant on their property than on ours. I assume they don’t mind if we eat their nettles but I haven’t asked.

I don’t know who the No Trespass sign is aimed at. Deer hunters? Partying teenagers? It predates these particular neighbors. We all have our ideas of who the trespassers are. Mine include 4-wheelers, morel hunters, and garlic mustard. I would welcome anybody who wanted to walk through our 5 acres of this extensive wooded area to admire the wildflowers. But I have never seen anyone else on foot anywhere in these woods.

I take that back. One fall, when Vic and I were walking through the woods across the road, a man who said he was the son of the owner asked us to leave. He had a gun. We left. Around here, it is definitely safer to stick to your own property. The idea of a commons has not taken hold.

So I feel fortunate to share a bit of land with the wildflowers.

Spring beauties

Dolphin walk

For the second morning in a row three dolphin have come by at sunrise, just as I walked out to the water’s edge with my cup of tea. As they arc along parallel to the shore at walking pace I follow, as if attached to them with a long leash. Did they come because I called; did I come because they called; or is it mere coincidence?

In any case, they make me happy. I come to this spectacular beach in Sanibel, Florida every year for a staff retreat. I’ve been missing the dolphins. A few years ago I had a spectacular encounter with many dolphins that opened my heart in a new way to the natural world and the presence of Spirit in it.

For a while after that, when I was at beaches, dolphins seemed to come when I wished them to show up, for other people as well as myself. Then, in the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t nature of miraculous encounters, they stopped. No dolphins at all for the last two years. But this year, dolphins again for everybody.

You have to be looking. This morning I passed a few other early morning walkers, joggers, dog walkers, and shell collectors. None of them followed my gaze out to sea. Maybe dolphins are no big deal.

But everything here is a big deal to me: the heavy pelicans that skim by as I swim in the cool Gulf, the sanderlings that skitter at the water’s edge, the stars and planets hanging like jewels in the night sky, hashing out the problems of the world under the palms, with my beloved colleagues.

I made a little video tribute to our work, my first e-movie ever. 

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/13157382/stick-guy-and-girl-in-the-pits-3-09

I am having trouble taking anything very seriously. After all these years of working on serious, serious stuff, all I want to do is play. Watch pelicans wheeling and diving. And be walked by dolphins.

Logistics

I am fortifying myself for a day of logistics. It has already begun and I need a break.

First there were the logistics of finding out Spirit Air’s baggage requirements and charges before Vic and I fly to Florida on Thursday for my annual staff retreat. Spirit does not make it easy. Note to self: Never fly Spirit again. They make you pay for everything, even carry-on bags, even advance seat assignments.

Oh well. I will check a bag and carry maple syrup to my colleagues, which some of them will not be able to carry back home because they’re not checking bags. Carolyn promises to mail the orphan bottles of sweetness that wouldn’t pass security. This makes no sense. Why don’t I just mail them to everybody’s home? But some will be able to take them and I don’t know who. And I can’t envision getting together the necessary boxes and bubble wrap and addresses just now because the other thing I’m doing  today is applying for visas for Congo.

You’d think, after expressing my intention to resign logistics, I wouldn’t volunteer to handle all the money and bureaucracy transactions for our three-women trip to Congo in May. But I did. I was so eager I forgot my limitations.

I researched and bought tickets, negotiating for the best price and schedule, and today I will be sending in the visa applications. The invitation letters, notarized in DRC, are printed out. My friends have sent me their passports, vaccination certificates, pictures, and applications. I need to put my own together today, pick up my own photos, and take everything to the post office--and don’t forget the postage paid return Express Mail envelope. I’ve only had to call the DRC embassy once to clarify the requirements.

On the inflow side, I’m receiving and recording supporting contributions and reimbursements. I asked Vic to create a spreadsheet. The promised contributions now match the expected costs. Our trip is paid for!

The spreadsheet is my only consolation in all this. While schedules and other arrangements give me a headache, I sometimes find numbers comforting. Once upon a time I rather enjoyed making organization budgets though now I happily leave that to others. Ooops. Please don’t tell my husband I like budgeting. Well, I guess he’ll read this.

Perhaps it is the serene certainty of numbers that comforts me. Plus you can move numbers around, make them come out differently. You can see balance and unbalance and correct it. You know what you have to do.

But right now, before I continue with the visa applications, I need another cup of tea.