I am not wishing to be an anchoress. I am not counting on anything. I am remembering learning to swim--no metaphor--at the Bambi Motel, Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan. If this is pride, then sometimes I too am amazed my soul stays in my body.

- Mary Ann Samyn, "From The Little Book of Female Mystics"

So much has happened, continues to happen, here. I had forgotten that a heart could hurt and love equally and at the same time, or maybe I just think I ever knew. And this is only proof of some personal evolution. I don't really care what it is or why it is or why it lingers here, or how much worse it might be without prayer flags and meditations. I just want it to leave, to do its work and leave us better off.

As for the things I haven't been able to say for myself, to myself, a blitz of second hand positivity may save me. Someone unexpected told me to envision the things that I want from this life, to be who I am, and also that I'm right to want this huge thing that now feels impossible--a light among darkness.

And in the meantime, I am working to loosen my grip just so the knuckles find their color again, just so my feet become mobile. I am trying not to count on anything.

29 of 31: a poem/meditation

Daily Spaces

--Again, no suitable beginning.

The power flickers: uninterested, uninteresting.

Our town's one train makes a too-long noise.

Is this enough?

On the radio, the sculptor said what I was thinking:

no to the pedestal, no to the frame

which I wrote down at the red light.

Then into the grocery store

where a woman sighed over tomatoes:

for this price they should be perfect.

I am in complete agreement,

which means I am often dissatisfied.

Produce is the least of it.

Yet sometimes in the crisper something I've forgotten

no longer looks like I remember: a riot

where only green once was,

or little beads of moisture congregating:

eager, trembling worlds on every stalk and tendril.

- Mary Ann Samyn, Purr

20 of 31: giving (a fresh perspective)

Leading up to this moment I have allowed a substantial amount of self-pity and self-loathing to occur, not to say that tomorrow I won't wake up feeling those things all over again in usual fashion. But at least in this moment I feel inspired.

I met a friend for sushi tonight, which was a grand alternative to my default evening plans of sitting slumped-over in front of the television, lusting after all the stress-eating I'd like to be doing instead of counting calories and trying to be healthy. I limited myself to a single order of Rainbow Roll and left feeling quite full. The mishap that followed with Ben & Jerry's chocolate-brownie-heaven-in-a-fro-yo-carton, albeit light, was not the best part of my day, nor was it the worst, but it guilted me into actually opening the cardio yoga DVD and popping it into the player. I unrolled my new cornflower blue Target-clearance mat, pushed away the coffee table from my living room's center and pressed play. It was amazing. The pace was perfect, the music was fantastic, the instructor was completely not annoying and I didn't get bored with the repetitions. She continuously promoted the reminder that each move (in this particular series) should be led by the heart with gratitude and appreciation, and while maybe that sounds cheesy and monotonous, it somehow hit home.

I forget how much gratitude I owe to my fortune, my health, to the cycle of Karma, the universe, etc. And the dark shadows of loneliness have made the clarity to see that much more muddled. It isn't just deployment, although it would be easy to point to it. It's me and learning to live on my own, to overcome seasons of less-confidence, of cooking for one, of no-motivation. By the end of the DVD I felt more aware of hope than I have in several weeks, so I drew a bath with lavendar bubbles, lit a candle, made a cup of "tension tamer" tea, turned iTunes radio to my favorite International station, grabbed a few health magazines and soaked for an hour. It was a glorious extension of what my "mother-in-law" called a "yoga induced zen." Now, I'm off to thumb through Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day for a good low-fat whole wheat sandwich loaf - in bed. There is nothing more therapeutic than putting my mind on autopilot in the kitchen [tomorrow].

As for tonight, with tensions momentarily tamed, I'm going to bed.

4 of 31: giving (myself a break)

I have never in all my life been so excited about spring break.  

Never.  

I'm pretty sure we all felt the same way in class tonight with the windows open to filter in the optimism of changing weather.  There were a number of laugh-till-we-cried moments, specifically during a sloppy reenactment of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.  

Thursdays nights were marked for gut-busting episodes last Fall and sadly they don't occur nearly as much as of late.  It was refreshing, though, to feel young and loopy and to laugh and laugh without reserve...at jokes that only us English nerds find funny.

It's been a while since I've felt entitled to double over, silly with joy, glad to just be alive.  My skin and my bones are voracious with a craving for sunshine and breezes that don't make your limbs scream with pain before going numb.  

It isn't all in the air.  I'm also glad to feel grateful again for a good man and a community of army wives ready to stand-in for my backbone when I don't have the wherewithal to hold a steady posture.  I feel like this week's low spot, while it was dim, allowed me to get to know a few ladies better.  I'm grateful to be building stronger relationships with The Staff Sergeant's family, as we are all stretched by the sacrifices he has to make for his convictions.  But there is something to be said for the bleak outlook cast by dreary Winter, and the new vision that is brightened by Spring.  

1 of 31: giving (up)

I'm giving nablopomo[.com] a try for March.  The theme is "giving (up)," however if I stuck with it, this would be a mighty depressing month, and I can tell you that the Forever Winter we are experiencing in these parts and deployment are doing a damn fine job of setting a forlorn tone.

For the kick-off, I'll do my best to throw on my rosey glasses and grace you with a little optimism.

[clears throat]

I wish that I had something profound and gracious to write.  And while I know that all the good outweighs the sacrifices (or I wouldn't be doing this) it's hard to be quiet enough to hear the meek, whispering reminders of choice.  The Staff Sergeant told me he was in the Army after luring me to coffee.  I considered walking out the door, giving him my best wishes and telling him to be safe but never to call.  However (entranced by his good looks and good shoes), I took my coffee from the counter and followed him back to our table.  He talked about literature and family and his smile, so perfectly perfect was hypnotizing.  By closing time my bones had dissolved and my limbs were tingly and beyond my body's physical acknowledgment that something was different, I couldn't stop what would happen in the months and months to follow.  

I was living the urban-dreamer life.  I had dibs on a loft in downtown Nashville, hopes to study sociology at Vanderbilt or to earn an MFA in writing, plans that snaked ten-times around the earth's circumference that did, in no way include or tolerate the Army.  Needless to say, I'm not in the loft of my dreams nor am I in a masters program at Vanderbilt, but I can say without a shadow of doubt that I am better for the altered plans (think space and money).  A year and a half ago I couldn't have told you that I'd be living it up in army-ville, working may way through a deployment.  In fact, I might have told you that a deployment was impossible.

I remember sobbing over the scene in The Interpreter when an African terrorist blows up the bus.  I thought to myself, I can't do this.  I thought that phrase a hundred times before looking around and realizing that I am doing it, regardless of how hard and heavy some days are.  At some point the thought became a question of how to be not whether or not I was strong enough.  

I hesitate to categorize any choices that I've made or changes to choices as "things I have given up", rather my perspective has changed and what I want out of life has taken a detour once again.  What I have [temporarily] given up is time and proximity.  He's not the first thing I see in the mornings or the last that I see before bed.  I've given up kisses and running inside jokes and dinner for two and the luxury of speed dial and an answer.  I've given up a lot of control that I probably never had anyway but let myself believe that I did.  

As I tell him almost daily, in emails that I'm not sure he really has time to read: I wouldn't change anything about where I live, who I love, and what that means about the person I have to be.  I don't like this leg of it but it will make the time that he's home so much better and so much more appreciated.

your head will collapse if there's nothing in it

Tonight is going more smoothly than the last few.  It seems to be helpful when I move faster than my brain can follow.  If there is no time to dwell then dwelling is bypassed.  Simple.  

That said, I'm glad to be typing from the comfort of my very spacious dining table, which has finally been cleared of moving debris.  I made it my mission to tackle the dining room tonight instead of vegging in front of the television, a wise decision made in rare form.  It took several hours to shovel boxes and lost trinkets and plates and glasses into more appropriate spaces, but it's done.  My once very lonely vintage china hutch is now full and ready for entertaining.  My poppy arrangement is a wonderful focal point and coordinates with the new drapes just as I had imagined. 

As for the bar idea, I'm going with something a little different because I am a limited-income grad student and because I found an old IKEA shelf that has already been purchased.  It just so happens to be the perfect size for the designated wall and has been left raw, a blank canvas open for any kind of finish or paint I choose.  I'm contemplating its destiny with each glance-over this nearly completed room gets.  I will be sure to post pictures once it is painted, hung and complete.

During other episodes of Friday's frenzied productivity, I got Valentine packages sent out to the The Staff Sergeant's mom and brother and a plain 'ole care package sent to him.  Actually, it held a sack of potatoes so I'm not sure it can claim any titles of "ordinary".  I'm sending potato guns through Amazon to the guys he's with, thinking that the long days and nights could use some comic relief.  I'm fairly certain the box from me will arrive first and with it a likely, "WTF?, why the hell is she sending potatoes in bulk?!"  

I might have also included the specs on a certain eye-catching piece of jewelry - super nonchalant...thus proving my prior point (see above reference to "the rarity of wise decisions").  With that recap in brevity, I'm off to bed or rather to read Kate Northrop's Back Through Interruption [since I didn't last week].  

If this were easy, everyone would be doing it.

"...if there's one thing I learned, it's that when our servicemen and women go to war, their families go with them. I saw how they take care of each other, heard how they fill in whenever the system fails and discovered that the trials they faced always were matched by the hope they shared that better days are still ahead." - Michelle Obama

Thank you for being strong enough to hold me up, live your dreams, and keep us safe all at the same time.  My flowers are beautiful and this morning's brief call made my birthday wonderful!  I hope the deluge of care packages adequately convey how much I love you and how proud I am to be waiting for you to come home.  I'd choose this life again and again and again to spend it with you.  See you in dreams tonight - let's meet somewhere warm!

thinking Spring

I'm ebaying from the floor of my living room, right in front of a heavenly space heater.  I just bought this poster for my study.  It says, "HELLO, Spring," while the snow outside says, "Stay warm in your jammies all day long because beyond your walls it is certainly Winter!"  I also like the poem: "Again the forest is fragrant/ The soaring larks lift up aloft/ With them the sky that to our/ Shoulders was heavy" - Rilke.

There are many hours in the day that I wish larks would lift aloft the weight on my shoulders.

HA-ppy voting!

Go forth and make us proud!

while we wait

It was the same juvenile giddiness that follows that first call to your home line, asking for you - that first taste of what "love" must be like. Remember when you were certain that it was, in whole, the prepubescent boy-child who fancied you enough to chase you down on the playground until you were rosy-cheeked and out of breath?

There I dawdled in the retail lull of early morning, catching up on an order that needed processing, filing some paperwork from the day before. I neatened up my corner of the shop and was grabbing for my keys to retrieve something from my car when my phone began to dance across the glass counter top. I haphazardly reached for it expecting a wrong number [or my mother]. Instead, it was my surfacing soldier two weeks later! Stomach spinning and heart startling into a feverish pulse, I fumbled to find a simple construct of "hello." It's awfully hard to push words through the strain of a grin like that, but I managed to partake in 15 blissful minutes of conversation before his calling beckoned his return.

The strangest phenomenon in this process is the way that perspective is so slyly rearranged. Before him, a quarter of an hour would have been an insufficient pinprick of time. I never would have settled for something so slight to sustain such an unbalanced proportion of time apart. He melts and reconfigures me before I am even aware and I hang happily on those sparse words exchanged in the otherwise barren wait for his return.

As I battled a bought of usual frustration one night, I joked with him that he should have handed over a manual when he finally confessed his profession. I heard his smirk convey through the sound waves of yet another phone call as he explained that he was under the impression I was writing it. In rare moments like today, I feel that I have proven maybe an ounce of compliance to the military life. I feel a hair closer to being malleable in the way that the army needs its wives and girlfriends to be. If we never become able to bend, the nature of this would be crushing. Looking back it seems not that I am writing a definitive how-to, but that I am in some manner, recording my slow and awkward success.

Nobody's lost but nobody wins

Happiness
comes from
contentment.

I fear tearing open the paper pouch because it seems that more brilliance and truth lies in the packaging of a tea bag than in my own emotional scope. I'm trying. I'm trying so hard not to want more than I've got, more than I get to have. I'm trying and failing so well that grace is an unimaginable attribute today. I'm not even trying to fake it, rather I'm trying to keep from slamming the cell phone messenger into the wall or surrendering my attempted composure to primal screams or to just slip into a warm bath of hysterics. What a relief it would be to just let it go and to have it gone and then to be able to go on as the sunny version of me.

I feel feeble and small. I feel helpless next to the piled obstacles. And clumsy. I feel more clumsy now than at any other time I've ever tried walking this road. I've slipped and tumbled and scraped and bruised, then risen to break again. I don't know why I am so bad at this.

[and all this like a message comes to shift my point of view. and watching through my own light. as it tints the shade of you]

Why, is not this better now than groaning for love?

Practice
kindness,
mercy and
forgiveness.

I fear what is coming from the sour sinking in my heart. An unexplainable pang, or dare I claim an intuition? It caught me today with a sudden grieving, I pray too soon and unnecessarily. And what to make of me, a brave young fatalist, trusting signs sent not by tea leaf but worse, tea bag?

Only Shakespeare would pose such comic tragedy, such foolery of Fortune, and foretelling. Perhaps the Universe wants only for me to act with kindness at all times and to practice forgiveness more wholly and consciously. A blanket statement, if you will.

A coincidence. It must be that simple, that all of my discourse happened to align with the random selection of that pomegranate package tonight. Oh, but if I am wrong and it is that ill news is to be ladled from the scalding pot...will I have the composure to practice kindness? To be merciful? Will I be humble and forgiving, as advised?

[let's just cross that bridge when/if we get there.]

Yogi Tea Suggests:

Love what is

ahead by

loving what has

come before.

[When in doubt, seek the paper tag on tea bags for Universal truths...]

Yogi Tea suggests:

Have wisdom
in your actions
and faith in
your merits.