Responsibility Used to Be Fun

Posted on June 28, 2013 by spiralwoman

My daughter in 2nd grade in an agony of desperate excitement. “Pick me!” One of my favorite photos of all time.

Small hands wave in the air. “Pick me, pick me!” they seem to say. They are attached to little humans whose faces bear expressions of anguish combined with hope combined with glee.

They want to volunteer for the job. Whatever the job is—they want it. Little children in school long to lead the line of students to the music room or clear off the lunch table or clean the paint brushes. In homes across the world, tiny people beg to perform the tasks of life, from feeding the cat to collecting the mail.

I remember my children hovering in the kitchen as I cooked, cleaned or did something else that, for me, was a chore. “Do you want to put the silverware away?” I’d ask my 3 year old son as I unloaded the dishwasher. Picking which stack to place a fork, knife or spoon in was probably fun for him and likely a good exercise for his developing sorting skills. Luckily he was tall for his age and could peer into the drawer without a boost.

My kids would sit with me on the giant family bed amidst drifts of clean laundry. They sorted socks, folded daddy’s boxers into tiny squares and sorted clothes into teetering piles according to family member.

They loved picking up the Brio trains or wooden blocks and putting them in their baskets, especially if we sang a clean-up song.

Fast forward. Age12. Even the most conscientious child who does her own homework the minute she gets home is likely to balk at any “chore” seen as unconnected to her own immediate self-interest, no matter how-up many clean-up songs are sung.

At the school where I taught for many years, I saw the same phenomenon over and over again.

Why does taking responsibility stop being fun? Or maybe it’s not responsibility per se, but the “jobs of life” that engage and enchant us at first, and then lose their luster.

Eventually, we get past adolescence and take on jobs galore, once again willing to shoulder worldly tasks. However, we no longer leap around gleefully begging to be given more duties at work or home; we simply accept that it is our lot in life to do so.

There are exceptions to this general trend. When a young person is starting out in her own job for the first time, or when someone branches out on his own to launch a business. The new employee makes everyone else look bad, volunteering for more and more responsibilities and joyfully staying at the office until 9 at night. Everyone else may be staying till 9 too, but with a seriously different attitude. They may feel like martyrs, or just abused, or maybe get a hit of self-esteem from the superiority of it all. But that new employee, like an entrepreneur starting up on her own, is steeped in glee to be doing it. All of it.

Of course there are twenty-somethings who play Halo in their parents’ basements and don’t want to do much of anything yet. There are people who have been in their jobs for 30 years and take on every day as if they were kindergarteners hoping to be allowed to clap the erasers (or whatever the electronic equivalent of that is these days).

But I’m talking about that thing that seems to be so inherent in little kids, and in all of us when we are starting out, or starting something new. That desire to do it all, and “be grown-ups” – prove ourselves? Take on what has been forbidden until this moment?

Is it an addiction to newness? Is it simply the lack of burn-out?

The little girl waving her hand in the air, longing to be called upon to read the weather to the class feels alive as she stands up to do her job. The new teacher feels alive as he works late into the night planning a lesson on westward expansion. The entrepreneur with a great idea feels alive as she goes days without sleeping to formulate her business plan, create her website and design her logo.

I have no idea where to go with this ramble. I know there is a way to approach every day as if it were new, full of promise and possibility, a chance to make a mark, change a life, forge an identity. I don’t want children to lose that feeling so that when they are 12 years old they look at the kindergarteners begging to serve the lunch as if they are freaks. Or so that when the 40 year veteran sees the new employee bursting at the seams, he does not default to resentment at worst, exhausted bemusement at best.

Who knows? Maybe at some point we stop believing that what we do has meaning, or that we are making a difference. But every 5 year old understands that the smallest task, from being line leader to setting the table for dinner, is meaningful and important. The child who brings in the mail or feeds the cat is making a difference. Every moment and every task, every responsibility and every silly item on the day’s list will certainly be appreciated by someone, and carried out with gratitude and joy if we can look at it through the eyes of a child.

Dog Blog

Posted on June 21, 2013 by spiralwoman

Cats have always been my animal. Well, and horses. In some ways I’m a girly stereotype, at least as identified by my animal preferences.

It’s not that I have not liked dogs. I’ve always enjoyed them, and even retained a strong attraction to German Shepherds despite the fact that I was attacked rather viciously by one when I was just three. My only distinct memory of that event was the sight of my dad’s shirt turning from white and brown check to red as he ran with me over his shoulder from Central Park to the nearest doctor’s office. Still, my brother-in-law’s shepherd, Miles, was one of my favorite people.

I feel an affinity for other animals at other times in my life, and pay close attention when one species in particular makes repeated appearances over the course of a few days or weeks. I love the book, Animal Speak, by Ted Andrews. He writes about animal medicine and advises his reader to stay alert to the lessons that can be learned, and what clues are to be found to help us step along our path toward inner knowing. The medicine comes to us through the spirits that greet us in the form of the hawk, the skunk, the bear, the heron, the deer, or the coyote. And many more.

But for me, 2013 so far has very much been about dogs. Through a series of circumstances, I have spent a lot of time with them. Different dogs. I have been moving around a lot and have ended up, several times, living with, getting to know, taking care of—dogs.

I’ve fallen in love with them. My heart has been melted by dogs. Even dogs who are complete strangers, whom I met while visiting a dog park with my sister and her pup, Dexter, have winnowed their way into my consciousness and heart.

So what is the animal magic dogs have brought to me? I’ve been thinking about this.

Live in the moment

A dog forgets the full bladder of dawn, the hungry tummy when the human dinner is cooking and no one has gotten around to feeding him yet, the hours of neglect in favor of the laptop, the washing machine, or the lawnmower. For a dog, history is gone forever and the now is everything. The smell of my flip flop. The flicker of laughter outside on the sidewalk. The sight of a favorite human. The feel of fingers scratching under a tilted chin. A dog’s sensations of the moment trump everything else. The past is meaningless. The future does not exist yet, so why bother?

Forgiveness

A dog’s forgiving nature relates to living in the moment, as I see it. The two dogs I am living with and caring for now, Nico (a poodle) and Chini (a lab mix), are dear, affectionate souls who love nothing more than to romp through the woods with me, flop in the sun at my feet as I read a book, lounge across me as I watch TV and scratch them languorously. They have accepted me into their lives as a surrogate mom they like a lot. Sometimes I have to leave them. Life happens. I try not to leave them for more than 5 hours at a time, if possible, and if I must, to enlist the help of a neighbor. One day, I got stuck. Frantic, I watched three hours tick by, over my deadline. When I finally pulled into the driveway, I heard their barking. Clearly I was not the only one feeling frantic. I ran at top speed into the house, patted Nico who was jumping literally 4 feet off the ground, released Chini from the crate (Nico doesn’t get crated), apologizing effusively the whole time. The dogs would not leave the house to relieve their bladders until they licked me, nuzzled me, received my loving in return. There was no canine acrimony. No pouting (I mean, admit it—a cat will pout). No attitude. Just love, and flat out forgiveness as the past was forgotten and the moment of love and liberation cherished.

Patience

My friend Terri has some dogs. Five, to be exact. Two labs. A bull dog. An Australian Silky. A mix of Chihuahua, Greyhound and something else. Somehow, it all works. Scout, one of the labs, is one of the most long-suffering, calm, unflappable beasts in the universe. He will lie on the floor while Lily, the mixed breed dog, inexplicably humps his head with abandon. He will romp all over the sprawling property with Daisy, the terrier, who is 10 times smaller than he is. They run; he waits; Daisy eventually catches up; they run some more. Invariably, they come home together. Rosie, the bulldog, has a temper. Scout refuses to be riled. Admittedly, he is not that patient when it’s close to meal time, but he is a dog, after all.

Unconditional love

Bodhi, king Poodle (very tall) with floppy hair and melting eyes, sits every day like a Buddhist monk of royal lineage, feet neatly aligned, waiting for his mom, my old friend Annie, to come home. He waits all day. Sometimes he sleeps on the couch. (He takes up half of it, but, when he wants to fit up there with two or more humans, can curl into a remarkably small package.) This hippie dog’s heart is as huge as Ghandi’s or Mother Theresa’s. While I was there for a two week visit, Bodhi tuned in to me remarkably fast. He sensed my sadness, and in a compromise borne of his own empathy, left his mother’s bed halfway through the night to come sleep on mine. He did not do this at first, but after he’d gotten to know and care about me, it became part of his action plan of love. Did he ask for anything in return? Not really. But he got my undying love. Bodhi loves without condition. Dogs know how to do that. They do not question, criticize, doubt, or demand. They may ask for pats and ear scratches, and surely find it suitable to be fed upon occasion, but in the scheme of things, they give so much more than they get.

Dignity

It’s true that dogs can be pretty goofy. They don’t have the meticulous standards of a cat. Dogs will roll in rotten raccoon guts. They’ll make a scene, barking hysterically at a leaf floating by. But I now see these behaviors as endearing in their unbridled enthusiasm for life. Bella, a Swiss Mountain dog, belonged to my friend Teri for ten years. I met her the day she came home with Teri and her two daughters, and knew her all her life till her recent death. Bella could be pretty maddening. For example, eating chocolate, reading glasses, undergarments, and a variety of other unorthodox, unhealthy, and indigestible items. But somehow, no matter what mischief she got herself into, Bella had inherent dignity. She embodied the qualities of forgiveness, unconditional love, living in the moment, and endless patience for the other dogs in her family too. But it was her dignity in the face of adversity that struck me at the end, as she gradually let go of life. Though she was not in awful pain, she grew weaker and more wobbly as tumors spread over her body. Breathing was not always easy, and it hurt to walk. But she roused herself each morning to walk the gardens with her mom, waited for her girls to come to say goodbye, and left life on her own terms.

Embracing the doggy lessons into my life is the task I’m grappling with this year of 2013. I can’t ignore the future and though my mind occasionally erases it, the past still has a strong hold on me. I can forgive easily, except the one it is most important to forgive—myself, though I am getting better at it. Patience. That’s a good one. My record is spotty there. As a teacher, I could have oodles of patience. But being patient about my own process? Not what I’m best at… yet. Patience goes with forgiveness in some ways, doesn’t it? And maybe unconditional love, too. Something easy to feel for one’s children—so hard to feel for oneself. And finally, I seek my own dignity in the face of egregious failures and errors. “Be patient with, forgive, and love yourself,” I hear the dogs say to me, “and live for today. Isn’t today wonderful? And aren’t you lucky to have it?”

Chini and Nico on a woods ramble with me.

: Saying goodbye to Bodhi down in Virginia.

Scout is patient with my daughter’s hugs because he loves her!

Chini and Nico — the look of love.

Dearest Bella in her last days, the epitome of all the doggy lessons, patient, loving, forgiving, dignified, and living in the last moments available.

The Flash

Posted on June 16, 2013 by spiralwoman

Flash of insight. Flashback. Hot flash.

I sometimes wake up in the wee hours – well, that specific wee hour when no matter how cool the room in which I sleep, my body becomes suffused with warmth. I can feel the heat flowing down my arms and legs the way honey flows down the spout of a honey jar. Slowly, deliberately, inevitably.

This is my own gentle version of the hot flash. I get, at most, one a day, in the dark hours between midnight and dawn. I don’t really mind them. I toss a leg out from under the covers, or throw back the sheets, let the cool air hit my skin and I drift back to sleep, only to waken some time later, shivering. Nine times out of ten, the flash of heat is accompanied by a flash of insight. Or at least a thought worth thinking.

Just as my body volunteers to turn pink and toasty, my mind volunteers little jewels for me to ponder in my attenuated state of alpha brain activity, as I rapidly slide back into sleep. If I don’t have the energy or wherewithal to jot down a clue to my morning self, I lose it for good.

Sometimes, that middle night waking brings another kind of flash. A flash from the past. An image, idea or whole memory blossoms in my occipital lobe, or cerebrum, and then exists there for me to examine, peacefully, as I doze off and on and finally succumb to sleepier brain waves, like theta, or delta. (Why do the stages of sleep sound like rushing a fraternity? But that’s not important right now.)

So I got to thinking about how we humans have attached the same word, flash, to these different phenomena. A flash is a burst. A burst of light, or a burst of “an emotional mood or intellectual activity” (Encarta via Word). It is, by definition, sudden and brief.

I guess a true genius has flashes of insight even when the mind is alert. Though I am willing to bet that, no matter how wide awake Mozart, Hildegard of Bingen, or Goethe were when their inspiration came, they were smart enough to write it down before they forgot.

Why, I wonder, does the mind work that way? In flashes? Hot flashes aside, it is the flashing mind that fascinates me. The brain, in all its wave formations, wakeful or sleepy, sober or intoxicated, has its moments when insight, memory, understanding, creation flash upon it. When everyone is a genius. When we access the widely-advertised unaccessed part of our brains.

Sometimes the flash cascades and we can keep the momentum going. (Or rather, the momentum keeps going and we have little to do with it except to ride the wave.) That happens when I write, sometimes (not today, though). I feel the sparkling, flashing brain thing happen and it continues, like a very long mental orgasm that goes and goes until something stops it. I get hungry or my leg falls asleep or the phone rings. Life.

When a mental flash occurs, for me at least, it is indeed as sudden and unexpected as my body’s epiphanies of warmth in the middle of the night. I don’t seem able to initiate, control or stop it. My mind reels at what my mind can do. I have concluded that I am my own best teacher. I just have to show up, do my homework, and pay attention when the flashes come.

Letting Go with Fire

Posted on June 10, 2013 by spiralwoman

Goodbye can be so painful. Parting with something or someone we love is rarely easy. Some goodbyes, however, are necessary. They are what is right and fitting. Sometimes goodbye is what saves us. Still, it is hard.

Saying goodbye to my son as he headed home to Vermont yesterday was sad, but I also knew it was necessary. He has to go to work, to class. Live his life and play his music. I also know that I will see him in a month – a help.

Goodbye to the masses of stuff I purged recently, and gave away or sold—that was easy. But for decades I had been unable to part with any of those things. It’s funny when goodbye goes from impossible to easy, seemingly overnight.

But of course there are many processes involved in parting. Some parting is slow, as when my mother died, and a few years later, my father. Some parting is sudden. My brother-in-law died in a nano-second this January from a brain aneurysm. No goodbye allowed.

But there are ways to say goodbye through ritual. To part not only with people, but with beliefs that hold us back, sorrows that clog our hearts, fears that keep us from living fully.

For loved ones who die, funerals and memorials are crucial rituals, shared with others. Other than a ceremony like a funeral, what other releasing rituals are we taught? How do we have a funeral for our fear that we will never find love? Or our belief that we are unworthy? Or the sorrow of a lost love? These feelings must be parted with for us to live fully. How to do it?

About nine years ago, I did my first work with a shaman. Her name is Skye Taylor and she lives in California now. I studied with her, and learned many lessons about myself, and the world. How to engage with the seen and unseen, the ego and the super-ego, the past, present and future. She also taught me how to release and say goodbye using fire.

The fire as ritual. For things you want to let go of permanently. Not for your child heading off to a year abroad—for her, a hug and a debit card will do. Not for the unwanted picture frames and end tables. For them, avoid fire and consider a tag sale or Goodwill. But for all that stuff you may not know how to get rid of, consider the cleansing prayer of fire and smoke.

I did not grow up in a religious family, but as a writer and English teacher I am very comfortable with symbolism. It is not difficult for me to envision a thought, belief or emotion being embodied in an inanimate object.

Skye taught me to blow into a stick (a match stick will do for city dwellers or if the sticks are all under the snow). Blow whatever is to be released, shipped off, dispatched. A toxic relationship, despair, fear, a limiting belief that I have acknowledged and am ready to let go of. The trick is to be specific, too, when thinking about what it is to be released, as I blow hard into that stick held between my hands. Despair over what? Fear of what? What belief, specifically? This is also a good way to release someone—someone you have lost through death, or a break up, and yet are having a painful time letting them go. There is no limit on how many sticks you can use, how many things you can release with one fire.

The fire needs to be burning already. If you don’t have a fireplace or firepit there is a way to create an indoor fire with baking soda and rubbing alcohol – it’s not as scary as it sounds and not at all dangerous. It burns slowly and is only as big as the pile of baking soda you use. (Put a mound of it in a cast iron skillet or a stainless steel baking dish – it won’t hurt them. Pour rubbing alcohol on the soda till it’s saturated and light it with a match. Magical.)

The sticks that now embody what is being released go into the fire. They are burned; they are thus transformed (chemical change is so comforting in its totality); they go up to the heavens as smoke.

If you would like to replace a fear or limiting belief with something positive and affirming, round two is like round one. After releasing, you symbolically bring into your life what you want. For example, you blow into a stick the knowledge that you will find a healthy relationship, a job, a house you love, that you will love yourself, take care of yourself, embrace intimacy, be adventurous—whatever it is that is lacking. Those sticks burn too, and the smoke rises like a prayer.

It works because I believe in the power of this ritual. I believe I can release what is toxic and manifest what is healthy inside myself. I love to see the little sticks curl up, redden, become ash. Doing this with friends or family is tremendously moving for me, as we take turns around the fire pit, or just all go at once, quietly blowing, releasing, blowing, bringing in. I have done it alone, too, which has its own murmuring, resonating intensity.

Clearing energy in my home by burning sage has a similar effect on me. It is about using fire to transform, cleanse, and make room for what is beautiful and beneficial. I walk around the house, smudge stick smoldering, and let the smoke float to the corners. I bend to let it find the spots under tables and even inside closets, where I imagine negative energy may be lurking. If everything is energy and energy never disappears, every fight or sob fest leaves its energy behind. If I have recently struggled especially, or been greatly unhappy, frightened or lost, that feeling has its energy that, in my mind, lingers in the spaces around me. I have faith in the potency of the savory smoke of burning sage to evict that energy. As far as I am concerned, it is banished, and that’s what matters.

These rituals do not erase emotion or memory, or miraculously change me overnight. But they usher in change. They confirm my intentions and begin the process of defusing the power the emotion or memory has over me. Releasing a toxic belief or emotion can be like letting go of something dangerous in the water. You still see it, but it is drifting away to where it can’t hurt you anymore.

Ritual is a funny thing. It has the power we let it have. And yet many believe that the ritual itself is powerful whether or not we believe. How many people go to church every Sunday, skeptical, jaded, but hoping that is true? That the ritual will work even if they can’t “go there.” Whatever the case, I believe in the power of goodbye rituals, releasing rituals, banishing rituals, and most important, manifesting rituals, to embody my intentions in the matter. My intention to let go. My intention to bring about change. In the end, my intentions are what matter, and if I set my intentions on goodbye, goodbye it is.

Lessons for a Klutz

Posted on June 7, 2013 by spiralwoman

Bang. The side of my hand ricochets off a door jamb while I’m carrying a heavy box. Thud. I slam my hip into a table corner. Crash. I walk smack into the edge of a glass table top, shattering it and ripping up my shin.

Even more dramatic than the huge sheet of glass smashing into giant shards was the day I flew head first into a wall. Yeah, I know. What the hell? I was walking rather enthusiastically to open the door for the plumber, who had just solved a huge septic problem despite frozen ground and an inch of snow. I tripped. The momentum projected me about five feet. In fact, I may have gone even further given the chance, but an inconveniently located wall stopped my flight and I crashed loudly. I may have gone all woozy for a second. The pain in various body parts was not insignificant. But honestly my first thought was, “Really? I had to do that in front of witnesses?” The plumber and his assistant were outside pounding on the glass door shouting, “Are you okay?”

That graceful episode resulted in a giant egg on my forehead, a gash down my forearm and a seriously messed up finger. The middle finger on my left hand – with which I must have tried to block my impact—hit the wall tip first. Nail shattered and middle joint traumatized. To this day, months later, the joint is still huge and painful. The whole hand is compromised. Who knew one silly finger could affect strength and agility in a hand? (I bet an orthopedist would have known, had I visited one. With a $2000 deductible in my insurance policy, it did not seem important enough at the time.)

In the last 5 months, I have endured more minor accidents than in the 5 years prior. Blood, torn flesh, scuffed skin, bruises, you name it.

I keep thinking there is a lesson here. Maybe more than one. Here are the teachings of this period of clumsiness. At least the ones I have come up with so far:

Slow down, you crazy woman! Look, listen, wait. Take stock. Just pause. Doing so may well protect my well-being (no more blood and gore), and it might also create a bubble around my vision, head and heart that will let me absorb more of what is in front of my face.
I don’t have to be perfect. Glass tables break. They can be replaced. Bruises heal. And my vanity about having pretty hands – well it’s probably time to let that one go. I can be a klutzy idiot and still hold my head up, have self-respect and maintain my friendships. Well, except for that one friend who only loved me because of my balletic grace and ability to walk flawlessly through life. So screw her.
It’s okay to ask for help. So if I’m limping due to a pratfall, or stunned into stupidity by a bonk on the head or unable to use my left hand for a month, it’s okay to get help. This has always been hard for me. But now I find that when I ask, I receive. Odd.
It’ s okay to be the one who gets taken care of now and then. Sometimes it really is nice to have someone stand there in the bathroom with me while I drip scarlet onto the floor and delicately wrap my hand in a clean cloth.

I’m very hopeful that if I have learned these lessons well enough, the universe will now stop teaching me. I’m ready to move on to a less painful curriculum.

Teacher Love

Posted on June 4, 2013 by spiralwoman

I was a teacher for 25 years. When I started teaching at a cozy little independent school in the Hudson Valley of New York State, I was a young woman in my mid-twenties, newly married, just out of graduate school. I was so young that the stress of my first year in the classroom gave me pimples. Now stress just gives me insomnia and makes my hair fall out. Not sure which is worse. In any case, whatever the stresses of the job—and there were many—none of it ever mattered. My job fed my soul and there is one reason for that—my students. I taught many youngsters in all those years, but mainly 6^th, 7^th and 8^th graders.

Those are great years, during which kids become the people they will be. Yes, human beings are “themselves” even as babies, toddlers, floppy haired second graders, but in middle school their faces, brains and bodies begin the incredible metamorphosis that gets them to “adult.”

I know because I keep track of my students as best I can. I see the “after” (at many stages) and can remember with vivid clarity the “before.”

At the end of my first year in the classroom, there was none of the history yet. I was a true newbie. And I was surprised—shocked, in fact— at the sense of loss I felt. After graduation, I spent the weekend crying, on and off. I was just starting to understand a thing I call “teacher love.” Like “mother love,” it sneaks up on your heart and takes hold.

Maybe you didn’t realize that we teachers love our students. I don’t mean in the abstract, benevolent way a deity loves the nameless humans who worship her or him. I mean, we are people who love each individual child. We know them very well. We see them. We feel their joy and pain and all those angsty struggles that are played out in a classroom. Through the chaos and busyness and hard work of every day, we absorb, as if through osmosis, a piece of each child’s soul. A teacher can understand a student with greater depth and accuracy than could be predicted by mere facts.

And in a very real way, they absorb us too. That’s why I always knew how important my job was. Not only was I teaching kids how to think critically, write well, and read deeply, I was in relationship with them. And I could really mess a kid up if I wasn’t careful. A teacher may be a human who loves (and praises, disciplines, encourages, and scolds), but we have a hell of a lot of power over those mini-people, and our words, actions, mere looks can stick with them for a lifetime. I know. They’ve told me.

I once had a student equate an approving look from me with a “glance from God.” That sure gave me pause.

So last week I took the commuter train down to the city and met up with a number of my former students at an alumni event on the Upper East Side. Such opportunities to come face to face with these adults, 5, 10, 15, 20 years later, are beyond delicious. And drinking a beer with someone I once had to give permission to go to the bathroom has a charming irony.

My face starts to hurt after the first hour. I can’t keep the happy grin off my silly face. I hear them say, “You have not changed at all!” and want to laugh at the absurdity. What they mean is: “There you are! I’d recognize you anywhere.” I could say the same to them. Kids no more, but surely and positively themselves.

When they were 12, 13, 14, their faces were plain to see. However much time passes, that face is still there. The sloping eyes, the toothy grin. A boy’s soft jaw carved into a strong line. A girl’s awkwardness smoothed out into a woman’s beauty. Bouncy childishness transformed into confident warmth.

I am tall – almost 5’10” – but I spend a lot of time at these parties craning my neck up at men whose heads once rested on my shoulder when the boys they once were gave their teacher a hug. Last week, Brendan, effusive, funny, towered over me. He and his classmate Eliza reminisced with me about the tortures I inflicted on them in my second year of teaching. We laughed. Though I was hard on them, sometimes expecting more than they could deliver, for some reason they remember the experience, and me, fondly. I guess we had fun, too. In 8^th grade, we made a movie. Brendan wrote the script and directed. We filmed on location and had a ball, with lots of laughter between takes. Brendan is now an independent movie producer and gives some credit to that experience, 23 years ago, which pleases and humbles me.

A number of my former students teach. That is one of the most lovely testimonials a teacher can receive. Eliza became a teacher and has also become a good friend. Her children now attend the school, and we get together sometimes for dinner, or a cold beer on a summer afternoon. We never run out of things to talk about and I rarely focus on the strange reality that the child I taught to proofread her essays for comma splices is now a mother, a woman, a teacher like me, with outlooks, beliefs, passions, and convictions in common.

I met up with Alex, a talented, soft-spoken young woman whose musical talent blew our minds when she plugged in her guitar 15 years ago, and pulled big sounds out of it with her small hands. Now she supports herself with her music. I chatted with Byron, who sells high-end Manhattan real estate. He was a little kid, it seems, not long ago, but that same grinning boy is now a man, navigating the big city/big kid world with calm confidence.

It’s not even about pride, although I feel plenty of that. It’s simply a sense of fullness, affection, and love. Some of these beloved students have found themselves. Some are still a little lost. Some are happy. Some are in pain. Some share. Some avoid. All are in my heart.

Permele and Emilie come 80 blocks after work to get to the midtown party. They make a bee-line for me in the gallery space and one of them says, leaning in for a hug: “We came to see you.”

I am flooded with feeling as I look at their beautiful, youthful faces and wide smiles and listen to their excited flow of words. I was hoping they’d be there. “No,” I think. “I came to see you.”

The people I once taught interest me, and inspire me, and make me think and laugh because they are fascinating, smart people and I am lucky enough to know them. When I first became a teacher I did not realize that I was making a lifetime commitment to every student I ever taught. I think I’d go to the ends of the earth to share a laugh, a beer, and a good story with any one of them.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Posted on May 31, 2013 by spiralwoman

The purge I discussed in ontological detail awhile back? Well, it came to fruition with the Epic Tag Sale.

After an ignominious semi-rain out on Saturday and Sunday, Monday dawned beautifully and full of promise. It took me 2 ½ hours to get everything out and set up, but by nine I was (almost) ready for the first customers who began wandering by. The town I live in has a Memorial Day parade every year. Even though it no longer goes past my house (more’s the pity), I knew there would be some significant traffic through town as people parked and walked to prime viewing real estate.

So this blog is about some of the wonderful people who stopped to buy, or just to look, or just to talk. Or a combination of the three.

Deirdre was my first customer. A tall, soft-spoken woman of about 65 or 70 who speaks with a German accent and walks with a cane, Deirdre came before I was done putting everything out. She meticulously examined every item I put on display, some seemingly insignificant and yet oddly specific. A never-before-opened oral hygiene tool, price still affixed, being sold at a 500% reduction. She bought that – clever shopper. Picture frames. Just a few. Small ones. A basket. She looked at all 10 of the baskets on display and selected one she said was “just the right size.” Deirdre lives across the street, she told me. I had not seen her before, a fact that bothered me more and more as we talked. Why had I not noticed her? Where she lives is a big house divided into apartments, and she has the one in back on the first floor, she explained. When she talked, she looked right into my eyes. She thought about what she wanted to say and often paused for a long time between words. This is a quality I admire. I don’t have it.

Deirdre bought about $6.00 worth of wares and said she would come back. She did. The second time she collected some more, carefully selected items. She looked at a clock radio and asked, “Can I just use this as a radio? You know, for some music around?” I ended up throwing that in for free. “You are my best customer,” I told her. “Repeat business is worth something.”

She returned three times, and on the third visit, she asked about a man’s suede jacket hanging on a ladder in the driveway. Someone had just looked at it a few minutes before and rejected it for a tiny hole the size of a pin head on one sleeve. I told Deirdre I would reduce the price from $10.00 to $7.00. She tried it on. Her face lit up. “It fits perfectly,” she said, grinning.

I knew, because of where she lives, because of how carefully she shopped, that Deirdre is alone, lives on a fixed, very low income, and that she is lonely, smart, a lovely person. Okay, I did not know all that because of where she lives or how she shopped, but I knew it. Each time she walked across the street to me, I greeted her warmly by name. I wanted her to know she was a person to me. That I had seen her. Finally.

After her last purchase, she went home to put it away and returned one more time. She told me she was going to the church thrift shop down the street. I said, “Well thank you for shopping here first!” She explained that she was not going there to shop, but to work. As a volunteer, helping the women sort, sell, organize, display. Deirdre explained, “I see things as they come in and sometimes get some great stuff!”

After 25 years in this town, I have not once stepped into that thrift store. Frugal shopper that I am, this fact speaks volumes. Deirdre shopped at my tag sale because she a. has no car and b. can’t afford to go to Walmart or Macy’s or Sears. Deirdre is in danger of becoming invisible. I don’t want that to happen.

Another lady who touched my heart was a young Latino mother who walked by with her three daughters. She approached my tables in the warmest part of the day. The sun was high and the maples in my front yard made gently moving patterns across her face. As she looked at clothes, her three exquisite children ages 4, 6 and 8, examined the stuffed animals in a big box, the art supplies, the bright red binoculars my son used to take when we’d go on hikes.

The lovely young mother did not speak much. Her children occasionally spoke to her, very softly. I helped the girl with the binoculars figure out which end to look through. Her sister crouched down to look at sheets of stickers in a box mainly filled with markers. She examined a stack of size 6 shorts with care and picked out a pair for $2.00. Her daughters did not beg; they did not fuss; they did not pull on her arm. They smiled up at me, waited patiently, respectfully handled things and put them back where they had been.

Mama examined the contents of her purse. She did calculations. She looked at the price on the binoculars. $5.00. “You can have that for $3.00,” I said, knowing she would not ask. She raised one eyebrow and tucked it into her arm where a pink Yankee’s hat (50¢) and the shorts already were. Her middle daughter had never left the box of like-new stuffed animals. When she saw her mother was wrapping things up, she pulled away from the box with intense will power. As she neared us, her mother looked down at her with the affectionate understanding of all mothers. She took the child’s hand and walked with her back to the box. The little girl pulled out a horse, legs dangling adorably. I chimed in: “All stuffed animals are $2.00.” Mama must have said something, because they came back to me, horse still clutched in the little girl’s hand. I totaled up their merchandise –$7.50 for shorts, hat, binoculars and horse.

Meanwhile, the oldest girl was without a purchase. She was still looking at the stickers. I said, “Can you hand me that box?” She picked up the Rubbermaid bin full of markers and stickers and handed it to me. I put the lid on and handed it back to her. “On the house.” Four black haired beauties walked back down the street, so quiet, so careful, and so satisfied.

A red mini-van pulled up to the curb and started to discharge passengers. A boy around 12, a mom, a dad, and three mentally handicapped adults, two women and a man. I quickly came to realize that they all lived together in the family’s home, which doubled as a supervised living situation for the three residents.

Like machines, the parents started to look through the offerings. Meanwhile, their son homed in on two ten pound weights selling for $5.00. I later found out that he is small for his age, and not 12 at all but 15 and in high school. He clearly has aspirations to bulk up and these barbells are going to be part of that plan.

The three residents look around too. Well, not the man. He stood apart, arms crossed over his chest, a smile fixed to his face. He seemed uninterested in shopping, but wanted to ask me questions. Do I live here? Alone? Do I have kids? Do I have dogs? Do I have cats? Is there a garden? “David always wants to know everything,” the mother explained, as she picked up a ski helmet and asked, “I wonder if we could use this for a bike helmet?”

Meanwhile, she had dispatched her husband to run home for money. As she found things she wanted – two hand-soap dispensers, a teapot, a framed print – she handed them to me to hold onto. A pile grew on the chair I brought out to sit on but never had a chance to sit on.

One of the disabled adult women had a very hard time articulating. Her speech was tough to understand but she did a wonderful job conveying meaning with her mobile face. She selected some lapis earrings, “For mah maw.” I confirmed: “A gift for your mother?” She nodded, looking directly into my eyes.

The house mother, moving efficiently and with tremendous focus, rifled through the clothes hanging on a line strung across the yard. She plucked out a pair of black and white capris and told the woman who wanted the earrings, “If these don’t fit me, they’re yours. How’s that?”

The smiling gentleman asked, “How long have you lived here?” For the past five minutes, the other woman had been clipping hair clips from a basket into her very short hair. She also kept picking up a reversible hand mirror and looking at herself in it, first on one side, then on the other, magnifying, side. She returned to it again and again.

All of my men’s clothing was sold except for one very nice collared Dean Martin style shirt (I don’t know how else to explain it). The boy, the one who wants to grow, tried it on over his tee shirt. “How do I look?” he asked all of us. The boy paused, awaiting his mother’s brisk approval. It goes on the chair, too.

They continued to shop till dad returned, at which point I bagged up their purchases (two paper shopping bags full), and gave them the total: “$31.00.” Suddenly dad looked at a wooden jewelry box, the one holding the remnants of the jewelry for sale. “Is this for sale?” I tell him it is, for $1.00. It was pretty beat up. He counted out dimes and quarters for this final purchase, and corrals his troops.

Just before she climbed into the car, the woman drawn to the mirror returned and picked it up off the table. “I will pay for this with my own money.” I held out my hand saying something encouraging. She gave me a dollar. “This,” she said, to be sure I understood, “is my own money.”

There were many more. The woman, visiting a friend for the weekend, whose eyes lit up when she noticed my goddess necklace. “There are more of us goddess worshippers around than you would think,” she confided. The independent but slightly slow young man who bought two men’s shirts, asking first to be sure, “These are for fall or winter, right?” A young girl and her boyfriend who stopped by and bought only three things. Three impractical things. An earth friendly bumper sticker, and two buttons, one of which clearly states that no apologies will be offered for sarcasm.

The people who stopped by my sale moved me and delighted me. Some wanted to share their stories. Others quietly shopped, paid and slipped away. The beds went. The table. At least 30 stuffed animals, released by my daughter at long last. Into other lives to enrich or satisfy or fill a hole or become a gift. And I am the lighter for it.

The Moving Industry Scam

Posted on May 26, 2013 by spiralwoman

I’m not an investigative reporter. I am just one person with a story to tell. Here it is.

I had never used a moving company before, until this past December.

Labor intensive as self-moving is, there is something comforting about being in control. If anything breaks, well, I have only myself to blame. Last fall, I made a long move sans professionals with nary a broken wine stem. I had friends to help and had been budgeting for the move for some time. Stressful, yes. Traumatic, no.

I had planned on spending a year down south during a teaching sabbatical. That plan tanked and I abruptly found myself needing to extricate myself from a home, a city, a state, and quickly. It was the Christmas season, which was a bit of a complication. And this time I had no support system—I’d left them all behind in New York. What to do?

To provide some context: I was shattered emotionally, tenuous financially, drained physically and psychically and did I mention it was Christmas? My kids were 1500 miles away. Enough said. Add to this the draining away of some pretty lofty hopes and dreams, the ignominious crashing of a love affair both ancient and new, and the desperate need to get away from a place where I had never found purchase and was decidedly not wanted.

About a week before Christmas, between bouts of uncontrollable sobbing, I searched the web for info about moving companies and began making inquiries. I received prompt and eager return calls from efficient sales personnel. I filled out inventories of belongings. I confided my need to get out fast. (My first mistake?) I was clearly a vulnerable customer prime for the sting.

I found out that some companies charge by space, some by weight. Of course, both of these calculations are virtually impossible to make over the phone. So we practiced the fine art of approximating.

The price quotes started rolling in. The very high numbers scared me. After all, this had to go on my credit card. The lower numbers got me calling back. I found one salesman who seemed like a real person. Dave was thoughtful and reassuring. He helped me make an itemized list of every object I had to move and a guesstimate of the number of boxes. His price quote was less heinous than many. Except for the uncertainty of the boxes, I knew for a fact we had not missed a single thing on our list. Based on my inventory, Dave was fairly confident that he could estimate the amount of square footage needed in the truck for my stuff. He admitted it would not be exactly perfect, but did not anticipate any big shocks when the final price was given, on the day of the move.

I started collecting boxes. Craig’s list was a great source of free boxes as people who had just moved were trying to get rid of the stuff. I also became friends with the liquor store guys, making nightly forays into their back room and divesting them of what, from their point of view was trash, and to me was a penny earned.

On Christmas Eve day, I started packing. Frantic as I was, I managed to label every box and wrap every piece of pottery with care. By the end of Christmas day, I was fully boxed up and in a state of heightened anxiety and depression that translated to single-minded focus on the tasks left to do. When I ran out of tasks, I made some up. Then I took a three hour walk and waited for bedtime.

The next day, the movers arrived, on time. Their head honcho, Val, swept through the apartment eyeballing the situation. He said, “Okay, you have 12 more boxes than you said you’d have. Looking around, this looks like yadda yadda square feet.” (I can’t remember numbers to save my life.) He whipped out his calculator and gave me the bottom line. “That means your estimate was off by $950.00. But we’ll do the best we can to keep that down. My guys are great.” As he spoke, his “guys” were already wrapping my couch in plastic.

I had started to cry (so embarrassing to remember this) when Val said, ‘$950.00.’ That was another third again on top of Dave’s estimate, which, to my current budget and pessimistic frame of mind, was beyond reason already.

I called Dave, the salesman, and left a message on his voicemail. I explained, haltingly, about Val’s calculations and wondered, angrily, how Dave could have screwed up so badly? I remember choking out the words, “I’m stuck now. I fly out tomorrow, my stuff is in boxes and I have no recourse.” I still had not figured out that this was, of course, business-as-usual. I did not hear back from Dave. At least not that day.

As the hours crawled on, I experienced for the first time what it is like to be moved by people who not only don’t care about me one bit, but don’t know me from Eve. I was just that morning’s job.

I think I threw them for a loop when, in a full-on state of panic, I started crossing things off my list of what I was taking. Since there was someone else living in the apartment too, I could leave things without difficulty. Aside from the fact that I was parting with my belongings. It felt like my life had become nothing but partings and leave-takings and this was all too much. Deciding to leave the rocking chair in which I’d nursed my babies—that was a tear jerker. It took up so much space, though. Maybe ditching it would pare down the cost. Two book shelves – leave them. A telephone table. A coffee table. These things struck me as taking up a lot of square inches and I thought, “I’ll get that damned estimate back down if I have to leave my left leg here.”

At the end of the day, after the semi-guilt-ridden men took my denuded Christmas tree to the dumpster for me, Val came to me with a big smile on his face. “Well, after packing the truck nice and tight, I have your final price.” And he gave me a number $675.00 less than what he’d quoted me at nine that morning.

My relief was enormous. It seemed like a gift. I even thanked him. I gag a little now, remembering. “Oh, good,” I breathed. “Good thing I was able to leave some stuff behind.”

He did not comment on that. We finalized our affairs. I signed some more papers. I said goodbye and spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how to cauterize my tear ducts.

Cut to the chase. Never mind about the rest of the move. I moved.

My credit card balance swelled. I washed up on the shores of home and crawled to dry land. I regained my equilibrium one day at a time and, mostly, managed to put on a brave face.

One day, about three weeks after all my stuff had been squeezed into a storage unit, I was sitting in a local coffee bar when my phone rang. It was Dave. Remember Dave?

Turns out he is a person after all. I’d been right about that, at least.

“Vanessa, I wanted to call you now that I don’t work for that moving company any more. I felt so bad that day you called me. What a mess.” Dave explained to me that he had only been working there a month when he and I first spoke to plan my move. He’d gotten the job through his girlfriend’s father, and it took him awhile to get the lay of the land. To realize there was a nasty subplot. The subplot is: bait, lure, gouge. The bait is a lowball estimate that gets the customer interested. Not so lowball as to sound fishy, but low enough. Then once you have the signed contract and the downpayment, continue to be very customer-friendly and available until the day of the move itself. Then be “away from your desk.” The part about the driver giving an extra high “re-estimate” of cost is part of the strategy, built in to the plan all along.

I’d actually figured as much. And it had worked perfectly on me. The $950.00 extra was so scary that I was actually HAPPY that the final cost was only $300.00 higher than the estimate. I honestly think that, had I not ditched so many pieces of furniture, the final numbers would have come in around $500.00 higher, but even Val could not justify that.

Dave corroborated all my vague paranoid speculations. Apparently, not many people end up reporting their moving estimate frustrations the way I did. My overwrought mental state and complete isolation (who did I have to talk to about this but Dave, after all?) meant I called him that morning and left him that garbled, choked, angry, petrified voicemail. And, being a person, he followed up.

What he found out was just how cold-blooded the whole operation was. The drivers are part of the overall plan, and know how to use the oh-so-effective scare tactics. That’s when Dave quit.

He quit the job and I respect him for it. And he called me back, eventually, to apologize and validate my feelings. So that’s the good part.

The bad part is – I feel a profound lack of trust when it comes to industries like the moving business. (And I know for a fact that not all movers are unscrupulous, but I’ve been, officially, burned.) They have their customers in a double bind no matter what. (Someday I’ll write about when I went through the wringer with the funeral home industry – talk about having vulnerable clients who can’t exactly say, “Never mind; I won’t put my loved one to rest after all, you big bully.”)

But with luck I can translate the vulnerability of not trusting into something else. Learning how to be strong when weak. How to see clearly through tears. How to recognize choices instead of roadblocks. How to find the lessons within every hurtful experience and then, let the hurt go.

At this point, she’s seen it all.

Grief, Love, and the Prayer Arrow

Posted on May 25, 2013 by spiralwoman

I ripped my life apart last year. Then I put it together so it looked very very different. Then I ripped it apart again. What does that feel like? Picture a surgical incision that goes from your breastbone to your pubic bone, and through every inch of muscle you’ve got. Now imagine that it heals… partly. And that’s when you rip it open again, and this time you tear it a little past the original scar. That line—stapled and trying to heal—becomes a line of demarcation between one hopeful sorrow and the next.

But as with any deeply felt pain, sometimes things go numb around the edges. The pain is deep and resonant below the surface. The edges of the wound, the patches where the staples clamp the surface closed over the ugly mess—loses something. A scab ripped open one too many times forms a tingly scar that can feel detached from the reality of actual flesh.

What is that? Nature’s way of letting us dissociate from trauma, anguish, sorrow, hurt? Survival instinct meets biology. When it comes to heart pain, survival instinct meets psychology. The result is similar.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being okay with the numbness. Don’t get me wrong, I am anything but a detached person. I let everything in. But maybe that’s why so many scabs have formed making little places of forgetting. Little places of denial. Little gaps in the skin of me.

To be whole, I need to attend to myself. I need to rub arnica on the dark places, vitamin E on the scars. Breathe the repressed darkness up to the surface where it can float away. Get me some loving—from me and the world.

I recently participated in a wonderful exercise in which everyone created a prayer arrow. To do this, we each had to decide on something that we wanted to manifest. Something we wanted to bring about, move into, recognize, accept, be, create… you get the drift.

How to decide? What, I wondered, is holding me back the most? In light of recent events, I knew instinctively that what I had to move toward was this: believing that I am loved and worthy of love.

I suspect far too many of us have a belief that we are not loved, not loveable. Well—that is a limiting belief and it sure does hold us back. So Cat, the shaman working with all of us that evening, had us write all the beliefs that were keeping us from realizing whatever it is we had decided to bring into our lives. The thing is, we had to write them on an arrow. An arrow about 2 feet long with the circumference of a pencil. She handed out the “sacred Sharpies” and with them we managed to write, using very small letters, a shit ton of limiting beliefs. We all wrote on those darned arrows for a long time. I glanced around the room to see the group of 7, men and women, balancing their blue or yellow or green arrows across their knees and earnestly confiding to those symbolic, primitive weapons the darkest of self-obliterating, self-denying, self-limiting, self-effacing beliefs.

One at a time, when we were finished, Cat had us stand inside our circle and take turns facing her. We were to break our arrow. Breaking it, as we moved toward what we wanted to bring into being, we would symbolically and literally shatter the limiting beliefs written on our arrow.

The catch: we had to break the arrows with our throats. That little hollow where the skin seems delicately draped over space. Underneath that hollow is our life blood pulsing visibly and vulnerably beneath the surface.

Cat put the feathered end of the arrow against a wooden board. When it was my turn, I did what had been done by the woman before me. I placed the tip of the arrow in that hollow. Using deep breaths and great conviction, being chanted into power by my group-mates, and looking into Cat’s warm, somewhat bemused, smiling eyes, on the count of three, I walked forward against the resistance of the arrow.

I felt it dig, briefly, into my flesh, pushing against me. But then, I pushed against it. It met with the resistance of my breath-tautened throat, and the board held by Cat. The arrow shattered and I did not.

There is such power in ceremony. Doing ceremony in community with beloved friends is transforming. But doing it in a room of (mostly) strangers is liberating and transforming. The energy grew in that space until all the arrows were broken. Some tears brimmed, many hearts pounded.

What does this have to do with the wounds and scabs of pain, grief and denial? Something about the fact that I put an arrow to my throat and did not receive a wound. Something about being fully conscious of the dark pathetic part of me that could not ever manage to believe in myself enough to see the love right in front of my face. And admitting it to the arrow and the people with me in that room. Something about making a conscious decision to heal, instead of waiting for years to notice that, wow, I wasn’t healing. Healing from whatever crap I allowed into my dark places 40, 30, 20, 10 years ago or yesterday.

I wrapped the pieces of my arrow with yarn; white and purple were the colors I chose. Under a waxing, gibbous moon, I planted the arrow, along with my prayers, into the earth.

My prayer arrow.

The Purge

Posted on May 23, 2013 by spiralwoman

25 years’ worth of stuff. No, I under-exaggerate. Over 50 years’ worth of stuff. Because I am still holding on to… way too much. A baby blanket used on newborn me. My first teddy bear, now creaky and rusty jointed and leaking his innards. Loose photos that never made it into an album or a frame. Vintage dresses I used to wear when I waited tables in a dark and smoky bistro in Charlottesville, VA. Old batting gloves that have not fit either of my children in at least ten years. A variety of dust-coated flower vases I don’t use. Why don’t I use them? I use the other 7 vases I have that I actually like. How many napkin rings does a person who does not use napkin rings really need? Why did I keep four small paint smocks in a drawer for 15 years after the last time my children and their playmates fit into them? I am grappling with these and other questions with a lot less angst than you might think.

So I started this whole thing out saying, “I am still holding on to way too much.” Make that “I was holding on to way too much.” Getting rid of my stuff is a kickass metaphor for getting rid of the shit clogging my chakras, the energetic holds on my heart, mind and spirit, the past that interrupts my present and screws with my future. Etc.

Context: A tumultuous year included two moves during which it dawned on me that I might have a bit of a stuff-burden. Now, I may, in fact, have way less in the way of material possessions than many Americans, but what defines “too much” for me might not be what it is for someone else. Clearly, having anything at all to put into a home with more than one room is a lot more than most people in this world possess. But, regardless of any judgment on how much is enough or not enough or too much, for a bunch of reasons, when I moved the first and second times in 2012, I was not in any condition to make purgative decisions when the rest of my life was in such flux/emotional turmoil/confusion as I coped with a series of over-the-top versions of joy/grief/ecstasy/terror/heartbreak/hope/misery.

But a funny thing happened. Due to circumstances within my control (but that’s another story), I lived for 5 months with 98% of my belongings in a storage unit. Nester, homemaker, keeper of stuff that I am, I was living out of 4 boxes and two suitcases. Period.

As the months went on and I lived with this pared down collection of the necessities of life, a lesson of great importance seeped into my underneath consciousness. A lesson I am putting to good use now. If I can be comfortable out of 4 boxes and 2 suitcases, I can release some of the crap collecting cobwebs in that storage unit.

A friend of mine recently wrote a blog about just this topic. I was in the midst (and still am) of my purge, and it rang my chimes. (Here’s a link: http://healthybeing.com/environment-is-everything/ ) The items piling up in boxes on the porch look like objects, feel like objects, collect dust like objects, but they represent – they are – energy. A static, clumping, blocking, curdling kind of energy that gets in my way, even when I don’t realize it.

I remember one summer when my son was about 15, I decided to tackle the basement (aka cellar) of my house. It was a dark, dank mess of a place containing a washer, dryer, freezer, furnace… the usual, plus a lot of other, well, mysterious crap. I borrowed a pick-up truck. My son, Win, and I hauled junk for hours, up from the cave into the light. As the truck filled, I’d schlep it up to a nearby town where there was a dump. A for-profit garbage place that had a cave of its own into which I deposited my unwanted stuff.

A very pale young fellow who may never have seen the light of day spent his working hours unloading other people’s unwanted items from their trucks and cars and tossing them into inexplicable piles, according to his own sense of order, inside the cavernous space.

Each time I entered the confines of this sprawling compound of garbage, my truck would be weighed. (They got an empty weight when I first arrived.) At the end of the day, when I went in to pay for the privilege of giving my rejected items (old doors, rusty pumps, decrepit shelving, an ancient crib that was from the previous owner of my house and so on), the woman behind the counter told me the total weight of the day’s many hauls: just over one ton. One TON. Win and I had carried one TON of SHIT out of our basement. How had we ever lived with one unneeded, unwanted TON cluttering up the energy of our home?

I feel the same way now. But this time, the things I’m releasing are perfectly good. They are useable. Meaningful in the world, to someone. But not me. Not any more. I won’t haul it to the dumping ground. I will offer it to the Memorial Day shoppers who cruise tag sales in the New England springtime. I will put prices like 25¢ and $1.00 on decent items. Polished up, washed, shiny and like new, or not so like new, these things will find a place of positive energy in the world. They will feather someone else’s nest. Maybe a young person getting her own apartment. Or a divorced father starting over. It doesn’t matter.

I release you, stuff. I clear my space, feng my shui, open the pores of my environment. Feels damn good.

spiralwoman

One woman trying to pull all the pieces together.

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