Gratitude Day 1

Inspired by real life needs and a beautiful gift of compact words set in a tome, I am sitting here with an idea of gratitude. If there was a time for it, it would be now, when storms in the mind stand out like tornados on otherwise calm waters. Maybe, writing with gratitude in mind will make those storms seem more like eddies, doing whatever eddies do. 

I am thankful for my job. I can't deny that.  Let's begin with that. I work with students and have spent most of my time on the job thinking that I could be doing such a better job of it.  Wait, that is not a gratitude entry. Why am I thinking about this and writing it? Oh, I promised myself I'd do that, do what I ask my students to do.  Just write. They ask me how. I don't know, I say, don't you? Am I doing the right thing - I am, right? Doing the right thing? - by putting the questioning back on them?  I heard that was a good idea.  It usually comes out ok. But I often have to correct the track and take over the conversation to make sure I know where it's going. See, I am grateful to be a teacher. They tell me they are grateful for me. I don't know what that means. I don't know that I do for them what I think I would be grateful to me for. It's like catching fish when you were only trying to catch the bait to lure them. I think. I am a little confused.  And that paragraph had more to do with me and my thinking than anything. So, there that is.  Am I satisfied being a teacher?  No. I want more.  But to take away teaching takes away an essential connection... so, let's call it the desire to evolve my teaching into something not just in the classroom or under the auspices of a local school district.

Gratitude doesn't require thinking.  I think too much, so I may seem ungrateful. Much of life can be spent thinking about yourself.  Wait... I spend much of my time thinking about myself.  Me, not you, necessarily, but if this chimes with you, cool.  I think I am becoming some guru on letting go, but then I realize that is me thinking about being a guru and therefore it's not really a goal but a thought which can also be let go.  I've been instructed to consider my inner voice like a roommate in my head that yaks all the time, and that I am the one who is listening to it. If I first identify that I am not my thoughts and emotions, then that's the path to self.  I've been instructed to constantly be looking to live in the present, to know that pain in the body from anxiety is a set of reactions from the past, and to find the self that listens and focus on that quiet observer... then I sit at the seat of consciousness.  

See, I wanna be great at that. I am grateful for the knowledge now that I know how to let go of anxiety when it builds up into balls of barbed wire in the belly.  Maybe that's magic.  But it's all breathing, connecting mind to breath and body, and the results are instant. Maybe that's all thinking still.  See.... it gets confusing, until you let it all go and realize You are still there.  It's like a game you can always win if you just keep letting things go rather than hold on to them.  You don't lose anything; you just don't take on anything more.   

I am grateful for healing from internal pain.  Truth is I don't have body pain, and that is because I am lucky, and I ate lots of veggies and have apparently-awesome healthy genes. I am grateful for feeling that I can understand what to do to help myself instead of being helplessly thinking and walking in circles or long blocks or just driving and always thinking, always processing...something I know and have done and am done with.  Overmixing the batter, adding more thoughts, sweeter thoughts, some alcohol, some subsequent mental vacations... it's a place to be, I tell ya... relief is so wonderfully pleasant you may want to just keep on floating. But I don't really want to float anymore.  My life has changed significantly, and through that change I have changed.

I am grateful for change and what is to come, and to be at a point in my life where I can grow from where I was planted while growing where I am currently planted.  I will have to face certain realities but I can do that without a fearful mind. The problems can be manageable when you aren't so busy managing you fear of the actual problem. So, I am in a constant place where I am letting go of the feeling of anxiety that comes with the problem, and the problem is outside me but the anxiety is within me. The problem isn't going away... but my fear of it is going away.  The world will always present itself and I have learned that letting it flow on through me is a revolutionary act for the self.  

I am grateful for being alive, recognizing my pain, and making it my life's work now to grow. I am grateful that I feel OK writing about my insides and exposing them to other's opinions (none of which I am entitled to know let alone do something about). I am grateful to know the part of my inside that has always been me, who was ignored, and who now has a chance to grow in ways I never could have dreamed.  I am grateful for the knowledge that every day I can let go and it is a good thing.

I am grateful for Love, a new human in my life who seems pulled from my past unfathomable dreams of possible connection and who stands firmly next to me around the hearth we create between us, together, with whom I get to practice reciprocity, responding from the heart(h), and a Knowing that can only come from what happens when someone was made in a lab just for you, when the old pictures of her and her life told a story I have felt meant to be a part of the whole time.  Such gratitude leans into a daily commitment that the time left on this planet will be spent with Love I didn't know was possible, that Love is her and is me, and our love is worth shouting, screaming, singing, sweating, laughing, romping, and writing about. 

In a sea of problems, gratitude is a buoy with a light in the ever-present fog -- always there even when you can't see it.  Just keep moving, and the moving will take you away from the stagnant solitude inside and eddy you back to the light where you belong. 

The First Month for Emilia

The countdown continues to June 14, 2015, Emilia Caledonia Rhea Avanzino's first birthday...

What were we doing this time last year?  We were expecting a baby any day now, of course.  The days leading up your birth were harrowing to say the least, but as soon as you yelled your big "HEY!" to the world, we had yet to know the true meaning of "life turned upside down."  That first month - Baby Boot Camp, indeed - changed your mom and me.  You made us into parents.

It's common knowledge that new parents will be in for sleepless nights, piles of diapers, constant drool and spit-up wiping, and general personal havoc while they adjust to focus on the new life in their lives. Luckily, your mom had planned ahead (Oh Baby!) so that the trailer, all of your necessities, many of your possible wishes, and even our prospective schedules were in place before we even left for the hospital.  We really had it dialed up and were going to start right!  Then came a few unknowns.

Unknown #1: You would quickly became all there was.  I had no idea how centered on myself I was until you became totally reliant on me and your mom. All that mattered each day was whether you had pooped or peed and how frequently, how long you were feeding, and how long you could nap and where would be best for that?  Did that work?  How about this!  OOOOO this works well... oops not anymore.  To physically and emotionally center awareness around you is something I couldn't explain or fathom before you arrived, and still can't.

Unknown #2: Clocks cease to matter. Days literally become one series of events (most of them listed above) that seems to have no stop or pattern.  Following the move of a single grunting and helpless being becomes a required obsession, constantly trying to establish a routine, prognosticating about who you will become as a result of our decisions, then relaxing about that last part, deftly adjusting and adapting everything for you based on what just worked, falling asleep when possible and waking up on the cusp of REM sleep. Absolutely the most delirious I have ever been... drunk on baby.  It was the worst best craziest peaceful endless month of my existence.

If I could relive that month, I would again and again.  We lost our minds in you.  But that's love.  

Grunties

Grunties.  It's more than just a British word that's fun to say and has to do with what you may think it does.  It's also more than the chuckling middle of a Monty Python sketch involving silly people that you may have heard already.  Rather, "grunties" will always be Emilia's first phase of vocalizations for me, though they will never eclipse the great big HEY! she yelled to her Ma when first she made her appearance in this world.

Emilia, you made grunties, non-stop, starting shortly after you were born in the summer of '14. For us, that little esophageal burst of air accompanied with a even quieter noise, over and over and over again for weeks, became so ubiquitous we had to give you the nickname. We'd pick you up in your cocoon swaddle, and you'd turn into Grunties as your head swiveled to follow the moving scenery. We'd change your diaper, and Grunties emerged with each contortion we put you through.  Head on shoulder napping, lounging in bed eating, resting in the hammock under fruit trees, your every life move required a sound from Grunties.

This #14 is dedicated to your first summer, up there in good ol' Eureka, when, among the moving boxes and general stirring of our life, Grunties serenaded the horse pasture trailer as we prepared to depart it. You grunted outside while the trees waved at you and the sun danced through their branches.  Grunties joined the bird song and the sound of wind through pine, poplar and willow, and helped break the beautiful, long country silences.  Grunties will also always be the first new and exciting thing you did that we watched you grow out of.

I'm thankful you were born into a place and time where nature touched your senses more often than traffic or technology.  I'm also thankful you responded so gruntily.

Dear Sasquatch Monkeyface, in your fifth month

Dear Sasquatch Monkeyface,

November is here, making it about five months since the last time I wrote in the treehouse.  I know that because also five months ago today you finally showed up.  Five months is too long not to write, but ever since you arrived and made my world your whirled, there is no sign of the elongated stretches of mental freedom I associate with writing a thoughtful entry on the Treehouse walls. I've hammered out random sentences in my leather journal and some semi-coherent reflections on random acts in my teaching journal, not to mention the thrown-together half-salient lesson plans that my students work so hard to endure.  So yeah really, baby, you've redefined the whole idea of "me time." Just like they all said you would.
If you weren't so joyful to watch while eating a book, or so very good at precision toothless smile delivery, I could focus enough to sit and compose scores of sentences revealing in detail the several years of experiences wrapped into these past four months and how all our uprooting and then settling-in time went by without the requisite reflection.  I would regale my Treehouse walls of stories about my paid frolic in the national forest during your infancy while your mom remained trailer-bound sharpening her new mommy skills.  Vats of vowels await use in describing the attractive tract of land we purchased in Kalispell, the move... that excruciating move an hour south into hobo and black widow spider battles and leaky faucet flood control.  Floodgates of story I could devote to the satisfying challenge of teaching completely new classes and writing new curriculum in a new city with new colleagues in the only IB school in Montana, of joining the only choir in the area and getting my chops back, and of strumming on the birthday banjo and my classical guitar that I can finally play F and B chords on. I can speak long diatribes detailing true delirium at having no sleep schedule, not using the homemade desk enough and the dog not walking enough and how he misses wide open country fields. There are, of course, the weeks upon months of 2 hour sleep chunks, frighteningly frantic mornings, the ensuing clueless days, the return home to start it all again, plus endlessly rocking cradles and rhythmic pats on bottoms, sore and stretched arm muscles from devotion to holding that one position that seems to put you to sleep, at least that one time. The couch nights and floor nights require less telling, but they are funny in their helplessness.

They pile on, all the small stories that dovetail and never cease now more than ever, each new one burying an older one beneath it like a few more fall leaves.  The stories I scrawl I realize, now, always scream about me and my perspective as I navigate life from the Treehouse poop deck.  Now, suddenly but gently, like a vapor plowing through a quiet room, I realize all the stories that matter now revolve around you.  Every story now seemingly watches out for signs of you, steps lightly over but picks up your growls and shrieks at some point, awaits your entrance.  And no story seems as good without you as it is with you.  How did you do that?  You are now so obviously the point, the reason. You are slowly and deliberately pushing yourself out of my brain and into the only story worth reporting: the story of how you are doing and who you are becoming.  Hmm... sounds familiar.

Sunset on the Tobacco River - last few weeks in Eureka