Heh…I really crack myself up sometimes. This one made me smile.
Watercolor and red thread on paper; 22″x30″.
View on flickr; large image here.
Here’s the whole Red Thread series to date.
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Sisters
I listen to women tell their story, and they tell my story, too. One part of my story I hear them telling goes like this: “I never felt like I got along with other women. I just got along better with men.”
It started at an early age for me. I never felt a lot of sibling rivalry with my brothers, but my sister and I were always at odds. It wasn’t that I didn’t love her…it was just that something inside of me always twisted itself up in envy at her success or hostility at her innocence. She just seemed to move easily within the world even though she had a certain vulnerability. Her feelings showed.
I was always fighting upstream against myself, trying to rein myself in until the pressure built too much and it came out in bursts of defiance and bad decisions. The part of me that demands honest self-expression always being dragged down by the self-loathing coward.
Of course, I didn’t see any of that then. I just stewed in resentment. It came out in bad behavior that I often came to regret.
………………………………..
It was summer and we were bored. A friend of the family, Curly, was visiting. Curly was an older bald guy, the father of my dad’s childhood friend, and he was something like a grandfather to us. He and Mom sat at the kitchen table chatting while my brothers and I played upstairs.
We had a big hard plastic toboggan. It was kind of silly, really…we lived in Ohio, on land that had once been The Great Black Swamp. It’s hard to imagine a place more flat…you had to drive in towards town, near the river, to find anything even close to a hill for sledding. We always went “belly whomping” in the ice-covered fields instead….holding the sled at your chest as you run, then leaping with it as if you were doing a head-first slide into second base. Not the kind of thing you do with a plastic toboggan…you need sturdy wood with metal runners for that.
Still, on that summer day I thought the plastic toboggan had a certain promise that was irresistible. What if we could ride it down the wooden stairs of our old farm house?
My brothers and I were at the top of the stairs with the toboggan thinking it over. We really wanted it to work, but we also really wanted to see someone else try it first. I was the oldest and always the ringleader in these kinds of escapades, but I always looked for someone else to take the risk. I was more the idea person.
My sister came down the hall, looked at us sitting there with the toboggan, and brightly asked, “Are you guys riding that down the stairs?!”
I looked at my brothers, and they looked at me, waiting for me to answer. Sis would sometimes report our activities to the authorities; caution was required. I remember looking at my brother and smiling before I looked back to her. “Yes!” I said enthusiastically. “It’s a lot of fun! Do you want to try it?”
We helped her get situated. She held the stair railing as we tilted everything downhill and I remember her saying, “Are you sure this works?”
“Oh yes.”
She grabbed the rope handles and we nudged the toboggan forward as it slid down the first few steps. Then it bounced funny. WHAM!
WHAM!
WHAM!
Sis screamed, grabbed the railing, legs flying, and the toboggan continued on its merry way, crashing onto the living room floor.
Curly and Mom came running. Mom saw Sis laying on the steps. “What are you doing?!!”
Curly stood looking up the stairs at us, and put the whole story together right away. He laughed, nodded at us and told my mom, “There’s the real trouble. Up there.”
………………………………..
My sister grew up to be the amazing person I always knew she’d be. I see her now with her family, still full of feeling and vulnerability, yet with a strength she’s forged out of her own being. I don’t envy her life now…I want something different. But even though the envy is gone, it’s still not so easy always to do the right thing. I screw up a lot. But it’s worth the effort to try to get it right. I need her.
If there is anything that I’ve learned in the past year, it’s how much I value the relationships I have with the women in my life. While I’m working on my relationship with my blood sister, I find that I now have a whole community of sisters in my life. Incredible women, full of the grace of feeling and vulnerability. Through them, I begin to accept appreciate those sides of myself.
It turns out that the feeling that I just “got along better with men” wasn’t a matter of getting along with men at all. It was really a rejection of women because they showed the same qualities I rejected in myself. It was fear.
It turns out that all along, I needed the kind of courage that women have. I needed my sisters.
Back on the Ground
What an pretty stretch of days we’ve had! Often when it’s this clear, it’s also cold. But there are some nights when I don’t even have to make a fire. Mornings are beautiful with color.
Yesterday I stayed at home all day, much to Laika’s delight. We walked down to the redwood grove, still able to cross the creek and go into the woods. The trees pump out oxygen and my lungs greedily suck it in.
Trees have fallen across the path; I find a downed Bay with sapsucker holes drilled in neat circles around its trunk. Sometimes finding the evidence of the bird is as interesting as finding the bird itself.
I spend the day taking care of mundane things like laundry and little repairs. But I also get to work on a painting. The process of these paintings has become as interesting to me as the work itself. Usually I start out by trying to force an idea, but the real painting whispers to me from behind. I try to push the idea away for days, criticizing it for being too dramatic, too over the top. But when I reach the point of taping paper to the board, I will get no peace until I go back to the whispered idea.
Oh, this is gonna be a good one. Way over the top. And exactly where I have been dwelling. Surrendered to the image that wants to be, the symbols appear in my life, making me laugh. Perfect.
I actually got paint down yesterday, and am watching the image rise up out of the flatness. I get to touch that other world, that world of symbol and image and feeling, and play there.
But I want to play it this world, too. Laika spends the day napping in the sun, and when her black coat is hot and glossy, she wades into the pond, then comes to see what I’m doing. “I’m deleting this account,” I tell her, and she seems pleased. “Don’t think,” I warn her, “that this means you get to sleep in the bed.” I walk out of the yurt with her, and she and Jasper seem expectant. “Do something!” So I do…I roll in the grass with them. There is something about getting down to dog level that seems to delight them. And me.
It’s a good life. I’m grateful for it just as it is.
——————————
This morning I caught up on some PC blogs I’ve been following, and was stunned to see that they’ve shut down operations in Niger, evacuating all the volunteers. Many of them had just completed training and were in the process of setting up at their assignments. I’m pretty sure that that’s where they were planning to send me. I’ve been warned of the uncertainty, and to be honest, Niger has never felt “real” to me. My mind wants to keep asking, “then where, where?” Let it be.
I had the first part of my medical exam today. Have to go back Wednesday for followup, and also need to get some tests and such done. Then the dental and vision. Lots and lots of paperwork to wade through. Lots of poking and prodding; the squeezing and squishing yet to come.
Doc moves the stethoscope over my chest, listening. “Your heart,” he says, “is perfect.”
I wince inwardly and think, “Well. Good enough for government work.”
Why I Like Raptors
Life Rolling Along
The flurry of the holidays are over, but now the really expectant time of the year begins….baby goat season will be upon us in six or seven weeks. The mamas (or, more correctly, the does) have their shaggy winter coats and grow heavier in the pasture. I don’t interact with them every day, but visit them from time to time to reconnect. They have grown more wary; I’m not sure if that’s an effect of their pregnancy or if it’s just because I haven’t been associated with the grain bucket every morning.
I’ve been here for over a year now, and have memories of the cycle of seasons through the year. As exhausted as I became last spring, I can’t help but look forward to kidding season. P says February 20 is the day, but I’m still hoping for Valentine’s day kids. Remember last year when I was anxiously examining the privates of every goat for weeks before we had our first happy deliveries? I expect I probably will be again.
I’ve never been good on patience, and I am being tested on that again. This time, it’s with the gigantic bureaucracy of the US government. I applied for the Peace Corps in November, and even though it all moved rather rapidly, it’s felt like an exercise in sitting with the unknown future.
It was an interesting thought path in the decision to apply for the PC (which I’ll call it for now, to keep this from popping up too much in search engines). I’ve been reading, off and on, Peter Matthiessen In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a devastating account of the continuing travesty of the treatment of Native Americans by we-the-people. A couple of references in the book to shamanism had me doing some casual research online, comparing Mongolian shamanism to Native American practices…and noticing the similarities in how those cultures have progressed. (In Mongolia, the Soviets moved in and “modernized” things…moving a nomadic culture off the land, severed their ties to wild nature and to their spiritual traditions, and moved them into urban areas where now rather than providing for themselves, they are simply poor. And, oh yes…drunk on vodka most of the time. Sound familiar?)
I have been crazy about the Mongolian Eagle Hunters for a long time. It is a dream of mine to see them in person some day. So while sitting at the computer, the thought pops into my head. “Why don’t I see if I can get the PC to send me to Mongolia?!”
It seemed like a silly idea at first, but I went off to the web site and started reading about it. My aunt was in the PC in it’s very early days; she served in Ethiopia. There is something about her outlook in life that I have always loved, and I found myself wondering if her PC experience had anything to do with that.
I found that you can’t choose where you will serve in the PC; you can suggest where you might like to go, but it’s very rare to be sent there. I found that most people who go to Mongolia have a background in teaching English as a second language, which I don’t have. But by the time I found that, I realized that everything about serving was sounding really good to me.
For a while now, I’ve been wrestling with the idea of doing good work in the world. I’m fortunate in that much of the work I do to earn a living is overall positive, but I don’t have a strong sense that it’s making a difference. I don’t have to do big things, but I do want to feel like I’m contributing to a greater good, even if it means working on bringing a better self forward in the world.
I also wrestle with the sheer mechanics of making a living. I’m pretty desperate to not go back into a full-time office environment and all that entails. I think it would literally kill me. I have enough trouble with the amount of time I spend in front of the computer now. But I haven’t really figured out yet how to make it all work. I’ve managed to keep health insurance, but I end up working almost a whole week every month just to pay for that, and the deductible is so high, I’m scared to use it. I love rural life, but auto milage adds up and I live in fear of car problems. (With good reason….I was able to get my car fixed last month relatively cheaply, given that a mechanic friend was very, very good to me. Even so, the yet-to-be-reimbursed tow and the repairs had me in a bind with January rent.) The situation on the ranch is iffy…it could be sold, and even though that would take time, who knows what I’d do then. And don’t even ask me about paying income tax. Taxes? April perhaps will be the cruelest month after all.
So the PC might buy me some time and space to keep figuring this out, while at the same time doing work I can believe in AND knocking me off my well-worn paths and opening my heart to something bigger and different. It would be an adventure of a lifetime, and those tax dollars would actually go towards keeping me sheltered, fed, working, and medically cared for while I did something generally positive.
The more I sat with the idea, the better it felt. Was I “pulling a geographic” – trying to escape my life for a fantasy of something else? I don’t think so. There is the mechanical making-a-living piece that perhaps I’m trying to “escape”, but I see this as more of a respectable solution to that instead of an escape from it. I’ve been sitting around for three years now with a feeling that I want to feel some purpose in life, and I’m not getting it on my own. It feels really good to think I can turn this over to a higher power and say, “OK. You decide how I can be of service and I am going to trust that it will be the right thing for me to be doing.”
So I talked to a recruiter. Got my application in. Convinced three wonderful people to write references for me. Got an interview. Then stalked my post office box (and my recruiter’s telephone) while waiting impatiently. Finally I got the nomination:
nominated to a/an Ag Extension assignment, going to the Africa region. Anticipated departure date is October 2011.
Exciting! I did some research online and found that the type of assignment and the departure date means it’s likely that the assignment is for one of three countries: Niger, Burkina Faso, or Rwanda. And the number of Ag Extension volunteers going to Niger has typically far exceeded the number sent to the other two countries. Of course, they could have a new program in a different country planned, or change some of the departure dates, so I would just drive myself crazy trying to “plan” to go to one of those places.
But this is all even more tenuous than it might sound here. My recruiter cautioned me that between nomination and the official invitation, assignments change up to 50% of the time. The official invitation happens only after passing medical and legal clearance (oh, hello IRS!), which I’m stumbing through now, and it is a huge pain in the ass, not to mention pocketbook. There seem to be an infinite number of things which could prevent me from going, not the least of which is my own ability to accept bureaucracy…possibly the greatest skill required for the whole venture.
Because the PC is a government agency, there’s a lot of data about it available on the web. I found that, out of 100 applicants, 65% get a nomination…that’s where I’m at. 42% (or 65% of those who get nominated) make it to receiving an invitation. 33% make it to trainee. 25% serve a year in-country, and 22% serve the entire 27-month term (3 months program and language training in-country, and 24 months of project service).
I’ve been trying to keep it quiet, but word has been getting out, so…well, I guess that’s one reason I haven’t been writing much here. But I may as well, because I miss writing here.
I must admit, however…there’s been another distraction. Over the holidays, I decided to go ahead and create a profile on a dating site. I’m honestly not sure of the wisdom of this, but I do miss that part of life. But maybe if I’m heading for a remote village in Africa, it would be better to get some of my ya-ya’s out now, you know? In some ways, maybe I am emotionally college-aged again, and it shows up in my interests in things like the Peace Corps and in dating. If I were really that age, I’d have no qualms about dating with the intention to go away for a couple of years. And I’m being honest about, and other important things, in my profile.
So far, the biggest results of this stupendously important decision has been a lot of learning about myself. And I am even more fucked up that I thought I was…surprising, given how incredibly intelligent I am <smile> Still, it’s been fun also. I’ve corresponded with some interesting guys I wouldn’t have met otherwise….a cowboy/pilot who lives a little too far away. An activist who splits his time between the US and his land and restoration project in South America and is WAY too far away. An artist who agrees he would be bad news for me, so we’ve let it drop. I’ve read messages from Nigerian scammers and other suspicious types. I’ve walked away from someone trying to argue that the 33% “enemy” percentage on our match in his very serious profile wasn’t a big deal (we vehemently disagree on “ethics”, “lifestyle”, “dating”, etc. so what’s the problem, right?).
So far, no actual dates, although it seems that once some logistical things work out, I might get to meet cowboy, who has taken to calling me “hippie girl”…he warns that there could be sparks and he might be right, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be from romance or from hippie girl cutting loose on a republican.
If nothing else, it could be a good story.
