Alma Mater

In a case of intriguing timing, just at the moment when I am grappling with previously unrecognized emotions over having not been a mother, my alma mater (Smith College) is about to hold its graduation/reunion weekend. "Alma Mater" literally means kind mother, and Smith was kind to me. I am eternally thankful that I made that choice, that I received scholarships to make my education there possible, that I had fabulous courses and musical training, a great house, and that I made excellent friends. It was a safe place for me during a particularly hard time for my family, and even though I think it was more my mother's choice than mine (most of her friends were Smith graduates; she had attended two-year college), I am proud to be an alum. This is my 40th reunion, and I should be going.

I guess the short reason that I am not going is that I had promised myself that the next time I attended, I would have some tangible achievement to present. Smith knows my "old story" all too well; I lived it while I was there, they've heard about it at a few reunions, and in a sense I have never broken out of it. I want to be able to go back and say, look at the book I published or the dream fully realized or the late love of my life, the respect I'm garnering in such-and-such field, or the money I've earned and can share with the school. I still believe these things will happen, and for years I've been "faking it till you make it," but my energy for getting out "ahead of my skis" is lagging. It worked when I was 40 and 50, but not so well at 60 (!) Plus, I just did that to some degree on my trip to New York. To be in the presence of many hundreds of brilliant, white-clad, high-achieving Smithies just might be too much for the tender place I'm in right now. I know it will be a beautiful, blessing-filled event. I'll make a commitment to attend our 50th, no matter what life brings these next ten years.

Thank goodness, again, for Martha Beck, whose daily words of inspiration today seemed to hit home: "What should you do now? Find a new way. A better way. Your way. The unknown, uncharted path through this wild new world that allows you--yourself in your uniqueness--to reclaim the full measure of your true nature." That's pretty much what I've been doing all along, walking uncharted paths. I suspect that this is about as "tangible" as we mystics manage to get!

Mommy

On a day such as today, there is a lot to talk about. But I'm still kind of reacting to Mother's Day on Sunday. A year ago, May 7, 2016, I posted a blog about Mother's Day which kind of says it all.

But not quite. In this last year, I have tried hard to focus less on who I am as I relate to the various past influences in my life, and more on who I am currently and essentially.

So Sunday, this year's reaction to Mother's Day was less, "may I put a bag over my head?" and more an outpouring of grief. I am not a mother. It finally hit me that, in this lifetime, I will never hear anyone call me "mommy." I (probably) will never have a child jump in my lap and hold onto me for dear life. My housemate has grandchildren, and several times a week, I can hear them call out to her and say, "grandma..." That, too, I will never hear. This was subtly my choice, I guess, but not an active choice. Life went on. I didn't realize that this hurts, but it does.

I don't remember any moments of jumping into my own mother's arms and calling her "mommy." It may have happened, but I don't remember. Mom did not really like being hugged and would back away from friends who tried to do it, so it's possible she did that with us too. (I do remember her sitting next to me and reading "Winnie the Pooh.") Since Sunday, I have had a few moments of just crying out for my mommy. She passed away in 2001, and I can't say I feel her "presence" but I definitely feel her absence. I miss her. We became pretty close in the eighteen months before she died. She needed a lot of help from me and others, but her mind was sharp as a tack, and we talked about politics, religion, science, you name it, until about one day before she died.

This is one of those things I know I will need to move on from, but you can't move on from the things that you didn't know were bothering you under the surface, so I am thankful for this clarity, and this understanding that there has been a gaping hole in my experience that I am still alive to fill. I know that motherhood is complex and often painful, but if you have ever had even one "mommy" moment, one sweet, hugging, "mommy" moment on the giving or receiving end, treasure it.

Spoons and tunes

I had to look up to see if I had borrowed from Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now," but that was "moons and Junes..." However, Wednesday/Thursday's full moon did seem to shed bright light on almost everything, didn't it?

Discovering great pearls of wisdom from the mouths of some of my favorite wise women. Martha Beck offered a free online class this week called "Paths to your Purpose," where she spoke about spoon theory, the concept that if you are suffering from a chronic illness, you have fewer "spoons" of energy with which to get through the day. Beck, in discussions with friends, has elaborated on this, suggesting that there are activities or passions in life that give you new spoons. You can feel fully drained and yet when something you love enters the picture, energy is miraculously restored. She says, not surprisingly, to pay attention to this, this is your life purpose asserting itself.

I experienced this almost literally this week. I wouldn't call 61 "an illness," but there is no question that one's energy and patience levels are so much lower than at 21 or 41. It has taken me almost a week to feel back on slightly solid ground after the previous week's nonstop train, subway and bus travel. And yet as we all know, it was a shocking, draining week on the news front and additionally, several of my anticipated work "gigs" appeared to have gone up in smoke. I felt exhausted by yesterday afternoon, battered, abandoned, even uncharacteristically tearful.

Enter another wise woman, less than half my age, to whom I presented my disparate passions of England/English church music, women's spirituality, mysticism, art and writing. She saw enormous creative potential. Some of the "crazy" ideas I've had about how to bring these factors together didn't seem crazy to her, and she was able to share some feedback and resources that could help me move forward with one or more of them if I can drum up the courage to learn some new things about technology. I walked into the meeting spoonless and nearly lifeless, and walked out with spoonfuls of new energy and purpose. Thankful, thankful, thankful to her, and to God/Goddess/Universe/Source. Just hearing one little voice say "that sounds really cool" changes everything. "That sounds really cool" is a new tune for me.

I may be trying to move beyond duality, but by the same token, what Abraham-Hicks calls "contrast" can be enlightening. I literally looked at life from "Both Sides Now" this week. In the bright light of that full moon, it's pretty clear which side is preferable.

Gates

I remember Watergate well. In May 1973, when the televised hearings began, I was about to graduate from high school, and I watched some of them on my family's small black-and-white television. My freshman year at Smith, the hearings continued, and for an hour here and there I would gather with other young women in the living room of our house and watch as Howard Baker asked, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" I had kind of a crush on Baker, as I did with the fictional Atticus Finch (played by Gregory Peck) and Sam Waterston's Jack McCoy, on Law and Order. It's the kind of lawyer I would have been, crusading, righteous (at times a little self-righteous?) and yet detailed, exacting and hard-working. It was a grave disappointment to me, when I finally worked as a paralegal, to find that there didn't always seem to be a "good guy." I knew I could never represent ("re-present") the bad guy, no matter how much I understood our legal system's rationale for it, and I did not follow my pioneering lawyer grandmother into the field.

Bits of these characteristics have oozed out into my life in interesting ways. Answering letters at Time Magazine, I checked and double-checked my research for accuracy, making me a little slower at getting through piles of World and International mail than I probably should have been. And in my community college teaching of writing and research skills, I underscored correct citation of sources almost ad nauseum. When a final paper was subsequently handed in with plagiarized material (and I was able to locate the original source), my first inner reaction (I am sorry to say) was, "Gotcha!" I was terribly sorry that the student had made that choice, but I couldn't let them think that was an appropriate way to go through life, misrepresenting things. I guess I never understand...it takes as much energy to do things right as to do them wrong. Why not just do it right?

So we appear to be going through another "gate" or series of them. OK, after that week away from the media, I'm semi-riveted, and little "Gotchas" are going off in my head. But I have studied the law of attraction just a bit too long to fully engage with it all. I think this is all happening as a death throe to the idea of duality and conflict and "good vs. evil." What is a post-duality/evolved/visionary woman to do right now? Just persist. I think we stay informed, but try as hard as possible to keep using our positive gifts of beauty, love, wisdom and healing. In the new paradigm, I'll bet there is no "Gotcha!"

It's poetry

I don't read much poetry. I should. I think there may be a poet within me, but I just haven't gone there...yet.

But the following quote from poet Muriel Rukeyser (who up until now I had never heard of) has come to me, and it pretty much says it all: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open."

It may not rhyme, but it is poetry to me. Maybe it explains why so many of us try to keep our journeys at arm's length. Thank you for your inspiration, Muriel.

Rainy Saturday

There has been persistent rain in the northeast, leading to flooding, grey moods and a sense of spring interrupted. Buds are waiting to bloom, but there just hasn't been enough sun to persuade them. I've returned to my current home base from the road, feeling mightily changed. And yet the physical environment seems to be frozen at "almost spring," much as it was over a week ago.

During my trip, I saw very little news online or on TV. It was beyond disheartening, then, to observe the celebratory back-slapping in the Rose Garden by a group of white men and a few white women who know perfectly well that the health care plan they are proposing will hurt their diverse nation. The heartlessness of it was sickening. I am white, yet I cannot resonate with any of these people or how they think. The hubris of it is so monumental, and I suspect that historians may look back on that moment, and that image, as pivotal.

I'll talk about the trip a little more in coming weeks, but ironically, one of the takeaways from it is how, given two days in New York City, my magnet drew me to the world's finest church music, John Singer Sargent's paintings of the "aristocracy," the Upper East Side, and some of the trappings of my supposed WASP heritage. I say "supposed," because most of my actual formative experience was far from coming out parties and the Social Register, more like returning home from college to find no food in the refrigerator or gas in the car. I've always lived between worlds, and continue to. These old constructs are in the process of being upended, clearly, and it's a good thing. But to the extent to which I actively tried to abandon my family's heritage along with church music, and to live in a sort of "opposite-land," I yearn to come home, even in some kind of new paradigm way. These two days felt strangely like a homecoming. Ultimately, it is a particular form of beauty that I still love and prefer. It's very, very confusing. I returned north to find mail from various worthy institutions asking me to add them to my estate plan. Little do they know that my "estate" is the $35 or so dollars I have to my name at this moment.

On this rainy Saturday, I should be gloomy, but I am not. Once again, I managed to get where I wanted to go, to see my choice of beauty, to hear my choice of music, to embrace my choice of loving friends, and to do it safely and happily. I lived my priorities for a little over a week, with a few dollars to spare. I am thankful.

Springing and slinging

I've graduated from New York City to upstate, way upstate, where the grass is green but the trees haven't come out yet and greyness persists. My spring break may not be what the college kids would recognize, but it was necessary after a winter to remember. Time to think (on train and bus), two gorgeous choral evensongs in the City and another service in Albany, jazz, and friends. What more do you need?

When you are a mystic, you can tell when time has been well spent if there are revelations, and there have been. Big time. I am still trying to sort them out, and a few others over the last few weeks. I realize that when I changed course at about 27 (and my astrologer friends would call this my first Saturn return), I tried to thoroughly forget my real self, and it was like taking apart a jigsaw puzzle and scattering the pieces across the table and swirling them around to thoroughly mix them up. For nearly thirty five years, I've been putting the pieces in, one at a time. And as with any jigsaw puzzle, once you get closer to the end, there are fewer mystery pieces left, and the process gets faster and faster. (Of course, the interesting thing is that back then, I thought I was working on an entirely new puzzle, and it's only a few years ago that I realized that I was putting together the old me.) It's fascinating, too, that it is at the second solar return that I'm nearly done -- the last few key pieces are fitting into place. You know they are "key" because they buzz. Literally. When you are in a certain setting or with certain people or doing a certain activity, you resonate. You can feel it, almost like the urge to speak in a Quaker meeting. I suspect that there could be moments of this resonance every day, and I'm going to make sure I feel for them from now on!

The other day, I spoke of artificial intelligence, but this trip has made me wish that science would focus on another type of development. I had decided against using a roller bag, and instead put my few things in an over-the-shoulder canvas bag, envisioning just being able to sling it easily over my shoulder as I tripped lightly up bus and subway station stairs, in and out of trains, etc. Um, what was I thinking? My computer alone (a rather heavy older laptop which thankfully still works) makes easy slinging impossible; add in two changes of clothes, an extra pair of shoes, a book, a few toiletries, a water bottle and snack, and it might as well be a bowling ball or two. Being "of a certain age," backpacks hurt my back. So it's like, forget virtual reality games. Could we come up with some way for all of these basic belongings to weigh about two pounds?! Thank you!