Hammock Stone

Sun setting over hills, clouds rolling in through twilight, dark sliding over trees, earth smelling of night. 

California Stars

Homesick all weekend. I've sat here for almost an hour now, trying to write about that, but the words won't come. I've felt in limbo since I got here, and such a non-place seems to defy description. Things aren't bad here at all--I love my job, my students, the many friends I was too far from for years. But now there are people (and dogs) on the other side of the country, and I can't really think about that distance too deeply, because I need to be able to function.
 
And there's the place itself, that other side. Maybe we only ever really find our place in the place where we find ourselves, whenever and however that happens. Maybe it would have happened here if I'd stayed. But I left before something in me was fully formed, and something about California helped me grow, expand, free myself.

All of this has been spinning around in my head. And then I heard this song tonight while I was driving, and suddenly I was on a cliff along Route 1, a damp, freezing wind blowing in hard from the Pacific, the scent of the ocean mixing with eucalyptus and coastal sage. And off to my left in the darkness there's a halo of light hovering over San Francisco, but it's nowhere near close enough to interfere with the millions and millions of stars in the perfect night sky.

Saturday Night

On the corner, a gaggle of young men and women waits for the light. In 50 degree weather, four women are dressed identically, in shorts so short and tight and Lycra-ey they may as well be underwear, button down shirts that fail to cover the underwear, four-inch platform sandals. The weirdest part: I don't think they're in costume.

Eavesdropping

Up in the air it's uncomfortably warm, and my neck and shoulders ache from craning my head upward as I cable lights. Down below me, six or seven young people are talking and laughing as they paint. Some have spent all day with us, and one bribed herself to finish a paper by telling herself she could work in the theater once it was done. My coworker, in the air with me, has been listening to them too. He turns to me, smiling and gesturing at the students, and says, "This makes me happy." I'm calculating how long each of them has until graduation. I'm already sad at the thought.

End of Day

Bare trees are silhouetted against early twilight, windows glow in the old stone; French drifts out from the family in the front apartment; cutlery sounds against china as tables are set. All around the complex, people settle back into these homes, birds returning to nests.

Everyday Travel

The majesty of every bridge. The way every city glitters like Oz as it rises in the distance.

Saturday Morning

The storybook ideal of fall: A neighborhood of large, old stone houses and vividly colored trees. All around a maple, the ground is carpeted with orange and red, and the sun slants through the tree's remaining leaves.

Late October

Cold air, dark blue sky. Stillness and the chirping and twittering of night things.

Last Light

Just before the sun sets, it bursts across the tops of things. Then the autumn trees look like Tiffany lamps, mosaics of green and gold and crimson.

Fall Fruit

A friend posts to Facebook about eating pomegranates. I consider how far I am from the pomegranates that grew in my backyard and think of all the crisp-tart apples I picked last weekend.

Glow

A string of white lights in a glass jar, like a hundred fireflies on a summer evening.

Haunt

A chill October night. A one room schoolhouse in the middle of a graveyard: Candles flicker across walls, pumpkins, dried corn stalks. The smell of hot cider. Ghost stories.

The Brain and the Heart

Why is the language of the brain so much easier to understand than the language of the heart? The brain has an unfair advantage, of course--it speaks in words, in concrete images. The languages we use every day to engage with other people. The brain stores information, and it warns us to stay out of traffic, or keeps us from putting our hands down on hot stoves. Its practical value makes the brain cocky. It believes its own hype and so do we. If it's wise enough to tell us that we shouldn't burn our hands, surely it should be listened to in all other situations, right?

But keeping our hands away from flames isn't wisdom. It's only common sense. Despite its clear, blunt communication tactics; its loud voice; its brute strength; its stash of facts, the brain is often misguided. It panics, it jumps forward and backward in time. It's afraid of pain. It's afraid of what other people will think. It's afraid, ironically, of making wrong decisions. 

It's afraid of the wrong things. And mine resents me for even writing that.

My heart knows better. My heart, after all, knows what's in my heart. And my heart's signals are as clear as my brain's, but they take different forms and I'm less practiced at reading them. There are physical signs when my heart knows a decision is wrong--crying I can't control, nausea, pain or coldness, awful electric shocks of anxiety at the very idea of settling on a particular decision. Or more subtle discomforts. Just...a feeling that something isn't right.

And you would think it'd be easy to pay attention. If something feels bad, why would I want to do it? But if the right decision might cause extraordinary pain, my brain is all in favor of living with my heart's discomfort, and it mounts the most amazing arguments in favor of a bad decision. In favor of ignoring my heart. And any time my heart is conflicted, my brain leaps in to fill the gap, to "take care of" things. And it's loud, it's a bully--it drowns out my heart as much as it can; it tells my heart it's naive or foolish or cowardly. And so my heart is often beaten down by my brain.

But ignoring my heart isn't wisdom. It's not even, it turns out, common sense. It always, always ends up being tremendously painful, in a way that's much harder to recover from than the pain of missing out on something potentially great, or the pain of necessary loss, or whatever other clean, pure pain the brain is trying to avoid.

So how to learn? How to learn to quiet my brain so I can listen to my heart or give it time to reach a decision? How to learn to calm the brain's fears, to comfort it enough that it's willing to work together with my heart? 

How to keep myself whole?

Forsythia

One spring, when I was in high school, a friend taught me the Korean word for forsythia. I didn't know what it was called in English, so I couldn't tell her, and for quite a while after that, I only knew the Korean word for it.

I don't remember when I learned the word "forsythia," or when the Korean word or my friend's name fell from my memory. But every spring, I see the yellow blossoms and I think of her.

Challenge Versus Ease

I'm a little homesick--for Annie and Tigger; and for dry, clear air; and for the wide fields and the hills off in the distance; and the fruit trees everywhere. I walked into a Whole Foods the other night and was greeted by a small basket of figs for sale--figs from California, of course; figs just like the ones that are probably currently ripening on the tree just behind the abundant garden I worked so hard to plant and left behind; figs that are ripening just in front of the two pomegranate trees that will still have a month or two to go before the arils burst the skins of the fruit.

But yesterday I walked past an apple tree someone had planted in front of their house. I don't remember seeing fruit trees anywhere in the city as a child. My grandfather's house in western Pennsylvania had apples, and the farm in upstate New York, where I lived right after college, had an incredible old apple tree with some of the most delicious apples I've ever eaten. Those seemed like the height of luxury--food! Growing right outside the door! California, with its abundance of edible landscaping--figs, pomegranates, plums, rosemary, cherries, apricots, pluots, blackberries...all just hanging out in city parks--seemed unreal and magical. Easy.

I have a hard relationship to easy. I'm never sure where the balance is for me: When is easy a good thing? When does it alleviate unnecessary difficulty, suffering even, and when does it begin to cross the line into facile and soul deadening?

This city is a hard place for me to be, in many ways. There are ghosts, emotional baggage. The weather here is terrible for me this time of year--not in an "I'm a delicate flower" way, but really, really hard. Atypical seasonal affective disorder hard. By the time I left for work one day last week, I was crying in my car, so rattled I couldn't even drive. My body was so physically miserable I could barely function, let alone maintain emotional balance. All I wanted was to be in the Central Valley, where it's dry as a bone and the mornings are cool, even in the height of summer.

The thing is, there are plenty of things I don't love back there. It took me years to stop being upset by the soulless architecture of most of Davis. The strip malls everywhere. The perfectly landscaped lack of wildness. The brutal sun in the middle of a summer day. The lack of public transit (I took a train to Center City Philadelphia yesterday, and it was blissful). 

No place is perfect. If there's a town that is ideally tailored to me, I've yet to meet it. I seem to keep making choices that end up challenging me one way or another, and that certainly sounds like a good thing on paper. But I'm not sure how to keep challenging choices from tipping from healthy and nourishing into extreme discomfort. But then I also wonder if maybe I'm just a challenged sort of person, always--maybe as a category of feeling it's related to the longing Lis wrote about. Maybe extreme discomfort is just part of the package, and maybe there's some cosmic lesson I'm meant to learn from that occasionally ease-less package.

In any event, despite my uneasy relationship with the kind of discomfort I'm feeling right now, my relationship with ease is, perhaps, even less easy. In some ways, certain choices have felt just as much about rejecting ease as accepting challenge. Is that just an adolescent distrust, a need to prove something to myself? Or is it actually a kind of self preservation? 

I want a life that's rich and nuanced and faceted. Ultimately, I guess what I really want is beauty and soulfulness and deep search and discovery. To the extent that those things are compatible with ease (and lack of humidity and heat--is that really too much to ask?), I'll take some ease, but apparently I'm unwilling (unable, even) to take ease if it means a lack of the other things. 

Meanwhile, this view out my office window is some solace in the middle of the discomfort of homesickness and sticky warm wetness. Rain glistening on slate and Wissahickon schist.

This Post is Probably a Mess, and I'm Posting it Anyway.

So, I got this new job. And I left California and the entire life I'd built up there over the last thirteen years. And I had to leave my dogs behind, which is, frankly, so heart wrenching that I'm pretty certain it hasn't even sunk in yet. It just doesn't feel real. I'm just on vacation, or simply in the part of the week when their other parent has them--it's not possible that they're an entire continent away from me, and that I won't get to see them this week, this month, this year maybe.

They have a good life, tons of love and doggie field trips and the best possible medical care imaginable. And I had an incredible opportunity to come back to a place that I love almost beyond my power to describe it. And my life in California had been winding down for a while. I was really only staying put for Annie and Tigger. And if they were human children, that might have made sense, and if they were mine alone, I wouldn't have thought twice--they'd have come with me. 

But I didn't sit down here to write about them, though I think I'll leave it up there.

The job: I'm working at Bryn Mawr College, in the theater, where I spent pretty much all my time as a college student in the late '80s. I haven't worked in theater since the late '90s. And I never imagined I'd return to Bryn Mawr this way. But here I am, polishing up the technical theater skills I abandoned a while back. Remembering how I love the sawdusty smell of a theater, the oddball problems that crop up, the challenge of learning a new technical skill (uber-advanced lighting and sound systems, anyone?). Remembering how much I like working as part of a real team--in person, on a day-to-day basis. It's different from the solitary work I've been doing, writing and editing and only communicating by email. Or putting together a cooking class in my kitchen or making jewelry all by myself. And it's delightfully different from working in an office--a fact I keep realizing every time I find myself climbing something or carrying something or running around the building at the last minute to make sure there are enough chairs on the stage for the event that's beginning in seconds.

But setting aside the theater work, this job is going to be a lot about working with the students--helping, advising, training, mentoring. Giving back and sharing, in a very real way, something that absolutely was given to me in this place. Helping them, I hope, to develop their senses of self, their capabilities, their solidity. Their ability to solve hard problems--fast, on the fly. Their ability to climb tall ladders and carry heavy things and to use power tools. Their ability to make something beautiful. Their ability to plunge into spaces where they know nothing at all and to teach themselves exactly what they need to know to occupy those spaces comfortably--to own them.

Yesterday, the freshman arrived, and at the end of the day, they were all piled onto the main stage in the theater, their families and friends in the audience, as they were officially welcomed by the president of the college and a number of other folks. I sat at the back of the house, watching that sea of 380 young women who don't yet know one another, and all I could imagine was the sea of young women with whom I entered the college 25 years ago. I remember on one of the first nights of orientation (or Customs Week, as we call it), being gathered in the gymnasium to fill out some form or other. We sprawled all over the gym floor, and the lighting was fluorescent and yellow over all the unfamiliar faces, and I felt both a bit lost and so eager to know these people and be known by them. And then I thought about all the ways that this place helped shape me.

And it's 25 years on, and many of those people are among the dearest ones I can imagine, and many of them are quite literally an everyday part of my life--along with many other Mawrters I've met along the way, both during and since college. And here I am again, home in some very deep way--returned to the mother ship, as many of us jokingly refer to it, this place that has been, for me and I know for others, quite literally an "alma mater."

•what happens•

Right now, there are a bunch of 'draft' posts littering the backstage here at HalfAssedMama.com. The titles are interesting. "Englandia." "Long losts." My favorite is simply "the toyotas."

There are a great many things preventing us from blogging. We both just landed ourselves new jobs. In my case, I got a text in England from my boss. One of our co-workers was leaving; would I like to apply for her job? After five weeks, Troy, Penn & I returned home to a swirl of jet-lag-interview-hired!-ready-set-full-time-job-for-mommy on top of (p.s.) a week-long conference that took Troy to Massachussetts. I'm still skinning my knees daily, just trying to keep up, but it's good to be working at a new velocity for That Store we love so well. It will let up, in December. So look for that "Englandia" post, then. Right now it's swim lessons and scraped-together meals and piles of suitcase innards.

For Amy's part, it's packing and working, not sleeping and tidying up loose ends, because her new job means a rather abrupt move, cross-country. Which means, first and foremost, we will be half-assedly blogging from opposite coasts of the US! (Thank you to Bryn Mawr for proffering this upgrade in bloggerly coolness.) Amy has accepted a dream job as a production manager for the Bryn Mawr theater department. She moves to Philadelphia on Sunday. I went to her house a few nights ago in a work-induced stupor, and she sent me away with a giant ceramic ladle, a box of beads, an oversized bag of clothes, and a book of our blog. Of course, all the clothes are still in the bag. The beads have been picked over by a small child. And the book is right here, online, for anyone to comb through. But there's something different about seeing all those early posts in pages. I can open to a random date, as though our posts are part of a larger story. And so they are. Once upon a time, Amy wrote, "Right now, I'm going to go put one small piece in the kiln to see what happens..."

Right now, I'm going to go.  

xox

30th Street Station

30th Street Station, by Kevin H. on Flickr

In my old city, I liked to sit in the train station. People rushed around, on their way to other neighborhoods, other cities, other states, even other countries. I sat cross-legged on the old wooden benches, their curves polished to glowing by decades of waiting bodies. I’d buy a cup of coffee and gaze at the impossibly high ceilings; the enormous bronze archangel cradling a soldier in his arms; the art deco light fixtures that look as if they’re a normal size, until you see them on the ground, slowly cranked down with winches to be cleaned, to have their bulbs changed. Then they’re shocking in their bigness, and lovely, their glass panes and bronze edges the facets of giant light-emitting jewels.

Often, I was waiting for a train. Sometimes it was late at night, the station more or less empty, announcements of departing and arriving trains echoing off the marble walls and floors. Maybe I’d just left, for the evening, a relationship that I didn’t really want, that was more a clue to something I wanted—something that had nothing to do with relationships. I’d stare around at the soaring space, feeling tiny and exhausted, filled with longing and yet somehow overwhelmed with joy at the way the building’s enormity underscored my own solidity, at the energy of people going places. The wooden bench anchored me; I could have sat there for hours.

But sometimes I would go to the station just to be there, anonymous in the busy crowd, but not alone. If I wanted to, I could buy a ticket, board a train, and be gone. There was freedom just in knowing that. More likely, I would choose a table amid the bakeries and food shops and schedule boards, the coffee stands and travelers and flower stalls, and I would write, just beginning to find my way on the page, just beginning to understand where the clue was leading me.

A soaring space with trains will inevitably leave you wanting to go. I left the city, and the station with it. There is nothing like it in my new city, in my new life, where I usually know what I want, where I am rarely anonymous, rarely tiny and exhausted.

Buying a train ticket doesn’t hold the same possibilities anymore. I crossed a bridge on my way out, and while I didn’t burn it, left unused, it decayed. If I visit, it’s by other routes—everything looks different. I can see a chasm where my bridge used to be, and the city hovers dreamlike on the far side, inaccessible, and I’m amazed that I was ever a part of it. I don’t want to return, really. But sometimes, just for a little while, I’d like to sit in that station, anonymous but not alone, and think of all the places I could go.

Pennsylvania Railroad World War II Memorial
(Angel of the Resurrection), by Sameold2010 on Flickr

30th Street Station, by MShades on Flickr