10/14/10-10/14/11: Not Exactly A Banner Year

I spent the one year anniversary of my last day as a public servant weeding, raking, sweeping, hauling mulch, making compost with rotten apples and household produce garbage, mowing and watering.  It was hotter than expected and as the sweat ran down my face while I was hanging onto the lawn mower, I mulled over this last year.  It has been much less than what I hoped for and yet it had many good parts too.  It was the anniversary of a divorce from my former profession that brought me to my very knees.

I could not say that I am done with my travails and it make get uglier before things seem more clear.  Like many people looking for work, I am glad to have been working the last month as there seem to be so few decent jobs out there that would actually consider me.  Although I was an exemplary employee with very good references, I could not even get a call back from my resume on most jobs.  Overqualified?  Guess again.  Not even considered.  And so it goes.  That was not what I thought would be at my feet when I stepped off the curb on 10/14/10 at 5:30 PM pacific standard time.

My day held some of the same ridiculousness of working as part of an all male crew that doesn't seem to want or know what to do with me.  5'2" and about 101 lbs.  In fact, it seems like they are entrenched and I don't seem to be the mousy woman they expected.  So, it could work out but it may not.  Each day can be a challenge and I don't mean the physical nature of gardening at my late age.  I work harder than the other gardener and it shows.  And so for me, on the anniversary of something that pulls back the image of a year unemployed, shocked, stressed, confused, disappointed, tenacious, determined and disappointed again, was spent with the same feelings inside of my head that covered my last year.

I can think of the many jobs-hundreds, that I applied for and never knew what happened.  I never will know and it doesn't seem like the past year brought any great revelations or lessons that make it all make sense today.  I feel just as confused about what I am doing or will do and wonder how long my body and my sense of self can take being belittled at a job.  Being employed has been held up to be something we the unemployed yearn for and when it comes it can feel like an oasis.

Be careful what you wish for though as it may just make you wonder anew at what that plane's banner really is trying to tell you.  Cryptic marketing tool or just bad grammar?

Not A Spiritual Giant And The Orange

The idea that "we are not saints" is a common thread to those of us familiar with twelve step programs.  For some of us who are also adult children of homes less than loving and less than safe, the idea that we can be less than perfect is a huge marble to swallow.  We can't actually.  We can only attempt to catch ourselves as we try so very hard to please others who cross our paths.  For me, there is a Cadillac sized gong that goes off for me when people are authority figures or scary or both.  The trick, for me, is to hear that vibrating sound before I start running my hamster around her wheel.

That said, some people who cross my path in twelve step meetings like to perform the illusion that they are now elevated to a kind of Buddha like status by spending time with the rest of us down here on earth.  They speak a line that sounds as if they have arrived and it smacks of a deceptive kind of grandiosity that is also a profound character flaw.  I suppose one could say that is the other side of the same hamster wheel and yet, it feels as if some of those folks will never see the wicked web they weave.

Last night, before the speaker began, she made sure to give me the "frosty treatment" and I was not sure what that meant.  Ah, my hamster stepped onto the wheel and paused.  I lowered my head and breathed.  The Tibetan monk was about to wail on that house sized gong in my head.  I listened as best I could for about twenty minutes to the woman claiming she had become a spiritual giant while sharpening her skills before her pitch on the "frosty treatment."  More like spiritual troll than giant.

The funny thing about lessons is that sometimes they just show up when you have let go of a hurt or a slight or a direct hit.  I often imagine Pema Chodron in my head smiling her leprechaun smile and waiting for me to get the irony in a situation.  So today, as I was giving an eight by eight garden patch a big face lift, down on my knee pads sweating and pulling with alternate hands, hot and focused and determined, one of those lessons came out the back door of the library.

One of the men that I work with, a man who escaped Guatemala years ago and most recently stopped a jumper on the Golden Gate bridge by talking to him, came by and offered me half of the orange he was about to eat.  That's right.  He didn't just offer me a piece, he gave me half of his orange.  We stood there in the hot sun and I devoured it.  It was juicy and sweet.  His gesture was not just generous, it was real without any strings. 

I wished that our speaker last night could have understood that what was offered freely is not some kind of pedantic drivel about how evolved we can be. In fact what a spiritual giant really looks like is as simple as extending half an orange to a co-worker on a hot day in October without even thinking about it.

Remembering Working With Chris

I am struggling with my new job situation to find my own island of sanity.  I know some things about gardening or I would never have gotten this job.  However, someone forgot to tell my co-worker that I am not his slave.  So, still trying to figure out how to best tell him that in English.  It is a long day's journey from working nights with Chris in the mid 1990s when I was in college.

Remembering Chris, I was lucky perhaps to have made such a fine connection with a man who is very bright and very funny.  He liked me as much as I liked him and we both worked so well together.  In fact, we produced 25% of the work for the department.  That meant that eight other people did the remaining 75%.  They were a lovely bunch they were.

Chris and I used to pile in my car for dinner or his old Lincoln and go down to Subway for sandwiches.  He was fun and loving.  I really miss him.  We were like a couple of 14 year old boys making up life as we went along.  We worked nights fueled by "mead" which was Dr. Pepper out of the machine.  I can say that I loved Chris-hell I still do-and I know he feels the same.

We flew through that year and helped the company that later was going to lay off Chris and quite a few others one Friday.  Chris went onto other companies and a divorce and now lives in Independence, Missouri.  He is remarried and has other children.  He is still connected to me through the social media empire and made my Christmas last year by contacting me. I can say that my current co-worker doesn't hold any kind of candle to Chris.  That makes me miss him even more.

I can say that I am not a slave and any day now I will probably go off on my co-worker or just shine him on because he is a slacker with some knowledge.  It certainly is not the Star ship Enterprise at my new digs and there is no Jean Luc Piccard.  I could use a Klingon body guard right about now but I will have to settle for finding my own truth and direction when the time is right.

For me, there is no Number One but I can say with a clear conscience that if Jean Luc was on the bridge out there near Common C, he would be saying, "make it so!."

Not Margaret Atwood's World

We all may have those days in the week that are more of a travail than the rest.  I am not sure since I really don't have best friends with whom I sit around having coffee with each week reflecting on the past week like the four women who play Desperate Housewives.  I would love that kind of connection though maybe more of an Eddie Bauer version of Desperate Housewives.  The coffee without the glitz and lipstick.

For me that day is Sunday morning.  I love the quiet of the early morning hush on our urban street and it allows for my kind of melancholy to bubble up and then throw a Sunday morning pie in my face.  My family hurts and haunts or just that existential loneliness that I carry around in the world with me.  Having a job, though the minute I stepped onto the campus things were whirling and chaotic with change, is not the final answer.  There is no washer/dryer combo behind door number three that will make my life a cinch. I never thought it would as I accepted a job that was not my first choice.  For me, an overachiever by nature, this is a very hard thing to comprehend. 

For me, the last almost eight years has come and gone as if someone else were living my life and I was left in the wings watching another performance.  Strange and true or just belief emerging from unanswered questions.  Since I have never been someone with a calling or an inclination of what would be a good fit for me, I have walked into jobs, looked around, decided what would be the next promotion and worked by skinny butt off trying to get there.  I have done that several times and gained professional success and wages doing it.  I thought I was someone and yet arriving often felt empty. 

This morning as I write and keep making time to write as I toil away and find myself feeling melancholy, I imagine that someone out there is living my life though I shall never find a way back through time to find out where I made my fatal mistake and stepped into the time tunnel.  Instead, out there somewhere, maybe in a high desert viewpoint on a cloudy, grey day, a car has broken down and the inhabitants stand and stare off down the deserted highway looking for help from a passerby.  This is not like No Country For Old Men but rather a Margaret Atwood novel where our heroin is in peril but there is an underlying moral conundrum that not only makes our hair stand on end but feel like we have a stake in the happy ending.

The Highwire Of Life

Balancing a 40 hour work week with participation in a spiritual community, running, eating, dog walking and going to the gym has become a big deal. I have not done it well for the past almost three weeks and I am trying.  Last night I just took care of cleaning up after the dogs who have wrecked havoc with the house, did laundry, bathed yet again in a day, ate dinner and read my new book.  That was a night off and it really did not seem like it very much.  The dogs really don't help matters right now.

I suppose having a human at your beck and call for a year with a human hot spot every day made them soft.  They have become used to having me here though they never helped me look for work.  In fact, they really did not care.  Now they are making a muddy mess in and out of the dog door because all is not right in their world.  I am working like a dog and they are not.  They are just being dogs.  Damn them.

I am doing the best that I can emotionally and my hands and knees hurt from the job.  I am struggling to make sense of being in a lovely place and not really feeling a part of the staff.  I am a native English speaker and the staff, except for only a few of us, are non-native English speakers.  They speak their common language to one another and I just sit there watching their faces.  It feels a bit lonely and maybe paybacks are a you-know-what. 

The best thing about today was a man who lives in the Assisted Living Unit.  His wife still lives in their apartment.  G. walks with a wheelie walker and he is slower on the draw than he used to be.  His wife is elegant and has a wide smile and porcelain skin.  She seems like she was once a dancer. 

I talked with them both today because G. wanted to meet me officially.  I stopped chucking the leaves while making compost and talked with them.  G. gave me a blessing and I spent the rest of the day thinking about him. I wondered what it would be like to be parted from my wife because she could no longer care for me.  This is the reality of our lives and yet it struck me to the core today.  The high wire of life is the act of balancing between life and life's tasks and the teeter totter of health and the weathering of our human vehicles. Some of us are still looking for the net.

Shedding The Past

October is a month of loss for me, shedding of the past, remarking on anniversaries of divorces, deaths, endings of friendships and birthdays of those I have loved in life.  Autumn brings a turning inward trend for the earth, also shedding her trappings and casting them downward to become compost for the spring and summer beyond. The earth seems to have an easier time of it than I do though she is well practiced and wiser than myself who still wants to cling to people, places and things as if those complete me.

How I navigate loss sometimes seems like a magic act or simply a slight of hand that even I am not shrewd enough to catch.  In order to stay present, and I am not there yet, I try to absorb the radiance of the changing light, the deep blue sky that is a backdrop for sunrise, birds collecting and skittering around at lunch and trust that my humanity is part of my humanity and this too shall pass.

I thought of Janis Joplin's song that claims "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.." as a way of making sense of loss and all that it attends to my heart these days.  In other words, feeling loss and the pain of no longer feeling connected to careers, people or places is  part of being here and the freedom comes in knowing that one does have nothing left to lose except everything.  What would Jean Paul Sartre have to write about that?

The Beautiful People

Today we went to volunteer at a food bank event called Calabash.  It is a good money maker for the food bank that serves 650 county humans living with HIV/AIDS.  It is a tadoo with over 150 volunteers over a six month prep period.  There is incredible art auctioned with gourmet food and wine served to the beautiful people who come to schmooze and ogle and participate in cocktail banter. 

For me now that I work 40 hours a week, taking an afternoon/eve to volunteer is a big deal.  Sad but true.  However, being of service and giving my time for things that I believe in sustains me and also sustains the planet we share.  I saw some handsome men and women, some bedecked artist types and one very odd necklace made of a monkey's skull replete with teeth.  That was gross not art.  I gave my time so that money made could feed men, women and children in our county who live with a virus that could easily kill them. 

I noticed several people who have crossed my path in my former profession, known to me by phone and attitude though they did not realize who was giving them a bidder number. I noticed several people who acted like they have wealth and may indeed have commas in their checkbook balance that I can only dream of having.  I noticed many humans with beautiful faces and stylish clothes and I wonder what that could be like to try on for an afternoon or a week maybe.  What would it be like to be one of the beautiful people admired simply because genetics played a winning hand in the poker game that became your body?