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I've just spent a few minutes looking around at images, trying to find a pile of rubble with a surprised yet gratified person standing in the midst. There are no images like that. Rubble is depressing or terrifying or wearying. Rubble follows in the wakes of disasters and wars and attacks.

But I have happy rubble! There aren't any pictures of happy rubble. My rubble is what happens after a concerted and deliberate effort to push over a wall. Bruises and scrapes and blood and tears of frustration, alternating with highly Zen periods of 's-all-okay, and more impatience and more blood and tears, and a rock fell out now and again, but the wall held ... and now, all at once, crash!!

Me: A Timeline

• Child stage: complete.

• Adolescent stage: complete, with amendments* made at a later date.

• Young adulthood: complete, despite necessary catching up (*see above).

• Active motherhood: done, and done! No really. Seriously. I'm not kidding. Pay no attention to the adult in the bedroom. And, no, actually, I am NOT fussing about things over which I have no more control. It was an excess of sugar that gave me insomnia, okay? (shut up)

• Transition into new phase of adulthood: geeeeeeez! Y'all? Transitions suck!

• The year of turning 50 in A.D. 2010

1. Soldier daughter home from a year in the Middle East.
2. Older son graduates from college.
3. Pairing off happening, prospects very happy-making.
4. Course work at school serving as a means for focusing intent.
5. Heard Mary Catherine Bateson speak - remembered that I am still me. I am the me I have been becoming my whole life.
6. Literature of Resistance + Nazareth House Apostolate + finding out how to be a person in a specific and disciplined practice of a traditional faith ("see the person, not the ideology")
7. A conversation with Andrew Pate, the painter and community activist
8. An accepted proposal, and now getting ready to teach my first session of Voice Lessons

That's what I want to do. I want to offer Voice Lessons. The walls fell down, and the stones rolled all over the place, and I think the entire decade of my forties was a process of birth-giving -- of life composition -- of learning not to be afraid of improv.

I'll call the series (something like):
Hearing Your Voice (lots of shared reading aloud + free writes on prompts)
Finding Your Voice (journals, poetry, letter-writing + intentional self-discovery)
Using Your Voice (poetry, records of personal experience + testimonial literature)

... and in conjunction with local artists? Things like, maybe, but I don't know because we haven't talked about it yet ...
Word Streams
Imaged Narratives
... words fail ... this will be a team effort, and it's not time yet to know these titles

Now that the rocks have rolled away and I stand in the midst of the rubble, blinking and a little stunned, I have started to laugh. This is the old dream - it's here again - this is the Art Therapy dream (from February of 2007), but I don't have to do the "art" part!