Summer in so many Ways

Okay, so maybe the weather isn't quite up to speed this year. "Summer" looming on the calendar looks a lot more like spring just barely starting outdoors, but I'm okay with that. Summer is usually a little too long and a little too hot for me anyway, and if we sneak up on it with some of this foggy, chilly, beachy, dampness, maybe it won't seem like a torture at the end of August. Shoot - at this rate, we'll be lucky to turn off the heat in the house by the end of August!

Season changing, and again there's a huge clock overlaying the world, and the second hand is near the top, and the minute hand is about to click. The scenery has already changed. Everything has changed. For me, everything has changed. Again.

At the parish, we are doing a huge project to organize, format, and use a multi-age, multi-purpose curriculum for children's religious education. This past school year was our first experiment, and it was a stunning success! Those kids learned hymns and catechism and songs and lessons ... they can recite in "choir" with each other, and they watch out for each other like a group of loving siblings. I couldn't be happier about the effort they've put in and the things they've been able and willing to do, and the final presentation for the congregation at coffee hour was a smashing success. But the secret's in the sauce.

And the sauce has been simmering for a long time. The sauce was not a one-person endeavor. The sauce needed more than one person to stir it. And THIS year another cook signed on for the fun - not just for awhile, but for years to come. Others have pitched in over the years when they've been needed, but none of them could stand and stir like this one does. You know who you are, my friend and sister, and without your creative input, enthusiastic willingness, and determined patience, I could not possibly have gotten those catechumens through a real year of vigorous, traditional Anglican children's instruction. I want to cut loose with the joy of it - to sing like Maria von Trapp in the opening sequences on mountaintops! This team we've formed - it's just so GOOD.

On the home front, we enter a new summer of our lives. This - here - now - this is two adult people who've passed all the way through child rearing and out the other side, and this is the first summer of the New Order of Things. We've done practice runs before. Evenings, or weeks, or school terms without offspring in the house. But this isn't practice. This is it. And now it's summer.

It's summer for us in a lot of ways. We planted and tilled and planted and weeded and tilled and planted and tilled and planted ... and the kids grew up! All at once, it's summer and there's nothing to do but watch what happens in this field we've worked on all these years. Now is not the time to try pulling out the tares. Too much of the wheat may be harmed, and it's not ours to do. Now is the time to let it alone to do what it will. The harvest is coming. (Please, God, send the latter rains.)

Life is like this. It's seasons inside of seasons - a wheel within a wheel, a'turnin', way in the middle of the air. For this family, it's summer. And I've just planted something I've never planted before ... and ... well, did you ever put a seed into the ground and be unable to stop yourself from checking on it several times a day? I feel like the boy in The Carrot Seed.

They keep telling him, "It won't come up." But he's an Idealist and a Dreamer and he knows. He just knows. If every day he pulls up the weeds around the seed and sprinkles the ground with water ... he just KNOWS it will come up.

And it does! It's HUGE. He carts his carrot around on a wheelbarrow because it's gigantic.

And my seed was a marketing idea, and my weeding was the courses I offered but never got to teach at the community center, and my water was hope ... and now I have a student. One perfect student who understands what she's doing and participates with her whole self and is learning to write for self-discovery and follow directions with the most sweetly lovely trust imaginable, and I am beside myself with the possibilities for the seeds I've planted.

Why ... what if ... what if a whole CROP of carrots as huge as my entire self came up? What if?

Press Release (my first one!)

Too excited and jumpy to sit still ... too tired to think or plan for it.

Tomorrow morning, I have an interview with the local paper! The Skamania County Pioneer is going to interview me about the classes I'm trying to get started down at the community center, and I very much need to think about what I'm going to say. But, of course, this is the week everything sort of imploded at the library (so I've had a lot of sub hours), and I've got a PLA essay barely started that was due on Tuesday, and this cold, nasty, beastly rain is practically mulching me.

What shall I wear? What shall I take with me for visual aids? I need a list of talking points - catch phrases that will get people interested. It's time to launch Words & Ways for real.

I hope.

But all I can think about it how very much I hope she does not want to take a picture tomorrow morning. Flattering photos of me ... they're as rare as dodo sitings.

Befriend Your Anxiety (yes, really)

Sign up!!

Karla McLaren's newsletter just came into my inbox. It's my first one, and I've just perused it with the jaded eye of an inveterate and compulsive newsletter subscriber. Email newsletters are almost universally boring and/or minimally useful. But this one? Wow! Here's an excerpt.

"Befriending Anxiety in 2011"

... Dr. Lamia contrasts procrastinators, who put things off until their anxiety kicks in and makes them do their work with do-it-aheaders, who do their work ahead of time. I’m a do-it-aheader, and we’ve got a joke in our family about thanking Karla from the past. We’ll find some job I finished weeks ago, or unearth finished pieces to a project that is crucial, or we’ll find important papers in my filing system, and we’ll say, “Thanks, Karla from the past, for making things easy on us!” Clearly, this thanking is a great motivator, because in each day, I think of all kinds of cool projects and jobs to do for the future happiness of my friends, my family, and myself. It’s a total win-win. It’s time travel that works!

Before I heard Dr, Lamia, I would have said that I didn’t do anxiety, but now I’m realizing, “Ooohhhh, I’ve got plenty of anxiety, but I’ve been been responding to it at very early points in its appearance, so it rarely gets to the level of a mood.” I have mistakenly thought of my very subtle level of do-it-ahead anxiety as, I don’t know, conscience, foresight, responsibility, or perhaps just being organized. I missed the fact that I was feeling an emotion that was trying to prepare me for the future. Whoops!! We live and learn, so I’m now taking anxiety out of the shadows and asking it questions, looking at people who run anxiety in its mood state, and focusing on anxiety more clearly.

Go to her site! Sign up for this stuff! Learn to understand the information, messages, feedback, and motivations your emotions are trying to give you!

New Launch ... New Venture ... New Dream

This is what I'm up to these days.

More news coming soon.

Aim

Oh, $%^*&#!!! Today is Tuesday, and at about 9:00 in the morning, I've just realized that yesterday was Monday, the day of the delayed beginning for the course in Personal Writing I was scheduled to teach. I've realized this fact in the same moment as realizing that I never went anywhere yesterday. If students had shown up (they didn't) they would have had no teacher. I didn't go to my own danged class!!

Brilliant job. Just brilliant. Way to impress the people who make the decisions down there at the Hegewald Center. (geeeez!)

But - the thing is - there were no students either. (I'm having an existential crisis with the two reactions. I screwed up. I wasn't ready. ... And ... No one needed me to be. No students. No one came.)

So I called the nice lady in charge, and she was ready for my call. She's even more disappointed than I am that no one showed up! (Knowing this from her is calming to my angsty moment.) She has ideas and proposals, and would like me to find a way to offer it again in the spring. Heartening. This is heartening to me.

It was not a bad target, but my aim was off.

I'd sure like to know, from anyone who reads this little blog, what would you attend? Pick one of the following, or invent something else, and help me figure this out. I've got good stuff, and I want to give it to people. So ... here are some options.

• Getting To Know You: a one-day seminar in self-discovery through writing

• Saturday Self-discovery Series ~ on the third Saturday of each month, gather with others to gain clarity, optimism, and a sense of purpose through guided writing and discussion

• Express Yourself! ~ Would you like to have clearer thoughts and the right words for saying what you really mean? The writing exercises in this course are adventures in self-discovery.

See, that's what the director thinks would work - to offer this information as self-discovery rather than as writing. The target we're trying to hit is the passing on of some simple, basic writing techniques, all of which are found in some easily accessible books and materials currently on the market, that can give anyone who uses them some wonderful benefits. The benefits are things like:

• more resilient immune system
• greater clarity of thought
• better problem solving
• clearer direction in life choices
• emotional release
• self-knowledge
• release from defensiveness
• release from resentment
• and a lot of other things

This information is gleaned by me (because I'm me and can't help gathering and experimenting with it), organized into a course, and offered so that a student could use it as it is, or branch out from what I've offered and find paths of his or her own. As you see, I've got my perennial problem - a huge, multi-faceted Big Idea, and a serious need for focus. I need better aim.

Any of you readers have any feedback at all? I can use anything you can give me.

Wondering What the Winter Weekends Will Bring

Registration for winter term is finally here! Three courses at Marylhurst this winter - one online (Poetry), one that takes three Friday/Saturday sessions and online work (History of Film), and one that takes a Friday evening and a Saturday (a workshop introduction to Art Therapy).

And here's the advert for the course I'm teaching. See it? Click on it to make it bigger. See? There I am! Second one down from the top, and so so so excited about this! This course is a toe in the water, testing what might be the beginning of another career for me, and one that could last for a couple of decades or more.

Winter weekends filling up and all sorts of possibilities are right 'round the corner.

When I get there, "the holidays" will have come and gone. The decorations that are not yet up will have been taken down. The meals will have been eaten. (Standing rib roast this year, I wonder? A goose maybe?) Advent, and St. Nicholas, and St. Lucia, and Midnight Mass (carrying in it all the other Midnight Masses we've gone to) will be over for another year, and I will spend January wondering why I feel a little depressed but this year I will be too busy to think about it. By the end of February, I'll be done with all my weekends at school, I'll be done teaching my courses, and I'll be much more than ready for our annual getaway at the beach.

That's what keeps going through my head. In a few more weeks - one winter - which I know goes in a flash - so much of what I am now planning will have become part of my past. I'll be the person who did all that. The planning, the dreaming, the wondering, the wistful wishing and the memories of days gone by ... the moment ... everything after the moment.

Remember these? These wooden mazes with the knobs that make the two inner boxes tilt up and down or side to side? The little metal ball bearing to keep balanced on the line by resisting the temptation to over steer, stopping the momentum, or looking too far ahead?

Every once in awhile, you could get the metal ball into one of the corners along the way, and you could re-gather your focus and get more calm and determined.

But it's not a good idea to try to stop the momentum to try to balance the ball in the middle of the travel sections. For those, you have to stay in the game all the way - you have to keep your eye on the rolling ball and the line, and you have to feel the way the knobs move in your hands. Most of the game is always going to be before or after where that ball is at any moment - and the game happens at the spot where the ball touches the painted line, and it happens in motion. One moment at a time.

More notes

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!

A Note Before Proceeding

Wow.

Every instrument in the symphony of my life is playing on key, in tune, and in concert right now. The course in self-assessment is ratifying my inner foundations, while the course in literary theory is teaching me to assess the literature, using Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a model, and the course in the literature of resistance and pain and injustice and atrocities is giving me the practicalities I need to be a valid witness ... and whether or not I teach at the community center this winter, I will - I know now - I will find ways to be a witness to the stories of others.

This is a thing I could not do before now. I knew I was not strong enough to stand as witness to the testimony of pain in this way. I wasn't born with the filter or the separator that makes some people so utterly capable of volunteering for Hospice or working in the cancer wards where children are the patients or doing art therapy for the PTSD sufferers. I couldn't do it, not because I didn't want to, and not because I would rather be deaf, blind, and dumb to the suffering of others ... I couldn't do it because I couldn't figure out how.

I know what bruises feel like in my body, and I know what injury means to my own loved ones. For them, I can stand as a witness and I can ratify and record their pain when they need a witness. But for strangers? For the people with whom I share no past? All I have ever been able to do for such people is -- well, nothing, really. And nothing else in my life pulls and tears at me like this knowledge - that I have done nothing. That I feel helpless to change such appalling inaction. I am ashamed of my cowardice and humbled by my helplessness.

But now -- because of this book required for The Literature of Resistance -- because it was written by a psychoanalyst and a lit professor who teamed up to "examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust," and because in this book they have found a way to teach what they have learned, now I have tools. I'll have to practice to become any good at this, but here is what a witness needs to do for the one giving testimony. The list begins on p. 72.

• Accept the sense of paralysis, brought about by the fear of merger with the atrocities being recounted.
• Accept the sense of outrage and anger, unwittingly directed at the victim, knowing that this tearing apart is happening because of our inadequacy to respond and a consequent desire to make the pain the fault of the sufferer.
• Accept the withdrawal and numbness in one's own reactions.
• Know that the flood of awe and fear make it natural to endow the speaker with a kind of sanctity, and that this is a way to avoid the intimacy entailed in knowing.
• Avoid hyperemotionality, which superficially looks like compassion, but in actuality floods the testifying victim in the defensive affectation of the listener.

and mostly ... for me, mostly ... for me, the missing piece ...

Avoid attempting "foreclosure through facts, through an obsession with factfinding; an absorbing interest in the factual details of the account which serve to circumvent the human experience."

I cried when I read that last night. I have hurt a lot of people by defending myself through my obsession with factfinding, and I could not figure out at the time what was happening. Now I know. And I find that I prefer honest regret and repentance to the horrible knowledge that I was only adding to someone's pain.

Thank you, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub.

Some of the books I'd use

I sent off that course proposal to the local Parks & Recreation people last week, and they said they'd make their decision this week, and I feel like I'm waiting for my plastic Junior Birdman wings to arrive after saving up 250 boxtops. I designed a front "cover" sheet for course handouts. I've been coming up with random ways to explain things like perspective and point of view when we write about our own lives and experiences. And, of course, books I could use -- I keep thinking of more. So, I might as well write it all down.

Here they are, for you. My favorite books of self-discovery coupled with the writing process. The covers are linked to the author sites wherever authors have sites, and to Powell's otherwise.

Some of these authors will probably seem a little "out there" for a lot of my friends who I know read my blog. And, to be completely honest, I did have some hurdles to get past, myself, when I first saw some of them.

But here's what I know now that I didn't used to know. There is a lot of value in "whatever works," and there is a lot of truth in home truths, and there is a lot of credibility in old ways ... and most of all, Love answers a lot of questions. Could I use this? Is it loving? Will this help me? Is it loving? Does it matter if I agree with the author about everything else before I can try some of the things that author does or explains? Is it loving?

See, I figure that if a thing in this world works a certain way, then it was made to work that way. If people blossom and bloom and become more fully themselves under certain practices or with very particular kinds of skills ... well, anyone who believes God made people would have to conclude God made people to work that way, right? That's what I think.

I know that we humans botch things up, and misunderstand, and get things wrong ... and I know we can hurt ourselves and often do. But you can figure out what kind of tree you're looking at if you know what fruit it bears. These books have borne good, loving, helpful, and transferable ideas and skills in me.

So here they are, in no particular order -- some of my faves, for lots of reasons. Some are presented as more profound, some as lighter. Some are meant for psychological and sociological study, some for personal self help. All contain exercises that show the reader/writer more of himself or herself, and all are worth owning. With two exceptions (I won't say which ones), I don't really think I'd be best buds with the authors ... but I'd love a meal or two and wine and conversation with all of them at least once.

So ... have they called yet? Check the messages. Can I teach this winter?

A will, a way, and a wondrous story (especially for unconventional parents and educators)

Imagine the back seat of a big rig as your high school classroom. For Kerry Anderson, who was home-schooled as her truck-driver mom made deliveries across the country, that was reality. Anderson eventually got through community college and received a full scholarship to Harvard University. Michele Norris talks to Anderson, now 26, about her unconventional education.

What he says

Although the speaker says we must, else we are doomed, and I believe that we will because that is what we are and what we do, I still see what he sees. I want what he wants. I work for what he is working for. And I think human beings are stunningly amazing creations.

Maybe so

A couple of weeks ago, I had an appointment with my Lit teacher. I wanted to know how to use the paper we write for her course as a submission for meeting an "outcome" necessary to my degree. If you're my age, the terminology is a bit confusing, but the bottom line is this: in order to graduate you have to demonstrate certain skills. These skills are called "outcomes," and at Marylhurst these "outcomes" may be met by demonstration of the skill rather than by enrolling in and then passing a course.

When I first "went back to school," I wondered about meeting outcomes in a lot of ways. Could I do that? Could I find ways to avoid taking freshman English and Composition for what seems like the twentieth time? (I took it myself, but at an unaccredited school ... and I've coached several other people through it ... please, please don't make me take the course again!) Could I find a way around it?

Maybe so.

For one thing, there's PLA. In the PLA way of gathering credits and meeting "outcomes," you find a college course that teaches the stuff you already know, and then you write an extensive and specifically formatted essay for the Prior Learning Assessment department --- or, I ought to say, and then I write an essay---, an evaluator reads that essay, and then you I get credits as if you I had taken that college course. That's one way: PLA. I have twenty-one PLA credits so far. Students are allowed to accrue as many as 45 PLA credits in a degree, which is about a year's worth of school, and far less expensive than school would be. A lot of people finish degrees this way - even degrees started years and years ago.

Or, you could take a standardized test (CLEP tests and others qualify for this way of gaining credits and meeting outcomes). A student is allowed as many as 45 credits through testing, and I think I'll be able to test for about 27 credits for my degree. Will I be able to meet my basic math "outcome this way?" Well, that's the plan.

Maybe so.

For meeting the "outcome" of basic writing and university level library research skills, there is yet another option. There is the non-credit outcome assessment. For a fairly low reading fee, the student submits a research paper and all of its components, and the assessor reads it, and then certifies that the student met this outcome. If you don't want the credits for it (and I don't - I want to put other classes into these places in my transcript), this is the way to go.

That's why I met with my instructor. I wanted to learn how to do this, and whether or not I could use the paper we are writing in this course as my submission to the evaluators. Can I do that?

Maybe so. Follow the directions, and then the answer is yes. Definitely so. My instructor is willing to read a ten-page paper instead of the eight-pager the course requires, so, yes.

But ... in the course of that practical and useful conversation, something else slipped in. Blipped past. Showed up, said hello, and moved on. I do not think the moment was as shattering to her as it was to me. Can't get it out of my head. I think it was important. I think -- well, I think I just got an invitation to a place I thought I'd left behind me about twenty years ago. I loved it there. I miss it. I thought I couldn't go back, but there, in my instructor's office, with one chance comment from her, it was as if a long-lost friend materialized and stood beside me. She didn't stay long. She just stood there until I looked up, she smiled knowingly - she winked at me, and she left as suddenly as she'd come.

She's a teacher.

I know her. She's the teacher I was becoming when I left the classroom two full decades ago. I thought she was gone, but ... well, there she was. She's not sad, she's not bitter, she's not the least bit tense. She's full of the focused, dynamic joy I always hoped she would be, and she thinks all my anxiety is a little bit funny. She winked at me!

Does a master's degree in Creative Nonfiction point the way, I wonder? Is it possible that the fleeting moments of, "that would have been an interesting life," are actually a kind of calling? Not grade school (which was never my first choice anyway), and not high school (which was my first choice, but which now is so bemired in K-12 politics that I have no taste for it). Not K-12, but college? Community college? Here? Where I live already? Really?

Maybe so.

Exactly!

THIS is EXACTLY what the best home schooling moms have figured out about school, it's the reason money isn't the problem with our public education system, it's the reason taking the profit motive out of the health care system would have unimaginable benefits to us as a society, it's the reason there's something truly heinous about megamillionaires calling themselves workers in God's vineyard.

(WHAT a GOOD report!! I just heard this author on Morning Edition, and since he had such brilliant things to say, I didn't even mind the awkward, corkscrew, modern colloquialisms in this guy's speech patterns ... much)

Rewards are really bad for us most of the time. Rewards for learning - passed out to children from some patronizing adult - grrr! - those act like little bits of rust, the little pocks and spots that will devour an entire car over time. In fact, the look on a kid's face when the adult "praises" learning ... well, the kid looks like someone who's just been paid for kisses. It's just nasty to be paid for learning.

oops.

Do I rant?

Why, yes, I believe I do.

Here. Here's what the guy said, and here's his book. He's less ranty than I am. And he's right. Regarding the "Tom Sawyer Effect," Daniel Pink says,

Adding a sense of autonomy and mastery to an otherwise dreary task can turn something that is work into playfulness.

(That's the way wise moms handle household chores. Let the kid own the mastery of it. Praise the skill level with genuine admiration. And for heaven's sake, stop picking at it!) He goes on:

Paying somebody to do something they really love to do can often turn play into work.

(!!! and ...)

There's a lot of research that shows that if you apply contingent, external rewards on something that's inherently interesting, you can actually extinguish someone's interest in that activity.

(ExACTly!!)