Spin Cycle

"It is not where we stand but in what direction we are moving." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I skinned my knee. Wow. I skinned my knee (the very expensive one). I haven't done that since I was 12. I am so stunned by the fact of the fall, I don't even think about it hurting. (Walking and texting. Not a good idea. As friend Charly says, Oprah never warned of the dangers of that.) I congratulate myself on keeping my head about me, and my feet in contact with the ground after I stub my toe, long enough to propel myself to the hood of a parked car where I stick out my arm and slow down the fall to hands and knees. And I didn’t drop my phone, either. Later, sitting on a bench reading a book just acquired at the library, three young mothers parade by pushing babes in strollers. Wow. Been a long time since I did that, too. I could feel old: clumsy and so way-past childbearing years. Oddly, I feel great! Young enough to be transported back to the babies-in-buggies-with-buddies years. Young enough to still skin my knee and get up and walk away from it. (Fortunately no one saw my mishap. That would have been a game-changer.)

Groundhog's Day was, of course, this week. I never paid much attention before--it's not, afterall, a day off work--until a few years ago when dear Dori revealed it as her favorite holiday and the movie her favorite flick. In the movie, Bill Murray--a news reporter covering breaking news in Punxsutawney, PA--wakes up to exactly the same day over and over and over. He cycles through all the emotions: curiosity, frustration, anger. His responding actions follow suit. He cannot make the day change no matter how negative he becomes, and how violently angry he is. Finally he figures it out. To make the day different, he has to change who he is in it--in a positive, life-giving rather than life-diminishing way.

How often I keep waiting for my environment, my circumstances to change; thinking they will all on their own. There is a woman, I will call her Oz, who has been at Cafe Carolina most Sunday mornings for the past year and a half. We have never spoken. I remain hunched over my laptop writing; she over her Kindle reading. Both of us throwing off don't-bother-me vibes. Both of us, it turns out, wanting to speak, but afraid to interrupt the other's sacred time. Last week, after arriving at the same moment at the coffee pot, she makes the break and stops by my table. She opens with a line that makes it clear she read my blog the previous week. Long story short, she got the name of this blog long ago, reading it over my shoulder from the booth behind me, and has been reading it ever since. She is in Raleigh long-term-temporarily and has spoken about me to her partner who lives in one of the northern cold states. Her partner encouraged her to just say hello. And she finally did. Thank you, Oz, for altering our little Groundhog's Day scenario. (We talk this morning for a long time. Delightful. And many discovered connections.)

The point is, we don't have to do much to change who we are in our day. And one little change has a domino effect. Yesterday I go to a Yoga for Women over 50 class at a studio other than the Y. A new class with different people, a new space, a new day for yoga, a change in Saturday routine. (Same wonderful instructor--I have my limits.) That hour changes the whole day. (It also helps that it is gray and raining.) The yoga opens me up and inspires a creative project involving magazines, scissors, and glue that makes me very happy; I bake bread and make soup, loving the mixing and kneading and chopping. And the aroma that permeates the house. The devouring is pretty darn good, too.

This morning I read last year's Groundhog's Day post. There is a photo of the emerging peony. We have all been exclaiming about the early spring this year, but I check this morning--no emerging

peony. But the banana tree has many new tightly-curled leaves this week; having never frozen back to the ground, it didn't have to start over. The tulip magnolia that bloomed too soon in Fletcher Park is gone, but I find another. And the cherry trees in the Park are blooming their outrageous-scented pinkness. A swinger of swings delights in newfound freedom, swinging so much higher than he dared a year ago. My blog of a year ago, also proclaims January warmth. Perhaps the pre-season warmth and bloom is not as unusual as we think it is. Maybe it is the same over and over. Could it be that we are different? I hope so. In spite of ourselves, we continually reinvent some small part of our Selves and then credit it to external events. I wonder if we are so afraid of change, that we deny that we have.

On Thursday afternoon, I can't figure out why my left arm and my expensive right knee are sore. By evening, the pain has spread to my shoulders. Friday morning, my lower back. Oh. Yes. The Fall. Today I am pretty much back to normal. It is a good lesson. Changing direction can be painful; but we survive, and our days look different because we are different in them. This week I am determined to rise 15 minutes earlier and get back to my dawn walk. Missing the sunrise affects me all day. I will miss the 15 minutes of mattress time for only a nano-second.

"Get yourself to your life...Rise above the aches and pains, the nausea, exhaustion, general malaise. The show won't last forever." -Patti Digh

Coloring Outside the Lines

It was a beautiful day in the neigh- borhood... and a strange, strange weekend in my universe. After I wrote my post last Sunday, I went out into the sunshine where the temperature was approaching the day's 71 degree high to sit and bask at a table in front of the cafe. I was soon approached by a man about my age who, saying he wasn't from here, asked if it was always like this in January. We proceeded to talk for the next 30 minutes. Let me just say here, that I don't generally talk to strangers, at least more than a phrase or two here and there. Ken was clearly accustomed to jumping right in, however, and we talked easily about things deeper than I generally discuss with friends. He asked if I believed everyone had a purpose, for example. I surprised myself by having an answer to that. Mostly, though he was really trying to engage me to talk--and I was talking--he was needing to inject as often as possible stuff about the capital W-Who that he is. My friend, Charly, who knows more about men than I do, says that's how men show their feathers. You have to try not to judge them until they finish strutting. Then you see if they can ask you questions; and, more importantly, if they can listen to the answers. This Ken does have a very interesting life, I must say. He is a nomad and photographer for such organizations as National Geographic, and he has a special interest in America's national parks. (I did google him.) He is leaving soon for one more tour in Afghanistan and then thinking of settling down in Seattle. I could tell you much more about him, but this blog is about me.

Ken got me thinking about coloring outside the lines; as is the book I am reading that Emma gave me for Christmas, Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World, by Rita Gelman, who became in mid-life an outside-the-lines colorer. I have no aspirations of a nomadic life. I like to travel, but I like home more. I am just interested in people who figure out how to step out of bounds and ignore the blowing whistle. When I was a colorer of coloring books, my first step on a new page was to trace all the lines with a crayon--thinking that would provide a physical barrier to keep my filling-in-color from inappropriately crossing into uncharted territory. I also took piano lessons. The lines of the staff kept the notes where they were supposed to be. I had a hard time memorizing the music; I needed the lines to guide me in the way in which I should go. My mother could not read music, and thus she said she couldn't play the piano. But when she sat down and played Humoresque from her heart, her hands flew and bounced on the keys. I wanted to play like that, but I kept to the lines.

Years ago I visited the gallery of an art school. On a wall was an art quilt in which some of the patchwork pieces had come apart at the seams and were spinning free of the carefully constructed, perfectly symmetrical body of the work. The vision of that color sneaking out beyond the lines has stayed with me all these years. I color outside the lines more these days. I don't like instructions; I prefer to figure it out myself. And I don't read how-to gardening books. I sit in a waiting room this week, looking through a Better Homes and Gardens. There is an illustrated article about what flowers do well together, how to group them, how many of each, and where to place them in the bed for the "better" look. A chart is included so the gardening reader can get it right. I feel brief guilt of wrongdoing as I recall impulse buying plants that call to me in the garden shop. The article warns against such behavior; like going to the grocery store without a list (heaven forbid you should act on a sudden hankering for pecan-crusted salmon that you hadn't planned on). I quickly shrug off the wrist-slap. I am coloring outside the lines. Does staying in the lines keep the color in? Or out?

Sir Wally of Raleigh saw his shadow at noon on Groundhog's Day. Since he would have seen his shadow at noon on pretty much any day of the year in the south, where winter does not hold a snow shovel to winter in the northlands, to depend on such an impostor as a predictor of the coming of spring is just plain lunacy. Punxsutawney Phil did not see his shadow, and I am sticking with him. The dangerously warm day on Sunday gets me day-dreaming about spring projects in the garden. But there is still plenty of winter left, regardless of what either Wally or Phil predict. In honor of Groundhog's Day, I dream a recurring nightmare this week. Only it has a twist. It is the end of the semester--I am in graduate school, not the usual junior high of my dream in the past. I have been to none of my classes all semester, and have done none of the reading. But I am not panicked. In fact, I realize that I haven't been to class because I am no longer interested in the field of study I have chosen. Days before the date of the finals, I walk into the registrar's office and withdraw.  

In my dream I worry about telling my parents that I have quit, but it doesn't feel like quitting to me. It feels courageous and right. I suppose this last is part of the dream because my father has been on my mind this week. Last week ended with the news that my former husband is leaving Raleigh, which feels really odd. Everyone I came here with is gone. I feel the loss of that relationship all over again. Even more bizarre is that he is returning to the place where we began our life together, calling up many memories of those halcyon days when we didn't know it wouldn't always be that way. The new week began with a call from my mother, saying that my dad's best friend of some 60 years had died. He has been looking after her these past fifteen years (a bit more than she needed, but I expect it was a comfort and a connection) since Daddy died. She said it felt like Daddy had died all over again. (I said it was a strange, strange weekend. Lost threads of connection that we didn't even know were tethering us. Feeling cut adrift in the world.) I hated to disappoint my father, even as an adult. And he had solid lines holding in "appropriate" behavior. It was always hard to tell him I was coloring outside the lines he drew; and there were consequences when I did. I guess it is always hard to tell those we love that we are going to leave the boundaries, especially if we drew them together. It is so hard, in fact, that sometimes it seems easier to just stay in them.

I have lived in four states. Though I dragged my feet to only one of them, all of the moves from my birth state were in response to someone else's life, and I was the follower. Within this state, I have made some courageous moves outside the lines. But they were not made alone, and though I didn't drag my feet, they were in response to someone else's choices again. My next move will be my choice alone. I anticipate that will be harder. It is hard to be in control of the crayon and move it outside the lines. Each time I go to my heart home for a visit, I am privileged to fly over the Great Plains. Crop circles and their amazing patterns can only be seen when we get some distance from them. When we look at our lives from afar, we can see the patterns. We can see those we like, and those we don't. There is opportunity this rainy Saturday for reflection. Reflection on what we see, or really seeing what we reflect on, is the beginning of change. My parents never told me to get my head out of the clouds, but I know many parents do tell their children that. Stay inside the lines, keep the notes on the staff. I say to us all, "Let Groundhog's Day be over. Get your head in the clouds, dream of the life you want. Then don't be afraid to color outside the lines."