The View Up Here

Yesterday morning, my heart was heavy. So heavy I had a hard time getting out the door and to work. I know it's a symptom of depression, that kind of darkness. It was the 10th anniversary of my mother's death, and I felt the wound of loss more keenly than I have since that night in 2009. It was as if my body remembered exactly what it had felt like.  I made it just barely in time for one of our killer 2-hour staff meetings, got ready to attend a service fair at the local college, and ate two hotdogs for lunch (which NEVER HAPPENS, people!). At the last minute I invited our seminarian Steve to join me at the service fair, and happily he was able to. Having him for company was a boon; he is a nerd and a man of spiritual integrity, so we get on very well. Afterwards, we grabbed a bite to eat at the local Wegmans, then I had a decision to make:  do I go to choir practice or go home and sleep? I was absolutely exhausted in mind and body. Steve, who is also in the Tradition...

2018 ended with a grinding, gasping, crushing sound in my little world. I found out a couple weeks before Christmas that a registered sex offender had been living downstairs from me, and although his crime was 20 years ago and had nothing to do with children, he had somehow violated whatever parole he was on. I saw the Staties leading him to a police cruiser as I returned home from work one night. I made eye contact with him; he threw me this sad little smile. I'd known for some time that he was lost and drifting, very nervous and paranoid. Now I know why. I pray for him because he seemed gentle but lost, not evil by any stretch. But it was distressing, and since I'd just moved into the apartment in October and had experienced quite a difficult transition, even more jarring. A few days after that, I discovered some very disturbing news about someone who once meant a great deal to me. The reverberations of this are still rippling through me. My judgment of character, so...

Thanksgiving is next week! What the... how did that happen? It seems like I was just in Giselle's garden in Salt Lake City, picking cosmos for the living room table, and cherry tomatoes and basil to make a batch of The Sauce. This year has been big for me - paying off credit card debt, getting new (bifocal) glasses and two root canals, moving from Utah to New York, and of course being granted a way to handle the student loan debt when I find the right community to enter. I also had my heart broken over two Carmels that didn't end up working out (it's okay! better things were on the way), only to be introduced to St. Clare and a deepening awareness of my own Franciscan/Clarian charism, leading up to my live-in with a Poor Clare monastic community in Massachusetts in January, 2016. I am humbled by all of this incredible grace. Can I just empty this thing and crawl inside until Jan. 2? And now we're all looking at the calendar, realizing that Thanksgiving is ...

The other day I was laughing at myself for "pulling an Elsie," which is what I call doing something that was typical of my mother, Elsie. I had to go search for a half-empty cup of coffee that I'd left in the bedroom (which was by now cold), after realizing I'd poured it, consumed half of it, and then left it somewhere. Viceroy gives you all the cancer, all the time The only difference between Elsie and me is that she would have two or three of these half-empty cold cups of coffee strewn in various rooms of the house, and they were always accompanied by an ashtray with an abandoned Viceroy cigarette butt that had burned to ash all the way down to the filter. (Mind you, she quit smoking in 1983, so these are memories from that glorious decade, the '70s). I'm like my mother in other ways, too. Ways that are less humorous. I try to control things. I worry. A lot. Just like Elsie did. Worry consumes me, eats me alive if I let it. I get irritable, desperat...

On the first day of week, after Jesus had been crucified and laid in a tomb, Mary Magdalene arrives early, before dawn, to the tomb where he lay. She finds the stone of the tomb entrance rolled away, the blessed body of her Rabbi gone. She is distraught. She runs and tells Peter and John. They come back to the tomb with her and verify that it is, indeed, empty. Then they go away. But Mary, she stays. She stays and weeps. I completely understand this. When my mother died, I didn't want to be apart from her, even at the funeral home, where I stood next to the casket the entire time, even at the grave, when I didn't want to leave after the service was over. I wanted to stay and be still, to mourn and cry, and to be near her. There is something visceral about this experience, when the connection to the deceased is so strong that separation feels like an impossibility, and there is a sense of massive disorientation, like this person isn't truly gone, somehow. Mary turns...

All of a sudden, it’s February. How did that happen, I wonder? Something about the earth rotating every 24 hours and then revolving around the sun in a 365-day cycle, and the moon revolving around the earth once every 28 to 30 days, causing the tides to bulge, occasionally there are 29 days in February but not this time, and oh yeah, now that the Super Bowl is over, we can start talking about Spring Training… Happily, there are some updates for the beginning of February: I’m into the final copy edit for Black Doves . I’m taking extra time to do this because I’m a perfectionist. ‘Nuff said. The Spring semester at I.C.L.A. is off and running to a great start. We have 114 students this semester, which is a lot, in case you’re wondering. Normally we have 85 – 95 at the top end. This is the graduating class that was over-enrolled as freshmen, so that’s why there are so many of them. But they are a good group, and my 24 work study students have so far been very helpfu...

Yesterday was three years without Mom. Yesterday was awful, for many other reasons, and interestingly enough, I wasn't even consciously aware of the date. Yet, in the midst of the roiling storm produced by the email volley (previous post), I kept thinking of Mom, how much I wish she were alive to advise me and console me, and I missed her achingly, acutely, as if she had just left. Clearly, I was aware of the date on some level. Another reminder not to let the sturm und drang distract me from the moments that make up life. I love you, Mom.

Yes, this is Christmas. Well, we're getting there, anyway. Today I dug into the closet and pulled out the Christmas decorations I planned to put up this year. I no longer do a tree - it's way too small in here, and anyway I'm the only one who does any decorating. It's a lot of work for one person to put it all up and take it all down again. I used to put up a 6 foot fake tree, then went to a 2-foot table tree, and now I just put up a holly garland with ribbon and lights over the fireplace. I put a couple special items out - like the ceramic St. Nick my mother made many years ago, and a cranberry-scented candle with a wreath that was Mom's. I also put up "The Jingle Bells." It's older than I am, in pretty rough shape, despite Mom's and my attempts at sprucing it up over the years, and the music box is starting to sound its age, but I love it just the same. So many memories of Christmas at 624 Forest St., Rockland, Mass. For the record, there are...

I really have changed - even more than I thought I had - from just a few short years ago. I'm done with people's head games and selfish behaviors. I'm no longer the "make other people happy and keep the peace, no matter if it means my needs aren't being met" type of gal my mother raised me to be. I used to let other people (friends, enemies, family, authority figures, lovers) call the shots of what my relationships with them were all about, and I'd give them the power of validating my life by seeking approval. Even if they were the lowest form of human waste on the planet, I'd give them some of this power when I was younger. And of course some of those people (not always because they meant to or wanted to hurt me), used that power. I just realized how angry that makes me, and how I don't put up with that bullshit any more. I am so much more at ease with who I am. I don't placate anyone or seek approval or play games to keep them around in t...

Today I went to visit Jenny, one of my oldest and best friends, who was visiting her family in Big Flats, NY. When I was a kid, by the way, I used to confuse the names of the neighboring towns of Big Flats and Horseheads and called it "Flatheads." Used to frustrate the hell out of my mom. Anyhoe, as always, seeing Jenny reminds me of who I am and where I've been. And we always tell stories of when we were teenagers driving our parents crazy - oh we laugh about it now but back then it was serious business. Today we noted how much we grown-up daughters love our moms, and how so often the roles become reversed. On the drive back to Ithaca, I played a song by Zero 7 that makes me think of Mom. Oh, dawn broke Heavy rains made it hard to load Is it time for the road? I don't know, don't know Father has gone So let's go hold your baby's head And I won't let go Of your hand , child of mine (Child of mine) When it's time to let go Then we'll be up in...

Okay, technically it's tomorrow, but I'm still awake since the morning of the 12th, so we're gonna call this safe. It's late, so I'll keep it simple: this week I started relearning how to walk. No really. After several ankle/knee injuries, plantar faciaitis (or as I like to call it, planter's fascists), flat feet, heel spur and lots of pain, my massage/Reiki therapist helped me to realize that I've been standing and walking with my right hip cocked back. Meaning, essentially, that I've been walking around with my right leg not really working the way it was designed to. So for the last week I've been walking with more body awareness, doing specific exercises for core strengthening, and paying attention to where my hips and feet are. How many of us take for granted that we are healthy in body and mind? Here's something I never thought I'd have to pay attention to. Walking. I mean, I've been doing it since I was two, right? Mom and me on...

1. 29-year old tubby co-workers who live at home with mom & dad, kind of want to go to grad school for something but don't want to deal with taking the GRE, evoke every D&D-playing, Star Trek-watching negative stereotype you've ever seen, and who hit on the (married albeit in the process of separating from her husband) temp receptionist (after divulging all these winning qualities). And who are temps, themselves. That's it, actually. I just wanted to point out that if you're 100 lbs overweight and fit the above description, you really need to rethink your life plan. Get some help. Join a cult, maybe? Yes, this is what happened to me this week at the awesome temp job I was raving about earlier. To be fair, the job is still great, the REST of the people at the office are cool, especially the one with the major candy craving, but I also have to deal with the afore-mentioned loser who is now giving me the brush off whenever I happen to be in the same room (like I ca...

I really wish my house were clean right now. But I don’t have the energy or the stomach to clean it. This is my perpetual dissonance. Wanting a clean apartment – wall-to-wall carpeting vacuumed, kitchen floor swept and mopped, dishes washed, counter tops cleared and spotless, cupboards organized and easy to access, furniture dusted, cobwebs whisked away, laundry folded and put away, winter turtlenecks and sweaters swapped for spring tops and summer shorts in the dressers, kitty litter changed, garbage all collected and tossed into the dumpster, patio swept, bathroom swept, mopped, scrubbed, disinfected, polished, bed linens changed, windows cleaned, desks organized, books rearranged. Now really – would I expect anyone to do that in one day? Of course not. But do I feel like shit because I can’t do it in one day? Naturally! I think I have this superhero image of my mother in the eyes of a six-year-old doing all this work in one day. Saturday, to be exact. The day that eve...

I meant to blog last weekend, but the entire weekend sort of slipped away, and then it was time to go back to work for the semester, and then I got sick. So, here's what I would have blogged last week... Last Friday, Jan. 22, marked the two year anniversary of my mother's passing. I spent Friday night feeling pretty damned lonely, so I called Jackie, my dearest and oldest friend in the world who is also an experienced hospice social worker. She told me that the relationship Mom and I nurtured in the last years of her life was inspirational, and she remarked on the question my mother asked me about a year before her death. One day while I was at Mom's apartment doing housework for her, she told me that she was trying to think of things she had taught me, but she couldn't think of any. She asked me what she had taught me. I was stunned at this, because I owe 90% of who I am to my mother. I rattled off a list on the spot, and over the next several months, I continued to ad...