Ceci N'Est Pas Une Ski Pass

I am trying to make friends with the snow this year. The last two years, I have loved the snow from the magical snow falls when the world gets snow quiet and the sky so light at night to the feeling of being snug in my house with a fire or outside playing in the cold medium. But this year, we are not so friendly. It takes a lot of work to get three humans ready to go out on a cold snowy day. My Volvo is audibly protesting to the cold, deciding to make horrible grinding noises when the heater fan is on (thank goodness a mechanic was able to patch up the Volvo’s hole that let so unfriendly cold air run over my feet). My house feels continually cold. Asher can only run so many circles around the house and over all the furniture.

Yesterday, I bundled up the kids and braved the cold to take them sledding. I found a manageable hill at the nearby golf course and, amazingly, our adventure went incredibly smoothly (if you don’t count Harper’s immediate and pitiful full face plant into the snow). I showed Asher how to use the sled and trudge back up the hill. He loved it – ignored all the cold and snow and building wind to go down the hill “my turn one more time” ten times before we left, discovered that he could lie back on the sled and soon found that he could be a Ninja sled rider (that is one who rolls out of the sled half way down the hill). We made snow angels, and Asher soon discovered he could do one of his favorite activities in the snow, roll down hills. Okay, this is worth the snow, watching my active three-year-old exhibit his unabashed and all out zest for life and learning.

For the past week, I have been planning to go skiing – get this – for the first time in Colorado after living here for three years. It was the perfect plan . . . except for the snow. As Amy and I started out this morning for the ski resort, we found to our great dismay that highway I-70 to the ski resort was closed. Unheard of! Refusing to believe the news and road closure signs and with great hopes that just by chance the road would open, we drove up to the closure. C-DOT employees informed us the road might open between noon and two. Unheard of!

So we turned around with much hope in our hearts that we could still have a fun day, sans skiing. Three and a half hours after starting out, wind whipping our faces, snowshoes strapped on, great hopes that it might be a bit warmer in the trees, we hiked away from Eldora’s Nordic center and up the Lakes Loop snowshoe path. How good it felt to be hiking, moving my legs, breathing heavily, among the trees, climbing to a view of the mountains, climbing down to a view of lake, chatting with Amy up and down the hills, feeling like I was “off duty” for a short while and accomplishing the completion of Lakes Loop.

We wrapped up the day with dinner and a pint of Jackman’s at Left Hand brewery, watching the sun set over the cloud veiled mountains and wondering if I-70 would ever opened. I am slightly reconciled to the snow, knowing the joy it brings Asher and the fun sports I have the opportunity to do in it (who can really complain about living somewhere that you can snowshoe if you can’t ski?). I am quite amazed at the power of a friend to make a good sized disappointment into a day of unabashed and all out zest for life.

Feel It to Heal It

Whether it was the message welcoming me at 6:15 a.m. on Sunday that I was the only parent in the house again, or the idea of sitting in church in the same row as Michael, or the struggle of putting two overly heavy carseats back in my Volvo again before church with a three year old who wanted to tromp through the snow even in his church clothes and an eighteen-month-old who wants to be reattached to her mama regardless of the weather, or the impending holidays of the week ahead, or all of these things, or just the right time, the Sunday before Christmas set off four days of wildfire of anger. The kind of anger that is pretty much all consuming, energy sapping, difficult to control and hard to predict – a wildfire. My patience was about two seconds long, and too many times I had to apologize to my kids for losing it, too many times put myself in time out and too many times almost decapitated a cat or two. Interestingly, I can’t remember specifics from this anger craze, except that I bought two new carseats as soon as humanly possible. Lots and lots of red hot anger.

This, I have been reassured, is good for me – this feeling of anger, letting it out. “You have to feel it to heal it,” reassured Megan. My therapist, Rhonda, praised me for feeling the anger. But in the midst of the flames, fleeing cats and stampeding children, it felt quite overwhelming, and I felt out of control. How can I ever end this anger? I wanted to know. The normal mantras of “It won’t always be like this” and “Breath, breath,” attempts at getting sleep, taking breaks from reality in books and movies, and writing tell all letters that I would never send, small pulls on my boot strings, were pretty useless. A small tear in my normal composure had opened into a wild windstorm. And it was exhausting and felt – at the time – quite useless. Feel it my butt, said the anger.

Wednesday night – it had really only been four days, I think, looking back – the kids were in bed, and I stepped into the shower. I was trying to avoid the normal morning screaming accompanying a morning shower after the kids get up (the three year old who wants to tromp the pirates around the pirate ship with me and the baby who wants to reattach to mama regardless of the need for a shower), but I found more than a scream saver. I’m at the end of myself with this, I told God, water sounding lovely on my head. I’m at the end. I can’t carry the anger and the heavy question pinching me, what does healing look like and how will I ever get there? It’s yours. Water from tears and the shower gently put the fire out.

Rhonda said something about the postivie effects of negative ions being washed away by water and reminded me of Anne Lamott’s wisdom that the bathroom is the best place to pray. There is indeed something sacred about water. And something so relieving about God taking things from me.

Thursday, my poltergeist-spinning head and fire-spitting mouth reset to normal. I relaxed inside, water having gently put the fire out. I looked around and found while I had been crazy inside (normal crazy, I’ve been reassured), my kids and cats survived. And so did I . . . perhaps more healed, at least better watered.

Postscript: Thinking about healing on Tuesday night again and that the healing may not be fully realized until years down the road. The deep healing is like physical therapy after major surgery - it helps some in the short term, but long term can be the difference between full use of a limb and limited use. I think about the anger that I dealt with my dad, how it took so many years to heal from the wounds of a distant and alcoholic father, and how I finally let myself feel anger until my senior year of college. My senior prediction from high school was that I would get angry - I was never angry. But as a result of never being angry, of never experiencing appropriate emotions, I was distant from myself, friends and family - distance was necessary so I could maintain not feeling. So it is that by feeling now, down the road I will be in better shape, in all my limbs.

How I love water – let me count the ways (from Quotes of the Day, www.qotd.org):
“The cure for anything is salt water; sweat, tears, or the sea.” Isak Dinesen
“The highest goodness is like water. Water benefits all things and does not compete. It stays in the lowly places which others despise. Therefore it is near The Eternal.” Lao-Tzu
“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.” Leonardo da Vinci
“If there is Magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” Loren Eiseley

Welcome the Future, Respect the Past

In September of this year, I attended my ten year college reunion in Santa Fe, NM (um . . . where exactly did those ten years go?). About a quarter of my class was there (which percentagewise is a great turnout and in a class of under 100, there were about 25 of us). I was struck by how much everyone was the same, how recognizable everyone was with some new layers and some old layers taken off from the passing ten years. I felt like I was looking at collegemates through rose colored glasses.

I had this same impression at the beginning of December during visits with two dear and old friends. Gillian was in the states from Australia for a conference and to see friends. Gillian and I lived in the same dorm freshman years and shared many good and hard times during college. For five days, we got to hang out together, make small trips around Colorado and enjoy catching up on the six years since we had seen each other in New York. Jen, who had been my best friend fifth grade through about sophomore year of high school and my gymnastics buddy, came over for lunch and some playtime with her daughter, Sydney. I had not seen Jen in over seven years, reconnected through Facebook (can I say again, what a thing Facebook is!), and found out she had moved to Denver this last summer. We were both overcome by surprise and excitement by this discover. We also enjoyed a time of reconnecting and catching up.

In most of my former classmates and close friends, I found a deeper sense of self and a better awareness of who they were and meant to be (not that we all have that big question figured out - heck, we're only in our thirties - just closer to it). I realized in being with Gillian and Jen and discussing our pasts what a poor friend I had been and what I had missed about myself but also that I may have been incapable of being anything other. As George Santayana wrote, "We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible." As with any close relationships, our histories, our family pasts, our deep wounds - only slightly discovered under the pretty facade - separated us and even while other important parts held us together. With Jen in particular, what an interesting clash our histories had. It feels important to make so many trips down memory lane, to look back with two who were such close friends and think about who I was so many years ago, what decisions I made, without judgement and with caring and listening hearts.

It was restorative to spend time with Gillian and Jen and to know them better now than I could before. It is restorative to see in myself how far I've come, that even (or especially) in darkness, God gives me strength to grow and light to grow in.

Herons and Aspens

On the forty-five minute drive back to Longmont from Westminster on Friday, I realized that I had not written a blog entry in two weeks. In the strange vortex of grief, part of me feels like more time should have passed – time so ballooned with a spectrum of emotions – and part of me wonders how two weeks already passed, three weeks that were in practical ways unproductive, a daily commitment to just one foot in front of the other, following the small increments of the line. What exactly did I do for two weeks?

Nothing came to the surface for a blog entry, and I thought about writing about nothing until near the end of the day. There is a liquor store on the east side of Longmont called Fox Hill Liquors, recently taken over by new owners who are unexpectantly welcoming. On my first visit, the lovely East Indian woman called me by my first name when I made a purchase. I felt like her friend immediately, as if we already knew something intimate about each other. On Friday, I stopped by on my way to pick up the kids, always a funny sequence of events because I feel like I’m picking up contraband, Alissa, our daycare provider, being Mormon.

One of the wine displays was a French winery, Heron, and I thought about this majestic bird, catching glimpses of one on the Chesapeake Bay in the wee hours of the morning as I sat in the seven seat of crew boat, seeing one fly over Golden Ponds in Longmont. If I was a bird, I would be a heron.

In high school, a friend, Chris, was filling out a multiple choice personality/ideal career test. The only question I remember is, “If you were a flower, what would you be?” My mom, Chris and I laughed after he read the question – especially because the friend was male and, though sensitive, still quite male and an adolescent. But I think these days, if I was a flower, I’d be a red poppy.

A few months ago, my pastor, EC, who is also the soon-to-no-longer-be Board President where I work, and I drove to Boulder for a non-profit awards luncheon. On the way back, we were talking about politics (or, he was talking, good preacher that he is) and mentioned in the conversation stream Barbara Walters’ first interview, which she rather flubbed when she asked Nixon, “If you were a tree, what would you be?” EC thought this a ridiculous question to ask. “Oh,” I laughed. “I don’t know. If I was a tree, I’d be an aspen.” It’s a perfectly fine question to ask.

I am reading Richard Rohr’s, “Everything Belongs.” A Franciscan monk, Rohr talks about small mind and big mind, small mind being what we tend to have in the West, analytical, detail oriented, at its worst, clinging mind. Big mind is more Eastern, able to float in mystery, connect with that which is bigger. This helps me realize one thing I miss now in my “religion” and connect to in my faith, something I feared in church, where the mystery, mystical, something bigger, inexplicable and only feelable, fantasy “fits.” I love children’s books, like “Goodnight Moon” and “You Are My I Love You” that take us out of the concrete, sensical on language and words. They are feelable.

So I put it out there – if you were a bird, a flower or a tree, what would you be? Ridiculous questions that I wonder about. Perhaps part of big mind, nonsensical. At the very least, a little humor to round the sharp corners of recent events.