Big World, Little Victories

[Photo by Javier Caceres]

 

1. Got stuck in rush hour traffic on I-5 ~ NPR reviewed Natalie Merchant’s latest album, talked to “part time farmers” and explained a previously confounding front of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in a way that I could process it. Also, the sun shone and the breeze breezed and people were nice.

2. Finally made myself sit down and make a budget for the next 8 months ~ realized I have enough to go back to school, go on a bit of an adventure, and more than adequately take care of both me and my dog’s health without starving.

3. Spent a sunny afternoon pressure-washing sister’s patio ~ discovered pressure-washing ton be on par with meditative walking, breaking ceramic plates, and petting kittens on the catharsis scale.

4. Had four hours to kill waiting for big sis to get done with her shift at the bar last night ~ made friends with two very different but equally fascinating people, one of whom stayed till close listening to my entire album with me beginning to end and discussing the role of music as both a tool and a vehicle for spiritual communication and creative expression in our lives. Also, I sort of understand experimental jazz now.

5. Addressed huge “To Do”/e-mail list ~ remembered I have a brand spankin’ new playlist from one of my most favorite people to jam out to while I’m sifting through all these numbers and words.

6. Freaking out about the cost of school ~ tuition waivers and scholarship come through within days of one another.

7. Freaking out about not having enough shows booked in the next month ~ get calls from two different people within 48 hours about good prospects on my already established travel route.

8. It’s 65 and sunny.

9. I woke up breathing this morning.

10. I’ve discovered a way to potentially make a living making music while also finishing my undergraduate degree/not losing my mind.

11. I am effectively de-constructing self-defeating mental patterns with habitual meditation, tea-drinking, long and meandering phone calls with people I adore, dog walks, new friends, new songs, big bowls of pho, long hugs, loud music, jet planes and sunshine.

 

Life is so blindingly beautiful today.

 

❤

I Am/I Am Not

I was honored to be welcomed into the safe space of a women’s support group at a local women’s and children’s shelter last week, as a guest artist of sorts.  I was asked in by a friend who was wrapping up a poetry unit with the support group attendees, and so we did a writing exercise after we’d all shared work from previous groups/times. It’s been years since I really practiced poetry and, though my technical skill has yet to resurface, the warm rush of release seeped under my skin instantaneously. We were given this prompt:

“I am…”

“I am not…”

“I want…”

“I urge you to…” 

And this is what came out:

I am living someone else’s dream.

The creases in the sheets hide the smell of arms that aren’t here anymore and I’m sure someone, somewhere finds it sexy but I just feel cracked and wayward in my nakedness. My skin seeps love I’d like to give, it pools under my nose, and I look sticky and spent but I’m just lonely.

I am not going to be OK. I am going to be beautiful or absolutely nothing at all, what’s the use in using you if you can’t even see me?

I am not going to fall into your sour-breathed, almost-morning pantomime;

I am not easy to love.

I am useful to a pointed look and then deflated, all sass and circumstance but no conviction to fall back on when they stop needing me to make them what they were.

I am what you want.

Isn’t that terrifying?

You don’t know my name.

I want to sleep by myself because the taste of whatever this is makes me dream of surgeons silently removing the things about me you hated, I loved them.

I urge you to reach out in the dark and hold your own self still.

I want your eyes to sink into mine and we’ll both look exhausted out at at a day we have no desire to survive.

Silver linings: Celebrating Adopt a Senior Pet Month

Multi-generational snuggle fest in the shelter clinic where I work.

Adopting a pet can, like any commitment, be daunting. The promise of shared experiences leading to a lifetime bond soothes this twinge, however, and quickly replaces it with excitement.

Just think of the quirks you’ll both learn to love about each other, the long walks or evenings spent reading by the fire, the companionship in both good and hard times. Falling in love is always a risk, but so is getting out of bed in the morning. Who knows what each day will bring? The only way to know is to take leaps of faith, both great and small.

Adopting is one such leap – giving another living being the power to change your life is the greatest gift you can give both them and yourself. Rescuing an animal in need can bring someone into your life who may, in turn, rescue you.

November is national Adopt a Senior Pet Month. Humane Societies and rescue groups all over the country are spending this month giving special discounts to adopters of senior animals, putting out senior-centric ad campaigns, and developing special programs to help senior pets find forever homes. If it seems odd to you that there is a whole month dedicated to such a specific faction of shelter pets, take into account that there are over 17,000 adoptable senior pets on Petfinder.com, the most commonly used search engine for rescues and shelters in the US. There are more than 10 adoptable senior animals at the Gastineau Humane Society in Juneau alone and a several of them have been adoptable and in the shelter for over a year.

Senior pets account for nearly 25 percent of Juneau’s shelter population, but make up a much smaller fraction of monthly adoptions. It’s our responsibility, as humans with both the resources to help and the understanding that age in no way depletes character or capacity to love and be loved, to close this gap.

Older animals are one of the toughest groups for shelters and rescues to place in homes, perhaps because adopters assume that you “can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” As animal lovers, however, we know better than to succumb to an adage. We know that an older animal is likely to be perfectly capable of learning the rules and customs of your home, and to be calmer, more reasonable, and to not beat around the bush about who they are and what they want.

When you adopt a senior pet, you both go into the relationship knowing what you’re getting into and what you want out of it. You may each have undesirable habits or small incompatibilities that will need to be worked on, but what good, long-term relationship doesn’t involve a little compromise and time invested? How often in life are we give the opportunity to be taken exactly as we are and loved for it unabashedly?

Truth be told, we’re all going gray. For some it is only inside so far, but there are pieces of us time and worry have weathered nonetheless. This is not a burden – experience bears its own gentle beauty, as each gray hair on my head can tell you. There is no way I would trade one day of my fascinating, if a bit tumultuous, life for another year or two with a few extra brunette strands.

Such is the nature of living, that we are bettered by time and the opportunity to grow from the challenges it brings. This makes people hardier, stronger, and more interesting. Why should we attribute any less to the glimmering white on a dog’s muzzle or the wisdom-filled eyes in a gray-flecked feline face? Their silver linings are a gift, just like ours.

 

View all of the Gastineau Humane Society’s adoptable animals here: http://www.petfinder.com/pet-search?animal_type=&pet_breed=&location=99801&startsearch=Searchf

“We Used to Take Care of the Reindeer”

“It was good.”

Photo Courtesy of the Library of Congress, via sitnews.com.

“We used to take care of the reindeer.” She repeated at the middle and end of stories, in the spaces between them. “I still think about back home.”

Every corner creased with a lifetime of laughing, celebrating a cherished memory the grandmother’s face folded softly into an ancient smile. She wore joy as effortlessly as the hair tucked expertly beneath her purple Russian scarf. Mid-sentence her face would collapse into exuberance and I was sure she was about to leap out of her chair and dance, recalling some long-buried friend or place: a whale-gut parka that kept her dry, a tricycle, an old wooden house with real glass in the window, a brother. So much peace in the comfortable way her cheeks rise to meet her eyes and embrace with more love than I think any person has ever shared, more joy than has ever been felt. So humbled by the contentedness of one blessed by the voices of ancestors in her heart, the abundance of the wild world in her blood.

 

Based on a presentation on reindeer herding in Kukaklek Lake by Mary Olympic and her granddaughter AlexAnna Salmon at the Alaska Anthropological Association 40th Annual Meeting in Anchorage, AK.

Learn about the history of reindeer herding in Kukaklek Lake, AK here.

This Is Where a Feminist Comes From

Where I’m from, women fix their own bicycles

and talk about placentas at the dinner table.

My beautiful mother, years before we met. Photo by a dear friend of hers.

Where I’m from, you’re from where you were last and we don’t shave our legs (except maybe Friday nights). Women swim naked and make sweet tea in Mason jars too big to wrap my what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up sized hands around, dancing in purple leather shoes and carrying casserole dishes full of guilty love from our house to yours every time someone dies or gets married. Where I’m from, mothers have the last word and sweet peas have the ayes the moment they poke their heads around the wire corners of the habitats our mothers built for peas and caught children and rabbits and butterflies and tin-can phones, too, like they knew they would. Where I’m from fingers are sticky July to September and Band-aids don’t come off until you promise not to scratch and the leaves turn bike-crash-scab burgundy and catch you on the nose on your way home from school. Where I’m from, Mirriam-Webster is an inevitable dinner-guest when Elijah’s out and we celebrate as many holidays as possible, because who knows what religion Aunt What’s-Her-Bucket is this year and wouldn’t it be nice to just leave these lights up all year round? Where I grew up, growing up is less important than swimming naked and sweet peas and mothers because it’s better to be a good person with bad habits than end up grown up and straight up and absolutely perfect and absolutely numb. Where I’m from, I can be proud to be from somewhere where I’m just another pair of scabbed up knees in the oak tree because we all know better than to try and make me come down. Where I’m from, I learned to be a woman on my hands and knees in the garden and on ladders painting houses and under hoods and over fences and inside books and without ribbons and protesting on Main St. and preferring boldly incorrect to comfortably complacent.

Where I’m from, women fix their own bicycles and talk about placentas at the dinner table. 

<3

I’m giving this to you. Not for good, but for now. I don’t think it’s right, how possessively we contain our selves. For me, this is just as much a radical act of community as it is one of romance. Today’s world seems hitched to passionless self-validation. I’m not asking you to un-hitch, and certainly not to validate me. Just, if you would, indulge my Communist love-dream and take this one little piece with you for a while. Don’t be afraid to take it with you when you garden, or when you work, drink, laugh, hug, dance…come to think of it, there isn’t much you can put it through that I haven’t already. Take it with you when you fight, cry, swear, poop, cheat, lie, self-destruct. I’m not leaving it here with you because you are gentle and perfect, but because you are so alive and beautiful in your volatile, messy, treacherous fallibility that it couldn’t possibly cease to beat in your presence.

And don’t worry. Like I said, this isn’t forever – just for now.

The Next Ten Years

So many things passed without noting – the end of my first serious relationship. The end of slumber parties. The end of being the first to wake up Christmas morning. The end of hating mushrooms and lettuce. The end of nose picking (thank god). The end of overalls embellished with farm animals (though that’s one I can see coming back someday soon…). The end of a horse obsession.  The end of “five more bites” and my daddy singing me to sleep at night. The end of public school. The end of bedtime.

It isn’t all endings, of course. In the last ten years I left and returned to Alaska. I learned to cook, drive, sew, knit, use a credit card, bathe a dog, flip a breaker, insulate windows, can food, hit on someone without creeping them out (OK, sort of), mourn a loss, do yoga, live on my own. I met someone I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with – I didn’t (whew). I graduated from high school. I had my first “real” job. I applied to the school of my dreams and didn’t even get wait-listed, and ended up exactly where I was supposed to be in spite of that. I made best friends, and lost them. I found religion and lost that, too. I befriended my parents. I befriended myself.

It feels as though I am being given a gift by time and the modern calendar. By marking the beginning of a new decade at this point in my life, it’s as though I am being permitted to close a door behind me. Not locking it, but containing all of the pieces and lessons and inspirations of that last growing period, so I can make the best of this one. The learning never stops, of course, but maybe I can use this fresh start of sorts to be more the person I want to be, to be happier, to become more whole.

Then again, maybe I can just work on keeping up with laundry and dishes and homework and work work and working a little more me-time, family-time and dream-time in around the edges. I’ve been feeling so tied-down lately, it’s good to remember not only how much I’ve grown up, but how young I am and how much I have both behind and ahead of me, how lucky I am to know the people I do and be the places I am.

Man, I’m looking forward to the next ten years.

Yes, let’s.

Let’s live in a yurt and can food all summer. Let’s tell people we’re crazy so they stop asking questions. Let’s garden naked. Let’s talk about feelings the way we talk about books or license plates or snails – you know, just talk. Let’s go find empty caves and fill them with imaginary monsters and sound. Let’s drive well but make racecar noises to make it feel more dangerous. Let’s argue about Antarctica. Let’s have shitty jobs and amazing friends. Lets’ get drunk and swap instruments. Let’s swim, all the time. Let’s start a band. Let’s start another one. Let’s bake complicated bread. Let’s get through family holidays with our sense of humor intact. Let’s make our own traditions. Lets’ call when we say we won’t. Let’s splatter paint the driveway. Let’s play Frisbee in the dark. Let’s sleep in. Let’s talk less. Let’s hug more. Let’s be careful with each other. Let’s be happy.

The Beginning

(Sweet find in a random document file on my computer. Must have written this months ago…..probably not entirely non0fiction, but still makes me miss North Carolina something fierce)

Deep in the south, in between the rolling blue-green hill-mountains that roil in fog every morning and seep in heavy sunlight all summer long, there is a house. It is not remarkable, lined by pastures on two sides and road on the others. The shutters are white and there are three stairs leading to a gray doorway, nestled in dull red brick. It is not the sort of house that is remembered for its beauty, but I remember it. No great beauty sleeps in a tower above it, no cave of wonders gapes below, but in that house, hundreds of years after the last of the princesses was laid to rest and forgotten, one more baby girl was born, one last chance at a happy ending. There were no fireworks or magic dust, gifts or curses. In a world that is sick and tired of fairy tales, in a house no one else remembers, I was born, once upon a time.

Woman Child

Where I’m from, women fix their own bicycles and talk about placentas at the dinner table. Where I’m from, you’re from where you were last and we don’t shave our legs (except maybe Friday nights). Where I’m from, women swim naked and make sweet tea in Mason jars too big to wrap my what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up sized hands around, dancing in purple leather shoes and carrying casserole dishes full of guilt and love from our house to yours every time someone dies or gets married. Where I’m from, mothers have the last word and sweet peas have the ayes the moment they poke their heads around the wire corners of the habitats our mothers built for sweet peas but caught children and rabbits and butterflies and tincan phones, too, like they knew they would. Where I’m from fingers are sticky July to September and bandaids don’t come off until you promise not to scratch and the leaves turn bike-crash-scab burgundy and start to catch you on the nose on your way home from school. Where I’m from, Mirriam-Webster is an inevitable dinner-guest when Elijah’s out and we celebrate as many holidays as possible, because who knows what religion Aunt What’s-Her-Bucket is this year and wouldn’t it be nice to just leave these lights up all year round? Where I grew up, growing up is less important than swimming naked and sweet peas and mothers because it’s better to be a good person with bad habits than end up grown up and straight up and absolutely perfect and absolutely mediocre. Where I’m from, I learned to be a woman on my hands and knees in the garden and on ladders painting houses and under hoods and over fences and inside books and without ribbons and protesting on Main St. and preferring boldly incorrect to comfortably complacent. Where I’m from, women fix their own bicycles and talk about placentas at the dinner table.