Living in Fear

I have never been one to live my life in fear. I have been afraid of things, and not wanted to face things, but I have always forced myself to do the uncomfortable, the scary. As I write that, I wonder if I have always lived like that or if it came to me gradually? I am not certain. I remember quitting color guard in my senior year of high school , but I do not recall that that was from fear; I think that was just teen aged awkwardness, or some other factor. I did not want to go to college, but it was not out of fear; it was just not a path I wanted to take in life. I moved to Florida on my own, fear aside. I have taken so many various directions and paths in my life, and I do not believe, to the best of my knowledge, that fear has ever guided me.

A few years back we went on a trip, my friends and I, along with an assortment of parents and family members. We travelled to Colorado to scatter the ashes of our dear friend/sister/mom/daughter, Wanda. My friend died suddenly at just 37 years old. It was a blood clot from her leg, and it killed her instantly. The loss of her in our lives was huge. She lived a quiet life, devoted to her son and to us, as we were to her. She loved to go to the beach, to sit in the sand and comb through miniscule shells. She loved to travel, she loved our Friday night ceramics nights; she loved food, beer, and sunshine, and she always smiled. She was the quiet one, the sweet one, and the easiest of us to get along with. She really loved life. A year after her death, we scattered her ashes in The Garden of the Gods outside Colorado Springs where she was born, in a public place we could all access if we chose to go back. We were a bunch of people with a bunch of personalities and we all had different ideas about our trip. We mourned our friend/sister/mom/daughter, but we were all alive and breathing and we were all able bodied. I learned so much of myself on that trip. I learned that I did not want to grow older and be afraid of everything or anything. I climbed Seven Falls Water Falls, crying all the way back down, scooting on my bottom most of the way. I crossed Royal Gorge Bridge on foot, 1053 feet in the air. I was terrified, but I was determined to live my life. I would do it again, with no less fear, but also, no less determination. Since then I have climbed mountain paths all over America. I have stood on mountain tops, ridden with my eyes closed up and down steep winding mountain cliffs. I have not lost my fear, and my knees grow weak, my breathing shallow; my heart beats rapidly. But I am determined to not live afraid, and I am determined to life my life.

Society lives in fear these days. It breaks my heart. Before I leave my house each day I open my blinds and let the sunlight soak my house, inside and out. I believe in living in light, in the open, with fresh air coming in as it may. Today I had to cover the small windows in my library, my workspace; my classroom; where I spend my work life five days a week. Each tiny, small window had to be covered. Because our society lives in such fear. We have to protect the children at all costs, and I do understand, I really do. But I mourn the loss of the slices of sunshine I have had in my life day in and day out. I despise that there are evil and violent people out there who force others to take these precautions. It makes my heart hurt for these generations of children who will know nothing but fear; fear that violence may visit their school in the form of a crazed gunman, or worse. It makes my heart hurt that the generations that followed mine did not have the same range of freedom I grew up with; playing outside all day until the sun went down – playing outside with no fear that someone crazy might snatch them from their yard or sell them into child slavery or worse. That many still look to the sky at a plane seemingly off course; that we have to have armed police at schools, concerts, sporting events; everywhere we gather in masses. What sadness.

I cannot live my life in fear. It is not part of who I am. I will be myself. I will continue to open my blinds at home daily, and allow the sunshine in my heart to fill my library, even if I have to keep the windows covered. I cannot give in to the fear that those who are mentally ill, or societal outcasts seem to thrive on. I cannot and I will not live in fear. That is my choice in life.

Understanding Poverty

So, here's the deal. I am sitting at my desk, and just finished eating a soggy tuna sandwich. I arrived at 6:45 am, as I always do, reset the copier, added paper, changed the lunch menu for the morning show, turned on all 30 computers, ran the morning show, sat through awards ceremony and took photos for the school slideshow, ran to the office to mix a printer snafu, came back to the media center to run my ongoing book fair. In the process I tried making two different cups of coffee (unsuccessfully finishing before both went cold). There has been no time for breakfast or even a water break, so by the time I was able to consume my very soggy sandwich (at 12:45) it didn't matter how it tasted, because I was quite honestly starving! I was able to finally check email during my sandwich time, and thank goodness nothing pressing was missed.

In the middle of my day, in between all else, I soothed ruffled teacher feathers, added water to the coffee maker, took candy from 5th graders (today is the day after Halloween, and despite the mandate there is no candy, there has been candy everywhere.) That is life, in a nutshell, when one works at an elementary school. What is easy about any of that? And seriously, what has any of that to do with my actual Master's Degree in Library and Information Science? My degree and none of my education prepared me for any of these things. Life prepared me; living life, learning to empathize, learning to problem solve, troubleshoot, learning to be a nurturer. But all those things were not taught in higher education. They were learned because of who my parents were, where I grew up, the influences in my life, both good and bad. It takes a village - it took a true village to teach me so much of that.

As a staff we are doing a book study on Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty. I did not understand the gulf before this book. I am not sure I even now understand it. But here is the thing. We are teaching kids from a middle class point-of-view, and they are coming to us from a generationally impoverished environment. We don't always speak the same language, even if we all speak English. So add all of that questioning to my above morning, and it is no wonder our public education system is in the uproar it is. I certainly do not know the answers. But I know this - what we are doing now is not working. When someone like me with an incredible wealth and passion of knowledge and books, with the compassion I have inside of me - with the education I have paid for has a morning like I had today; and nearly every day has a similar path and schedule, with similar results. When that happens, it is time to truly rethink what it is I do, why I do it. And to consider what next I want to do. Because none of those things satisfy that urge inside of me to continue to blindly share what I know without seeing some connected end result. It becomes harder and harder to give of myself, and continually give. That is where educational burn-out occurs. There is something truly wrong with this whole scenario. I wish I knew the answers.

Chewing Thoughts

February 5, 2018

I came home in an odd mood tonight. Pensive, reflective, almost apprehensive; vexed in a certain way There is nothing wrong in my own life to contribute to these feelings, and yet I  tend to absorb the moods of others; their thoughts, fears, sadness’s; their anxieties. It is not a quality I am always glad to have, though. I did the handful of odd jobs I normally do when I get home. Living alone with no husband or children does not mean there are not always odd jobs to do; there are, In fact, there is no one to share normal duties with, and sometimes this can be a cause for its own distress. Today, though, I know where my mood stems from. Still, the knowing does not always stop the mood. Immediate tasks completed, I lay back on my bed, Jimi-Kitty cuddling and purring in my ear. I rubbed his silky head and ears, and his purrs were a soothing balm to me. He curled up around my head, his world complete. My biggest cat jumped up on the bed too – something he seldom does except at night when it is time to sleep. His purrs were louder than Jimi-Kitty, and he took it upon himself to nuzzle my eyelashes. Both my male cats do that when I am stressed or sick, or even just very tired. It snapped me from my revelry, my pensive thoughts, and I mentally shook myself. Nothing is wrong in my own personal life. What I was doing, was projecting from my friends pain and an running wild with an innocuous comment she made about the value of a house for sale close by, and how it was “dated”. I lay there on my bed imagining future days and future actions. I was imagining myself purging my house of belongings in an effort to minimize, and I was imagining what I needed to do around my house and yard to make it more “sellable” and just how dated was my own house? I was adding up in my head the costs, and subtracting it from the mortgage due and the equity earned. Why, I wondered? I don’t have any intention of selling my home in the next few days, or even months, and yet here I am staging the sale. My grandmother used to call that “borrowing trouble”; imagining wrongs where nothing was. Doing tasks that are not even the most remote of possibilities today, and not even physically doing them, but imagining them elaborately inside my own head.

This summer we had to go through Mom-Carole’s things. It is a thankless task sorting, someone else’s belongings. Every little thing, at one time, had a purpose or a meaning. Sometimes personal, sometimes long forgotten reasons why it was kept. But to sort through belongings that were collected by someone near and dear – that is so hard. My friend’s mom is laying in that semi-state of life and death, with death imminent. I’ve been visiting daily’ bringing food, giving hugs; helpless, as every person is in that moment of life. Wanting to help, not being able to; seeing the pain, knowing what all are feeling and experiencing. It is a tough place. Because I have that absorbent personality, I have been taking it all in, carrying it around with me, and keeping it inside my heart. There is a song from Sister Hazel called “Your Winter. One of the lines of lyrics says “Why do you chew your pain?” That is what I do. Chew my pain, and that of others; I absorb moods around me like a sponge. It is almost a physical feeling. Knowledge of it still does not allow me to distance myself. I found myself redirecting my thoughts once I realized what I was doing, and I managed to shake of my reverie and the strangeness I brought home with me. Now the evening is upon me and my day is winding down. I am grateful, once again, for the peace and quiet of my own thoughts and my house and possessions all around me.

Abandoned

I’m meant to be leaving. I plan to deliver food to my friend’s family as they sit vigil over their dying mother. I plan to visit my aunt in Winter Haven; there are just so many summers. And just so many springs – we have to spend time with our loved ones when we can. I plan to drop off a key to my brother’s house in Winter Haven to the man who will be doing some repairs.

Here I am, though, in my own home, windows open to the humid, warm air. I’m listening to silence punctuated by the delicate sound of wind chimes dancing on the breeze, traffic on the distant interstate, Sandhill cranes calling; the ceiling fan steadily spinning. I had to sit and write a few moments before I go to my tasks. Home has been on my mind – home, our abandoned childhood home, laying in cold, darkness, the basement filled with water from a burst pipe; the foundation probably compromised, because the mortar holding the giant stones the foundation stands on is melting in that giant puddle of water. The backyard pool, always so beautiful, even with snow covering it; the promise of summer lay waiting; now half filled with muddy, dirty snow and water; the lining ripped and torn.

I drive by abandoned, crumbling, falling down houses all the time, and I can imagine the stories those walls could tell. They break my heart, those sad lonely houses. I imagine that someone walked out that door for the last time, leaving all the memories stored in those walls behind. We did that this past fall; how can that be? How can it be that we cannot keep it AND our own homes, too? Our home since we were pre-teens closed up, lonely, yet full of a lifetime of memories both good and bad; life, death, laughter, tears – joy, sorrow. That beautiful, stately home, deteriorating day by day since it was rebuilt and reimagined 45 years ago. That beautiful stately home, originally built back in the turn of the 20^th century, surviving the fire that swept through the village so long ago. That home lovingly cared for, now lying so silent and still. Years of porch sitting, years of old windows open to spring and summer breezes. Years of lives lived, dreams dreamed. Years, more recently, of mom’s quiet, lonely days.

Abandoned homes break my heart. At some point, someone was the last person to turn the key in the lock and walk away from that place of life, of memories of secrets. This time, it was our task to take on. My heart is filled with sorrow.