Conversation Time With Jordan

So..lately, I've been bombarded by death. Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that this whole civilization thing is the reality, but my inner animal comes to the surface way too often for me to be fooled for long, especially when it comes to death. I think, as living and thinking creatures, we spend our lives doing this crazy, instinctual dance with death, even though we know that, as always, we will have to succumb....again and again and again. Not just physically, in the end, but also mentally, with the deaths of our loved ones, the deaths of strangers that we hear about daily, the lost pets on the sides of the roads we drive on, the bugs on the windshield. Death reminds us everyday that it is reality, and yet somehow we manage to compartmentalize that reality, always putting it in a place that we don't believe will effect us, at least here and now. My civilized side does its best to put death in its appropriate box, covered by its appropriate lid, and believe that the lid won't come off until that day, far in the future, when I decide that I'm ready to take the lid off and deal with it. My animal side is still pretty strong though, and it knows that no lid is going to keep death away...it won't even keep the idea of death away. My animal side knows that no one could ever really put death in a box anyway...it's like air. It's always there...it is in the food that I eat, the books that I read, the songs that I sing, the relationships I make...it is, as Walt Whitman said, under my boot soles. I heard a song this weekend that said, among other things, "Life taught me to die." I wonder if anyone ever really learns that lesson...I guess it really doesn't matter if they do. Either way, the only thing I'm learning is that boxes don't work...life happens in circles.

So...I've been lacking a little motivation/inspiration lately. I am off work and school for the entire month of May, and I thought that meant I'd finally have some time to dedicate to my creativity, but, instead, I've hit a long and powerful lull. But, I've finally summoned the courage to power through...so, here we go.

It is a crazy time in the life of the Gross family. We have lots of things up in air right now, and the future has become suspended in a limbo-zone of hopes, fears, and thousands of possible scenarios that are consuming my mind at all times. I resigned my one great wish of being able to glimpse into the future many years ago...of all the gifts I've been blessed with, psychic power isn't one of them. But I've also resigned myself to another truth: if I could go back to any other point in my life and tell myself just one thing, I wouldn't tell myself all the answers. I would simlply say, "Everything is going to be okay...everything is going to be beyond okay...you are going to be blessed in so many ways beyond any of the possibilties you ever could have imagined."

Things pretty much always turn out exactly how they are supposed to. I know this, and yet it really doesn't soothe any of my anxieties. If only I had a nickel for everytime someone told has told me that "God has a plan for you" or "If you want God to laugh, tell him your plans" or something along these lines...I always nod politely, thankful for the advice, but in my mind I'm thinking..."Yeah...uh huh..but who ever got anywhere without a plan?" I've always taken a "50% work and planning 50% fate" approach to life. In the end, do I really have any control over how my life is going to turn out? Not much, but maybe a little...and I'm going to juice that little bit of power just as much as I can.

I am a major planner. I create timelined plans for accomplishing goals...small term goals that contribute to greater long term goals. Michael and I are in various stages of different sets of plans and goals, both individually and as a team. These plans are our attemts to manage and maximize the little bit of control we do have over our lives. I throw myself into these plans and attempt to micromanage every part of my life...even things like my creativity.

So, while I scheduled May out to be a time for extreme creative output before another three hectic semesters of school, life threw me one of its many curveballs and hit me with a dry spell. During the past few weeks, I have had moments of desperation...wondering if my creativity will wither and fade and die...wondering how I will ever be able to call myself a writer when I can't even manage to squeeze out a weekly blog. In these moments, I summon my future self's advice: "Things will be okay...things will be more than okay...you are going to be blessed in so many ways beyond any of the possibilities you could have ever imagined."

I feel like I am constantly learning one lesson in life over and over again...it is all about balance. I have to learn to feel comfortable balancing that little bit of control I can hold onto and the roller coaster ride of fate. I have to have a little faith that it will all work out, somehow, someway, and usually my wildest dreams will be surpassed. Dry spells end and difficulties are overcome and you can't really plan how or when it will all happen. All you can really do is suck the life out of every single day and make as much of what you want to happen happen...and try as hard as you can to be thankful for every moment you get to experience in this crazy world.

So I am going to seize the opportunity and learn from the difficulty of this limbo world. I am going to focus on having faith that the best thing will ultimately happen and I am going to power through this dry spell and believe that pretty soon, the magic will return to me....perhaps it is busy elsewhere these days, make unseen, unknown changes in my world, sprinkling fairy dust on the seedlings of a future beyond my own imaginings...

Wwwwhhhhheeeewww....Sorry, but I had to start this post out with a giant sigh of relief. I have been fighting battles for this day for several months now, and it is finally here! I survived this semester of craziness...I had a baby, checked off six more hours of graduate credit, finished my last semester as a full time tutor in the writing center (it's on to teaching next semester...yikes!), and along the way I also juggled the rest of my responsibilities, a little financial stress, and some crazy postpartum hormones. Today is a day of sweet relief. Michael is at a fishing tournament, and I am getting to spend some much needed quality time with my baby boy.

Last night we went out to celebrate, just the three of us...and of course the crazy scary tornado weather had to come and try to blow us away, but we managed to survive and actually have a pretty amazing night together. I think it was an appropriate way to cap off the whole experience of this past semester. When we got home, the three of us huddled up together to watch the weather and Michael said, "We're going to be just fine." It was so simple but also so transcendent.

I think that I have finally reached the realization that Michael and I can weather pretty much any kind of storm together successfully. It is days like today, when I have some time to reflect, that I stand in awe at the tremendous power of our unlikely relationship.

We are two of the most different kind of people you will ever meet. In a nutshell, I would hesitantly label myself an academic. I go to school for the pleasure of learning...I cherish free time spent alone with books and even (gasp) paper writing, although I wouldn't have told you that earlier this week. I am a little neurotic, very sensitive and analytical...a moody introvert.

Michael, on the other hand, is pretty much always happy. He is satisfied by working on little (or big) tasks of any kind. He can find a way to laugh (and make others laugh) at almost anything, and he hasn't read a single book since we started dating seven years ago. He doesn't care about underlying meanings or analyzing feelings...He's more about figuring out the facts and making things happen than sitting around thinking about who/what/when/where/why and how things come to be the way they are.

We met when we were practically babies, and got married, I'd say, right around the toddler stage. Most people thought we were crazy...I'm pretty sure they were right. We didn't have money or a plan or anything going for us except for an intense desire to wake up next to one another every morning and fight through life side-by-side.

In some ways, I think the two of us are kind of like step-siblings on hormonal overdrive or something (only less creepy)...he is more like a brother to me sometimes...protective, bossy, doing his best to annoy me. And I feel like our relationship is the only place I can safely relinquish the bitchy teenage sister inside my soul. We spend much of our time bickering about stupid, little things and even more time wrestling and laughing and making fun of one another.

There have been many times when I have been full of doubt when it comes to the two of us...how can two such different people who have about nine million obstacles ahead of them make it together in a world where most people end up divorced...especially the ones who try to make a marriage work when they are as young as we are? And yet, somehow, against all odds, the two of us prove me wrong through every challenge.

I only have to look at our son to see why. As I have gotten to know his emerging little personality, I have come to the realization that, together, Michael and I make the best kind of person. Chase has inherited such distinct qualities from each of us...he is such a serious joy spreader; he just makes everyone so insanely happy. And for the most part, he is so mellow and calm. He wants to get his hands on things and move around, and he already tries to stand up and even take little steps. Those things come from his daddy. But he also has these moments in which you can tell he is just a little old soul waiting for his baby body to grow into his mind. You can tell that, as soon as he can get his mouth to do it, he is going to start spouting out all the little wonderful, intense thoughts he is already thinking. And he has these wild explosions of emotion...these things come from me. I can already tell that he has the perfect tools to cut out his own unique and amazing path through life. He is going to make it, and he is going to do awesome things because he is just the right combination of a doer and a thinker...just the right combination of a lover and a fighter.

He is the perfect example of why our relationship works so surprisingly well even when there are tornados and hurricanes and earthquakes going on around us all the time. I am certain that as long as the three of us continue to wake up each morning with the desire to fight through one more day together that we will make it through a whole lifetime of challenges like this past semester with more smiles and laughter and love than is really fair for one family to have. We will blaze our own trail through life, one never traveled before, and be thankful for the blessing of every obstacle that we are given the chance to overcome together. We're going to be just fine.

So...sometimes I have this dream. In it, I'm standing in the middle of a dark field and it's raining. The only things around me besides the darkness and the falling water are my arms. In the dream, I have many, many arms. Arms of different lengths and strengths....and in each hand I am holding a bowl of some sort. Some of the bowls are deep and heavy and made of earthen clay, some of them are rusted metal buckets, some of them are pristine dishes that look like they belong in my grandmother's china cabinet. In the dream, I am desperately trying to balance the weight of all the different bowls...trying not to drop one, or lose my balance, or even fall. The rain only complicates matters, changing the weight distribution with every single drop. It also floods the ground under my feet, threatening to loosen my footing and remove my center of gravity. If I spend too much time or energy on one arm, or one bowl, or my feet, the whole system threatens to fall apart. I know if I can't maintain the balance, I will drop all the bowls and be left with nothing, drowinging in the crazy rain ocean of life.

Topic for the day: Balance

If you know me, then you know that I love Indians (American Indians...Native Americans...whatever term you prefer). I love them in a totally romanticized and unrealistic way. I love them in a way that Vine Deloria wouldn't approve of (However, to be fair to myself, I have spent countless hours reading, studying and analyzing the writings of contemporary indigenous people...I have met many Native Americans and learned as much as possible about their ways of life...I have and will continue to try to understand living, breathing native people instead of just imagining them in an idealized way. Nevertheless, I am still a giddy little girl who gets my highs by reading about Indian sprituality, politically incorrect as it may be).

I was introduced to Native American spirituality in an American literature class several years ago, and it changed my life. One of the first topics we discussed in that class was a Navajo concept called hozho (pronounced, I think, like hojo with a soft j). While I could never do justice to the concept of hozho by trying to translate what I understand of it into English, I can tell you that what it has come to mean to me is that life is all about balance. It is the constant attempt to accept things as they are, to walk through this world with a sense of peace and love and harmony with everything in your world, to take what life hands you and find beauty in it, to learn that maintaining a sense of balance isn't really work. It's more like art.

I think that my recurring dream symbolizes my difficulty in marrying certain parts of myself. In some ways, I want to be the typical, type A, All-American girl. I want to be that person who can work hard and get everything done and do it with poise and grace and beauty. That person is a good person...she works hard, and she knows how to keep her head floating above water when things get crazy. She knows how to kick her legs and balance her arms just right and ensure that she will stay alive and that the world will stay rightside up. But there is another part of me that is learning how to appreciate the art of things. This girl is learning that she doesn't really have to work so hard to keep her head above water, that it will happen on its own. She is learning that life is more about letting go and feeling the amazing joy of just being in the water. She is learning that, not only is it okay when the world doesn't stay right side up, it is actually kind of fun.

I probably couldn't make anything happen in my world without both of those girls. I need the overly organized, driven list-maker to keep me on track. I also need the floater, the artist to help me keep things in perspective and realize how beautful this whole life thing really is. The two of these girls together can make something happen...I believe it. It's all about the balance though. It's all about hozho.

Yesterday, I had a tutoring session with a girl who was working on a paper about Wordsworth and Shelley, and just reading it made me want to revisit this poem. I read it to Chase this morning, over coffee and a bottle of formula. My heart just can't let go of these few lines:

"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:-feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime, that blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:-that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,-
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."

Okay, okay..so maybe that was a little more than a few lines, but I won't apologize.

This time of year especially I feel the tug of my earthen roots. This spring, and every spring, is made fresh and alive and full of hope by my past experiences of the season. One breathfull of the wet green April air transports me. I am here, on my backporch, listening to my baby giggle. I am fifteen again and falling in love in a hammock under a blooming dogwood, and George Straight is serenading us through the rolled down windows of an old S10. I am eight and barefoot in a ditch, trying to catch a tadpole the size of a golfball with a paint bucket and my best friend. I am twenty, sitting around a campfire in the depths of Canyon De Chelley, singing Bob Dylan songs with teachers and friends and a Navajo family.

I associate these moments with that other "gift of aspect more sublime, that blessed mood." It is in these moments that the world we've created comes unhinged and dissipates under the pure power of the earth...when nothing else matters but the air I'm breathing and the blood pumping through my veins...when I realize that I am nothing but a part of it all..when I realize that I am everything.

Disclaimer: This blog is absolutely ridiculous. It is an attempt to just let my mind wander and try to make something out of a subject which I find nearly impenatrable. I am pretty sure that I'm way off track. The point is that now I have thought about it all long and hard, and I do believe that maybe my brain is a little bigger.

Topic of the evening: Post-Modernism (maybe?)

Here goes -

There is this woman who I have invented. She is just the right combination of a woman and a girl. She always has something witty and appropriate to say. She is pretty in a such a way that shows she doesn't care too much. She is wild and independent, but willing to surrender. She is a good mother...it comes naturally to her, but you can tell how hard she tries. She is a good friend...she knows how to make you feel good about yourself, in a real way, because she notices your subtleties. She is interested in just the right variety of cool things...nothing too superficial. She is a lover in a ridiculous sort of way. She has something important to say. She is pretty responsible. You might see her and think that she's got it all together.

You might see her on my facebook page, or in my stories, or walking around inside my mind (if you could see things like that). She is, I think (if I'm getting this Baudrillard guy right at all) a "hyperreal" version of myself. She is the me I put out there, the person I want you to see. But there is a problem. You see, the hyperreal is not the real at all. The hyperreal kills the real. It represents something that was never there (I think I'm going off track here. Sorry, Mr. Baudrillard, if this is not what you meant at all. This is where the non-real, hyper-something, whoever I am floated when I read your essay). In trying to be, I no longer am. I become a hollowed-out shell/mask of nonexistent, unattainable nothingness. This is the problem with the world today. We become the sum of our status updates and "about me" paragraphs. We end up as nothing more than the face we put on. Real life doesn't work this way. Reality is more of a string of actions and choices and thoughts than a state of being. Reality is a shifting something that could never be encapsulated in a thousand volumes of words.

The person that I described to you earlier is not real. She is a figment of my imagination. She is wishful thinking. This is what is real: a girl who drank too much coffee and can't sleep is staying up too late to type a blog that could very possibly make no sense whatsoever. She is almost too full of self-doubt to post it. She didn't finish her homework, and her house, car, and life are in various states of disarray (in a good way). She wants so bad to be good at life...to be smart...to be valid. She is real...or, at least, she was real for a moment. But I think in describing her, I may have just made her hyperreal.
And on that note of ridiculousness, I think it is important that I go to bed...

I can't believe I am finding time to do this again today. After staying up way too late last night goofing around on the internet reading other blogs and such, I overslept this morning. So, instead of sitting down to a nice chunk of time with my blog today, this post will most likely be composed in chunks throughout the day, whenever I get a spare minute. I'll try to be cohesive.

I feel like this is my constant struggle these days. Now that I have the baby, graduate school, work in the writing center, and a host of familial responsibilities, I find that I am literally flying from one task to another. I stay up late and wake up early, feeling as though my feet are already on the ground and I'm already running. I give myself that "little engine that could" speech when I feel my feet start to drag. I blog for clarity, and I write seriously whenever I can. I find myself sitting in bed at the end of the day feeling mentally, creatively, physically and emotionally exhausted, asking myself where the day went. The days of 2010 continue to slip through my fingers so quickly that it feels as though they were never in my hands at all. This brings me to the topic of the day.

Topic of the Day: Time

Sometimes I let the stress get to me. I waste what precious time I do have wishing for more. I get to feeling resentful of the paper deadlines that constantly taunt me and the tedium of my job and never-ending to-do list that makes up my life, and I just wish I could stay home with my baby boy all day long and write when he sleeps and have no other responsibilities.

This morning I remembered something my dad said to me during my senior year as an undergrad. I was (I only thought) totally bogged down with stress. I had multiple projects and papers due, and I was in full on perfectionist mode. I had launched into a tirade about how ridiculous it was for me to have gotten myself into this mess…why would I take eighteen hours of upper level English classes at once…who did I think I was…You all know the drill.

And my wise Daddy, instead of giving me a big long pep-talk about how awesome I was, instead of reminding me that he believed I could do anything, he gave me one simple, brilliant sentence:

“Try to remember that you actually love to do this.”

And I do. I absolutely love this crazy, stressful, student/mommy/worker/wife/writer thing I’ve got going on.

When I graduated from UCA last December, I expected to feel relief at the absence of pressure. Instead, I would wake up in the middle of the night looking for projects. I needed something to do and, more importantly, something to learn. I desperately needed papers to write and textbooks to read. That’s why I came back to school. During the interim, I spent seven dreadful months working as a waitress at a truck-stop, and as stimulating (and surprisingly lucrative) as that was, I didn’t love it. I learned that it majorly sucks to get up every day and go to a job that you hate, even if you do make a lot of money and have a lot of free time on your hands. The days slip through your fingers just as quickly, only there is no satisfaction at the end of the day. I need to wake up running. I need to shuffle from one loving task to another. I need the deadlines, the pressure, the stress. Even when it seems to be too much, I remember that I love each and every moment of my crazy, busy days.

I will power through this last month of the semester. The papers will get done, the presentations will get given, the bills will get paid. And amidst the chaos, I will grab every moment of solace I can. I will enjoy the kisses from my husband, the laughs with my writing center friends over coffee breaks, the late night blog readings, the crammed in morning writing sessions, the few minutes spent “talking” to my smiling two month old son before he drifts off to sleep, the quiet Sunday afternoons talking to my Mom on her porch swing. I will continue to wake up running everyday through this life I love, alternating between these easy moments and the challenges of my responsibilities because I know that time isn’t going to stop for me. Because I have got to suck down all the juice I can while life is ripe. Beacause this is what I love to do. Because (at the risk of sounding like a cheesy, musical-lover) there is “no day but today.”