I’ve spent the last year doing everything except writing.
For the most part, I didn’t write because I spent most of my time reflecting upon things that I could never transcribe without betraying confidence. Lots of confidences, actually. It seems that 2015 was The Year of the Life Lesson. As a minister, friend, mother, lover, teacher,[1] I’ve held my share of hands in 2015. By the end of the year, my refrain had become, “A’right Universe, no more life lessons; I’m all full up on character building at the moment!” Most of these were not *my* life lessons, mind you—I was part of support systems during others’ life lessons—though there was definitely a learning curve for me in this tale. A Cosmic teachable moment, if you will. I’ll get to that.
The intensity of my year, genuine personal crisis among close kindred after genuine personal crisis among close kindred,
resulted in a really beautiful summer experience with everyone leaning on each other and taking solace in “not being alone.” And musical theatre. Once fall rolled around, many of the crises had leveled out to manageable; divorces were finalized, custody battles were no longer heated, risky pregnancies were brought to healthy conclusions, abusers were managed by the legal system, and that sort of thing. Two new crises appeared—one cancer diagnosis and one lost job for the family’s sole provider—nothing to sneeze at, but certainly not the power-punch jab-cross-left uppercut-cross combination of spring. Just let me just say, for the record, the last days of September and the first weeks of October sucked. (For a peek at how I approach the cycles of the seasons, have a look at “Deep Winter,” written almost exactly a year ago.) In the vacuum of further crises, however, I saw that patterns of abuse started to appear—some of them wonderfully resolved—others not. That’s where the lesson became mine. At what point do I stop being “support” and start being “crutch”? Here’s what I figured out. Some people come to me because they respect me as a spiritual leader. Once they’ve been ministered to, they are grateful and go back about their lives. Some people come to me and don’t know how to respect the role of service a minister assumes.[2] As spiritual leaders, this is a precarious ledge for us to tread. And entirely our responsibility to regulate.
This is just an interesting side-note and, perhaps, metaphor. My daughter, who works at an assisted-living complex, came home and said, “This lady asked me why we wear gloves when we bus tables. When I told her it was ‘sanitary,’ she said understood why we wore them to serve, but not to bus. I had to tell her, ‘When we serve, we wear gloves to protect you. When we bus, we wear them to protect ourselves.’” Apparently, the lady still didn’t get it. In some circumstances servers are imagined as automatons. But there is a big difference between service and servitude. And sometimes it’s appropriate to put on prophylactic gloves.
The problem with this is that we need to touch[3] and to be touched—physically, metaphorically, you know—and gloves act, by their intended nature, as a barrier. So, when to wear gloves, when not to wear gloves? When do I need to stop directly touching and start protecting myself in this act of service? Yeah.
That’s where I am. Trying to figure out gloves.
And boxing.
In the past three months, though I had decided I was out of the confidential woods enough to write again, I’d not been writing because my life took on some of those elements that required me to learn to lean on someone. It’s odd having the shoe on the other foot. Or glove on the other hand, as it were. Here’s the deal. My kids are grown and my husband and I are looking to relocate—perhaps across the state, perhaps across the country, we haven’t determined that yet. The ambiguity of the situation is naturally riddled with both anticipation and anxiety. Smack dab in the middle of that, we’ve taken in a tenant,[4] a dear friend who has a great opportunity to advance his career but who needs a temporary leg-up to make that happen. Anyone who’s had a long-term house-mate knows there’s a good deal of negotiation involved.
And a good deal of boxing—move this here, that there, put this in storage, etc. In the middle of boxing up a house inhabited for a dozen years, a house in which small children came to adulthood, I needed to relearn to relean on my own support system. Thank the gods I had one. And I made a new discovery along the way; (this is probably the point I want to get to most), I have found a Muse again. It took all the literal and figurative boxing up of the past and all of the precautionary glove-wearing of the present to create room for new things: a safe space.
So, here’s my plan. (If I write it down and post it, I feel more accountable to follow through.) I know I’ve told you a dozen times that I was going to write a book about my nutty experiences in the Pagan arena. Sure, I did all the handbooks and non-fiction religious texts, but not the book idea that was the inspiration for this blog over five years ago. I never could get my hands wrapped around the narrative properly because A) like I said in “Deep Winter,” I didn’t know how the story ended and B) I didn’t have an appropriate Muse to address. Now I have both closure and a Muse. No more excuses. But to keep me in the writing mode, I’m going to hold myself responsible to this blog again too. It’s a good way to keep my spiritual-academic brain in top form. I’ll be writing about the Runes and Heathen lore and practical applications, as usual; but rather than using the English alphabet as many of us did for years a few years ago, I’m going to work my way through the Futhark “alphabet.” (The Elder—not that I won’t wander into the Younger or the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc from time to time.)
With that, I leave you for now. As ever, I’ll tell you how the boxing goes and what I discover about these gloves.
[1] And add to this list “musical director”! Yay, it’s such an adventure. After my fun with George Bailey, I got to direct Young Frankenstein. On Tuesday, we, The Board of Directors for the local theatre, will vote on the musical for summer 2016. I have the perusal pack for the seemingly unanimous top pick already on my desk. As ever, I’ll let you know. For now, I’ll just say that I may need to build a wooden rabbit.
[2] Servants exist to be persistently retained, right? Um, no. Let’s not get off on entitlement and the creation of a servant-class and the politics of servitude in The Deep South, because this quasi-Marxist Witch could go off. When a teenager from Texas makes a bad choice and lives are destroyed and his momma’s defense is “affluenza”? Huston, we have a problem.
[3] Exciting new change: I’m providing Reiki services at a local wellness studio. It’s grand and I feel “in touch” again.
[4] Who, it just occurred to me as synchronous to this post, “donated” a large box of culinary gloves to our household. Anyone who knows me knows that there is a direct corollary between the Scoville score of a pepper and the likelihood that I will touch a facial membrane after cutting it.
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