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Elements, based on Ivo's book: The Four Elements of the Wise. Starts tonight, for 8 or 9 Monday nights, all June and July beginning June 12.

Six students expressed interest, four signed up, one is skipping tonight because of illness. If I decide to go to Sirius Rising I'll reschedule one, but that's up for grabs right now.

Am I prepared? Well, mostly. Ready? Surprisingly.

Spent much of the day tidying up and rearranging, and the place feels more habitable -- even though I wasn't aware of minding the low-level clutter. Dusting and wiping the rings off tabletops was surprisingly satisfying.

Class itself was remarkable. Working with three seasoned practitioners of all different kinds of experience. Each entered into the four 5-minute meditations with intention and focus, and all wrote extensive notes after each. Insights shared afterward were useful and somewhat startling.

We're on our way.

Driving home last night, hit a deer. Tore up the right front fender, headlight, bumper. Left the hood undamaged. The right front door doesn't open properly, but it opens. The right rear door as a minor dent and a fur mark where the deer hit as the fender flipped it sideways. No idea where the deer landed, exactly, but the police report suggests it was evident even in the dark. Humans not hurt, just shaken up and lost a couple hours of sleep.
I'm awed and proud of the Ioniq, which handled perfectly getting to the shoulder and then at 15 mph driving half a mile to a parking lot under the guidance of a state trooper. Even with the guts of its headlight hanging in front of the wheel and the plastic interior of the wheel well rubbing the tire.
Score another one for Hyundai, the car that gives its all and protects people inside.

Good grief, have I really not written here since March?

I've seen the open tab in my browser a bunch of times, but usually on my way to something else ... or getting ready to run out the door to some scheduled event. Or other excuses.

I don't have a lot to say right now either, except that of course I'm writing here to procrastinate on phone calls -- there are 5 personal and 5 chaplain calls I should make, and I'm choking as bad as the Chicago Cubs in August.

Is there anything else to talk about?

Therapy appointment today. Feeling depressed and frustrated. Finally arrived at some clarity.

* I'm not doing enough that feels useful. Far too little chaplain work, thanks to budget cuts, administrative decision. Nothing personal. The fact that last year's income was barely 55% of the previous year's doesn't signify. Because the hard part isn't (thankfully) the money; it's the interaction, the feeling of using my skills. I miss the work, and one or two appointments a week isn't enough.

* I'm not playing the piano, though it's been on its feet in my apartment for weeks. Time to let it go. So today, shortly after the therapy session, I sent out a broadcast email to all the descendants of my mother, inviting them to consider if they want it. May 1 I will sell it if they don't. Maybe if I hear 'No' from everyone, I'll mention it to Facebook.

* After all this time I may actually have to learn to set up a webpage. Therapist is right; I could start a little business doing chaplaincy for Pagans and other non-monotheists, whether with 'hospice' folks or otherwise. I could work as a Death Midwife in addition to what I do for my medical-system employer.

* After all this time I may have to start writing fiction. One of the big frustrations of this season of memoir has been the vagueness of my memory for real events and real conversations. But if I make up what they would or should have been ... maybe that's fiction. Can I learn to write short stories?

* I need to go back and visit the Pagan folks who have reached out to me. Just because they didn't fit into that week ... I should check back in. Maybe that's where I should be spending my time.

* If I move the loom back into the center of the apartment?

* If I continue to cull the books?

Stay tuned.

Is it just that with Daylight Savings Time new two days ago, it doesn't feel late enough yet? Is it just that the last time I danced I missed a couple of calls due to hearing challenges? Hmm.

Last night I realized I can't dance as long as I used to, or even the way I used to.

Back in the 90s I square danced regularly for several years, but sometime in the 2000s I got "too busy". This year I started dancing again. It's been fun, and fulfilling. I don't remember as many of the calls as I'd like, but re-learning Mainstream and Plus has felt interesting and challenging enough not to be bored.

Early in this first class I signed up to go to a major continental convention.

I just canceled that trip. It's obvious that I can't dance all day, and won't have developed that kind of stamina between now and July. When I bail out on class and leave early ... When I can dance just three tips in a row -- total 45 minutes, with two 2-minute breaks -- and then have to sit down ... Well, traveling halfway across the country to spend $1000 on a hotel room seems like a lot to do for about 3 hours of dancing over 5 days.
It feels weird to be 'knowing my limitations' like that, though.

Much like giving away my iceskates, it's another moment of recognizing things I may never do again.

This semester I'm taking a course in Trauma-informed Chaplaincy. As I should have expected, it's bringing up a lot of feelings about various moments of past discomfort, confusion, helplessness, anger, etc. The reading is illuminating corners of my psyche that I haven't visited in awhile, some of which is delightful. And some isn't.

So i'm back in therapy, doing some work with EMDR and a couple of related techniques to address trauma without necessarily invoking the intellectual mind.

It's been useful. And hard. And at the moment I seem to be a bit fragile.

Apart from the work with trauma, the memoir has been a challenge for related reasons.

But most of what's troubling me these past few months is aging. Forgetfulness, distractedness, a growing puzzlement about modern technology. Any time I buy a new piece of electronics I'm frustrated because I can't figure out how to use it without help. Reminds me a lot of the early days of cellphones, when all the kids knew intuitively how they worked and all the grandparents didn't.

I don't like feeling doddery. It makes me cycle between anxiety and depression. There have been moments this winter when I wondered if I was sliding into a clinical depression. Or maybe it was just the Winter Dark. Since it seems to be easing a bit.

Life sure is complicated. Childhood is harder than it looks.

So I sabotaged myself without noticing. I've been writing a memoir, in a writing group 10 weeks at a time for a bit over a year this time -- started 10 years ago, but still. After I signed up, but before class started, Cherry Hill Seminary offered a class in Trauma-informed chaplaincy, which sounded exactly right for the next stage of my work as a hospice chaplain.

So now I'm working with trauma at the same time that I'm working with my personal history. Yikes.

Lots of crap from the past came forward. So today I had my first session in years with a therapist I was seeing in the early 2000s. It was awesome. Effective. Deep.

I'm exhausted but right where I should be.

Posting because I want to start again the habit of regular blogging. Also it's a way to be journaling. Which I would like to be doing more of.

Lately I find myself wondering if I'm sliding away. Too much time playing computer solitaire -- a couple of new games have caught my attention, but it isn't really that. Too much time reading click-bait on the internet. What am I avoiding?

Practically everything.

My feelings about having grandkids I rarely see and barely know, and no earthly idea how I might get to know them. I've always been so awful about understanding kids (or other adults, really).

My feelings about aging, my awareness that at some point I will have become actually too old for ____. Is this now?

Right at the moment I'm having that feeling about work, partly because my workload has sharply decreased due to a falling census and stricter medicare rules thanks to a few bad actors in our industry. And partly because my memory fails me regularly.

Is this depression? or being realistic? Is it time to quit or take a break? or just time?

Got the piano tuned. I still find it hard to play. Can't find the book with the works I'd really like to be playing, and find the sound just a bit uncomfortable. Is that my hearing aids?

Every couple of weeks I weave another few inches. I love the weaving, when I'm doing it, but sure does take a lot to get me to put my butt on the bench.

I should sell the piano, I think. I should keep it, but none of the kids actually want it. Hmm.

Not sure what to write, except that I want to be making entries more often -- and here it is more than a month later.

Today is Christmas Eve. Against my actual inclinations, I'm in either the second or third year of celebrating Christmas with three other people on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, and then their extended family in the afternoon. It's always a little difficult, chiefly because of archaic wishes and performance anxiety. My free choice in recent years was often to spend the day working in a hospital or in-patient unit, or to spend the day alone at home or maybe outdoors. But since forming this relationship, I've been here.

It''s interesting to look at how much I have behaved avoidantly about so many relationships. Especially when I feel guilty, and even more especially when I'm not acknowledging that I feel guilty, my lifelong reaction has been to walk away.

I walked away from two marriages when I couldn't manage my feelings, most especially my resentment at being treated as 'less than.' In one case, it was the husband making a decision that I thought we should have discussed together. In the other case, it was realizing that his political views ignored my lived experience (this is still a cop-out description but I don't have a better one).

A conversation with one of my kids the other day brought forward how avoidant I have been as a parent, making assumptions about what my kids wanted or needed but failing to look deeply into that. Even when they were children I wasn't necessarily attentive to their actual need for my company and attention. And there's so much I can't really say about that.

The closer I look, the more I don't want to see, the more I can't look away. Some of the decisions I made ... some of the choices ... some of the moments when I should have looked away, but didn't, when I should have turned my back... so painful to try to look at all that without (too much) judginess.

My first exposure to polyamory was full of honesty and confusion, people trying to tell the truth about their feelings but mostly only telling the truth about their actions, people wanting -- for easy example -- to pretend that relationships could be transitive, so that if A is friends with B and B is friends with C, it follows that of course A and C will fall immediately into friendship. But at least we told the truth about what we were doing, at least among ourselves and with everyone we were close to.

The next couple of attempts were clumsy and awkward, mainly because (again?) people weren't entirely honest about their feelings. I can look back, now, and see that Husband #1 wanted to have an open marriage but wasn't comfortable about his young wife having free choice or making decisions without explicitly consulting him. I can see that he had specific sexual inclinations that he was afraid to talk with her about, that led him to occasionally wander off for a day or two at a time, and buy the sort of magazine that couldn't be sold above the counter in the neighborhood drugstore. We also had entirely different childhood experiences and entirely different styles of fighting. So that marriage was open, and we each had other lovers (though not many) ... but the marriage collapsed anyway.

Marriage #2 was difficult in an entirely different way, and I'm still processing how to write about that. So much seems to depend on what individual words mean, and what assumptions each of us made in various moments. And all of this really ought to get a couple of pages apiece.

So I made an off-hand comment in a previous segment posted for the memoir class, and of course everyone wants to know more. I should have expected that, since I mentioned in a single paragraph my mother's disastrous first marriage and my dead half-brother. But answering the question has been ... interesting.

I write what she told me when I was a very young kid -- say, elementary school age -- and she wanted to shut down kids gossiping.

I write what she told me when I was in high school ... and college.

I write the last story she told me -- the one with a major age difference between her and her husband, the likelihood that it was a forced marriage, the possibility that the child was conceived in rape.

I try to figure out when the child was actually born, and how old she actually was. Every time I do a piece of the math I get a new surprise.

That this is probably part of the memoir process, that in the process of writing a memoir one should expect to arrive at more clarity about life events ... doesn't seem to make the revelations easier.

The more I learn about Victorian morality (my grandmother was born in the late 1860s), the more I learn about New York Social Register restrictions, the more I learn about a girl being "ruined," the more I want to puke. No wonder my dad was so worried about the possibility that I might get pregnant. No wonder abortion was a well-known fact, if you knew the right people and had the right money, even though it was definitely illegal and doctors went to jail and lost their medical licenses if they were caught doing it.

So many lives blighted by forced marriages. So much destruction in the name of knowing for sure which children you might have fathered.

Lately lots of dreaming, after a long time of being silent. Most recently they suddenly have real people from my waking life in them ... which hasn't really happened since childhood.

Staying up with the class has been hard. Having deadlines has been very, very useful. Last night I stayed up until 1:30 am to finish something that was due this morning -- and I'm glad I did. It's not as polished as I would like, but it's complete, it's as long as the word count allowed for the assignment (which means it's the biggest chunk of memoir I could post). I'm hoping the comments of my classmates will help me refine it.

I'm clear at this point that there are at least three memoirs I could finish, if I do: something about suburbia in the 1950s, which is so very different from either the post-war neighborhoods of Cape Cods or the McMansions of the 1990s and later; something about growing up the child of an alcoholic pillar of the community; polyamory; Paganism and chaplaincy; woman wanting to be an engineer; thwarted dreams running in the family; the tragedy of non-consensual sexual experience (and does that kind of victimization run in families? why or why not?). Probably there is more, too.

All that remains is to keep myself writing, and start to find some way to structure the output.

And, of course, to ease, conquer, or ignore my fears about the process.

So far the writing process seems to go best when I look at the comments on the last bit and try to fill in the blanks.

Last time I off-handedly mentioned a piece of my mom's life that was background and rather taken for granted in my childhood ... and of course the readers want to know all about it and misinterpreted some of it.

The amount of unconscious racism and sexism in the comments is amazing -- people asking questions of women they would never ask of men.

I see this is rambling and incoherent but I'm tired.

Ok, now I'm seriously spooked. Spent most of the morning with my head in trivia -- solitaire, facebook, utter nonsense. Even pulling out clothing to donate.

Which is to say, I have an opportunity and find myself scared of it.

Pulled out most of the autobiographical writing I've done since 1998 ... some of it well-organized and articulate, some of it deeply in first-draft territory. It's a lot. There must be a book in here somewhere.

My current mentor (Gotham Writers Workshops, if you want to know) suggests reading through all of it, keeping a list of which pieces have which themes -- or even just making piles on the floor.

I could do that: Themes that immediately suggest themselves:

The Alcoholic's Daughter (I have about 60 more-or-less consecutive pages of that one in about third draft.
Polyamory then and now
Living alone and preferring it
Spirituality, religion, witchcraft
Chaplaincy
Woman engineer wannabe
Boundaries and which ones actually matter to me and which don't ... or not much
eg lending my car to almost anyone, ditto money, supporting people who have less and wanting to be anonymous with it

Also, nonfiction books / essay collections:

Building the house
Travels with RV, touring the repair shops of North America
Cross-country travel

I'm spooked and hiding rather than start reading. Do I need to know why?

Maybe I should make a point of writing here a bit more often.

Right now I'm in my third consecutive semester -- well, 10-week class -- in memoir writing. Trying to sort out a number of issues from the long past. Trying to write clearly about some things that seem important.

The last thing I wrote here suggested I ought to collect 'everything' and see if it could find a publisher, and I may still do that -- we'll see.

For now, though, I want to try posting her a bit more often than quarterly. Sorry for the delay.

I posted an edited / improved version of last month's memoir piece last week, got a lot of good feedback. The book I'm working on is nominally about my work as a hospice chaplain, but almost all the feedback I get asks me for more personal reminiscence, more details about my life before chaplaincy.

So I resurrected a piece I workshopped in a different class back in 2009.

Now I'm chagrined to discover that I don't recall the events anywhere near as clearly now as I did then, even though what I was writing about was 30 years in the past by 2009, and only 43 years in the past now. Have I lost THAT much detailed memory in 10 years? Yep.

On the other hand, I am a somewhat better writer and editor now than I was, so I can tighten this up decently well.

Reading it at that level of detail is kind of interesting in several ways. The tone of voice, grammar, viewpoint and voice I was writing in then, compared to now. The events that I really took to heart, and felt hurt by, then -- that I barely recall now. All the big feelings, the anger and resentment, the sense of being injured ... all that has just dissipated.

In the meantime, I've read several of the pieces from that era and found that actually they're pretty good. Maybe I should collect them in a book and look for a publisher without waiting for the hospice memoir to feel 'done.'

Suddenly a month has gone by. The movie shooting is done, I've attended an out of town event at which my long-ago friend presented, I'm getting to understand more of what's at stake for her, and for the videographer, in this documentary, and that's a good thing.
I got a chance to see the tiniest clip of my own interview with her, and marvel at how heavy-lidded my eyes these days. Maybe I'll be next for blepharoplasty? Like a friend had a few years ago? But so far the droopy eyeliids aren't in MY way, no matter how sleepy they make me look.
My workload is down, at hospice, which leaves more time for friends and for the memoir class I'm in. I'm writing reasonably good stuff, and workshopping some of it to be better, so that's another good thing. Smaller paychecks not so much, but it's not being a problem.
Working on my estate plan, recognizing that leaving everything to the probate process is probably not best. Still figuring out what to do, especially in the changing landscape of post-pandemic (if we're actually there yet), with the Great Resignation still in progress.
Getting stuff done, that's the main thing.
Learning how to write my feelings into the memoir, presently writing about Hospice.

Today's event: a visit from a videographer who is making a documentary of a dear friend from long, long ago. Today she's photographing, page by page, a file of letters we exchanged in the 1970s, when we were no longer living in the same town but were still regularly in touch and visiting back and forth. Tomorrow I get to spend some time with the friend as well, being video'd while we reminisce. Fabulous and weird ... and I recognize how self-conscious I would have been even 10 years ago, and how little I am afraid of this now.

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Tending Joy

Teaching again

Crash

Hiatus

Selling the piano

Missing Square Dancing

Getting old and giving things up

Studying trauma -- oof

Back in therapy again

January 2023

Egad the year is almost over!

Memoir process, and memory

Memoir about mom

Dreaming

Writing, somehow

Writing a book

Memoir into book?

Memoir and memory

Memoir, history, walking down memory lane

Time flies

Risk and memory

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June 2025

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