Have you ever read Meg Fee's blog? I stumbled across her page when I was in high school--and have been reading her ever since. Insights and softness and red lipstick, oh my. I saw this quote on her Instagram page this weekend, and it was exactly what I needed to hear. And now, for the risking.

"Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver

It's been nearly two years since I first heard this poem, while on retreat. 
One of those life-altering pieces of art that comes along once in a long while.

Screwing up is part of the program: on building community

Slowly but surely, building community, little by little

"Just to be clear

I don’t want to get out 

without a broken heart.

I intend to leave this life 

so shattered 

there better be a thousand separate heavens 

for all of my separate parts" 

--Andrea Gibson, Royal Heart 

I once heard someone describe St. Louis as a “sticky place.” People never intend to live here long, he said, but somehow or other they get stuck.

In many ways, Spokane reminds me of St. Louis, and as I’ve been making decisions about where I want to live at this moment in time, I’ve taken into consideration the idea that Spokane, too, may be a sticky place.

This frightens me. I never want to be stuck. I’ve thought about leaving just to opt out of staying. Choosing to leave seems easier to me, right now. My spirit is restless and I don’t want to get stuck. But then I’ve moved enough to know the loneliness I would feel upon leaving is greater than the loneliness I feel now in staying.

For the past two years, I have lived in what we called intentional community. When I volunteered at the Catholic Worker house in St. Louis, one of the community members talked about the St. Louis heat and the house’s lack of air conditioning. Community living was hard, she said, but we’ve all decided to stay in love anyway. This is my image of what community living should be. Human beings. Drinking from mason jars. Sweating in the summer heat. Sharing stories. Screwing up. Choosing to stay in love anyway. This is not how my years in intentional community played out, to say the least.

At the end of July, I finished my two years with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest, which signified a transition in both my work and living situations. Every day I feel as though I am flailing. Friends are graciously taking me into their homes. I am working part-time as a hostess at a restaurant. I am no longer in school or AmeriCorps, where community is built into my days.

When I was a freshman in high school, I asked a boy to the Turnabout dance and he turned me down. The night of the dance, I stayed home. I cried and cried, and my dad made me a chocolate milkshake, like he sometimes did when I was sad. This weekend, in moments of loneliness, I’ve longed to be sitting on the orange couch with my dad and mom, chocolate milkshake in hand. I imagine that sitting there, I would no longer feel this loneliness. But I would.

Just to be clear, I don’t want to get out without a broken heart.

I don’t want to stay home the night of the dance, just because a boy turned me down.

And so, here I am, fighting to keep my heart open, even if that means it’s more likely to be broken. Dancing, even when I feel like I was turned down.

When I left Portland, a co-worker gave me a pair of socks that read: SCREWING UP IS PART OF THE PROGRAM.

I’ve always been terrified of screwing up. What I need is a community in which screwing up is part of the program.

This morning, my friend Kim and I sat across from each other, drinking coffee and brunching. Earlier I’d shared my thoughts of going home to Chicago, said that right now, as my life has changed so much in the past two months, I don’t know where I belong.

That’s part of why it’s hard for me to stay in Spokane, said Kim. But I think there is also something to slowly but surely building your own community, little by little.

Community is remembering that my voice is loud and carries and knowing that I am loved as myself when I still choose to keep my throat chakra open. Community is having the grace to screw up. Community is when a friend orders me leggings that she thinks I would like, just because. Community is little kids running to me, each hugging one of my knees. Community is sending job leads. Community is sitting on the couch, drinking tea, biking on the Centennial Trail and knowing where I am going. It’s knowing the owner. It’s writing letters to friends in faraway places.

I will still feel like I’m flailing most days. But I deserve a community where screwing up is part of the program, and the only way I will build that is in staying. I don’t want to leave because I am afraid of getting stuck. I am here, and I am all here, if only for this moment in time. And just to be clear, I don’t want to get out without a broken heart.

Fishing in Newport, WA 9/26/15

To find the joy in transitions, take breaks for:

  

·         Earl Grey tea with lots of honey and half-and-half

·         Saturday morning chats with friends in Missouri

·         Spending the morning smelling three-leaf clovers with this sweet little lady

Woo girls: the new hip

I am beginning to believe that the key to happiness is the decision not to be the smartest person in the room.

This summer at the end of my friend Clare’s wedding, her uncle Craig said to me, “I’ve figured out who you are. You’re a woo girl.”

With my mama in Seattle, likely pre- or post- woo.

“Well, I mean, I live in the Pacific Northwest and bike everywhere, so I’m kind of hip, too,” I responded, thereby negating any of the hipness left over after a night of dancing, befriending Josh-the-bartender, and, yes, lots of wooing. I know woo girls are not highly regarded by all. I’ve watched How I Met Your Mother. Though I’d had one of the best days, celebrating my dear, dear friends, I felt the need to explain my personality type on the Enneagram, Meyers-Briggs, and StrengthsFinder, and to point out that when I took the StrengthsFinder test three years ago, I was not, in fact, a WOO.

My hypersensitivity to other people’s impression of me reached its height when I studied abroad in Ireland and became acutely aware of the “obnoxious American” stereotype. I did not want to be that girl. So I kept myself in check—and when I didn’t, I fretted that my new friends and Irish family would write me off as just another one of those American girls.

This thought pattern inhibited my connection to the two great loves of my life: risk-taking and rowdiness. And it inhibited it for much too long. I frequently found cause to explain the complexities of my personality and to point out that smart, hip, and observant as I was, I knew what boxes people were placing me in. How exhausting! How unnecessary! How much happier I am when I choose not to be the smartest person in the room, not to speculate as to what others are thinking of me!

At the wedding, my mom joined in the conversation I was having with Craig, who asked her if she was a woo girl, too. To answer the question, she’d gotten in trouble in high school for “being boisterous in the lunch room.” At one point, my ma and I wooed in unison.

We may be woo girls, and I do know what that means in popular culture. But we also have the most fun of any girls at the party.

On being gentle

Coming back from the drugstore, my hands hold Old Spice, blue razor blades. This is being gentle.

Crunchy and brittle are listed as synonyms in the thesaurus. They aren’t. Because right now, as the muggy summer turns to crispness, I don’t want the particles my homemade deodorant forgot to seep into my new, elbow-padded sweaters. And I wish that homemade deodorant worked better than this. My armpits belie my DIY books.

Cleaning out an old deodorant applicator, melting olive oil and pellets of beeswax, adding essential oils. Finding a spray bottle to fill with baking soda and water. A double deodorizing scheme. Yet, here I am, my hands clutching Old Spice and razor blades. 

One summer in college my friend Terrence lived with my roommate Roma and me for two weeks. After his shower, the bathroom would smell like boy-smell, as we called it. We would smell his Old Spice body wash as we sat on the toilet. After he left, we missed that smell. We asked our friend Mark to shower in our shower. He did. The next day I smelled my loofah and it smelled of boy-smell. I didn’t use that loofah again.

Walking out the store, my hands filled with Old Spice and pink-tax-free razor blades, I thought about femininity, and what it means to mine that I am purchasing products marketed to men. What it means to my crunchiness that I am purchasing products at all. But, again, crunchiness isn’t brittleness. Old Spice isn’t brittly [it’s a word in Old English] unfeminine. I can still bend without breaking. 

The Big Pit

When I was seven, my family went on a vacation to Arizona, which included a trip to the Grand Canyon. As we looked out over this geological phenomenon, this holy site of the Pueblo people, I said, “It’s just a big pit.”

The more my parents simultaneously scoffed and laughed at my commentary, the more I repeated it, as seven-year-olds tend to do. I repeated my quip about “The Big Pit” so many times that it became the title of our Grand Canyon scrapbook page.

I’ll read Wuthering Heights or The Boston Girl or any of a number of other books in which beautiful, complicated child characters will have had a deep connection to the moors they lived near or to the sea, which they saw for the first time when they were 16. I’ll read these books and wonder why, if I am the complex creature I’ve found myself to be, it took me years to feel connection to the earth and to adventure.

Growing up, I didn’t like to be outside; I thought roses were plain and funny smelling; I didn’t care to look out the window on road trips through the Appalachians; and I thought the Grand Canyon was nothing but a big pit. I would have chosen a book over an adventure any day—and I am grateful for my connection to the written word, but I sometimes fret that I missed too many experiences for the sake of getting transition over and done with and getting back to my books.

This may be the reason that I am in love with the Pacific Northwest. I’m soaking in all the natural beauty that I ignored as a child twenty-zillion-fold. In Portland, I could literally stop and smell the roses the entire way to work.

If I ever write an autobiography, it would be dishonest of me to begin by reminiscing about my connection to the maple tree in my backyard or to Lake Michigan. The romantic, English major, four on the Enneagram side of me aches to be able to say these things are true. But the genuine, human, gentle side of me knows that it’s alright that I spent more of my childhood hours reading about adventures than having them and eating McDonalds instead of basking in the sun pockets beneath the trees.

My story doesn’t have to fit the mold of the young girl who intuitively understood her connectedness to the people and spaces around her. My story can be—and is—about the woman who can spend hours walking on the beach on Whidbey Island and jumped off the cliffs at Tubbs Hill with a college best friend. And I can find solace when I remember that there was a little bit of this spunk in me when I was a girl, since I was the one who discovered the hidden raspberry bush in our backyard, I auditioned for countless plays from middle school through high school, I interrupted my teacher in the middle of her rendition of "The Highway Man" because I knew I could read it with more feeling. It just looks a little different than it does in the novels.