Category Archives: My personal history

Changing lanes

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The way I figure it, I spent about 200 24-hour days in traffic on State Route 520 from Seattle to Redmond and back over the course of 10 years. This commute bore the distinction of taking me across the longest floating bridge on Earth twice a day.

You see a lot when you spend that kind of time in the car. Little things, like the fact that someone glued a bottle of aspirin to the jersey wall between the east- and west-bound lanes. The way a road-striping crew painted a fresh yellow line all the way up to—and then beyond—a dead raccoon on the side of the highway. And a guy dressed as the grim reaper, standing silently at an intersection.

These things were entertaining, but one of my experiences became a metaphor that has helped me ever since.

During my commute, I was often frustrated to find myself in a lane that had come to a dead stop, while traffic moved briskly and efficiently in the next lane over. Eventually, I learned that I couldn’t switch to the lane I wanted to be in unless the traffic in my own lane began to move as well.

I learned that you can’t change lanes unless you’re moving.

The economy brought me to a halt, and I saw nothing but brake lights. This was especially frustrating because people were sailing by unscathed in the next lane over.

It took a while, but the lane I’m in has begun to move. It’s less than ideal. It’s nowhere near where I’ve been or where I want to be. But as I pick up speed, I also pick up the ability to make choices.

At some point, I’ll be able to change lanes. Or I’ll realize that the one I’m in now turned out to be the right one after all.

What’s a nice girl like you doing at a land trust?

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We lived on a 50- by 100-foot lot in Seattle’s Crown Hill neighborhood when my son Adrian was born. He was only weeks old when I noticed that he stopped crying if I took him outside, and I soon realized that I couldn’t raise him in the city that I’d called home for 20 years. We had to move. This child needed to be in nature.

My husband did not feel called to parenthood as I did, nor did he feel called to move to the country. The day came when I had to choose between my husband and my child, and our divorce was final when Adrian was 18 months old–three days after my father died.

I was doubled over with loss, but Adrian’s needs kept me putting one foot in front of the other. He inched me through the valley of the shadow one diaper-change, one feeding, and one nap at a time.

I set my sights on Whidbey Island and began the search for a new home. It was difficult for the people who loved us to understand this, and some took it personally. How could a single mom leave her support network behind and move with her toddler to a strange place where she knew only one family?

Architect Ross Chapin once told me, “Whidbey Island is a calling.” For us, it was more than that. I felt as if we got caught in a sci-fi tractor beam–there was no way for us not to come.

There are times here on Whidbey Island, particularly in Langley, when life feels so idyllic that I’m afraid a Klieg light will drop out of the sky, as it did in the movie The Truman Show, and I’ll discover that I’m just living on a really big movie set. It feels that idyllic. And it’s my deepest privilege to raise my child in a place where he can fish, dig for clams, and whack nettles with a stick; where he’s had goats, chickens, and bees to care for; potatoes to harvest; and trails to blaze through the forest. But beyond being a beautiful place, Whidbey Island has redefined what the word “family” means. Our family has grown to include others who heeded the same call and moved here to provide the best imaginable childhood they could for their children.

I stayed home with Adrian until he was 10, which is when we finally overcame the vision problems that had made it so challenging for him to succeed in school. The businesses that I had been running from home did not generate enough income to support us, so I began looking for a job elsewhere. Having been employed as a technical writer before Adrian was born, I searched for writing and editing jobs on the mainland, completely heartsick about the 12 hours a day that I’d have to spend away from my son, and struck by the irony that I had to work off the island so we could live on the island. Moving was out of the question.

Then, one day, clicking the wrong link on Craig’s List led me to an expired listing for a communication and marketing position at the Whidbey Camano Land Trust. I read the description, and said, “That’s me!” But when I went to www.wclt.org and saw this slide show below, I knew it was my job in the same way that I knew I had to move to Whidbey Island. The slide show represented everything we loved about our home.

Could it GET any better than working on the island, protecting what makes it so special in the first place? In spite of my late application and a total of 165 applicants, I was the one they hired, and I feel lucky to spend my days preserving a place I love so dearly.

Stuff, and how it defines us

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“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” William Morris

My mother grew up in Germany during World War II and experienced genuine need. During that time, for example, ration cards limited each citizen to only one egg per month. And if somebody in your family had a birthday that month, your egg was likely to wind up in his or her cake.

Surviving the war caused Mom to hoard Stuff, which insulates her from need.  At 80, she is surrounded by a sea of her own Stuff, as well as all the Stuff that my father left behind when he died.

Dad’s father was a chaplain in the Army, which had him moving hither and yon all of his childhood. Unfortunately, Dad later joined the Air Force and forced the same fate on us. When we were moving every year or two, we didn’t acquire much Stuff. But when Dad retired, Stuff came in waves.

For dad, Stuff was grounding. It was an anchor. It kept him in place. It also raised his self esteem. Being able to say “I’ve got one of those” made him feel important. When he died, he left behind an inordinate amount of Stuff.

My Stuff story didn’t gel until after I’d realized a dream and designed and built a house. Building it was one of the most fun and creative things I’ve ever done. It was self-expression on a grand scale, and the best part was that I got to live in it after it was done. Everywhere I looked, I saw a reflection of who I am.

For me, Stuff became a mirror. Due to a perfect storm of adverse financial circumstances, I have to sell the house that I created, and with it, a business and a farm. This has sent me reeling. I’ve come to realize that, in the absence of my Stuff, I don’t know who I am.

We moved several weeks ago, and I still haven’t found my feet. Most of our remaining belongings are in storage, and only the bare essentials are with us in a cabin that a dear friend invited us to live in for a few months. As lucky as we are to be here, I do not see myself reflected in my surroundings and I’ve been experiencing an identity crisis.

Who am I?

In my attempt to make sense of my losses, I concluded that they must’ve been necessary because I’d come to derive my sense of self from the wrong things. But what were the right things?

Today, with the help of two coach friends, I realized that the right thing is people. People—and the love they hold for me—are the most accurate reflection of who I am.

I cannot describe how much relief that realization has brought.

But enough about me. What’s your Stuff story?

Oh, hell

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My 80-year-old mother and I got in a big argument about hell on Sunday. She’s absolutely certain that I’m going there, and I’m just as certain that I’m not.

Here’s my reasoning:

  1. One of the most important laws of physics is that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.
  2. I believe that our essential selves–the core of who we are–are made up of energy.
  3. This was made clear to me at the funeral of my friend Jill, who died in a car accident at the age of 16. Seeing her body at the funeral was a shock. Though it looked like Jill, her essential “Jillness” was gone, and all that was left was a shell.
  4. Jill’s death caused my then-fundamentalist Christian faith to crumble. It took me 20 years to rebuild a belief system that made sense to me. But I never stopped believing that Jill’s consciousness had survived the accident.
  5. I concluded that, because a disembodied consciousness (or “soul”) does not have physical senses, you can’t hurt it by hitting, stabbing, or burning it.
  6. So, even if a physical hell did exist, how could it hurt something that is pure consciousness?

There are many other reasons why I don’t believe there’s a hell (more of my journey away from fundamentalist Christianity is described here). But as I said, Mom is just as sure that there is a hell, and that it’s my destiny. There’s a little girl inside me who has always yearned for my mother’s approval, and it hurts to know that the only way I will ever receive it is become what I am not. I find it difficult to reconcile Mom’s professions of love for me on the one hand with her insistence that I am going to hell on the other.

A few years ago, Mom got not one, but two ulcers. She attributed them to my sister’s and my refusal to accept Jesus as our lord and savior. She was hospitalized, so I called the hospital’s gift shop and asked them to fill up two helium balloons, then write my name on one of them with a permanent marker, and my sister’s name on the other. I asked them to take the balloons up to Mom’s room, then called Mom and instructed her to go outside and let the balloons go. I wanted her to experience the release of that, but she didn’t do it. She asked my brother to go outside and do it for her, saying she’d watch from the window. I don’t know if he ever did. The whole meaning of the ritual was lost.

So here’s take two: A declaration of emancipation.

I don’t know if it’ll help Mom, but it helped me. When my son and I want to let things go, we find big rocks, write what we want to release on them in permanent marker, and then drive up to Deception Pass. There’s a bridge there whose deck is about 180 feet above the water, and when we drop our rocks over the railing, it takes a loooong time for the them to hit the water. It gives us a satisfying feeling of release.

Our New Year’s Eve tradition (in fact, we just did it today), is to conduct a burning bowl ceremony. We write on slips of tissue paper all the things that we want to release, take turns sharing them with each other, touch the paper to the flame of a candle, and then drop the burning paper into a metal bowl. One of the things I burned up today was “My mother’s expectations.”

Can a recession teach us anything about happiness?

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Like many of us, I’ve been affected by the economy. Sometimes, when projecting my life out into the future, I have become deer-in-the-headlights scared, which has caused me to turn to the past and berate myself for choices that got me to where I am. No matter which direction I turned—forward or back—I felt awful. Eventually, I realized that I felt most comfortable in the present moment.

I realized that I would create the very future that I feared if I didn’t bring my thoughts home to the present. I also realized that no amount of second guessing could change the past, and pulled those thoughts into the present as well. (This is not something that stays done, by the way. It takes constant vigilance.)

For some reason, I believed that the circumstances I found myself in amounted to failure, and I feared that others would judge me as harshly as I judged myself. They didn’t. In fact, I received the most love and support from the people I least expected to receive it from.

Letting go of the past and the future and feeling the support of loved ones enabled me to relax into the moment and discover that I have absolutely everything I need—right now.

I achieved a somewhat fragile sense of inner peace when I heard a recorded interview with Marci Shimoff, author of Happy for No Reason, and checked her book out of the library. Since then, I’ve learned more about the field of Positive Psychology, and have a queue of books to read, including two by Positive Psychology founder Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism) and one by scholar Sonja Lyubomirsky, who wrote The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want.

In the Upanishads, it says, “Happiness for any reason is just another form of misery.” The idea that I could be happy for no reason was a new one for me.

Like most of us, I thought my circumstances determined my happiness. We think we’ll be happy when we get a better job, find our soul mate, earn a certain amount of money, acquire a desired object, lose weight, achieve better health, and so on. But when we realize those goals, we often find that they don’t make us happy after all–or do for only a while. So we set our sights on a new goal, get back on the hamster wheel, and try again. It’s a game that can’t be won.

Not so with happiness that we find within. Because unconditional happiness isn’t linked to what we have, what we do, or who we’re with, we can never lose it. The spiritual masters we revere most achieved this state. They had nothing in the way of possessions, yet radiated a sense of unshakable peace and happiness that draws us to them.

For years, I’ve claimed the saying, “My greatest gift to others is my own happiness.” I even had it printed on my checks. But I never really got it until the recession forced me to realize that happiness doesn’t come from anything outside me. It comes from within and to achieve it, that’s where my focus needs to be.

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life,
the whole aim and end of human existence.” Aristotle

The illustration, by Kris Wiltse, is from the “Happy” card, which is part of the Mixed Emotions card deck.

A major spiritual shift

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I was speaking, in passing, with a friend, when someone who overheard our conversation stopped, waited for it to end, and then mentioned something she’d just learned about that might help me. Challenging to pronounce, and even more difficult to spell, I had trouble finding more information about it on the Internet, but ultimately succeeded. It’s called ho’oponopono, and as you may guess from its spelling, is Hawaiian in origin.

What is it? It is an ancient practice of reconciliation and forgiveness. “Ho’oponopono” basically means to set things right. It entails taking 100 percent responsibility for everything that enters your awareness, because there is no “out there.” Everything you perceive is interpreted within the confines of your physical body, where all kinds of filters and influences come into play—especially in the form of memories.

We are all One, and in ho’oponopono, we take responsibility for the situations in which we find ourselves, whether we “caused” them or not. Long before I knew about ho’oponopono, I forced myself to go to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. I did not play a role in the Holocaust. I was not responsible for it. But I knew that if humans could do that to each other, somewhere deep inside me, I must hold the potential to do it too. I had to face and confront that.

If I had known ho’oponopono then, my experience would have been different. Ho’oponopono is a simple four-step process that entails taking responsibility, apologizing, and asking for forgiveness. In Dachau, I might have said something like this:

  1. I am sorry for the suffering that people experienced here. I am sorry for the unspeakable cruelty that prisoners endured. But I am also sorry that Nazi soldiers were ordered to be cruel by their superiors.
  2. Please forgive me for the potential that lies within me to be so judgmental of and so cruel to my fellow human beings.
  3. Thank you for this opportunity to make amends.
  4. I love you.

This process is called “cleaning.”

Ho’oponopono in everyday life

Yesterday, a friend told me about a situation that has been incredibly challenging, in a twisted, convoluted, messed up sort of way. It was her experience, but once she told me about it, it became part of my experience, and something I needed to clean. You clean everything that comes into your experience that does not feel right or harmonious—which means you could be cleaning continuously. And when you are not cleaning, you can cut to the last step and say, “I love you” to things you’ve been taking for granted. Today, for example, I loved the trees in their autumn splendor and the road that brought me home.

Another example of using ho’oponopono is food, which I’ve thought a lot about. Are certain kinds of foods bad for us in and of themselves, or are they bad for us because we think they’re bad? A friend recently told the story of her Grandpa Norm, who had his own stick of butter at mealtimes (everyone else at the table had to share a second stick). He put butter on everything—including donuts—and lived to the age of 92. Clearly, grandpa was saying “I love you” to his butter. He welcomed it into his body and his body received it in harmony.

Although I’m committed to eating in a healthy way, I hate thinking of supermarkets or restaurants as mine fields, where danger lurks in the artificial sweeteners, trans fats, and genetically modified organisms that are hiding everywhere. So today, I tried ho’oponopono on the can of non-organic soup I had for lunch. I said, “I am sorry for the way I have judged you. Please forgive me for thinking that any part of you might be bad for my health. Thank you for nourishing me. I love you.” This will be our new way of saying grace.

The advantages of ho’oponopono

For me, the advantages of ho’oponopono are:

  1. It prevents me from judging. When I take responsibility for the circumstances I’m in, say I’m sorry, ask for forgiveness, and express gratitude and love, it becomes impossible to judge.
  2. It makes me feel peaceful.
  3. It makes me feel empowered, because acknowledging the role I play in everything means I can’t possibly be a victim.
  4. It addresses issues I’ve had with the law of attraction for a long time. The law of attraction is about intention (tell the Universe exactly what you want and you will get it). Ho’oponopono is about inspiration (clean up your mess and clear the way, so you can receive inspiration from the Divine). The law of attraction entails constant effort via affirmations, visioning, scripting, etc. Ho’oponopono entails clearing the channels between ourselves and the Divine, so we can receive (and act on) its inspiration and guidance. And that feels right to me.

I’ve fallen, and it takes a village to get me up

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While Adrian and I were at an orchard party yesterday, I missed a step and took a header onto concrete. I lay there taking inventory, trying to figure out what body part hurt worst, and people rushed to my aid. I sat up and determined that my right foot had suffered the worst damage. A reflexologist immediately grabbed my ears and applied pressure in spots that help with pain. An emergency physician checked out my ankle, assured me that it wasn’t broken, and prevented a trip to the hospital. The host of the party brought an ace bandage and the physician’s wife, an emergency nurse, wrapped my foot in it. A neighbor brought arnica ointment and tablets, and I’m not exactly sure where the ibuprofen and a Ziploc bag full of ice came from. People helped me walk to a lawn-type recliner that they had placed in the sun for me (I was in shock and shaking), and they made me elevate my ankle and put ice on it.

As I lay on the recliner, I thought about the fact that we were completely out of hay, our goats had nothing to eat, and that I would be unable to go to the feed store after the party to get a couple bales of hay as I had planned. When I mentioned this, a woman I’d never met said that she needed to get a couple bales of hay for her goats, too, and offered to pick some up for me and bring them to our house. (Even here on rural Whidbey Island, it’s rare to be at a party with someone who also has goats, much less someone who has also run out of hay and was also headed to the feed store to get exactly the same thing you were planning to get after the party.)

My fall could’ve been an accident, carelessness, or dumb luck, but if this experience had a message in it, I wanted to hear it. I had literally missed a step. Might that be a metaphor for missing a step in real life? Had I overlooked something? Or maybe I just need to slow down.

Today, I thought of the friends, acquaintances, and strangers who had cared for me and how completely and instantaneously supported I felt. Tears came to my eyes, and I realized that that was the message: shit will happen, but you will get through it with the help of your community.

My foot hurts, but I can walk, and I have learned that I don’t always have to walk alone.

The psychic therapist

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I once had a therapist who earned her living as a psychic before she switched careers and became a counselor. Her psychic skills were kind of handy when my ex-husband and I were going through marriage counseling, because identifying and articulating emotions was a real struggle for him. She could just “reach” in, dig around, and “pull out” some emotions for his consideration. When she narrowed down his options that way, he was able to identify how he felt.

Despite our efforts, my ex and I decided to end our marriage. Several years later, I was in a relationship with another man and went back to the same therapist. She insisted that he and I would end up together. But as time went on, it became clear that he was not right for me. Although I shared events, insights, and emotions that led me to believe that we were not meant for each other, she continued to insist that we were. So, I redoubled my efforts and kept trying.

In the end, my emotions and her psychic perspective on things were at such odds that I broke up with the guy and fired her. It taught me an important lesson. As tempting as it is, I don’t look outside myself for guidance anymore. That means no psychics, horoscopes, or other means of predicting the future. But it also means that I now heed my own inner guidance above that of experts, gurus, teachers, clergy, parents, and friends.

This is not always easy, and is something that I have to recommit myself to repeatedly–especially as I bump around in the dark trying to find my way. It is much easier to trust the sometimes loud and insistent guidance of others than it is to listen for that still, small voice inside myself. But I believe it’s what’s right for me. Fact is, I believe it’s right for us all.

Snakes, rocks, and hard places

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When I look back on my life, I have often known when it was time to move on because I felt squeezed out of a particular situation. This is how I imagine a snake feels when it needs to shed. I imagine things start feeling constrictive, uncomfortable, irritating, and itchy. At that point, a snake will actually seek out a rock or a hard place and brush its body against it to tear its skin. Then it’ll work at the tear until it’s big enough, find something to catch the skin on, and wriggle out shiny and new.

Snakes shed so they can grow, and because they grow throughout their lives, they shed their skin until they die. I think we shed so that we can grow, too. Today, I realized that I have felt the constriction, discomfort, irritation, and itchiness of a situation that no longer fits. It is time to move on–to wriggle out of this situation so I can emerge into a new one.

If snakes were to look in mirrors (and I’m sure fashionable snakes do), they would see in their reflection everything they will eventually shed. What they shed is their outward appearance, their physical identity, the way they and others recognize themselves in the world. When I have faced sheddings in the past, I have found it impossible to imagine who I’d be without my old skin. Who would I be if I left corporate life to become a parent? Who would I be if I got divorced and raised my son on my own? Yet the skin no longer fit, and I knew it had to come off.

For me, the worst part of shedding is the sense of spiritual disconnection I feel. Before a snake sheds, it is virtually blind for a period of time, because the skin over its eyes becomes cloudy. This I understand, because I have felt blind in terms of my source of inner guidance lately.

A situation that was known and comfortable has become constrictive and irritating. I feel blind to my inner guidance, and am instinctively seeking out rocks and hard places that will help me tear open an escape hatch in this old skin. Seems like a bad thing, but is it? I feel confusion, grief, and a sense of loss around losing something that was known and comfortable. And this spot between the rock and the hard place is painful. But who am I becoming? Freed of my old skin, what possibilities and adventures await me?

How I lost my faith

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When I was in the fourth grade, my sister, brother, and I responded to a hell-fire and brimstone altar call at the Bible Baptist Church in Rantoul, Illinois. My mother had been raised a Christian by devout Methodist parents, and her brother was a Methodist minister. But she also became “born again” and raised the bar. She got baptised in the church’s baptismal tank, which amounted to a declaration of war between her and my father. From then on, it was us against him.

Mom and Dad were now “unequally yoked,” and the pressure was on for him to see the light and accept Jesus as his Lord and Saviour. But Dad, who had been raised by an Army chaplain with a mean streak, would have none of it.

After Dad retired from the Air Force, we headed west, where he and Mom owned an unfinished house in Roy, Washington. There, we attended the Roy Missionary Church, where I eventually became a Sunday school teacher, youth group leader, and camp counselor.

It was while preparing one of my “sermons” for the youth group that I realized God was too small. I went out onto my grandfather’s land and prayed, “God, this is too easy. I could fit you into a shoebox and that can’t be right. Show me how big you are.”

At that time, I had my first serious boyfriend. His mother had died of cancer when his little sister was nine, and I had a special place in my heart for her. Jill was one of the brightest lights and most deeply spiritual people I’d ever met. She joined our youth group and caught the eye of Mike, who asked me to help him write poems with which to woo her. Soon, Mike and Jill fell in love.

I lived with my parents during my first two years of college and then packed my car and headed to Seattle Pacific University for the last two years. On my way out of town, I stopped by the cemetary where Jill’s mother was buried, knelt by her grave, and prayed, “God, I can’t take care of Jill anymore. Please take care of her for me.”

In the winter of my senior year at college, Mike and Jill were killed in a car accident. It took place right in front of Jill’s house and her father was the first one on the scene.

Jill’s father asked me to speak at the funeral, which I did. Seeing Jill’s broken body in a casket was difficult, but having both caskets in front of me while addressing the hundreds of people who attended the funeral was even harder. It was, without question, the most gut-wrenching thing I’ve ever done.

When Mike and Jill’s lives ended, my war with God began. I had asked–I had specifically asked–God to take care of Jill, and he killed her. If he didn’t outright kill her, then he failed to prevent her death, which was just as bad.

The prayer I’d said on my grandfather’s land had been answered–this God certainly didn’t fit in a shoebox. I felt completely betrayed and wanted nothing to do with him. My faith crumbled. The black-and-white world in which I had found comfort vanished. I was adrift on seas of gray under an angry sky and lost sight of everything that had once lent order to my universe.

Hopeless

Oddly, it never occurred to me not to believe in God–I guess I needed him to exist so I’d have someone to blame. I eventually rebuilt a spiritual world view that made sense to me, but it took almost 20 years to do it. It is nothing like my mother’s.

My mother believes that Mike and Jill, who had been together for a number of years, may have been finding it difficult to keep from getting physical with each other. She believes that God ”took” them before they managed to fornicate. “You mean death is better than premarital sex?” I asked her. “Yes,” she said, nodding sadly.

* The illustration, by Kris Wiltse, is from the “Hopeless” card, which is part of the Mixed Emotions card deck.