#24 Ch-ch-ch-changing

         'Tis done. The changes have wrought a new life. 
                          
       Friends, blogacious and otherwise, have been asking, “What’s happening with your blog?  I want to hear about your life in the hills.”  Well, it’s a long story…

 Said Thoreau (in slightly different terms): "If one advances confidently in the direction of her own dreams, and endeavors to live the life imagined, she will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." 

Two years ago in May, I began advancing rather more fearfully than confidently toward my own dream, but at least I advanced, if only stumbling forward at times.  And I have met with success at last.

 I left what many would consider a dream job and its many benefits (including health benefits), on the tenure track at California State University Sacramento. There I had engaging colleagues and students; the opportunity to help young people in their minds and hearts and thus contribute positively to society in relation to gripping social issues. I had a lovely home, here below in February with the wisteria in bloom, and an amazing neighborhood to live in by the American River (Cholo enjoyed it especially), along with much more for which I was and still am grateful. 

And yet… and yet I was deeply unhappy. I complained ad nauseum about The Papers. Having been first a high school English teacher, then a college composition teacher in whatever class I was teaching (Urban Education, Gender Equity), I had been spent 25 of my 29 years in classrooms taking home piles of papers daily.  Nor was I ever able to give these papers mere cursory attention as I was instructed to do by colleagues concerned about my burn out. After all, many teachers manage to stay in the profession for 35 or 40 years (even if burned out themselves). No, I labored minutely over every essay, giving each 30 minutes to provide feedback on everything from the student’s positive use of language and analysis to teaching comma rules and reasoning on that same page. Many students expressed appreciation for this feedback that they had rarely if ever received before. And so I pushed on—to the breaking point. At 100 or 150/week  x 30 minutes per paper comprised a crushing 50+  hours of work on top of classroom time, office hours, committees, lesson planning and communications.

Until the end this work was usually worth it. My students—at Sac State, but also in other colleges and high schools where I have taught—often taught me about the world through their papers, as well as through our class discussions and antics, through our conversations outside of class. The student who reported in his essay that his brother had killed their father to stop the violence against their mother.  The student who shared that her parents would send her back to India if they knew she was dating a man they had not picked for her marriage. The student who revealed the indignities he had tolerated from fellow students teasing him about being “a fag.”  The student who told me before anyone else about her pregnancy, seeking advice what she should tell her parents.  Oh, so many hundreds of stories!  I cherished the trust put in me, even as the weight of suffering and want revealed burdened me. The lessons in poverty, racism, and sexism and their impacts touched me deeply wherever I taught.

In fact, my need to break away from teaching before breaking down wasn’t just the papers.  I had been carrying the weight of others’ problems and my deeply embedded proposition to resolve those problems from the time I understood my mother’s drinking problem at age 12 and resolved to heal her (i.e. a severe case of codependence, and yes, it can cripple one; see this site: Codependents Anonymous).  A child’s magical thinking became an adult’s rescue mission. 

Surely I have had helped many students, as some former students graciously attest, just as they have influenced my life and remained in it, as these recent photos show: I got to visit Juan at his welcoming party for his new baby, a housewarming for Jennifer (below), and Tanisia (below) who helped fix my hair with her cosmetology skills   for a performance I did (a story for another time) 

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.   Pericles

But sometimes the teacher needs to learn and the rescuer needs rescuing.

My most supportive colleagues tried to find ways to keep me at the university without my going under, given the ever increasing demands on faculty as the university itself was going under from budget cuts (need I say that our national priorities are screwed up?).  But after four years there (now three years ago, in May 2009), I let my colleagues know I needed to take a leave of absence by May 2010 (such planning ahead at the college level!). I hoped that after a break, I could return, rejuvenated.

However, several months into using my leave to rejuvenate my cabin in the woods as well as myself, a whole new path for my life opened up. Who could not love this sunrise from the back deck? 

Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis. /Martha Beck, O Magazine, Growing Wings, January 2004/

My blog started a year and a half ago, in December 2010, when I had just moved to the cabin and was beginning the renovations, which started with clearing brush on the land and getting plans and permits ready for the actual rebuilding.  The reconstruction projects lasted from April 2011 to October 2011. I was planning to settle down finally for a few quiet months of my new editing, research, and writing work, but then all hell broke loose between my housemates back in Sacramento where I’d been renting rooms. 

Just when you think you’ve got your life into a new groove, a healthy routine, here comes change barreling through. After much deep agonizing about my future, my security, my loyalties, I decided to let go of my job and put my house on the market in favor of risking the more basic conditions of life at the cabin and the unknown potential of work as a writer.

We cannot discover new oceans unless we have the courage to lose sight of the shore: Andre Gide

When I perseverated about these changes, I had no lack of support from many loved ones who knew how desperately I needed to remake my life: A long walk with my brother Stephen on a beach, talking about the right to find happiness even at the expense of letting go of old ways of giving to others. A reminder from my brother Greg that I had been complaining for years, years, about feeling burdened by my work. A loving butt-kicking from my sister-in-law Wendy and a similarly insistent letter from my sister-in-law Phyllis whose philosophy is worth sharing with the world for anyone down-and-out: 

“How about being relentless about re-creating joy in your life in a way that would be beneficial to everyone around you?  How about struggling to find a new way to use your gifts of giving that would restore your optimism, your strength, and replace weariness with wonder, boredom with beauty and brilliance?  You may find that your energy to contribute will not only be restored, but may even multiply.  I realize that walking into the great unknown is scary.  Just know that ‘with great risk, comes great rewards.’  Those rewards are waiting for you to claim them.”  

Phyllis echoes what Norman Vincent Peale said: “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” 

With the final decision to resign from my job and sell my house in Sacramento came whole new pressures to sort and pack up my stuff, make repairs to the house, repaint, and yet again deal with a slew of people to enact this long-term plan, all mostly single-handedly (a shout out to Katherine and Jeff in Sac for all their help and support in this process).  Exhausting! This is why we refuse to change our lives.

All this combustion explains in part why I left the blog behind.  I was dealing with dry rot , too much stuff  garage sales, and open houses.  

Lovely home that it was, in a sweet neighborhood near a good school and open space by the American River, I got an offer on my house the day after it went on the market, an offer far less than I bought the house for, naturally, in this time of the housing market collapse, but that it sold so quickly for a good enough price perhaps also signals some minutely positive change in the economy.  A high school English teacher, her husband, their two dogs, and a baby on the way were the best possible buyers I could have imagined for a home and the nearby river that had given me, my family, friends and lots of kids among us many good memories. 

Once I had most of my belongings relocated to a storage unit in Willits  and I had returned to my cabin on the hill, instead of choosing relative rest after all the commotion of moving, I leaped into yet one more renovation project. Garden below cabin before Garden below cabin after Sonny's work

A back hoe last year had cut a couple of raw terraces into the hillside below the cabin.  Now Johan was installing the irrigation while Sonny was providing the expertise and hard physical labor, as well as laughter, to get the terraces built, turning the rocky cuts into three beautiful terraces. He use the “moonboards” (cuts from redwood trees felled last year to create more sunlight for my solar power system), along with other parts of redwood trees. Sonny got the opportunity to work out a marvellous design while rock music rang out on the hillside and Sata played in the dirt beside him. After a month of Sonny’s hard work and company, money for the garden ran out as my need ran up like a fever for the quiet and solitude I’d been working to create over these last couple of years. Renovation fatigue! But amazing results in the end.         

Wednesday, May 23^rd, was the last day of having folks here helping with renovations on a regular basis. Now, I may spend several quiet hours a day doing some editing work, an hour hiking with Sata and clearing the Creek Trail, enjoying the new lilies, another hour planting deer-resistant lavendar, and wrap up the evening by writing or reading.   I hope to share some further experiences over time about what it’s like to head back to the land, to run away from home in one’s 50s and start over again, to milk goats and get food from a farm that still uses horses, to learn new ways to give back to society without expending one’s one vital energies over and over again. A friend asked me if living here is relaxing. I reply to such questions that you can take the woman out of the city, but not the city out of the woman quite so easily.  I’m still a Type A personality, but I do have trees to temper my busy-ness.

I close with a couple of lines from a wonderful poem called "Pruning" by Erica Funkhouser in this season of spring:

After a point, one sees/what one's life is going to be,/what one really knew all along.
Grace requires adaptation/to circumstance,/learning to work with one's nature…