Loose Leaf Notes

–In 2015 I contributed a chapter to Floyd Folks: Collective Wisdom from a (One Stoplight) Mountain Community, a collection of stories about love, loss and triumph from eighteen local writers. Published by Tommy Bailey’s Free Range Press, all proceeds after printing have gone to local non-profits. Here is Part One of the chapter I contributed. I’ll post part two tomorrow.

Sometimes I judge the success of a day by how much I get done.  Other times, when I look at my life in the long term, I’m amazed at what I’ve created, choice by choice, both consciously and unconsciously.  I’m sobered knowing that many of my life choices have already been made and are now unchangeable.  I don’t have the energy to change them now even if I wanted to.

The bottom line is that I like the life I’ve created.  I find pleasure in living each day.  I’m blessed with rich relationships and am supported to do the things I love. But I’m not the most likely spokesperson for living a successful and happy life because I’m not necessarily successful by modern world standards, and the happiness I experience is in spite of some longstanding limitations.

At the age of nineteen, I was knocked for a loop with full-blown depression and anxiety, which was most likely caused by Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and which I experience to this day as a low-grade depressive undercurrent.  I contracted Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) via a viral illness during my late ‘20s, before there was a name for it.  The early years of CFS were the worst, but I still have achy fatigue and get overwhelmed easily, which causes problems with mental processing and at its worse can bring on seizure-like brain activity.  “If everyone gets a deck of 52 cards of energy a day, I only get 30 on my best days, and I have to use them wisely” is one way I’ve described living with CFS.

But I’ve been thrown for more than one loop and sometimes literally.  When I was thirteen, I hit the gym floor after fainting and suffered a head injury that was followed by segmental vitiligo.  As an infant, I was separated from my family on two occasions before the age of one.  First, I was left with a family friend for a month, and then I was hospitalized with burns for a month.   As described by mythologist/author Michael Meade, I believe that the unique gifts we each have to give exist close to where we are wounded.  It took years of self-analysis and therapy to realize that my infancy traumas are not only related to my security issues but they awakened me and shaped me to be an advocate for children.

Being sensitive to the needs of young children and seeing them as people to be treated with respect has been a theme throughout my life, first in my earliest vocation of working in day-care in Massachusetts and then raising my sons, Josh and Dylan, which I have described as “the highlight of my life.”  I consciously set my intention to raise children that would be a blessing to the world, rather than a burden.   Today, I help steward the soul development of my two young grandsons by seeing their unique preciousness and reflecting it back to them.  Being in the presence of young children at play heals and nurtures me in an elemental way.  Being sensitive to them has also made me more generous to the child within me and others.

“Dear Abby, how can I get rid of freckles” may have been my first published piece at the age of 11 (as my writer’s bio-note reveals), but writing an article, and then a poem, for Mothering magazine in the early ‘80s was the first time I got paid as a writer.  It happened because mothering my young sons provided me with a home-based lifestyle that allowed me to pursue my interests in a natural context.   I remember during that period, a friend asked me what I was going to do with my life once my kids got older, as if my life was on hold while I was mothering.  From my perspective, I was just starting to discover a new level of my truest self.

I knew when my friend asked me what I was going to do with the rest of my life that I would simply build on what I was already interested in and let that be my guide.  Because CFS prevented me from working at a full-time job or career and because being an at-home mom was a priority, I patched together ways to make a living, making and selling jewelry at Grateful Dead concerts and craft shows, working part-time in retail and even being a night watchman for a time.  Later, I provided foster care for an adult with disabilities for eight years, which allowed me to work primarily from home.

I moved to the country (Floyd via Texas via Massachusetts) in 1985 with my first husband and young sons to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle, one in which we could live within our means, knowing that would translate into true security and freedom.  As the mother of a young family with just one income, it was easy to choose having one car over two and caring for my children rather than paying someone else to.  I knew that a job was a way to make money to provide food and shelter and that there were ways to provide those needs more directly.  I wanted to learn those skills, to grow food, share resources and build community with others of like-mind.

Throughout all my early life changes, I kept journals, took pictures and wrote.  My writing was never separated from the rest of my life and came from issues close to my heart, whether it was helping a friend start a cesarean prevention newsletter, writing for a homespun magazine on home-schooling, co-founding a publication on peace, writing political commentaries, or contributing to the Museletter – Floyd’s alter-native newsletter that was printed monthly for more than 20 years and was my most foundational writer’s training ground.

I identify strongly with my working-class Irish storyteller roots.  Jump rope jingles, nursery rhymes and the songs from the 40′s that my father taught me were some of the early influences that contributed to my love of language, rhythm, and word play.  Later it was Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and hearing Leonard Cohen sing Suzanne that made me want to write poetry.

In the ‘70s I remember scribbling poems on scraps of paper in the factory where my sister Sherry and I worked during what we called our “Laverne and Shirley” days.  My friend Juniper recently reminded me how I had taped a poem titled “Poet Cashier” to the cash register when I worked in her bead shop in the early ‘90s: It’s all I can do / not to / say “Buckle my shoe” / after “One, two” / when I’m counting out the money.

There was also love poetry, and the line goes:  If raising Josh and Dylan was the highlight of my life, then getting together with Joe (my second husband) was the reward of my life.  It’s been a legendary love with soulful recognition and “internal dimensions made richer for the delight of the heart,” so says a line in a poem that I read at our wedding at the Saddle overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Joe’s and my relationship has been sustained (30 years) because our inner work dovetails and we’re on a similar life study course, which has included studying the teachings of Carl Jung, Michael Meade and Lao Tzu, taking a class on Conscious Loving and pondering the science of Quantum Physics.  Our interest in personal growth and healing is also mutual and based on intimacy, honesty, imagination and vulnerability.  When I think about the integrity of my marriage, I’m reminded of what Eknath Easwaran said about choosing a mantra for meditation:  If you dig shallow wells in many places; you will never go deep enough to find water.  – Colleen Redman

Note: Part 2 can be found HERE. Floyd Folks: Collective Wisdom from a (One Stoplight) Mountain Community is available at local shops and on Amazon HERE.   And HERE is the piece I wrote for the local paper about the book.