Things That Lift

There's this sensation, at the end of the pack test, or any good ruck, when you take your pack off and you feel so light that you might float away. It's similar to the instant right after you deliver a baby where the pain was so intense that the sudden absence of it is almost euphoric.

I opened my eyes yesterday morning and I had that same sensation. It was like 20 years of weight had lifted off of my chest and all I felt was light and free. I smiled. Directly after waking up. Before coffee. With no one beside me except a Very Fuzzy Wiener Dog, I smiled. I think I might have even giggled.

I've been in a weird state of suspended animation for a few days. I am on one hand unwilling to connect with any deep, painful emotions that are lying in the subterranean depths of my soul because I have decided that The Thing in my life that just ended will not cost me one more tear. But I am also relentlessly happy. I don't feel sad. I am afraid to look deeply, but even when I peek past my superficial giddiness, I don't sense a looming darkness that has been there for some time, if I'm honest. Maybe even years.

I don't remember the last time that I felt this way. I am not certain I ever have. There has never been a moment in my life where I have no emotional or psychological obligatory tie to any other person (other than my kids, of course) and holy heck, it feels amazing. I owe no man nothin'.

Every choice I make, anything I decide to do, is for my own benefit. It's not to make anyone else happy. I can clean my house or not. Wash my hair or not. I can eat what I want, wear what I want, watch what I want, sleep if I want, or not. I don't have to worry about how somebody else is sleeping, or what might annoy them or make them react. I honestly don't give a rat's ass what anybody else wants or needs right now, and I like it.

I've lived, voluntarily, for the last three years on a minefield of fragile and destructive egg shells. Every move I made was potentially disastrous, and I don't think I had any idea how much it was weighing me down. I rolled onto that battlefield freshly wounded from a dense forest of psychological games and damage, so one tense struggle turned easily into another one, and if I danced Just So, the pain was less than before, so I was grateful. But the dance was exhausting. And now it's done. The woods and the trenches are behind me and I'm declaring an armistice for my heart.

Life's kind of been a fog for me the last week or so, partially due to a gnarly head cold and partially due to Certain Events, and I know the fog will eventually lift and I'll probably have some more vivid emotions to deal with. I am planning for that. But right now, I've got it on cruise control and everything feels ok, even in the rain and mist and dismal gray that I normally hate. Maybe I've always hated it because of the storm inside. I haven't even needed a drink lately. I know this buzz will wear off, but dang, it feels good for now.

Things That Sting

Three times now, you told me you don't want me. Twice, you changed your mind. You won't get that luxury again. Sure, I did this to myself. I wanted you to come back. I wanted you to want me. I wanted to be with you. I wanted US, and I was committed.

As I go through and delete all of the pictures of us today, it's funny how each one is associated with a negative memory. The context of when you would dump me next, or some critical thing you said, or just a heavy, nagging sense that I wasn't enough around you. There's good memories too. Great ones. Real, deep laughter and love. True love. I truly loved you. I believe you did me, as well, in your own limited way.

But not enough. Not enough to commit to me. To this. Too messy. Too complicated. No way forward, that you can see. One of us needs glasses because it looked okay up ahead to me. But that's good. I don't need somebody who doesn't want me. I'm too much to be not enough, you know?

I wish you well in your journey, wherever it takes you. I won't even try to imagine that because it hurts too much, whichever outcome. I hope you find what you're looking for. Or I hope you can at least figure out what you're looking for. I thought I had. I am grateful for the growing that being with you caused in me. I had to learn a lot of patience. I had to learn a lot of self-denial. I had to learn self control in new levels so I didn't scare you off, and that was good for me. I had to learn to curb passive-aggressive manipulation habits because you had no patience for them. I had to learn to be less emotional because you couldn't handle it. I had to learn to listen - all the way - before speaking (still working on this one). I learned the beauty of sitting quietly. I learned the value of protecting my down time. I learned that it is possible to give up too much for someone you love. I learned the hard way that it doesn't matter if you give it all, you can't change somebody else's heart.

I learned that sometimes, the things we need to move us forward can be really, really hard and excruciatingly painful and lonely. I thought I had learned that earlier in life, but it feels like I am learning it all over again, fresh and new. I also learned that I can survive things that I feel like I won't.

I am sad. I am sorry for you. For us. For the loss. For the wasted investment. I only hope that some part of if can carry forward into each of our lives separately and make us happier in the end. If I'm honest, right now I want you to suffer, but deep down that's not really true.

I won't say you're a good person. I think you're selfish and broken. Like most of us. Maybe just a bit more. I won't say you're a bad person either. You're just a person like the rest of us and now you're not even a special one to me. You just are.

I will say that I loved you as hard as I knew how. I saw your depth and your strength. And I saw your need for growth and I loved those things.

I know I shouldn't call it a waste. I know that it all happens for a reason. I know that in the end, it's for the best. I know all the things. But it feels like a waste. Like a big, fat, sad waste. But that's life. We buy in. We win. We lose. I gotta believe at some point the buying in is gonna win for me, but not this time. I'm too old for this middle school bullshit. I'm too old for the shame of an ex-boyfriend or another random face in the family pictures. This sucks.

The last time you ended it, I wrote something titled Why The Worst Boyfriend Ever Was the Hardest One to Lose. I never shared it, but here is part of it, edited to remove all the reasons why you were the Worst Ever, those will stay private for the time being... but the rest of it is still painfully true, and I am setting it all out here to remind myself, this time, why I won't look back.

I am learning a lot about control these days. Mostly, about the lack thereof that I have in every aspect of life except, like the stoic philosophers were so keen to point out, what goes on between my own two ears. 

I’ve been wrestling all night, every night, with one of the most intense and long-lived hurts that I have ever experienced. After all the random weirdness in my life, it feels strange to say that I am having such a terrible time recovering from a relationship that was far from ideal. But I think it was the lack of perfection that has been so hard to let go of. I fell for someone that was hard to love, and I loved the challenge.

I has made me aware that no amount of hard work, self-confrontation or dedication can change the mind or will of another person, and no amount of performance on my part can convince someone to love me. Not that I was perfect, far from it. He brought out ugly parts of me that I thought were dead and buried ages ago. Need for control and contact, even the green-eyed monster of jealousy… There were days when I was with him that I didn’t even like myself. But I took those challenges and tackled them. 

At the end of the day, I just wasn’t what he wanted, and it wasn’t a matter of me being worthy (even though I am) or him being an asshole (although he might be), the bottom line is, he gets to decide and there is nothing. I. can. do. Enter the pain. Enter the sense of helplessness. Hopelessness. 

I jumped into this, and he never promised me a rose garden. I moved, I switched up my life on a shaky, hopeless romantic feeling that there was something we needed in each other. I still don’t think I was wrong. I still think he is. But it doesn’t matter. I gambled and I lost, hard. He’s moving on to find what he really wants, now that he’s better, healthier, and he’s “got his shit together,” whatever that means. My shit has never been more all over the place and that’s because he and I measure “together” by different standards. “Together” in his world is financial and material success, “Together” in my world is an unconditional us. I know it’s out there for me, he’s just not a part of it. 

Things About Chasing Tail(s)

I've figured out that life is a never ending game of tail chasing. Either you're chasing someone else's tail or you're chasing your own tail of self-identity. If you're lucky, the game of chasing tail that does not belong to you will be short lived and the victory will remain for ages. Or, if you're like me, it's an endless game of both. Many of us find ourselves in the confusing world of perpetual self-tail chasing along with the constantly frustrating and disillusioning chase of tail that isn't our own.

I've got no advice to offer on the subject of chasing the tails of others since I have little success from which to draw, but I am gradually learning a thing or two about chasing my own tail. 

Lately (loosely translated: all the time in my whole life), I find myself in the midst of an identity crisis. When I was 19.5 years old it was the teenager fresh from the bunkbeds of a shared room with a little sister to the bumperpad-to-bumperbad cribs of two small infants in a studio apartment with a husband I barely knew. When I was 26 it was the almost-certified wildland firefighter banished from the practice controlled burn because it was "unsafe" for me at 6 months pregnant with child number four. At 32 it was the untapped teenage angst in the body of a single mom with four kids, three jobs and a full credit load of online college classes and a penchant for microbrews. I've always been seeking "myself," but it isn't until I got to be 41 that I realized that my "self" might be just as enigmatic to me as it was when I was three years old and climbing to the top of my Dad's Oak etageres to see if I could fly. But my "self" is also as familiar to me as the pillow I keep tucked between my arms every night. I know who I am. Sometimes, I just can't see the forest for the trees. 

Mark Manson talks about the diversification of identity, and I guess that's what I've always struggled with. I know how many things I am, and I know that a lot of those things don't fit the prescribed mold, or at least, not in the moment. Three year olds don't generally fly, even from a six-foot etagere. 19 year olds aren't the best mothers, unless they're a saint, like my younger sister might have been, or maybe even my Second Daughter given the chance (but thank you for waiting). Pregnant ladies aren't the best suited for wildland firefighters and 32 year olds should just stay away from microbrews, I've learned. 

But through it all I keep pushing, keep seeking"myself." And now I am 41. I am older and wiser and doing 41-year-old things. Going to my kid's ball games and graduation ceremonies. Paying my bills and having a savings account and learning the correct pronunciation for Roth IRA, etc. I wear jeans without holes (occasionally)(unwillingly) and craft lofty and condescending justifications for my tattoos. Deep inside though, I am still chasing my own tail. Trying to figure out just who I am, and the difference between what I WANT and what I NEED and who I AM. Those lines get blurry. But the definitive moment is always just barely out of reach. Like my tail.  

I always imagined that grown ups had no question about who they "are." They are just THEM. Doctors, teachers, mothers, transportation planners, rocket scientists. It seemed so simple. I thought maybe if I decided What to Be, that I would suddenly find this serenity and zen about self-identity that would once-and-for-all end my need to climb etageres. (By the way, if you haven't Googled etagere yet, you can click on the link.) But I've decided at least 23 times what to be when I grow up and I am still not completely sure that I can't fly. Because what IF?

So the tail-chase has continued. Sometimes I thought that if I caught the tail of someone else that I was chasing, I would suddenly KNOW. The epiphany of why I exist would descend upon me in an opaque and irrefutable destiny and all of my seeking would come to an end in the person that I belonged to. I'll admit, it seems to work for a year or two, maybe even close to a decade, especially if you bury your soul in the fabric of another person and/or community who Clearly Know What's Best For You and Don't Mind Telling You. But at the end of the day, or the decade, it's really up to you, or, in this case, up to me, to know who and what I am, and what's best for me, and if I know ANYTHING, it's that nobody can tell me What's Best for Me but my very own self. (I have at least 6 for-real psychologists who will back me up on this in their less-than-helpful-self-help-techniques. For a fee. )

But anyway, here I am, 41 and still chasing tail. Still slightly insecure about what I know about myself, but knowing, deep-down and just-the-same that I KNOW who I am. I am Liv. Not Liv the mom, Liv the firefighter, Liv the Writer, Liv the EMT, Liv the girlfriend, Liv the NOT girlfriend, Liv the former wife, Liv the messy, Liv the teacher, Liv the Cashier's Assistant, Liv the student, Liv the Avett Fanatic, Liv the emotionally unstable, Liv the self-aware (The psychologists told me that. For a fee.), Liv the beer girl, Liv the wannabe... I mean, yes, I AM all of those things... but I am not just one, I am every one, all of the time. And if Liv the writer is feeling angsty at Liv the mom's basketball game, then Liv the self-aware can take the steps to do what she needs to do and get the words out. And if Liv the former wife (please review my stern disapproval of "ex" terminology") is making a mess of Liv the girlfriend, or even Liv the NOT girlfriend, then Liv the self-reliant can make the adjustments she needs to make because ALL of those things in me have given me the tools to adapt. 

Chasing tail makes the world go 'round, as it happens, both biologically and psychologically. It's the ones of us that keep seeking and keep asking questions, like "Why am I cooking french fries at 41 years old?" that make life bigger than a single wide mobile home and a 1992 Ford Escort. Not that there's any shame in starting there, Daughter with said vehicle. 

Mark Manson, whom I clearly revere and tend to overcite, says that the idea of seeking your passion is bunk, because we're already putting our time into the things we're passionate about. For some of us, that's a 9-5 job that gets us where we need to be financially, a legitimate passion to pursue. For some of us, that's hours of journaling hopeless love letters that will be burned, unread at a later date. I know people in both camps - some more intimately than others, and I believe it's true that we put our money (read:time/energy) where our real passion lies. For me, when I get writer's cramp from journaling, it seems to be at the local brewery. I am not ashamed. I am me. And I've got some fine tail to keep chasing. Plus I MIGHT be able to fly. Who knows? 

Did I mention Liv the Whisky Drinker?

Things About Crying in the Sink

I used to joke that all of my exes*, rather than being from Texas, were from Wisconsin. Back then I took some pride in the fact that other than the mere fact that I had more than one "ex*" to claim, there wasn't much else about my life that resembled a country song. The fact that they were from (as I think it should be called) the Middle East of the U.S.A., just meant that there was less deep-south heartbreak to correlate with my breakups, plus, my dogs were still alive and my kids were all smart and attractive, and nobody in my family had been thrown in jail in a couple of generations.

Lately, my bragging rights to a relatively melodrama free life have been circling the drain. Both my big dogs died, leaving me bereft and without a hound dog to ride shotgun in my pickup. My employment situation wavers perilously on the brink of the down-and-out blues, and my love life went tits up, relegating me to a life that is the smack dab epitome of a cry-in-the-sink country song.

Most of these things, with the exception of two dead dogs, I can boil down to matters of choice. My career path has been, to say the least, a meandering one, for which I make no apologies and generally thrive in the flexibility and enjoyment that I usually get out of it, however much stability is lacking. That's a choice I've made and I own it.

 In love, I can only blame my choices for the broken hearts I have borne. Either I chose the wrong guy, or I chose the wrong behavior. And maybe sometimes, like my recent past, I chose both.

I'd like to say that my choosing has gotten better over the years. Albeit much too gradual for my impatient taste - but I know that I have been choosing better and better in the men department and I know that as far as behavior goes, well, I wouldn't hardly recognize the girl I was ten years ago if I bumped into her today. I am getting better, no matter what they say.

But still, no matter how real those increments of improvement might be, they haven't arrived me at blissful perfection yet, and while the number and geographic diversity of my "exes*" have grown a little, so has my ability to be the kind of person that someday, when I choose the perfect guy, will make me nigh unto perfect myself, and I'll be singing the B side of that heartbreak album about heaven and having everything I ever wanted. Someday.


*Authors note: I am strongly adverse to the terminology of "exes" - I tell my girls that once a relationship ends, you aren't their anything, and they aren't yours. I don't like the ownership idea that it conveys. I have former husbands and past boyfriends (don't really like that word either...)... but they aren't "MY exes."

Things About St. Valentine

Before you write off Valentine’s Day as another invention of American corporations in the quest for perpetual revenue from mass produced greeting cards and several thousand tons of seasonal candy, take a moment to consider the long, if not convoluted, history behind the holiday. Long before it was chocolates and diamonds and fancy dinner dates, Saint Valentine’s Day became a celebration of enduring love.

Valentine of Rome was a Christian saint in the 5th century who was martyred in 496 AD for his faith. He was buried on February 14th, and the anniversary of his death was observed by the Catholic Church after he was canonized. According to legend, Saint Valentine wore an amethyst ring embedded with the image of cupid. He officiated at the illegal Christian weddings of Roman Soldiers, who were forbidden to marry, as the Emperor Claudius II believed that married men did not make for good soldier material. It was said soldiers would recognize him by his cupid ring and request the performance of his secret nuptials. The amethyst later became the birthstone for the month of February, and is said to bring love. St. Valentine is said to have cut hearts out of parchment and given them to the soldiers that he ministered to, beginning the tradition of heart shaped cards.

Eventually Valentine was imprisoned for his Christian ministry, and while in jail, he is said to have healed his jailer’s daughter, Julia, from blindness. A letter sent from his jail cell to the girl was signed “from your Valentine”, perhaps the first Valentine ever sent. After his death, Julia planted an almond tree with pink blossoms near his grave. The almond tree is still symbolic of undying love and friendship.

The Catholic Church removed St. Valentine’s day from the General Roman Calendar in 1969, but the holiday was well rooted in tradition across the globe by that time. Speculation has tied the holiday to the ancient Roman feast of Lupercalia, a three day celebration of fertility in mid February, but there has been no traceable connection to this observance and the later resurgence of the romantic theme appointed to February 14th by poets and lovers who were far removed from Rome’s pagan roots.

The first romantic association with the church holiday of St. Valentine’s Day wasn’t until nearly a thousand years later, when Geoffrey Chaucer, the English poet, penned the verse: For this was on seynt Volantynys day, Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make. ["For this was on St. Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate."] Later, scholars would argue that the Valentine he referred to was not Valentine of Rome, but the feast of St. Valentine of Genoa, who died nearly 100 years before Valentine of Rome, which was observed in early May, a time more likely for the mating of birds in Britain.

Whatever the reference really meant, Valentine’s Day was securely established as a celebration of love on February 14th by the beginning of the 15th century. Following Chaucer’s lead, French and English poets latched on to the theme and over the next 200 years, references to Valentine’s day, featuring birds and romantic love surfaced across Europe. The oldest surviving Valentine came from Charles, Duke of Orleans, referring to his wife as his  “very sweet Valentine” while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London in the 1400s: Je suis desja d'amour tanné, Ma tres doulce Valentinée… Even Shakespeare gave a nod to the holiday in Hamlet in the early 1600s.

Mass productions of romantic poetry, cards and love notes was well underway in England by the end of the 18th century, and in 1847, the first commercially produced Valentines were available in the United States. It wasn’t until the late 1900s that the traditional note giving escalated to chocolates and jewelry. This became a trend in the United States when the candy and diamond industries saw potential for growth. It is estimated that over 190 million Valentines were sent in the United States in 2015, not including homemade exchanges between school age children. The average amount spent on a Valentine’s day gift in the US last year was $131.

However you choose to observe (or not) the festival of love that is Valentine’s Day, the story of St. Valentine, perhaps embellished over the years, is a good excuse to let the ones we love know that we are thinking of them. It’s also a good chance to break out the scissors and glue stick and show our love with a little bit of creativity and personal attention. Maybe we don’t need diamonds and puppies to tell our Valentine’s how much they mean to us, but since the middle ages, we’ve been using poetry to get our point across. The cliche “Roses are Red” rhyme began in 1590, with Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene, but was adapted into a nursery rhyme in 1784 from Gammar Gurton’s Garland:

The rose is red, the violet's blue,

The honey's sweet, and so are you.

Thou are my love and I am thine;

I drew thee to my Valentine:

The lot was cast and then I drew,

And Fortune said it shou'd be you

Things About Light

I learned something today about gratitude. I try, for the most part, to operate out of a spirit of love and gratefulness and humility. Sometimes I suck at this, because, like all y’all, I am human and I am not always all of those things. Sometimes I am not even any of those things. Earlier this week I was really fighting ungratefulness and a mean spirit. I am not sure why. It would be easy to blame hormones or lack of good sleep or being homesick or whatnot, but whatever the cause, I had a hard time being nice.

I didn’t really feel like writing, but all the Writing People are adamant that writing is a discipline, not a whimsical option. So I made myself write. The writing that came out of me, being in a bad place was, in a word, bad. I mean it was funny, don’t get me wrong. But maybe it was funny at the expense of people I didn’t really know… based on outside observation. Maybe it was prejudiced. Maybe it was unkind.

If my words don’t come out of a place of gratitude and love, they have no business being. It doesn’t matter if they are true. It doesn’t matter if they are funny as hell. I get this. Part of me bucks against censorship and feels like I have some inalienable right to say whatever the heck I want. Nothing that I said was SO HORRIBLE or illegal or even totally wrong, but I KNOW BETTER. I know better than to let loose words of mine that come from a place of darkness. They do nobody any good.

When the sun disappeared behind the shadow of the moon for a few brief minutes yesterday morning, it brought into startling clarity, just how much I take for granted. The world was cold. Much colder than it had been only minutes before in the light of the sun. It was dark and colorless, like the light of the sun took out every hue of green and yellow and blue and red when it left. It was the dusky colorless of the last light in the evening, when the road and the trees and the herds of whitetail deer roving dangerously among it all are the same color. This is the difference between words that come out of darkness and words that come out of light. Color and warmth are in the light. It’s just how it is.

It’s not that I shouldn’t ever be able to laugh and make light of where I am and the TRULY ridiculous things going on around me, but I know when my voice is kind and when it is not. In reality, I work with a lot of great people, in amazing places, and I feel very blessed for the years that I have done this crazy cool job.

Here is what I learned: When I am where I am supposed to be (which I try to be, most of the time), I need to be grateful and kind and humble, and if I cannot be those things, then I need to be still and quiet. I learned that I don’t like a sunless, lightless world. I want to live in the sun, in the color and the warmth. I want others to live there with me.

If the moon were a little closer to the earth, we would lose the sunlight more often. It really is an amazing thing, this astronomical system we live in. It overwhelms me to think about the infinite minutia that dictate our survival. The tiny changes in temperature, atmosphere, angles and rotations that determine how we live or die on this planet are, in a word, epic. It’s like the little changes in mood, in motivation, in voice that determine the effect of a word on the world that it lands on.

All change is facilitated either through love or through hate. Real love is born from gratitude, accepting your worth and giving it back to those around you. Hate creeps in to fill up the absence of gratitude, the ugly insecurity of the lie that you are worthless. A lie I know like the back of my hand. We are such small, insignificant parts of this giant miracle of a world. I want the change that I bring to my tiny space to be rooted in the warmth and color of love and light. I want to speak love without flattery, truth without unkindness and hope without dishonesty. I want to make people smile, and laugh, and love more.

Photo Credit: Collin Andrew

Things About Being Heard

I met a listener. I am not sure if you know how rare that is, but you probably do. If you're lucky enough to meet a listener, it's a good idea to keep them around, because you never know if and when you'll run across another one. Somehow I got super lucky and the listener I met seems to like me, so we hang out a lot. Being listened to is one of the Best Things In the Whole World, because being listened to is the first step of Being Known and Being Known is the one thing in the whole world that matters, especially if you are, like me, a Tigger.

Being Known is basically the same thing as intimacy, which I have heard comes through discovery, which it turns out is the exact same thing as listening. See how that works? Listening = discovery, discovery = being known, being known = intimacy, intimacy = mattering to someone. So the bottom line is that having a listener means having someone that thinks you matter. This, my friends, is a big, big deal.

My listener is the best kind. The kind that takes the listening and turns it into actions. The kind of listener that actually hears, and then actually does. Some listeners are good hearers but not doers. My listener picks up on the little things that I say, sometimes without words, and believes them, and acts upon them. My listener hears things both with his heart and his ears. He's not a perfect listener, sometimes he forgets the things I say, but with the Really Important Things, which are occasionally the Really Small Things as well, he always remembers. Like if I like marinara sauce and what my favorite socks are and how I feel about turtlenecks. He might not remember if I said I was coming over on Tuesday or Wednesday, but he always remembers how I like my coffee, which is much more vitally important.

I don't think there is a way for me to say how good it feels to have a listener, because it's a feel that they haven't made a word for yet, unless maybe it's love.

Things That Are Worth The Risk

Being in love is a lot like being drunk. And it's a good enough feeling that we go back over and over and over again (some of us do) for more, even though we know that heartbreak, like a hangover, is gonna sting like a mother-frakker and we're gonna swear that we'll never do it again. I've vowed off of love (and beer) repeatedly, but somehow, I always end up tottering on the brink of Going There one more time.

Some hangovers are just worth it, that's all. Even the worst ones that you think you'll never recover from. Because you're never gonna forget that one time that you NAILED What's Going On at karaoke, or sinking your ATV seat-deep in the sand out by the river at night, or the new dance you invented with your BFFs in a moment of Absolute Clarity after a shotski of fireball, if you remember those things in the first place. But seriously, can you hang a price tag on those good times with friends, any more than you can name the value of the butterflies you get when he leans in for the first kiss?.. Just brace yourself for the morning after, cause it's probably gonna hurt.

I've made all of the mistakes in my life - enough for me and all of my friends who 'courted' and missed out on the tragedy and triumph that is dating. I guess for better or worse, I traded 'for better or worse' for 'trial and error' and a lot of good intention and poor execution. It's not that I didn't want to stay married, really. I would happily be somebody's wife right now, if somebody could have just got his shit together. Clearly I am perfect, in case you hadn't noticed.

And being perfect, I have had a long line of perfect relationships, wherein I was never too clingy, too selfish, too moody or too demanding. Ever. Through no fault of my own, they ended, and the poor bastards that lost out in the end really had no idea what they were missing out on. But that's ok, because I just haven't met anybody as perfect as me yet, that's all. But I must still believe he is out there, deep down, because something makes me run back into the bloody fray that is hope and stand, battered heart in hand, wondering where he's hanging out. I've been checking the brew pubs and dive bars, since I didn't find him in the church groups and intentional communities. But I don't think that perfect guys hang out at perfect places. I think they're more like me and they're all over the place. It's just that my timing that has been terribly, horribly wrong for 38 years.

If I could list every time that I went a little out of my way, or took a little time I shouldn't have to stop into a random brewery, just to make sure I didn't miss out on the Best Beer In The World, well - I'd have to write a book, because I can't think of a time that I wished I hadn't. And I have had some of the Best Beers In The World, and met some of the coolest people, because I just did it, never a regret. Dating should be the same way. You never know when you'll run across the Best Beer/Man Ever, because you went a little out of your way or took a little time you shouldn't have. It's worth the gamble. I hope.

Maybe it's just that the ache of a broken heart has a familiar comfort to it. A reminder that I am actually alive. For a couple years now I have alternated between nursing old wounds and deciding that I would never, ever risk that damage again. But then I watch my young, pretty girls and I think that I would hug them, give 'em a kick in the ass and then send them back out to find love. And whether it's the springtime or beer, or the country music, or road trip season sneaking up on me with nobody to ride shotgun beside, I dunno - either way, it seems like it's time to take a gamble on some butterflies and risk the next morning, shaking my fist at god and Bad Decisions.

definitely worth the risk.

Things About Time Travel

Yesterday I drove over Sherman Pass to Republic for a cello concert. The concert was amazing - more about that to come. But the drive...

Ten years ago, I made that drive a million times a week. Sometimes twice in one day. The memories of that summer wash over me like a rough cold wave on the Oregon coast, taking my breath away. The songs, the sights, all flash through my mind. The Forest Service campground where I spent weeks excavating. The creek bed where I waded up to my waist on survey. The brilliant smile of a beautiful boy with a soot-blackened face. Camo pants, Dollar Bets, karaoke at the Hitching Post. Sweet Home Alabama, Tim McGraw and Watching The Wind Blow By, rope swings and watermelon. Falling asleep in an exhausted pile of over-sung, over-danced, over-worked and over-funned boys and girls still wearing nomex and boots.

The memories make my heart race and my stomach flutter like it hasn't in years. Funny how a drive can transport you back in history to a different time. Every curve of the road had a different memory, a conversation, a song - this is the spot where I lose cell service, and this is the other spot where it comes back and 37 text messages from a waiting boy flood my screen.

I remember a little blonde baby and a 4 1/2 year old who ate so much watermelon that she threw it up all over my car.  An 8 year old tomboy and a 7 year old fairy princess. Missing plenty of teeth but not one minute of life. I remember liberation from the tyranny of a terrible marriage. Years of pain washing off of me in the lakes of Ferry County. I remember stepping off of the blind precipice that is leaving A Religion behind, to find out if there is really A God instead. I can still feel the freefall into learning that absolute truth is defined in the burning trees and tumbling rocks of nature. I can still taste the tiniest trace of unconditional love on my lips. Love without judgement, only curiosity and the desire to Know Me. I can feel the wonder of being my own person, valued and sought out and enjoyed, finally escaping years of condemnation and failure and never, ever, ever Getting It Right. For a little while, I didn't have to. I just had to be. Honest, open, trusting, seeking, learning.

That drive was my road home. My pathway to freedom. To knowing my own soul and who I was Created To Be. That mountain pass was the crossover from incarceration to liberty. I learned to fly on that road, and not only when I was going 75 MPH, trusting in the false security of friendship with the county cops and the entire staff of the Colville National Forest. After an insular life of overprotection and sheltering, I finally found a safe place in the wild country over the hill. I fell out of the nest and into a whirlwind of freedom and grace and learning. My instructors were rough and clumsy. My classmates were unruly and uncouth. And I loved them all. Still do. I am thankful for that summer. For all of the steps leading up to it and away from it. For the memories and the baggage that it gave me. I am thankful for that time machine of a road.