Labor enough

Here is a confession, or perhaps just an admission: I don’t know what to write about here lately. Much of the time recently, I feel in retreat from the world, but writing for others is an act of communion with it. It is an act of staking a claim in it. For me, it has always been a means to understand it, to wrest some kind of meaning from my experience of living in order to do so more purposely and fully.

This week, Maria Popova highlighted a book by poet Lewis Hyde, who makes a distinction between work and labor. I encourage clicking over to read her words about his (if this topic interests you), but the gist of it is this: Work is what we do “by the hour,” and often for money, an “intended activity that is accomplished through will.” Labor is something different; as Popova understands it, “At the heart of the distinction is the recognition that those fruits [labors] are offered to the world not as a service or a transaction but as a gift.” Hyde offers these as examples of labors: “Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms… .” If I were to apply the distinction to what makes up the bulk of my days in recent months, washing the dishes is work I do, but making a home is my labor, a gift to those who come within its sphere.

Honestly, though, I’m finding the distinction a little fuzzy. How can they not be, when money is what we need to survive in our current world, and some labor is paid and some work is not? Yet it is clear to me that writing a blog–this kind of blog, at any rate–is clearly on the side of labor, and not work. It’s a labor I have been feeling ambivalent about.

What do I have to offer here? Do I have anything to say that anyone will benefit from hearing?

It’s a challenge to create a gift to the world when my instinct these days has been to retreat from it. Until now, I’ve had no choice about engaging with the world; continuing my existence required me to live deeply with it. Grading papers, planning lessons, submitting book purchase orders: These are all acts of work, and one can, I suppose, do the work of being a teacher or librarian without doing the labor of being an educator. But I never could, and laboring as an educator requires full immersion in the world. Now, I have a choice. Now, I finally have the resources I need to give myself to labor of whatever kind I might choose, and all I want to do is hunker down in my little shelter from the world.

I’d like to think it’s just a seasonal thing. Winter is a time of hibernation, of course. Or, perhaps, it’s a recovering from burnout thing. It feels like something more or different, though. The world feels increasingly foreign to me, and something with which I can’t keep up. Don’t necessarily want to keep up. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve been wondering what it will mean to be a writer–or any kind of artist–in a world with ChatGPT.

Which, in my head, quickly leads to more important questions: What does it mean to be human? What will it mean to be human? (And then I just want to bury that head in some sand.)

I want to think that we will always need human poets and other writers to help us answer those questions, but answering them–laboring for the world–requires us to be of it and in it. And right now, I don’t much want to be there. I’m feeling weary of this place in which mass shootings, videos of police murdering someone following a traffic stop, and politicians unashamedly, openly intent on either breaking or profiting from our systems are so commonplace that they hardly seem to register. A world so full of inane and/or vitriolic chatter, so much sharing that is the opposite of a gift. (Might my silence be a gift?) A world that has changed and is changing so fundamentally, so rapidly, in multiple ways. We cannot create poetry or any kind of art from a place of numbness, and I feel largely numb to the world outside my own, private one.

I think this is at the heart of the difficulty I’ve had even engaging with fiction, which was once my way deeper into the world. So many books now feel like just so much more of that chatter, taking me to places I don’t really want to go. The few that capture me lately tend to take me to a world that is, in some way, fundamentally different from the one in which I’m living.*

And yet, here I am, sending these words out here. They aren’t poetry, but maybe they are a kind of storytelling. Maybe this post is a small chapter in the story of one who was born into the old world and has to figure out how to adapt to the emerging one at an age when adaptation is becoming difficult. And maybe, for those of you sitting around the metaphorical fire with me, that is labor enough. At least for today.

Speaking of work and labor and other worlds, this week I encountered these images in a book from 1946, taken at the Hyster factory in Portland, Oregon. There were women doing every job. I wonder if they were able to keep them when men returned from the war. I do take some comfort in knowing that the world has never been static.

*Two books I’m currently reading that are holding my interest:

Cover of The Net Beneath Us by Carol Dunbar.
I picked up this story about a woman living off the grid in Wisconsin following her husband’s logging accident because I remembered a compelling essay the author wrote a few years back: Truce, in Literary Mama.
Cover of Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
Who doesn’t love Kate Atkinson? Her most recent book is set in 1920’s London. I’m listening to the audiobook of this one.

Of pain and gain

I’ve written here about being a school librarian, but I’ve never said much about the other role I played for the last third of my career as an educator: instructional coach. In short, my job was to support teachers in improving their instructional practice. My speciality was literacy, and I was often leading training sessions to teach teachers how to implement an instructional framework my district had committed to that I came to believe wholeheartedly in.

My faith was based in both research studies showing the framework’s effectiveness and in seeing how it transformed teaching and learning for those teachers I worked with who implemented it fully. For a very few teachers, I watched teaching become more joyful, less arduous, and more effective.

Why only a very few? you might be wondering. Well, because very few were willing/able to implement it fully. Many were frustrated and burned out by the many, many systemic inadequacies they worked within. Many had tried many, many things already that had promised to make things better, only to be disappointed when they did not, in fact, make things better. What I was asking them to do was not easy, and most of us won’t voluntarily do hard things if we don’t have faith or hope that doing them will make things better.

“I already do that,” they’d say to me. (No, they didn’t really. They did parts, or they did things that were “that” superficially, but not in the ways that mattered most. But they weren’t really doing it.)

“It won’t work because ______ (fill in with any number of things that are beyond a teacher’s control to fix or change),” they’d say. They believed that if someone else could just fix those things (poor attendance, kids’ home lives, lack of resources, etc.), the ways in which they were teaching would be just fine and they wouldn’t need to change what they were doing.

I was often frustrated and bewildered by their responses. There I was, offering a way that was in their control to make their teaching lives better–and improve their students’ learning. True, it would require them to teach in some radically different ways. It would require the shifting of some long-held paradigms. It would mean bucking tradition and giving up some things that they valued. But the current ways weren’t really working! (Everyone admitted that.) And they were unsustainable!

“What do you really have to lose if it doesn’t go well?” I’d ask. “Just try,” I’d implore.

Most did not. I could not understand the resistance I faced when I was offering tools of empowerment. So many people I talked with were so frustrated because they felt powerless. “The great thing is that you have the power to make things better,” I’d say. “And the hard thing is that you have the power to make things better.” It’s hard because if we have the power to make a change, we are the ones who have to make it happen. We are the ones who have to change. We can’t wait for someone else to do things to improve the situation.

This fall, as a student in a 7-week pain management course, and in subsequent experiences that have grown out of that one, I’ve come to a greater understanding of that resistance.

I hated my pain management course. I dreaded Thursday mornings, when I’d have to sit in a 2-hour Zoom meeting and listen to excessively chirpy and annoyingly positive facilitators tell me that I had the power to reduce my pain and make my life better.

I was pretty sure that those facilitators did not know chronic pain the way my fellow participants and I know chronic pain. They were not living it as we were. (I actually don’t know if that’s true. They might have been.)

They shared a poem that basically said it was our responsibility to change the course of our journey with pain, and the implication that it was my choices creating my pain (and therefore my fault) pissed me off so much I said in a session that I thought the poem was ableist and insulting and wondered if perhaps they could find something that gave a similar message about empowerment without the victim-blaming. (Yep, I was that person.)

I, and, it became clear, all of my fellow course participants, had already done and tried so many of the things they were “teaching” us to do. And yet, there we all were, still in pain that was negatively impacting our lives. That pissed me off, too.

In one session, I got extra pissed off because life circumstances for most people make the remedies they were suggesting impossible to implement. Many of the things suggested would not have been possible for me to do in my life when I was working full-time and single-parenting my kids. Since September, I have told others that my new job is getting a handle on my health and pursuing remedies to the various maladies that have plagued me for 3 decades or more, and I haven’t been joking. It has felt like a full-time job, doing All The Things (which I won’t list here).

And, man, if I don’t now get where all those teachers who didn’t want my Kool-Aid were coming from. I was just as burned out from years of struggle with my health and the healthcare system as many of them were from years of struggle with their teaching practice in a dysfunctional educational system. Like the teachers I worked with, my frustrations and anger and hopelessness were real and justified. Things have been all fucked up and it just isn’t right.

But that doesn’t mean my pain class facilitators were wrong.

Seeing the parallels pretty quickly, I forced myself to do the kinds of things I wished more of my colleagues had been able to do with me. I made myself stick with the class. (I did skip one session, though.) I made myself keep trying new things. I made myself keep making and attending appointments and doing the things at home I’ve been advised to do. I read books and clicked links and watched videos. I made myself work to keep an open mind. I gave myself permission to be imperfect in all of this and take breaks when I just couldn’t with it all. And this week, I finally (I think, I hope) got to a doctor who was able to weave the many threads of my story with pain into a cohesive narrative. For the first time, ever.

And damn if those perky facilitators weren’t (for the most part) right. (Yay! And Fuuuuck!)

As is often the case with true stories, there is no black-and-white conflict, no easy cause-and-effect, no simple or neat resolution. There is much more “yes, and” than “either/or.” Yes, there are things I can do to improve my life with pain AND the pain has not been something in my control because it originates from my parasympathetic nervous system, which cannot be consciously controlled. Yes, it is, in a sense, “all in my head”–in that the pain originates in my brain–AND the pain is real, and felt in other parts of my body. Yes, the parts of my body that (now) hurt are structurally sound and disease-free, AND decades of living with a hyper-aroused nervous system have caused physical damage to some of those parts. (Also: In the past, some body systems were damaged, and that damage created pain, and that contributed to forming neural pathways that create pain now, even though I no longer have those organs that created the initial problem. It’s been tangly.) Yes, I lived and worked in broken systems for years that helped create these problems and that I was powerless to change, AND simply leaving those systems hasn’t made everything all better. (And won’t.) Yes, there’s finally a pathway to something better, AND going down it requires a lot of resources that aren’t available to a lot of people–which means that I probably couldn’t have done all that much to improve my situation in the years when I didn’t have them. And that we shouldn’t blame or shame those who don’t have what they need to be able to shift out of surviving a situation to improving it.

As was true for the teachers I worked with, there is no outside fix that will make everything all better and what I want it to be. There is no quick and easy solution, and certainly no perfect one. I cannot pick and choose the parts of a coping framework I can easily adopt and ignore other whole parts of it. If I do, I will get only partial benefits, if any. (Which is why so many of the things chronic pain sufferers been told to do over the years haven’t really worked for many of us.) Improving things will require me to adopt new paradigms and do things differently and it will take some time for me to see results. To stay on this path, I will need to abandon others, and there is some loss in that.

But I will tell you this: for the first time in years, I have hope that things can be significantly better. If you’ve ever lost hope and then regained it, you know what a gift it is.

Following serendipitous breadcrumbs

Saturday morning Mel posted a photo of her reading pile, which got me to Googling one of the books in it, and I learned that it was written by Brooke McAlary–a name I thought I recognized. Turns out Brooke is a writer I used to follow long ago, when I was writing a different blog and she was just starting hers. It was in the early 20teens, before Pinterest, Instagram, podcasting, etc. ad nauseum left old school blogging (what we do around these parts) in the dust.

I stopped following when the blog became more of a commercial enterprise than a personal journal, but Saturday I stopped by her site to see if she still writes a blog, and yes, she does. I poked around in it a bit, and was especially pleased with this post, which reminded me more clearly about both why I originally followed (a strong writer exploring issues I care about) and why I eventually stopped. Brooke writes about going back to look at old posts she’d written and finding that most of them “just felt… small. Like returning to my primary school as an adult. What once felt big and unwieldy and hard to navigate simply felt outgrown.”

Boy, can I relate to that.

As I know has been true for so many of us, the last few years have brought profound shifts in how I see and understand the world and my place in it. I am still working to find some sure footing on what feels like unsteady ground, and often, when I look back at the place I used to be, I feel some feelings that could easily turn into shame.

Why didn’t I see…

Why didn’t I understand…

How could I have said…

Why did I…

Brooke seems to be coming back to writing after an extended absence brought on by a health challenge–something I can very much relate to–and I especially appreciated these words of hers, about looking back at her earlier writing and feeling some cringe:

“To allow ourselves to grow and change is such a gift. I wish I did it earlier. And while this is not the day to dig into this thought, I think self-compassion might be one of the biggest gifts I’ve received from spending much of the past couple of years being unwell. I’ve had to let so much unravel. And it’s in the putting back together that I can really question what old stories to bring with me, and which ones get left behind.”

And then I went looking for another writer I used to follow, and I must’ve gone a few other places, and somewhere along the way I found a simple list-ish way of giving a quick update on the week that is much like Kate’s lists of -ings that she regularly shares. Even though I have a million tabs open (per usual) I somehow lost that particular breadcrumb in my morning ramblings through the Internet forest. It was a simple, short list of -ings that I wanted to copy here.

I wanted to use it because I like connecting with others here regularly, but I’m just not in a place to write much these days. I had a good week–a really good one–but I seem to be in a fallow time when it comes to writing. My days have been full of PT exercises, skating, and mundane homemaking. That’s the surface of them, anyway. Under the surface, lots of shifting and dot-connecting that I don’t feel ready/able to write much about.

So, here’s my modified, from-memory list:

Listening…to The Love Songs of W. E. B. du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers. I wish I had the print version of this book because it moves around in time and there are so many characters; sometimes I wish I could turn back to an earlier part of the book to remind myself of what came before. But: the narration is so good. The book is big, painful, beautiful, and beautifully written. Jeffers is a poet, and it shows. I can’t remember if an audiobook has ever brought me to tears, but this one did this week. I’ve also been listening to the Lori McKenna mix on Spotify.

Reading…A Headache in the Pelvis by David Wise Ph.D., Rodney Anderson M.D. This was recommended by someone, somewhere in my chronic pain journey, and its explanation of pelvic pain is helping me connect the dots of all my various kinds of pain and their root causes. After years of feeling hopeless and maybe crazy, this book–along with several other key things over the past few months–has me feeling hopeful and seen. I can’t express yet what that means.

Feeling…joy in my pain-full body. I skated 4 of 5 days last week after a break over the holiday, and it felt so good to move that way. To feel how much I had missed it. On the ice, I feel strong and joyful and free. No longer having the body that I had when I was a child, I can’t skate as I did then, but I can still feel in my body some of the ways I once did–and it’s such an unexpected gift. I can’t stop marveling over it. (Trying to tell my physical therapist about it brought me to unexpected tears this week, too.)

Planning…to paint our second bathroom. In early February, my daughter will be visiting her husband in Sweden for an extended stay, and that seems like a good opportunity to paint our second bathroom. It’s a room that’s never gotten much love, but it could use some. OK, a lot. I truly dislike the floor tiles (they don’t fit with the rest of the house and always look dirty, no matter how much or with what I scrub at them), but we’re going to work with them. Maybe a different paint color will transform them. It could happen.

Wondering…what it means to be a poet (or anything, really). In the context of a conversation this week, a co-worker of my daughter’s said to me, “You’re a poet, right?” and I wasn’t sure of how to respond. Later, she and I debated my answer to the question. Since I rarely write poetry now, I don’t really think of myself as a poet. She says that, since I have written and am still capable of writing poetry, I am one. Which has me thinking about the labels we attach to ourselves and how we use them. Am I still a teacher? What about a librarian? Am I still a grand-daughter, even though I have no living grandparents? Was I a skater all those years (45!) I didn’t skate? If I’m not the things I used to be, what am I now? (Is this a question we need/get to keep answering until we die?)

Trying…a new way to keep the house clean. We have 6 rooms/zones that are regularly used. That’s one per day, with a 7th day to rest. It’s only been a week, and I haven’t been perfect in this, but so far I like it.

Making…a Sunday dinner habit. Or tradition. Or ritual. Something. We began having nice Sunday dinners in the lead-up to Christmas, a Swedish advent tradition that we adopted. When advent ended, we didn’t want to dinners to. It’s the one night a week that Cane, Grace, and I are all together around the table. Tonight, we’ll be having Ditalini with Chickpeas and Rosemary-Garlic Oil, by candlelight. If the dinners don’t have to end, the candlelight doesn’t, either.

Taking…photos of things that please or interest me. From this week’s camera roll:

Photo of an old tree with many branches and deep grooves in its bark.
This tree is the old woman I want to be.

A hand-crocheted sweater with varied flowers in it.
My daughter began teaching herself to crochet earlier this year. She followed patterns to make the flowers in this sweater, but everything else is her own creation. This delights me in so many ways.

An old, grand house almost invisible behind overgrown branches and brambles.
This house is almost lost to the trees and vines and brambles growing around and–in some places–into it. I always wonder what the story of such places is and wish I could write them.

Hoping you all have a good week. I’d love to hear about your -ings, whatever they may be.

Epiphany

Some years, I can hardly wait until December 26 to take the Christmas tree down. Not this one. My daughter’s husband flew in from Sweden with the ice storm on December 22, and for two weeks our little house was full of sugar and clutter and candlelight and puzzle pieces and music and comfort food and ease. It felt like a warm, slow-moving dream, and I didn’t want it to end, but finally, on Epiphany Eve, I began to put Christmas away.

I’d thought about waiting until Fredrik left to begin dismantling our holiday, but as the world moved on from New Year’s Day things started to feel differently. When Cane returned to school, it started to feel right to begin gathering up our beloved objects and putting them back in their boxes, a physical manifestation of our transition to a different way of being. I didn’t meet the traditional expectation and get everything taken down and put away on Epiphany Eve. In some cultures, that would mean that our decorations needed to then stay up until February 2–but I just can’t with that. I didn’t even finish the next day, Friday, though I made some progress. We were having such a nice one, our last full day with Fredrik. I didn’t want to lose the time we still had to preparing for the time to come.

I was deep in de-lighting the tree that afternoon when Cane’s daughter called to tell him that her cat needed to be put down. We knew it was coming–he was old and ill when she adopted him nearly three years ago–but it was still a blow. Cane would need to be with her the next day while Grace and I took Fredrik to the airport. It was to be a day of hard endings for our girls, and for us, too.

I finished putting Christmas away on Saturday, after our trip to the airport. Driving away from Fredrik and from Grace who was going to privately say goodbye to him there before getting herself to work, I counted three couples clinging to each other on the sidewalk in front of the departures doors, some wiping tears from their faces. I couldn’t stop my own from coming.

That night, Cane and I sat in front of a fire in our living room. Normally, I love the first evening after putting all the Christmas things away. The clean, open spaces feel good. Not this time. “It feels empty in here,” I said, even though we’d spent some of the afternoon talking about how we have too much furniture in the room. “I think this is the first year since I’ve known you that I didn’t say ‘fucking Christmas’ at least one time during the season,” I added. He laughed and agreed that it was.

I suppose that might be because it’s the first year in my adult life I found myself accepting the holidays as they came, able to be more grateful for what we have than sad for what we don’t. As Cane and I sipped wine and put wood on the fire, we talked about our family–the people we’ve lost (our grandparents, younger versions of our children and parents and selves) and the ones who remain. We talked about our fears for losses we know are coming.

“What I didn’t understand when I was younger,” I said, “is that everything and everyone is always dying. Every good-bye is a little death. The Fredrik who gets on the plane will not be the same one we see the next time we are all together in June. We won’t be the same.”

I know that sounds morbid, but I found it comforting, somehow. Time feels like an endless sea at the beginning of all our holidays, all our love stories; we float and play in it with nothing but delight because all we can see is water. We know there is a shore and that the waves are taking us relentlessly toward it, but it’s so far away. Until it isn’t. Eventually, always, the calendar turns. Something ends. Someone leaves or dies. The tree comes down. But that there are always endings means that there are always beginnings, new versions of us to fall in love with, new waters to dive into with joy.

As the fire burned down and we talked about all that we love and have loved, the room began to feel a little more full, and I began to make peace with the changes in it. Or maybe my eyes just began to get used to how it is now, as they always do. We’d planned to cook dinner at home, to make a good new memory in our favorite place, but we were both tired from the day and couldn’t bear the idea of cleaning up afterward. Instead, we went out for Chinese. “It’s still the holidays, right?” he said, and we laughed.

When we returned, the house felt a little more like home than it did when we’d left. And it was all right.

We were all right.

(From our visit to my parents’ over the holidays.)

Is it too late for a new year’s post?

(Nope.)

Each New Year’s Eve, I wonder what the coming year will bring that I cannot anticipate, which prompts me to look back at the previous year and note those things that surprised me. In 2022, for example, these are developments I could not have predicted on December 31, 2021:

I returned to the ice.

I began a new, fundamentally different relationship with my body after an episode of severe back pain.

We bought a project house in Louisiana.

These are all huge things for me, and my life is significantly different from a year ago because of each of them. I will also wonder, too, about what things will happen in the world. On January 5, 2020, I wrote these words, reflecting on the death of someone important to me:

“We are living through a frightening, unstable time. Robert and I viewed many things differently, but we agreed about this. His death–or, more importantly, his life and his beliefs and his many words to me–have me thinking hard about what work needs to be done in the face of all that is coming.”

Ha! “…in the face of all that is coming.” I had no idea what was going to be coming in the months that followed: pandemic, schools closing, protests, wildfires that gave my city–for a week or so–the worst air quality in the world, a presidential election in which the loser (we now know for sure) tried to overthrow the results and was largely responsible for ending our long streak of peaceful transfers of power.

What will the coming year bring? Who knows! After the past few, I have lost any illusions I once had about being in control of what happens. And honestly, I am glad I don’t know. I’d rather deal with the hard things as they come; knowing about last year’s ahead of time would not have allowed me to prevent or mitigate any of them. As for the events I’ve deemed “good,” this last year gave me such lovely, wonderful surprises, and a big part of my delight was the unexpectedness of them.

Perhaps because of the way so many things have felt out of my control in recent years (in ways both good and bad), I’ve abandoned anything that looks like a traditional resolution, and I don’t choose a word for the year, and I don’t really even set intentions. I like to think that new ways of being are something I can invite in at any time (which is why I’m publishing a new year’s post after everyone else has moved on from that topic), and I’m more interested in small shifts than grand undertakings. So, these are two small shifts I’m making this month:

1. PT and yoga: I began physical therapy in the fall, but I haven’t made good progress with it. Despite the fact that it should only take me minutes a day, I’ve had a terrible time making time for it. Yoga is also something I’ve been wanting to start. I’ve signed up for a 30 day yoga series through Yoga with Adriene (recommended by the pain management clinic I started working with in October). I am only a few days in, but I’ve been starting my days with PT and yoga. Maybe I needed more of a time commitment, so that it wouldn’t be so easy to tell myself I’d do it later in the day? I’m not sure how it will work when skating starts up again (classes weren’t in session over the holidays), but my goal is to do PT/yoga on any days I’m not skating. (I’m giving myself permission in advance not to be perfect in my practice. I think that’s got to be a key to sticking with new things.)

2. Reading: Last year my daughter introduced me to an app called StoryGraph. I signed up for it, recorded one book, and promptly forgot about it. I’ve never been a GoodReads person; StoryGraph appeals to me (maybe?) because it’s small. Or it’s small the way I plan to use it. I’ve signed up for the January Pages Challenge, using both the audiobook I’m currently listening to (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois) and the print book I’m reading (The Winners). I want a way to track my reading, and I want some accountability for myself. I like the visuals of this platform. I don’t know why I’ve been having trouble sustaining my attention with print books, but I’d like to work on changing that. I know the best way is simply to read more. Right now, I’m just raising my awareness of how much I’m reading and why I sometimes don’t pick up a book. If this is something you use or are interested in using, let’s be reading buddies; my username is ritamarie.

That’s it. These are two things I hope I can turn into new routines in my life, regardless of what the year brings. Challenging my body and my mind, cultivating good mental and physical health. I’m still plugging away at food issues (planning, preparation, low-inflammation options, developing workable routines), household organization, figuring out skating goals, and thinking about writing goals, but I’m not starting anything new with any of those things. I can only cultivate so many new habits at once, and these two seem pretty compatible with winter, with its slower pace.

I would love to know what you’re anticipating in the coming year, how you establish new habits, or if you have any book recommendations. Or maybe just chime in on what you want to be in 2023:

(from https://www.instagram.com/positivelypresent/)

Sending wishes that all your surprises in the coming year will be good ones.

This is me wearing my new skating halo, a gift from my daughter given with hopes of avoiding the bad surprise of a head injury.