Lying in the Mud Waiting for Rain

Another sleepless night. Now I know what it feels like to get thrown under that proverbial bus. It's an experience that has a demoralizing quality like no other. The wheels start to spin and dig their muddy ruts and there seems little chance that the bus will ever extract itself from the pit to roll forward again. The gears grind and we lurch from side to side.

I truly think I'd rather be under here than on the bus at this point. I think I am going to welcome the role of scapegoat and run with it. I think I am actually uniquely suited for the role, and that it fits me well. Blame me for everything. It makes sense.

Part of my minutes-taking love is the sacred role of impartial witness, observer of all, interpreter, person who frames things with honesty. I try so very hard to do that. It's a spiritual practice to me. I think of myself as someone who pursues rationality, contructs sensible and productive narratives even when there is chaotic action to describe. I don't think this is delusional, though of course tonight I am working over my delusions in fine detail trying to see if I am really the dissembler I have been accused of being. It doesn't fit with who I believe myself to be.

But I'm a person who understands being really wrong. I am the gullible innocent, and don't try not to be. I think it's part of what allows me to approach that level of honesty I try to get to. I can be fooled. But I can also see patterns and repeating attempts to confuse and I can articulate them. Not that it helps. People who haven't seen the patterns tend to not believe in them and the more the description extends, the more the listener can edge away. There's an instinctive discomfort to get away from things that one doesn't have the capability to follow or understand. Gaslighting comes into play. The sensitive noticer becomes the one at fault. Protesting adds more words. Someone who exposes misconceptions in such detail must be constructing one. People throw up their hands and won't believe anything.

Lots of metaphors I could use. I wish I could tell the story in concrete detail, but it's depressing and the best strategy is to endure until more pressing matters arrive to wash the bus down the lane despite its broken parts. Pack up the tools and pick up the next piece of work. There's still plenty to do, and there's no better way to rebuild trust than to pick the work up and resume doing it. Start sawing, start stacking, get that woodpile lined up straight and don't forget that winter will arrive whether or not all of us are ready. Summer will flee while we fret and analyze and fiddle with the details of things that are going to have to creak along somehow. With or without us.

I have the strength to be the scapegoat for awhile. I've made enough mistakes that I certainly deserve blame for some of them. I made my kid eat school lunch, for heaven's sake. I'm guilty. Blame me.

Dump all your blaming and your shaming and all of your accusations, dump them right on me, right now. You get two more minutes. Get it out. This is a limited time offer, but it's wide open. Blame me for every little thing. Let's all throw it all out there and then we can let it go up in smoke. We can bury that hatchet once we chop all of our flaming blame into little tiny pieces and stomp on it and make sure all the fire is out. Get it done.

And then we can get back to work. We still have a lot to do, and we're still stuck with each other here in our little mud pit we made. We're still going to have to shove each other around a little until we can get comfortable for the long haul. We keep finding a lot more problems to pitch into this soup. We keep trying to make something beautiful happen with what materials we have.

It's always worked before. I've been through this: being wrong, being blamed, being seen in the wrong light or called hurtful names or bruised with the thrust of someone else's defense moves. It wasn't about me then and it isn't really about me now. It's about our need to climb up, out of the pit, and the way we sometimes step on each other when we do that. It's nothing personal, that muddy boot on your shoulder. You're supposed to climb out too. At some point someone else will reach back and give you a hand. It's not a story that has an end to it.

Hardly a story at all. Someday I'll tell you the details, maybe. Probably they don't matter. It's when I tell the details that people start edging away and thinking I'm too serious about it, too intense, maybe even hysterical. Been there? Let's keep trying to make a world where that doesn't happen.

Jeez it's bad

I haven't been writing, Perhaps you noticed. I don't have a theme or a subject I've been mulling over, or something compelling I just have to say. Probably shouldn't start, but I remembered that when I am troubled or rootless it has helped to write. Don't have that faith at the moment, but something has to be different than watching Colbert while I doze off in my chair and then going to take a hot bath, read for a few minutes and wake up at dawn to worry some more.

So many things are falling apart. I had an hour or so of feeling good this morning but that was killed by another long and difficult meeting. All the meetings are long and difficult these days. When we laugh it is with ironic detachment. We don't let ourselves feel much, we save that for when we lie in bed in the morning and feel like we don't want to get up and we don't want our stomachs to be tied in knots any more. It seems pointless to cry about it.

We probably don't all feel that. It's going to be sunny so there's a little glimmer of hope that says maybe I'll get some happy moments. I will, because I am easy to slay with a flowering shrub so when I walk downtown for one of those meetings I walk under those flowering chestnuts and past the quickly changing neighborhood of mollis azaleas and rhodys and sometimes even see a plant I don't recognize or hadn't noticed before. There's one dogwood I have to check on that's glorious. And I have a pair of Bewick's Wrens in the neighborhood, and a bushtit's nest in my fir tree. So there are those things.

I get a little thrill by the Little Free Libraries but I don't have time to finish the paper so it isn't a good time to get more books. I smile at people but they trouble me with their desperate energies and their transparent faces that I try not to really look at. Every so often I see a person who seems okay, but only rarely one with no worries. Maybe in the summer. We've had a lot of rain.

It's the beginning of my busy season. By some miracle of discipline I finished my big order on the day it was due but I didn't feel the love like I used to. I used to muse how each shirt was given its meaning by my hands and would go off to be treasured forever by the lucky hard-working volunteer who got to get it sweaty and hang it from their belt when they weren't working, make it into a quilt or wear it until it falls apart. I used to feel a connection with each person and be happy to see them wearing "my" shirt but I'm pretty heartbroken by my Fair world these days. Some of those people wearing those shirts are pretty hateful toward some of the other people wearing my shirts and some of my shirts shouldn't have ever been printed I guess even though they were done with pure intentions and no malice. They were made to bring us together but I guess "us" has changed. And we might have broken up, not sure, because we're not answering each other's texts.

It's not just Fair that's broken, the Market broke too. I'm pushed into leadership I was trying to move away from, a little, to get some peace for myself, to get to garden, to get to read, to get to do my work that I will soon have a ton of. I've been bullied and manipulated, and in fighting that off I took on another big challenging task, to change the bullying culture. My efforts will be tiny drops in a sea of meanness. Tomorrow I go in to watch more bullying and see if I can inject a tiny bit of wisdom or helpfulness in the midst of it, but I don't have a lot of hope for that. Maybe. Sometimes things don't go as badly as I expect. It's not all dysfunctional behaviors people should have learned about in grade school. Lots of people are trying to do their best, but they don't always know what that is. Sometimes things are a relief.

I'm so far behind in transcribing minutes of meetings I can't face it long enough to make a list. I'm going to have to work all of my days off for weeks to catch up, and we keep scheduling more meetings. I'm either in charge or being the note-taking witness, or both, and it's all urgent and it's all uncomfortable as hell. And listening to it again while I transcribe doesn't usually make it any better.
And making it about me is the exact wrong thing to do. Some time in the empathy tent would help perhaps, but as soon as I clear one worry away a new one springs forth. At least with the minutes I get to leave things out that shouldn't have been said.

There's no hope of being inspired. There won't be a special peach tote bag this year, and the only hat design I can think of is "Someday we'll laugh about this" but it comes with a derisive snort. We're nowhere near the laughing stage. Selling is still fun, especially to the students who love my hats and say things like they're the best thing they've ever seen in their lives, but all the tourists want to move here and you know how that boom town story goes
. I get a few hours of pleasant feelings on Saturdays but probably for the next two months I'll get a lot of concerned or angry members coming to criticize, try to get some reassurance, or simply to let me know they have no idea what is so hard about what I'm thinking and feeling, because they have the simple answers. It has been a long time since I thought there were any simple answers.

So yeah, the plants and flowers, and the birds. The humans are not doing so well. Who would have thought one evilly stupid person could have spread so much shit over everything, even the things that are really not related to politics? Who could have predicted that we had so many bullies waiting to be empowered who are now gleefully causing chaos everywhere? They must have been holding it in. A truck with a confederate flag drove right by MY HOUSE yesterday. Colleen, to her credit, yelled at him. I couldn't even raise my voice to do that.

At least I truly do have a few allies in this with me, a few people who know how it is and are working for the same goals as I am. Fewer than I would like but maybe more than I know. Some people are doing better than I thought they would. Some new people will come along and be even better than that, I think. Rising to the challenges is always gratifying on some level. Plus I registered for the parade and asked the Radar Angel Jell-O Artists to be in it with me. 

And then I remembered that it might be a lot of work. The fun part might be really worth it, but to do it well means I have to use that discipline I am so good at and stick with it and make it happen. It's again, up to me. Did I really give myself another challenge when I am feeling so unable?

Yes, yes I did. I decided that I didn't want to miss the parade and the chance to be a Queen, a chance that might not come again like that. I feel overwhelmingly vulnerable, and the wrong thing to do is make myself more vulnerable by revealing what I really care about that might make me look a little not exactly normal, revealing what I really care about that makes it something I can't afford to lose, something I have to work to protect and save and make whole again and somehow preserve to care about some more.

I keep thinking about the practice of filling the cracks in broken crockery with gold. Taking something precious, that's ruined, and putting something even more precious on the line to make that point, that this is treasure worth saving, that we have to hold it together until the gold hardens and the piece will stand on its own again. We have to. And we will.

Because that is what we do. We rise to challenges, we work harder than we want to and we work long hours and sometimes the hot bath is the best thing we have to count on. We make do with that until things get better. We didn't really think we lived in a rose garden without thorns.

This is hard on me. This is hard. I will try to do my best to make it less hard on you, and you can try to help me, and we will do the work and put our world back together. At least this small corner, we will preserve and protect. We will make our Market stronger and more polished and even more full of vital life, that which has built us and we have built, and we will ripen our peach too and somehow hold onto our flamingo family as well, somehow we will hold our friends until they can stop being hurt and angry. Somehow we will do these things, carefully and slowly and we'll make it last as long as we can. I'm not letting go of any of it. I'm melting gold. 

Here I am, in the late night, melting my own heart so I can push it back into shape. That's what I wanted to do. Thank the dark, thank the pain, thank the heart that can still beat through it all. There will be summer, a parade, lots of them in fact, there will be some laughs, there will be some results of our work, and someday we will laugh about all this. There. Fixed. Goodnight.