Day 365

One year ago I made a commitment to keep a blog for one year. I decided to focus on my efforts to live a nonviolent life. Now it is time to say good-bye to this blog. Before I do, I would like to reflect a little on what I have gained from this experience.

This blog was a promise to myself. I am almost never break my promises to other people but I needed to practice doing the same for me. I am proud that I saw this project through to the end. The rewards were plentiful.

I remember that first time I ever flew in an airplane. Looking down at the landscape I saw a patchwork quilt of green and brown, only visible from a great distance. This blog has given me that perspective on my own life. I have come to see the patterns and I have gained appreciation for my hard-won sense of equanimity.

This blog has helped me to embrace myself as a writer. Some entries were insightful, some were boring. The value was in the doing. The end product was in many ways incidental. As Miles Horton once said, "We make the road by walking."

I have decided to continue down this road. One of the things I learned this year about nonviolence was that it is, more than anything else, about honoring that which is most alive for us at any given moment. That is my plan for the immediate future.

Day 364

I heard a news story today about a man who was convicted of stealing a sign that hung at the entrance to Auschwitz. The sign read "Arbeit macht frei" which can be translated as work will make you free.

I couldn't get the phrase out of my head today as I was shoveling the driveway and making bread and doing housework. There is truth in this old German proverb. There is a certain freedom in meaningful work. Of course work is only meaningful when it is imbued with a sense of autonomy and as Malcolm Gladwell points out a relationship between effort and reward.

It is sad to think of the way the Nazi's distorted this noble truth. I suppose it is not really so different from the ways our own instituions distort the truth to shape the will of the people.

Dasy 363

I woke up this morning to a blizzard. I looked through the frosted window in my room. It was like looking out from inside a gingerbread house. The buildings and cars across the street had disappeared, painted over by a wall of blowing snow. I felt shut off from the rest of the world. Yesterday I relished in the notion of isolation. Today it made me feel sad and lonely.

Then again, maybe my mood is more attributable to the calendar. The week between Christmas and New Years Day is like a chasm between the past and present. I create, edit, play and replay the movie highlights of the year that is about to come to a close. At the same time, I dream about what the new year might hold in store. It is a time for quiet reflection. Perhaps it is the perfect time for being snowed in.

Day 362

I put Kat on a bus headed for Olympia at 7:00 a.m. I was a little sad to see her go but also excited to get back home and reclaim my space. I am fortunate to have a room of my own, that I occasionally forfeit for guests.

Virginia Woolf counted a room of one's own as an essential component of the creative life. I'm not sure that I agree about the room. But I do know that I need time to be alone with my thoughts. It is wonderful to be able to close the door and shut out the rest of the world. Being alone, without distractions or obligations, allows me to hear my own thoughts and begin to understand my own mind. This is the essence of awareness.

When I was younger I never wanted to be alone. I would talk on the phone with friends for hours to avoid the silence. I would busy myself with endless projects to elude the stillness. I was afraid of the quiet because I was afraid of my own mind. I stopped running only when I was too exhausted to go on. What a gift that was.

Day 361

Last night Bill and Kat got into an intellectual disagreement. It involved philosophy and science and the philosophy of science - very heady stuff. It was interesting to listen to. I was too emotionally invested, however, to fully enjoy the debate.

At one point their voices became strained; I could read the tension on their faces. They were talking over each other, barely waiting for the other to finish speaking before leaping in to foist another intellectual jab. Their mutual frustration hung in the air; it felt dangerous. I worried that someone might get hurt.

Later, when I was falling off to sleep, I could hear them talking in another room. Bill said something that was muffled by the walls between us. Kat laughed. I huddled into the blankets and felt warmed by their comradery, my love for each of them multiplied by their shared affection.

Day 360

I was reading Natalie Goldberg this morning. She urges memoir writers to start with the scary stuff, the dark places, the hidden knowledge, the secrets. She might as well be saying write down your shame.

I think of myself as an open book. I often share intimate details with those closest to me and sometimes with people in line at the grocery store. I sometimes referred to myself as an emotional voyeur. And yet Natalie's prompt this morning got me thinking...

It is challenging for me to talk or write about my own sexuality. I can talk about sex in a clinical, detached sort of way. In fact, I was once a sexuality educator for a teen pregnancy prevention project. But when I try to write about a sexual experience of my own or even my own thoughts and feelings about sex, I experience a rush of shameful emotions.

Natalie says we have to write about the stuff we should not write about, otherwise, we will always be writing around our secrets. I wonder how much energy I expend avoiding thoughts and feelings about my own sexuality.

Day 359

Kat was checking her Facebook page yesterday and noticed a conversation about "Christmas" started by one of her friends. Her friend was frustrated with people who assumed that she was celebrating the holiday. She insisted that "this is not a Christian country." This set off a whole string of responses, both angry and sympathetic.

Here was that drama again. Kat goes to a liberal arts college that is full of would-be activists. They remind me of myself when I was younger. Always struggling, always fighting. There is an air of drama all around them because they are always casting themselves as the protagonists in their stories and others as the antagonists.

I have been working to recast my own stories: no antagonists, no protagonists, only human beings all struggling to be accepted, to connect, to love and be loved. It doesn't make for good drama but it does make for a more peaceful life.

Oh yeah, and happy nondenominational winter season greetings!