New Beginnings

A New Beginning January 2010


A new year begins –

My curiosity brims over,

Excitement bubbles up into delight.

I ponder the year’s blank white slate

And wait to learn its invitations

And answer “yes,”

As it beckons to me about becoming.



Reflections:

Ellen’s and my friend, Kara, sent me today a link to her thoughts about the New Year, as she also reflected on the devastating loss of Ellen’s friendship a little over a year ago: “I thought of loss and of gratitude, and of how the light from all the fireworks pushed back all the darkness. I thought of beginnings, and how beginnings are a state of mind, an Innocence that we bring every day to the way we live and what we experience. It was one of my wishes always to look at life with fresh eyes, and always to be humble and grateful when doing so.”

I love the thought of beginnings as a state of mind, as innocence.

Endings inevitably entrain beginnings. Endings create vacuums, dark holes, negative spaces, absence. Light eventually comes to fill in the holes – if and when we can accept it.

A conversation today led me to reconsider one dramatic ending and beginning – with amazing light – that I experienced some time ago. I was 57. I had been teaching at the same college for 32 years, dodging the restraints of bureaucracy as best I could, inventing different ways to fulfill my contract while also remaining alive, vibrant, involved, and creative. My job, as defined, was during each semester teaching 150 students, from the bottom 10% of their high school classes – the least motivated -- how to write a sentence, then a paragraph, in a way that made sense and was grammatically correct. The goal was gradually to raise their literacy to a point where they would be able to take college level classes.

This task involved thirty classroom and mandated office hours a week, and another 20 or so hours a week slogging through dull, repetitive, often plagiarized, pompous, opinionated, ungrammatical, poorly spelled, and illegible student papers. The “Catch 22” was that if I marked the papers with lots of red ink, a job that required hours of tedious repetition, the students paid no attention to what I had written. What I said made no different in any way. On the other hand, if I summarized my critique in a sentence, they protested loudly that I’d given them a lower grade on a paper that I hadn’t marked up. If I hadn’t marked it up, it must have been perfect, so why didn’t they get an “A”? (I roll my eyes….).

I was worn out both from doing as much of this impossible job as I did and from creating other ways to use my time, from involving each class in a group project that involved community service, to supporting public secondary school teachers in providing experiential learning opportunities for their “less academic” students, to serving as the college’s grants coordinator for 10 years. I was exhausted. I felt unable to invent any other ways to let myself out of the impossibility of teaching so many of those students. I felt overwhelmed, beaten down. Also, my daughter had graduated from college and was on her own, and my husband and I had grown in very different directions during our 33 years together. We were unhappy and stressed.

One day, I knew that I had to retire and also to get away from St. Louis and from the marriage, at least for a while, to regain my bearings. If I didn’t, I felt overwhelmingly that I would become seriously ill from the accumulated stress.

I had spent a day with friends who lived in a rural Ozark community, and had told them my decision. As I was driving back to the city from their house, I experienced a “new beginning,” a transcendent experience of awesome, rainbow-hued light into which I entered. I was overwhelmed. The beauty, peace, and love within that light went beyond anything I could have imagined. It was heavenly bliss. I was no longer in the car. I perceived from the midst of the light that my car was stopped, engine turned off, in the middle of the rural road. The experience seemed to last for a long time, but it could also have been a second. Time did not exist in the light. I knew that I had to come back and go on with life on earth. But I also learned at that moment that there was indeed life after life, and that I could stop at any time, and go into that light of love, in meditation.

For years, I wondered why that life-transforming experience had happened at that moment; I finally figured out that it was the experience of a new beginning. I had accepted that my life as it had gone so far had to end, had to change, and I had – finally -- said “yes” to that change.

After taking early retirement and telling my husband I needed to get away, I drove to California, to Berkeley. After being there and seeing and getting to know numerous lesbian couples openly together, I had an epiphany. I realized that although I didn’t want to live alone, I also really didn’t want to remain married, or to try to meet other guys or to marry another one. All my life, I had had crushes and “particular friendships” with women. I’d never been romantically interested in boys – had never understood why the other girls were all so obsessed about boys. As a married woman, I'd always felt that I just didn’t get what all the other wives were interested in. I didn’t feel like one of them, but didn’t understand why not. I tried my best. I desperately wanted to look feminine, to act feminine. But I never felt feminine. I just didn’t seem able to fit in.

In California, I realized that in fact I had been gay all my life, that I was wired differently than most of the women I’d known, that I finally fit in somewhere -- with lesbians. For the first time ever, at age 58, I felt “normal.” I felt as though my being had a reason, that I could be myself and be accepted. It was such an enormous relief! I look back now on photographs of myself as a younger woman, with my family, and recognizing now the look of gay women, I see that woman in the photos – me -- and think, “Oh! She’s definitely gay.”

In California, also, as I served as a caregiver for my friend Fred during his last months of dying from cancer, I also finally found my true professional calling, as a healer and counselor. I had never wanted to be a teacher, never felt that was my true calling.  It was what years in graduate school had prepared me to do. It was also what I was trying to avoid by staying in graduate school as long as possible! Now, I decided to become a homeopath.  In Berkeley, I went through the full seven years of training, apprenticeship, student clinics, writing an original research thesis, taking a two day long written national examination, passing an oral exam, being interviewed about my practice principles and grasp of the profession’s ethics, and finally, at age 65,  becoming internationally certified as a professional classical homeopath.

At last, I was living authentically, being who I was meant to be and following my calling, and it felt wonderful. The experience in the light had predicted the “rightness” that would ensue after I had finally accepted how my life wasn’t working, and had opened to perceiving and following what seemed right.

Losing Ellen meant, of course, another dramatic ending to a period of my life, and the next vacuum that would lead to a new beginning. 2009 was the vacuum. I feel now, as 2010 begins, that I am open to the next new period in my life.


Saying “NO” December 27 2009

As children, we first learn “I”,

Closely followed by “No!”

“No” becomes our favorite word.

We love the role of despot, the sense of power.

We feel important making life step back from us.

We’ll say “no” to anything! --

“Do you want a cookie?” -- “No!!”

“I think you’ll like this.” – No!!

“Maybe if you started over here.” -- No!!!

“Can I help you?” – No!!

We say “no” most of our lives.

We refuse to surrender, we don’t want to appear weak,

We know we’re right, we’re meant to do everything ourselves,

We fear we’ll have to give back or do more:

We resist. We suffer.



But when we finally say “Yes” to life, things change.

A door opens and emits the rainbow light of a new world.

Our life begins anew.

We know our name, our nature, and our worth.