Archives for posts with tag: Finding Hope

ADRIFT – Part 1

04/10/2015 //
2

My heart was breaking.

My marriage had failed. The relationship suddenly ended, abandoned, when the man I was married to cleared out of my life forever. I had wanted him gone, yet still I was reeling in shock and loss.

In the way that only sudden loss can inspire, I found myself shoving various and often copious amounts of insights, ideas, new projects, sugar, cigarettes, the occasional diet soda and all the wrong kinds of love into the spot that had opened up in my soul.

They call it a rebound for a reason: A split-second, built-in reaction learned through practice. This is true be it basketball, or love. And I had practiced it many times before, throughout my adult life, this stuffing of love into the empty places where other things should be. It was a practiced response.

He was known to me, this rebound: We’d been acquaintances for a few years. He paid attention to me, looked me in the eye. He had kids, beautiful ones.

And he helped me fight off the deep internal sense that I deserved to be abandoned. That I was broken. My mind told me that I WAS good enough: kind (most of the time); Fair, outgoing, adventurous; A keeper. I was surrounded by love to prove this. In the days and months after the abandonment, family, friends, and colleagues had come rushing to my side, into my days and evenings with phone calls, with trips, and with love. Pure love.

It was not enough to plug the hole. Created not by the abandonment itself, but by something much earlier and deep-seated, I rebounded into the easy salve, an attempt to make a scar disappear.

We all know how that works: It doesn’t. He wasn’t right for me, he wasn’t right to me. And yet, I kept him around. It wasn’t healthy, but I couldn’t leave. We were both complicit in trying to weave this bandage.

Without being able to admit it, name it, or see it, I was floundering. I was adrift – in love, in self-worth, in sense of self.

The Wolf, docked at Sailabration, was unmistakable

The Wolf, docked at Sailabration, was unmistakable

Then, in July 2012, the Topsail Schooner Wolf sailed back into my life in the port of Baltimore. I recognized her pulling into her slip from across the harbor – she was unmistakable. Brown hull, brown masts. Pirate flag and Conch Republic Flag – the Key West emblem — flying off the halyards to the stern, the back of the boat.

She was the smallest of the fleet come to the harbor to visit Baltimore as part of the week-long Sailabration, and her slip was tucked away from the main docks. Yet still hundreds flocked to visit her, to sail her. The Wolf is like that: She is a pirate ship, with her salt-spray grey rope for her lines, and the wolf head that forms the ship’s figurehead. This is no sleek racing ship with winches and machinery: It takes manpower to haul and trim her sails. It takes a crew to make her live.

Boarding Wolf again for the first time in decades.

Boarding Wolf again for the first time in decades.

Wolf is the closest-thing you’ll get to a modern-day pirate ship: she saves souls, equitably, firmly, lovingly. As though this is trumpeted through her steel hull, pirate flag and hodge-podge crew, people flock to Wolf, even when she is surrounded by wooden-hulled beauties of teak and oak. She is different, set apart, and she calls to those who recognize in her the need for equal balance of discipline and freedom. This is the seemingly incongruous aspect of a pirate ship: in her seemingly hedonistic spirit, instead there is much to be uncovered about the spirit of being human.

####

I’d been adrift the FIRST time I’d found the Wolf in 1996, sitting dockside in the harbor of Key West.

I’d fled to Key West on the heels of a family secret revealed – one that everyone knew except me. Wrestling with this new information, something I should have seen before, I felt betrayed. Flummoxed. Lost. In the midst of college classes and a full-time job at a TV station, I’d been unable to synthesize it, and I ran from the disbelief and misunderstanding that dogged my heels through an entire spring.

I ran to the edge of the world. Key West is at the end of a chain of islands created by petrified coral and mangrove trees, small blips of land filled in with sand, rock and people’s dreams. It is simultaneously a paradise, and a Sodom, the denizen of artists, writers, vagabonds, thieves – and dreamers. It lives at the edge of the US, and as though the island knows this, she breathes it into the people who call the island home.

Key West “seceded” from the United States in 1982, after government blockades designed to shut down the drug trade stopped its tourist trade as well. Citizens of Key West rebelled, declared the lower keys separate and independent, and the Conch Republic was born. It is in jest, this Conch Republic status – kind of. Maybe. Her role as outcast pirate island is as real to the people of Key West as the daily drudgery of life and work.

The Schooner Wolf is the Conch Republic’s flagship, and when I stepped onto the docks of Key West’s Harbor that summer of ’96, I took one look at her sitting amongst the sleek boats that were there and said, “I want to learn to sail. And I want to learn on her.”

I found Captain Finbar, Wolf’s Captain and Owner, working at the boat one day. He was outfitted in full beard, long blonde-grey hair pulled back into a pony tail. A button-up white shirt. A ball cap with admiral’s wings on it. He was both formidable and approachable. Such is the way of the dichotomy of the pirate ship spirit.

“I’d like to work on the Wolf,” I told him.

“Ah. Have you ever worked on a ship before?” he asked.

Little butterflies entered my stomach. I wanted nothing more than to be on this boat. I willed it to be. “No,” I said. “But I’m a good learner.” A beat. “She’s beautiful,” I told him.

Captain Finbar nodded one time, looked down towards the deck of the boat where he stood, back at me on the land. “Aye. OK, come aboard tonight for our sunset sail. You can learn the ropes, see if you like it.”

I learned her customs, the commands, over a week. By the second week I had learned the ebb and flow of having customers on board to entertain for her evening sunset cruises. Within a month, I had learned the power of a crew, the beauty of a command given, and the heady rush in fulfilling it as part of a whole. We were an all-female crew aboard the Wolf, and what we lacked in muscle power we made up for in team work, communication, solid support. We were all in this together, against the waves, the wind, the sea.

I’d stopped speaking to my father before I’d moved to Key West, had all buy excommunicated him from my life, a reaction to the family secret. A punishment. I’d called my Mother the week before I moved to Key West for a summer, brushed aside her concerns that I wouldn’t return to school (she was right: I would not return until the following year). I went wild with freedom, but each night stepped aboard the Wolf to controlled discovery.

Finbar at the helm

Finbar at the helm

For all the ways I shoved my father out of my life that summer and fall, I found Captain Finbar. He was a man of few words, but he commanded, still: with solidarity, with loyalty and with trust, we followed his orders implicitly. We knew he had our best interests in the center of his sights. This is the thing that makes a great captain. It could be a wild place, this sea. Finbar did not seek to conquer it, merely to judge the winds and waves and current to get the ship on the best course for sail. I plugged him in to where my father used to be. I never fully knew him, but I knew that he would not let me down – would not let his crew down.

I stayed out of school for the fall semester, licking wounds in the sunsets. In those daily sails I found my strength, I found my team, I found my spirit and I found myself again.

#####

Yet by 2012, I was floundering again. My relationship with my father healed, grown up a few decades, more patient, I was still wrestling with finding men I could trust.

I sailed with the Wolf from Baltimore to Annapolis, spent a few days with her, and I began to heal again. For a few decades I had tried to solve it myself: with alcohol; with rampant biking, running and swimming until I’d blow out my knees and hips; with ever-rising levels of career success. None of them had helped, and I was now left with only this: a  string of lovers who didn’t work out. Relationships had become my salve, however ineffective, and I could not give them up. I picked partners wrong, I ignored signs I shouldn’t have, and when it didn’t work out, I picked again as quickly as possible to prove that I was good enough – that I had worth. Despite being emotionally intelligent, despite knowing that THIS was not the way to find love, I repeated the pattern again and again.

Departing, I would never be the same.

Departing, I would never be the same.

I saw the Wolf off to her next port in her East Coast Voyage of 2012 one early, hot, windless summer day in July 2012. We loaded up ice, prepared her lines, and I stepped onto the dock. Her engine fired up, a deep glug that reverberated over the water, around the dock, and into my solar plexus. As she pulled away, I let loose with a deep, guttural howl. “Aaahwooooooo!” A wolf howl, from deep inside, a resonating reminder to myself, to tje Wolf, that I remembered, now, who I was.

And I began my own journey to heal, in love, in life.

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Categories Emotional health, Personal Growth, Spirituality, Uncategorized

ABANDONED

04/01/2015 //
2

On Oct. 15 2011, my husband left me.

I don’t mean left me as in, we talked about separation, we divided up our things and he departed the house — you know, with agreement. With finality. With closure. With conversation. I mean, he left me as in I returned home one evening to find he had packed up all he could fit into the car, cleared out the bank accounts, and left the keys behind, with nary a word or a note –and never to communicate again via phone, text or email (at least, not until seven months later when he wanted to get the rest of his things).

To be fair, we HAD talked separation. After nearly a year of marriage counseling, and another few previous years of strife and struggle, I had finally come to the realization that the marriage was never going to be truly that  — a marriage, a joint union, each spouse standing for the other, making decisions for the marriage in lieu of the self. The morning he left, we had talked a bit more about the logistics of a separation, what the process might be.

But his actions that day had me feeling just one thing: ABANDONED.

Abandonment was my worst fear, realized.

It was the stuff of all my nightmares as a child, a teen, and even an adult. It’s what I had fought to avoid — in all my relationships, in my jobs, in my every day.  By 4 am the next morning I was exhausted, unable to sleep and devoid of any feeling except a deep pit in my stomach that was unquenchable with the very blackness of its depth. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even think.

I was an empty vessel lying in bed that night and morning. I didn’t know until then how much of my soul had gone into keeping the very thing I feared the most — abandonment — at bay.

When I called my Mom the morning after that sleepless night, all the feelings I’d been holding back, the ones locked behind the empty vessel I had become over the past three years, came flooding out in one single clarified moment. For the first time in many, many years, I sobbed, and I did it from the depths of my fear. All the loneliness, pointless wishing and hiding from myself I’d been doing came crashing in at once and came out of me in a  low empty, nearly voiceless cry turning into a deep racking sob that lasted for wordless, endless moments.

It’s amazing what can happen when there’s nothing left to lose. For the first time in my life, I asked my Mon to come and rescue me: to come and stay with me the next week as I navigated not just sudden aloneness, but with the sudden grappling of the knowledge I’d been trying to avoid for so long, maybe since just after I’d gotten married. Not only was I abandoned NOW, I’d been abandoned, really, from the very beginning. Maybe before I’d even fathomed the idea of marriage at all.

She came to rescue me, to stay with me, just to BE with me. And my restart started, again.

*******************

Abandoned, or at rest, a boat unsailed will start to rot.

Each year, hundreds of ships are abandoned at docks and on sea. Depending on how you define abandonment, the actual number could be MUCH higher. After all, while we often talk about ships as though they embody a human — usually a she, as in, “She sails straight,” or “She is a great, beautiful boat,” or “She has her quirks but she never lets me down in weather,” — sailors and shipmen alike tend to refer to how much “soul” a boat has. Some storied ships carry their own spirit, regardless of owner, but these are few and far between. I would argue that most ships only have as much soul as its captain and crew are willing to put into it.

Abandoned, or at rest, a boat unsailed will start to rot.

Abandoned, or at rest, a boat unsailed will start to rot.

Amazingly, even though many of these abandoned ships sit at docks or anchor for years, no one steps in to claim them as their own. There is an unwritten rule that, even if a ship’s owner has not taken care of a ship in years, has not visited her or paid for her dockage or done anything to upkeep the ship, She belongs to someone else.

Plenty of laws exist on the books in each local, state and international jurisdiction that make it clear that even if it’s abandoned, it still belongs to someone. Marinas have to go through piles of paperwork to get an abandoned boat declared as such before they can legally be allowed to remove it. The US Coast Guard and state natural resource departments can’t even begin to clean up the waste of an unclaimed boat until they get a legal declaration — a process that again takes much time and paperwork. Even if they do, there remains the ultimate question of who will pay for the removal of not just the boat but the fuel and oil it leeches into the water as it decays. Because ultimately, these abandoned ships eventually succumb to the water in which they languish.

A boat without water flowing by its hulls will eventually begin to rot, from the outside in. Wooden boats’ planks begin to shrink, change shape and leak water until the boards open to let more water in while the batteries die and the pumps stop emptying the ship of the inevitable water that makes its way through (because, as any seasoned sailor will tell you, all wooden boats leak, all the time). Metal hulls start to rust and welded seams eventually fail. Fiberglass hulls, too, develop weaknesses when left to the wiles of winds, waves and rain.

To prosper and survive, ships need sailed. As though there is a deep-seated recognition that an abandoned ship is soulless and without much merit, the REAL pirates of today — the ones that patrol Africa’s coast and the China seas and even parts of the Caribbean — will not touch an abandoned boat. They target vessels already under steam, with a crew, a commodity underway. These pirates know a boat abandoned is merely an empty vessel, and they want a vessel full of possibility they can steal.

***********************

In the months after my spouse abandoned me, an amazing and unexpected thing happened: I found faith. In the vastness of love foundered on dreams unrealized, I developed a deep, abiding belief in love. I found a lasting sense of peace. And I discovered I had never been abandoned at all.  In this abandonment, I found freedom to take the abandoned vessel I thought I had become, shore it up with some new boards, a bit of pitch tar and faith in a right wind and TRUST it fully again. I learned to trust myself again, and I learned to trust the sense that came from deep within that there was something else driving this ship, something that I could trust.

Photo, Pam Steude. Sometimes dark times, are really openings to more

Photo, Pam Steude. Sometimes dark times, are really openings to more

We all have this opportunity, all the time, in the small and big losses of life.

Losing a job, an important relationship, a loved one, a dream: In our human attempts to overcome the inevitability of life, the ebb and flow of dreams developed, followed and derailed, we try to keep those events that cause those feelings at bay because, ultimately, we like to think that we can control what happens to us.

We gather inspirational sayings to arm ourselves against that nagging voice that tells us in the quiet moments on dark nights that we are not good enough, not important enough or not doing enough. These work, for a time, until that next quiet moment returns. These losses force us to look directly at the one thing we fight against as humans:  that We Can Not, try as we might, BE God.

We do not consider, maybe we cannot consider, that in the clearing that loss creates, we are not DEVOID as much as we are an empty vessel ready to be filled. Perhaps then, the ultimate question is what we will fill our vessels with, what soul cry we will answer when we are finally empty enough to choose freely.

And so maybe boats – and people- ultimately become a product of their story and founding principles no matter where they sit or sail.

Left with nothing to lose, our vessels ask us what soul cry we will pick up. Our fate is not sealed: we are not an empty ship abandoned and now devoid of soul without its captain and crew to give it story and heart. Our vessel was never empty to begin with. And instead of fearing the space that these great losses can bring, we can instead remember that our soul infuses within us a continuing story.  Abandonment is a chance for us to ask, instead of what the world will bring to us, what WE will bring to the world.

I choose faith, love, hope and peace.Hope

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Categories Emotional health, Personal Growth, Spirituality

When Life Gives you Lemons… Make Whine

03/16/2015 //
2

I was sick for three months.

Ok, so maybe it was more like 2.75. But whatever. I’m a writer. Sometimes writers fudge and expand the details to enhance the story.

At any rate, at the exact time that I had FINALLY been given some time to do that THING that has most called to me for almost my entire life is the time when sickness fell and wiped me out. For, like, that last three months.

For years I’d been a busy, professional and rather successful career woman. I had the titles, the salary, the friends (but not the car… a part of me has always eschewed totally following the cliché). But last year, something snapped. A bit of frustration, plus a workaholic schedule, plus the growing realization that my life was perfectly poised to go DO this thing – for once – naturally made me want to shake it all up.
Full confession: I am approaching the official mid-life mark, and now that it’s nearly here and I’ve made the jump, I can no longer deny that perhaps the big 4-0 had more to do with this new life than I’d previously wanted to admit.

I am, admittedly in this telling, glossing over all the gory details: suffice it to say, on Dec. 1, I quit the job and headed out to follow my dream = to write that book I’ve wanted to do for years.

I’d developed an agreement with myself that I could have six gloriously free months to research and write the book. I’d do a two-week trip to Key West in December for all the research to be done. By January, I’d have it outlined. By February I’d be done with Chapter 2. By May my first draft would be done.

Given that planning it out in my professional career before had usually, mostly, WORKED, I had no reason to think this would go any differently.

Dude, Dudette. DogGod... whatever works for your "higher power"

Dude, Dudette. DogGod… whatever works for your “higher power”

But the dude (or dudette or DogGod or Pluto- whatever you need you believe. Just make sure you read What Questions a Dog would Ask God) upstairs has one heck of a sense of humor. As so often happens when things are set up PERFECTLY, the plan hit the bottom of the ravine all too quickly. My dream of spending day after day writing, editing, researching – thoroughly embedded in the work of my story — slowly slipped away as, week after week, I either caught an infection or had some new symptom develop that essentially wiped out my ability to do much of anything useful.

It started in the middle of Paradise on my maiden voyage, just two weeks into this grand new life. I was struck: a bacterial infection that sent my insides scrambling and left me with a prescription for two heavy-duty antibiotics. I avoided the hospital this time, but not without suffering through a few weeks of side effects. Then, at the tail end of that debacle came the flu. Happy New Year. Followed by a cold. Then another. Then a virus that refused to go away. Then another cold. Ad nauseam, for two months. As if that wasn’t enough, in January my hands pretty much stopped working, and I couldn’t actually perform the function of writing for any longer than 10 minutes.

I was a pirate in paradise when it all went down...

I was a pirate in paradise when it all went down…

For a newly-minted, newly-proclaimed writer, this loss of use of hands was the cruelest. It sent me howling into my journal (a new daily practice I mostly do, seeming only apropos that if I’m to be a writer I should write something each day, even if it’s only dribbling thoughts). I read back through those entries the other day and admit, here, fully – It was entirely whining. Like with a capital W. In retrospect, some WINE might have helped that situation- but I don’t do that anymore (another story).

It didn’t help that each time I’d have a day or two of feeling better, of being nearly normal, and then I’d feel some signal of the start of yet another virus. My Whining reached fevered pitch, along with my visits to various doctors and specialists. I may have even shook  my fists in the air at God- which at the least did make me, and the hubster, laugh.

 While I am back to pre-December production, energy level and doing-ness, it turns out there are in fact reasons this has all been happening – an immune dysfunction that doctors usually treat only when the patient is symptomatic and/or under duress. And I am fast hurtling towards a Fibromyalgia diagnosis, which is where they put you when you have all these THINGS, but no known underlying already-defined disease. Never mind that I don’t have either one of the main hallmark of the disorder (all-over pain). Truth is, this isn’t the first time: Like many in my situation, I started having bouts of this after a 3-month virus in 2008, and in the past few years it has gotten worse. Last year I spent most of my time going to work and when I wasn’t doing that, sleeping. The on-and-off elevated pulse, the fingers and toes losing circulation, the extreme fatigue, and tingling hands were, my doctor told me, all due to stress. Blood tests backed this up. OK, so great, simple solution: quit said stressful job. So when it got WORSE at the beginning of this year, rather than better…. well hopefully you can empathize with why I was so flummoxed. Beside myself. OK: Angry. I was very angry and pitiful.

But like all things, it eventually wound down, the sickness and the Whining.

Because in the midst this storm that was sleeping, eating, feeling awful, battling medicinal side effects, not being able to comprehend the words I was reading let alone make NEW thoughts out of them, I remembered one very important thing: I was a pirate once.

topsail schooner wolf

Schooner Wolf

Albeit, I was a nice pirate, the kind that you run into on sailboats in very nice touristy places—but still, even there the pirate spirit exists. You take the girl off the ship, but you can’t take the pirate out of the girl. You can’t take away the rebellion, you can’t remove the desire to freedom, and you can’t get away from the pirate’s indomitable spirit to PROSPER against even the mightiest of uncontrollable forces. In fact, it is those very howling forces of fate that call a pirate to most BE. It is this spirit, after all, that attracts so many people to the idea of pirates – this the reason the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has done so well, that pirate festivals around the US have flourished (and been established even inland, like Kansas).

Yes, somewhere around about late January I got angry, full of fight. Somewhere around mid-February, I gave up. Perhaps not UP as much as IN: to the irrefutable truth that life so often seems to want to teach us: that despite the best-laid plans, you cannot control the actual outcome of the situation. My pirate self started, essentially, to howl into the wind. And now that the storm has abated (today marks one week entirely symptom free, two weeks since I could function normally again), I am beginning to do what so many REAL pirates before me have done when faced with a journey thwarted, a ship sunk: to begin again.

This marks the launch of a serial blog, one that will pull on bits and pieces from the book I am working on, will explore what makes a pirate, why we love pirates, and what it all has to do with business – and life. I know three people who will read it. And I’m happy with that. It’s practice, and it will remind me that I am a pirate at heart, as so many of us really, truly are. It all comes from my time aboard the Schooner Wolf, Key West’s official pirate flagship –often stories that don’t fit in the official book. The one time that knife-wielding customer boarded the evening sunset sail, for instance. Stories abound on a pirate ship. And I am just beginning to capture them.

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Categories Bucking the System, I Quit My Job, Personal Growth

On Playing God & Creativity

01/06/2015 //
2

I am a recovering creative.

Truth be told, I am a recovering a lot of things. But that’s another blog. Ok, maybe a book since, after all, I’m getting up there in age.

I don’t mean recovering creative as in, “used to be and now seeking to not be.” I mean recovering as in, “becoming again.”

Just Say No(In case you think I am making up this creative recovery thing, I am not: it has a whole movement, a 12-step recovery process all its own, A.R.T.S Anonymous. As if artists really need help being any more anonymous: if you ask me, we need more light shined on how much work we are actually producing each day. It’s surprisingly easy to do work, without actually working on what you are supposed to be working on — this blog post being the perfect example.)

Each day I used to don the professional gear, commute 20 to 30 minutes, sit at my desk and begin the work of beginning to work. Each day was different, but the setting, the task, the GOAL, was the same: do lots of stuff to accomplish overall organizational goals, win friends, influence others and look smart while doing it!

And let me tell you, when it was working, it was HEADY stuff. When I was ON, the power was mine to wield, to make marvelous things happen for people, to make a DIFFERENCE. And I was good at my jobs – Good at getting money for the organizations I worked for; good at producing papers, newsletters, words that made people act; good at connecting people and making things happen.

But after 20 years, I was starting to run dry. The stress of not working on the words, the stories, the ideas in my head, was starting to show.

More importantly, I was starting to believe the headiness all that power of creation in the workplace created. I was starting to buy in. I started to want the fancy Brooks Brothers suits; the nicer, new car; the Washington DC parties and high-end connections and the power of knowing the people running the Ultimate Power City. In short, I started to think it was real.

Thankfully, a few things happened that leveled out my progress down the Great Corporate Power Road:

  1. My first husband left me, suddenly and without word or communicationIPhone Laura 2015 239 thereafter, after clearing out all his clothes and our joint bank account;
  2. Bereft and broken, I started exploring the whys and hows of the world, and of me;
  3. When I slipped up and let my EGO pick a power-filled job again, I ended up In a position that made me realize, quickly, that no amount of work would actually mean I could achieve the very thing I was supposed to in said job.

Ultimately, it was the crushing of my EGO — the painful tearing away of expectations, assumptions and successes — that got me out of that mess.

And so here I sit today: STRESS-less and Corporate-America-Shine-and-Dine-Big-JOB-less. Entirely for the better.

Except.

Each day I write and work on my active creative recovery for an hour, sometimes up to three. I am supposed to “play” several times during the week – and do lots of reading, not necessarily related to the book I am working on. I am supposed to work at creative things that don’t necessarily produce anything, and aren’t meant to. After I write, I head to the desk to tackle my actual creative work: Research, writing, planning. Usually for all of four hours, which is about what I have left after all that. I have yet to produce any new words for my book, and I’m only 10% done with my research. I alternate between feelings of despair, hopelessness and loneliness, and ever-soaring elation, freedom and the feeling that I have finally landed IN myself. Which, it turns out, is exactly what folks tend to feel in addiction recovery programs.

Addiction, at its core, is all about when individuals start thinking/believing and/or trying to BE God. For many of us, that’s exactly what work becomes. When you’re working, hard, every day, and making things happen, and bringing in more money each year, and hearing great things about yourself from all loads of people – well, it becomes easy to believe all that. And, you start to want to hear it more often. Until just one is no longer enough.

Our culture is set up to support accomplishment, great productions – money and things included. I’m starting to think that, in fact, our nation’s founders had tendencies towards bi-polar disorder that made them want to strike off across the ocean to unknown land to begin with – let alone settle remote outposts surrounded by woods and wilds. That certainly explains the Salem Witch Trials  to me a whole heck of a lot better than religious zealotry. Ok, so maybe it’s an equally-weighted thing.

Either way, as with anything that feels good when you first do it, but then gets more guilt-laden than celebratory, where the repercussions start outweighing the benefits, and where one is just not enough (job, shift, one more hour or one more digit increase to the salary), eventually, if work is your addiction, you hit the proverbial bottom.

Increasingly, we Americans are hitting that bottom – even as countless stories, research projects and pundits caution us that happiness does not lie in great works, money, things or more hours working. You analytical types can see the proof by reading Stanford University’s “The Relationship Between Hours Worked and Productivity,” or by watching the Ted Talk Video, “Flow: the Secret of Happiness.”  Or read up on the work of social scientists who discovered a few years ago that people who make $75k or more may feel better in general about life, but not in day-to-day, overall emotional well-being – and that, in fact, that daily happiness ratio decreases the more a person makes above that mark.

It’s just not hard to find the studies and scholarly articles that prove we Americans are working more, achieving less and being more miserable doing it.

The challenge is, of course, recovering in a society that is largely addicted to the power of work – something that ultimately is more related to culture, which would take far more than a nationwide 12-step recovery program to address.

But if any of you creative, workaholic types out there feel like tackling that fix-it, have at it.

IPhone Laura 2015 199In the meantime, the best answer might be for us each, individually, to embark upon our own recovery – creative, spiritual, family or otherwise. At the end, it’s all about uncovering what it is that throws us off balance, tracking it down, excising it and then working on re-centering.

Maybe that’s the closest we really need to a New Year’s resolution.

 

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Categories creativity, I Quit My Job, Personal Growth, work-life balance

Abandoned

10/13/2013 //
0

On Oct. 15,  2011, my husband left me.

I don’t mean left me as in, we talked about separation, we divided up our things and he departed the  house one day at an arranged time — you know, with agreement. With finality. With closure. With conversation. I mean, he left me as in I returned home one evening to find he had packed up all he could fit into the car, cleared out the bank accounts, and left the keys behind, with nary a word or a note –and never to communicate again via phone, text or email (at least, not until seven months later when he wanted to get the rest of his things).

To be fair, we HAD talked separation. After nearly a year of marriage counseling, and another few previous years of strife and struggle, I had finally come to the realization that the marriage was never going to be truly that  — a marriage, a joint union, each spouse standing for the other, making decisions for the marriage in lieu of the self. It had been my decision to separate to move towards divorce. And the morning he left, we had talked a bit more about the logistics of a separation, what the process might be.

But his actions that day had me feeling just one thing: ABANDONED.

Abandonment was my worst fear, realized.

It was the stuff of all my nightmares as a child, a teen, and even an adult. It’s what I had fought to avoid — in all my relationships, in my jobs, in my every day.  By 4 am the next morning I was exhausted, anxious, unable to sleep and devoid of any feeling except a deep pit in my stomach that was unquenchable with the very blackness of its depth. So much so that I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even think.

I was an empty vessel lying in bed that night and morning: As though until I had to quit fighting, hard, every second of every day and even in my sleep for the shell of a marriage I had found myself in, I didn’t even know how hard I’d been fighting. I didn’t know then how much of my soul had gone into keeping the very thing I feared the most — abandonment — at bay.

When I called my Mom the morning after that sleepless night, all the feelings I’d been holding back, the ones locked behind the empty vessel I had become over the past three years, came flooding out in one single clarified moment. For the first time in many, many years, I sobbed, and I did it from the depths of my fear. All the loneliness, pointless wishing and hiding from myself I’d been doing came crashing in at once and came out of me in a  low empty, nearly voiceless cry turning into a deep racking sob that lasted for wordless, endless moments.

It’s amazing what can happen when there’s nothing left to lose. For the first time in my life, I asked her to come and rescue me: to come and stay with me the next week as I navigated not just sudden aloneness, but with the sudden grappling of the knowledge I’d been trying to avoid for so long, maybe since just after I’d gotten married. Not only was I abandoned NOW, I’d been abandoned, really, from the very beginning. Maybe before I’d even fathomed the idea of marriage at all.

She came to rescue me, to stay with me, just to BE with me. And my restart started, again.

*******************

Abandoned, or at rest, a boat unsailed will start to rot.

Abandoned, or at rest, a boat unsailed will start to rot.

Each year, hundreds of ships are abandoned at docks and on sea. Depending on how you define abandonment, the actual number could be MUCH higher. After all, while we often talk about ships as though they embody a human — usually a she, as in, “She sails straight,” or “She is a great, beautiful boat,” or “She has her quirks but she never lets me down in weather,” — sailors and shipmen alike tend to refer to how much “soul” a boat has. Some storied ships carry their own spirit, regardless of owner, but these are few and far between. And, I would argue that most ships only have as much soul as its captain and crew are willing to put into it.

Amazingly, despite the ships that sit abandoned at docks, no one comes to claim them as their own. There is an unwritten rule that, even if a ship’s owner has not taken care of a ship in years, has not visited her or paid for her dockage or done anything to upkeep the ship, She belongs to someone else. And plenty of laws exist on the books in each local, state and international jurisdiction that make it clear that even if it’s abandoned, it still belongs to someone. Marinas have to go through piles of paperwork to get an abandoned boat declared as such before they can legally be allowed to remove it. The US Coast Guard and state natural resource departments can’t even begin to clean up the waste of an unclaimed boat until they get a legal declaration — a process that again takes much time and paperwork. And even if they do, there remains the ultimate question of who will pay for the removal of not just the boat but the fuel and oil it leeches into the water  as it decays. Because ultimately, these abandoned ships eventually succumb to the water in which they languish. A boat without water flowing by its hulls will eventually begin to rot, from the outside in. Wooden boats’ planks begin to shrink, change shape and leak water until the boards open to let more water in while the batteries die and the pumps stop emptying the ship of the inevitable water that makes its way through (because, as any seasoned sailor will tell you, all wooden boats leak, all the time). Metal hulls start to rust and welded seams eventually fail. Fiberglass hulls, too, develop weaknesses when left to the wiles of winds, waves and rain. To prosper and survive, ships need sailed. As though there is a deep-seated recognition that an abandoned ship is soulless and without much merit, the REAL pirates of today — the ones that patrol Africa’s eastern coast’s and the China seas — will not touch an abandoned boat. They target vessels already under steam, with a crew, a commodity underway. These pirates know a boat abandoned is merely an empty vessel, and they want a vessel full of possibility they can steal.

A boat that sits too long, too often, that’s faced a checkered past, a bad reputation, often meets if not an abandoned, untimely end, then a sad fading into semi-obscurity. Look no further than the tale of the Schooner America, a replica of the boat for which the landmark sailboat match the world tunes into today was named (This year’s match was out of San Francisco August 21 to 26 and October 2 to 7). Built by a wealthy Virginian restaurateur to be both a money-making venture and a goodwill ambassador for the US,  Mr. Ray Giovanni’s dream never quite materialized. The boat has alternated in its 20-year history between being celebrated, reviled, abandoned, recovered and re-celebrated before fading once again into the background at some dock in a port town (the full story of the Schooner America is coming soon, in a post entitled “Checkered Pasts and High Seas: The Life of the Schooner America”). Just three years after the Schooner America was built to great fanfare, celebration and media coverage, she languished at a Ft. Lauderdale marina, unwanted at the original asking price. In those short 36 months, the ship had developed enough of a reputation that few were willing to tackle a young boat with a checkered past. Its various owners in its life — three to date — have proclaimed in various ways that THIS time she was to prosper fully. Greg Muzzy,  owner of Liberty Fleet which bought the Schooner America in 1999 — only to have her run aground just a year later as she sailed on her maiden voyage out of Boston — told me in 2000: “The boat’s had a checkered life and created some bad reputations here and there. Our job is to try and fix some of those reputation problems and turn it into the best it can be.” And yet, just a few years later, Liberty Fleet put the Schooner America up on the auction block again.

A vessel facing criticism, abandonment, trials and innuendos, can hardly seem to escape that fate. The Schooner America is not the only ship to sail this tale.

And here lies the very real distinction between a vessel abandoned, and a person abandoned.

***********************

In the months after my spouse abandoned me, an amazing and unexpected thing happened: I found faith. In the vastness of love foundered on dreams unrealized, I developed a deep, abiding belief in love. I found a lasting sense of peace. And I discovered I had never been abandoned at all.  In this abandonment, I found freedom to take the abandoned vessel I thought I had become, shore it up with some new boards, a bit of pitch tar and faith in a right wind and TRUST it fully again. I learned to trust myself again, and I learned to trust the sense that came from deep within that there was something else driving this ship, something that I could trust.

Photo, Pam Steude. Sometimes dark times, are really openings to more

Photo, Pam Steude. Sometimes dark times, are really openings to more

We all have this opportunity, all the time, in the small and big losses of life.

Losing a job, an important relationship, a child, a dream: In our human attempts to overcome the inevitability of life, the ebb and flow of dreams developed, followed and derailed, we try to keep those events that cause those feelings at bay because, ultimately, we like to think that we can control what happens to us. Or, at the least, affect the outcome when they do happen- the fear, loneliness and hopelessness that can follow in the wake of our most shocking life changes.

We gather inspirational sayings to arm ourselves against that nagging voice that tells us in the quiet moments on dark nights that we are not good enough, not important enough or not doing enough. These work, for a time, until that next quiet moment returns. These losses force us to look directly at the one thing we fight against as humans:  that We Can Not, try as we might, BE God.

We do not consider, maybe we cannot consider, that in that wake, the clearing that loss creates, we are not DEVOID as much as we are an empty vessel ready to be filled. Perhaps then, the ultimate question is what will we fill our vessels with, what soul cry will we answer when we are finally empty enough to choose freely.

And so maybe boats – and people- ultimately become a product of their story and founding principles no matter where they sit or sail. The America might have been so embattled precisely because Mr. Ray founded her on two dual and competing purposes. You cannot produce a revenue to feed the company that runs you AND be a “goodwill” ambassador – which implies that it operates solely for the good of the people.

Left with nothing to lose, our vessels ask us what soul cry we will pick up. Our fate is not sealed: we are not an empty ship abandoned and now devoid of soul without its captain and crew to give it story and heart. Our vessel was never empty to begin with. And instead of fearing the space that these great losses can bring, we can instead remember that our soul infuses within us a continuing story.  Abandonment is a chance for us to ask, instead of what the world will bring to us, what WE will bring to the world.

I choose faith, love, hope and peace.

Hope

 

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Categories Emotional health, Personal Growth, Spirituality