Repost: Wistful and grateful on the night before I go to grad school to become a therapist...

(original posting 5.13.2009
Choptank, MD)

About a month or so ago I went to try therapy.

“Let’s see,” she said. “So you started using drugs regularly at 15. I am sure you have heard that whatever age you start using is the age that you basically stop growing. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to grow up. You are still, essentially, 15.”

Hmm. Maybe it’s possible that this woman, who for the first 45 minutes of our meeting did not allow me to talk except to answer her pointed questions, somehow missed the part where I mentioned that for over eight years I’ve been on a committed path of recovery and self-help, learning to take responsibility for me and aiming for emotional maturity.

Of the “adult” skills I’ve actually focused on, one has been the willingness to allow others room to be heard; so normally this helps to curb any immediate reactiveness to asinine fucking comments like the one above. But that day on the therapist couch the blood curled around my neck even as I smiled graciously at her opinion, oh, uh-huh, mmm-hmmm. It was later in the session when the radical, albeit kind, honesty kicked in.  When she tried to tell me that my wanderlust and great passion for traveling too were indicators that I needed “to grow up.”

One of the other adult skills I’m really working on is learning to integrate information from various different sources and in the end use them to supplement my own views with all the regularly outputting stimulus of the world. I am learning, in other words, how to trust myself.

Needless to say, therapy, this time, didn’t quite work out.

I was 15 when I first found myself saddled up with my bags and my trinkets, my combat boots and cigarettes, scowling from low down in the passenger’s seat of the blue hatchback my mom behind the wheel, my brother’s perpetual chirpiness behind us his head in the middle between the seats. Up the Baltimore beltway then down 295, on our way to Dr. Lessey in the city. He had an office on Park Ave. On the corner was a soul food joint with bars on the window and a yellow sign for Lake Trout. Across the street and to the left was a store called The Leather Underground.

I had my learner’s permit, I was almost 16, it would soon be my regular, weekly route. Soon enough it was just me in the car. I was never brave enough to try the soul food. The bemused gay men in the bondage store, however, eventually knew this pink-headed purple-booted riot grrl by name. It was the early 90’s and hard to find places like that were ahead of the soon to come piercing trend. Leather Underground was the only place that I knew of that you could go for a belly button ring, and they used a 10 gauge cow-ring, not a bar, and there was nothing girly or petite about it.

Dr. Lessey was soft and gentle with gold spectacles and a sandman peace about him. I always pictured him with a nightcap on, the kind that triangles down one side of the head with a little cotton ball on the end, you know faded cotton-white with light blue stripes. And a candle in his hands.

It was six or eight months that I went to the city to see him. I was touched in a way that I couldn’t get my words to say, I was touched by the kindness of this sweet, quiet little man. I never told him about the pot I was smoking or the drinking that was edging beyond exploratory. I kept us occupied by tales of the girls I hated at school and this new, daring guy who showed up one day by my side, grinning down at me delicious in his eyes, walking me up the stairs to my homeroom. He had just gotten kicked out of public school. I was entranced and a month or so later when the same guy got locked up at Harbour Hospital in South Baltimore, Dr. Lessey encouraged me to go see him. I trusted the good Doctor. I used to bring my friends there to meet him, my brother, my boyfriend even (the boyfriend that I had secured as result of a visit paid to him at South Baltimore’s Harbour Hospital mental ward.) Dr. Lessey looked on in amazement, the only adult who didn’t judge and seemed uniquely interested, when my friend Briana showed up with me in his office sporting her knew Leather Underground navel loop. I loved how much he seemed, simply, to care.

Around the time that I really did start to make changes and work to get my life cleaned up, this would be roughly the spring of 2001, I entered in to another therapist relationship, this time with Father Ed. His was, I think, the fourth “couch” I’d been on by then. He was supplied to me for free by the uber-conservative liberal arts college that I’d already by then dropped out twice from, both times as result of drinking and drugs. Father Ed had me do things like hold fake conversations with the air; the air of course was always a character and usually someone close to me in life. I had to hold pillows tight and close and pretend that they were me. He was the first therapist I ever cried in front of and lord did it make me feel so, so clean. I loved him, Father Ed, for the same reason as Dr. Lessey, he truly seemed to care. That, and one clear, new thing: I was capable, or at least so beginning, of being honest. Truly honest about me. No more hiding the extracurricular’s that were so much a part of my life it wasn’t that I was even purposefully hiding them before, just that I took them so much for granted as a part of how I lived my life. The drugs and the alcohol were, plainly, part of me, of who I was, as natural as air or water or food when it came to the things I did each day. I just never questioned any of it, no matter the consequences or miserable thin vein of fear that seemed to increase with each passing year, feeling like ice in my blood and a cold wall at the base of my heart, steadily growing.

The honesty made all the difference. Clarity is a mixture of willingness, or at least a capacity, to be honest with myself and then trusting me enough to know that my own truth is the one that counts. The therapists that I’ve gained the most from over the years, as I’ve sorted through and grieved out my humanness and wounds, are the ones who’ve made it clear that they care and you can’t fake that, caring is a quality that is or isn’t. I know when it’s true, and more, affront when it is false or faked. In an atmosphere of care one feels safe, and safety is what is required, at least for me, to get to a place where I am willing to get honest with myself—on whatever level, at whatever risk of responsibility it means that I am going to have to take. And good therapy, for me at least, has been no more than the process of showing up to witness that allowing. Good therapists ask the right questions and then let the process of discovery guide its self. I always end up being the one who sees what I need to see just by having a safe place to say it out loud.

So if I’ve learned anything at all over the years, it’s that the answers are indeed within; and that especially it’s not a sign of weakness to sometimes need another’s help in order to get them out. In fact I’d say that empowering oneself like that is all about being Brave. But that other person doesn’t get to tell you what to do. They definitely don’t get to yield control over your ideas. Self-trust is the goal to me, and so it was that over a month ago my life started to turn around at its darkest point: what I thought would be the beginning step in self-discovery when I took the plunge on to a new couch turned out actually to be the exercise I needed to affirm the ending of self-doubt. And now that I am here, doing the Real Work with a book and some close friends as my guides, I am realizing that the two concepts are actually one and the same.

With the mere mind and heart

I moved to Laguna because one day in May on a field trip my students and I hiked the canyon at Crystal Cove. That day for the first time since I'd been south I felt the mama impulse in my blood.  That means I could feel the land rise and fall, it means that my breathe as if breathing earth particles caught then plummeted in silent then threshold spirit-plateaus.  Like the earth was actually breathing me.  I forgot how it felt to be so connected to the green, even though it was coming to me in my dreams.  I looked on the map when I got back to my room in Huntington that day and saw the wilderness surrounding Laguna.  In the most quiet place in my heart where I go when I get still or maybe where stillness goes when I get my heart I quieted then asked me, I mean spirit-me, what do you want and this little apartment here, that's what, when the silence parted, I could see. Fall has never had such a thrill.

The two first months here I ran in constant press in preparation for grad school which was between two major trips back east.   It was not until Beth came the weekend before last that I could be here, now.  Grief can be so hectic the way it pushes you around.

Tonight I made dinner then sat outside under my plants and twinkle lights the canyon walls above me houses constellating the ridge like touchable stars.  Oh big California, oh rancher artist adobe houses on cliffs I could put 9 of my little apartments inside.  12 if you count your deck.  16 your garage and carport with the at least two antique cars....

In the last two chapters of one of my textbooks for gradschool I read about contemplative therapies. I was sitting in the crazy sun.  I learned that Maslow and others have long issued what came to me those early months my first fall out of college, when I gave myself to poetry and meditation each and every day.  That human consciousness, for most of us, is in its infancy.  That with the mere mind and heart alone we are capable of sheer galaxies inside.  I strapped in, alone, back then and have never stopped enjoying the ride.  Since then it has been my only and final guide.

It's nice to be not so alone in that anymore.  To know what this path has all been for, or to have one tiny clue anyhow.  It's really nice to be outside at dinner, in the warm fall in California, the mama hush cradling me in her round green Laguna arms.

Enjoy. Settle in.

All these marvels jigsawing across the floating screens in my head.  It is two weeks since I've blogged but that doesn't stop me from composing in my mind.  From wanting to tell you, funny computer page, about the yellow fall light it's different not for its bright but its shadows, how a dark edge can make the radiance so much more succinct   Understand, if you can, the way the brown earth rises from the sea at Crystal Cove, how the crowns of land remind me of low tide on the Choptank River where I used to jump from tump to tump, where the fragmite grows.  I want to tell you that my friend is on the road in canyon country and that talking to him made me see the Anasazi riches and how the gnosis of that energy once lived me deep and whole on that same land.  Made me smell the high-nosed sugar of the black-green pines, made me exalt Coconino coconino...ahh Kaibab.  O to truly live off the land.  Enchanted.  Poet wanderer on the road, any person on the road.  And me, for the first time, the first ever when talking to such a person, did not yearn to move, felt no ache no pressing that said go get out go be and allow, no hard thin line in me with no words but an urge that says must go be simply in the flow.  Do you get it white page?  What that feels like, the outbreath?  The exhalation of these roots, straight down are meant to grow?

I spent last fall in the mountains under the tall trees.  I watched magic manifest. I am here now, fall again, a different setting, just as blessed.  I am plugged in to this, am plugging in now, to my real life.  To what I want to build, to grow, powering on and in to the best parts of who I am.  Or can be, or become.  As recently as (my most recent) trip east I was near that quitten point, with the drain-strain of exhaustion nipping at my heels and running tapes in my head. The only thing worse than regret is doubt and I believe the two shadow box from an arm with two fake fists.  Thankfully the lesson of retract curved me in its hand, I remembered the heir of patience which is acceptance, blends to compassion, softens in to loving tenderness with my self.  Is the gentle loving hush that sings Slowww down.  Sink down.

Enjoy...
Settle in.

Maryland in the Fall

Past the flat side of the Eastern Shore, past the Bay, past the sprawl of the Route 2 corridor, past the cities and burbs where I'm from...

...Come the hills.  Where the mountains start, Western Maryland where my brother and his lady and the sweetest ever little babe live.  I slept so full last night, long sweet talks with Sean and Jamie til our eyes were part closed, then the peepers out my window, Carl Jung on my chest.  Heee heee and baby cuddles all morning long....  

I Love Maryland in the Fall.

To tame this head

The Eastern Shore is the rural, country side of Maryland.  It is flat but full of agricultural and watermen history, you can almost see its bias and charm in the fog banks that stack thick on a fall day like today.  The Chesapeake Bay divides the shore from the stretch of urban corridor between Annapolis, DC, and Baltimore where I am right now.   Over there, or  the other side is what Shore people call it here.

The last time I was here in this shop I lived on the shore.  I had edits due to Erika; her most recent submission of Hemingway's Girl.  It didn't have a contract on it yet.  She didn't even have an agent then.  In such little time so much can change.

My cousin Erin drove us to Annapolis this morning.  Last night sort of late we went to Ellicot City, my favorite place to go in the fall. Later of course it was Sex and the City reruns in her bed.  We parted ways this morning at her car, she to the State House where she works me to the Hard Bean where now I can write and study and be the Kelly that inside me really is and needs to be.  It's been a whirlwind, in San Antonio with mom and dad the Montezuma Cypresses hung over us on the river walk and talked low like they knew our names.  A Mexican man fell in love with me and spoke in Spanish about the true ancient heritage of my tattoo.  It made me laugh in a gentle way and turn red.  It's the first time anyone has done that, ever, in spanish Los Indios, Los Aztecos...not one of my Mexican friends ever knew, not one.  Coatalique in the eyes, lore of female divine still living in our unconscious but in the temporal from day to day she is dead.  In Austin I stayed on a ranch with 26 other McMullens for the weekend.  It was like being a child again at Gram and Pops at the beach.  People on mattresses on the floor and every couch bodied.  Kate looked like a Grecian princess in the times of the Goddess on her wedding day.  We made a circle around them and I couldn't stop the hot tears that ran the whole time.  Now I'm here, Maryland where I'm from, time at Uncle Tim's where I slept all night two nights ago, the first time I've done that since Mary went in the hospital.  Time with Brian my brother in Canton and my family in Pennsylvania, too.

And now time with me today, before I meet with my brother Sean and Aunt Sue, to write poems and sing this soul of mine back to life.  Out the shop front the boat show is setting up, years ago I worked twelve hour shifts at Pussers back to back because boat show weekend brings all the tips.  I lived here then and was going to marry a man named Joe.  Years after that I came here to the docks on my first date with Brandon, who I would spend six years with in a farmhouse deep in the country of the Eastern Shore.  Growing veggies and swapping music and fresh eggs.  Years after that I came up here to meet with Erika, begin this phase which has been all about the soul song, all about trusting that there is no arrival, just a path that presses and spirals, and cycles on.

Good for me to think on that today.  To tame this head that really wants to know about   ...Years from now...?  That really loves to wrap up in the different experiences of home.