shameless

Sometimes I feel invincible,
and for all that human frailty may try to keep me back
I am gonna just spit in its face,
'cause the fount of feeling that wells up in my breast,
the hurricane, thunderstorm, cavalcade, concerto
of overwhelming emotion that bursts forth from my soul,
Constantly,
is powerful as nine hundred million nuclear reactors on the face of the sun
and I simply must use this power for good.

I am omnipotent,
Able to accomplish astonishing feats like
Coaxing the unwilling to learn to love,
Overcoming internalized oppression so I feel really good about myself as a person,
Communicating remarkably well, all of the time,
and consistently being a considerate human being
while striving, aggressively, toward my dreams.

I am unabashed and unwilling to take no for an answer.
I can and will do it all,
Experience every raw moment this raucous life presents –
I will guzzle everyday miracles like a baleen whale sucking saltwater in the sea,
I will let life shove my face full of sweetness like she is my merciless newlywed,
I will nurture and tend like the thousand-breasted Artemis, and
I will ride life bareback like she was my bucking rodeo pony.
I will use the thorns of the Joshua tree soaked in cuttlefish ink to etch life’s pedigree permanently under my skin,
I will study like a scholar in an ivory tower and obtain the highest degrees –
Just you try to stop me!
And I will wail the cries of every widow war ever made, brokenhearted under the stars then
Like a Jedi on Dagobah I’ll levitate my spaceship above the murky abyss that tries to keep me from soaring light speed through the universe and
Turn even the most heinous of events into lessons I will be grateful to have learned.

I refuse to accept any assessment that I am
Too big, too loud, too wild, too proud and
when those words come toward me like bullets
I will pluck them delicately from the air
Pulverize them,
then blow the dust back in the faces of non-believers till they see…
There is no one as powerful as me,
No one as powerful as any one of us who insist
We live life by our hearts
We submerge ourselves fully in the complexities of existence and
Never ever apologize for what we are or
Who we want to be -
We who are shameless in our insistence that
We are fucking remarkable beyond belief.

(This piece inspired in part by a shameless scorpio beloved, a silver super sonic rock star, and a Death Cab for Cutie song I got turned onto by said silver rock star. The artwork above, also titled "Shameless," is by an amazing artist I just discovered named Stephanie Metz. She is a felted wool sculpture - wow. Please click to see more of her work once you have read my post, of course. Thanks Stephanie.)

rhetorical flourish

I am friends with a young fellow who I'll call M. M is four years old, tall for his age, blonde in a Dennis the Menace kind of way, and uncannily clever. He has a way with words far beyond his years and has a gentle, sensitive, inquisitive nature that often disarms people. He is so amicable people often do not know what to make of him. He is one of my favorite people.

One of the most delightful things about this young character is his penchant for describing and naming things in fabulous detail and with words you'd never expect out of the mouth of a four-year-old. A few weeks after Halloween he pointed out his family's forgotten jack-o-lanterns wasting away in the yard, and told me that those pumpkins were "decaying." Recently his mom told me a story about him explaining to her that he wanted to share his "loves" with her and then described his loves according to the colors and degrees of sparkliness as he saw them.

Today, while playing a game in which he attempts to surprise his mom and she is supposed to act scared, she overdid it and yelled out. M told his mom that her reaction was too loud and that he didn't like it. She asked him how she was supposed to act scared. "Maybe you could just cower," he told her. Yeah mom. Duh. Just cower next time.

But a different incident recently topped them all.

I was visiting with M a couple weeks back, and he wanted to show me one of his robots. He is quite into Transformers (one can hardly blame him; those guys are badass), and he introduced me to a battle worn robot he called Rhetorical Flourish.

"What?" I said, and looked to his mom for confirmation.

"Rhetorical Flourish," M said, with literal flourish. "This is Rhetorical Flourish and he likes to......" and whatever it is that M went on to tell me about Rhetorical Flourish I totally don't recall because I was in shock that I had heard what he had just said.

"What the hell?!" I asked his mom.

You see, M's parents are pretty serious Obama supporters. During the election they had the TV turned to MSNBC most nights taking in all the punditry they could in anticipation and hope for Obama's election. M was there, listening passively, and began endearingly referring to Obama as the president before the election ever happened. At some point M must have picked up that phrase and decided it was an apt name for his Transformer. He shocked his mother, though, the first day he asked her if she had seen Rhetorical Flourish. She said she reacted in much the way I did, asking "What?" with her jaw agape.

So yeah. Rhetorical Flourish. There's not much more I can say to compete with that.

my face in asheville

I am participating in a fantastic project that I am excited to share with you. The lovely and talented Jen Bowen is documenting the people who love Asheville and call it their home. The project is called Faces of Asheville, and I encourage you to check out her beautiful and well done website about this inspiring undertaking as soon as you are done reading my blog post!

Faces of Asheville is a two part project. The first part is comprised of portraits taken of any and all Asheville volunteers who were willing to come and be photographed, holding a single item somehow representative of themselves. My boys and I went and were photographed individually and together. L held his guitar, of course; G held a stick and wore a mask for his individual photo, and I held a puppy... ;) We also did a family portrait. We haven't seen our pictures yet, but there are great examples of other people's portraits in the website.

The second aspect is for each participant to share their Asheville story. Jen asked us to write about what brought us here, what keeps us here, and what do we hope for our future in our city? Plus she asked us to include our thoughts on the a few more questions regarding Asheville:
1) In the immediate present, what do you like / dislike?
2) In the immediate future, what would you change and what is sacred that should not be changed?
3) In the more distant future, what is your vision or hope for Asheville and the surrounding region?

This was my answer:

I originally came to Asheville in 1992 to attend Warren-Wilson College. As soon as I visited the area I knew I wanted to be here. I loved Warren-Wilson, but at that point in my life I was not sure I wanted to be in school. What I really wanted was to be a mom. I had just turned 19 years old. I had some fun at WWC, and in the meantime I discovered a local herbalist named Whitewolf with whom I started my first holistic herbal studies. I decided I wanted to pursue this training and carry it over into studying midwifery. Asheville seemed like a great place to do that.

Then, sort of accidentally on purpose, I got pregnant. Yay! It was during the amazing blizzard of '93 in which my partner and I got stuck out in Swannanoa. He worked in the kitchen at the restaurant in the Holiday Inn on Highway 70, and the management put us up in a room at the hotel so he would be available to cook every shift for all the hotel patrons trapped in Swannanoa, too. We were there for three days, and during his few hours off of kitchen duty, we made a baby.

Even though I loved the area, I thought I wanted to be closer to my family in Pittsburgh to have the baby, so we moved back up north. Our families helped us a lot, which we needed, but I never quit feeling like leaving Asheville was a mistake. I loved it here so much. But, I was busy having a baby and my partner went back to school and that was what we did for a couple of years. In the meantime, we got pregnant again, and in the spring of 1995 I had my second son just in time for their daddy to graduate college.

We lived, all four of us, at my mother's house in Pittsburgh for one more year, and during the summer of 1996 we returned to attend a friend's wedding at Warren-Wilson. That was it. We knew we had to come back. Though I loved being a mommy and lived in a busy suburban area close to the city, I have never felt so isolated in my life as I did at that time in Pittsburgh. Our move back to Asheville was like a whirlwind. We went to the wedding and were in town one weekend. We picked up a Sunday edition of the Asheville Citizen-Times, and my partner found a job listing that interested him. We returned to Pittsburgh, and he spent the next couple weeks interviewing over the phone, faxing resumes to the company, and lo and behold, they hired him, sight unseen. One month to the day after we had been in town for the wedding, my partner returned to Asheville to start his new job and to look for a place for our family to live. One month after that, on August 1st 1996, our whole family relocated to Asheville, the place where our family, really, had begun.

On the way to NC our very old Volkswagen bus bit the dust, so we were destined to move with no vehicle. He found a place in Montford for us to live, a 2nd story apartment in an old brick apartment quad that seemed perfect since it was walking distance to his new job and to town, and there was a family in the apartment below, a young couple like us with two babies almost the exact same age as our kids. To this day I remain close friends with them, and our kids are the oldest and closest of friends.

So that's what brought me here. What keeps me here is the amazing community. As soon as we moved back, I felt like my whole world opened up. In Pittsburgh I had been an isolated, young, alternative mommy with no peers and no friends. In Asheville there was a thriving, supportive, progressive community of young parents with whom I immediately connected. I made great friends, as did my kids, and I loved living with my babies in such a healthy positive place with so many creative, inspired, loving people. I still do. To this day we have many friends that we have been close to for most of the years since we returned. I can't imagine living without that kind of thriving, conscious, support network.

In the years I have been here things have changed a lot, some for the worse, some for the better. I am thrilled by how vibrant the Asheville arts community has become. Everyday, everywhere you go you can find amazing visual artists, poets, musicians, dancers, crafters, circus performers and individuals doing things you never dreamed of to make this place exciting and entertaining. Unfortunately, with the influx of amazing gifted people, there has also been an element of those who seek to gentrify the town, make it more homogeneous, more upscale, and as a result the racial diversity in town has diminished, and buildings and housing developments have been going up, up, up while dragging the landscape down, down, down. The devastation of our amazing natural resources is by far the worst thing I think that is happening here. The air quality has plummeted since I first came here 16 years ago, and I think the steep slope development, cookie cutter housing complexes and forest clearcutting is criminal. If I had one wish for Asheville and the country as a whole it would be for everyone to STOP, take a deep breath, and to start doing some well-considered urban, suburban and rural planning that would preserve the land and its resources- forests, mountains, waterways, farms, etc. and learn to build sustainably with an eye for integrating with the natural landscape in the places where development and growth must take place.

That is my vision for Asheville and the surrounding area. I want us to create a sustainable haven for individuals and families that wish to live consciously - conscious of community issues such as racism and poverty and oppression and how to work against them, conscious of health and the best ways to live well, conscious of the value of art, music, dance, poetry and the beauty of self-expression, conscious of how to protect the land and the plants and animals for whom this region is also home, conscious of the human need to develop spirituality and seek divinity in a myriad of ways. I want us to learn to truly value diversity and not just give it lip service. I hope we will start taking steps toward this future immediately, so we can reap the benefits of it continually throughout the future of Asheville. Blessed be.

thank you, barack

Earlier tonight I watched Barack Obama speak as he accepted the Democratic party nomination. I am no political pundit, nor am I particularly versed on politics in general. My agenda is generally so far from anything any mainstream American political candidate can muster that, unfortunately, I often pay them no heed. And though I am not naively touting the party line now, well aware of the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and even of Obama's campaign, I genuinely support Barack Obama. Furthermore, even if I didn't support him, I would still honor and respect him if only for his brilliant speech writing capabilities and his breathtaking skills as an orator. His speech tonight was certainly another spellbinding moment in his career.

I was gathered with some friends and my kids to watch the speech, and as we waited for Barack to hit the stage my younger son, G, asked if he could go watch a movie in another room. I told him no because I thought he should be with us for an important historical moment, the moment that a major political party in the United States finally, officially nominated somebody other than a white guy as the presidential candidate. Even if Barack does not assume the presidency, though I dearly pray he does, I felt this moment was of historical significance and that it was a worthy history lesson, a valuable moment to spend time with family, and if nothing else, an opportunity for the boys to get a good lesson in public speaking.

My friends and L and I watched the speech in rapt attention, and though I wasn't keeping very close tabs on him, G seemed kind of bored, and occasionally I had to stop him from fidgeting with a ball as the noise from him playing was making it hard for us to hear. So, imagine my surprise when we arrived home and G came up to me and said, "Mom, that speech was so amazing. I was interested in it the whole time even though I didn't think I would be. I even got tingles sometimes listening to it. I've never ever heard anything like that."

I asked him if he was glad I had made him watch it. He said, "Yeah," then hugged me and walked away.

Wow. For all that the American political process feels antiquated to me like a coal-fueled steam engine heading over a rickety bridge in the dark of night with no moon to guide, my heart sang for this moment. My children were inspired by the political process; they were inspired by a man participating in this supposed democracy who is doing his job well enough that an aloof teenage boy who would normally rather be playing video games listened with interest and "tingles" to a political speech referencing foreign policy, veterans' affairs, energy resources, tax cuts, the right to choose and same sex marriage. The acceptance speech from the US Democratic party candidate moved my thirteen year old boy to hug me in thanks for making sure he did not miss it, and this is a child who generally does not give physical affection without a struggle. Wow.

Thank you, Barack. Though I know this country and the world need a lot more than one man to bail us out of this handbasket to hell, I am sure grateful that you're hat is in the ring to try to help. Thank you for demonstrating to my sons that compassion, hard work, dedication and good communication are valuable to our society, and thank you for, perhaps, inspiring them to take up their civic responsibility someday soon. I am grateful for that.

I hope you and your beautiful family fare this arduous election process safely and come out thriving on the other side. And I hope I can soon call you the next president of the United States.

first night

(the moon as seen before the eclipse, through the Bone Tree)

Today Burning Man 2008 begins in the Black Rock Desert, and I will not be there. I feel good about that, although of course I would love to be there, because going to Burning Man in the first place was an amazing miracle that I thought I might never accomplish, and now I have been twice! So, to my dear friends on the playa tonight, I dedicate this poem that I wrote about my first night last year during the outstanding lunar eclipse. I hope you all the change the world, one dusty step at a time.


(during the eclipse)


we were bicycle pilgrims in the flat desert night
watched the looming moon disappear into eclipse
the absence of the silver brilliant sheen rendered the scene undercover
like an underground movement of salvation seeking souls.
hallucinated colors orbited the newborn stars of the falsely dark sky
the rust colored orb slowly arced through shifting star trails
and chaos reigned as the effigy burned by arson nearby.
but all around a neon city grew from the bottom up
the bare bones of geodesic domes filled with
towers of speaker stacks eager to create oases of sound.
the moon in totality loped at a timeless pace
we wondered like the ancients if the world was ending
or just beginning
and if we would ever see her silver face again.
our answer was to commence the ritual
fired up the gas generators to start the electric drums
that echoed over the long silent floor of the empty lake bed
now brittle, dry and alkaline.
the boom of the beat drove bodies to move
to shake and stomp and beg for the light
all the while worshiping the dark.
I danced the prayers of a thousand deities into white dinosaur bone dust
felt the mercury moonglow like liquid as it seeped
cold and crystal bright from the edges of the swollen shadowed satellite
witnessed the sky’s evolution from india ink to azure
my own shadow once again cast long on the ground by
the lunar spotlight shining just above the mountain horizon
where she headed for her morning’s rest.
but before the moon laid herself down
the beat belied a hint of brassy
the distant line of the opposite horizon
began to glimmer with a warm edge of daylight.
we were engulfed between cool blue waning
and golden dawn fire waxing
breathing in the powdered shells of trilobites
rising in fossil clouds from beneath our pounding feet
rising as the smoke from the still smoldering remains of the man
who we would resurrect only to burn again
and the music carried us
as our shadows centered into ourselves
balanced
rapturously
between the moon and the sun
in the exact moment
that our day was born of night.


(the man still smoldering as the eclipse wanes)

elemental

I have been noticing the parade of time lately
marching jubilantly across my friends’ faces,
fertilizing each life stage my sons race through and
dragging down the soft contours of my frame

a silent river, invisible and swift, carrying away
one day after the next
edging flowers out of the earth
trampling them then back to loam,
building our young from seed cells to
marbled flesh grown
on to lanky strong bodies
that eventually curl to shrunken shells
of themselves

our bodies are mere mile markers in this race of indefinite end
that turns brown to green to yellow orange red brown again
feel it gaining speed each turn of the season
frost floods of spring barreling down mountain streams and
fall’s hurricane winds whipping wildly through trees
a frenzy of change, of cycles, reprise
with power and momentum that never cease

yet

in the eye of this storm I find I’m defenseless
flailing and grasping to reign in my senses
to come back to the moment and be here right now
to witness, experience and listen to how
amidst this rampage of growth and decay
imperceptibly the most devout of songs plays
the undercurrent, the harmony heard only
when we deign our minds still
the thrum rises up like a sap
with which our veins slowly fill
with its essence of each moment existing tranquil
deliberate and wholly in the now
each separate zen instant
ending adamantly as it begins
the force of the stillness sets the mind to spin

it’s inscrutable this paradox of time raging on
composed of a train of never-ending seconds
individually lethargic, gradual, brief
but time that deft bandit gathers them, a nimble thief
leaving only traces and memories on our minds and our flesh
like the skin now threadbare that covers my breasts
they’re silt-dust soft as a favorite shirt worn see-through
the caress of aging that I never quite knew
to expect or to love as these lessons I learn
for youth and days past it’s so easy to yearn
but the element of time our compassionate master
nudges us onward sometimes slow, sometimes faster
to the inevitable and gorgeous culmination of our days
and we have the great joy of indulging on the way
in each second, instant, moment, hour, year and phase
and I am gathering my rosebuds while I may
and I speak to suggest that you do the same
but unlike the poet of that phrase’s fame
I implore you to endeavor that your gathering persist
long beyond the days of your prime

time does what it does and there is no denying
but how we define its impact is our way of trying
to live absolutely our fullest and best
to soak it all up before our shells rest
to make peace with ourselves and our own perfection
as creatures laconic without resurrection

I know, I say it all the time- we die!
but dear ones my point is to see through the lies
of the inequity of age and the falsehoods of danger
so we will live and live and live
and never be as strangers
to each other, to experience and
to our own corporeal selves
we are so blessed to inhabit this realm

time giveth and time taketh away
but even in the taking there are gifts that remain
so hold them, examine them, let them wide in
feel it move across your skin
I am absorbing this lifetime and letting it
win

irony

I just returned from a trip to New York City to visit my sister. I consider myself a country girl and choose to live way the hell out in the mountains, and I like it that way. I do, however, very much enjoy the city. I love to see all the people and daydream what their lives are like, and of course in New York the diversity is fantastic. There are so many languages, so many styles of dress, so many colors of skin, and so, so many fabulous foods to eat from all over the globe. I also love concerts and museums and busy excitement, so the city is a great place for me to visit, then I am perfectly content to get back to my crickets and sunrises at home.

On this particular trip I enjoyed a couple moments of great irony. On our first day in town, my sister asked the boys and me if we would mind to help her catch up on her gardening. She has a plot in a wonderful, reclaimed lot full of flowers, herbs, veggies and artwork that is clearly a haven for the community. We dug in the dirt, pulled weeds and helped her harvest tons of green beans, tomatoes, basil, carrots and hot peppers. I love to garden and was so glad to have the chance to help my sister, but I couldn't get over how ridiculous it was that I had to go on vacation to one of the biggest cities in the world in order to be able to garden. At home I have a very small flower and herb garden I keep up, but I am entirely too busy, thus far, to invest in a veggie garden. I hate that I don't have one, and one of these days I will, but right now school, work and single parent homeschooling has ruled it out. Funny, huh?

On our last day in town we visited a P.S.1., a satellite MOMA gallery. It was awesome! There were several exhibits I really liked including one called "Arctic Hysteria" which featured, amongst other things, a stuffed, white, arctic hare perched mystically at the edge of a round, lighted pool of water as if the fellow were in the middle of scrying some future torment for its human adversaries. His colleague, above, holds a small plate of milk and was animated by a motor so he trembled, thus the piece's name, "Trembling and Honoring." How good is that?

There was also a collection of socio-political activist artwork from and inspired by the 60's and 70's called "That Was Then... This Is Now." Naturally, I thought this was great. I love revolutionary artwork and do believe that art is a natural forum for creating social change, so I am always glad to see it in action. I find it inspirational.

Honestly, I am a bit of a museum slut. It does not take much to turn me on when it comes to creative expression because, for the most part, I am just so freaking pleased when people take the time to do anything out of the ordinary to share their own unique perspective with the world that even if the work does not appeal to me personally, I am glad to have seen it.

So the second moment of irony came at the P.S.1. The gallery has an outdoor installation of large, round barrels full of plants and vegetables, again, another constructive way of employing urban space to hold aesthetic and oxygen-providing greenery. But this installation did not stop at plants. Oh no, once again I found that I had traveled 750 miles to the city to indulge in a simple country pleasure. This time it was hanging out with their chickens. You see, I don't have chickens of my own, even though I would really like to, because my husky dog loves to eat them. So at a hip, urban art gallery in Queens, I got to chill with some quaint country fowl. They were cute. It made me happy.

After all, I love irony.

blogs are amazing: a post for cassi

I have blogger's guilt, which is a silly self-imposed phenomenon, but nevertheless I am feeling it because I have sorely neglected this blog for the last year. Though the truth is, my blog is still serving me. As you may know, I started graduate school this summer. It has been an amazing whirlwind of an experience in which first I had this wild hair idea to go back to school against all adds, and next thing I knew I was doing it.

Now, I love it! So far, at least. I completed my summer semester with a 4.0, thoroughly enjoyed all my classes, learned a great deal and realized I am absolutely on the right path for myself at this time. One of the things I have realized through this process, first in applying to the program then in doing my coursework this past semester, is that my writing joints are well lubricated even though it has been seven years since I was last in school. Blogging did this for me! If you read my first post you will see that one of my intentions in starting this blog was to give myself a constructive outlet with some degree of accountability so that I would write and keep writing. At that juncture, I was specifically missing the structure of a formal educational environment that would force me to think critically and write proactively, so I made that for myself with this blog. Now that I am back in school, I don't need it as much, so I am writing here less. C'est la vie. But I love this blog and suspect I will always tune in from time to time to put in my two cents. I can't help myself. My brain churns out penny thoughts at an alarming rate. I've got to stash all that intellectual loose change somewhere.

The other thing that is amazing about blogs is how it connects people. Twice in the last year I have had lovely experiences in which someone who read my blog had been connected to me in the past or was going to be connected to me in the future. When I met the beautiful and talented Yoni Love online through myspace, she said to me, "I have been wondering when we would meet." She had been introduced to my blog through a midwife teacher we share, and she was already intimately acquainted with my writing when I wrote to her to ooh and ahh over her gorgeous yoni paintings (please check out her artwork, like the piece above, and contact her if interested in prints of her work). In fact, she had shared one of my poems with a birthing family to ease them in a difficult time. Wow.

Recently, I was contacted by a former acquaintance who had the mixed fortune I did to grow up in the same backwards, blue-collar suburb of Pittsburgh from which I so gratefully escaped. That place always felt to me like a prison, a stifling, choking vortex of unhealthy attitudes and suffering people that I prayed through my youth to leave. And my suspicions were correct; my life blossomed in a liberating and healing way when I relocated. Every now and again I hear from folks still living in that same community, and all too often they are still stifled and stuck there carrying on the same attitudes and oppression that our families and neighbors bore before us. Once in a while, though, I meet up with a light that shone through, someone else who realized that, though they may stay in that place, they need not live that oppression and that they can seek emotional, spiritual and physical health through a different paradigm. Though I haven't spoken with her, Cassi, for whom I wrote this post, connected with me to say that she, too, has a passion for midwifery, and knowing midwifery as I do, I realize that if she holds dear the values of midwifery, she has come a long way since those dark Shaler days. I am glad you found me, Cassi. I am glad we can look behind us together and realize we are not stuck there. I would be glad to stay connected into the future.

So today, in honor of the gifts this blog has given me, I have decided to breathe a little new life into it. I've got a handful of small posts I have been meaning to add, and I will try to get them up in the next few days. School starts in one week, so before I get carried away by the rapid river of academic assignments, I'd like to dip my feet into this babbling brook of my creative writing a few more times. Thanks, "just a position." And thanks to all of you other writers out there connecting and sharing in our global community. Yay us!

paean to a modern mystic

Body painted in reds and blues
you open your face to bellow melodies
that scream of soul’s initiation
of looming revelation
of stoned intoxication
the divine---
your holy verse delivered
in front of an electrified guitar choir
rumbling powerfully
fueled by sacred meter drumfire

ministering to many, your lyrics a koan
raising the level of human vibration
sending followers to seek an unknown
sung by you
your rage, your love
your holistic experience of godhead
dropping the hints we need
to reap the Eleusinian mysteries of our age

You, irreverent harbinger of the rains to come,
I am listening---
I have experienced communion through the sound of your voice,
a raw tremor and roar speaking directly to god,
resounding your poetry of sex and death
mother/ son
father/ child
the illusion of our pain
I have felt your parabols deliver me
to my mortal eternity
to the inborn wisdom seen
through my own third eye

in supplication
in prayer that I might behold you, hold you and
hear, at least once, the inflection of your voice
hummed directly in my ear
I offer my mind to yours to share in
metaphysical, psychedelic discourse,
I offer my flesh to yours to share in
sessions of salvation through intercourse
Maynard James, I would give you the holiest of gifts
I offer you my sacramental self

i have been accepted

Heh. I like the sound of that. It can mean so many lovely things.

In this case, though, it means that I received my acceptance letter from the grad school program to which I applied. Which is great and a great honor. Only now I am scared to bejeesus of what my life will be like as a single mom, homeschooling two kids, holding down a part-time job and commuting to a grad school program that will be either a 30 minute or an hour and a half commute depending on which site my classes are that day. I have hardly written anything in months because I have been working on my application and quietly hiding away with all the responsibilities that I have, and love, but that already take up all of my time.

Can I make magic? Can I create more hours in the day so I can still make healthy dinners from scratch and take long walks with my dogs and do yoga and teach my kids a little about the world and go to soccer games and guitar lessons AND attend classes every evening and do lots of valuable reading and write thoughtful papers and complete an internship? Goddess bless, I hope so, 'cause I think I am gonna give it a shot!

So the program to which I have been invited is for a Masters in Community Counseling at Western Carolina University. It is, apparently, a very good program, well accredited and appropriately focused on personal wellness.

I thought I'd share the essay I wrote for my application since it is the only thing worth noting I have written in quite some time. This is the extended version; I had to cut it back considerably in order to stay within the required length, but wordy creature that I am, I prefer this version:

For a number of years it has been my goal to seek the education I need to make counseling my career path; as such I am applying for admission to the M.S. in Community Counseling program. I have an earnest desire to promote healing and wellness in the world by providing assistance to others to help them attain their own satisfaction, comfort and joy. I have always been personally dedicated to human service and healing. Earlier in my life I studied and practiced as a midwife because I felt that by helping families bring their children into the world in safety and in peace that I might make an impact toward creating a safer and more peaceful world. It is my belief that with compassionate, natural care during pregnancy and birth it will increase the likelihood that healthful nurturing will take place within the family itself, and my hope that it would create a healthy family dynamic preventing potential problems for those family members later.

For a variety of reasons, though, I have decided that I am unable to practice midwifery as my career, yet my interest in serving my community as a resource and support person has never waned and, fortunately, neither have my opportunities to provide that service. Friends and acquaintances as well as the families with whom I have shared birth experiences have continued to call upon me to midwife them, so to speak, through some of their more troubling personal concerns, and I have been grateful to make myself available to them to serve in that capacity. I have stood with my loved ones as they have faced relationship concerns, parenting issues, community disagreements, addiction, depression and the loss of loved ones. While I never think that I have the answers to their problems, I find that I have a strong ability to be present and listen and offer support in a variety of ways to people in these situations. I believe it is the logical progression of my being organically called to serve in a counseling capacity to my community to now move forward and strive for the education that will allow me to best serve that community and also allow my family and myself to benefit from this service by making it my career.

In my role as a midwife I have had many opportunities to work with people as they have tried to overcome deep fears and concerns. Midwifery is an intimate service in which normal barriers fall away and you find yourself staring directly in the face of another person, to whom you previously may not have been close at all, as they stare directly in the face of their greatest challenges. In this space I have found myself needing to be centered and compassionate, strong but yielding, giving of myself though never taking over the process that rightly belongs with the family. I have assisted women as they dealt with the unexpected disappointment of a difficult birth, a c-section when a natural birth was truly desired. I have been supportive to couples as they have decided how to tell their families they are unexpectedly becoming parents and as they dealt with the emotional repercussions of their families’ reactions. I have mediated between an expectant father and mother as they tried with difficulty to decide whether or not to circumcise their baby, should he be a boy, because the father felt his heritage dictated that ritual but the mother believed strongly that it was an unnecessary and undesirable medical procedure to which to subject the child. I have provided reassurance as a family learned their newborn had a grave congenital heart defect and stayed close as they processed the intensity of his subsequent surgeries and hospitalizations. And I have cried with a family as they grieved over their stillborn daughter and spent many long hours in therapeutic discussion with the bereaved mother as she tried to make sense of her loss.

My experiences in the realm of counseling are not limited to those I have had through midwifery. I am a mother of two teenaged sons, and my interpersonal dealings with them as they navigate their relationships with each other, with their father, who has lived long-distance from us since their early childhood, and with me has been a fount of opportunity to explore therapeutic human interaction. As a result of home-schooling my children I have also taught a wide age-range of other children in classes and groups and participated with them as they have worked to learn their subjects, to learn about themselves and the world and to learn how to interact with their peers. I have served as a youth group teacher and counselor in Unitarian-Universalist churches off and on throughout my adulthood and have worked with young people as they have explored such diverse topics as race relations, religious tolerance and their own developing human sexuality. In my long time residence in the Asheville area I have connected with a wide social circle full of an eclectic set of characters typical of this unique area; many times I have found myself in the position of mediating between these friends or within families or various local organizations. I chose to bolster my skills in mediation by pursuing professional training through The Mediation Center, which I completed in 2006.

I feel that my own personal growth process has led me to a place in which I am very open to self-reflection for the purpose of preparing myself to become a counselor to others. I am, to be frank, a thriving survivor of a highly dysfunctional family in which I experienced poverty, abuse and neglect. I have coped with the long distance separation of my children’s father from our family and raising my sons as a single parent. I faced serious emotional hurdles in supporting a former partner during an emotional breakdown that led to his commitment to a mental health facility, followed by a stay in a drug rehabilitation center and ongoing recovery work. The combination of these experiences, amongst others, has resulted in a personal openness, a deep sense of compassion for myself and others, a willingness and desire to communicate as effectively and healthfully as possible and a sense of understanding of self that allows me to recognize my mistakes and patterns, to forgive myself and to learn from the process. These traits are helping me to become a more strong and adaptable person and to succeed in my personal goals, and I hope that they will foster my ability to learn what I need in order to work competently in the counseling field. I see myself working professionally in a private or group practice, counseling for individuals or families, perhaps in conjunction with practitioners of other holistic modalities. I may wish to focus on working with a similar demographic as I did in midwifery, families going through the experiences and transitions of childbearing and childrearing and the concomitant changes of that time in relationship to self and others, and perhaps providing grief counseling for families experiencing childbearing losses.

Today, after all I have been through, I consider myself to be a content, well-adjusted and self-assured individual with a great joy for living. It is the fact that I have faced such hardship and been able, with the help of an assortment of different types of counseling and therapy, to make such an enjoyable life for myself, to provide a healthy home for my children and to have enduring and beneficial relationships with my family and friends that leads me to believe that it is possible for individuals to overcome many hardships and still find their peace. While I know that I can never hold the secret for others to reach contentment, as they must do so for themselves, I do believe that with the proper education I can combine the lessons I have learned, my gifts for compassion and communication and my desire to serve and go out into the world and listen, support, and yes, midwife others as they seek their own resolution, find their own peace and become the people they long to be.