R+71: Embracing the Tangle

Detroit. 2.28.14

I have been back at work for six weeks now.  I am still getting my feet under me.   The contrast to our lives on the bike is remarkable.  While we were on the bike sojourn, and then later, when we were on the writers’ retreat in our cabin, life, managing priorities and communications were much simpler.

On the bike, choices are reduced.  When do we leave?  Where do we go?  When do we stop?  Where do we stay?  What do we eat?  Of these, the only one that regularly presented complications was “Where do we stay?”  In many places across the country, there were exactly two choices.  Do we camp outside or do we stay in the one small motel in town?  In Circle, Montana, for instance, there was a KOA campground or there was a creepy looking motel.  We were so tired after biking hours in a howling wind, we didn’t want any more time outside.  We opted for the motel, and were filled with anxiety when we saw its ramshackle sign and abandoned, crumbling coffee shop.  As it turned out, the motel owner “gave us his best room,” which although the plumbing leaked, and was newly painted a spectacular combination of pink, blue, and gold,  it ended up being a pretty good rest for our weary bones.

To stay or not stay here....that is the question.

Other times, we were faced with a plethora of choices.  In Shawano, Wisconsin, there were many nice looking accommodations.  It was late, we had been lost (again), but we had reservations at a resort, theoretically on the lake.  Our inner voices were screaming at us, to just take one of these rooms and not bike out in the dark to that distant room.  But no.  And when we got there, after meeting the befuddled owner in a lobby reeking of cat, we found our beautiful lakeside resort was actually a rundown welfare motel. 

Still--these choices were pretty straightforward: cope or not cope with the choice.  Rail against your fate (Wes’ choice in Shawano) or slip into surly resignation (Shaun’s choice in Shawano).   The good news was that we could leave behind our bad choices the next day.   We left it behind and rolled onto the next adventure.

Communications on the road are also pretty simple.  First of all, for much of the day, silence reigns.  Once we mount our bikes, there might be an hour or two where the only communication was an internal conversation with yourself.   Many times, there was not even that.    

Our brains were focused on making sure that our bodies were functioning as needed, especially when the terrain was challenging.  The only thing that mattered, that truly was all-consuming, was getting that bike up that hill.  The same can be said for many down-hills.  Full concentration was required when zipping down a mountain at 35 miles an hour.  There is only one choice available.   The same is true riding in traffic, as when we were trying to make our way on that hell-hole of a two lane road going into Whitefish, MT.  With no shoulder, heavy traffic, and a six inch drop off the highway to the surrounding land, it took every ounce of our mind and body to stay alive.  

As we were going in and out of public places, like restaurants or bars, communication was an option.  If we were tired, or not feeling social, we could easily choose not to engage with the people around us.  When we did talk to the strangers we met, it was easy enough to turn the conversation to them and find out about who they are, what they are experiencing, what they are perceiving in the world.   We had nearly pat answers to the five standard questions.  (Where did you start?  Where are you going?  How many miles a day do you ride?  Where do you stay?  How many tires have you gone through?)  If our conversation turned to our background or interests, we could disclose… or not.  In any case, these were 15-45 minute relationships.  Before long, we would be down the road and would likely never see this person again.   Such are the pleasures of anonymity.

Oh, what a difference to be back in Detroit and back at work.   First of all, good bye to anonymity.  Nearly everywhere I go in this small town masquerading as a big city, I see someone I know.  Here at the coffee shop where I am writing this, I have spoken to 7 people in less than an hour.   Some of these people I have known for years.  I know their families.  I have had disagreements off and on through the years.  I must choose how I continue these relationships.  Let bygones be bygones?  Warily engage and watch out for grounds of conflict?  Keep the war alive?  I almost never choose the latter, although I know people who do.  I wish I could always choose the first, but I am rather bad at that best of choices.  Mostly I focus on the positive and watch out for the negative.   With the woman whose politics make me uneasy, but whose personality and family I like, we talk of family and history and neighborhood.

Back at work, the choices can be overwhelming.  There are ramifications to everything.  Who will it benefit?  Who will disagree?  What happens if we do?  What happens if we don’t?  What are the steps to get there?  Everything is a finely balanced choice.  Choose wrong and the resulting mess will bring emotions and confusion and disorder that may take years to sort. 

Even in the best of circumstances, I am operating with a mass of indefinites.   This is a human operation.  Humans don’t always say what they mean… even when they are not trying to obfuscate.  They may not have the skills to express it.  They may not feel comfortable expressing it in these circumstances. They may not know what they want (one of my particular failings)… And there are the inevitable balancing acts.  What may be just great for A is deeply upsetting to B and C is not yet ready to choose.  Round and round and round it goes. 

Then the context for every decision must be considered.  Can I see what is happening in the city, in our community?  If I align with one group, do I damage my relationships with another?  If I speak against one option, do I close off the possibility of a relationship with the people who support the other option?  Which way is the best way?  Who knows?  Who can tell?
And no matter what, whatever I choose, I will have to live with consequences of my choice.  If my choice angers someone, then I will have to work through the backwash of that emotion, even while allowing another person the space and time to celebrate, or worry, or dismiss the same thing.  It is a tangle, that’s for sure.

During these first few weeks, being back in the tangle has felt claustrophobic.  How often I just wanted to get on my bike and disappear from all these complications. How much I just wanted to retreat into a spot where all the choices are mine, as are all the silences. 

However, in one of those moments of grace that sometimes touch my life, I had a realization.  The tangle is the work.  To engage in human work, and be in the human community means embracing the tangle.  My only choice is to be as authentic and simple and straightforward as I can.  The negotiations will be constant.  The confusion will be ever present.  My job, therefore, is presenting my best and truest heart, and silencing the worrisome yammer in my brain.  I agree to muddle on, sorting and sifting and winding the tangle that is life.

R+ 43: Shedding a Skin

 Detroi:t 1/30/14

We have been back in Detroit nearly six weeks.   Finally, I am settled enough to write.  The need to re-organize and empty my house was a powerful urge during the first weeks of our return.  Although our house-sitters did a fantastic job of caring for our animals, house, and yard, some deep non-rational urge required I take everything apart, clean, wipe, re-fold, re-stack, re-arrange and otherwise re-connect to everything we touch or use in the house.

In the kitchen, every shelf, every drawer, whether visible or no, was emptied, cleaned, and re-ordered.  I have a mania for categorizing, so all the copper pots, cast iron, and Creuset were cleaned, polished or re-sealed and put in their specific shelf.  All of the storage containers were re-united with their lids and organized by type.  All of the food shelves were scrubbed and organized by food type.

I crawled all over the room, scrubbing the floors and the woodwork, wiping down doors, cleaning, wiping, touching everything.  In the midst of all this, I get rid of excess.  The memorabilia, the little tchotchkes and doo-hickeys, the piles of paper, the “I might use this someday” stacks of this and that---all gone through, much of it removed. 



This continued throughout the house, especially in the much neglected basement.  I spent days setting up a new work space and clearing out and organizing a portion of the house that had become a repository of good intentions, tired memories, and lost dreams.  One distressing day, I pulled apart the hardware cabinet, to find that our circular saw, sitting in its cardboard box, had been both wet and occasionally used as a kitty box.  It was rusted and filthy; a few of its blades were so gone to rust they could not be rehabilitated with WD-40 and steel wool.

There, working in my nightgown and bathrobe, I rubbed and scrubbed the goo and bubbles on this tool, regretting our neglect.  I emptied a small wooden cabinet of its mittens and gloves, then spent hours sorting hinges and sliders and hasps and whatnot into their own categories and finally into their own marked drawer.   Screws, nuts, bolts, nails…mixed randomly into jars or piled in their half empty boxes were separated, organized, and marked. 

I repaired or removed chairs and furniture that sat for years in the basement awaiting attention.  I removed videos, and books, and papers by the box-full.  Every piece of clothing in our drawers and closet were taken out, examined for fit, repair, and cleanliness.  Most of my clothes are much too big now.  I took sack after sack of clothes to the Salvation Army until I am in a “pant crisis”—I have only two pair of somewhat too big pants suitable for work.  I have only three pair of pants for casual wear.

Out go shirts, and shoes, and jackets, and purses.  Gone are briefcases.  Wes spends days pulling apart bags and bags carrying the scripts, rehearsal notes, promotional materials, and associated palaver from years of directing and producing plays.  All of the artwork and photos that had been waiting years for frames have finally been displayed.  Yarn and fabric in the box I mailed from England (in 1983!) are put in project boxes, still awaiting their encounter with the sewing machine or knitting needles.   I pull down a box of dog and cat grooming supplies, accumulated through years of living with animals.  We take leashes, collars, a dog shaving set, brushes, groomers, on and on, to the Dearborn Animal Rescue group.



High School Sports

We pull down books that have sat on the shelves in the library for years.  Out go the stacks of audio books.  All of them good, sometimes great books.  We ask: will we read this again?  If the answer is “No,” out it goes.  Good bye to multiple copies of anything, detritus of years of teaching.  We debate: shall we keep this set of Carlos Castaneda books, remnant of our life in the 1970’s.  Wes says “Let ‘em go,” but oddly enough, I say “Keep.”  I want to see if I still find any shred of truth in those trippy old things.

Down on our hands and knees, we clean and scrub and repair and wax and buff long neglected floors in our library and dressing room.  To our embarrassment, we think this may be the first time we have done the floors in the dressing room, although we have lived in this house for more than 20 years.



The floor is finally done!

We start the long process of going through boxes and boxes and boxes of papers.  The first box is one gathered by Wes’ mom and returned to us during the traumatic days of cleaning out the family shed after his father’s funeral.  There we found every letter we had written to them through all the years we had been married.  There were missives from our first years, travelogues of our time living and biking in Europe, painful letters from our disastrous foray into Houston, accounts of buying this house, promotional materials from Matrix.  Even more remarkable, Wes found letters to his parents from the young woman who broke his heart.  There were long missives from Wes on the road, hitchhiking his grief away in Europe, escaping from the inevitable but brutal end of that foray into mismatched love.

A letter from the road 1982
 

There pages and pages of clippings from Wes’ days of high school sports, but not a thing from his days of high school theatre. There were long-lost pictures of children and relatives and olden days of yore.  Wes sorts through these artifacts.  He wants to throw away all the sports stuff, but I convince to keep it.  In a few years, it may have more meaning for him than it does now. 



On and on the cleaning and sorting and arranging and disposing goes…right through Christmas…right through New Year’s…right up until I return to work.  It continues a bit at time, even now.  We are making our slow way through the storage room downstairs and know we have the giant problem of the unheated but stuffed attic awaiting us when the temperatures finally climb out of the icebox.

Throughout all this, several questions arise.  Why do we have all this stuff?  Why did we keep all this stuff?  What do we need to carry us forward now?  During our 20’s, we were footloose and fancy free.  We moved all the time, shedding possessions with nary a thought. (Although we now regret some of our thoughtlessness: we shed a western couch and chair my mother had carried from the earliest days of her marriage to my long-deceased father.)  We were in full explorer mode.  Life was out there and we wanted to go meet it.   We’d store the books and papers, garage sale our meager possessions, and hitch-hike off to our next adventure. 

By the time we got to Detroit, in 1989, that pattern was well past tired.  I was 33.  I wanted a home.  I needed a nest.  We set down some roots.  For twenty years, we built a home and a business and a career.  We weaved connections, and mounded up piles, and plugged along.  Until it was all much too much.

The bike journey put an end to all that.  Across the miles, pedal after pedal, the junk in our minds, the globs of fat on our guts and butts, were slowly burnt away.  Returning to our home, it was painful to see how constipated and fussy we had let every part our life become. 

So out it all goes.  If it has meaning, or purpose, it gets to stay.  Goodbye to all those old and tired patterns, so long to all that “just in case” keeping.   Good riddance to “woulda, shoulda, mighta” piles of papers, books, and clothes.  The Third Third of our life is upon us.   Leaner, cleaner, clearer…those are the watch-words for this time of life. 

But my-oh-my, do we still have a long way to go!  Just as I am still sporting plenty of flubber jiggling on my gut, butt, and thighs, my house is still crowded with plenty of stuff.  My mind still cavorts in eddies of worry and piles of fear.   There’s a lot more scrubbing, and cleaning, and clearing to do.  It’s all of a piece, both within and without, to come to the place redounding of peace.