Chaos & Panic

I went to my first Creative Mornings gathering today and the topic was Chaos. I froze when I saw the question on my name tag. I wanted to write something bold or creative, but ‘panic’ was honestly all I could come up with.

My world’s been turned upside down this year. Although I chose all of it, I sure didn’t see it coming. Benjamin and I have been talking for a couple of years about someday leaving the city. Living here has been such a rich experience, but it’s not a place we can build the future we dream of.

But leaving has always been somewhere in the distant future. It’s perpetually been 1-2 years away. So when we sat down in February and had the same old conversation we’d already had so many times about ‘what next and when’ it honestly surprised me that the time had come.

See, I’d always thought we’d have everything figured out by the time we left. That we’d know where we were heading next and what we’d be doing there. Instead, the time to leave became real and necessary before the next pieces fell into place. So we decided to do some extended travel during that in-between time. We’ve been saving for some time for this trip, I just thought it would be next year. When it became apparent it was happening this autumn instead, I felt unprepared.

Despite years of conversations and planning, the fear, uncertainty, and grief in this shift gripped me hard. During the height of the transitional turmoil (through May and June) when we were finalizing all of the details, my anxiety skyrocketed. I still can’t put words to it although heaven knows I’ve tried. I’m still very much in recovery and management and working diligently to avoid a relapse so as to be physically and emotionally ready for leaving the city in five weeks time and then traveling for 2-4 months.

People ask if I’m excited about our trip. Yes, I’m excited about seeing wondrous things, getting out of the city and spending time in forests and oceans, and seeing friends and family. But right now I’m mostly just focused on survival: on all the loose ends and projects that need to be tied up before we can go, and on diligent self-care that keeps me grounded during this time of upheaval.

So yeah, there was really truly only one pressing answer to the question on my name tag because it’s been the story of my summer. I’m Hilary. My life feels like a tossed salad. And when I’m tossed into chaos, I will panic. But I’m also working hard to manage that. And this morning’s awesome talk had a lot of really helpful, relevant, and encouraging stuff to share about navigating chaos. It couldn’t have come at a better time.

Lots of Smaller Losses

The photo from my friend. 

Yesterday evening a friend sent me a photo of a snail she saw on her morning walk. It’s a rare but wonderful treat when a friend sees a snail wherever they are in real life, and they snap a pic and send it to me. It always feels good to be thought of. But also, it feels good to take a moment to contemplate the goings on of a small snail in some corner of the world and to see them thriving at it. When I see wild snails thrive, I can believe in Parsley’s resilience and that he is thriving too.

I was sitting on the bus feeling unwell (and discouraged about feeling unwell, yet again, despite sustained attempts at healing) and trying to decide if a migraine was coming on or if I was just feeling overly sensitive to the glaring lights above me in this nighttime bus. Then this snail arrived via text and I felt myself let out the biggest exhale of breath I didn’t know I was holding. My tense shoulders sank into their proper hanging place and I began to relax.

It was a potent reminder of how Parsley cared for me. Parsley grounded me like nothing else I’ve ever known. His slow, steady, gliding, contemplative behaviors. His long hours of slumber. His proficiency at self-care. Watching him be a snail, whether sleeping or awake, was deeply relaxing. He taught me how to better care for myself. He gave me permission to rest. He was also an integral part of my bedtime routine. The bedtime transition is a tough one for me. I have a hard time shutting down from the day, turning off the brain and all its energy. I engage in avoidance behaviors in going to bed because I don’t want to lie there in the dark with my brain racing as it so often does.

But, because Parsley was nocturnal, it was always the last task of my evening before bed to make sure he had fresh breakfast and a freshly spritzed home. The spritzing would often wake him up (if he wasn’t awake already) and he would start gliding around and maybe head for his breakfast. So I would spend time sitting by him before bed watching him wake, watching him glide, and listening to his tiny munches. I’d go to bed deeply soothed, thinking of him just feet away gliding about his snaily business, straining my ears to try to hear him munching away. On nights when I felt in need of extra emotional support, I’d put his home on the floor right near my pillow and sleep with him beside me. It was easier to hear his munches that way, which comforted me until I slept.

When Parsley left, I lost a friend, mentor, and confidant. But I also lost a healthy, grounding routine that tempered my anxiety and helped me transition into sleep. While the loss of Parsley isn’t the cause of the mental, emotional, and physical derailment I’ve experienced this summer, I certainly feel his loss more acutely as I seek balance and healing because I’m grieving the loss of a friend and teacher while simultaneously losing the practical coping tools he offered me.

For a moment, when that snail came in on my phone, I briefly felt the solace Parsley gave me; a welcome relief and distraction from my discouragement. It also had the unexpected effect of helping me to finally be able to start articulating all I lost when he went away. I woke suddenly in the pre-dawn darkness of the early morning after a restless sleep and couldn’t stop the words from forming in my mind: thoughts of losing my grandfather and of losing Parsley and how the loss of someone seems at first like one, big, solitary loss because they aren’t there anymore. But we all contain multitudes, so their single departure actually results in hundreds of smaller losses, and those are the things that truly make their absence so hard to adjust to and bear.

Avoiding Overgrown Gardens

On an autumn day in my 12th year, I came down the front steps of my middle school at the end of the day to find my dad in his pickup with my little brother in the back seat. It was an unexpected and pleasant surprise, as I knew he’d left that morning on an out of town trip for work. I was naive to the warning signs of calamity then, so I didn’t think to feel alarmed that he was picking me up from school, which had only ever been my mother’s domain, especially when he should have been out of town.

But I was to have my first lesson in the unraveling that follows calamity when I learned that my maternal grandfather had been in an accident and my mom and grandmother were rushing down the interstate to follow the emergency helicopter to the nearest big-city hospital where he’d been taken. He later died from that accident and this was my first significant loss of a close family member. 

My grandfather had a large garden that he nurtured and tended. As hot west Texas days faded into the relative cool of the evenings, he would sit in his canvas folding lawn chair in the shade behind the garage and watch his garden grow. My favorite evenings were the ones where he’d have a sprinkler running and each breeze that graced us would blow some of that cooling mist in our direction. Sometimes their neighbor would see us sitting back there and come over for a visit. Those were golden days indeed.

After his death the garden dwindled and grass began to overtake it. For a couple of years after his death I wouldn’t go anywhere near the back side of the garage. This was tricky and necessitated some planning because my great-grandmother lived on the lot behind my grandparents, just across the alley. There were no fences to separate the two lots, just one seamless family homestead in this little Texas town. Naturally, when visiting my grandparents, we were back and forth between the two houses to see my great-grandmother as well.

The back of her home (we only ever went in and out the back door) looked out over her spacious plot of land onto the back of my grandparents land, which meant a full view of the back side of the garage and the declining garden. My solution to this predicament varied, but usually involved some combination of squinting my eyes to blur them and running right past it until I was squarely back in my grandparents’ backyard and the backside of the garage was behind me. As long as I didn’t go over there, I could fool myself that he might still be sitting there, watching his garden grow. Those first two years after his death were full of anger at silly, stupid, fluke accidents that shouldn’t ever happen paired with denial. As long as I didn’t round that corner, he wasn’t really gone.

In the spring of my 34th year, Parsley came to stay with us. 1 year and 1 month later I released him and his baby in a private ceremonial moment filled with unquenchable tears. I released him in a place where I knew he’d have food to eat and where I felt he’d be safe. It’s also a place that has meant a lot to me over the last couple of years that I visited often when I needed to clear my head and ‘reset.’ I’ve found that since his release, I’ve only been back to this place three times in three months. I used to go several times a week. I let the avoidance behavior continue until a friend asked me about it, and then Benjamin did the same. Once I received these promptings to put words to it, I realized it was my grandfather and his garden all over again.

As long as I don’t go to Parsley’s place, there remains the hope that he’s still there. There’s still the hope that I could walk up to the spot where I left him and the baby and find things just as they were: Parsley sitting on top of the piece of squash and cuttlebone I left for him, looking up at me with the baby sitting on top of him peeking over Parsley’s shell. (I know it sounds too picturesque to be believable, but it’s true. Benjamin captured it in a grainy photo for me. I honestly didn’t even notice it as it was happening because I was too upset. If it helps to balance this hardly believable picturesque scene with some reality, Parsley really had the most goofy expression on his face and it’s not a very good photo. No doubt his face was due to the disorientation of having just been deposited in his strange new world).

I’m still living with the denial of Parsley’s absence. When I released him I promised I’d visit but it seems I was wrong. Because it turns out that if I visit, and he’s not there, then he really is gone, and that’s a reality I still can’t face.

Connecting With Our Elders

The taco joint was mostly empty when we arrived. We went for our weekly 'art brunch' visit, which we'd postponed through the morning until it finally became lunchtime. Each weekend, Benjamin and I sit down and discuss the art we made that week and exchange praise and honest critique. It inspires us to make more art, generates fresh ideas, and helps us identify pitfalls to avoid and areas for improvement.

As we finished placing our order, a frail, old man in a wheelchair came in being pushed by a tall young woman and got in line behind us. We went and took our seats and shortly thereafter they came and sat at the same end of the restaurant just a few tables away.

I didn't try to pay particular attention to them, and yet they kept invading my consciousness. Benjamin would be elaborating on some lovely reflection about the practice of making art, and I would suddenly dissociate and have to fight the urge to cry. I discreetly and internally pondered why the pair down the way from us made me feel so sad. Why I was projecting all of my feelings onto these two people that I knew absolutely nothing about?

After some brief but thoughtful reflection (I was still trying to be part of the art-conversation too all the while and not divert our experience with my sudden arrival of unwieldy feelings, which happens all too often and is hardly fair to my patient partner), I realized it's because of my own hunger for a connection with older generations.

For about 4 years I worked with the elderly, but that was eleven years ago. I loved it. I deeply treasure the times I shared with them at the end of their lives (I worked primarily in hospice care), although those memories grow fainter with each passing year. Since moving up here, I haven't had much intergenerational contact of any kind, not even with people of my parents' generation. Until very recently, my community was made up only of people around my age, give or take 10 years. I hunger for time spent with older generations.

The man quietly ate his food, which I knew he was enjoying because I heard him remark how delicious it was. The young woman, who appeared to be his hired caregiver, didn't eat and mostly killed time on her phone. Occasionally he would say something to her and she would reply. He had trouble hearing her replies and would have to ask her to repeat herself a few times. When it was time to go she attentively helped him clear his space and they headed for the door.

Anything I could say about them would only be speculation. I know nothing of the dynamic of their relationship or their feelings about life in general. But that brief encounter as a bystander several tables away reminded me of several things: First, how lonely I've been for intergenerational community. Second, what a waste it seems (to me, from my place of longing) to have an older person in your life to visit with and learn from and to spend that time on your phone instead. Third, what a missed opportunity to be a real bright spot in an elderly person's day... a segment of the population that is often isolated and has little opportunity for social interaction. Fourth, and most of all, that the ability to comfortably sit with an elderly person and to know how to converse with them when they can't hear, or they mumble, or you feel you have nothing in common is a learned skill, and one that is especially lacking in one's youth.

My mom took us to nursing homes when we were kids and it was awkward and wildly uncomfortable for me. Despite that exposure from a young age, I carried that discomfort into my young-adulthood. I consider myself very fortunate to have developed those skills in a professional context as part of my college education. I don't fault the young woman for her behavior. I saw my younger self in her because I realized that I would have done the exact same thing had I not benefitted from repeated educational and professional opportunities to practice being comfortable in similar situations.

This explained the root of my sadness to me: generalized sadness at an isolated elderly population paired with lack of know-how for the non-elderly (whether youth or upper-middle-aged) to bridge that gap. Everyone misses out all the way around when we don't know how to connect with our elders. It's got me thinking about what I can do on a community level, but it's also got me thinking that I'm way overdue in writing a letter to my grandmother. I'll start with that and work my way forward from there.

Portrait of a Photographer

I started with my first camera around age 8 and was quite a shutterbug! I shot with that same Kodak 35mm kid-camera all the way through high school, mostly photos of people and places. I left for college just as digital cameras were still taking flight and before smart-phone cameras. I mistakenly thought I'd outgrown my kid-camera, but didn't yet have a great solution for replacing it.

During college I met the one who would become both my life-partner and a talented professional photographer: Benjamin. He got me started with my first digital camera in 2006, a compact little pearly pink point and shoot. Having a camera in hand that provided real-time feedback via the display screen accelerated my learning dramatically and helped me further develop my eye for composition.

In 2011, I graduated to a micro 4/3 Olympus, my first camera with exchangeable lenses! It was compact and lightweight, but allowed me to experiment with the building blocks of photography: shutter speed, aperture, ISO and varied focal lengths. This helped me grow my technical skill.

In 2016 I graduated to a Nikon DSLR. I inherited it from Benjamin on 'manual' and didn't know how to change the settings to cheat with auto-settings (and didn't bother looking it up), so I finally forced myself to learn how to shoot manually! This was just the push I needed to help me understand shutter-speed, aperture, and ISO even better.

But the one part of digital photography that I never grew to like was the editing. I've developed a great eye as an editing assistant and can scan through several hundred photos in no time, weeding out the great from the lackluster. But I never developed the skills, confidence, (or more accurately the patience) for taking my photos all the way to completion. It was cumbersome.

By the end of 2016, I was confidently shooting manually with the DSLR, but noticed that I'd started thinking about and really missing my old kid-camera and all the simplicity and joy of it. I looked around at my parents house, but already knew it was long gone. 

Then 2017 rolled around and film cameras just started popping up! First a Nikon SLR was gifted to me by my brother who hadn't used it in years, then I stumbled upon a basic point and shoot in a junk pile at a local camera shop. By autumn, I met the Holga, and this past Spring the Kodak Hawkeye. All the while, as these cameras kept showing up, I started shooting film again.

I love it. After being dialed in to tech-based photography for so long, I was astounded to (re)discover that these old cameras require no electricity whatsoever!  They're purely mechanical.

Shooting with film is a slow and mindful process. Because I pay for every shot I take (for developing and printing, neither of which I currently have the set-up to do myself), I take more care in deciding on each shot and I shoot more sparingly. I also shoot with different cameras and film depending on the style of shot that I want. So it can take me a while to make it through one role of film, since I’m shooting sparingly across 3-4 different cameras.

I love that it takes so long to get my photos back and that each one is a surprise. I’m still getting to know each of these cameras and how they shoot. I’m also still growing in my skill as a photographer, especially with film. Right now, I’m shooting on vintage film, which lends another unknown quality to how they might turn out.

Film is slow, unknown, surprising, simple, and fun. Film photography gave me my start and digital photography gave me technique and skill. Film gave me back my love of photography and, strangely, led me back to digital, since there are some things I will always turn to digital for (including my awesome macro lens) and instant-feedback for developing my eye.

So, now I do both.

• I shoot with the equipment that will yield the result I’m seeking.

• I shoot with the mindfulness of film regardless of which camera I have in hand…

• …and I treat my finished photo more like film in that I only do basic necessary color correction instead of trying to make it ‘perfect.’

• I use my smartphone with a black-and-white filter turned on to help me walk through the world and examine how texture, contrast and tone translates into a film medium that I have no experience with, but want to learn. With digital tech, I can learn how to compose my b&w film shots with real-time feedback and increase my rate of success as I’m learning.

It’s been the best journey. I love photography so much. Having married a talented and skillful professional photographer and artist, I spent many years only seeing my lack of photographic skill in comparison. But returning to film and finding a whole wide world of vintage cameras has reminded me that among other things, I am also a photographer.

My path is different: it’s not professional and it’s not formally trained. But it’s the earliest art form (besides music) that I adopted and one I absolutely can't give up. My path’s been circuitous and I haven’t done it alone (props to my mom, the original shutter-bug! and to Benjamin who’s taught me most everything I know, and continues to repeat himself again and again when I can’t remember technique or terminology). But it’s been unwavering in that I always want a camera within arm’s reach and I love the challenge that comes from practicing this craft.

Old Friends in the Rock Pile

This messy pile may not look like much, but I know these faces and they hold a lot of meaning for me. I can’t believe I never made the connection before, but during this trip home, it hit me: both sets of my grandparents collected large and interesting rocks and fossils and kept them in a rock pile in their respective yards. As a kid I played in these well-appointed and well-maintained rock-piles and knew many of these rocks as individuals with distinct personalities.

My maternal grandfather died more than 20 years ago, and it changed the landscape. No one could care for that land like he did. As I grew older and stopped playing in the rocks, and the land was managed less meticulously, the rocks were buried under years of leaves-turned-to-soil and the grasses that came to grow there.

After the death of my paternal grandmother, just about 4 years back, some of her rocks came to live on this land in their own small pile. Perhaps it was seeing them there, a novel recent addition to the landscape, that reawakened my interest in the old rock-pile and helped me realize that my connection to rocks comes from both sides of my family tree.

So I dug out one earthy side of the rock pile and was surprised to see old friends looking back at me. Rocks that I used to know as singular individuals by their shape, texture, and markings were still there waiting for me to find after all these years.

There wasn’t time to clean out the whole rock pile on this trip, but I don’t know that that’s what was most needed right now. I think, more importantly, my work was to reconnect to treasured things forgotten and realize that the love of rocks I’ve had since childhood wasn’t born in a vacuum, but that I come from a line of ancestors who also found wonder and awe in noticing rocks and loved to bring them home to live with and appreciate.

Meanwhile, these rocks still lay under years of plant-matter. They are no longer forgotten, just waiting in slumber until it’s time to wake them up again.

Ginger Molasses Cookies

I had a really early morning today, up and out the door to work a frosting shift, and I didn't rearrange my Sunday evening to get an adequate night's rest. I finished my shift about 8:45 this morning, leaving a whole vast expanse of day with which to achieve all of the goals for my day that I carefully listed in my bullet journal before bed last night.

It's a quiet, cool, cloudy kind of day. (as I'm writing this, it's finally raining outside which makes all the cloudy grayness even better). I spent the day at my desk, working in my bullet journal, writing a letter to a friend, and catching up on administrative sorts of things. When lunchtime came, I took a break with a lovely bucolic book I'm presently reading then returned to my desk. The quietness, gray and solitude were lovely companions to my day... until about 3 o'clock, when my inadequate night's sleep caught up with me and it was all I could do to stay awake.

Harboring hope that I would still get a few things done on my list, and not wanting to take a nap for fear I'd never want to go to sleep tonight, I knew a change of pace was in order and headed to the kitchen to wash some dishes and find a snack. Before I even crossed the room to the kitchen, I knew I wanted to make ginger-molasses cookies, and I realized delightedly that I had everything I needed on hand to get the job done.

With the oven preheating, I pulled out the few simple ingredients and started mixing. While my coconut oil softened on the stovetop, I washed the dishes left in the sink from before. By the time my coconut oil was soft and ready for adding to the dry mix, I already had a clean kitchen. I put the first tiny batch of mini-cookies in our small oven and washed the few items I'd used to make the cookies. 9 minutes later the first batch was done. 

Like I said, we have a small oven, so I use mini cookie sheets. Since I'm still getting used to this new oven and haven't made this recipe in it yet - or figured out the oven's baking quirks (and it sure does seem to have some) - I opted to bake one tray of cookies at a time, so that I didn't have to worry about one tray cooking differently than another or affecting each other's conduction of heat.

It took three 9-minute runs to get all of the mini-cookies baked. But this felt like a perfect way to spend my time, sitting with the cookies as they baked, rotating them as they finished. It was a nice diversion from the stillness I'd had at my desk all day.

All through the afternoon I'd had trouble shaking the chill off of me, so I was more than happy to babysit the oven and sit near its warmth. As the second batch started baking I depanned the first six small cookies, and proceeded to eat them, still hot and chewy from the oven, while I waited for the second batch to finish.

After the last batch was on the cooling rack, I took Pepper for a walk in the rain and returned to a house that was inviting in its warmth and its autumn spice scent. The act of baking, washing dishes, walking the dog (and no doubt the tasty molasses) gave me just the extra boost I needed to come back here and get a few more things done before I call it a day.

And not only did I give myself a boost, but Benjamin was delighted to come home from work and find the surprise of fresh cookies waiting, still sitting out to cool. Isn't it lovely when everything's on hand for a last-minute bake-off? There is much to be said for the benefits of a well-stocked baker pantry as a means of nurturing ourselves and others.

These cookies are grain-free and vegan. I adapted them from http://comfybelly.com/2011/12/ginger-snap-cookies-using-almond-flour/#.WA6JTzKZPeQ

Ginger Molasses Cookies

Ingredients:

• 2 cups blanched almond flour

• 1/8 teaspoon salt

• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

• 2 teaspoons ground ginger

• 1/2 teaspoon cloves

• 1/3 cup molasses

• 1/4 cup coconut oil, softened

Directions:

• Preheat your oven to 350°F

• Grease baking sheet with coconut oil.

• Mix together flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves in a bowl. - I used a coarse almond meal because I like the nutty, crunchy texture in these cookies!

• Combine molasses and coconut oil to a small bowl. If coconut oil has chunks in it, just set it over the oven vent on your stove top until it melts.

• Add the molasses and coconut oil to the dry mix and blend well until a soft dough forms.

• Roll about 1 tablespoon of dough into a small ball and place it on the greased baking sheet, about 2 inches apart.

• Press each cookie with the palm of your hand, or a fork, to flatten it out.

• Bake for 9 minutes or until the cookies are turning golden brown (it may be hard to tell with the dark molasses color of the cookies, and they do tend to burn easily. Try anywhere from 8-10 minutes depending on your oven).

• Eat hot right out of the oven for a super-chewy, warm, delicious cookie. Or, let it cool for a crispy outside and a chewy inside. YUMM.

Yields about 18 mini-cookies.