Sometimes Life has to be a Beach

Let me begin by saying, many posts here notwithstanding, The Bug and I are NOT beach bunnies! In the days of my youth, I loved being in the water, but even then I preferred the pool to the ocean or lake. Nice and routine and sanitary, comparatively...and no snakes or sharks or jellyfish! I enjoyed soaking in the tub and lounging in the pool on our cruise, and I did like our all-too brief dip in the Caribbean, but yeah, we don't come to the beach for "the beach" so to speak. But we do love finding a beach our speed and renting a room with a view from which to sit and watch the action. We usually try to hit the beach in May, when it is a bit cooler and less hectic, but this year life events (not bad ones) led us to change our reservations to this week, which means we are at the beach in Delaware with tons of newly minted high school graduates, lol! Shenanigans abundant, I am sure. But it also means we can be relatively invisible, and that suits us just fine. We're here for the salt air and the wildlife, and as was the case last time we stayed in this particular hotel (two years ago) both come to us in abundance! Ahhh...that is the sound of the stress and strain and grief slipping away.

Okay, so here are some people.

 And the evening

 And the morning

 Were the first day

 Barn Swallows everywhere!

 And Ospreys!

Catch of the day...shot from our balcony. We love this place!

 Laughing gulls

And Grackles, of course

And this young male, a Northern Bob-White!

And there, just offshore, dolphins! Sigh...I was losing the light by the time they showed. Dewey Beach...one of our happy places! Tomorrow we'll drive around a bit, visit some nature preserves, and get in some hiking, but for now we are enjoying every bit of the several dimes we spent for this room.

Our first peonies!

Last year I set out some peonies along our short sidewalk. I had hesitated because we rent this place, but we seemed in a sedentary pattern and I thought why not. We thought it was a waste of money, because they looked terrible by late summer and then just died away. I had forgotten the wonderful plants of my childhood and how they go dormant and then "spring" back to life! Funny, really. Anyway, she requested pink, and I, as always, aim to please:

In this area, they typically reach peak around Memorial Day, and there are many of them planted in local cemeteries. A fitting tribute to the honored dead: life, and the struggle to be a more free and equal people, goes on. In remembrance of so many kinsmen and friends...

Climbing Mount Pergatory

Graduation has come and gone, final grades are in, and I am embarking on my first true summer off in...forever, it seems. No classes to teach, no workshops to lead, no papers or lectures to present, we're not moving, and I don't have to learn to read German in 10 weeks! Also, no research grant requiring me to travel and then present my findings, etc., etc., etc. And so I have some time to work on me before I have to turn my attention toward the Fall teaching load, and I must say, I am a bit of a mess. I have been through phases in recent years of trying to identify and address issues, past and present, to, as it were, identify my demons and try to confront them. I must honestly report that, so far, the demons have kicked my ass!

 But then this week a long-time friend who, like me, is an INFP, raised a question, and the locks and chains  that have bound me to that way of thinking began to fall away. What if I told you, to paraphrase her, that your "inner demons" are not demons at all, not something to be fought and quashed, or to be defeated by and consumed, but rather more like children, begging to be understood and nurtured? What if the real demon is conformist thinking and the external pressures we feel to be the person, at least in appearance, "they" expect or demand? Reject that way of thinking! Accept who you are. That was the clarion call that made me stop in my tracks. In other words, as a wise young woman once said to her kid sister, "You be you, boo!" Or in the words of the Bard, "To thine own self be true." Words to live by, I say!

 As a society, there is no doubt that we have failed to understand this, and we need to stop failing! We need to stop hammering each other and ourselves into identities that are more shaped to be comfortable to others than to be the right fit for the one being hammered! I, for one, have suffered way too much along this line in the course of my life: the misunderstood, misfit child; not the little girl Daddy wanted, obviously, as I do identify as heterosexual male, but neither was I the mirror of my tough as nails father when he was a boy. The child with the high IQ in a culture that did not value intellectualism, the "hefty" lad who was slow and clumsy, the user of "big words" and the creative kid who often failed to do what was assigned because he was having too much fun in his imagination to be bothered with the mundane, that was me. As longtime readers here know, the result was years of bullying, culminating in the unimaginable final assault on my innocence in the year from hell that was 1975.

 What I haven't spoken as much about is the dark decade that followed, the nature and self-destructiveness of my lifestyle during much of that time. I finally broke out of that pattern of self-loathing and, indeed, de facto self-abuse, but the breakout sent me into the Pit of Despair. Happily, I was surrounded by a loving community, one of whom was to become my soulmate, and so in 1988 I began the long climb out of the pit and up Mount Purgatory. In the process, I completed my Master of Divinity degree, pivoted, after a year of intense soul-searching, to teaching as my vocation, earned NC certification, then immediately went on to earn a Master's degree in American history, and then admission to a Ph.D. program, where I thrived for the first couple of years.

 And then I fell into the Pit again, as events triggered all the demanding memories, some of which I had buried so deep as to be all but forgotten. Now I relived them in full color surround sound, because my brain is, well, special. So back on the meds I went, back to channeling the negative into positive. I took up painting when I couldn't write, not continually but as a way to express myself in a positive, pretty way. I painted landscapes, tobacco barns, dogs, horses, tractors, and then sand dunes, gulls, a lighthouse. These were things that made me smile, and they made my wife smile. And we wrote poetry again! And I finally finished that dissertation, and I got a full-time job in academia, and she advanced to a very comfortable position in her company. Life was okay, even as we faced the unthinkable with death of loved ones...life was okay.

But the realities of my new job, the challenges of working in such a financially troubled school, the coming and going of good friends, and the ever-present cost of loving each subsequent class of students, then having to let them go, began to take their toll. I drifted back into bad habits, even as I continued to be successful. I landed a book contract; I published a book chapter in an edited collection, and I wrote an award-winning article over the next few years. I won awards for best faculty and best club advisor, I earned tenure. And then the playhouse fell apart. I lost my book contract, as I had failed over and over again to meet deadlines. And the faculty finally received the news we had feared for awhile: we were bankrupt. My fifth year at this job was the year a part of me stopped caring. All the wind left my sails and I drifted badly toward the Pit. When another institution purchased us the next Spring, many thought it was our salvation, but it hasn't played that way. The uncertainty and angst is still there, along with the institutional dysfunction.

With aging families and seemingly a never-ending parade of deaths and funerals, life for us has been challenging. And with the new reality of my employment (at will status now, no tenure), where it seems like surface appearance takes precedence over depth of experience, and where we literally are in too precarious a position to give some students the grades they earned (the unspoken edict cloaked in the language of "retention"), it became too easy to let things go, to fake my way through teaching...and life. After all, any semester now they could (possibly will) calculate that they no longer need a full-time history professor, and that will be that. So I started to steal happiness, because I no longer felt happy, and when I couldn't steal it, I could drown out the pain. And so I got stuck in a deep, deep rut...not the Pit, at least not yet, but a helluva rut. We stole more than a bit of happiness on our wonderful 25th anniversary cruise, but by the time it was over, I was falling apart.

At some point this semester, with the grief accompanying the deaths of my Aunt Helen and Uncle Barry, word came to me concerning the personal struggles, based on a traumatic experience, of a student in one of my classes. I sought help from trusted colleagues in dealing with that revelation, including the anger I felt toward administrators for their inaction, and the anger I felt toward other students who were shaming and taunting the victim, or shunning her. I learned more stories...this was an institutional problem, and a dear one whom I know well and adore had suffered similar humiliation, shaming, victim-blaming, shunning, and even threats, when she had reported professional misconduct that needed reporting and investigating. The dam broke, and I cried me a river, let me tell you, projecting on those two young people all the feelings I had buried. I didn't just identify with them, I felt it all...everything I had "manned up" and swallowed, rather than face the shunning when, at age 16, I had been the victim.

I knew then that I had to act to take care of myself...I was in the Pit and it was worse than ever. It was swim or drown time. I chose to swim. I've been on maintenance meds for a long time, but I knew they were not nearly enough to cope with all this. So I acted on my instinct and long-time study of depression, and my doc backed me up, and the new regimen is helping. The river of tears has dried up, but the damage in the flood zone was formidable. I will be repairing bridges for awhile, but Spring has come, and with it promise of renewal.

The point is that I find myself once again wrestling with the great inner questions of who I am and how I can nurture and understand those inner voices that have become so demanding and petulant in recent years. There is the dead poet Lemuel Crouse, but who is he, really, and is "he" really a "he"? There is a strong feminine voice in some of Lemuel's work...I wish to explore this, as any artist should. And then there is the painter who for the last seven years has not dabbed oil to canvas. And there is the historian with a book people want that he can't seem to complete. And there's the guy with the ponytail and earring. What's that about? Is there a (modest, not really visible under most circumstances) tattoo in his future? And then there is the beloved teacher who can be so much better than he has been these past few years, despite the surface accolades.

It is an interesting time in my life. Most of the people who expected conformity from me are gone, so it is a bit easier for me to be myself, to find the masculine and feminine voices within, to let the introverted feeler feel, but to call on my shadow self, the entity I like to think of as an ISTJ female (perhaps naively believing that, somewhere in there, is a J, lol), to give structure and order to a professional life that has become far too chaotic. Mostly, one grows weary of always feeling as if happiness is something to be stolen, not lived. I intend to live! I will challenge people's comfort zones. I always have, but I will have better filters and, yes, a return to common sense and health. Wish me well! You know where to find me...

Elemental revisited

As I once again find myself in a time of emotional transition and soul-searching, I return to this outpouring of who I am. I was still in mourning for my mother when I wrote these. Death once again stalks our families. We've buried two of Mom's siblings since returning from our anniversary cruise. And I am face to face yet again with my old demons as my chronic depression has erupted into acute despair. Alack...the road goes ever on and on. And yet I walk it with my steadfast poet Lemuel Crouse. Who knows what next will erupt from my mind? I am curious to see for myself. In the meantime, my Elemental collection:

Child of Earth

From rock-ribbed, misty meadows

Where horned sheep safely grazed

While myriad solitary shepherd boys

Gazed heavenward and dreamt

Of a mythic distant land where each

Might claim a bit of his own ground

And work it by his leave, unfettered,

My forebears sallied forth in strength.

Not to Plymouth Rock or to Virginia,

But to Penn's luscious woodlands

And acres of soil so dark and fertile

One might well try to cook and eat it

Rather than bother planting crops.

Indeed, traditional grains thrived there,

But so, too, did old prejudices, pressures
And new, unsettling competitive stresses.

So my people took the Great Wagon Road

Up the storied Shenandoah Valley, onward

Through lofty gaps and carved gorges,

Turning down at length toward the knob

That still marks the way into Carolina,

And southwest to an open, rolling land

Described to them by other Deutsch men
Who had ventured to the Catawba River.

Along the South Fork, they farmed, milled,
Raised corn, fodder, hogs, sheep, cows,

Laying hens, turkeys, and draft horses, all

Tended by Lutheran sons and daughters.

Some took to working the supple clay,

Turning and burning mugs, jugs, crocks,

Thriving in the new world they made;

Few chose to roam further westward.

Yes, am I a child of the Piedmont,

With its clod-strewn plowed fields,

Lush pastures and cattle grazing

Their way through slow, lazy days

Of hazy, stifling humidity and flies.

My blood is the color of its clay,

My heart kneaded and shaped

And fired in a groundhog kiln.

But my soul longs for mountains,

For ancient, resting Grandfather

And Black Mitchell, the backbone;

For cloud-shrouded Clingman's Dome

And Mount Le Conte draped in snow;

For mighty Pisgah and blue ridges,

And our beloved Craggy Pinnacle,

Dressed in Catawba Rhododendron.

There I am at peace, high above

The crucible in which I must live,

Giving myself away, word by word,

Ever pining for Appalachian solace.

Child of Winds

In my age of innocence, I freely embraced

The trades, riding a soft, sweet westerly.

Lovingly caressed at first by my friend,

Pulled in by the promise of exotic shores,
Naive in the ways of winds and tide,
I was swept along, unaware of danger
Building behind me, swelling water spout,
I was unprepared when it went cyclonic.

Laid waste, I swallowing bitter dregs.

My bloodshot, tear-stained eyes left me

Blinded; that twister was but an outlier

Of a raging, pounding apocalyptic storm.

The fearsome wall hit me, shoveling all

Before it, plowing furrows across

The fragile farmland of my young heart,

Ripping holes in my woven cotton soul.

I saw the decimation, seeming random,

Slaughter of ships great and humble,

Shattered, hardwoods splintered,

Pine laid low, so many matchsticks

Scattered about in the tempest's fury.

I was carried up, up, and out, anon:

Spewed forth and falling, screaming,

Thinking wind itself to be my enemy.

I dared not dream as I plummeted

That I might survive, live to sail

Again, though not so carefree,

But here I am at the windlass...

My heart flies high on the foremast,

Double-sheet bend secure, exposed,

Slapped by every passing fancy,

Be it breeze, gust, gale, or typhoon.

Still, the knot holds, and I endure,

My colors showing honest agony,

Even as they are whipped to and fro,

Child no more, I fetch yonder horizon.

Child of Fire

Wrought as winter's bright embers

Still glowed warm in the fireplace,

Refined in a hot red-clay forge,

Hammered flat on the harsh anvil

That defined my teenage years

And tempered quick by tragedy,

I became hard, cold, with an edge,

But I still know what it is to burn.

I am known to boil over, bubbling

Like so much gurgling pastel mud

In perking Yellowstone paint pots.

I have shot steam-spray rockets

Skyward, a brash young geyser,

With irregular, happy abandon.

A simmering, stewing sot, I am,
Quick to erupt, absolutely deadly.

I have spat napalm, shat fire alive,

Pissed blazing kerosene streams
Upward in raging incendiary arcs

Onto unsuspecting heaps of tinder,

And I have felt scalding salt-tears

Scorch my sooty, puffy cheeks

As I wept over beloved bridges

I had wantonly sacked and ashed.

 I can be an inferno incarnate,

With tin dipper melting in hand,
Trying and failing ever to fetch

Just one healing, quenching sip

From the waiting, loving pool

Which longs to come to my aid
As my soul pops and crackles:

Son of flames, I am consumed.

Child of Waters

What magnetic moonlit tidal tug

Is it that pulls me off beam,

Sends me downstream, reeling,

Ever descending, rushing through

Rock-strewn, sand-barred creeks

Into gushing, swelling rivers...

Floating, fallen-timber rudderless,

Swept headlong to deeper waters?

Perhaps an accident of birth--

My winter-born sister Alaska

Speaks of liquid crystal, flowing:

Iron-brittle, creeping glaciers,

Gold-flecked beds, melt-floods,

Plowing, charging, galloping...

Fulminant meeting engagements

In resilient sounds and shallow seas.

Summer-born Hawaii whispers

Of fearsome typhoon and tidal wave,

Lead-white snow-capped peaks

And rain-drenched emerald slopes,

Vertigo-high waterfalls plunging,

Teeming pools and rivulets receiving...

Volcanoes and black sand beaches

Stranded by Everest-deep ocean.

I, too, am marked by waters,

Born a Scorpio, for good and ill,

Familiar with glittering frosty mornings,

Drifting snow, cumulonimbus towers,

Ear-splitting, rain-gorged supercells...

I have seen swirling, green-sky terror

And sat insomniac through hurricanes,

Two dark, one white, and grinned.

I am drawn, polarized, once again

To deep water, to saline amniotic fluid

From whence I came, a storm unnamed,

Tropical depression, seeking healing balm,

Calming, renewal of my formidable core

Until my own lion's roar again resounds,

Drowning out the screaming, searing,

Sticky cacophony that hounds me.

Feeling Sheepish

Sheep are very social creatures by nature, but also easily frightened. I can relate. 

There are times when social media creates more social anxiety for me than socialization, when I second-guess everything I type or post, when I want to, and do, scream "Here I am! Love me!" but fear my screams, and my neediness, simply push friends away. 

Yes, I am the most intense person you've never met, lol. Except it isn't funny when it hurts, when I dive in head-first, mouth open, and try to swallow up enough of others to fill the empty cup of my soul. 

My cup has a hole in it, this I acknowledged decades ago. I thought at one time that it was fairly well patched. Alack...recent years have proven otherwise. I've gone through some friends in those years, where one or the other of us simply torched the bridge between us for our own reasons. It is a very empty feeling when that happens. And we have suffered grief and loss, colleagues terminated in down-sizing and restructuring, friends and relatives getting sick, dying, and physical distance, not to mention significant disagreements over politics, religion, etc., pushing us further away from others than we would like. 

The result is that I am at the end of my rope these days, nowhere near the teacher I can be, struggling day to day just to show up. I cope with my physical and mental pain in less than healthy ways, to say the least. 

I know the path I need to walk, but the ability to walk it has eluded me for some time now. 

In recent weeks, however, I have reached out to friends...people I have known for some time...and opened up. This is hard work! It leaves me feeling a lot like a lobster without its shell...or sometimes a lobster about to be dropped into a boiling pot! It is not an easy place to be, but it is a step forward on a path I must take. 

I cannot be driven down this path, for, in the final analsys, I am more stubborn Great Pyr than sheep, but patient caring, yes, that can persuade me to move forward. 

My wife has been SO patient! I know her anxiety has been through the roof for several years on my behalf. We have fun, still, and we enjoy each other, but seeing me wallow so much, drink too much, fail to meet my own expectations and deadlines over and over and over again...this is not easy. 

But move forward I must, along a path not just of survival but healing, growing, and being the best social animal I can be while taking care of my battered heart.

Photographs from our recent emergency trip to NC, Lincoln and Catawba Couty.