Category — Practicing Imperfection

One of the first things I learned in high school Spanish was the phrase “poco a poco se va lejos.”  It means, “little by little, one goes far.”

Over the last few days I’ve taken a lot of little steps.  I purchased a pack and a new sleeping bag.  I picked up a new pair of walking shoes – after 8 years – and even a pair of fast drying underwear.  Fancy.

Right now, I’m typing on a new netbook, one that I think will work wonderfully for keeping in touch and updating MidLeap as I travel around.

I don’t know that I’ve ever purchased so many new things in one weekend.  It makes me vaguely uneasy.  I think it’s because it reminds me of the consumerist life I used to live.  Still, I’ve purchased a handful of things that I will be depending on every day for the next while, and I know they’ll help me in my grand adventure.

The thing I had the hardest time purchasing was my plane ticket.  That’s taken a while.  I’ve put it off because I have a lot to do.  I’ve put it off to work in the yard.  I’ve put it off because I wanted to play RockBand.  Today, I stopped putting it off.  Once I clicked the “submit” button, I felt a great relief.  But in the days leading up to it, I had a hard time figuring out why I was delaying.

Today I realized that the plane ticket was the last thing keeping me from moving forward…well, the last thing, aside from me.

I have great ideas almost daily.  Inspiration is never far off for me.  It’s the follow-through I struggle with.  I’d love to be part of a think-tank, developing fantastic, cutting-edge ideas, or an inventor, creating new things – and handing them to a team for implementation.

My decision to change the direction of my life isn’t totally out-of-the-ordinary for me.  My follow-through is.  When I bought my plane ticket today, it was a breakthrough moment.  I literally felt the push-back as I moved from the world where I have held myself back, into the world where all there is is opportunity, and support and love.

I know that my friends and family have always supported me in whatever it is I’ve done.  For the first time, maybe, I feel like I’m supporting me, too.  Now it’s time to see just how far I can go.

Last week, I sold my house. Well, I signed the acceptance papers, so I count that as selling the house.

Don't we look happy together?

It might not seem like much, but it’s been a long, long journey. After living there for 5 years, I let the house sit empty for almost two years, unable to tear myself away from it. Unable to even rent it. Unable to move on with my life. It took a lot of time, an energy clearing, and a major life change to get to the point where I’m finally ready to hand the house to the next owner.

When I first moved out of the house, I had a really hard time. I cried every time I went back, which made it hard to pack up, clean it out, or do any kind of maintenance on the house. It took a toll on my finances. It took a toll on my relationship. My inability to move on has kept me in a holding pattern, circling my “successes” and pondering my “failures”.

You see, I bought the house right after law school. In fact, I made an offer, sight-unseen, while I was on vacation in Hawaii, one week after taking the bar exam. I lived there the entire time I practiced law – while I worked at the Court of Appeals, while I worked as a Hearings Officer, and when I opened my own practice – in my house. I lived there when I was a political organizer, doing the work I loved.

That house was a symbol of everything in my life I had decided to be. A symbol of the success I had worked hard for. It was part of my “five-year-plan” – the smart investment I’d decided on in my college financial planning course. And, that course was part of my business major, the marketable degree I’d decided to get.

Yay me! I planned my life out at age 20! What’s crazy is that I lived my life according to that plan for the next 12 years. Wow.

Even after I moved out, it took me a couple of years – the time the house was empty – to figure that out. It was a painful two years. Even once I saw the reason I was paralyzed, I wasn’t able to change it.

It’s amazing how effectively we can fool ourselves. A three-bedroom ranch in the suburbs filled with furniture and consumer debt. That was the pre-packaged experience I chose.

I realized something today when I was talking with my boss about my decision to pick up my life and go traveling. For quite some time, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want. I’ve made myself truly miserable searching for the life I want. What do I want to be? What do I want to do? How do I want to live? That’s a hell of an overwhelming series of questions. I’ve been searching for the entire life plan/path/experience that I want, instead of just doing what I want to do today, in this moment. I was so absorbed in the giant task of figuring out my life that I couldn’t see the little things that I wanted. For the first time in a very long time, I know what I want. I just want to go back to Italy. I know nothing after that. I have thoughts about what might happen. I have ideas about what I could do, but the only thing I know I want is to go back. Next to years of agonizing over what life I want to live, deciding to go back to Italy seems like one of the easiest things in the world.

Last week when I was at the house, I had a remarkable moment when I looked around and saw the house as someone else’s home. It’s a great house, and I loved my time in it – but it belongs to someone else now. It will always mean a great deal to me, but perhaps now I will think of it as less of a symbol of my “success” and more as one of my greatest teachers.

I just wish my teachers didn’t make me cry so much. It’s kind of how I imagine Catholic school.

I had an experience this week that really highlighted the importance of sharing with each other.

While at a friend’s birthday party, I was introduced to a woman who does energy work. “Kristin, this is so and so. She does energy work!”

I’m a recycling freak and a fan of sustainability, so I thought we were talking wind turbines. “Oh great! What kind of energy work do you do?”

She looked a little taken aback. It turns out she’s a spiratual healer. (Oh, THAT kind of energy work.) We had a lovely conversation about her practice in energetic healing and some changes in the field. I don’t know a lot about energy work, but I find it fascinating, and this woman was talking about it like it was any other industry, describing new R & D and the efficiencies yielded by new processes.

While we were talking, another woman came and sat on the chair that was about 6 inches from the stool I was perched on. I didn’t pay much attention, but when my conversation was over and I turned around, she was looking at me. We’d met earlier in the night, and she seemed cool so I just smiled.

“I tried to eavesdrop a couple of times, but, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what you guys were talking about. What does that woman do?”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure how to explain. It kind of depends on your background and my understanding.” She laughed. The other woman had told me about identifying her clients’ limiting beliefs and how she had moved from extracting the seed beliefs before transmuting them to directly “blasting” the beliefs in place. Evidently this is an improvement in the field of energy work.

I wasn’t sure that the woman I was now talking with had any idea of the answer she was about to hear – and I wasn’t sure how I wanted to answer.

“Well, I guess you’d say she’s a healer.” Now, I’ve had my fair share of exposure to energy work, and I believe in energetic healing. Still, I felt like I was telling someone else’s dirty secret. I kept looking back at the healer, trying to catch her eye to bring her into the conversation – to tell her own story.

“OH!” was the response I got as my new friend recoiled a little, eyes wide.

“Yeah” I said, feeling a little like I should defend the healer, “it’s pretty interesting stuff, but I don’t have enough knowledge to really explain.”

The woman laughed a little nervously again. “From the way she was talking, I thought she might help people with getting their passports. Sounded like she was talking about working through layers of bureaucracy.” It was true. We both laughed a little and then, I don’t really remember how, we started sharing our own experiences with things energetic in nature.

I’m in the process of selling my house, and, as the result of another random conversation with a friend, have recently contacted a woman who does energy clearings for homes. We talked a bit about that, the chakra clearing that I had done as well, and my upcoming travels.

She shared her experiences in the Peace Corps with the “bushman telegraph,” and indigenous people who, without use of any modern device, could sense when a family member would be arriving in the village.

We talked about the ability of the bushmen to “fly” over landscapes and project themselves into distant locations (and the US Government’s “remote sensing” program that taught the skill). We talked about our own experiences with flight dreams and how she wished she still had them.

As our conversation drew to a close, she expressed how interesting it is to know that there is so much more going on than what she can see, and I expressed how much I enjoy finding people who are willing to talk about their experiences. We so often stop ourselves for fear of sounding “woo-woo” or being marginalized because “you just don’t talk about those things.”

Before we said our goodbyes, she told me a story about a friend of hers who she described as “mind-expanding.”

“One day we were talking about these types of things, and she said that pepole don’t talk about all of the experiences that they have. I said ‘oh you mean like the green balls,’ and she said, ‘Yes! Exactly like the green balls.'” Green balls? I had no idea what this woman was talking about. She continued, “I remembered, as a child, having experiences where it looked like everything in the world was made of green balls. When I shared this with my friend, she told me that it’s a fairly common experience for people to have when they are beginning to meditate. I had no idea. I thought it was just me.”

Bingo. I thought it was just me. Now, I’ve never seen green balls, but I have had other interesting, puzzling experiences that I’ve hesitated to share. On the way home, I talked with another friend about the conversations I’d had at the party. Her response was, “Yeah, it’s like the woman in the kitchen. When I was growing up I didn’t like walking through the house at night, because I was sure there was always a woman in the kitchen.” Yup. When I was a kid, my sister and I didn’t like going into our super-nice, finished basement, because we were sure there was always someone down there.

Almost everyone I’ve ever talked with about these kinds of things has had a similar experience, whether it’s feeling a strange presence in their house when they were growing up, or flying to remote locations in their sleep. Most people, though, didn’t just volunteer the info unless it was around a campfire or at a sleepover as a “scary story.”

So, I’m going to start talking about it – about my experiences – because I really feel that, when we hide pieces of our human experience, even the pieces we don’t understand, we invalidate little parts of ourselves. We isolate and devalue. And I’m not so into that.

Portland is a giving city.

Many places have community gardens.  There are lots of cities where people put their old furniture and appliances on the curb with a “free” sign.   Portland, it seems, takes it a step further.

Like a lot of places, Portland is experiencing a renaissance of home vegetable gardens.

One of my co-workers brings in tomatoes from her garden, another brings in basil.  Another brings in squash and cucumbers from her family’s garden.  We share produce and recipes and the things that we make.  One of my co-workers even lives in a neighborhood where they share produce in a community overflow box.  Whatever overflow a family has from their garden, they put in the box, and other families trade for produce of their own.  Brilliant.

Just down the street from where I live, there’s a funky house that uses almost every square foot of its yard to grow food.  Sprinkled in the beds are children’s toys and ceramic figures.  In the strip of dirt between the sidewalk and the street sits a box labeled “FREE,” where the owners of the house place all manner of useful items.  Depending on the time of the year, the box holds shoes, gloves, blankets and coats.

It’s a little box of humanity, allowing those in need to help themselves, without having to knock on a stranger’s door and ask.

This week, when walking to dinner, I happened upon this.  If free is good, why not take it a step further and give someone their own door?

I mean really, why not?

I thought that my strangest day of work as a fundraiser would be last year when I was bit by Zeus, the parrot.  I may have been wrong.  That was the strangest day of last year’s event season.  This year’s strangest day of work was probably today when, dressed in spandex and a trash bag, I was stabbed repeatedly, in the neck, with a foam sword – by a grown man.

That was around the same time that a volunteer asked me if she needed a degree to apply for my job.

The funny thing is that, officially, you do need a degree to apply for my job.  I happen to have a law degree.  I think, however, I missed the day where they taught superhero attire, and how to get the shit beat out of you by a volunteer with a foam sword, while keeping a smile on your face.  That, it seems, isn’t something you can teach.

When I took this job, I wanted to learn how to fundraise.  I wanted to develop the skills that would allow me to make major gift asks, and the skills that would allow me to train others to raise money.  I wanted to conquer my paralyzing fear of cold calls.  I wanted to plan events.

Three years later, I’ve done all of those things.  I’ve gotten everything from the experience that I wanted when I started – and I picked up a little something else along the way.

Through the ups and downs, I’ve realized how useful a sense of humor and humility can be.

This isn’t just the case in strange, themed events.  It holds true with co-workers, when driving, while on the phone with telemarketers, on conference calls, in elevators, and pretty much anytime I have to interact with other people.

About the time I was getting to my knees for an adorable 5-year-old to beat me about the neck and head, my volunteer said “you have a Masters in Humility.”  I hope she was right.  If I take anything with me, I hope it is that.  I also hope that I never get bit by a parrot again – that really sucked.