The First Day of What I've Worked to Achieve

Transitions are difficult for me to demarcate.  I've been working on launching a second, or third, or fourth career, depending upon how you look at the journey that is my life,  in which  personal constraints are folded into the mix in a way that enhances my ability to succeed.  Success is defined in oh so many ways and I think that I probably define success in a most different fashion than most other folks in our culture. 

I'm at the point in my life toward which I have been aiming for a very long time.   I am not exactly sure when I became aware of this event horizon, but it is a point from which there is no backing away.  This is different from setting a goal.  This is a harvest of a lifetime of goals set up until this point.  Yes, I feel some pressure to make this work. I'm not scared of success or failure. I will succeed in one or more aspects of the life work on which I now will focus.

Okay, to the point:  I begin putting it all together tomorrow.  I'm in my home.  In my office.  Graphics, words, web, observation, research, analysis, information, data, trends, networking... the whole shebang treated like a real career, job, way of life.  It has been a long time coming.  Tomorrow is the first day since I have had my health back when I will be able to work in my home without interruption.  I began being able to breathe, sleep and heal after my nose surgery in June of last year.  This co-occurred with treatment for recently diagnosed diabetes; a sensible diet and a couple of pills a day.  I awoke one day in July and realized that I would soon be able to focus on my own work for extended periods of time.  I now had the energy to work more than a couple hours a day as well as the ability to focus for extended periods of time. 

So why am I only starting this new phase of my life now?  I have to give the same answer that so many women still do when asked why they have not pushed ahead in their career as far as they could have.  The answer is family.  My husband began a sabbatical in August during which time he would be home all day long when he was not on the and my daughter also moved back in with us in August for the last semester of her undergraduate college days, with her 110 lb. mastiff, and shared a car with me.  Also my s-daughter, her hubby, and the twins visited during the holidays and for the graduation extravaganza. 

Do I really need to say I got none of my own work done this past autumn? But now the situation has changed.

My liminal stage is ending and I am fully entering a stage of life in which women have acquired some wisdom, a set of skills unique unto her, and the influence to change many aspects of the world she knows.  I'm excited.  I'm ready. 

• I am home.      Check.
• Hubby is teaching and researching again at the university.       Check.
• Daughter has moved out of state.      Check.
• My car is shared with no one.     Check.
• No puppies or kittens in house, only lazy old dogs and cats.      Check
• Ideas aplenty.      Check.
• Groundwork laid for most projects.     Check. 
• Good attitude and good health.       Check. 

Looks like all systems are go.   

So the time I have been waiting for is upon me and I am seizing it.  Tomorrow I will walk into my office and begin working full-time on my stuff as a business / a career / my life's work.  I believe most projects will succeed.  Some will make money.  A few may change the world.

I am a happy woman entering one of the best time of my life.  Send me best wishes as I embark upon this segment of my path with renewed determination, concentration, and a fierce love of and belief in the freedom of information and the need for women to reclaim their role as leaders of communities and the amalgamation of communities we know as civilization. 

I am thankful, grateful to have reached this point in life.  Namaste. 

A Full Range of Emotions

I started this blog when my Zilla was living in the same city as me, but in her own place while going to college.  Most parents experience the empty nest in some form by having a child move out of their home.  Not all experience the empty nest of a child moving far away.  I still feel that this is a good and natural process that comes about with successful parenting.  But when a grown child is thousands of miles away, the emotions are more complex. 

Yes, I'm still happy to have the constant parenting behind me as it allows me to work on my stuff without interruption more often.  But the distance is more than the ideal distance.  I have to admit that I teared up a few times along the way on the road trip to help her move to Minneapolis.  I teared up as we were pulling away from our home here.  Leaving her on the steps of her new home as I drove away found me sobbing a bit.  Visiting my parent's graves also found me crying as I thought of how they never got to see her as an adult and how proud they would have been had they known her.  Driving back into Tucson alone really triggered a sad, lonely feeling in me. 

Because my husband was on a business trip when I returned home, my house seemed very empty. 

I do not feel empty.  If I didn't have a full life I would not be experiencing this range of emotions. I'm happy to be young enough to be able to launch projects and feel that I'm entering a new phase of my life that is full of promise. There is time for my husband and I to get to know each other again and have our schedules accommodate only our needs.  I also now have my office space and a guest room.  While I miss my daughter and wish she didn't live quite so far away, there are many positives aspects of this new phase too. 

So to answer a question that I have sort of framed here, I can be done nesting, but I will always be a parent and my parenting now happens to include being a role model for letting go and for how to accept transitions in life.  There are stages to being done nesting.  I didn't really know that until going through the experience myself. 

Relative-ity, Friends, and Beyond

There is a book that I recommend to almost everyone with whom I enter into a discussion about books.  It is The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson.  An alternate history that looks at what  what the world might be like if Europe had succumbed completely to The Plague rather than recuperating from it.  It also looks at souls traveling together through time and space, through multiple incarnations.  I recommended it to a friend on this trip I just finished.  
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Sometimes I wonder about the people, the spirits, we meet and and connect with throughout our lifetimes.  What random tumble of the dice allows us to be born into the families into which we are born?  After living with a hard core "this reality is all there is" type scientist for decades, I am somewhat reticent to publicly discuss spirituality as it always seems to venture into what I call woo-woo.  I thought about this a lot during my recent road trip. 

What makes us instantly connect with one person and let scores of others pass through our lives with little note?  How do we explain not seeing someone for years and years and then sitting down to talk with that person and realizing hours have passed in conversation and it is as though the years of separation have not happened?  I do not know.  I am far less of a skeptic than my husband, but I feel extremely comfortable with the peace I have with knowing there is so much more yet not having the need to limit myself to a particular set of beliefs.  Beliefs from around the world intrigue me. I think that is why this speculative fiction novel by Robinson so appeals to me.  His research is impeccable.  He conveys times and places and in this case peoples as though he has lived them.  These times, places and peoples have never existed.  He relates his connection to essences of human experience and human cultures in ways that could have happened. 

Years ago when I first read this book, I felt that the portrayal of the persistence of human spirits as well as the evocation of coherent cultures made the book one of the best speculative fiction novels I had ever read.  Sometimes writers capture archetypes.  This is what Robinson did. 

All cultures seem to have some concept of a spiritual dimension.  Sometimes members of cultures believe there are souls, for others there is a life energy to which we return, even in the scientific belief set nothing is ever created or destroyed, only transformed.  

All of this somehow combines into my occasional glimpse of the essence of my personal theology that is fueled by connections to people, gut feelings, and the occasional experiences that have no good explanation. 

Do our energies continue beyond this life?  Do they recur together?  Don't know.  I don't know that I will ever know, but sometimes I like to believe that they do.  It is great to have a literary work I can share that conveys a belief that I cannot even describe for myself.  It is doubly wonderful to share it with people who I feel as though I have a much deeper or longer life experience than our actual time together would seem to explain. 

Solo Road Tripping

Road trips have always seemed like they should be relaxed meanderings over highways and byways.  For me they never seem to turn out that way though.  I have a place to get to and while I might be able to have a bit of wiggle room in the dates and the stops along way to and from the main stopover of the trip.

Before I left in an old Toyota 4-Runner loaded down with some furniture, some art, clothing, bedding and kitchenware to help my daughter start her new life with her honey, Tree Boy, I had opportunity to have lunch with a blogger who really knows how to travel.  Becky blogs at Kinexxions, a genealogical blog that focuses on the area and families from my old "neck of the woods."  I do love genealogy, local history, stories of community, and someone who can string words together in an entertaining way.  I stumbled across Becky's blog quite a while back and return to it because she is a darn fine writer from whom I can learn a thing or three!  It turns out I was the first of her readers with whom she had ever met.  I can't imagine that she hasn't met others as she is such an enchanting teller of stories of people, places, and procedures. 

She has been traveling and living out of her mobile blogging studio for quite a while now, her comfortably equipped van. That is so inspiring!  I met an actual woman who travels by herself, going places and doing research, taking photographs, and sharing the info unearthed along the way in her blog.  Of course as an anthropologist I have known  many women researchers and scientists who obviously travel, but to find a woman who lived the normal sedentary life, except for that stint in the military during the 1960s and 1970s, and only allowed her happy feet to dance across the country after retirement.  Hers is a generous practice, and an inspiring one.  Women who have a nomadic streak are not all that rare.  Women who act on the urge are however a bit harder to find.  She planned, met with a financial advisor, sticks to her budget, has a very well organized van, goals for her research, and does the research she is obviously meant to do. 

Becky was going through Tucson and we had arranged to meet.  I'm so glad it worked out.  We met at the patio section of The Cup Cafe of The Hotel Congress for Tortilla Soup and conversation.  Turns out we are shirt-tail relations! Hans Jakob Brubaker III who lived in the late 18th and early 19th Century was our last common ancestor from what we can tell.  The link was found through the South Whitley Brubakers.  We chatted about Whitley and Kosciusko Counties in Indiana, the place from which we both hail.  Becky is not a gregarious person, does not like driving in big cities, and met up with me with a bit of skepticism.  It was a bit out of character for me to just say, "Can we meet?" to someone I don't know, but I so am glad I did.  It really helped me frame the trip of the last two weeks and plot about how I might be able to do a trip much more like one Becky might do the next time I head out on the road.

It's All Relative - A Whirlwind Trip Through The Midwest

Just arrived home last evening, so perhaps it is an odd time to start a month of blogging about travel, but that is what I am doing.  I have a buzillion blog posts started, notes on things that need something written down about them, and well over a dozen voice notes of various lengths on my phone - that are  travel and driving observations.  I did not always have time on the road to put together a coherent post.  And sometimes I was too tired at the end of the day to put a coherent sentence together.

This month the writing theme over at BlogHer's Nablopomo is "Relative" so I added myself and this blog as a Travel Blog.  Traveling through time and space has always been my thing.  I wonder if my rather wry sense of humor comes through?  Oh well.

Anyway... relative is a good topic for me for this month as this whirlwind tour through the Midwestern U.S. that took about 2 weeks was a relative experience in oh so many ways.  The baseline reason for the trip was moving my daughter to Minneapolis.  She is most certainly a relative.  Family is a relative term.  I visited a few friends with whom I feel a bond that is just as close as family and closer, for me, than with many family members. I visited my brothers.  They are most certainly my relatives.  And all the experiences of the last weeks have shown me once again that most certainly everything is relative.

It is going to be an interesting month for me to see how I make sense of all the things I thought and did while making my way from Tucson, AZ to Minneapolis, MN, and back to Tucson with a quick loop through Chicago and Northern and Eastern Indiana.  That is the backdrop for this month's posts.

I hope you can join me this month as I document what was for me a very significant trip.