Broken Things

I've been thinking a lot lately about the necessity of broken things.

It takes just one shift in tectonic plates to shatter our perceptions of safety. To send us scrambling to the phones to see if loved ones are ok in Japan. To fill every classroom, every office with the small talk of those who are caught in that tangle of helplessness called distance: "Did you hear about the nuclear radiation? Did you see the pictures? They're saying the country moved a few inches. They're saying the death toll is climbing." *Shake of the head* "but what do you do?"

I've been spending a lot of time wondering how my country would prepare for massive disasters. Whether or not our nuclear power plants are half as secure as Japan's. If there's enough food to go around. My Sunday School class reminded us all of the importance of food storage, 72 hour kits, and having a plan. I close my eyes at night and listen to the trains speed past my window and wonder, what if, instead of steel barreling past that pane, it was a wall of water. Or wind. Or fire. Or men. Wars. Tragedies. I feel overwhelmingly sheltered in this safe town in Idaho, and yet it seems that these disasters and genocides are only increasing in number the older I get. Egypt. Libya. North Korea. Maybe it's not that they're increasing, maybe it's just that I'm paying more attention. (Not to mention the technology that increasingly brings the world in to us; who would have thought five years ago that news stations would be using Twitter, Google and Facebook?)

Distantly, I know that this is important. It's important to be reminded how fragile our society is, how infinitely tiny one person is. It forces us to prioritize, to plan, to find faith again. In this sense, broken things are important.

In my poetry class we are reading a collection of poems by Jana Harris about women on the plains in Washington in the 1800s, some from pioneers, some from orphans, some from Native Americans. In nearly every poem I find something breaking. Children die of fevers, livestock freeze to death, Indians raid, lawlessness prevails. But from each breaking comes a healing and strengthening that my 21st century mind cannot comprehend. A woman getting her teeth pulled without anesthetic calmly looks out the window and counts her blessings over the year--the children who are still alive, the swans who sometimes come to visit. The girl who loses her mother in an avalanche grows to adulthood in a matter of hours, taking her responsibilities as head of the home. The woman who survives a bitter winter works tirelessly, half-crippled with fever, and keeps her family and cattle together enough to thrive decades later.

These women had their lives broken a thousand ways, yet found a way.

In my church there is the concept of developing a broken heart. I don't think I fully understood the significance of these words until this week, when my own was finally rent apart. To have a broken heart means to be humble enough to take all the parts of yourself, good bad and ugly, and give them to God. Not to say that you're beyond repair, or above it. But simply to know that you need it.

I think I have the tendency to act broken. I place one toe in the wrong direction, wait for lightning to strike, and when it doesn't I put another, and a foot, and a leg, until I'm sprinting the opposite way I want to be going. And by the time I stop to catch my breath, looking behind me to where I began, it seems too far to backtrack. So I just stand still and wait. For what I don't know. I'm tired of being that person.

Just once I want to be like the women I'm reading about. Like the tens of thousands in Japan who are somehow getting by and finding strength. I'm allowing my heart to break at last, and pray it doesn't heal crooked this time.

*picture from Google*

Snow Kisses

Poetry draft for my journal--the assignment was to take something cliche and abstract, like heartbreak or regret or dreams, and create a concrete scene. This one was inspired by the winter storm we had today:

Smudging through
gray and white,
tracks of muddy gold
in a March flurry. I
glaze through slushy sidewalks
feeling heavy in
big chocolate boots.

Eyes find the
treetops;
gray green reflecting
silver blue,
reminding me of your
oceanic gaze
which never fails to
melt my world.

A single snowflake
ice crystal tender
rides the wind
right
down
my sweater,
committing suicide
on my collar bone;
burst of
frigid bliss.

Shivering,
I think of
this selfless kiss,
cold where you are warm.
Brief and unexpected
where yours are rare,
absent,
mechanical.

When I think
of all the ways you
hold back
push away
build walls
flare with
sudden temper
sizzle...

I think I prefer
the frozen
kiss,
selflessly unassuming,
to
your

empty

one.

*picture from me*

The Guilty One

I am a very guilt driven person. I'll be the first to admit it. I'm a sucker for the guys who stand outside Walmart with cardboard signs saying "God Bless." (I cried when Ted Williams, the man with the "Golden Voice," was plucked from poverty and given a home and a several thousand dollar contract to Mac and Cheese, even though he used that money to promptly turn to alcohol again.)

I apologize when I cut someone off on the freeway, even as they flip me off. I had to quit my volunteer job at the pound in Jr. High because I learned they euthenized all the animals that didn't get adopted, and looking into those sad brown eyes every Saturday pleading for me to take this or that furball home was simply too much. When my family traveled to Peru in tenth grade I witnessed true poverty for the first time, and upon our return to the States, I hated myself for having "luxuries" like clean underwear and two-ply paper in the bathroom.

So what does a person like me--who beat herself up for a month because she forgot to donate blood last fall and the Red Cross won't stop sending those "we NEED you" e-mails--DO when an actual damning event occurs, and offense is taken, and consequences are severe? Like say, being involved in an awful affair. Or single-handedly altering three different lives in a negative way.

When something like this happens, my guilty alter-ego, "Victim Girl," steps in. She shoulders all responsibility, attaches all blame and discouragement and hopelessness with steel velcro to her person, and marches herself and me straight to an abyss.

She's not fun company, by any means. And she always seems to make an appearance when I am at my highest peak. For example, right after finishing the best ice cream of my life. Or after an evening out with friends. Or when an entire week goes by where nothing fell apart and I'm just beginning to believe in myself again.

SMASH. SHATTER. KAPOW.

Everything's blown to hell.

It's like this at the beginning of every new semester. I measure up my new classes and look at the workload, and just barely finish convincing myself that it's doable when She appears. At first it's just a virtual tap on the shoulder. Hey there friend, I don't want to startle you but, um, you're going to fail miserably. Then the tap gets stronger. Soon it's a choke hold. GIVE UP. LAY DOWN. EIGHTY SIX IT.

Sorry Alter Ego, but I'm not buying it this time. I know that I can pass these classes. I know that I can continue to change myself and be happier, be selfless, and make peace with the past. I'm ready to let go of some of that weight. I'm ready to let go of YOU.

In A Beautiful Mind, Russel Crowe plays a Professor plagued by schizophrenia. His own personal demons take the form of his best friend, an imaginary jokester; a FBI agent, his imaginary antagonist; and a little girl, his imagined innocent return to childhood. Throughout the movie you come to love, or at least trust, these characters undisputed existence, and you are almost thrown out of your seat when you learn that they aren't real. Fake. Phantoms. When the Professor, Nash, finally recognizes the hallucinations for himself, he struggles to turn his back on them, taking years and years of practice until finally he can ignore his best friend, his enemy, and the little girl who stretches her arms up to him for comfort. It's a bitter sweet victory for him, and in my mind, a similar situation for depression.

My personal demon is not physically manifest, and there is no real person whispering real doubts into my ear. But the crushing weight of guilt IS real, and it's something that, like Nash, I hope I can learn to live with. My favorite scene in the movie is at the end, when Nash gives an acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. In the audience he sees his wife, his kids, his friends and colleagues. And, of course, the three hallucinations. He meets their gaze, falters in his speech for a moment, then turns away. He recognizes them as an equal. Something he can choose to pay attention to, but won't.

Today I recognize my elephantine guilt, rooted both in truth and lies, as an equal. I know my past is not spotless. I know I still need to make my peace with a lot of it. I can choose to constantly give my life to this grief, but I won't. I can choose to be constantly self-absorbed in a pity party, but then I will have nothing left over to give to those around me. Those who still stand by me.

I owe it to them, and I owe it to myself, to stand tall. To give myself just enough credit so that I can give OF myself, again and again and again.

Winter's Showers Someday Bring Flowers: Being a Late Bloomer

"You're HOW old and you don't even have a car yet??" My five year old cousin's eyes were full of sympathy and horror at what he perceived as a major tragedy in my life, reminiscent of little Rusty Duritz when he wails to his grown-up self Bruce Willis in The Kid: "You don't have an airplane, you don't have a girlfriend, you don't have a DOG?! I grow up to be a loser." I tried to explain that sometimes grown-ups have to trade in what they want for what they need, like paying for school tuition instead of a set of wheels, but I don't think I got through to him.

Yes, I'm twenty years old, and no, I don't have a car. But honestly I don't mind hoofing it around Caldwell, especially in the fall and spring when the entire city feels like it's own kind of Eden, and it takes the train whistle blowing or a radio blaring rap to bring me back to the sidewalk in front of me and remember it's built with human hands. Under the perfume of maple leaves and lilacs lurks cement and tar, car exhaust and ash.

On one of my recent walks I was passing a semi-circle of rose bushes by the campus activities center when I saw something that gave me pause. Two of the bushes were still growing, despite the frost and chill of the past several days. Late bloomers. These blossoms, bright and pink against the white of the snow had laid dormant throughout the summer and autumn waiting for their moment to burst through the bark and shine. The fact that they were the last to appear made me wonder if they were the strongest or the most long-suffering, having picked the cruelest period in nature's cycle to make their debut.

I think all of us know real life late bloomers. Friends or family that were dorky in grade school and grew to class president, or struggled with sports before blossoming in art and music. As I kid I had the works of geekhood: head-gear, glasses, a perm gone wrong, and braces within a few short years of each other. When I got to high school I was blessed with friends who accepted me exactly as I was, and I never really felt out of place until after graduation. When The Unknown loomed. Now a Sophomore in college I've found a few niches: jazz band, choir, food bank, journalism. And in some ways I've began to peek out of the branches and look at all the flowers around me, full grown and confident in who they are. But I haven't bloomed. Not yet.

I survived the summer. I survived the frost. I survived the scavengers of doubt that creep up and whisper "give up...it's not worth it." And now the sky has opened up and the flurries are raining down (forgive the corny metaphor) and I've started to wonder if I'm going to bloom at all, or just keep waiting for my moment forever. School is majorly stressing me out, not just because I am racing to catch up before finals, but because increasingly I get the feeling that I'm running and running and not gaining any ground. Every last drop of confidence I pocketed away over the years found a way to slip out, like pennies falling through the tear in a pair of jeans. I can look back and see them, see the moments when I felt secure and capable winking up at me from where they dropped, but I can't pick them back up.

It took Robinson Crusoe thirty years of shipwrecked solitude to finally be able to say "I learned not to despair of anything...that labor and patience would carry me through." Crusoe even thanked Providence for the shipwreck, the disease, the rains and the wolves, losing his crops and meeting the cannibal native Friday because they made him humble. I think if I was him I'd say Providence deserved a swift kick in the you-know-where.

Plenty of middle aged men or women long to go back to their college days, and I always wonder why. If I had their perspective maybe I would see it, maybe these things that appear to overwhelm me I will come to look on with fondness in time. Maybe this is Providence's way of shaping my character. But as I watch the snow fall and imagine those beautiful roses resting in confident peace, their potential having been successfully reached despite the cold, I hope I'm one of the late bloomers. And I hope it's not too late.

*picture from me*

Dragonfly Wings

By: Robyn Argyle
(attempt at poetry take three)

They began in spring,
tiny green fists clenched tight
to the smooth skin of their mother.
They grew far too fast;
fanning out, spreading thin.

They clung so strong
though the wind blew angry.
Flat, leather limbs
refusing to falter, or bend
or spin to the ground.

They didn't plan for autumn.
Did not feel the chill
or see the browning grass beneath
their proud, tall perch.
They were invincible.

But October brought frost
and November brought snow.
They stopped getting food.
Their bodies grew brighter, and duller
and finally fell apart.

They caught in my hair,
whirlwinds around my shoes,
little helicopters spiraling down
sleeting in the sky
skittering across parking lots.

I bent and caught a handful.
Brown and gold and brittle
they crinkled in my hand.
I could see through their glossy
web-work of crisscross.

They looked like stretched
wide dragonfly wings
torn from small slender bodies;
I threw the handful to the breeze
and watched them fly away.

*picture from Google*

Climbing the Impossible Hill

Ah. It's THAT time of year again. I've finally left the teenage years behind, and entered the twenties. Scary. And exciting. And somehow, aggravatingly, exactly the same. Last November I took an opportunity to reflect on what my years had made of me, and where I was going next. Allow me to do so again.

A year ago this time is when I started writing this blog, and it was something different then it is now. It was an outlet for my frustrations, a confidant when I was alone for the first time, swept up in campus life; and above all, I suppose it was a physical necessity. I NEEDED to write. To express what I can't in the spoken word. I am hopelessly awkward in person, tripping over my words and embarrassing myself to that degree that the generous call "cute" and the more realist call "dorky." But give me a keyboard (I type faster than I write with pen) and some time and I will churn out something closer to my real voice. The one I'm too quiet to use in the classrooms.

In a lot of ways this blog is still that megaphone for thought, but it doesn't come as easily as it used to. Now it has weight. What I write here helps to correct my language, improve whatever skill I have so that when I stand in cap and gown and wave good-bye to Caldwell, I'll know where the hell to go next. I finally narrowed down my majors from fifteen to two: English and Psychology. Somehow I had the idea that choosing a major gave one a sense of security, a handhold to grasp when someone stops you on the street and says "well...what next?" To any of you college Freshmen, this concept is WRONG. Choosing a major is just one step on the staircase to graduation. And it ain't small. We're talking the grand slopes of Mount Niesen. We're talking the bleachers the track coach made you run fifty times over at practice. Every decision you make in the next four years will open up a host of other staircases, until you arrive at who you are, and what you're meant to be.

Last week in my Lit class we read a poem that summed it better than I could: "On a huge hill, cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will reach her, about must, and about must go; and what the hill's suddenness resists, win so." After reading it I thought seriously about what careers I wanted to look into, and mused to myself "gosh I guess editing would be ok." After talking with a professor and a career counselor, my options had multiplied into the hundreds. What kind of editing? Technical? Literary? Research? Did I want to volunteer as a peer editor? School newspaper? Online magazine? What internships could I find? Who should I start getting to know?

Head spinning, I then veered to the other vague career path, and after the first ten minutes of conversation with my psych professor I realized I'd stepped on another mine of possibilities. Counseling or social work? Working with kids or adults? How many extra years of college did I want? Could I handle the emotional stresses? What training could I get to help people? (And, most frightening for me,) how would I handle it if I failed?

If it's possible, I feel MORE lost now than I did in my Freshmen year. Sure, I've learned how to live on my own, how to balance my homework load with life, how to speak with more confidence to a classroom of strangers. I know not to grocery shop when hungry, and not to cram ten minutes before the test. I've settled into a kind of niche with people I feel comfortable with, and look forward each week to the two places I can be me: my music classes and food bank. But when I'm not delivering food to families or practicing my saxophone or singing, who am I? What will I be remembered for?

While I usually avoid her music like the plague, Mily Cyrus did make one good song. My favorite goes:

"Ain't about how fast I get there
Ain't about what's waiting on the other side
It's the climb"

I've chosen a lot of Everests to climb this year, from the wonderful guy I am dating, to friendships I have lost, to my relationship with my parents, and being less afraid to try new things. I learn something new every minute, every day. But wisdom doesn't always equal character, and as the one grows and grows I come to question the other with greater intensity. I still feel selfish, silly, and ungrateful...but...I'm still climbing. Hand over hand, inch by inch.

And take it from someone who fell and fell hard last year, climbing feels GOOD.

Part Time Waitress, Part Time Janitor, Full Time Ranch Girl

"You lead a strangely sheltered life," Sarah said flatly to me one day after I confessed I'd never had raspberry pie before, one of a list of things I'd never experienced prior to Ten Sleep. I vanquished a host of "nevers" in the last three months:

--driving a stick shift (while my cousin Andrew gripped the armrests of his seat and pretended not to be terrified)
--galloping bareback across the hay fields with Cassie (I regret working too much and not getting to do this more often)
--getting high (on VERY strong cleaning chemicals while cleaning out the bathrooms at the high school...turned me into a giggling twit for an hour)
--watching my crazy relatives fire roman candles at each other and catch the field on fire (Andrew said when fireworks carry the label "Caution. Light and get away." It REALLY means "hold in hand and aim at someone's face")

and allowing myself forgiveness for the first time in over a year.

Many people know that my Freshmen year of school was full of painful memories, and watched me fragment slowly into something I wasn't. There is a kind of flower on the hills, I want to call them Daylilies, which bloom only after the sun has gone down. The only eyes that get to see these flowers are those similarly active at night: coyotes, bats, alley cats, and night-shift waitresses heading home late. It was Sarah, one of the cooks at the Crazy Woman, who pointed them out to me one day, and I couldn't help but compare their transformation to mine last spring. I began my school year full of life and eager to make friends and be involved with every activity on campus, and slowly closed myself to the confines of my room until over time, I became a living Daylily. Coming out only in the late late hours when sleep escaped me as it so often does. My writing, both in classes and for my blog, became sullen, withdrawn, and dark. Eventually, I gave it up entirely. Writing down my emotions made them more real, and thus more painful to bear.

But something changed the longer I stayed at the ranch. I felt my roots stir, my desire to stretch out and fight the long nighttime hours win out, and eventually, slowly, I started to put thoughts to paper again. A friend of mine suggested a kind of therapy for me. Keeping two notebooks as journals over the summer; one with only positive entries that showed progress, healing, and joy, and one that recorded everything else. Within two weeks of being on the ranch, I expressed these two things: "My cousins really do feel like brothers and sisters to me. The whole family is like that, they just adopt you in, give you a place to stay, with no questions asked. They don't care about my past. There is love here." And then later, "It's good to not be afraid to write anymore." As the summer drew to a close I felt a flash of fear that I might crumble back into a broken Daylily, but as Valerie, my coworker at the school said, "Wyoming has a way of staying with you."

And she was right. Wyoming is everywhere. In the shards of freshly cut grass spilling over my shoes and piercing my nose with the natural earth that the city tries so hard to cover. In the handful of country tunes that somehow made it into my playlist by the end of the summer despite all previous loathing of that genre, because sometimes they really do know exactly what to say. It's in the sky and the beauty of campus. And most pressingly, it's in my mind, flashing to the surface every time something triggers a memory of what has been the best summer of my nineteen years.

Today I walked to Albertsons to pick up last minute school supplies and got the uncomfortable feeling of eyes following me across the hot asphalt of the parking lot. I nearly walked straight into the thing before I realized what everyone was staring at: an over-sized antique of a John Deere that had somehow shuddered and wheezed it's last tired miles into this particular park space, right next to a shiny new silver Mustang. The contrast between the two vehicles was laughable, and I snapped a picture with my phone just like everyone else rolling their eyes and shaking their heads, writing "only in Idaho!" on their Facebook profiles from their Smart Phones. But a feeling kept nagging me up and down the aisles of the store and to the check-out stand. It wasn't until I was walking out the automatic doors that the feeling developed a name: Homesickness.

Yes, only in Idaho would a tractor and a Mustang share the same road with semi-equal respect. In Wyoming, it would be the Mustang people gawked at and photographed, and the big city folk inside the vehicle being ridiculed for daring to navigate the same dirt roads. As I passed the strange pair again on my way home, I let my loyalty slip to the tractor and its owner, whispering the same parting lines I gave to everyone in Wyoming, "drive safe."

There is this duality existing in me now. The born and raised Idaho Falls native who needs a telephone to be surgically removed from her ear to have a real conversation, and the country girl who would rather listen to crickets chirping at night then the cacophony of electronic buzzes and beeps that now keep her awake in her dorm room. The way I still can't pronounce "creek" properly (crick instead of creak,) the way I've come to glare at people who freak out when a little mud and rain gets on their shoes. I have to remind myself that I was exactly like that, AM exactly like that, nine months out of every year. It's only in the summer time, when I'm removed from city limits and my self-imposed picky lifestyle, that I truly become who I was meant to be. Open. Free. Selfless. Strong.

I chose to spend my summer in Ten Sleep, Wyoming (population three hundred and four) away from my friends and family and the familiar for two reasons. First, because I had made a promise to somebody I cared about that I would not be around flashing my existence in her face, and secondly because I needed money. Tuition was on the rise, textbooks are expensive, and a little spending money is as good as gold to a college student living off mac n cheese and popcorn. My Aunt Becky acted as my guardian angel, job hunter, and reference and helped me get two jobs: one as a waitress at Crazy Woman Cafe, and one as a janitor at the local (and only) school in town.

Working at the cafe was absolutely the best job I've ever had. Ever since I took a road trip with my mom and we listened to Joan Bauer's "Hope Was Here" on tape, I have longed to waitress. Hope is more than a waitress in the novel, she changes lives. Now I can't really say that I changed anybody's life serving endless coffee and Philly steak sandwiches, but there were little moments that shined. The expression of pure child-like euphoria on the face of a woman celebrating her ninety first birthday when I slipped her a piece of cherry pie on her way out the door. "You only turn ninety one once," I smiled and she laughed and replied triumphantly "calories be damned!" The night when a snooty couple with a poodle insisted Steve had over-cooked their steak, and Steve ripped the meat open with his bare hands, waving it in their shocked faces and demanding that they call it anything but medium rare. (Steve got the full tip from that table, despite the couple's fervent demand that I give nothing to "that uncultured man." Best money ever spent for a night that is now legend.)

Last night in the college cafeteria as I scanned the choices for dinner, my waitress-trained brain reduced every beautiful dish to shorthand: "Organic fed beef roast with a vegetable medley...spicy chicken stir fry...cous cous...and chocolate cream custard" becomes "spec w/veg...fry...CC...and tard." Crude? Maybe. But it gets the job done. If there's one thing I learned in the cafe it was that food doesn't have to sound pretty to taste good. Just take the horrible assault on the senses called Sour Cream and Raisin Pie. AMAZING. Really. Ask anybody.

I loved the bikers who came through on their way to Sturgis or Yellowstone. The stories they had to tell and the generous tips they offered. I loved my other waitresses, with whom I could talk openly about school, sex, life, and fight over the tables with the cutest guys. I almost soiled my jeans many times laughing so hard with the cooks and the dish-washers, and still miss the pies that Mary Margaret would make. I miss Sarah and Steve, who took up the immense task of being my guardian angels over the weeks and helped me believe in myself again. I even miss Gail, the owner of the Crazy Woman who up until the last couple weeks of work I was convinced hated me, because I was clumsy and broke things and asked for days off to trail cows with my cousins.

Being a janitor was also amazing, but in the "I can't believe I take this for granted so much" kind of way. Janitors are definitely some of the most under-appreciated people in the workforce, and for the first time I experienced what it was like to wax floors only to have a single table scratch them to pieces later, to shampoo and scrub and shine classrooms that would be demolished in a few weeks by children with innocent faces and sticky hands. I am forever grateful for Valerie and her patience with me, her stories about her grandchildren, and the talks that we had about growing up which ended in hugs and tears.

But the best memories came from the ranch, and from the family that lives there. Shara amazes me. I watched her calmly flip her baby boy Brandon over on her knee and administer CPR when he choked on his breakfast, while I stood frozen and helpless nearby completely freaking out. When the rest of the house is yelling and stomping trying to get organized and out the door, she is humming a song or wishing us well or making someone smile. Brandon seems to have absorbed this calming ability. One hot July night when I was staring up at the ceiling feeling lost and waiting for sleep that would not come, I heard him screaming in the room above mine. Minutes ticked by and he didn't go back to sleep, so with a sigh I got up and climbed the stairs to his room, finding him wide-eyed and howling at a nightmare. He clung to me when I picked him up and I sat with him in the rocking chair for nearly an hour, feeling my anxiety melt away with each passing minute as the little body I was trying to comfort comforted me instead.

Each of my cousins and I bond in a different way. For one it's video games, for another horse-back riding, and for a third it's fencing high up in the mountains, where troubles seem to be nonexistent. (Maybe hermits like John Muir and Jedidiah have the right idea.) We all bonded when Ten Sleep got struck with a nasty case of the flu, and we swapped barf buckets and fever reducers and played board games in the basement. Andrew even managed to drag me out on a couple of double dates with his friends, where I experienced another couple of "nevers:" fishing in the dark, archery, walking the train tracks at night. My Uncle and I might disagree on politics, but I will never be able to give him enough credit for picking the most beautiful place on the planet to live, or give enough thanks to my Aunt for working so hard for people (like me) who are often ungrateful. They are the people that helped me feel like myself again, helped me stop being so angry with the world and with God, and loved me in spite of me. They deserve medals.

This morning I look out my third-floor window at the campus beneath me, at the city spread out around me, and realize I feel the most at home walking through those wheat fields I can barely see shining gold and amber in the distance. For now, I will have to settle on weekend bike trips to find the open spaces free of cluttered living and a cluttered mind, but next summer you can bet I will be headed back to the place that opened its arms to me. Thanks Wyoming :)