The Rain Came

 
Finally, after several months without a drop of rain, we get a whole day, and more promised.  The air is tangible again.  The sunflowers, that yesterday, seemed broken with age, are standing up straight.  We are always glad for one more day of sun in the Northwest, where fall and winter become a single memory of cold feet, the flapping of windshield wipers, and hidden dangers of footfalls into puddles or the squelch of mud.  Unlike other climates,here, there is the rainy season and the solid sun of summer and little in between. 

Mid October and my new early morning routine is darkness.  I cannot stop myself from waking earlier and earlier, my head roaring with questions.  The inquiry is all details of work, which defy interest for anyone else, but have become symbolic of everything else.  It does not matter what this job is about, only that I find a way to wrestle it into meaning.  I realize now that whatever we do, it is simply an expression of  ourselves and what we believe we are. 

Inevitably, concentration on one thing neglects others.  I have always had a hard time choosing what to let go.  Even now, I can't tell you anything I would willingly give up in my panoply of interests.  But the trivial tasks of cooking and cleaning and trying to perfect home economics take a back seat to the long commute of work.  I do not suffer from lack of nutrition; indeed, vegetables are the only craving that cannot be satisfied wherever I happen to be. So I chop and saute and consume strange combinations of leafy crunchy things and call it dinner. 

I hate how life rushes by, and I am barely able to find a high point to look back upon it.  But I love that headlong, headfull hunger to fill up on everything around me, to consume the moment, even if it shoves me faster toward the full stop.

Back to Work

I have worked seven days at my new job.  I miss my leisure but not the uncertain future of being unemployed.   Now the days are a blur of commuting, trying to figure out the requirements of the job and remembering names of people I have met more than once.

Each day I make a hundred mile round trip.  I have time during lunch to wander around the state capital where there are notable buildings, statues and plaques galore.  In my office, everything is state agency gray.  There are procedures for everything.  It would be daunting, if it wasn't so amusing.    I happen to have arrived just as heavy talks were beginning about "dress guidelines."   Tomorrow I will go to Goodwill and stock up on shirts that can't be mistaken for t-shirts, and tasteful skirts.  If I wasn't so advanced in years, I might care, but I don't.  

My biggest problem is getting enough sleep.  I have not convinced myself to sleep enough hours to be perky at 6:00 AM.  But I knew that any new schedule was going to be difficult after the luxury of the 9-5 of Legal Aid. 

I am trying to learn how to fit my other activities into the time available.  It will happen.  But dinner time preparations are suffering mightily.  I'm going to have to shop and cook for the the week on the weekend.  A new regime to learn. 

Today I continued the tree inventory of our neighborhood.  I love the reality of identifying trees.  If I had a life to do over again, I would throw my lot with the biology of our planet, rather than with words and laws.  But I am here now, and I will get what I can out of it. 

It's Getting Old

106 days since my last day of work.  In the first few weeks, I was purposeful , making appointments and lists of things to accomplish, and then actually doing some of them.  I aggressively applied for jobs, kept in touch with former colleagues and told whomever would listen of my state of unemployment.

But as the weather improved I turned more to gardening and sitting outside and exercising.  I am exploring all the different sightlines of the backyard, where I can look up from my book and see the rose's pink explosions, and where my neighbor's catalpa tree with its enormous droopy leaves can be enjoyed.  In the old working days the garden was just an outdoor list of tasks and an unobtainable vision of Edenlike splendor I imagined moving toward.  Now, in this lucky summer of excellent weather, I really have nothing better to do than enjoy the squirrels running their avenues of fenceline, and the zooming hummingbirds zipping between neighbors' feeders.  I don't think I have felt this simplicity since childhood.

I have a theory that the world of work is a cleverly designed illusion where we are convinced to willingly perform arduous tasks that fill nearly all our time, in exchange for treasure that we can trade for other treasure.  The truth is that the system only works because the treasure we get is worth less that the time we give to obtain it.  No matter how much we earn, the desire for treasure ratchets up so that we keep working for more.  Maybe it is all a very sensible plot by social engineers to keep us out of trouble, but go off the tracks like I have and you begin to see behind the curtain.  Pardon the now banal comparison, but the movie, the Matrix is much on my mind.

Although I know that eventually new money will be required and somehow I must locate a job, I still regret my best decades were devoted to a job that now seems besides the point.  Alternatively, my next best decade is now and I am determined to enjoy it properly.   There are plants to water, words to string together, and colors to be dabbled in.  Time does not wait.

Our House, Is a Very, Very, Very Fine House

Ever since I stopped going to work, I have become aware of what goes on while most of us are out of the neighborhood, making money.  Our houses are visited throughout the day by an army of workers.  They lavish these boxes with attention; cleaning their interiors, trimming the vegetation that surrounds them, painting and altering the superstructure, adjusting and replacing bits of the circulatory systems that bring in electricity and heat and water and take away the waste products, bringing in new appliances and taking out old, catching animals who dare to invade, and these are just some of the reasons we let people into the house while we are gone.  If I didn't know better, I might surmise that human beings exist to tend these structures.  Certainly much of the money earned in middle class America goes toward the glory of the boxes we live in.

Surely, if we were efficient creatures, we would have invented a one size fits all habitation that needs no special tools or experience to maintain.   Something like the $300 House, designed for the poor.  But we actually expect our houses to express our innermost feelings, through an inexplicable assortment of design and equipment attributes.  Our inability to convey our desires through woodwork, may be the reason why the craftsmen are constantly arriving to try once again.

In my house, it comes down to the kitchen.  The enamelled sink is shedding its enamel and rusting.  The vinyl floor was white when it began, but can't be turned white with any amount of scrubbing.  These are good reasons to get replacements.  But how big should we go?  As any householder knows, one thing leads to another and another.  If we replace the sink, we should really get new countertops.  If we do that, maybe it is time to build the cabinets and counters on the other wall that would make a lot more room, but then that begs the question of whether we should get all new cabinets.  And of course we need a new floor and isn't it time to change all the appliances?  I just find it very hard to go down that long slippery path.    Each choice seems to mean something and demand careful thought.  And at the end we will need to invite at least several workers into our home. 

I know the home building industry creates a lot of jobs, but if we didn't have these terribly complicated structures, wouldn't we need a lot less money?

Everything That Rises Must Converge

Every time I think I am close to stringing a few thoughts together, I get distracted and thoughts go unstrung. This is similar, but not the same as being at loose ends.  I keep being on the verge of cleaning up my room, on the cusp of beginning a big project, but I see now, as I have seen many a time, that anything big takes big effort, and I am better at little efforts.  Hence this blog has become neglected and short shrifted.  The day by day drama of my life is playing out over in blipfoto, where I have faithfully posted a picture a day, plus words, for more than a year.  See http://www.blipfoto.com/grazingllama for those daily ruminations.  But here are supposed to be the big pithier stuff, which seems in short supply. 

The report goes something like this.  Still unemployed.  Do not mind at all.  Looking for work.  It all looks good.  In the meantime, I have discovered almost all jobs create illusions of importance which keep your attention for hoursdaysyearsanddecades, and then when it is over, it is as if it never was.   True of life in general, but at least you get to pick each action item of your nonwork.  I am just amazed by how a whole career is irrelevant as soon as I leave it. 

But never mind.  In the meantime, there is just one distracting day after another, which I have no trouble filling with little nodes of pleasure.  A little eating, then exercise, then music, and gardening and cleaning and art and some job hunting and reading and oh dear it is time to plan dinner and shop and cook and then it is all over until tomorrow.

I embrace work as my feminist right to earn my own living, but after thirty years of this, I have started to see how much of life is lost at work, and question whether we have a decent balance in this country between what we do for money and what we do for love.  Until the money runs out, I'm living it up! 

What's That Word?

It has been two weeks since I have gone  to work.  Two weeks without the requirement of plugging my brain into a computer and participating in the interchange between electrons in a machine and in my head.  When we examine the life of the office worker, the world looks more and more like The Matrix.

There is a transition going on, but it is subtle.  Note I am again connected to these machine electrons.  However, I am one step away from buying a datebook made of paper.  And a few more steps away from returning this box to the status of tool, rather than companion. 

There ought to be a word for the condition I'm in.  The only words I know - retirement and unemployment- reflect the poles of experience.  Retirement is for those who have declared the end to wage earning and planted the flag in the country of leisure.  Unemployment states an absence, perhaps a perilous one.  I don't feel leisurely or financially imperiled.  I do have an urgency about time.  Employment answers the question of what will I do today.  Without that mandate, the whole world is available, crying out for attention.

What will I do today?  Without a plan, the questions keep me up at night.  Yet, I don't have a sense of how I would choose, even if I were to force myself to make a list in order to prioritize.  There are things I do to soothe the anxiety:  Swim laps, clean the kitchen, play music.  These have always been diversions from the harder work that needs more thought or creativity.  But the bigger questions are how do I make a difference, how do I create beauty, and how do I engage in relationships?  Harder still, how to have a balance of all of it?

A job has always narrowed the available time to almost nothing, thereby vitiating the question.   Now, the questions loom large and real.  There isn't much time left.  What to do?

Wait.  The sun is out.  Gotta go!

Finally, Unemployed

I wanted to write something in March, just to say I had been here at least monthly.  Yesterday was my last official work day, although I already had my office, computer and phone taken away, so I didn't go anywhere, just poked around on email, forwarding some last tasks to others.  Today,  meeting new people at my treeplanting activities with Friends of Trees,  I found folks sympathetic, as everyone has been unemployed at some point.  It is like being pregnant, inspiring complete strangers to tell their similar stories.  Of course, I have to be careful not to milk it too much.

Tomorrow I plan to start a number of lists of things to do between now and whenever.  I feel I might get a job too soon, before I have used this moment to assess what I really want.  Already I feel the weight of the endless grind of the work week lifting, as I see that Sunday isn't the end of the weekend, just the beginning of a new week.  My biggest fear is the loss of companionship from not seeing my office mates each day.  I will have to find a way to have regular interaction with others.  For the first time, I realize the purpose of coffee shops.  I'm hoping there will be more words here.