closing time

It's been a long day. I didn't run or meditate or do anything of personal power except clean my room and eat half a chocolate chip muffin. Underneath the surface-layer-nothingness the past 24 hours have provided, it has yet been an intense day. A second to last day. A goodbye day. A day of reading thank you/congratulations/ see you later cards. And for all these reasons, I need the monotonous hum of something... be it my breath or a mantra or the slow guitar picking from the Be Good Tanyas on iTunes... just to get me back to a baseline from where I can think clearly.

And so I type.

"Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are all multivolume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don't waste our time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success. Listen, learn, go on."

And then the mmhmmm's start within me, and pulse from my diaphram past my heart and out my closed yet relaxed mouth - all inbetween great sighs.

The quote is from Women Who Run with the Wolves. It's the book that's saving my soul right now. Without these very fine words, I'd be swimming in a pool of bitterness, fear, and an overwhelming feeling of failure. It's a book about insticts. About following my wildish nature. About allowing my soul to cast out and see what it grabs without hooking onto a poisonous lure leading to questions of value and worth. (see previous posts.)

So I hum.

Tomorrow is my last day of work. I'll be packing up my files and closing up shop, leaving only what I can for the next lost soul to take on my position, if there ever will be such a person. No one but me will be in the center tomorrow, and it's procuring a profound memory of packing up my belongings in Michigan before I squeezed in my car and drove to the unknown. 2 years later, look at how things have changed.

In the last two days, I've confessed my departure to all the youth I've worked with in the past year. It's the kind of closure these young people deserve - and suddenly I realize why so many men never gave me the obvious gift, seeing as it is so hard. For one of the first times in speaking to these teens I had an impossible time looking them in the eyes. I had an even harder time keeping a steady voice with a simple sentence. Time stopped and shook like an earthquake, and my old-soul confidence fell to the floor as their faces drooped down with some tears.

They love me, and they hate me for going, and in my going I am taking away their programs, their efforts, their dreams and experiences of Home. And I hate reality. But the funds are cut. There's nothing else to do but say goodbye...

"There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them."

I'll lean on that for a bit, with one arm stretching south and embracing the space between me and my youth's tender, thoughtful hugs, and the other arm reaching to the future to a new position, with new youth and a level surface to build upon. So with these open arms, my heart calls out, "Would you rather me a hammer or a nail?"

I'm a nail. Not crushed. Used for a cause and a much bigger purpose. And I will go on humming, learning, casting myself out to a senseless and tempting world all in the name of getting to the next episode.