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Appalachian Spring #3 (i’ll think of you)
This is the last piece I wrote hiking the southern most piece of the Appalachian Trail in 2000. Overall that was a really rough year for me but this piece has some joy in it. It was in early May and the wildflowers were really spectacular. We bought a little book and tried to learn their names as we went and this piece came out of those efforts. I remember reciting it for a friend and she was rather surprised i had this kind of sentiment in me. Life is not made up all of metaphysics and politics, but it takes a little love now and again as well.
When the Mountain Laurel is blooming
And the Cinquefoil is too
And the Bluets and the Spiderwort
Is such a lovely hue
I’ll think of you
And I’ll think of you
When I have fresh berries
That are so delightfully blue
Or I see the mulberry tree
And stop to pick a few
I’ll think of you
And I’ll think of you
When the leaves start to change
And turn all red and yellow like they do
And I go out walking in the woods
And the Great Horned Owl asks “who?”
I’ll tell him you
And I’ll thank of you
When the first snowfall comes
And turns everything white and new
and the kiddies don’t have to go to school
And the moms don’t know what to do
I’ll think of you
And I’ll think of you
At the stars at night
I’ll think of you
When the sun shines bright
I’ll think of you
Most every season
I’ll think of you
For any reason
I’ll think of you
And I’ll think of you
“Appalachian Spring #1”
In the spring of 2001 my wife at the time Amee and I quit our jobs, sold our stuff, and set out to hike a good chunk of the Appalachian Trail. Not long after we put in notice and right around when we had our sale I found out my mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. What had been the fulfillment of a lifelong dream became one of the most difficult times in my life. Not really understanding the gravity of the situation we started the hike at the trail’s southern terminus Springer Mountain in Georgia and hiked 136 trail miles North to the Nantahala Outdoor Center in North Carolina where our packs were stolen. It turned out to be a blessing as my mom ended up having very little time left and i got to spend a lot more time with her after curtailing the trip. The biggest lesson i learned is not to let your plans, hopes, dreams, or apparent obligations stand in the way of what is really important. Being there in a significant way for the ones you love. It was a pretty emotionally raw time and if i ever find my journal from the time i might write at length about the trip. I ended up writing a fair amount of poetry, almost exclusively silly and placed them in my chapbook “America: Its Land and Its People” under Appalachian Spring 1-4.
Appalachian Spring #1
Sassafras Mountain is green with nature’s love
But its ringed with solitude
For all those who will walk above
The speeding cars and the busy places
The teeming masses of the city spaces
Left behind for nature’s stasis
On Sassafras Mountain
Cadre Convening
Thursday and Friday I attended a convening of the Missouri Cadre for Co-Occurring Excellence. The Cadre is a group of clinicians and active consumers who meet quarterly to plan and strategize on improving services for individuals who have co-occurring mental health and substance abuse problems. It arose out of funding from the Missouri Foundation for Health hiring substance abuse agencies to do mental health work and mental health agencies to do substance abuse work with the idea that most individuals have both problems and would be better served if their services were delivered that way.
I have been attending for a couple of years, do a little committee work, and now serve on the Interim Committee, a quasi-democratic body charged with navigating us from a project of a foundation to an independent participatory democratic organization. Mostly its educational sessions by the charming duo of Dr Cline and Dr Minkoff, experts in the field of co-occurring disorders.
This convening was held at a Marriott in West St Louis. I was asked to bring along a consumer from Jeff City and agreed to do so. He was a real charming fellow and a bit manic which can be contagious and we had some real animated conversation driving out. It was nice to see someone else managing their disorder in a healthy and independent way and it made the drive fly by.
I had left at the ass crack of dawn, well quarter after, i was running late but was still a little late to the meeting. After wards I was talking to our fearless leader Craig who also sits on the credentialing board and I found out I likely have enough training hours to get my co-occurring specialist certification. This will allow me to bill for doing co-occurring counseling which is mostly what I do but i have to bill it as substance abuse counseling because that’s all the licensure I currently have. That was probably the most helpful thing I learned.
The conference programming was a lot of review and I can’t say I learned a whole hell of a lot. There was some stuff on stage matched groups that was interesting. There was also a role play of a group and the role players were really funny. There was also a lay out for a presentation on anxiety that looks helpful and replicable. Mostly it just validated my own approach to the work, which is good.
The evening of the conference I went and saw an old friend. It was really fun hanging out and we went to The Himalaya and I had my first Nepalese food. It was pretty good and reminded me of Indian cuisine. I also hardly got any sleep. We also watched 500 Days of Summer which was better than I expected.
At the previous conference we had focused on increasing consumer involvement so amongst other things we had a presentation by Tim Hamilton the founder of DRA (Dual Recovery Anonymous) and his wife Betty. Betty had asked for a show of hands of who has a dual disorder and I had outed myself as a lunatic with some drug history for the first time. I frequently do when talking to clients but rarely do when talking to other professionals. Its not relevant or helpful so i have known all these folks for years and then let them know i was on the other side of the fence.
So driving home from the last convening I had thought about the implications of that and it came to me that i should share this poem with them. It talks about being an agent of change and we fancy ourselves change agents in this movement of ours. I kept putting off asking for a little time on the agenda until the last piece. Craig was facilitating updates and it was dragging a bit. He was standing by me so i asked for the last 3 minutes for a closing. I read the following poem:
Becoming Whole
You see the whole absurdity in the human condition
And strive to see the beauty in the life that your living
You’ve overcome the emptiness
And learned the art of giving
And you have broken the chains
That once held you down
You have learned to rearrange
You are an agent of change
You think and you learn and you are
Destined for the stars
You love every part of life
You see the hope and the magic
You smile through the darkest nights
And rise to face the tragic
And you have opened your mind
And reached for the prize
You have learned to feel and grow
You can let people know
Change has happened before
It will happen again
The least shall rise up
The great shall pay for their sins
And you stand upon the rooftop
And shout out your agnostocism
Yet you love your neighbor as yourself
And live out your cathechism
And you have crossed the great valley
And are on the other side
You have faced the great fear
You have crossed the divide
You have learned to overcome
Light shines from your soul
You are mighty and strong and you are
Becoming Whole
It was really well received. I was nervous and put a lot of emotion into it. My proudest part was in my intro I mentioned that I had bi-polar disorder and that one of the gifts of that was poetry. I think I was definitely the only one to refer to bi-polar as a gift. So people liked it. I have pledged to post it on the Missouri Institute of Mental Health co-occurring list serve and Betty Hamilton talked to me about doing a CD for DRA, so maybe something will come of it. I am a little nervous with my increasingly high profile. There are so many apparent contradictions in my life that it just seems like someday they will have to come back and bite me in the ass. Not everyone believes “everything is true, everything is permissible”.
On the drive home i was very jazzed up from the energy and positive feedback. My co-pilot also was inspired and we had a great time making plans. We are going to bring Bruce C. in for a DRA speaker and try to reinvigorate DRA in Jeff City. Good things are coming and it feels good to be part of a movement again.
meteorological spring revisited
Seeing some interest in last years post I thought I would revisit the topic this year. Meteorological Spring is the idea that the equinox doesn’t really hit when the seasons really change. Its the idea that March, April & May are more springlike and June not so much. Astronomically spring rolls through to around June 20. Obviously mid June is Summer. Personally I celebrate both.
Last year I was a new nonsmoker. This year its been a year and I am in a great place with it. I feel as much more like a nonsmoker than a former smoker. This weekend I was even able to pick The Popster up a pack which would have been a no no a year ago.
Last year I was sick of winter. This year much more so. I am in a better place emotionally which i wouldn’t have realized without going back and reading my old post. This winter has been so much worse. We got hit with a long and very cold snap in December wiping out my winter crops and then snow and cold all winter long. No winter gardening. Only 2 of my 3 garlics i managed to get in survived. The third one washed away and froze. I don’t know when i’ll get my hands in the dirt. The compost hasn’t done anything all winter so it’ll probably be May before I have usable stuff. (Last year I had a batch in March and a batch in May).
Last year I had a Convening of the Cadre for Co-Occurring Excellence to attend. This year I do as well. This year I am on the steering committee and we are trying to do something. I’ll see if we really did on Meteorological Spring part 3.
Other changes, I am blogging more, playing more dungeons and dragons, and getting less projects done on the house. Getting along better with Dad in retrospect and am overall happier. I am getting a little more exercise, eating out a lot less and spending a lot less money. I am driving less and reading less books and more magazines. I facebook more and talk on the phone less. I gave up my personal cell phone months ago (great decision) and am days away from dropping my work cell phone. I am working a little less but still too much. All in all life improves. Easy to miss without some reflection on where we’ve come from. I am more and more seeing an “attitude of gratitude” as the most fundamental thing in my quality of life. Thanks for sharing the journey and please leave a comment.
sick again
I have been sick twice this winter. Its probably been a decade since that happened. How often I get sick is directly proportional to how much stress i allow in my life. When i was working 40-50 hours and going to college full time i would get sick all the time, i remember going down with the flue for two weeks. Gradually i learned to take better care of myself, workload wise. It is easy for me to lose myself in helping others. After my mental break down i became more cognizant of taking care of myself. When i would get overcomitted i would flee to the woods or the desert or the road to rest and heal. I went four years without getting sick when i worked jobs with moderate hours and lower stress. I moved to columbia and my second winter i knew i was going to get sick. and i did. this year i was positively looking forward to it. a chance to sit down, without the expectation of doing anything. so this year i went down twice. too much of a good thing. I am trying to not run away from stress but carve out reasonable limits in my existing environment. I think i have a long way to go but i’ll get there.
swinging an axe
I spent a chunk of the day chopping down the bush honey locust out of the northwest corner of my backyard. My friend Trevor had pointed it out and mentioned it was a pernicious invader that had to go but then i heard that the cultivated ones weren’t pernicious. Last spring at the native plant show i talked to some experts and they said the white and yellow flowered kind were the aggressive ones and so i waited until it confirmed my memory that the flowers were white and decided to knock it out this winter. I see how it has a big edge over the natives because it didn’t drop its leaves until well into December.
Than we had a couple of weeks of ugly cold and now I’m cutting it down. I spent a couple of sessions warming up and got serious on it yesterday. I was stymied because all the branches were seriously entangled and large chunks of it hung over the neighbors rusty old chain link fence (which keeps out the pit-bull), wires, and my own fence. I had it better’n a third down and hadn’t been able to pull out anything out of the mass. Finally I just started chopping off branches and pulling them out one by one. The final pieces I roped and had Harry pull on the rope to keep the wires up. Success.
Now I am hand sawing some of the mid sized trunks to line a path through the new beds. I am hoping to rake out the plant material, pull up the handfuls of grass & mud I haven’t smushed all apart yet and plant my wildflower mix. I picked that up last spring at the Missouri Wildflower Nursery in Brazito last spring. I am going to use a packet of shade mix, one of shade mix thin soil, some bush clover, and one other one which is escaping me. Getting the seeds on the ground is the part of the project that is time sensitive. Its barely early winter yet.
Swinging the axe has got me nostalgic. I got into chopping wood in my early teens. It helped me get a handle on my anger which saved me a world of hurt. There’s something special about cutting stuff down by hand. If I had used a chainsaw i could have blasted through it but the noise and my general unease with machinery would have taken away from the experience. I wouldn’t have the satisfied delight from the tingle in my hands and the feeling that i did something in all those weird muscle groups around my body.
It reminds me of camping, and splitting wood for anyone whoever guested me and burned wood. I remember going home for christmas break with Claire and splitting her a winter’s worth of wood. I got into a rhythm and was nailing these big oak logs with one swing of the maul. It felt good, feels good now.
consternation, bother and loss of a sense of self
I wrote this paragraph on halloween and have been sitting on it ever since. publish or delete? you see what i picked.
I am in the midst of a long and annoying semi-functional funk and am starting to feel it is endless. It began with trying to write some more on the ‘about’ page. I thought i might begin with talking about what i do, so far as work. not an easy question. I wrote i am in transition from supervising a program providing integrated mental health and substance abuse treatment to individuals with multiple problems in a community based setting to providing community based substance abuse counseling informed by mental health treatment. That subtle difference is a huge pain in my ass and i can’t help but be a little broke up and sad about it.
all saints day
Samhain has passed and its a pagan new year, a new pagan year. something like that for sure. i definitely felt a thinning between the years waking from a dream of my mother on halloween morn’. I dreamed she’d been in the bath and the water was running, had overrun the sides of the tub. She hid herself when i arrived but i could see where she’d started to towel up the water. and that was that. i found her presence, or at least the feeling of her shortly gone, comforting. something of some meaning to ruminate on to get back to the true spirit of the season, pardon the pun. i carved a pumkin, the last of the 3 volunteers that came up in my strawberry bed out of the compost of presumably last years jack o’ lantern. i made a square eyed square mouthed fellah with bolts on the side with a definite frankenstein look. my best pumpkin in a decade i think is safe to say. got 10 trick or treaters, up from 7. Only one without a costume, a little guy who said he was a christian when the popster asked what he was supposed to be. played some D & D, ate the bulk of the candy after Harry’s Halloweeny beanie weanie for dinner. Finished off the evening with an HP Lovecraft movie. Party Bonus for the end of daylights saving time. Today i give my nod to all the saints, the lives they led, and they’re continued comforting presence.
curriculum vita (a prose poem found in my paint by # calendar Dec. 06)
What is my story, what is the essence of my being? From where does come this hunger to know, to be known? Why mar the blank page? in what hubris it must lay, lie, die.
Oh to be of one and now, but what cost history, even to gain eternity, oh blessed now, the razor’s edge of existence that i can only pretend exists as by the time the light has hit my eyes its history, pure history. And oh, memory, the purest form of imagination. When the brain is eaten through with plaquey-tentacles and the mind from which is sprung is thin and patchy, the mind holds onto childhood. the earliest stories, the purest, the best, the core. oh history i sing your praise and yearn to never forget, even at the cost of the now.
My life a taut quivering string of ambivilance. the cost of a vivid imagination. There’s good reason to believe in everything. any damn thing.
At what cost freedom? At what cost power, even unsought, unutilized, unspent this currency weighs heavy in my pocket. Makes me want to walk all cockeyed, or spend it. or just fucking lay down, rest, forget, dream perhaps, not without struggle but how’s it going to drag you down, when your laying on the bottom?
life in hyper-drive
there is a dynamic balance between experiencing with full presence and maintaining a sense of history, a basic requirement to live through time. i feel tremendously out of balance. three months without blogging. tragic. i hadn’t missed a month than i missed 2. not good. i was starting to feel like i was in the early stages of losing it but i am feeling like i am getting a handle on it again. it made me realize, or possibly remember, a couple of things. one, my life is a narrative and i don’t really want my story to go that way. time to exert a little editorial discretion and send this story in a more pleasant direction. secondly i realized it wouldn’t be so bad if i did lose it. its not like having it is all that pleasant of late anyway and it would certainly be a new direction. i feel like my life is rushing by with this emotionally engaging frenetic burst all day and then dropping into some weird shell shocked fugue after work. i don’t know what i would do if i had to try to float a personal life. it feels good writing this. i’m gonna try to remember that and get back on putting some stuff out there. theres been a lot going on. i’m doing a group i’m excited about, fostering a dual recovery group, writing a new grant, pushing my people, had folks relapse, go on meds, and get into treatment after years of doing the opposite. its so crazy. i had a homeless one get a home today though, thats always a good day, but getting fewer. gotta remember every time a homeless person gets housed an angel gets their wings.
Multiconstruct 
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