Bionic Teutonic

Ariel and I just got back from my step-mother’s memorial service. It was a very strange thing to have to attend. It’s very strange to think of somebody who has been part of your life for that long in the past tense. My brain has not quite made the shift yet, so it felt a bit surreal to have her death be made official in that way. I’ve been thinking a lot about her life, my life, what people do with their lives, etc. As a little exercise, I’ve come up with a list of 50 things that I have always wanted to do (and have not yet accomplished). I’m sure there is more to add if I thought about it more, but I figure 50 is a good number to put down on paper (virtual as it is). If anybody is interested in doing any of these with me, let me know and we will see about making it happen!

1. Release an album
2. Become a yoga teacher
3. Work in a soup kitchen
4. Go to cooking school
5. Ride in a hot air balloon (jump out of one?)
6. Study Flamenco in Spain
7. Ride a camel
8. Swim with dolphins
9. Have a child and raise it well
10. Join a circus
11. Speak 6 languages
12. Write a book
13. Go to a Man United match
14. One handed hand stand
15. Paint
16. Have a photography show
17. Name a star after somebody I love
18. Live in Europe again
19. Take my kid on a bike trip around the Bodensee
20. Be able to do the front splits
21. Climb a big wall in Yosemite
22. Have an orchard/ vinyerd and sell the produce
23. Ride a double decker bus in London
24. Take part in an archeology dig
25. Do aid work in Africa
26. Hike the Grand Canyon
27. Learn what all the cloud formations are named
28. Run a marathon
29. Research my ancestry
30. Busk my way around Europe
31. Get to know a homeless person
32. Dance around a maypole
33. Hop a train
34. Spend a night in jail
35. Visit Jerusalem
36. Go caving (spelunking)
37. Study tabla in India
38. Learn to knit
39. Bike across the U.S.
40. Paraglide
41. Spend a day riding around with a cop
42. Open a swiss bank account
43. Party at Stonehenge
44. Scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef (before it disappears)
45. Learn to walk on stilts
46. Get my CPR certification
47. Learn to ride a unicycle
48. Watch the space shuttle take off
49. See the northern lights in Alaska
50. Die gracefully

Summer is finally here. I feel like I’m on the beginning edge of getting some normalcy back in my life. I’ve been trying to follow up on all the little changes I have planned while at the same time getting back to all the routines I’m trying to maintain (but have all fallen to the side lately). I went to yoga during lunch for the first time in what felt like ages and am just trying to get a little bit of a groove back in my day-to-day. I’m feeling optimistic. We started populating our new shelves yesterday and am super excited about that. I just applied for a yoga teacher training starting this fall and am really excited about that possibility (still need to be accepted). I’ve also come to some decisions about work and sticking it out for a bit that seems to have lifted some of my stress for now. I’m ready for summer.

It’s been a while since I’ve last written here. Right now, I’m sitting at my dad’s home in Missoula where my step-mother has been slowly losing a struggle against cancer. I’ve been back twice now, both times thinking her death was right around the corner, but the process has been slower than we were expecting. It’s hard to see somebody wither away like that. She is completely skin and bones and has not been taking in any nutrients or even much hydration for the last 4 or 5 days now. Her conversations are definitely not anything I can follow anymore, but she is still responding to friends, recognizing people, and thanking people for the signs of love they have been showing.

My step-mother and I haven’t always gotten along so well. When I was growing up I think we both didn’t really know how to deal with the other and there were times when our relationship was definitely strained. Over the last 10 years or so though, our relationship has matured and become much better and I think we have come to appreciate things about each-other that maybe we overlooked before. Though we are still of very different worlds, she is caring, generous, and has been a wonderful friend, mentor, and teacher to an extraordinary number of people. I’ve come to see how much she gives to those around her. Her biggest gift right now, to all of us, has been the example she has been setting with how she has gone about dying. She has done it with amazing grace, gratitude, and thoughtfulness. I haven’t once seen her get angry or be anything less than grateful to the people in her life or for the life she has lead. When I was back a few weeks ago, I watched her thank friend after friend for the part they played in her life. In speaking with one of her friends, a former priest who has been a spiritual mentor to a lot of people in her community, she told him “I’ve had a great life, and I would like to have a great death”. I can only hope that when my time comes, I can follow her example and embrace the experience as fully and with as much acceptance as she has.

I worry a lot about my dad and sister (who just had a baby 3 weeks ago and will no longer have a mother to help guide her through her new motherhood) and how they will deal with this. My dad has just retired and I think that while he has a lot to keep him occupied at the moment, the reality of how his life will be different will hit him fully at some point and I hope that all of us can just be there when he needs us to be there. There is beauty though in the way that she has been able to prepare everybody for her death and ask for their acceptance, just as she has accepted it. I think it makes it a lot easier for everybody around. Seeing her gratitude helps others to try and find the same gratitude for the part she has played in their life and that is a tremendous gift to be able to give as you go. So thank you for everything you have given and will continue to give to me and my family.

I’ve been thinking a lot about closing doors lately. I seem to have a lot of different things in my life that sort of half occupy my attention. I think that out of fear of letting anything go, I sacrifice having a deeper experience with any of my interests. Sometimes when you put some real parameters or limiting factors around what you are doing, it can free you up, though it seems counterintuitive. I’ve known this to be the case with music for a long time. In school we used to get assignments where certain limitations were placed on our songs in order to force us to better utilize what we did have to work with. I haven’t really ever placed those kinds of limitations on my life before though. While I get very obsessive about things, I don’t usually intentionally close other doors. I think sometimes I get afraid that if I let something go, I will never pick it back up again and it will just slowly fade away from my life. Which is kind of odd, because if it doesn’t tug at me enough to force it’s way back in, it probably doesn’t need to be there anyway (at least that’s how I’ve been feeling lately). I’ve always sort of romanticized this idea of the renaissance man. But I think for me, where I am in my life at the moment, that’s sort of a luxury. If you have a ton of free time, and/or have managed to create a work life where you get to dip into many different interests, this is a great thing to strive for, but if you are like me and spend most of your day completely removed from those interests, trying to cram them all in to the time you do have (also accounting for the need to just veg and recover from work sometimes), you end up making way less progress on things and having less satisfying experiences than you were originally hoping for. Sort of a jack of all trades, master of none scenario. I think I’m going to try and start closing some doors and seeing what happens. This sort of frightens me actually, but I think that fear is part of why I need to do it. To start practicing some more non-attachment.

I have had the worst back pain for the last week or so. I believe I injured it during aerials two weeks ago, but it didn’t really start hurting until several days after that, and since then, the muscles of my back have tensed up so much that I have only managed brief pain free moments. Strangely, working out seems to provide relief, at least for the duration of the exercise. I got a massage from my friend Lily this weekend and she went to town trying to loosen up the knots that have formed in my back, which bought me almost an entire evening without pain, but then it started to come back and has basically returned to it’s previous state. It sucks. I hate being in chronic pain. I went to the doctor yesterday though and got a perscription for massage, so I’m kind of stoked about that. Free massage! Nice. I also had him check out my finger which still has not healed. He told me he did pretty much the same thing to his finger in a biking accident and it was about a 6 month long healing process, which is nice because I was a little freaked out that it had been so long and I wasn’t seeing much improvement.

Holy crap, it’s been a while since I last posted. Lots of stuff going on, including at the moment a pretty nasty flu that has had me laid out for the last 4 days. I’m really not looking forward to going back to work in the morning. Let’s see - not sure where to even start. My life of late has been pretty work intensive, most of it pretty stressful and anxiety inducing, which I either need to figure out how to deal with or make some moves in a different direction work-wise. I’ve told myself I’m giving it at least a year, though that seems very manageable or very daunting depending on the day. Week before last, I did get to go to Chicago for work, which was actually great (if a little confusing*). My mom and her partner Susan drove from Iowa to meet me there for the weekend, so we got to wander the city, going to museums and going out for dinner and such. Chicago was cold as hell (when frozen) but it was great to visit anyway. It was also my mom’s birthday so that worked out really well. I just got a new camera (a Canon digital rebel) so I took a ton of pictures, though I keep getting thwarted trying to get a copy of photoshop so I can edit and post them. Soon.

*Being in Chicago on business was sort of like inhabiting an alternate reality where my all of a sudden, I’m living somebody else’s life (and you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house…. how did I get here?). I had a few moments of disbelief that somehow, this is now something I do. I’m still very unsure about it, and it throws me pretty regularly.

My step-mother Sallie is finally back home in Missoula after a 7 week hospital stay. My dad lived out of a hotel that whole time. Nobody was expecting it to take that long, but she seems to be doing well and is steadily improving. I’ll be seeing her in a little over a month, when I go back home for my sister’s baby shower, and apparently, an Elton John concert (Sallie is pretty much the world’s biggest Elton John fan). My sister seems to be settling into her life in Missoula incredibly well. She has taken over the family store, is having a kid, has a boyfriend that people actually like, and just seems to be maturing on a lot of levels, which makes me happy. She turned a year older yesterday

Music has been a little slow lately. I have been otherwise engaged most of my evenings and the weekends seem to go by with only a couple hours spent on it, though hopefully that will free up a bit soon. I’m trying to only make big plans one out of every four weekends of the month. I have a trip to Mt. Bachelor coming up to go snowboarding with a bunch of friends, I’ll be going to Montana for the baby-shower, and Ariel and I have a couple of other trips in the work, but for those other weekends I’m planning on making as much of a racket as possible (a beautiful racket that is).