For Christmas, Bradford bought me gift cards to spend at The Gap (or one of its affiliated stores) mostly because the state of my underwear is, well, let's just say is thin. I laughed when I was in Portugal, hanging my clean laundry out to dry because, if the sun was shining just right, I could make out the shapes of things on the other side of my suspended panties. Anything too athletic and my underwear just headed south, the elasticity to support the waistband long gone. But I digress.
As I was driving through a small, New Hampshire town between home and the site of the nearest Gap, I was remarking with sadness on the state of some communities in this part of the country -
this once proud site of business, trade, industry, and commercial activity, looked desperate and abandoned. I then thought about how the face of my counseling clients has changed over the years. When I lived in Boulder, Colorado (surely voted at one time or another the city with the most gorgeous people on the planet) I worked at Monarch and my clients were affluent. While their issues and stories were no less painful, they were buffered by their financial solidity, able to pay $400 a day for help.
Mostly, the clients I get to sit with today just don't fit into 'pretty' - I sit with many people who live in the outlying areas of the American Dream. Not so gorgeous. Not so wealthy. Not so fit. Not so likely to be portrayed as a success. I was thinking of the stories I gather in a given week and some of them are edgey. I hear things that cause me to take a breath and swallow a bitter taste of judgment which rises in my throat. I notice harsh thoughts sometimes - how did you let yourself get to this point? why don't you do something to 'better' yourself and your life, your children's lives? why not get with the program and get on the conformity lifeboat with the rest of us?
At times I feel myself wincing. Underneath these experiences is a basic feeling of dread - fear of falling off the lifeboat, fear of losing my marbles, fear of being pushed to the margins and scorned. I think many people want to surround themselves with 'pretty' because it quells our inner disturbance that we might be 'not quite right.' Or maybe some of us like to 'help' those who are not-so-beautiful because we are reassured that we're okay ourselves. Who knows? Those answers live in the stillness and not too many of us touch into the stillness that holds our lives.
Driving through this one town, I noticed a strange figure in the distance, off to my left. Two people, one who caused my eyes to blink and re-focus. This figure was shrouded in a dark, hooded cape - the hood was peaked and, even with my refocusing attempt at clarity, I had the sense I was looking at the back of a character from Lord of the Rings. Driving by I wanted to look more closely, see the face and body of the soul in this strange, cloaking garment. And there it was, but too outside my realm of familiar - with a head too large for its body and a nose too large for its face. I use "it" because I don't know if I was seeing a female or a male. I type, ashamed but feeling a drive towards honesty and realness. I was simultaneously wanting a closer look and needing to turn away, repulsed, scared.
Traffic moved me forward and away. I realized that I didn't even see the second person other than registering them as a female. I was drawn into trying to understand what I had glimpsed: a birth defect? a disease of some sort? And then I began thinking about what it would be like to walk through the world with such an undisguisable deviation from familiar. What is it like to be so obviously far from normal? I noticed that I wanted more and yet I was terrified. I was both acutely attracted to and frightened of what this being evoked in me and what she or he carried for most of us. I wondered about the sharply-peaked cape and the magic and mystery wrapped therein.
And I continued with the movements of people in traffic with somewhere to go, myself on my way to The Gap.
As I was driving through a small, New Hampshire town between home and the site of the nearest Gap, I was remarking with sadness on the state of some communities in this part of the country -
this once proud site of business, trade, industry, and commercial activity, looked desperate and abandoned. I then thought about how the face of my counseling clients has changed over the years. When I lived in Boulder, Colorado (surely voted at one time or another the city with the most gorgeous people on the planet) I worked at Monarch and my clients were affluent. While their issues and stories were no less painful, they were buffered by their financial solidity, able to pay $400 a day for help. Mostly, the clients I get to sit with today just don't fit into 'pretty' - I sit with many people who live in the outlying areas of the American Dream. Not so gorgeous. Not so wealthy. Not so fit. Not so likely to be portrayed as a success. I was thinking of the stories I gather in a given week and some of them are edgey. I hear things that cause me to take a breath and swallow a bitter taste of judgment which rises in my throat. I notice harsh thoughts sometimes - how did you let yourself get to this point? why don't you do something to 'better' yourself and your life, your children's lives? why not get with the program and get on the conformity lifeboat with the rest of us?
At times I feel myself wincing. Underneath these experiences is a basic feeling of dread - fear of falling off the lifeboat, fear of losing my marbles, fear of being pushed to the margins and scorned. I think many people want to surround themselves with 'pretty' because it quells our inner disturbance that we might be 'not quite right.' Or maybe some of us like to 'help' those who are not-so-beautiful because we are reassured that we're okay ourselves. Who knows? Those answers live in the stillness and not too many of us touch into the stillness that holds our lives.
Driving through this one town, I noticed a strange figure in the distance, off to my left. Two people, one who caused my eyes to blink and re-focus. This figure was shrouded in a dark, hooded cape - the hood was peaked and, even with my refocusing attempt at clarity, I had the sense I was looking at the back of a character from Lord of the Rings. Driving by I wanted to look more closely, see the face and body of the soul in this strange, cloaking garment. And there it was, but too outside my realm of familiar - with a head too large for its body and a nose too large for its face. I use "it" because I don't know if I was seeing a female or a male. I type, ashamed but feeling a drive towards honesty and realness. I was simultaneously wanting a closer look and needing to turn away, repulsed, scared.
Traffic moved me forward and away. I realized that I didn't even see the second person other than registering them as a female. I was drawn into trying to understand what I had glimpsed: a birth defect? a disease of some sort? And then I began thinking about what it would be like to walk through the world with such an undisguisable deviation from familiar. What is it like to be so obviously far from normal? I noticed that I wanted more and yet I was terrified. I was both acutely attracted to and frightened of what this being evoked in me and what she or he carried for most of us. I wondered about the sharply-peaked cape and the magic and mystery wrapped therein.
And I continued with the movements of people in traffic with somewhere to go, myself on my way to The Gap.
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