Sick

I have been really sick. Coughing and hacking so violently that my stomach and back muscles are remembering times when hard labor was the way I made my money. It has been two weeks and I have finally decided to give in and go to a doctor. I've tried all the herbs, tinctures, steam baths, hot water bottles, vitamins and anything else I could think of to knock this cough out of my body. Nothing has worked.

I'm going to California in a week to take a permaculture design course north of San Francisco, to visit friends and to get a much needed break from Ohio in winter. I'm really looking forward to all three.

Since I last wrote, I have moved into a little apartment in Athens and have been religiously going through all my stuff and getting rid of excess weight -- emotional and physical. it's been really gratifying to see the trash pile growing as I purge my life of the dead weight of so much stuff. Most of my stuff is just ridiculous -- old articles from my college days, 25 copies of all the papers I wrote for my creative writing workshops, old notebooks -- so much paper! In looking through all this stuff again after many years, I realize that the things I know, I already know. I don't have to save all the pieces of the picture that helped me create the person I am today.

Of all the pieces of paper, I am saving only the words I have written -- papers, journals, the stories I have told myself about who I am, what the world means, where I want to go. I imagine my grandchildren's grandchildren discovering the words someday and piecing together the stories of a life lived. I wish I could find some words written by my great-grandmother Carmella who is said to have killed the man who killed her husband -- stabbing him with a kitchen knife in the back as he ran away. There are also stories of her following her husband to work every day dressed as a man, packing a gun, protecting him from some unknown danger sensed in the streets in turn of the century Dayton, Ohio. What I wouldn't give to hear some stories of her life. The love she felt for her first husband Domenico. Supposedly they both worked in the palace of the Italian king until he was overthrown and they had to leave the country.

Anyway, I have decided to let myself sit with my heart for the next 6 months in Athens. Too much of my life for the past several years has been lived in fear and anxiety -- always worrying about each choice, paralyzed by my opportunities, always trying to fulfill someone else's needs while my own wither away and die. This is a pattern I have known for much of my life, that I felt I was really overcoming 3-4 years ago and which I have fallen back into as a result of family trauma and the complete restructuring of my emotional foundation. Sitting with my heart, I can learn to hear it again, to trust it again. I can remember that it is much more frightening to not follow your heart than it ever could be to follow it.

I never thought I would be here now. I thought I would be beyond all this navel-gazing emotional trauma. I'm not. I'm right here. This is my life. I'm living it in the only way I know how.