Coffee Beans and Gratitude.

I saw my sisters last weekend and as I was driving home, I felt a transcendent joy settle around my shoulders like the mink mantle my aunt just granted me that was my great grandmother’s. I was grateful to realize that it hadn’t been long since I’d felt such happiness, screaming songs and dancing rambunctiously with Milla in my car only two weeks ago on my birthday.

Then I realized, shoot! I never wrote about the awesome day that was my birthday.

So, Milla and I have been trying to see as much of each other as possible in this, her summer of freedom, before she moves to Colorado. I’m stoked every time we get to hang out because we have a really intense and unique connection that throughout the course of our friendship has been maintained at a distance, which makes getting to see her often a beautiful and intense and appreciated thing. Like a chocolate covered coffee bean. Yeah. Biting into one of those and feeling that shock of flavor and deep appreciation afterwards is as good an analogy as I can think of to describe my time with her.

Anyway, back to my birthday. She came down in the morning after telling me while we were in San Diego the week before that she put aside the entire Saturday for ME, no one else, and that she we were going to do whatever I wanted. So, we shenaniganed. Had an awesome lunch at Martha Green’s, a place I’ve been wanting her to try for awhile…got baby stuff for my cousin’s baby shower later that day…went to said baby shower…then boned out to get me a new tattoo. My artist, Aaron Funk at Tattoo Revolution in Redlands, is normally booked up about three months in advance and yet found the time to fit me in so I could get “so it goes.”, one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes, on my shoulder. We drive down the freeway, and suddenly “Home” by Edward Sharpe is on the stereo and Milla turns to me, massive smile lighting up her face, and says “It’s our song!”

We start singing, rocking our shoulders and leaning toward each other and loudly shouting that home is wherever I’m in love with you.

Florence and the Machine, “Dog Days are Over” comes on next, and immediately the sweet singing of the last song becomes a wild dancing ride, arms flailing and hands clapping and screaming at the top of our lungs that you’d better run for you mother, father, sisters and brothers…to leave all your loving behind because you can’t carry it with you if you want to survive. And there was a joy that I can’t fully describe. Something that hits when you have these moments with your best friends and sisters and foster mothers or are making jam with you ma, where you feel one with everything around you. Your soul expands and you know as surely as you know breath that this is what people work entire lives to feel, ache through trying relationships to know, tithe to churches to understand: you and the universe, you and love are not separate and divisible things. You’re one and the same, have always and will always be one and the same, and the only dividers that make you feel separate are the ones you put there yourself.

I don’t think I’d be able to feel such things if I were surrounded by anything less than the outstanding caliber of people that choose to love me, and damn, aren’t I lucky for it?

Gratitude. Yes, I’ll have a second helping. Thank you.

Fields.

Sometimes I want to drive into the middle of nowhere, sit in the middle of a field, and scream my brains out. Then cry my heart out. Then figure out where I'm going from there.

I wonder if the reason I feel so solitary is because my soul is almost done with this journey, and if I had a kid or a lover I'd be leaving them too early, and the damage done would make me come back again to learn my lesson.

I fake my happiness so much that I don't know when I truly feel it thrumming anymore. I never fake gratitude though. That's a perk.

I want to lie on the grass and look at the sky, all day if I wanted to. I want to go to the beach and put my feet in the ocean and remember why I'm here in the life I've chosen.

I feel a profound sense of guilt about Jim. He seems so sad about us, and I just wanted to go slow. When I saw him rushing and I had to be the one to constantly put on the brakes, a wall started to develop. Absolutes are a scary thing. I can't deal with "always" from the get-go. Unyielding devotion needs to be tempered, like steel, over time. You try to form it too quick and it'll snap in its development.

I think I'll spend the weekend lying in the grass somewhere.

Maybe it'll serve as a reminder on what the journey is about before you end up in the ground.

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." –Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love.

I am full of profound feelings and thoughts right now. I’m in my training to be a Court Appointed Special Advocate, or CASA, and am sitting on a bench next to tee-pees used for camp outs at a mansion in Redlands that is owned by a philanthropic oil entrepreneur dedicated to enriching the lives of underprivileged children.

In training this morning, a social worker who’s been on the job for 26 years, the span of my life (which, trust me, the insinuation was not lost on me) was explaining the sense of loss and mistrust the foster kids we’ll be advocating for are bound to feel, and why. How so few of them succeed in life, or continue in the same cyclical poverty and abuse they were raised in, passing the abuse to the next generation. How we, as CASAs, have the capability to be the factor that changes the course of that child’s life, by simply staying true to our word, by BEING THERE because we care to volunteer our time, not because we’re paid to be there.

As soon as we had a break, I went outside and called Jacque. I wandered up a grassy knoll to a shady spot under an orchid tree and asked her how her leg was doing, found out she went back into the hospital for an infection and deliberately didn’t tell me because she didn’t want to worry me, et cetera. Eventually, I couldn’t hold the fact that I was crying from her anymore, and she fretted. “What’s wrong baby? Why are you crying? You never cry.”

I thanked her. I told her how much I loved her, how people can only achieve as much as they are willing to risk, and I have always been so driven because I knew I always had people who have my back. Jacque, my foster mom, who was there on the nightly basis that the cops told me I had to find a place to sleep or they’d have to remove me from the home, and I knew I could always go there. My aunt, when it was time to take me out of my home for the sake of my own safety and well-being. She took care of me to the best of her abilities, handling a teenage girl, which she’d never raised firsthand, in all of my angst.

My mother was pivotal in loving me from the beginning and establishing the trust I needed to be able to trust the right people later and survive, but ultimately, it has been people who were not obligated to loving or raising me that have helped me be who I am today. Two bachelor degrees, with honors. On my way to grad school. Ambitions of becoming a published writer and a business owner and getting a doctorate.

I feel that becoming a CASA is one of the truest things I have ever done. When I took guardianship of Becca when I was 18 and she became my sister, my family didn’t know what to make of it. Who is this girl that calls herself your sister? Hm? But they grew to understand that my unorthodox upbringing freed me from the standard definition of family, and that I am blessed with the ability to love people like Becca, and Jay, and my Cataldo and Thompson and Foster families as if they’ve been with me since birth. This is one of my purest strengths, and being able to try and give the support that’s been given to me to a teenager that needs it is a calling to my innermost.

I feel a new drive. New goals developing. Becoming a foster parent isn’t an ambiguous goal that lives somewhere in my future. I will be a CASA until my life is together enough to foster a teen, but my goal is within the next five years.

I had a waiter tell me last night that I’m enigmatic. One of those perpetually unattainable women, that look lovely and engaging but always separate, unapproachable, because I am too far away. I smiled at him, laughing and asking if this was him trying to be slick and “attain” me. But he blushed and said, no, I just wanted to tell you. And I felt that a divine power had spoken afterward when I recounted it to Milla. Sometimes, driven people just need to be solo forces. I can’t imagine how a partner would enrich my life at this point. All of my relationships lately have been juvenile, wrought with miscommunication and ultimately wastes of my time and energy. I don’t have a lot of time in this life, and I have a lot I need to do, so staying focused on the goals ahead are quickly diminishing the societal standard of husband and marriage that have consumed so much of my last 2 years.

I feel pretty done with that chapter. I’m on to the new, the paying forward of what was so freely given to me my whole life, to living a life worth having, and fighting for, and being deeply satisfied with.

Needless to say, this whole week since my birthday has been a growing revelation. I feel very connected to my soul, which in turn makes me feel acutely connected to the ones I love, including God. I imagine heaven will be a swirling love-energy mass where what I feel for them is tangible and visible in the matter that makes up the universe.

My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love. But that’s okay. In my heart of hearts, they’re swirling with me all the time.