On Becoming a Super - Part 1
February 29, 2020

     My son is obsessed with Spiderman.  His third birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and he's been reminding us daily for several weeks now that (1) he is Spiderman, (2) he wants a Spiderman cake, and (3) he wants some tools so he can help Daddy with projects around the farm.  Okay, so the third one is not really related to Spiderman, as far as I can tell, but you can see how the kid's mind works.  At this point, he's started running both my husband and me (and sometimes my mom or dad, and anyone else who will listen) through a shorthand drill about what he expects for his upcoming big day: he faces us squarely, cocks his head to one side, points his finger and says, "Spiderman, tools" – as if he's reminding a miniature, imaginary spouse of the two things he needs from the grocery store.  This will be a fun birthday for him.

     Before he landed on Spiderman, Koen was telling us for weeks that he was "a Thuper" – meaning he was a Super, a la The Incredibles.  Now he can actually say the "hero" part too (though still with some difficulty), but before he just left it at "Thuper," raising one fist straight up in the air to make sure we got the point.  And he found a ready audience for his regular self-pronouncements.  I happily assured him, both before and after he became Spiderman, "Yes, Bubba, you are a Super!"

     It's pretty easy for a boy in our culture to find himself in a swirl of superhero air, so I think Koen has picked some of this up from beyond our home.   But my oldest daughter, Emma, has been watching a lot of superhero movies lately – more than her usual fare – so Koen has gotten some reinforcement from that, I'm sure.  In fact, I can trace the switch from generic "Thuper" to "Spiderman" to my husband's recording of the latest Spiderman movie for Emma earlier this month.  And while we limit Emma's TV time, she's still probably watched the movie three times in the last few weeks, and the younger kids naturally watch it with her (though they usually don't sit through the whole thing, thank goodness).  She's used up most of her TV credits on that and a spate of other movies in the superhero genre, including a few featuring girls and women as the superheroes.  

      So I've indulged her in this, yes, but it's also given me occasion to think about superhero stories in a new light – new to me, anyway (they're actually ancient, archetypal).  Now that I've considered them, I see that superhero stories are not just mindless cultural garbage, an excuse for Hollywood to get a lot of BANG! and BOOM! on the screen and at the box office.  Okay, maybe some of them are mostly just about BANG! and BOOM! and ticket sales.  But some of them – especially the ones that weren't giant box office hits – are really well done, depicting unlikely heroes stumbling upon and then growing into their superpowers and developing them to fight the villains and evildoers.

    I like the way the main character in Monsters Versus Aliens – a young woman whose entire existence, at the beginning of the story, revolves around her arrogant and self-centered fianceˊ – grows, very literally, into a larger-than-life figure who takes on the alien (and his clones) threatening to take over Earth.  She defeats the evil alien with help from her small army of misfit "monsters" and then turns around and dumps that arrogant, self-centered fianceˊ.  I also like the way the little cyborg girl with a human brain in Alita Battle Angel develops her physical powers in order to recover her forgotten past and prepare herself to take on the cruel overlord of her society.  It didn't hurt that when I asked Emma why she liked this movie so much, she answered, "It shows how girls can become strong and beat the bad guys," and then proceeded to practice some martial arts moves. 

     Yes, Baby.  They can.  They can, indeed.      

All Shit and No Ponies: The Test of Real Magic
February 28, 2020

     Let me be clear: there is no "bright side" to the Holocaust.  There is no "upside" to rape.  There is no "silver lining" to child sex trafficking, the Soviet Gulags, or the mass murders of children at Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.  If you have two children, and one of them was killed in the 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, your glass is not "half full." 

     You might be able to rescue something from these atrocities, and others like them.  You might, somehow, by grace or by luck, manage to come away with your life and some dim glimmer of hope or some tiny spark of moral courage with which to rebuild your life, with which to receive again the good that life can offer.  You might be able to take your experience of evil and transform it into a force for good, into a force for hope, into a force for combating the very evil you have lived through, and others like it.  You might, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, write The Gulag Archipelago, to give the world a true account of the evil you have been subjected to, and perhaps, thereby, give it a few resources with which to fight such evil in the future.  You might, like Dudley Randall, forever memorialize, in a poem, a mother's grief at the loss of her young child in that 1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and perhaps, thereby, lay bare the sins of Jim Crow before the conscience of a nation, in the hope of redeeming that nation from its long history of sins.

     You might.

     But let me be clear: if you do this, if you somehow manage, by grace or by luck, to wrestle some good back out of the jaws of evil, or if you preserve one child's sense of wonder at life, and his basic sense of trust, in the midst of utter depravity and hatred, you are not making lemonade out of lemons.  There is no pony in that shit.  You are making something good in spite of evil, not because of it.

     You are doing something far more noble and far more necessary than seeing the bright side of a situation.  You are practicing the real magic, the magic borne of the truth – the kind of truth that sets you and others free for this purpose:  to fight the very real evil that is afoot in the world.

      Don't get me wrong.  As I said, I love me some lemonade.  And I love me some ponies, both real and metaphorical.  And when that hurricane or that flood rolls in and rolls back out, you can bet I'm gonna call up the damned cavalry, load them ponies down with sugar or honey, and set up an army of lemonade stands in the wake of disaster.  I can make lemonade outta that shit with the best of 'em.  And you can too.

     And we should.  We should practice alleviation of suffering wherever we find it, whatever its source.  We should practice bringing people together, and we should celebrate our fundamental interdependence on one another – an interdependence that we so easily forget until a natural disaster rolls in and rolls back out.  And we have that hurricane or that flood to thank for reminding us of this truth about ourselves.
     
     But this is not the real magic.  It is magical, no doubt.  It partakes of magic.  But the test of real magic is not whether we can withstand the tempests that nature, entropy, and chance throw at us.  No.  The test of real magic is whether we can speak and follow and fight for the truth when the forces of evil within and around us array themselves against the truth.

     Roberto Benigni understood this.  So he told us a true story – a story that revealed truth – about a father who saves his son's life by empowering him with a magical story.  That's the real magic.  Abracadabra!

A Story of Magic
February 27, 2020

     You know who understands the real magic?  Roberto Benigni.

     * * *

   I saw Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning film Life Is Beautiful in the theater (before it won its Oscars) and wept.  No, I mean sobbed.  Giant, audible, messy, whole-body-heaving cries, in the theater.  And I wasn't the only one.

    It was early 1999, which happened to be the middle of my sophomore year of college.  It was the first year that my roommate, Carrie, and I tried to see all the films that were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards for the year, plus maybe a few more that struck our fancy.  The Oscars would be held in March that year, so we crammed in as many as we reasonably could on our shoestring budgets between the time the nominations were announced and the awards show aired.  So Life is Beautiful was on our list.

    The film tells the story of a Jewish-Italian father who keeps his young son alive through their internment in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II by weaving an elaborate tale about their circumstances.  I would not say that he lies to his son – lying implies deceit, and there is not a shred of deceit, not one drop of guile, in the father's character, who is played by Benigni himself.  (Benigni co-wrote the screenplay and directed the film, in addition to playing the father.)  Rather, because the child is so young – no more than five or six years old, at most, when they are interned (and separated from the child's mother, who is placed in the women's area of the camp) – the father tells the boy that they have been chosen to play a complex game in which they can earn points by doing various strange and uncomfortable tasks.  The players with the most points at the end of the game, he explains, will win a military tank.  The son is excited to play, and obediently follows his father's every instruction, completely trusting him even in the most difficult situations. 

   The film follows the father-son duo through a series of close scrapes and near misses that demonstrate the father's unflagging efforts to preserve the innocence of his son's childhood in the face of the darkest evil.  If the father is grief-stricken and terrified at their circumstances, he never betrays that to his son.  The father clearly understands that torture and death are probable, perhaps even imminent.  Yet he also understands that the Nazis could kill his son's spirit even if he somehow managed to survive the death camp.  So the father keeps up the game-story with his son, as a long-shot strategy to save both the boy's body and his soul, whole, intact, and integrated. 

    When word eventually arrives that the Allies are coming to liberate the camp, the father knows what this means:  that all the remaining prisoners will be murdered.  So he gives his son his sternest, most absolute instruction of the entire "game": he must stay in a box that the father puts him in and remain perfectly silent and still, no matter what, until his tank arrives.  They are very close to winning, the father tells him, and this is the last task he must perform in order to win, but he must do it noiselessly and without moving at all.

    If you haven't seen the film yet, I won't give away the ending other than to say, (1) the Allies do arrive, and (2) giant, audible, messy, whole-body-heaving cries, in the theater.

     It was magical sobbing, but sobbing nonetheless.   

     Oh, and did I mention, the film is subtitled?  I watched the whole thing in Italian, with the English subtitles trotting along at the bottom of the screen.  It didn't make the slightest bit of difference.  At some point in the film, I forgot it was in Italian and that the subtitles were even there. 

    Life Is Beautiful did not win Best Picture that year – although it did win the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score.  Also, Roberto Benigni himself took home the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in the film, and his acceptance speech – including the way  he bounded to the stage like a happy lamb – was a feat of pure magic in its own right.  His wild, childlike joy will restore your faith in humanity, so you should find that on the Interwebs and watch it too.  

    When people ask me today what my favorite movie is, I always tell them that Life Is Beautiful is the most hopeful story of real magic that I've ever encountered.  More on that tomorrow.

In Search of the Real Magic
February 26, 2020

     So if you were inclined toward a somewhat cynical turn of mind, your response to my Smokey-the-pony story might run something like, Sure, I'd be a "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal" too, if I got the friggin' flesh-and-blood pony for Christmas.   Such a reaction would miss the point, of course.  Furthermore, and perhaps somewhat ironically, it would miss the point in much the same way that people inclined to more lemons-to-lemonade casts of mind often miss the potential danger lurking in their sunny mental default mode.

     Don't get me wrong: I love me some positive people.  I love me some lemonade.  And I love me some ponies, both real and metaphorical.  People who look for the bright side of things are my people, my tribe.  They're easy to be around, easy to work with, easy to love.  They can perform minor miracles, by turning negatives into positives.  Rain on my outdoor wedding reception?  Fine, we'll all join in a chorus of "Singin' in the Rain " and dance our hearts out in the downpour.  Flat tire on the van this morning?  It was overdue for an alignment check and oil change anyway, so now I get to knock those things off the to-do list.  Out of black tea this morning?  I need to cut back on caffeine anyway, so here's my chance to jump start that effort.

     Okay, so I might actually be a little upset – sad, really –  if I ran out of my English breakfast tea with honey on any given morning.  It's my crutch.  It's my fuel.  It's how I can imagine how difficult it must be to break addictions to harder drugs.  If the thought of giving up my daily three-cups-of-tea makes me this sad (and sends me searching for the Tylenol, for when the headache kicks in later), then I have some inkling of the addict's struggle, and thus some basis, however small, for sympathy with their plight.

     Stop.  That's the move.  That, right there.  Did you see what I just did?  That's how it happens.  That's the mental slight of hand.  Did you see how I turned my negative into a positive?  Did you see how I re-imagined – or perhaps rationalized – my caffeine addiction by re-casting it as a way of understanding the struggles of those addicted to more problematic substances?  

     Now, here's the thing: maybe that's a legitimate move and maybe it's not.  I can hear what feels to me like a legitimate criticism: You don't know jack-shit about addiction, girly, so you can take your tea and sympathy, and your Tylenol, and your mildly narcissistic trivialization of other people's struggles, and stuff it.  

     Point taken.
          
    Here's what I'm getting at: the problem with an unexamined "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal" mode – my natural default mode – is that you risk blinding yourself to real problems in the world, including problems within yourself, which often arise from patterns of pain avoidance, and also (perhaps especially) problems that arise from active malevolence, from evil.  And blinding yourself to such problems leaves you ill-equipped to confront them.  You cannot combat the evil that you refuse to see.  It's one thing to transform or transmute a problem, creatively leveraging it, elevating it as an impetus to find and form a real solution.  But to do that, you have to squarely face the problem, you have to actually understand it on its own terms first.  Anything less than that is merely commuting the problem to another form without really addressing it.  Anything less than that is just slight of hand. It's not real magic.

     But I want the real magic.

Magical Wisdom: A Christmas Story
 February 25, 2020

    I don't remember many details from that Christmas.  I can reconstruct some of them from Mom's telling of the story, and from the few pictures we have.  My grandmother, Madeline, my dad's mother, is in the pictures, so she must have flown in from northern California.  And I know my dad's brother, Beau, was there with his wife, Linda, and their infant daughter, Amanda – because Mom always mentions how it was Beau who helped her figure out how to put Smokey's cart harness on him for the first time that Christmas morning.  She says they laid the harness pieces out on the ground to try to puzzle out how they should go on Smokey, and then how they should attach to the cart itself.  She always says there was some latch or strap or hook she forgot to fasten somewhere and how it was a good thing we didn't have a minor accident.

    I don't remember any other presents I got that Christmas, or when we opened them, or when or whether we had a big Christmas dinner at some point that day.  I don't even remember my mom and Beau slipping away and being strangely absent for a while.  They must have given us some reason for why they were leaving, but I don't remember being suspicious.  Maybe I was occupied with some of my new Christmas loot.

    Someone must have told me at some point to get warm clothes on and put on my coat and go outside.  It must have been pretty cold that morning, because we're all bundled pretty heavily in the pictures.  And it must have been at least mid- to late-morning by this time because the sun is high and bright. 

    The moment my memory kicks in is when I'm walking around the side of the house, and I glimpse my mom coming up the road in front of our house in the little red cart, pulled by Smokey.  She's still a good hundred yards off at least – far enough away that there was enough time for that image to imprint itself deeply on my six-year-old brain.  I was getting a pony for Christmas!  And there he was, trotting up the road with my mom in tow.  

    We took rides around the neighborhood (we lived on the edge of town, but definitely in town).  Reed and I were both small enough that we could squeeze together in the cart with Mom.  Someone took pictures.  We showed Smokey and the cart off to our neighbor lady, Lucille.  It was cold.  Smokey's full winter Shetland coat had grown in thick and shaggy already.  He looked like an oddly shaped, overgrown Pyrenees.  

     It was magical.  

     And it was that magic, largely, that carried me through childhood.

    My parents would separate not long after this Christmas, and they officially divorced a few years later.  It was necessary, and probably the best thing for everyone involved.  But it meant that  my mom would raise my brother and me alone.  My dad had things to sort through and would not be able to help us financially for many years to come, more than a decade, in fact.  So growing up on a single teacher's salary was tough.  We turned the heat way down in the winter and opened up the windows in summer instead of running the air conditioner.  There were times toward the end of a month when we had to get creative about meals, because Mom wouldn't get paid for another week (teachers only got paid once a month), so we couldn't go to the grocery store for that week. We ate a lot of hot dogs, peanut butter, and fish sticks.  

    Most other parents would have sold or given away the pony under these circumstances.  That would have been a rational and prudent thing to do.  Everyone would have understood a move like that.  In fact, I think some people counseled my mom to do just that.  And she may have even considered it, in some of the hardest spells.  But in the end, she was having none of that nonsense. 

    You see, my mom is a magical thinker – in the best sense of that phrase.  And she is also stubbornly persistent.  Those are two of her most fundamental characteristics: she stubbornly persists in thinking with and about the magic of childhood – her own, mine, that of her music students.  And now she is working her magic with my kids as well.

     You see, she, too, is a "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal."  There's no doubt that's who I got it from.  And you can bet no self-respecting "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal" is ever gonna get rid of the pony once she's found him. 

     And it's a good thing she didn't.  Though she probably wouldn't have articulated it quite like this (or at all) at the time, she seems to have intuited that I would need some magic to get me through to adulthood.  And Smokey the pony was just the beginning.  By the time I was in fifth grade, I had outgrown Smokey, so Mom bought me a full-sized horse, an Arabian gelding named Shzad, who had been trained as a cattle horse and became my best friend.  "Shazzy," I called him. I made that horse do everything under the sun.  And a little over a year later, when I wanted to expand my range at the saddle club horse shows, Mom bought me another Arabian, this time a red chestnut mare with flaxen mane and tail named Jayya Jamana.

    In some sense, we had no business foolin' around with these horses.  They were a financial drain on an already financially tenuous household.  They meant there were a lot of other things my brother and I would go without.  They meant a lot of hot dogs, peanut butter, and fish sticks. 

    But they also kept me sane, focused, grounded, both in touch and in love with the physical world.  I would spend much of the next decade and a half of my life with those horses: the weekly riding lessons and monthly horse shows eventually turned into teaching riding lessons and leading trail rides at the summer camp where I worked until I was 21.  They meant summers spent not only mucking stalls, but also cleaning out the water troughs and then using them as substitute swimming pools.  They meant winter mornings chopping ice and freezing fingers and toes riding in the annual Christmas parade downtown.  They meant long solo training rides with Shzad in my teenage years under a rising full moon in the back pasture at Fullerton's Farm, where we boarded the horses less than a half mile from our house.  They meant bareback sprints across the north pasture that nearly gave my mother a heart attack.  They meant a trip to wine country in northern California when I was fourteen, for a few lessons with French dressage master, Dominique Barbier, whose barn was nestled in the middle of his vineyard, and who set me on one of his elegant Andalusians, and that's how I learned that riding a horse could be like conducting the gathering of a storm. 

    It might not have been a rational move on my mother's part, or a prudent one.  But it was how she made space for magic in my childhood.  It was how she, against the clamoring voices of reason and financial responsibility, preserved the possibility for magic to bubble up and pop! into my life at unexpected times and in unexpected places.  It might not have been a rational or prudent move, but this magic-making was wise.  

    And it all started with that little white pony trotting up the road toward me with his little red cart on that cold Christmas morning.  Abracadabra!

Smokey the Pony:  An Origin Story
February 24, 2020

     In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention here that I actually got a pony when I was a kid.  For Christmas.  When I was six.  And I did not have to dig through manure in my bedroom to find him.  (Feel free to hate me a little right now.  I get it.)

 * * *

     His name was Smokey.  He was a little white Shetland pony whose gray legs faded in color up toward his barrel (the equine equivalent of a torso) like wisps of smoke.  Or, at least they did until they faded to white altogether.  He was one of those white ponies that was born black and faded to white by about age five, like a miniature Lipizzaner.  And it was a darn good thing he was not an actual Lipizzaner, because he was a mean little cuss who liked to nip.  Got my brother on the butt when my brother was about four years old, and that was the end of horsin' around for Reed.  Somebody would have lost a chunk of flesh or a digit or two if Smokey had been a full-sized horse.

    Penchant for biting notwithstanding, Smokey was a dream come true.  For me, yes – no more riding the dog around in the backyard.  But even more so for my mother.  A whiff of little-girl horse craziness in me was all it took for her to decide it was time to fulfill her own childhood dream of having a horse.  She was raised in central Missouri, in an area known for its beautiful Saddlebred show horses.  Saddlebreds are those tall, elegant horses known – at one time, at least – for their flashy, high-steppin' gait between a walk and a trot, which made for an incredibly smooth ride (albeit somewhat artifically induced – the conventional training techniques could be quite brutal and likely wouldn't pass a test of humaneness today).  They were originally bred as war horses for generals and other high-ranking military officials who, in pre-Civil War days, needed  horses whose gait made long weeks or months in the saddle a bit more tolerable, and whose presence also exuded pure pomp-and-circumstance.  In the decades after the Civil War, the horses became a form of American bling, especially as horses generally became less a necessity and more a luxury in the early decades of the 20th century, and horse shows became a thing.  A Saddlebred became the equine equivalent of a Bentley.

  

    And my mother grew up in the heart of Saddlebred country, with a major training barn just blocks from her childhood home in Mexico, Missouri.  Walking back and forth to school everyday, she got to watch all the pretty horses.

    She longed for a horse.  Yearned.  Pined.  Wished.  Dreamed.  She asked her parents for horse.  Begged them for a horse.  Pled, reasoned, and bargained with them for a horse.  Sensible, newly middle-class people, they told her no, and gave her a set of small toy horses when she was in the fifth grade.  She was devastated.

     And she carried that deep disappointment with her for decades, until I came along and proceeded to ride the dog in the backyard. 

     That was all it took.  That was all the prompting she needed to start looking around for a pony for her six-year-old daughter to ride.   

    And that's how (or why) she found Smokey, at the home of an older couple who had purchased him a couple of years earlier for their grandkids, who had promptly lost interest.  I remember when we went to look at him for the first time.  He was still pretty young on that bright fall day in late 1985 – less than five years old – and he bounded up to the gate of his little pasture with a whinny and a buck and a toss of his head.  I was still small enough that I looked up to him a little bit, but he was pretty small himself, about as tall as a large Great Dane.  I was in love.  And for $200.00 – which was pretty steep at that time for my mother, a school teacher – we could have him, plus his little red cart.  He hadn't had much saddle training, but he knew how to pull that little two-person wrought-iron red cart. 

     We didn't leave with Smokey that day.  I don't remember what my mom told me to keep me at bay, but whatever it was, it must have been just the right mix of hint-of-promise and non-committal so as to not give away her plans and still not crush my spirit.  She had work to do to pull this off.

A Loose End
February 23, 2020

    Okay, I know, I know.  I left that "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal" thing just sitting out there without coming back to it.  So here goes:

    It comes from that old joke about the kid who is relentlessly positive – almost pathologically so.  In fact, in the version of the joke that Ronald Reagan used to tell, according to one of his speechwriters, the kid is actually a twin, and their parents take them to a psychologist because the kids are so extreme in their personality types.  One twin is so negative about everything that he bursts out crying when the psychologist fills the kid's bedroom with new toys.  "They're all just going to break!" he wails.  The other twin, by contrast, is so positive about everything that when the psychologist fills this kid's bedroom with horse manure, the kid leaps into the pile enthusiastically and starts digging.  "What on earth are you doing?" the psychologist asks.  Breathless with glee, the kid yells back, flinging dung into the air, "With all this horse shit, there must be a pony in here somewhere!" 

    Now, regardless of one's take on Ronald Reagan's politics – I was too young to have an opinion during his presidency, but my studied assessment now is that much about his politics was misguided – one can nonetheless appreciate that the 40th president was a legendary story-teller.  He knew how to tell a good joke, and he did it with both genuine humanity and keen wit.  I never heard Reagan deliver this particular joke (although I'm sure there are YouTube videos of it out on the Interwebs), and it was probably a full two decades after his presidency before I heard a version of the joke for the first time myself.  But when I did, something clicked in place within me.  I knew I had found my own personal pop culture icon.  I knew I was that kid.  I knew I was a "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal."

    I was also wise enough by that time to know that while I took this as a point of pride, a minor badge of honor (and still do), it is not always a good thing to be a "shit-'n'-pony kinda gal."  While the life-hands-you-lemons-so-make-lemonade mentality is generally laudable, preferable most of the time to less sunny alternatives, there are some situations, some realities, where it just does not work or is straight up inappropriate, perhaps even pathological.  More on that to come.  

Pro Tip:  How We Hit Pay Dirt
February 22, 2020

    I'm also a shit-'n'-pony kinda gal.  By which I mean, I'm an optimist – the sometimes (always?) annoying, half-glass-full, Pollyanna kind.  Full-blown Olaf.  I can find the bright side of the underside of a rock.  I can tell you why the dog peeing on the floor is "actually a good thing" ("because I needed to deep clean that area anyway").  I can tell you why losing so much sleep in the first few months of my babies' lives built my character ("Now I sorta understand the training our Navy Seals willingly put themselves through").  I can tell you why chicken shit is pay dirt.

    No, seriously, I can. 

    * * *

    Last year was our first year having a big vegetable garden – or, bigger than anything we'd ever attempted, anyway.  The year before that, in 2018, my dad put in six tomato plants in the front row of the 40'x25' garden plot I tilled up at our place with a roto-tiller.  I added a seventh tomato plant to the row, and it promptly got some kind of rot or fungus and choked.  But those six tomato plants of my dad's produced.  I don't know if it was the epsom salt or the fish and blood meal he used at planting, or the mushroom compost we worked into the soil (or all of the above), but I was still picking a bucket of cherry and grape tomatoes off two of those plants every day in mid-October, right up until the first hard frost.  I couldn't give them away fast enough.  And the large tomato plants produced these luscious, dark, sweet-and-tangy fruits.  I made my first ever batch of tomato sauce from scratch from those tomatoes.  Brad declared it the best he'd ever eaten, and the kids gobbled it down.  I saved the seeds from all of our favorites.

    But we didn't get anything else planted that year besides the tomatoes.  I experienced a retina detachment in my right eye in June that year, and the surgery and recovery from that basically nixed our gardening progress.  And before that, our only experience with vegetable gardening had been three or four potted tomato plants sitting on the back porch of our house outside of Oklahoma City,  which were attacked by hornworms and only produced about five tiny green fruits at the very end of the growing season.  Not exactly what I would call an auspicious start to our gardening story.  

    So 2019 was ambitious for us.  I germinated those saved tomato seeds by the dozens, along with a few additional heirloom varieties that I had ordered the previous fall, plus bell peppers, two varieties of cucumbers, and a spate of herbs: thyme, sage, basil, and mint.  (I bought a rosemary seedling and my spicy oregano plant from the year before came back on its own.)  I gave away most of my seedlings because there were just so many, but we ended up putting in a dozen tomato plants.  We also tried potatoes and garlic for the first time, as well as butternut squash and miniature pumpkins.  The mini-pumpkins were a hit at the kids' schools last fall.

    To say that the garden was successful would be a gross understatement.  We just used up the last of our tomato sauce that we made from our tomatoes last summer a few weeks ago – and it's the end of February.  I can't count the hundreds (thousands?) of fruits that those plants produced, but it was epic.  And we're still eating off of the squash and potatoes.  We got about 60 squash from six plants, and I currently have about a dozen left.  I also have a handful of full garlic bulbs left.  And for the ten pounds of seed potatoes that we planted, we got over 150 pounds of full grown potatoes!  We would have gotten more if I hadn't left half of them in ground about two weeks too long.  I probably threw at least ten or fifteen pounds from that batch straight into the compost pile because they had rotted in the ground.  I still have about 20 pounds of potatoes that we need to finish off in the next few weeks.  

    We shared (and still share) a great deal of this bounty with the chickens.  Chickens are nature's garbage disposals.  (So are pigs, just on a bigger scale.  But as permaculture-homesteader guru Justin Rhodes says, chickens are basically small pigs with feathers who give you eggs instead of bacon.)  If you have chickens, you always have a place for your kitchen scraps and surplus food waste to go.  If you have both chickens and a compost pile, you'll never put organic matter in a landfill again.  There's a pro tip for ya.  Here's another:  Chickens are also great at processing your surplus garden proceeds and converting it into eggs.  So when we were up to our eyeballs in tomatoes last year – or if there were tomatoes or cucumbers or peppers that were damaged or otherwise wonky – we just threw them to the chickens, who gobbled that stuff up with abandon.  It is also convenient that cucumber seeds (and other seeds of plants in the cucurbits family, such as squash, pumpkins, and zucchini) act as a natural de-wormer for chickens, eliminating the need to use synthetically produced chemicals for that purpose.  Pro tip.

   We also moved our chickens to new patches of grass every couple of weeks.  Many modern homesteaders and farmers practicing regenerative agriculture try to move their chickens every day.  But we're not that awesome yet.  Nonetheless, we moved their coops-on-wheels and their light, solar-powered electric fence as often as we could, in order to make sure they had access to fresh grass for beta carotene and fresh bugs . . . for all the good stuff that's in fresh bugs.  Pro tip.  

    Oh, and as you move the chickens across a given space, they poop.  A lot.  And the poop acts as fertilizer for the space – all that nitrogen! – as long as it's not too concentrated (hence, the don't-leave-them-in-one-place-for-very-long practice).  Pro tip.

   So perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised when we found tomato plants growing in the  chickens' wake.  But that's exactly what we found, and surprised we were.  Giddy, in fact.  The chickens had gobbled up all those tomatoes, and then deposited some of the seeds in little, ready-made packages of fertilizer.  And since we had moved the chickens on to fresh ground, the seeds were able to germinate and take root unmolested.  It was late in the growing season by the time they got going, but we actually got a few grape tomatoes off of some of those plants!  (Don't worry, we fed them back to the chickens.)

    Chicken shit.  Pay dirt.  No lie.  

    Pro tip.

Passing My Own Bar & Flying High
February 21, 2020

    But even my winning genetic lottery ticket takes work – real work – to cash in.  It's not like it cashes itself in.  If I have a decent poker hand, I still have to play it – and all the more so if I don't have a decent hand.  Them cards ain't gonna bluff for themselves.  And they ain't gonna fold by themselves neither, if that's the better part of valor in a particular situation.  

    I've got to take control of my game – or at least take as much control of it as I can.  So much is beyond my control, it's true.  But no one really knows where the "I got this" ends and the "it's outta my hands" begins.  There's a potentially vast, foggy gray area in the middle between control and chance, where I'm mostly flying blind.

   And that's where I have to act as if I wield a great deal of control.  That's where, like a commercial airline pilot relying on their minimum 1500 hours of required flight time before flying their first jetful of passengers, I fall back on my preparation.  

 * * *

    My last year of law school, I teamed up with two of my classmates and started studying for the bar exam long before most of our other classmates started.  I planned to take the bar in July of 2010 (following graduation in May), but my friends and I started meeting a couple times a week at the beginning of the spring semester of our last year – so, in January of 2010 – to work on practice questions and discuss answers.

    A little background about the bar exam might be helpful here.  It's a two-day test in most states (although in some states there's a third day as well), and it's only administered twice a year, in July and February.  You take the bar exam for a particular state, but all states administer the test at the same time.  This is because one of the exam days consists entirely of a battery of multiple choice questions that are the same across all states.  In other words, on that one day, every aspiring lawyer, everywhere in the country, answers the very same set of multiple choice questions.  These questions are supposed to reflect knowledge of the broad principles of law that apply anywhere in the U.S.  The other day (or days) of the test is (are) is devoted to a series of essay questions, and in Oklahoma these are state-law specific, which means the universe of material to know should be more limited (in theory).  Plus, the essays are developed and graded by practicing Oklahoma attorneys, who have an interest in making sure there are enough attorneys to handle the public demand for legal service, which usually means they're pretty lenient (in theory).  So it's the multiple choice part of the exam that most people worry about.  It's killer.

    There's a lot riding on the test, obviously, for all recent law grads.  In my case, in January 2010, I had already accepted a job offer at one of the largest and most prestigious firms in the state of Oklahoma, with a six-figure starting salary (quadrupling that of my first teaching salary).  But keeping that job was contingent on passing the bar.  And since Brad and I were financing our professional degrees with student loans (at the price of a decent home, in the Oklahoma housing market), I also knew the payment train would soon be upon us. 

    No pressure.  No pressure at all.

    I was not going to screw up this opportunity.  I had a normal courseload that last semester, plus my ongoing responsibilities as Managing Editor of the school's scholarly legal journal, the Oklahoma Law Review (which effectively constituted a full-time – though unpaid – job in and of itself).  But I was going to make time to start studying for the bar, because I was not going to screw this up.  To the extent that it was within my power, I was not going to get into that bar exam in six months and freak out and fail.  And I knew it could happen.  Before law school, I had never had test anxiety, but law school exams were different, and I had whiffed just enough of them to know what it was like to freeze up and perform poorly.  And there was just too much riding on this one crazy test to let that happen.  

   I knew I needed to be prepared enough to open that multiple choice test booklet on multi-state day and not be overwhelmed with nerves.  I knew I needed to be familiar with the style and format of the questions.  I knew I needed to understand the standard gimmes and gotchas.  I knew I needed to know, as much as possible, what was coming.

    And so I studied.  I studied my ass off.  And went to class.  And managed the law review.  My two friends and I met once or twice a week that whole spring semester to work and discuss our multiple choice practice sets.  And then, right after graduation (law school graduation is kind of cruel, by the way – what, with the bar exam still two and a half months off), I turned right around and started the formal bar prep course, which consisted of about four weeks of three- to four-hour daily training sessions, four or five days a week.  Plus, I started independently doing at least one, one-hour multiple choice practice test a day, every day, with another hour to review the answer explanations afterward.  Oh, and I was still working on law review editing that summer, for at least another three to four hours a day. 

    It was like training for a marathon.  It was grueling.  

   All told, I calculated later, I spent about 500 hours studying for that two-day bar exam.  That might not be the 1500 flight hours that a commercial airline pilot has to log before his first passenger flight, but it is a ridiculous amount of time.  In some sense, I waaaaaaaayyyyyy overshot what was necessary to pass.  But my nerves stayed within manageable limits when it was show time, and those crazy multiple choice questions felt like familiar territory.  That was the bar I needed to pass.  That was the fog I needed to fly through.

    And I passed.  With flying colors.

The Upside of (Not) Winning the Lottery
February 20, 2020

    I'm a junkie for the upside of a learning curve.

    When I was in college, and for a while afterward, if I got that question, "What would you do if you won the lottery?" I knew my answer.  I'd stay in school.  I'd become a sort of academic Peter Pan, earning serial bachelor's or master's degrees – not for any particular purpose, no long-term plan to become a professor or to ever use my garland of degrees for anything.  Just for the pure, unadulterated joy of learning.

    You see, I'm a junkie for the upside of a learning curve.  (Did I also mention I'm a nerd and a bookworm?)
      
    So fast forward 15 or 20 years, and my answer to the what-would-you-do-if-you-won-the-lottery question is a little different now – though perhaps no less bizarre: I would go into full-time farming, and I'd start an organization to launch a new generation of innovative, earth-conscious farmers.  That too would make for a lifetime riding the upside of a learning curve.  But that's another story, for another day.

    For today, the story is about how I got my old lottery wish, but by slightly different means, and with arguably better results.  You see, I had already won a lottery – the genetic lottery, by which I had a few spare IQ points lying around.  (That's not bragging because I didn't earn those IQ points; you can't brag about what you didn't earn.)  And I found out that my lack of spare cash to fund a life as a perpetual university student need not put a damper on my love of learning.  I learned, in fact, that someone, lots of someones, would actually pay me to learn stuff for them, and – bonus! – what I learned made a practical difference in the world.  It's debatable whether that practical difference was/is always positive, but it no doubt makes a difference.

    You see, that's an attorney's job: first you learn a bunch of basic rules and principles in law school, plus how to use various research tools to learn all the rules and principles that you didn't learn in law school (or that you forgot by the time you need them – which is most of them).  Then, when you get out into practice and you have a client, you learn as much as you can about the client's circumstances – which often involves learning a great deal about the client's business or industry and the broader social and economic factors and forces that shape or constrain the client's circumstances.  Then, you have to use the rules and principles of law that you've learned and researched to figure out how to help the client solve whatever problem they're facing – or at least as much of that problem as can be solved through the machinery of the law (which is usually not all of the problem).  

    Each case thus becomes like a complete college course.  Do a few cases of a similar type, and all of a sudden you're building the kind of expertise that is supposed to be captured in a college "major".  Practice in a variety of areas, and it's like a broad degree program – or several at once.  Who knew, back when I was pining to stay in the womb of academia, that I would get to learn loads about healthcare and insurance, when hospitals and insurance companies became my core clients at the law firm in Oklahoma City?  I had no way of anticipating, back then, that I would someday become fascinated (and somewhat disturbed) by real estate title,  pipeline contruction, eminent domain, and bank lending regulations, by doing work for oil and gas companies and banks foreclosing mortgages.  I didn't realize the deep dive I would get to take into the history of Native American tribes in this country, particularly the history that led to the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, when I started helping tribes protect their revenue sources, improve their social services, and promote policies of cultural reclamation.  And I had no idea what a privilege it would be to help my community advance by reviewing contracts for the City Council, and to walk families in my area through the legal and financial issues associated with planning for death or dealing with the death of a loved one.

    What I didn't know then, but understand pretty intimately now, is that practicing law is basically the poor man's (or middle-class girl's) ticket to staying in school forever, to riding the upside of that learning curve for the rest of my days, to feeding an addiction to learning.  Lucky me. 

Prepper Life: Just Start
February 19, 2020

    Prepare mightily.  Prepare with pizazz.  Prepare as if your life depended on it.  (It does.)  Prepare for doomsday, if you must.  But while you're at it, you might as well prepare for the life you want.  You can't know whether you'll get that life, but you can know this: you won't get it if you don't prepare for it.  

    Take a lesson from quantum physics: observation of a phenomenon can change that phenomenon.  So observe.  Observe your life, where you are.  Observe your desires.  Where do you want to be?  Where do you want your family to be?  Your community?  The world?  Start preparing for that, and you're far more likely to be in a position to help it happen  – or perhaps something even better or more interesting.

    Here's one: prepare in such a way as to leave as many doors open for yourself as possible.  Life and time will close most of your doors of opportunity all by themselves.  They don't need any active help from you, except in instances where a particular path, such as marriage, calls for special commitment and fidelity to one person or endeavor, to the exclusion of others.  But even those doors – the ones that seem to cut you off from other opportunities – can be magical, in a sense, because they can open on the other side to whole new worlds of opportunity you didn't even know existed, worlds inaccessible without that special commitment and fidelity.  But you have to be ready to walk through these doors at an opportune time. 
         
    So you have to prepare.  You have to train yourself to be a person of commitment and fidelity, if that is the life you wish to share with another person.  If you want a life of financial freedom, practice some financial discipline. Nix just one discretionary expense, and put the savings toward debt reduction or in a savings account.  See where that leads.  If you want to be physically healthy, take a walk and eat an apple.  You don't have to get it all right, right now.  Just start practicing.  Just start preparing.  

    Just start.

Through a Glass Darkly: On Preparation
February 18, 2020

    Perhaps it is obvious, then, that all learning – and thus all growth, all knowledge, all wisdom – proceeds from a certain kind of ignorance: the ignorance borne of our being in time.  We cannot know the future, either in general or in detail; therefore, we must learn.  We must let the future teach us, draw us toward itself.  We must be teachable, therefore; we must be capable of being drawn.

     We must be ready.  

     And this seems like a contradiction in terms, a paradox.  How can we be ready for something we cannot know?  Readiness implies preparation.  How do we prepare for something we cannot see or understand in the present? 

     Answer: We can't – at least not perfectly.  Too many variables lie outside our control.  We can only see "through a glass darkly," if we see at all.  We cannot prepare for the black hole that swallows our galaxy, or the car accident that kills our child (which may be the same thing).  But we can make ourselves, now, into the kind of people who can face that void and not let go of our humanity, the kind of people who love in the face of absolute darkness, whose love for life and for one another is an affront to every kind of darkness.

     * * *

     I don't know whether I'll ever be able to walk the Appalachian trail with my children, or el Camino de Santiago, but I dream of it, and I walk with them now through the pasture and the woods.  And it makes me stronger, this walking, and the kids too.  

    I don't know whether I'll ever see my county become food self-sufficient, but I dream of it, and I tend my garden and my chickens now.  And it makes me stronger, this tending, and my county too.

    I don't know whether I'll ever publish a book of the wisdom I've collected over the years, but I dream of it, and I write now, with as much wisdom as I can muster.  And it makes me stronger, this writing, and perhaps wiser too.

Had I Known: On the Value of Unavoidable Ignorance
February 17, 2020

     So, for some things, ignorance really is bliss, or can help you get there at least.  Since you can't know everything about what's in front of you anyway, and since, if you did, you probably wouldn't take some of your most important leaps, it is a mercy, in some sense, that our knowledge of the future is limited.
   
     Had I known how much sleep I would lose, and just how much chaos I would have to learn to tolerate, in becoming a mother of three, I might have thought twice about jumping into parenthood.  That's ridiculous, of course, because the love that I share with my kids, and the joy they bring to my life, is totally worth all the lost sleep and all the chaos and more.  Also, I am a much better person because of my kids – more generous, less stressed, more hopeful, more determined.  But I only understand the trade-off because I've inhabited it from the inside.  I had to live it to get it.  

     Had I known how much time it would take to carry out the duties of president of the local school foundation (a charitable endowment for our local public school district), I might have declined the opportunity.  In fact, there are other, similar opportunities in my community that I have declined, and will decline, out of sheer self-preservation – or financial survival, since an attorney's time is their money.  But this particular service opportunity has allowed me to put my money where my mouth is, by helping this organization make some critical forward leaps of its own – and thereby fulfilling a promise I made years ago when I left teaching for law school, a promise at the heart of my law school application essay:  to use my advocacy skills as an attorney to promote public education.  I had no idea at the time I wrote that essay that I would get the opportunity to live up to that promise back home, in support of the very school district that I was leaving.  But that same school district had shepherded my own public education, and it is now the one shepherding my children's education.  So it is right and fitting that I fulfill my promise through this service.  It's just a good thing I didn't know in advance how much it would cost me, in time and thus in treasure.

    Had I known what a long, hard slog it would be to get through some of the probates that local judges have asked me to assist with, I might very well have turned down those opportunities as well.  A probate is the set of legal proceedings to determine how a person's property should be distributed after they die, and probate practice is central to my law practice now.  Most of the time, probates are merely paper-pushing exercises, intended to ensure that any creditors are paid, a clean chain of title to real estate is preserved, and all other property is distributed to heirs in an orderly fashion.  But sometimes probates take a turn for the thornier side, and I am now on my fifth or sixth of this kind, most of which have come to me by way of a phone call from a judge, asking me to step in as the official, court-appointed Personal Representative for the estate.  It is an honor to be asked by a judge to take on such a responsibility – and one that an attorney, particularly a relatively young attorney, cannot lightly decline.  But judges only make these calls when a case has already proven itself especially challenging, marked by things like:  seemingly intractable family fighting, difficulties with identification or location of assets, or potential embezzlement of estate funds by a family friend.  So if I had had more experience under my belt when I received these judicial calls, I might have been more . . . well, judicious about saying yes to such appointments.

  

    But then again, I wouldn't be getting so much experience under my belt.  As I said, probate is the core of my practice now, along with its corresponding practice for the living: estate planning.  And I find that I have a strange affinity and aptitude for these areas of legal practice.  They suit me in a way I could have never anticipated.  But I wouldn't be learning their ins-and-outs, their traps and pitfalls, their tricks and shortcuts, nearly so readily if I weren't taking on these hard cases.  It's oh-so-true that you learn the rule by the exceptions, and the exceptional cases are the best ones by which you learn the rules and how to use them advantageously.  So it's probably a good thing, in the long run, that I didn't know going in just how hard these probates would be – and how financially risky in some instances.  I might not have stuck my neck out quite so far.  And I wouldn't be learning nearly as much.

Going Over the Edge
February 16, 2020

     If I had known what a huge financial risk I would be taking in moving home and starting my own law practice, I might not have made the leap. 

     And a leap it was.

   

     * * *

     I will forever remember the day I had to tell my supervising attorney at the firm in Oklahoma City – who also happened to be my closest mentor and a great friend – that I was leaving to go practice law back home.  I had been out of the office on some errand around lunchtime that day and was planning to go submit my resignation to Kevin as soon as I returned.  As I was walking back to our building, I just happened to see a couple of guys in repelling gear start a descent down the side of another building across the courtyard.  I don't know whether they were window washers or inspectors of some sort, or whether this was some kind of motivational exercise for a team at the business that occupied that other building.  But in any case, I glimpsed these two guys just as they were making that first backward lean off the edge of the building.

     I knew that backward lean pretty well.  I had been a ropes course instructor for a while, recall, and I had also done a fair amount of repelling over in the Ozarks of northwestern Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma.  So I knew exactly, and viscerally, what it was like to lean back over the edge of a high vertical face, knees bent slightly but body mostly straight like you're falling onto a mattress, going for something close to a 90̊ angle with the vertical surface, so that you're more or less parallel with the ground below as you descend.  I knew how the harness should be adjusted, how the ropes should be tied,  and where to place my brake-hand in order to control the descent.  I knew how the rope guide on the ground should hold the rope, the stance he should take to slow or stop the fall if needed, and the calls that the faller and ground guide would need to make to one another – "On belay?" "Belay on." – to make sure everyone was ready before the descent began.  I knew all of these things.

     I also knew how I never, ever, ever got comfortable with that initial backward lean.  It nauseated me no matter how many times I did it, or how many times I had helped others do it.  

    Now, I don't know whether God or the universe sends us signs.  I actually doubt it, most of the time.  So it could be, and probably was, just sheer coincidence that I saw these two guys going over the edge of an adjacent building just as I was about to head up to the top floor of my office building to tell Kevin that I was leaving the firm.  But that day, I took those two guys as a sign.  I got in the elevator, pushed 10, and headed straight for Kevin's office.  "On belay?" I asked myself.  By the time I knocked on his door, my heart was pounding and my breath was short.  Stepping into his office, I nervously asked whether he'd noticed the repellers on the side of the neighboring building.  He had.  "I know how they feel," I said.  Then I told him I was making a leap of my own. 

  

     Belay on.

The Price of Bliss
February 15, 2020

     And you don't need to know everything about what you're going to do before you do it.  In fact, you can't know everything about what you're going to do before you do it.  Not possible.  So don't let that stop you.

     Furthermore, if you did know everything about what you were going to do before you did it, you almost certainly would not go through with it.  Doing amazing things that stretch you beyond your known limits is hard – really hard – sometimes.  And scary as hell.   And boring.  It's true – amazing endeavors in life often (usually) involve long stretches of mind-numbing tedium.  What's the old saw about war?  "War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror."  Yeah, it's a lot like that, except sometimes you get to swap out the moments of sheer terror for a few moments of sheer bliss.  Sometimes.

     So if you knew in advance just how hard and scary and boring your adventures were going to be much of the time, you almost certainly wouldn't set out on them in the first place.  But then you'd miss the bliss.

 * * *

     If I had known anything about the Ivy League before I went, there's a good chance I wouldn't have applied to Harvard at all.  It wasn't until I started traveling with the Women's Basketball team, as the team manager, in the fall of my junior year, that I even visited the other Ivies – and realized that Dartmouth or Cornell probably would have won me over, if I had known about them and had been accepted by those schools as well.  What, with the cozy, poetic romance of Hanover, New Hampshire, and the ghost of Robert Frost glistening in the snowflakes and rustling in the evergreens, Dartmouth would have been my first choice, no doubt.  And Cornell, with its robust agricultural and outdoor education programs, would likely have come in a close second.  Each of those places would have fit far more neatly into the narrative I had going for myself when I was 18 – and thus might not have stretched my narrative as much as Harvard did.  

    Not that there is a thing in the world wrong with either Dartmouth or Cornell.  They are ridiculously fabulous schools, and it would have been a privilege of the highest order to attend them.  Hell, from a historical perspective, the fact that I was heading to college anywhere, as a young woman of lower middle-class means, constituted a privilege that bordered on the miraculous – one that almost certainly would not have been possible for someone like me as little as four or five decades earlier.  

      So don't get me wrong.  I'm not knocking Dartmouth and Cornell.  I would never want to knock anyone's choice of college – or for that matter, anyone's choice of any endeavors undertaken to expand, extend, and enlarge their ability to bring gifts into the world.  Whether you do it through formal higher education or by any of an infinite number of other paths, the expansion's the thing, and the extension, and the enlargement of the scope of yourself.  

     Know first that your best self and your best life probably lie somewhere out on the margins of your current self – or beyond them – so you might not find your bests if you play it too safe.  Know next that it can be hard and scary and sometimes really boring out there too.  Such is the price of bliss.

Stretch Out!
February 14, 2020

     Deacon had me pegged.  And clearly he knew something I didn't: that the most authentic self I could assemble at the tender age of 18 was needed (needed!) in a place I could barely imagine – a place, moreover, that did not seem at all consistent with my emerging authentic self.

     Did he also know that that very incongruity would provide fertile soil from which a more mature version of my most authentic self could arise, years later?  Did he know that I needed to stretch that "simple, poetry-slinging, horse-and-Jesus-loving girl" beyond herself in order to find  her best self, to live into her best life?  I think so.

     This is why, when people say things like, "Follow your passions," "Live your dreams," "Follow your heart," or "Stay true to yourself," I cringe a little on the inside and think, Ehhh . . .it might not be that simple.  Especially when the recipient of the message is a teenager or a twenty-something, I think, No, you might actually need to do something that doesn't fit you at all, or doesn't seem to, anyhow.  You might need to do a bunch of somethings like that.  You might need to get beyond yourself, over yourself, out of your own way.  You might need to lose yourself for a while in order to find your best self later.

     Sure, you need to have some sense as a young person of what you love to do – or at least what wakes you up a bit and makes you feel a little (or a lot) more alive.  It doesn't have to set your heart or your brain on fire necessarily, but it should be something that draws you in and engages you more fully than anything else, preferably in both body and mind.  Extended devotion to a few things like this in childhood and early adulthood will give you your basic lifeline.  And you need a lifeline. 

     So keep a pulse on those things, but don't be afraid to try others or to hone your devotions in unusual or unexpected ways or places.

     And it should go without saying – but I'm going to say it anyway – that you don't have to go to Harvard or law school to do this.  Those just happened to be a couple of the key places where I, by luck or by grace, got to stretch myself beyond myself.  But that kind of stretching can be done almost anywhere if you have your eyes open to the possibilities, to any shred of luck or grace you can find lying around, and if you make space and time to examine and explore them.

     Go forth, in other words, and stretch out! 

Beyond the Limits of Self-Image
February 13, 2020

     Harvard was also a surprise.  I didn't see that one coming either.  And this fact constantly reminds me to treat my preconceived ideas – particularly about myself – with a healthy dose of skepticism.

 * * * 

     Right up until I received my acceptance letter in the mail – they actually came on physical, paper letters back in those days, by snail mail – I was telling people it wasn't going to happen.  Everybody just needed to chill out.  On one level, it was a desperate attempt at expectations management on my part.  But even long before I felt the need to tamp down expectations about Harvard specifically (mine and everyone else's), I had "decided" – and announced – that I had no need and no intention of going to college anywhere west of the Rockies or east of the Mississippi.  I liked it fine right here in the middle of the country, thank you very much.  The middle of the country fit the self-image I had come by honestly, though not easily: simple, poetry-slinging, horse-and-Jesus-loving girl, a little heavy in the gray matter.  More Willa Cather than J.D. Salinger, in any case.  I had, in fact, only applied to one other college: a very small, private liberal arts college in a suburb north of Kansas City, with historical ties to the Southern Baptist Convention.  At William Jewell, I thought, I could continue my riding lessons and maybe even work at a horse barn, since one of my riding instructors owned a large barn and arena in another Kansas City suburb.

   But then that crazy acceptance letter from Harvard arrived on April 4, 1997, and I had to re-evaluate my self-image – or at least the limitations that I thought my self-image imposed.  I had to start thinking about how that self-image of mine might fare at a place like Harvard.

     I had never been to Harvard.  Hell, I had only been east of the Mississippi once, and that was on a trip to Washington D.C. with my parents when I was five.  A college visit – let alone the college tours that some families take their kids on, visiting half a dozen campuses or more before application season gets into full swing – was simply beyond my family's financial means.  So I had almost no idea of what to expect about Harvard.  I knew the name, the reputation, the general location, the pictures from the glossy promotional materials.  I also knew that only one other person from my high school had ever gone to Harvard as an undergraduate, ten years before me – and he had ended up as a Rhodes Scholar.  (Nothing intimidating about that at all.)  It was Deacon, in fact, who had encouraged me to apply, who had been my alumni interviewer, and who – I only found out several years later – had personally contacted a friend on the admissions committee to make an extra push on my behalf.  "You were my cowgirl poet," Deacon told me many years later.  "Harvard needed one of those."

Surprise!  The Life You Never Imagined is Calling
February 12, 2020

     So twist a bit, take a few wacky turns, do something even you didn't expect.  Surprise yourself.  The only thing you have to lose is the chance to learn something – about yourself, about the world, about what you're capable of doing in the world, about the gifts you can bring into the world.  And you'll only lose that chance if you don't take it.  So take it.  Take several.  Take a whole decade's worth.  See what happens.

     * * *

     This September, I'll mark ten years since I was sworn in by the Justices of the Supreme Court of Oklahoma to practice law in this state.  But practicing law was something I never saw coming ten years before that. It was nowhere on my radar as a younger person.  In high school, I was on the Speech & Debate team, but I stayed safely over on the Speech-y side of things.  I avoided anything that involved even a whiff of confrontation – even the canned confrontation of formal debate competition.  And in college, my closest friends knew that the only thing that rivaled my penchant for conflict avoidance was my commitment to my sleep.  "Where's Georgeann?"  "Oh, she's either sleeping or avoiding the tension in the room."  I actually told people in those years that my personal mascot should be an ostrich.  I'm not kidding.

     So it was not until well into my fifth or sixth year of teaching high school that the idea of going to law school even occurred to me.  I didn't really know any attorneys well.  There were none in my family, and I while I knew of several attorneys in town, I didn't have any sense of what they actually did from day to day – aside from what one sees in courtroom dramas in movies and on TV.  And those didn't interest me in the slightest.  (Also, courtroom dramas do not depict what the vast majority of attorneys do day to day.  But I did not realize that at the time.)  What I did know was that among my college classmates, law school was sort of a fall-back option.  If you weren't headed to medical school or into investment banking or consulting (common precursors to business school), then law school was the next logical choice for professional training.  And many of those people didn't have a burning desire to participate in courtroom drama, so maybe they knew something I didn't.  Also, I had a close friend tell me I'd make a good judge someday, and that intrigued me – although I knew precisely nothing about what judges do either.  

   This is how law school won out for me over graduate programs in psychology or school administration, despite the fact that, by the time I actually started studying for the LSAT, I had grown accustomed to seeing myself as more of the high school counselor or high school principal type.  There were no flashing lights, no singing angels, no profound sense of calling or vocation.  Just, "Hmmm.  Law school.  That's interesting.  I think I'll try it."  I pushed pause on my inner artist, at whose insistence I had also briefly toyed with the idea of trying to get into one of those fancy MFA writing programs – what with the romance of the writer's life still glowing in me from my teens.  (I had even visited the University of Iowa on the way back from a fishing trip to Minnesota one summer, to see if lightning might strike in the form of an Iowa Writer's Workshop residency.  But I ultimately concluded I didn't have the chops for that.)  And while I had also long fantisized about returning to the womb of academia and staying there as a professor of one sort or another, I realized I had basically missed the train on that one.  But I wasn't too terribly disappointed about it.  Landing a tenure-track professorship somewhere, I reasoned, would probably involve a good deal of moving around, and  by this time, I was ready to commit to a place.  I was married by now, and I wasn't particularly enamored with the idea of dragging my husband all over creation.  And besides, I had already had my fling with the outside world in college.  And I had come back to make Oklahoma my home.  

     So law school it was, specifically at the University of Oklahoma.

 * * *

     And law practice it is today, specifically in the small town where I grew up in the far northeast corner of Oklahoma.  

     Turns out, it was a good move.  Ten years into this gig, and it's just starting to get that favorite-pair-of-jeans feel to it.  Oh, and chicken shit.  Literally.  I'm liable to have a little chicken shit on my pants at any given time these days – what with the micro-farm gig brewing on the side.  Such is the life of a gentlewoman farmer.   

     I didn't see that coming.  Life is full of surprises.

Dabbling in Mysticism: On Taking Some Wacky Turns
February 11, 2020

     So find yourself a mentor or two.  Actively seek out and cultivate the relationship, but be careful not to become a burden.  Learn lightly, if you can.  But learn.  Learn all you can, and if the relationship takes a turn for the up-close-and-personal, or for the long-haul, or for the intense, collaborative-project end of things, bring all that you can to the table.  The benefits will mostly accrue in your favor, but work on some reciprocity.  A little will go a long way.

    That's one of my standard bits of advice when I'm speaking to high school and college-age audiences – which is something I find myself doing with some regularity these days.

      Another is this: do something – or a whole series of somethings – that would surprise the "you" of one or two years ago.  In the spring semester of my first year of college, I took a seminar-style class called "Martyrs, Mystics, and Witches".  I think the course name had a subtitle as well, which I don‛t recall offhand, but which must have run something like "Ecstatic Bodily Experience in the Christian Tradition" – because that's essentially what the class was about.  It examined the treatment and experience of the body (especially the female body) in early, medieval, and early Reformation-era Christian texts, as much from the perspectives of the martyrs, mystics,  and witches themselves as could be excavated from historical sources.  It was the first class I took that was offered by Harvard's Committee on the Comparative Study of Religion, which was where I ended up making my academic home for the next three years.  I think there were six students in the class, a couple of whom may have been graduate students from the divinity school.

 
     Now, I must say, a class called "Martyrs, Mystics, and Witches" is not exactly a class that my slightly younger Southern Baptist self would have gravitated toward.  In fact, my slightly younger Southern Baptist self probably would have shunned that kind of class on the presumption that it would inevitably peddle some kind of outrageous heresy.  At a minimum, let's just say it was not on my list during shopping week that semester (when Harvard undergrads get to visit and "try on" courses for a week before officially enrolling in them for the semester).  But I think I had gone to an introductory meeting for the Comparative Study of Religion – that was one of several "concentrations" I was considering settling into as my principal field of study, the other two being English and philosophy – and I must have met the instructor for the MMW course there, or maybe someone just encouraged me to take that class.  I don't recall exactly.  

     But by whatever chain of seeming accidents that I wound up there, it was through that slightly heretical-sounding class that I struck up a relationship with the instructor, Kimerer LaMothe, who became my principal academic advisor for the rest of my undergraduate studies.  It was Kimerer who convinced me to stick with the Comparative Study of Religion – a field of study that set my brain and heart on fire, and gave my undergraduate experience a richness and texture I could have easily missed in a more mainline degree program.  I took several more of Kimerer's classes over the ensuing years, and it is not an exaggeration to say that she is a (the?) central reason why my Harvard experience was an overwhelmingly positive one.

     Kimerer also remains one of my most cherished mentors to this day, for reasons that will probably unfold in this space.  But for now, suffice it to say that I would not have the treasure of her mentorship in my life if I had not been willing to do something a little wacky, a little surprising, a little off the beaten path – a little mystical, perhaps.

A Good Deal: On Mentorship (and Menteeship)
February 10, 2020

     When I have my attorney hat on, I give a lot of advice.  That's part of the job, obviously –  to advise, to inform, to recommend, to counsel.  I also seek out a good deal of advice in my practice, mostly from Chuck, the attorney with more than forty years of experience with whom I share an office. 

     It's a good deal for both of us – although four-and-a-half years into our arrangement, the benefits are still quite lopsided in my favor.  Perhaps that will always be the case.  Perhaps that is in the nature of mentoring relationships, particularly mentoring relationships that occupy the more "apprenticeship" end of the mentoring spectrum.  Perhaps that is why Sheryl Sandberg spent a good deal of time discussing the etiquette of the mentee (or any would-be mentee) in her 2013 bestseller Lean In. 

     Perhaps.  Perhaps I will understand this better once I am spending more time on the mentor side of the mentor-mentee relationship.  I have been quite fortunate, as yesterday's list demonstrates, to spend a great deal of time on the mentee side.  The investment that each of those people has made in me is a tremendous gift – free to me, but not without cost.  And collectively?  I could easily make an argument that their collective investment in me accounts for at least half of any success I can claim today, perhaps even half or more of the person I am becoming.

  

     That's a good deal.  Or perhaps I still have work to do to make it so.

Roll Call
February 9, 2020

    Setting aside (for the moment) my family, friends, peers, and scholarship donors, here are the people who have taken up a strong, supportive stance alongside my swinging log and extended their hands to steady and guide my walk.  These are the people who, beginning in my early adolescence, have invested significant time to help me, to teach me, to point me in the right direction.  These are my mentors, in other words – my spirit guides, in some cases.  For some, the time they personally invested in me was very brief but wildly impactful; others have mentored me by consistent presence in my life over longer periods of time, sometimes much longer periods of time.  A few have mentored (or continue to mentor) me from a distance, while others have been – or are now – my up-close-and-personal go-tos.  Each has made an incalculably valuable contribution to my life.

     Brent and Jill, Deidre, Donna, KayBo, Tom M., Rebecca, Tom P., Deacon, my college algebra and college trig instructor at NEO A&M College (spring and fall semesters, 1996).

     Kimerer, Emily.

     Larry, Michelle, Jamie, Dick and Cindi.

     Michael S., Rick, Mary Sue, Katie.

     Will, Adam, Timila, Kevin, Libby, Judy, Michael P., Mac, Michael M., Gary.

     Chuck and Ann, Ben, Chuck C.

     * * *

     No wonder I'm still up here on this log.