Elementary

I read people's stories, of their childhood. Their stories involve their families. My childhood stories don't...at least not on the surface. It bothers me at times, this lack of family memories.

Maybe I just have a shoddy memory. Sparse.

I was my own person, even as a child. I rarely, at least to my recollection, asked permission to do things. I just did them.

When I was around 6 years old, I made myself a chore chart and posted it on the outside of the painted off-white bathroom door on the back porch. The "back porch" was the den, not a porch. It was a porch before the porch got torn down and my parents had a real room built in place of the porch. I remember when the old screened-in porch got demolished, there was a door that went from the kitchen to where the porch used to be. If someone would have walked out the door then, before the new real room was built, they'd fall from the second story and hit the ground. I wonder if there was some sort of caution tape put up to keep us from walking, by habit, through that door?

But I don't recall any tape; I just recall how cool it was that I could open the door and have the air as a floor.

I wanted to have responsibility like my friends had. That's why I designed the chore chart. My friends had chore charts, with checks and stars and stickers, all given for completed chores. I don't remember what chores I listed on my chart. I tried to give myself checks when I completed a chore. Probably didn't last but a couple weeks.

Looking back, maybe I just wanted to be noticed. To think that I was somebody. That I was here.

I used to have temper tantrums too. Once I demolished my red plastic gum machine that distirbuted the little square Chiclet gum that came in a two-pack.

I spent lots of time with horses, up until I was 12. They were some of my best friends, horses were.

I then traded horses for boys.

There were lots of kids in our neighborhood...lots of kids. At that time in middle-class American culture, neighbors used to play together. We spent a lot of time outside.

There weren't all the time-consuming organized sports and activities like we have now.

There were sand lot games..rolly bat, football, tag, Sardines, Werewolf, Hide and Seek, Croquette. There were horses, bicycles, minibikes. And sleds in the winter. There was the miniature putt-putt course that some of the guys built in the woods across the street where houses are now.

I broke my arm when I was around 10 years old in some of the woods that were across the street, below the putt-putt course. I was breaking in Mary Jane, a horse. She was the size of a Welsh pony, multicolored white with black and brown spots. She got spooked that day, I think by a mini-bike, and she took off in a wild uncontrolled panicked gallop. I started screaming, instead of staying calm. Mary Jane didn't like my screams; she ran faster and harder through the woods.

I woke up on the ground at the base of a tree. My face scratched and bleeding from briers. My right arm numb.

I began to scream, "My arm's dead! My arm's dead!"

Mr. Yount, our neighbor who I had a crush on, who used to give me rides on his motorcycle, came to my aid. I don't know who took me to the hospital. It seems like they first let Dr. Lafferty, our neighbor who was a family doctor, examine me. Or maybe I'm thinking of the time I got bit by Georgia Girl, another horse. Seems she was a quarter horse of some sort.

I don't think Dr. Lafferty charged the neighbors to check out the neighborhood kid injuries. He was a kind man, something out of a Normal Rockwell painting.

We were neighbors.

Look at what is

As I was descending the mountain yesterday, I had a mix of emotions.

I was savoring the feeling I often experience on one-day excursions into the wilderness.

Magic. Eternity's touch. Wind. Ocean of mountains. Stillness. The wild.

Cares of life that await once off the mountain. Longing for simplicity. Fear of not living up to cultural standards. Fear of ignorance of politics. Lack of confidence in my own ability to communicate. Fear of others' appraisals of me.

I home-eclectic-un(in that order)-schooled my children from birth through high school. Like any other field of life, there are people who paved the way. There are experts, so to speak. There are a slew of magazines, books, conferences on the 'right' way to raise a child, on the 'right' way to school or unschool a child. Opinions abound. Experiences abound. Studies? Not so sure if they abound, but there are studies on child rearing and schooling.

Opinions can make me nervous. I feel sure my own self-doubt plays into that nervousness. I often have to calm my mind and heart and tell myself, "Carol, just look at what is. Now what do you think? What do you feel? What is your assessment? If you didn't have the experts' opinions and opinions of those so adamantly confident running through your head, what would your thoughts be...independent of their thoughts? Look at what is."

I used to go through that 'exercise' with homeschooling and educational and child-rearing approaches and opinions. I'd have to go back to my heart, focus there, and see what I thought and what resonated with me. From there, I did my best to choose a course of action at that given time.

Isn't that the best any of us can do?

Advice, opinions, suggestions, judgement of others. I'm sure most people mean well; but when these people assume to know others (especially from cursory knowledge of the other) and spout their unsolicited advices, it can turn me off...or at least cause me to want to avoid such persons.

And it reveals, that maybe the adviser has a narrow viewpoint of life? Hasn't put themselves in the other person's shoes?

The unsolicited adviser might better serve the other by asking questions, instead of ass-you-ming the other wants their advice, or even that their advice applies.

It is madness at times...all these well-meaners with their oh-so-sage wisdom, without ever having walked in the other person's shoes.

On the 9-mile-probably-most-rugged-hike-I've-ever-hiked yesterday, my 21-year old son and I talked of life, of mountains, of music, of family, of culture, of beliefs, of education, of choices. It is a day I will always treasure.

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My son descends the ladder into the "subway."
~Grandfather Trail, NC

On my walks today

On my walks today, I cross examined myself.

I asked questions in regard to my motives.
I asked questions in regard to compassion.
I asked questions in regard to my behavior.

On my walks today, I recalled Fred Poole stating something like, "Write what scares you. Write what shames you." I think he heard that from one of the McCourt brothers.

What shames me the most in my life?

It's not the short-lived, long-distance phone and online affair I had when my husband and I were on the brink of divorce. It's not the abortion I chose when I was 19 years old. It's not the hiding-my-head-in-the-sand my last years in The Way, trying to be true to myself and true to the Ministry. It's not my past life involving drugs and sex as a teenager. It's not even the recent events that have played out online in regard to my ex-therapist, though I do feel at times that he has branded me with a scarlet letter by accusations of which I am not guilty but that I apparently brought on myself by publishing some of what I've written in private the past year, an exposure really more of me than of him. There is much I haven't exposed regarding him.

No, it's none of those things. At least for today.

What is the thing that shames me most? It is still, as has been for decades, that I broke my Way Corps commitment in my early 20s. I not only broke it once, but twice.

Write what shames me. Write what scares me.

What scares me? My thoughts sometimes scare me, my memories and me wondering which are accurate and which aren't and if I write what I remember am I really being honest. What if that car is a 2001 model and not a 1999 model?

I'm sure other things scare me and shame me.

On my walks today, that is what came to mind. That and speaking in tongues.
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