Thank You, 2010: A Year's Recap

[windinthemaples]

For the past two years (2009 and 2008), I've spent time looking back over my journal, my photographs, and my calendar to remember just what it was the past year delivered into my life. It is a recap and an act of acknowledgment and gratitude. This year I have just as many things to be thankful for. Thank you, 2010, for delivering all of these moments of unexpected clarity, unconditional love, challenge and perfectly imperfect existence to me and allowing me to spend this year with those who enrich my life so thoroughly. But seriously, 2010, you kicked my butt and raked me over the coals and while I wouldn't want to trade these experiences, I'd rather not repeat them. Okay? :)

January

January was such a difficult month. We'd driven down, over the Christmas break, to South Florida to begin our experiment in snowbirding for the winter. I got food poisoning on the drive down and we were forced to cancel a trip to Disney World. Once ensconced at my mom's vacant condo, that food poisoning morphed into the worst illness I've ever experienced. I was sick for weeks and nothing seemed to shake it. We realized, a bit too late, that Daniel realistically had to travel 5 days a week to keep up with work demands, so we got to spend very little time with him. My aunt and cousin, who became our new neighbors, never wanted to visit (especially with me being mysteriously ill), so I was profoundly alone. And sick.

A few weeks in, I woke up with the worst back/ovary pain of my life. I was pretty sure I was dying. Thankfully, that was Daniel's night of the week to be with us and he got me to the emergency room where I was diagnosed with a severe urinary tract infection and a kidney stone about the size of a marble. Clearing up the UTI eliminated my pain and I didn't have the support I needed to go about surgery for my kidney stone, so I stepped firmly into 'necessary denial' and went about my life as best I could. I hoped maybe the stone would magically disintegrate or lie dormant for years. (It didn't.)

There were pluses to a month in Florida. Graeme flourished under the warm sun and wide horizons of a suburban, outdoor existence. We played at the beach and the park. He rode his tricycle along the palm-lined sidewalks. We went to visit the animals recuperating at the Busch Wildlife Sanctuary and the Loggerhead Marinelife Center. We taught him how to play tee ball in the yard (our first experience with a yard!) and he got a baby bed and slept alone for the first time. Everything about him glowed. His vocabulary began to accelerate dramatically. He was deeply happy.



I tried, in vain, to get myself untangled from a mess with PayPal over my inadvertent use of a "Donate" button to raise money to buy pajamas for The Pajama Program. It never worked. I couldn't escape the red tape but in the process my efforts to collect and donate 500 warm pajamas was derailed--deflated. It was an emotional defeat I just didn't get over easily.





The month had some incredibly bright moments for me. There was a wonderful sense of homecoming. I happened upon the scene as 70 sea turtles, rescued from cold shock in more northern waters, were returned to the ocean. I discovered Darbster, the best vegan restaurant in the world. I perfected the vegan grilled cheese sandwich. I had profound moments of healing and wholeness at the beach, got to see the World Famous Lipizzaner Stallions perform, and hosted Jenn and Sarah for a few days of beach-going and touristing and general happy Florida exploits. (I climbed the iconic, hometown Jupiter Lighthouse for the first time in my life!) The month ended, thankfully, in an esbat ritual on Juno Beach with mermaiden where I was able to forget, or perhaps put into perspective, every hard thing that'd come before. It renewed my spirit and reminded me of my limitless nature.



February


In February, I dedicated the month to exploring the Ace of Cups, to invoking the influence of Water in my life. The spiritual repercussions of that decision were profound. (I learned that too much Water, too much romanticism and sweeping emotional blinders were also a recipe for being swept overboard by physical, logical reality. (Take, for instance, this time I really was almost swept overboard on a boating tour.)



Water brought the importance of family ties. My teenage niece, Sequoia, came to visit us for a week of Disney World, beach, and museum trips. My mother married her boyfriend of six years. We spent a day, after the wedding, with my brother, my sister-in-law, and our two nephews. For Daniel, the month was spent largely alone in Chicago, hauling boxes of our belongings into storage and supervising a remodeling of our condo to put it back up on the market by March 1st. We missed him, dreadfully. I realized the price of Graeme and I escaping the Chicago winter was too high to pay for Daniel.







We were scheduled to take a ten day cruise through the Caribbean with family to celebrate my Aunt's 60th birthday. The day before setting sail, my mom's wedding date, Graeme woke up with a high fever. We, as a family, were exhausted. Our financial situation had plummeted with Daniel missing pay for several months. We were secretly grateful to have a reason to use our travel insurance, get a refund on most of our cruise money, and stay home. Graeme recovered within a few days and we had the rest of the week together to enjoy Florida as a family. Daniel worked some frugal magic with his free hotel points and coupons and expense account perks and surprised Graeme and I with a couple days of almost-entirely-free mini-vacation together. We rode an airboat through the Everglades, waded in a glass-smooth bay in the Keys, visited Monkey Jungle, and watched the Harlem Globetrotters play. It was wonderful.



My Pajama Program regrets turned around with a new outlook. I realized I was making a pretty big difference, even if I didn't reach my goal of 500 donated pajamas this year. So I went back to it and amassed dozens more through sudden windfalls, forgotten gift cards, and the humbling generosity of my friends and family.

At the end of the month, I fell ill again with a high fever. It was a winter of lingering illnesses I just couldn't seem to leave behind.



March
No matter how much rest and vitamin C I took, I wasn't getting any better. I spent the entire month of March battling what I discovered was bronchitis and a sinus infection. Eventually, Graeme and Daniel came down with it, too. It seemed like we kept reinfecting each other. I suspected that the mold I'd found in my mother's condo had something to do with it, but who knows? I was on a ton of antibiotics and felt pretty lousy, pretty much every day. :/



The month was dedicated to the Ace of Coins, the element of Earth. I started to wake up from the mindless consumer cycle I'd been immersed in. I recognized that I was addicted to stuff and that it was suffocating the meaning out of my life. I heard the voice of Gaia for the first time and realized that my behavior wasn't in line with my spirituality. I was not honoring Her. I called it "(Non)Materialism March" and "Mindful March" but what it was, in effect, was a four week spending freeze. I only bought the necessary food and consumables for our household. All other shopping, no matter how thrifty it might have been, was abandoned. I fell in love with the library all over again. I spent every fair-weather moment I could outdoors at free parks and events. We became more active. I did a lot of reading about minimalism, "affluenza", and the intersection between consuming resources and environmental degradation. I incubated ideas about starting an intentional community farm and restoring some part of nature to nature. I felt like I had begun to fundamentally question who I was and what my purpose was in life.

While I was too sick to attend the Pajama Program event, I did donate 237 pajamas and 35 storybooks to the cause in honor of Daniel and I's 5th Wedding Anniversary. With our sickness and our spending freeze, that's all we did to celebrate and really, all we needed to do.





At the end of the month, I flew to Diana's Grove to celebrate the Spring Equinox with mermaiden and about fifteen other women. It was truly transformative--perfectly framing and ritualizing a lot of the thoughts I'd had over the past month. I just wished I wasn't still so sick!


April
In April, I stayed committed to not-buying-anything while relaxing some of the restrictions so that we could enjoy meals out at some of our favorite local restaurants as a treat. It worked remarkably well. I was also successful at staying healthy for several weeks in a row, providing better conditions for hosting my niece again for the ten days of her spring break as well as welcoming my mother-in-law to join all of us for a few days of that, too. The weather was warm enough to enjoy beach trips as well as exploring some of the natural areas of my hometown--Jonathan Dickinson State Park and Grassy Waters Preserve, most memorably.





May
May was Graeme and I's last month living in South Florida. It seems like once the temperatures rose, sunburn and heat drove me indoors where the temptations to rejoin the consumer society increased. Daniel and I's financial troubles were resolved when he got all of his back pay and I went back to shopping, at least in part. It's interesting (and sad) to me in hindsight to realize that's the same point when my gung-ho attention to launching the Nature Nurtured blog waned as well as my commitment to the spiritual work I was doing with Christopher Penczak. One thing that I did do, beginning in May, was go on a diet. My weight had creeped up steadily over the course of several years and I found myself feeling sick, unwell, out of shape and unable to fit into any of my clothes.

The most exciting event of the month, besides moving back to Chicago to rejoin Daniel, was spending the Beltane weekend in Pennsylvania with mermaiden and willow_cabin at the Spoutwood Farm Fairie Festival. It was so much fun! I got to meet greyeyedpixie and her husband-Corey, aerialmelodies, cloverdew, costumenut and roofpig13. I completely fell off the non-material bandwagon in the presence of so many great artisans, unique vendors, and icy beverage stands. :) We took a ton of photographs, danced, and had Ruby Tuesday for dinner two nights running. :D And, because I couldn't catch a break this winter, I fell ill on the last days of the festival and went back home to get my third course of antibiotics. :/



June
In June, I was back to Chicago and still clinging to the hope that we'd be able to sell our condo if we only moved enough of our clutter into storage and kept up the faith. I was getting some renewed twinges of kidney discomfort, my stone rattling around in there, so I finally made an appointment with a urologist and started the full-time job of bouncing around to radiology, ultrasound, and back to the doctor again for follow-up after follow-up as he decided on a surgical treatment option.

I began reading and working my way through the spiritual color Temple of the Twelve books with a few of my LiveJournal friends--beginning this month with Black. Graeme started taking art classes at a wonderful Waldorf-y type school in our neighborhood--turning out many lovely salt-dough sculptures, paintings, and abstract collages each week. :D



Daniel and I took a mini-vacation from our stressful condo living by escaping downtown to a hotel for the weekend. We walked around downtown and behaved like Chicago tourists instead of Chicago residents. We visited the Lincoln Park Zoo, where Graeme had a traumatizing knee-skinning incident, and splashed around at night in that big fountain at Millenium Park. My best friend, radshaun, published his first book The Deathday Letter and I got to see it displayed in a downtown bookstore. We ate picnic lunches and made salad from ingredients we'd brought from home at night in our hotel room and it was simply the best little bit of down time. :)



My diet took off in earnest and I started working, again, on some of my ingrained food issues. Summer produce filled our fridge with color and Daniel and I both started to feel worlds better on a low-calorie, high-raw foods diet. We were aware and awake and conscientious about what we were eating and it was quite a wake-up call.





For Midsummer, I flew out for the weekend to willow_cabin and mermaiden's first annual Midsummer Faerie Celebration a costumed outdoor tea party, evening ritual, and backyard camping party. It was one of the highlights of my year. Unfortunately, by the end of the weekend, I suffered an acute little kidney stone attack and so going into July, I began hoping that I could navigate my way to surgery before another bad attack occurred. The images showed that my stone, large enough for my doctor to say, "I don't see people with stones your size upright!" was spiked and menacingly large on the x-rays. The time I'd borrowed in January to deal with the stone had kinda run out. :)

July


Oh, July was hard! I dealt with a lot of pain from my kidney stone and an edge-of-my-seat terror-terror-terror mindset as I prepared for my surgery. I took a bit of a risk and traveled for a Mystery School weekend the weekend before my surgery was finally scheduled. I was working with the Temple of the Twelve again, this time with the color Pink, and had to learn a lot about having compassion for myself and being trusting enough to ask for the help I needed. That worked out pretty well. By the time of my surgery, I was able to go into the hospital and admit, to everyone I met, how terrified I was. I was taken care of and the surgery went better than ever hoped for. I clearly had a lot of people who loved me and sent healing, courageous energies my way.

The shock upon my release from the hospital was the news that I'd be under lifting restrictions for the next four weeks. I wasn't allowed to push, pull, lift, or carry *anything* weighing more than ten pounds. That meant I couldn't be an effective parent. I couldn't lift Graeme into or out of the tub, onto or off of the potty, into or out of his carseat. I couldn't push him in a stroller or his tricycle. I couldn't go grocery shopping. I couldn't do *anything*. It was maddening. My Mom flew into town to help get me through surgery and my immediate recovery, which was a huge blessing. Graeme soldiered through. I spent a ton of time in bed, listening to the sounds of normal life happening just outside my room.



August
August was spent doing the heavy work of recovering from surgery. My mother-in-law flew into town to take care of Graeme and I for a few days so that Daniel could get back to work. A mother's helper I hired filled in when family wasn't able to. Some days I pushed myself too hard and other days I forced myself to stay in bed. By the New Moon, I'd finished my Temple of the Twelve Pink Month. I'd had so much time to think and process that it felt like the surgery had been a gift. I thought about minimalism again and made a move back towards not buying 'stuff'.

One benefit to the time laid up in bed, coinciding with my month of Silver in the Temple of the Twelve, is that I had the time and childcare necessary to work on my budding astrology business, A Witch's Stars. I did quite a few charts, including my own, and had some general insights from the work that led to a book idea--about death, life lessons, and astrology.

Towards the end of my Silver month, I had a dream that I can only attribute to past life recall. It was so vivid and explained *so much* about my conflicting thoughts about sex and power and relationships and was my first memory of any sort where Daniel was with me...albeit for a very brief moment. I haven't unpacked as much as I should have from that, or from the month of Silver in general, and by the beginning of September my work with the Temple of the Twelve had stalled out. Perhaps my spiritual sight, in general, stalled out. I didn't have the energy necessary to do any more astrology reports and I just began to feel mired in everyday troubles as we scrambled to find a way out of our Chicago condo and a new home for us closer to Daniel's new Evanston office.



September
We spent most of the month preparing our Chicago condo for rental and searching for a house near Evanston to rent. (Surprisingly, there weren't many options.) We lost out on a couple houses for various bizarre reasons, so it seemed like we'd never find a place. Our search radius expanded and expanded and expanded until we were looking up to an hour's drive from Daniel's new office instead of the mile or two we'd intended.



aerialmelodies was in town for a few days and we met up at Navy Pier to tour the Stained Glass Museum together and have lunch.

The best part of the month was Graeme's Third Birthday. Graeme had been asking, since February, for a Blue's Clues themed party and by-gum that's exactly what we pulled off with a lot of help from thrift stores and eBay and a little ingenuity. :) It was just the three of us, but we had a fabulous day. It's also about that time that we realized, without a doubt, that Graeme could read.





We spent a lot of time outside to combat the stress and depression I was feeling with our housing struggles.

Finally,I spent Autumn Equinox celebrating the Feast of Persephone at Diana's Grove.



October


In October, we moved out of the city and into a rental house up in Highland Park. Everything about our life changed when we came home. Obvious things--like we tripled our square footage and suddenly had a bedroom for Graeme. We were reunited with everything we'd put in storage years ago. We had a yard to play in. Every day in this house became magical, extraordinary, golden--like treasured memories we were living, in the moment. The three of us ended the month, dressed like a family of fairies at Graeme's request, ambling around our neighborhood and having so much fun. October was simply sublime.







November
November was all about family. We drove out to Lexington, Kentucky to spend a long weekend with Daniel's parents and his older brother, David. David lives in Italy, so it was a rare treat to have him visiting the States. There was a particularly poignant moment when the brothers introduced Graeme to the joys of climbing an old Osage Orange tree that has stood outside an old fort there for centuries and was the very same tree *they* climbed as children.



David drove with us back to Highland Park for a few days and became our first guest in the new house.



The following weekend, rubymulligan came to visit. We spent the vast majority of her visit down at the beach and waist-deep in ice-cold gravel--sorting through in the hopes of finding pottery and sea glass bits. It was such, such fun!





As a surprise to us, my father decided to accept my token invitation to spend Thanksgiving at our house. He lives three hours' drive away, has never visited, and spends most of his days bed-bound so this was pretty shocking. He spent several days with us and he was a surprising mixture of obnoxious and wonderful. There was something of value in our time together.



Graeme and I also got to go to a Thanksgiving-themed party for vegan and vegetarian children in a neighboring community. It was wonderful and encouraging. My tribe is out there.



December
December has been a blur as I worked to get presents together and shipped out to various friends and family. For the sixth year in a row, we purchased gifts for families we sponsored through the Cathedral Shelter's amazing Christmas Basket program. I also gave things away, left and right, through FreeCycle and holiday_wishes. We discovered the fatal flaw of our rental house when the temperatures dropped below 20 degrees--an ice cold wing of the house that required additional room heaters and a visit from our landlord's fix-it guy to address. The first snowfall was on December 1st and as of today, December 28th, that snow and the snow of a dozen other snowfalls has remained unmelted on our lawn and drifted and frozen into a ten-foot tall icescape at the beach.





We had the chance to share our holiday festivities with houseguests as mermaiden and willow_cabin flew out early in the month to celebrate Yule and my mother-in-law came out on Christmas Day for a long weekend as well.





It has been a strange month, a hectic month, where we tried to accomplish a lot without spending any money to do it. Somehow, we pulled it off with surprising aplomb. :)



What in the world will 2011 hold?

I can't imagine.

Comments

[mermaiden.livejournal.com]

As I was reading this post, a few things struck me--how much courage and grace you have, especially grace under fire, and how blessed we were that we were able to see you so many times this year, and how amazing they all were. :) We love you~ <3

[sugarmaplelife.livejournal.com]

<3 Thank you. Your good opinion of me means a lot. Thank you for all the parts you played in my year's unfolding. It has been wonderful. :)

[sidheblessed.livejournal.com]

You have inspired me so much this year with everything you have accomplished. I hope 2011 is filled with joy for you and your family.

[shveta-thakrar.livejournal.com]

This was a wonderful post and told me a lot about you. :) I'm so glad I got to meet you yesterday, even briefly, and I hope it's okay I'm adding you on here as a friend.

[sugarmaplelife.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'm happy to have you here and I look forward to getting to know you better. It was an honor to meet you at Fairie Festival and a relief to see that you've escaped without hypothermia! :)

I've friended you back. :)