At the risk of sounding "Coachy"…

I'd like to take a brisk walk in the wild this month and revisit some of my old Life Coaching talents.  Not every one can remember when I called myself a Life Coach (basically, before everybody knew what a LC was), and most of my reasons for walking away from it either related to other interests, other obligations, or, inevitably, poor business practices.  But I digress.  I feel an urge, at the risk of treading on some soft-core Schmaltz along the way, to get a little preachy with this stuff.  After all, what good is a blog about being Unencumbered unless we take a risk and exercise a little "self-help."

Karen's Kombucha glass #1

  And so, I return to one of my favorite self-help measures.  Make something every day.  For me, this might involve writing, yarning, building, cooking.  Today we're unveiling our first ever batch of Kombucha!!!!! So excited to make this drink.  Soon after I returned from a trip to the extra-healthy friends' house in February, I took it upon myself to find a local Scoby, which is the mushroom looking bacterial mass that creates Kombucha.  No sooner did I wander around my little village than I ran into a friend of a friend who had a collection of Scoby at her humble abode (actually, I met her at a wedding, but I digress).  Scoby and recipe in hand, I brewed a junk of black tea, sweetened heavily, left in my cabinet for a few weeks, pulled it out today, and wa-laaa! Vinegar-y tea, sweet juice drink, no more pre-bottled store for me….Home made all the way!!!

 At least one person who lives in my home claims to not like Kombucha.  Fine by me, I'll be the only one reaping the healthy benefits of home brew goodness.

floating mass otherwise known as Scoby

After a few weeks hidden in the cabinet

But then, what's the big deal about Coachi-Ness and making something like Kombucha?  Here it is, and I guess for me it's about looking within and trying to create an inner calm while chaos revolves around us.  I like to be in my own favorite spaces, and I like to make things.  After I have my quiet time, I'm ready to be out, engaging and trying different things, being around people.  But I can't be out there in the world all the time.  I get incredibly frazzled, fragile, angry, despondent.  So I take time, pamper, pamper, create, create.  How might that look to another person for their own sense of calm? I honestly don't know, and, of course, we all experience periods of time where there is almost no solution, no place of calm.  Times when we live in the blizzard and can only expect that it will subside eventually, so that we can create some sense of our capabilities and priorities.

In my case, this Spring, I emerged from a relatively jumbled phase, to feel empowered enough to be more proactive in my own community and own some of my hates and resentments.  The creative side of me is what allows me to identify a shift in my own energy, and name it, so I can appreciate uplift when I experience it.  In fact, I was flipping through a journal the other day and found a short piece I wrote, just a month ago, on March 8, 2015:

And then it was March in the distant future. Everything had changed, and I led the most charmed life. I had been there when Mom needed me and saw her fade away. And now, Mom and Dad are everywhere around me, and my home.  My kids are amazing, Peter is my best friend, and life surges forward. March has awoken the sadness but also the incredibly aliveness. I want to live, I love myself. I am the master of my Domain. Life is full. The world is a mess. I have friends and love.

First sip, be still my beating heart.

And for the old coach-y adages:

• "What does calm look like for you?"
• "If you were to make something, everyday, what would that feel like?"
• "What if you make something, just for you, and nobody else?"
• "What's most important?"  "What will you take with you?"

Okay, now let me know how it goes! Happy April, Happy Spring. we're here, until we're not.

What's Really Hard…or…Why I Never Cry, Anymore.

For months, I thought the answer to this question was that I was deep in denial.  Talking about Mom, her opinions, her belongings, in the present tense, as if she were (and she sort of is) right here with me.  But now that time has passed I'm beginning to believe my shortage of tears is a sort of tribute to who my mom was to me, to other members of the family, and who I am trying to become, as I adopt the mantle of the matriarch of a family traditionally dominated by singular, strong, fair-minded women not prone to the whims of fashion, time, or circumstance.  My mother, her mother, and her mother before here were all only children, reared in upstanding Oregon homes.  College educated, craftswomen and homemakers, learned but never beyond their station in life.  The simplicity of austere, old-fashioned conservatism.  

Coupled with this strong will and ordered mind was the discretion honored by many folks my parents' age and older, plus my mom's own inclination to a very private personal life.  It wasn't until I was in my teens, (or perhaps older) that I learned that my own mother's parents were divorced when she was a young girl.  How it escaped me, as I grew up, that she and her mother were alone, together for most of her formative years and beyond is a puzzle to those of us raising children in this day and age, sharing as many secrets and life experiences as we see fit.  In a similar vein, the fact that I was adopted at birth was a hush-hush thing that even into my teenage years, we alluded to, rather than discuss directly.  Finally, when we did discuss the adoption, my parents shared with me that the lawyer who brokered my adoption assured my parents that birth parents were "tall" so I might fit in with my family.  I don't need to accent the extent to which that spirit has shifted today.  

And so, my experience of my mother is one of a woman who was fiercely loyal, proud, loved my brother and I without wavering, and offered a vision of life as an ordered path which a hard-working soul could navigate.  I have absolutely no recollection of my mother crying over the loss of her own mother, but I do remember vividly the weeks and weeks that she and my father and I spent, cleaning out that old Portland house.  It was a job that she embraced.  Certainly with love, and compassion for all of the memories and stories, but never in a maudlin fashion.  Take care of business.  My mother ran our own family with the charge of a highly intelligent, organized, purposeful being.  In her absence, as I read her dictates to my brother and I, as we prepared for her memorial service,  and as we divide our family's estate, the fact that she played her hand (as if it were bridge) perfectly.  Not a stone unturned.

I didnt even cry when Mom was getting ready to die.  It seemed like any minute she was gonna snap out of it and say something like, "what do you think, I'm dying?!"  So, I guess it's no surprise at all, that I never cry anymore.  Except, sometimes, when something sappy that would probably sort of offend Mom shows up, and for a brief respite I can cry quiet little tears, until I'm ready to get back to the project at hand, whatever it is.

"I'm Everything I am…because you loved me." 
-Celine Dion.