Steven Joiner

(If you haven’t already, check out Part One of the ‘Notes from the Broken Heartland’. It will help this make a bit more sense.)

Looking forward, looking back, looking around

‘I’m not dead yet’

I was just listening to a 2006 Fresh Air interview with Reynolds Price–a southern writer who died January 20th of a heart attack. Despite being a Duke grad and professor, he had some very interesting insights*.

(*If we can’t pick on Duke then what do we have left?)

I caught the portion of the interview in which he shared his thoughts on losing his legs due to a cancerous spinal tumor. He said he wished that someone had come into the room after his surgery to say (I’m paraphrasing here): ‘Reynolds Price is dead. Who do you want to be now?’

This hit home for me in the chill-running-up-my-spine-and-tingling-out-the-top-of-my-rapidly-balding-head way that only ‘Capital T Truth’ can. It also helped me to glimpse into what’s been ‘wrong’ with me over the last few days. You see, I hit this energetic melancholy earlier this week and, no matter what I did about it (sleep more, walk more, stretch more, eat felicitously), I wasn’t feeling better. Two people told me that I looked ‘tired and frazzled’ and I had to concede that I did indeed feel that way. I ascribed my state of being to a combination of coming down from the heavy lifting necessary during a move (after being back for over a month now, ‘normal life’ has returned) and the significant increase in my workload. Keep in mind that I was chronically underemployed for the better part of a year so I’m now flexing atrophied muscles beyond their limits of comfort.

Too much work and the end of a transitory phase… that explanation–like any intellectualization–made perfect sense. I also knew energetically and emotionally it was incomplete.

Before hearing the Fresh Air interview, I caught up with my dear friend Catherine in KC. We touched on many topics–updates, expectations, emotions–and our conversation concluded with a check-in on various friends… including the woman I loved. With that conversation fresh in my mind, I realized minutes later, upon hearing Reynolds, that I didn’t know the answer to his question. In part one of this missive, I talk about ‘surrendering the future’ and now I realize I have to wrestle with giving myself permission to die. (more…)

Ink memories from the life before this life that ended

Resistance is Futile

The office in my apartment is my last refuge from the reality that my life is steadily crawling into boxes. My room and my closets are all now empty and everything in the living room is sequestered into ‘stuff I need to get rid of’ and ‘stuff that I am going to attempt to fit in my truck’. I am juggling the need for my cat to have access to water and a litter box while also holding space in my luggage for all the accessories associated with her food/waste cycle.

I woke up Monday realizing that I will be driving my green truck west in seven day… and, in the course of those seven days, I am flying to Portland for two nights to take Fortuna. I return Saturday to load the truck and aim the wheels toward California (en route to Oregon) on Monday. I drove a green truck west in the fall of 2000 on a trip that set the course of my life for the next eight years. I am cautiously eager to see what this trip holds in store.

Last night I met with some friends to meditate and exchange blessings. I talked about ‘surrender’ and realized that relinquishing defines my last year here in the Broken Heartland: surrendering my career, my intellectual control, my emotional rigidity, my financial security (almost a full year without any substantive paid work), my heart (which, when it was returned to me, was in pieces), my cat (to live next door for a year… and, while my dear friend Autumn was a wonderful ‘long-term cat sitter’, seeing one’s animal familiar for 20-30 minutes a day barely counts as connecting), and my spiritual skepticism. I’ve chronicled much of this part of my time in the Broken Heartland in the essay ‘Losing Control‘.

While I strongly recommend surrendering and choosing to lose control, I also confess that it has made me so very weary. I’m infamous for my patience and I said to my friends last night that my patience with constantly surrendering has worn thin. I’m also infamous for my temper… which explodes when the patience runs out. My intention as I roll west is to transform my impatience with surrendering into creative, not destructive, energy.

The Year of Living Dangerously Midwestern

I do appreciate the irony of leaving Portland, Oregon for Kansas City, Missouri in order to connect to my new-age, metaphysical, spiritual-smorgasbord potential. (more…)