Photo by Be Seen - Erin Berg

“The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break."

~ Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening

The New Rules

The summer between first and second grade, Doreen and Mic (aka Mom and Dad) packed us up and moved us from our quiet little street in Yakima, over the mountains to Seattle. As our car pulled away from the curb, I remember waving goodbye to Jeannie, the girl who lived across the street and had been my friend for as long as I could remember. The memory of the short life I had known slowly faded in the rearview mirror.

The move to Seattle was a significant change for me.

First, it rained. A lot. Rain was something we rarely saw in Yakima. My sunshine-filled days were spent outside with my siblings and cousins from morning till dusk. I don't ever remember having a rainy indoor day.

Second, slugs were everywhere. I had never encountered a slug before moving to Seattle. My brother and I were fascinated by the cornucopia of slimy brown blobs that left glistening trails in their wake, and the remnants of what once was a flowerbed. A favorite pastime was taking the container of Morton's Salt out on a mission to eliminate the pests by melting them. It was cruel, yes, but for a seven-year-old, oddly satisfying.

School started the day after Labor Day, and I was scared. Everything would be unfamiliar, and after successfully navigating kindergarten and first grade, I felt like I was being forced to start all over with a whole new set of rules.

At my old school, I wore a uniform. Not much to argue about when it came to getting dressed in the morning. But at my new school, there were no uniforms. Apparently, it was a free dress day every day. I think this may have been the start of my fetish with fashion.

At my old school, the nuns fixed hot lunch every day, complete with fresh, yummy homemade butter rolls. But now I carried my new Campus Queen lunchbox with a thermos full of Campbell's Soup and some sort of sandwich made with an artificial filling called Deviled Ham. Seriously. This is what they passed off as food, and somehow justified calling it healthy. Questionable, at best.

And then there was the wave of melancholy that comes over me at the end of every summer, along with the business of making new friends in a new school. For my young, tender, little heart, it felt overwhelming and simply too much to bear.

I'm happy to report that by the end of the first week, I had learned what to wear and what not to wear just by watching the other girls out on the playground. I knew Deviled Ham was, apparently, lunch now. Nobody sat me down and explained any of it. I learned it the way we learn most things that actually stick, and before we know it, it becomes the new way of life.

Divorce works on the same principle. So does leaving a career you built your identity around, watching your last child leave for college, or waking up one day inside a marriage, a body, or a life you no longer recognize. Nobody arrives with a manual for who you become next. What arrives instead is the same clumsy process of paying attention, trying something, getting it wrong, trying again, until a new life starts to fit the way the old one used to.

It never feels like anything but loss while you're standing in the middle of it.

Every summer ends before the next grade feels possible. Every ending asks the same thing of us, not perfect answers, just the willingness to keep learning, one clumsy day at a time, until the new way of living stops feeling new.

Maybe that is the real offer hidden inside every ending. Not a verdict. Something closer to an apprenticeship, the chance to grow fluent in a life none of us has lived yet.

Love and Light,

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