in memoriam

I used to be a chaplain. I am currently staying home full-time with our two children. It is good. It is what I have longed for. It is hard. It has taken me almost a whole year to really say good-bye to what was. The change was a welcome one. I could not figure out how to be in that position anymore. It was a lovely 9.5 years. A lovely place.

It was also becoming impossible for me to be myself there. I felt bitterness. I didn't feel enough creative energy to get along with people whom I didn't feel understood by. I need to process that here at Circle Squared, because I'm still hanging on. I still think about my former career when I awake and go to sleep. I think about what I want to say to my supervisor, who is not my supervisor anymore. I am having real difficulty letting go of that relationship. Or, rather, not the relationship itself, but what it symbolized for me.

In that relationship I felt deeply misunderstood. The person I had been at my workplace no longer fit in, because she evolved as I moved from full-time to part-time work, beginning in 2007. She was evolving before that. Don't we all?

My workplace changed, too. The culture changed in a way I can't put into words. I felt I had lost my voice.

That is okay. I speak on. I am okay. They're okay, too. And that's good to hear.

I was done a divine and human favor by being told "it's apply for full-time work here or leave."

I was let go. I chose to let go. The day I learned the change would be happening, this poem by Rilke came into my home email as part of the Gratefulness.org November 2009 newsletter. I owe that site a lot, because they've shaped me as a person over the last decade. Here is the poem.

Sonnets to Orpheus
Part Two, XII

Want change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything is alight as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body turning away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.


Rainer Maria Rilke

I don't think I quite dare to become the wind yet, but I am pouring myself out like a fountain, flowing into the knowledge that what I am seeking finishes at the start and begins at the ending.