I have never known what to say in those annual “employee development” conversations. Usually I tell the manager of the week that I don’t want to go into people-management, and that’s about as far as I get. It’s not that I dislike my job. I’m pretty good at it, and I like the people I work with. It’s more the word “aspiration.” To aspire to something implies a sense of wonder and delight. The truth is, my aspirations have never had anything to do with the jobs I’ve had, so I skirt around the issue and come up with something vague. Here is my real list (probably in more than 300 characters, so forgive me):

• Write interesting things and get paid for it. (I am paid to write stuff, but it is far from interesting.)
• Make order out of someone else’s chaotic information (it goes way beyond editing; I love taking a mess of information and putting it into categories and making sense out of it).
• Do visual arrangement (layout).
• Train to be a yoga teacher and work as part of a team of teachers.
• Encourage writers (in small groups of 2 or 3).

Of course, I want to do all of this when I am at my most energetic (early morning and late afternoon), in a schedule that enables me to be there for my kids, and mostly (but not always) at home. Is anybody looking for a creative person who can make order out of chaotic information, help you become a better writer, and help you document your life in beautiful photobooks? Just wondering.

We have never had a conversation about reincarnation. She came up with this notion on her own. I am living with an old soul.

Harold met and adopted Maggie as a puppy. Our friend Monica went with him to The Pound and was skeptical, because apparently Maggie was exactly as talkative and excitable as a puppy as she remains today, but Harold fell in love, and Maggie spent all of a few hours of her life in The Pound before he took her home.

When I met Maggie, she was about 3 years old, fast, smart, talkative, and selective in who she chose as “her people.” She is not the dog whore that Gus is (he will love the exterminator as much as me, if the exterminator pets him). I am a dog person; I know how to approach them, and usually they meet me halfway and I have an instant friend. Maggie isn’t like that, though. She ignored me at first, occasionally would check me out when Harold and I took her for walks. She actually sat herself between us on Harold’s couch when we were on a date, and she went wild whenever Harold and I danced in front of her (Harold called her a Baptist). But before long, I won her over.

I love taking walks, particularly with a dog to share the experience, so when Harold and I started dating, he would give me a key and I’d go to his place and take Maggie out for a walk. I did this a few times a week for a while, always keeping her on a leash, until one day when I decided that we were ready to test our relationship. I let her off the leash. She was so happy that she did the breathing/talking terrier thing and pranced her feet up and down. She would run ahead but always run back to me, as if to make sure it was still OK to be off the leash. “Good girl,” I’d encourage when she came back. She’d wind her tail like a helicopter, ears perked up, and run off again. Our walks bonded us, and after that she decided that I was OK. By the time Harold and I were married (less than a year after we started dating), Maggie would follow ME around, check to make sure I was OK when we went mountain biking, would wait for me if Harold went to bed first.  She’s definitely OUR dog.

These days, walking with Maggie is a meditation and an act of compassion. She is arthritic and can’t go very far, she doesn’t see well, and she doesn’t hear well. It is a slow and quiet walk. This walk is not for me; I wait patiently to let her sniff everything that she wants to sniff, let her wander in whatever direction she wants. I smile when I see her ears perk up when she smells something good. I remember the quick little dog that she was, and we slowly head back home.

It has been tough to walk with Gus regularly since the kids arrived on the scene almost 5 years ago. He is too strong to walk while also pushing a stroller, so I had to either find another adult (Harold or a neighbor) to go with us or I had to enlist Harold to watch the kids while I escaped with Gus. Add on our crazy schedules and the fact that there are minimal streetlights in my neighborhood and, especially in the winter, it was very difficult to work in more than a weekend walk.

Somehow, in the last few months, I’ve found ways to squeeze in more walks with Gus (though not always alone). I want my kids to like walking their dogs (I want them to understand that it’s part of having and caring for dogs), and the kids have recently turned a corner of sorts and abandoned the strollers. Kate will go for short walks with just Gus and me. The promise of alone-with-Mommy time is enough to buoy her through the mile or mile and a half route. Matthew will also go on walks with me, although it’s slightly more stressful because he runs the whole way and I don’t always have full confidence that he will listen to my pleas to slow down and not run out of my sight when Gus makes a pit stop to pee on a bush. Still, we all let off steam and get some fresh air, so I take the stress with the benefits.

My favorite walks, though, are the ones with just Gus and me. Gus’s ears are perked up and he lopes along, thrilled to be smelling other animals, peeing on bushes, and stretching his legs. Just the act of walking with him makes him so HAPPY. Who else is so easy to please? When I am walking with Gus, I am alone with my thoughts but I am not ALONE. There is minimal talking (other than an occasional “good dog” or “this way”), which lets me smell the air, feel the wind, hear the birds, hear my thoughts. When I run in to other walkers, I am less self-conscious when walking with Gus because, again, I am not alone. I have a purpose in my walk.

Gus is also a great “pace dog.” Although he is about 11 years old (rescue dog, so no one knows his exact age), he is still pure muscle. His walk is probably about a 14-minute mile, and he tolerates my jogging, which is about an 11-minute mile. When I walk by myself, I notice that I’m exercising and I feel the stress on my ankles or back. With Gus, my interval trainer, I actually enjoy what I’m doing. The sight of his perked up ears bobbing up and down are enough to keep me going.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the mortality of my dogs. Maggie is almost 16 years old (I’ll write about walking with Maggie later this week), and I know that she can’t defy the odds forever. I do complain from time to time about the realities of sharing my home with two big, hairy dogs. I flip ottomans and kids’ toys and laundry baskets on the living room furniture any time we leave the house to keep the dogs off of the furniture. I am incapable of keeping up with the tumbleweed of dog hair on my hardwood floors. And if I don’t wash the dog beds weekly, you can tell as soon as you enter my house. But despite those minor inconveniences, I can’t imagine not having the greeting when I return home, the gentle presence when I’m feeling ill, and my walking partner who helps me stay sane.

Quick reality check: I was sick from the week after Thanksgiving until oh, about yesterday when I hit day 3 of the antibiotics to which I finally succumbed. Endless coughing and congestion lingered, then add pinkeye to the mix the day after Christmas, and top it off with 2 weeks of a sore throat. Needless to say, I didn’t have a lot of energy over the “break.” (As any stay-at-home mom will attest, being at home with a 2- and 4-year-old, particularly when they have access to and have been consuming obscene amounts of sugar, is not exactly a “break.”) Let’s review my plans:

1. The weather, which is almost always decent or even GOOD in my location within any two-week period in the year, was crappy. It was damp, it was cold, and on the rare portion of the day when it was nice, we weren’t all healthy. Skip the trip to the zoo.
2. “The Tale of Des.pereaux”…I hemmed and hawed about whether my kids could hang with the plot, after I read a little more about it. I thought it was way beyond the two-year-old, and I have yet to figure out an ideal time to take them to the movies, since Matt still naps in the afternoon. Instead, we watched Kung Fu P.anda, Sleeping Beauty, and Barb.ie and the Dia.mond Castle (Christmas gifts) about a hundred times.
3. Cookies: our oven has been on the fritz (a la “F2 Error” beeping at me when I haven’t gone anywhere near the damn thing). When we get the error, which is all the time, it shuts itself off. We have a toaster oven that has been saving us, but it’s not the greatest cookie oven. Also, did I mention that I was feeling sick? So the great cookie baking of 2008 consisted of “break and bake” sugar cookies, dipped in sprinkles, hastily cooked on Christmas Eve so that we could leave cookies and milk for Santa (who felt so sick that he and she had to bury the cookies in the trash because they didn’t even want to eat them).
4. Play dates: There was one play date, it involved two friends, and you already read the resulting quote from Kate. So, she never again wants to invite to our house more than one friend at a time. Well, at least we learned something. It was a tough thing to learn at 9 AM, though, knowing that the moms wouldn’t be picking up the girls until 1 PM.
5. Craft Day was intended to be part of The Play Date. Oh, the visions I had of artistic masterpieces and how I could do the crafts, too. What fun! My kitchen went from zero to chaos in 7.2 seconds. There will be a separate post about Craft Day.

So my husband and I have already discussed how maybe next year we won’t try for a “quiet Christmas at home.” Maybe there’s something to be said for a little travelling chaos. If we’re healthy in 2009, we’re outta here.

Let me start by saying that I don’t look like a “Passionflower.” In many ways, I am a resounding example of “normal” or “standard” without appearing extraordinary. My build is well proportioned with no particular feature standing out. My hair is a “medium” brown with some red, some blond, some gray, with no particular color taking center stage. In the winter I wear a uniform of khakis, white shirt, and some form of sweater. I have a job in the technology industry that certainly doesn’t scream “passionflower.” With two small kids, a husband, and a full-time-plus job 70 miles from my house, there’s barely time to trim my nails or dry my hair, let alone cultivate passion. And yet, one day, someone on Hayhouse Radio (I think it was D*enise Linn, or maybe S*onia Choquette) called me to do so.

I was doing a time-consuming but rote task at work and listening to Hayhouse on headphones to make the act of verifying translations of CD labels more pleasant. The whole show was about connecting with your spirit, and the host kept asking callers to name their spirits. Every caller hesitated. “Come on,” she’d encourage, “if you had to make up a name, what would it be? Tell me the first thing that comes to you.” And they’d come up with something. Could I name my spirit? What part of my spirit would I name? What is the essence of me, without the kids, husband, job, education, experiences? When those are stripped away, what is left?

Passion + Flowers = Passionflower

In the moments when I can still my mind, I rely on my body for guidance. I feel my intuition in my heart, the heart in my physical chest, and then I see pictures. This time I saw my heart, sporting a few old wounds but quite healthy overall. Maybe it was all those trips to a local science museum that had a heart big enough to walk through when I was a child, but I have a clear vision of what a real heart (not a Valentine heart) looks like. When I thought of the word “passion,” flowers started sprouting from my heart and opening. I felt the opening, the flowering, in every part of me, the way the oxygen gets carried to the cells in every part of your body. So passion flowers (verb), and I decided that my spirit was a flowering of passion, a passionflower.

Canvas

Although writing is certainly a compelling practice for me, this blog is not called “Passionflower’s Notebook” because it wouldn’t convey the whole picture. If I were to call myself a writer only, I would be denying the part of me that longs to create visual beauty. So, even though you haven’t seen evidence of it on the blog yet, I wanted to be an artist long before I knew how to read or write. My favorite gift the Christmas when I was 5 was a big Crayola set with pastels, paints, colored pencils, and crayons. It still chokes me up to remember hearing my mother’s father (who died when I was six) say, “I never saw anyone so small draw so well.” When I was in elementary school, my mother kept me out of school on my birthday and took me to an awesome art museum in the big city nearby (because that’s what I wanted to do). When I cut school as a senior, I went to the same art museum. By the time I was 8, I knew on exactly which shelves at the library to look for books on the Impressionists and Picasso, and I checked them out on a regular basis, right next to my Beverly Cleary and Sweet Valley High books.

The tagline of this blog is “One woman’s journey to rediscover her creative spirit.” I don’t know where those words came from, I don’t remember crafting them in my mind, so they must have been my spirit speaking. If I am to rediscover my creative spirit, it’s going to be a multimedia activity, with physical and digital canvases as well as words painting images for your to create in your own heads. So that’s why this space is more than a notebook, it’s Passionflower’s Canvas.

When there were six of us at home (2 parents and 4 kids), we had one complete bathroom (and another one upstairs, behind a door, waiting to be finished). By the time there were four of us left at home, my parents managed to finish that bathroom. When brother number 3 went off to college, my parents built a large family room addition, which had built-in bookshelves, a nook for a card table and chairs (at which we did actually play cards, or sometimes type on Dad’s typewriter — whew, I sound old!), a bathroom with shower, and a seriously high ceiling. It was 14 or 15 feet high.

My parents are very responsible people — a pastor and a nurse, responsible with their money, good neighbors, good parents, and all that good stuff. We went out to eat as a family about twice a year, at the Ponderosa, after church, with a coupon. They had an actual budget for each week (for food, for gas, whatever) and paid attention to it. We went to church every Sunday, we had dinner as a family every night, and we returned to the same places for vacation. But every once in a while my dad shows his impulsive side.

Unlike in the South (where I reside now and am happily married to a southerner and have been converted to say “Hey, y’all” instead of “Hi, you guys” — so, no offense, y’all!), where you apparently must purchase your Christmas tree by December 3 or you will end up with some brownish stick that drops needles, where I grew up we used to get our tree between December 15 and December 20. By that time, everyone was home from college and we could all be part of the setup. I didn’t go to pick out the tree the year my parents built the addition, but I remember the looks on my brothers’ faces when they came back with Dad. They were beaming. They were laughing. They were dragging in a 14 and a half foot tree. I have no idea how they got the tree on top of the small car my dad drove. I’m not even sure how they got it through the front door, but they did.

The very top of the tree grazed the ceiling. It took up an area bigger than the large cubicle I sit in at work. God only knows what it cost. They got out 8-foot ladders and still had to kind of toss the lights over the top. We decorated and ran out to the store for more lights and more candycanes and decorated some more. My mother walked in and her eyes got really wide, and she LAUGHED. I was fourteen years old, and I have no idea what presents I opened that year, but that tree was magic.

I needed this yesterday, after a whirlwind three and a half days of packing, driving, visiting, trading presents, and more presents and visiting, repacking, and driving home. At our last stop (in addition to the kid presents) we received several armloads of a wardrobe for our 2-year-old, which started out in a nice big box but could fit only if the contents were dumped over all of the other present loot. This was a rented vehicle, mind you, so it had to be emptied yesterday. With all of the excitement and driving and odd eating habits, Kate was not feeling well and I spent the last three hours of the drive praying that she would not be sick in this rental all over our stuff. She made it home and seemed to mend from a magic formula of  loose PJs, a movie, and, later on, some bland oatmeal, but the stress of worrying that she MIGHT be sick was exhausting for me.

“Finish one thing” drove me to empty the car, put away laundry, put away the clean dishes waiting for our return, put away the snacks we had dragged 5 hours south and east and back again, put away the toys we’d brought as diversions (before we got the slew of new toys). I managed to gather up the pieces of an outfit to wear today, set up the coffeemaker, set my alarm, and NOT check e-mail. One at a time, item by item, bird by bird (love that Anne Lamott!).

I thought it would be OK if I got that far. I thought that all I needed was a plan for dinner and a start on the kids’ lunches. And yet…today…my head is like the inside of a snow globe. All the work to-dos, swirling around, and I can’t quite catch one individual flake to finish one thing. I try to catch one, and I end up swirling around all the rest. Breathe, focus, reach up one hand to catch a flake…swirl them all around again. I wrote out a list of priorities before I left on Thursday and sent it to myself in e-mail. The letters are Greek. I can’t break down the tasks into the next step. Reach, focus, almost catch the flake…swirl. Finish one post. Stop. Then finish one more thing.

First of all, I have to say that I am proud of myself for avoiding Snow White completely. Snow is not part of the family DVD collection. I heard her voice on a preview once and good LORD it sounds like an inexperienced piccolo player. I can’t comment on Aurora because we don’t have Sleeping Beauty, either, though I just wrapped her the other day for Christmas, so I might have to amend this in January, by which time I will surely have watched it 100 times. On to the serious analysis.

Despite Ariel’s strong spirit (she has the guts and independence to go against her father’s wishes) and her brief flash of feminist insight in the secret grotto (“…bright young women, sick of swimmin’, ready to stand…”), let’s face it. She gives away her gift, her talent, her VOICE to be with a man she sees once. Now, I’m not dissing Prince Eric. He is strong, handsome, can sail a boat and play the flute, and is kind and thoughtful enough to take in Ariel when he assumes that she has washed up on shore from a shipwreck. But still — she saw him ONCE and changed her essential being (mermaid to human) and gave up her gift for a chance to be with him. Not a course of action that I recommend for Kate.

Cinderella seems like a ridiculous pushover at first glance, keeping up the “yes, Stepmother” and “yes, Drizella” as she gets treated like a slave. But you see a tiny bit of intelligence and humor, so quick that it is easy to miss, when she raises her eyebrows and almost laughs about interrupting Anastasia and Drizella’s hideous “music lesson” to deliver the announcement of the royal ball from the king. Still, she maintains her sweetness just a bit too long for my taste.

Belle does have a brain and realizes that she would not make it as Gaston’s “little” wife. She is the only princess caught reading, and she cares about her family and about the beast. The other thing she has going for her is that she appears to be about twenty, which, though young, is much more palatable than the 16-year-old Ariel running off to get married (don’t even let me get started about Pocahontas). In addition, she actually spends at least weeks getting to know the beast, unlike Ariel (3 days before marriage) and Cinderella (one evening and she gets married the next day).

Jasmine is an independent young woman who wants to marry for love. She is still kind of Daddy’s girl (by the way, Daddy is a carbon copy of the King in Cinderella), but she can see through the pompous idiot suitors. And she can leap across buildings in a single bound, which counts for something. Her age is unclear, and I don’t recall her reading any books. I do like the theme of freedom: freedom from the bottle (genie), freedom from forced marriage (for Jasmine), and freedom from potential-stunting poverty (for Aladdin). But again, we are talking about 3 days of courtship, tops, before she is marrying the guy.

Then there’s Mulan. She doesn’t fit the mold of perfect silent wife: she speaks her mind and risks her life to save her father. Though she demonstrates physical strength, her greater strength is her intellect. Mulan figures out how to use any challenges or liabilities to her advantage. When faced with with the task of climbing a pole with heavy large discs weighing down her wrists, she loops them around the pole in a way that helps her reach the top. She uses one cannon to take out an entire army by aiming at the snow above, causing an avalanche. And in the Forbidden City, she uses her weakness (as a woman, no one listens to or sees her) to her advantage by dressing the male soldiers as women to sneak into the palace.

We see the destruction of war, an entire village burned to the ground, the Imperial Army slaughtered, no survivors. We are reminded that this really is a war movie when she takes a small doll, says a silent prayer, and places it beside the helmet of the fallen General, as if to honor the women and children lost as well as the fallen warriors.

Finally, Mulan’s father is not portrayed as a slave to honor and tradition, though he clearly values both. He puts aside the tokens of honor (the crest of the emperor and the sword of the enemy) to hug his daughter (“the greatest gift and honor is having you as a daughter.”). Yes, Captain Shang shows up to see Mulan, but she simply invites him to dinner. They don’t get married in the next 5 minutes. This time, the big D got it right. And yes, this is how I deal with English major withdrawal.