Sunday Scribbling #116: Happy Endings

[Detail from the infamous Logo-Board that blossomed one fine week in Mr B's classroom: starting with NM's nifty YouTube, it grew from there, grades 7-12 participating.]

I’m not sure of the exact time, but it was probably around 1991 or 1992. I was living in New Orleans, and was about two or three years into my immersion in all things metaphysical (psychic channels, astrology, healing touch, bodywork, past life regressions: it was the New Age, baby!). At the Golden Age Bookstore, I consulted an astrologer from Memphis who, amongst many other things said: “What’s with this psychotherapy thing? I see you as a teacher.” I gave her a standard Scorpio hmmm, and trotted out some pat rationalizations: supervising graduate social work interns, staff development, therapy as teaching—“No, teaching. In a classroom. That’s what I see.” She could bulldoze as well as the Scorpio across the table. Sarah was her name: Sagittarian, I believe, was her game (same, no surprise, as my son).

I didn’t seek out astrologers or my spiritual mentor Mary Jo McCabe (a psychic up in Baton Rouge; I’d see her once a year) for predictions, much as they might like to give them: I was looking for an understanding of who I was in the moment, not where (they thought) I might be. Of course, I missed the point that, as far as Sarah was concerned, she was not predicting: she was just stating the facts. My fault if I was off course.

I didn’t come to think of myself as off course, but in my last few years as a therapist, I found that I kept looking for ways to push beyond the classical structures (and strictures) of talk therapy into movement, bodywork, healing energy work, and other spiritual explorations. I also found myself wanting to just jump ship and do something completely different, things that invariably looked like minimum wage work: working in a bookstore, an art gallery, an organic nursery. Teaching never once entered the inner computations, computations that invariably led me to conclude that I was not yet ready to make the leap out of my comfortably-incomed life as a psychotherapist.

And then along came a Libra who I left an entire life for, and not too long thereafter, a young Sag swimming in her belly. His presence in our lives was as forceful as that other Sag who sat across from me six or seven years before. His importance to us and our commitment to him blew up all my sense of who I was, what I was, what I would do with my life. I made the leap from my comfortable life and, as I have said before, “trusting in the universe,” I leapt into a void of not-knowing.

And landed flat on my face in a deep swimming pool without water. Bloodied? You bet.

I limped out of the New Age, and took my bruised body into four years of Iyengar yoga: I felt betrayed by the universe in which I had (I now say naively and arrogantly) trusted, and I wanted nothing to do with metaphysical speculations: I wanted to heal a body, and came to see that the body was THE site and intersection of all things metaphysical. For us, on this planet, anyway.

Finding a work life after my life as a therapist was torture: part of my naïve arrogance was also a belief that the world out there would scoop me up with all my “transferrable skills,” that it didn’t take a genius to see that I had plenty to offer. “World” didn’t seem to agree. “World” mainly remained silent.

In my old high school stomping grounds of Jackson, Mississippi I managed to crib together a job as an archivist with the state Department of Archives and History, a wonderful job as it turned out, but one that walked on the thinnest of threads, a government contract job in a frenzied budget-cutting state: the blade came down fourteen months into that experiment in living.

From Jackson, I tossed myself up on the “shores” of my hometown here in Tres Leches (San Antonio, for the uninitiated) and ran into more closed doors than I would have thought possible in a city of over a million residents, the self-proclaimed “seventh or eighth” largest city in the US.

One day a new friend marched herself down to our local literary center and, as far as I can tell, virtually browbeat the wonderful Ms. Nan Cuba into offering me a part time job as PR Director. The writer in me was delighted, Nan was extremely supportive and loving, and the staff she had assembled, well, my nickname for the joint was the Love Shack.

But PR was just a part time gig, and I needed another part to go along with it. Through yet another odd labyrinthine passage, I landed a gig as an instructor at a local career school, what in the old days would have been called a vocational school, trade school, what have you. I taught the light, non-techy stuff, some of it mildly interesting, most of it drivel. I thought I had landed in hell.

Except that, over the next four years, I came to see that teaching was largely about building relationships and exploring material from that established trailhead. Social animal that I am, I grew to love working with the students, as did they with me. Over at the lit center, founder Nan was on her way out to a well-deserved extended sabbatical: let’s just say that the center has yet to recover from that jolt. A year and half later, I walked out myself, no longer trusting any universe to step in, but too miserable at the time to give a damn.

But the “teaching” gig continued, and sunk in deep enough into my bones that when word came two years ago that our program was being cut, I could confidently say that, for all its warts, the school had blessed me with the opportunity to “discover” what Sarah had tried to get me to see a mere fourteen or fifteen years before.

Two years now into a full time teacher’s gig, and ensconced in the Xanadu of my second summer vacation, I cannot imagine a better life, short of full time slackerdom (this 10 week slackerfest is plenty good in itself).

I just hope Sarah hasn’t got something else up her sleeve. Scorps are fixed signs, creatures of habit.

Happy endings sometimes take a while for slow learners. And fixed signs at that.