I stopped at the top of the mountain to take pictures after we had done a few runs. Ben skied on ahead of me. When I met him partway down the trail, he was bending over fixing his boot. I didn’t think much of this as he is a telemark skier and is constantly adjusting his gear. When he looked up at me though, I knew, I knew by the look on his face. I’m not sure if I will always be able to remember the exact words that were spoken after that, but I know I will remember the look on his face for the rest of my life. Somewhere between the beautiful words he said and the tears that I immediately began to cry, I agreed to marry that wonderful man right there in the middle of a ski mountain. I agreed to marry my best friend and the man who challenges me to be a better person every day. I agreed to marry the man who has seen me at my best, and seen me at my absolute worst.

What ensued after that moment was one of the most magical conversations of my life. Don’t get me wrong, I adored hearing him ask me to marry him and I said yes with all of my heart (and the ring isn’t too bad either )…but that conversation, the one where we took off our skis and sat in the snow for a while and just talked, that’s the one I will hold in the deepest part of my heart for the rest of my life. There was no expectation and there was nothing standing between us, there was nothing telling us where to go or what to do…we were able to just be with each other in that moment on that mountain and revel in the beautiful notion of spending our lives together.

He makes me tea in the morning. He holds my hand when I’m scared. He sits with me when I’m crying, even if we both know there are no words that will make it better. He makes me laugh daily. He sees beyond anything I am on the outside to the core of my being. He’s everything, and he doesn’t even know it most days. He travels the world not realizing the light within him is what made me love him in the first place. I hadn’t even met him yet, but I knew I wanted to know him. He is quietly kind and wonderfully weird.

I adore this man. When you strip away the clutter from your mind and from your world, it becomes so much easier to love. I can’t wait to continue to clear away the clutter, to learn, to grow, to experience, explore, and play with this man.

Thank you for handing me the best day of my life. I’ll love you until my heart stops beating…and after that I’ll float around the universe with you basking in the nothingness of it all.

but none of this matters. Not a single ounce of it matters.Hindsight is always 20/20. I’m getting better at practicing and seeing this in the moment. But…

Alas, I went home and after eating and doing some odds and ends around the apartment I went to take my 8 month old puppy out to take a wiz one last time before we all went to bed. Usually this process takes a collective 3 minutes. Downstairs, up on a snow pile, lift leg, pee, upstairs, bed. Not last night. Last night he wanted to sniff every single corner and hole and nibblet that he found on the sidewalk. The snow has melted considerably here in NYC and what is left is a dirty wet mess of garbage and probably a spot or 10 where another dog peed 3 months ago before there was any snow on the ground. It’s like a carnival for Watson’s nose. The poor thing didn’t realize how tired the human on the other end of his leash was and how desperately she wanted to crawl into bed. The minutes seemed to drag on forever. 5, 10, 15, 20. Still no wiz. I started to feel it creep up in my stomach, then into my chest, and then it had infiltrated my mind at which point I took it as my reality, this is who I am in this moment. Angry. Victimized. Assaulted by the atrocious notion that my dog would put his nose before my being tired.

Wait…but he’s a dog. He doesn’t have thoughts. He lives in the moment. He also is able to sense emotion better than any human I have ever met. He doesn’t know what it means though, he just knows the person on the other end of the leash is getting anxious, which makes me feel anxious, which makes me want to sniff more, which makes me not know what I did wrong, which makes me not know where to pee or how to pee or IF I SHOULD PEE. sniff sniff tug tug run run.

He never peed. We went upstairs and Ben took him out a few minutes later to try again.

I was left feeling utterly guilty at getting so frustrated with him and raising my voice to an octave I know he doesn’t understand.

We went to bed. I slept restlessly. Oh the guilt. Oh the frustration of it all. At that point it wasn’t based on anything that had actually happened in my day yesterday, it was based on the fact that I had internalized all of those little emotions and I had identified with them. I fell asleep thinking “this is who I am right now”. The truth being it was how I felt , and it had nothing to do with my actual being.

I woke up. Ben was just letting Watson out of his crate. He came over to me as I sluggishly let my legs hang off the side of the bed and wiped the sleep from my eyes. He started licking my toes and nuzzling my legs as if to say “let’s go play, it’s a new day, come on come on!”

He wasn’t mad at me. He didn’t feel any less loved. He didn’t want to give me the silent treatment or judge me based on my behavior the previous night. He wanted to play and love and relish in the delight of a brand spanking new day. There were things to pee on and play with and eat and smell! LET’S GO!

My dog is the most Buddhist being I know. I’m not about to go and start sniffing anyone’s butt to become more like him, but I will try to forgive and love and experience more wholly and gracefully like he does.

I am breathing in, I know I am breathing in…I am breathing out, I know I am breathing out…

The middle of winter has arrived.

I heard a car trying to get out of a parking spot this morning. It was that revving noise over and over as the tires slid in their grooves of ice and slush. It went on for what seemed like an eternity. I could almost see the grooves getting deeper and deeper, further trapping the car in place. The person persisted though, revving again and again and again…

It made me think. This is what we, as humans, do in our minds. We get specific tracks or grooves that our thoughts follow. The argument on how they got there and when is an entirely different debate, but regardless, they are deep and worn in and habitual. Our thoughts slide down these grooves like butter down the drain. The more we use them, the deeper the grooves get and the harder it is to step outside of the thought pattern. This has been painfully true for me lately. I can feel the grooves in my mind. I know when it is happening. There is that conscious part of me that recognizes it but the grooves are so deep my thoughts just remain. Negative thinking is like a poison that creeps into every part of our living existence. For me my negative thinking makes me quiet. It silences me. I feel I have nothing to say to anyone about what is really going on in my head. This is just the poison taking over though. How could I have anything to say when what I have to say is not important?

The grooves are deep. The wheels rev again and again and again. Until the conscious part of me, that guy over there in the corner sitting all peaceful and aware of the ego that has taken over my thoughts, he gets up, pushes me out of the groove, and I am free. That part is me. The actual me. The person who believes and is free from judgment and free from the need to beat myself up every day with negative thinking. The person without labels or pages of agendas. That’s the real me. Free. Just being.

The grooves are deepest in the heart of winter. They always are. Awareness is what stops the wheels from spinning though.

Maybe I should go tell the guy outside to stop spinning. He’ll be in that parking spot all day if he doesn’t try a different route.

“Will be more patient”

It usually comes right after “Will be calmer”

Right now I am in a place in my life where I am waiting for a lot of things. BIG things. 3.5+ years ago I was beginning my Master’s program in social work, excited and nervous and alive with the possibility of my big bright future. I was beginning a relationship with a man that has turned out to be the person I will spend the rest of my life with. Now I am graduated, living with said man, and waiting for so many things…

I am waiting for a job, that perfect job that everyone wants when they graduate with a shiny new degree. Unfortunately for me I graduated during one of the worst economic recessions in our history and social services are sadly being cut left and right. It is sad for me, but it is also sad for the people that desperately need those services during this time. I have applied to many different jobs and opportunities, all looking at first glance like “my dream job”. I don’t even know how many nights I have gone home at this point and confidently declared to Ben that “I found my dream job today, I applied, and I have a really good feeling about it!” I will continue to do this because I believe in putting positive energy out into the universe. The alternative feels dreary and useless to me. Alas, I still don’t have said dream job. And in fact I have remolded what my dream job looks like countless times over the past 4 months.I have no doubt I will continue to do so.

I am also waiting to be engaged. Now, before I get started on this topic, I know that this is 2011 and if I was so desperate to make this man my husband I could just pluck up my feminist notions and ask him. As my mom recently said so perfectly though, I am a confusing blend of traditional and modern. I live in NYC and have my heels strongly rooted in the ideas of equality. I also have generations of traditional in my soul though and without discussing it, my boyfriend and I knew that he would propose and I would wait for that moment. Don’t think this means I have waited quietly. There have been moments of sheer emotion in which all I can muster up the voice to say is “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!” But these things take time and in the end our journey through this maze of choosing someone to be your life partner has been one beautifully painful lesson in how to be patient. I know with 100% certainty that I will look back at this time and cherish it. We have never been closer. We have never been more honest and real. We have never been more in love. In the series of moments that are my life, this series is by far the best.

I think a part of my uneasiness in the waiting is that our culture puts so much emphasis on rushing through things, getting to the finish line, and when you get there building a new finish line to get to. Our egos get all tied up in everything we do and we begin labeling things. “Old, young, smart, stupid, right, wrong”. We get lost in the labels and life all of a sudden isn’t about the moments and the energy of those moments but it is about what we look like and what our choices look like.

I’m not good at waiting. I’m better at it then I was last year though and I will continue to work on it. Sometimes I feel like a runner hunched down waiting for the gun to go off. There is no gun though, and this is my life. Right now in all this uncertainty and in all this waiting, this is my reality. So maybe I’ll just stand back up and stop waiting.

My friend put it perfectly when giving me advice about my struggle with waiting. She said “it will happen eventually. It just takes time….but time can be incredibly obnoxious.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

But wait, I’m supposed to be meditating, quieting my mind, connecting with the present moment and abandoning my ego and the thoughts that come with it. Epic Fail. So I decided to shift my perspective and stand on my head. God, hello? Are you there? It’s me Kate, I’m upside down and I thought maybe I could hear you better if I stood on my head…

Nada.

Sigh.

This is just where I am today. So I decided to just accept it and go on with my day. What that meant was making these blessed cupcakes. Anyone from the NYC area or anyone who is a vegan or allergic to wheat may have heard about the famous Babycakes bakery. Well, the woman who started that bakery came out with a cook book with all of the recipes to her fabulously delicious and relatively healthy desserts. I promised my other half I would make him cupcakes for his birthday.

His birthday was January 5th.

In fairness though, the ingredients in these things are ridiculously difficult to find. I don’t know how I would do it if I didn’t live in a city with umpteen organic and whole food markets. Even with all of that I still had to go to 5 different stores to get everything I needed. And by the way- if you ever find yourself in this predicament you can buy xanthan gum from amazon.com. That’s right- xanthan gum. If he doesn’t know I love him after this project he never will. But I digress. I finally got all of the ingredients and set to work in making the frosting. This meant finally taking the beautiful and slightly intimidating food processor out of the place I had shoved it since Christmas when I got it. I opened it, all ready to start PROCESSING SOME FOOD. But this thing had more parts than a car. And low and behold, it comes with a 50 minute DVD! What happened to good ol’ instruction manuals? Are they a thing of the past? Come on, I can’t already be at the age where I’m saying “Back in my day…”. But, alas, it comes with both. OH GOODY. I really fought hard against watching the DVD. Screw you food processor! I have a Bachelor’s degree AND a Master’s degree, you can’t defeat me! After seeing the blades and posts and slicers and bobbles (yeah, I just made that one up) I gave in.

Food processor: 1 Katie: 0

I watched the dang dvd. And ya know what happened? I enjoyed it. It was miraculous! They were slicing potatoes in the time it takes me to take the potatoes out of the bag. They were shredding carrots in seconds. This thing is BRILLIANT! THEY SHOULD MAKE DVD INSTRUCTION MANUALS FOR EVERYTHING! Baking, moving, getting married, meditating, getting pregnant (maybe not for this last one)…there it goes again, the unstoppable train of ridiculous thoughts.

Again, you can tell I’m a little over-excitable today. So I took some deep breaths, went into the kitchen, and made some kick butt vegan vanilla frosting. I’m not a vegan for those of you who are wondering, but my health and choice of diet will have to wait until another post.

I see a nap in my future. And some yoga during which I will try again to quiet the loud screaming ego in my head today.

He was born on April 1st, 2010 at 6:32 pm. He’s perfect.

Ian Finn, you’ve stolen my heart…

baby boy, we are so blessed that God brought you to us...

I love this family!

Ian and his beautiful mother, my sister

My supervisor in the field gave me the most fitting advice on Saturday, and he delivered it with as much warmth and color as he does everything he says to me, “stop being so perfect will ya?! Take a rest, you don’t have to be perfect”. I’m thankful for this as I am most of the things he says to me.

So this letter, the one that holds my truth, in actuality holds what I am in this moment and all of my imperfections. It’s a bumpy road figuring out how I was broken and what to do with the pieces. It’s not the truth, it’s just what I know right now. Tomorrow the truth might look different, it might be a little less jagged and it might hurt a little less.

I’m so tired of not having the time to sink into couches and write letters to no one…

Graduation is May 12th. I stumbled across Lincoln Center (where I will be graduating) on my walk home the other night and was moved to… cry? scream? I did a little of both. Luckily I wasn’t alone and I have evidence of this magical moment.

If I told you how I was feeling, would you listen?

If I told you I was terrified, would you say you feel the same way?

If you saw who I really was, would you still love me?

If I said I was sorry, would you hear me?

If I asked you to break, would you?

If I told you it was ok, to not be perfect, because I’m not perfect either, would you believe me?

If I ran away for a while, would you put your head down and go on…

If I told you what you were to me would you ignore me?

If I asked, would you be honest. Would I be honest?

The trouble is, we don’t have the option to go back or to erase anything. One conversation impacts who we are. One day can change our lives.

Is this thing on?

On one particular flight a couple of weeks ago, while sitting next to my mother, I again became convinced that we were falling out of the sky. There was a bit of turbulence and without the ability to relinquish my need to feel in control, I immediately found myself in a panicked state. My 59 year old mother took one look at the panic in my eyes and said “oh honey, all is well. You need to stop living in fear, without fear we can do anything we want, we can go anywhere we want. When our number is up it’s not up to us”. You see my mother loves flying. I’m not sure if she always did but she certainly does now in the same way I used to. She then put her head back and closed her eyes. She had a slight smile on her face and her fingers held her place in the book she was reading. She was completely and utterly at peace. It was a moment where I deeply admired her. I also felt a strong desire to go into her pockets and steal her faith from her…or at least borrow it. But I know it doesn’t work like that. She’s spent her entire life molding her own faith and I have to do the same. I am doing the same. Faith is a tricky thing for me at this point in my life. I have it and I’ll defend my feeble version of it to anyone who asks. But there are moments such as that one, where I find myself flying without a net, that make me think. I feel like that thing I call faith that lives inside me is merely an infant. It desperately needs to be fed regularly so that it can grow into the kind of Faith that has a capital F. It’s that kind of faith that will allow me to fly without fear. After my mother told me her stance on relinquishing control of when our “number is up”, she was sure to clarify that she wouldn’t be going sky diving anytime soon. She said it in a tone that meant, I’m not afraid of dying but I’m also not stupid honey. She also commented on my lack of fear in going trapezing and flying to Ireland for 4 months all on my own. Sure, I’ve lived without fear. I’ve taken risks and made big mistakes and big victories. So what’s happening in my life right now that my Fear is bigger than my Faith? I think what’s happening is the string on my spool is so tightly wound it’s cutting off my circulation. I can tell you this as a certainty because having a month or so where things weren’t so tightly wound freed me. I think it’s called happiness. I think it’s called letting go.

I don’t regret any of the choices I have made over the past 3 years. What would be the point of that? I’m a mere few months away from being able to let some of the thread go on my spool, or letting some of the balls drop, or I’m closer to some other metaphor that works in this situation. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a constant state of having open heart surgery. I’m wide open. The result of that? I feel everything. There is no lesson lost on me. I love it, I cherish it, I wouldn’t have it any other way. But sometimes, it makes me need to take a few more time outs than others might need.

So in saying all this, it’s January. It’s a new year. So I welcome you, 2010, with open arms. It’s so nice to meet you and I can’t wait to get to know you…

So long sweet mistery. I have no doubt I’ll see you again. I’ll even go so far as to say you are welcome to visit. I’m a big believer in the whole spectrum. The intense rainbow of emotions is what makes me who I am. But please hear me when I say you are only allowed to visit. Take up residence somewhere else. The loft above my apartment is empty. I think there might be a duplex down the street. I’ll cosign the lease for you. I’ll buy you some furniture. I’m not saying you haven’t been loyal. But I’m done needing you, and it’s time to move on. I’m done relying on you instead of myself.

So long sweet misery. I know you used to take up residence with my mother. I think I thought you would leave her alone if I let you move in with me. I took you on as my loyal companion. The thing is- I understand now why I needed you. I’m sorry my mom kicked you out, and now I’m doing the same. But you really should be on your own. You’re better as a visitor. I’ll see you every once in a while, maybe we’ll reminisce and maybe I’ll wrap up in you for a night. But from now on, I’m going to rely on myself.

So long sweet misery.

Love,

Kate