Spring

I am not stereotypically girly in a lot of ways, but I think that the sun and warmth bring this out in me.

I need to tell you all how much I love spring flowers. I mean, I love spring in general. But I am totally CRAZY about spring flowers. Daffodils, tulips, lilies, bluebell, forget-me-nots,

I LOVE CHERRY BLOSSOMS.

I just, I had to tell someone. Everyone. I love them

What a week. There has been a lot of growth, or at least a lot of uncovery. It has been a painful week. It has been an emotional week. But it has also been a hopeful week. It's funny to me how sometimes the most painful of moments can leave us with the hope that it will get better from here. At least there is now a name to the suffering.

I had a dream, an awful dream on Thursday night. I had a dream that Grandma Joan was still living but she was in the nursing home and I had to go see her before she died. I left for Michigan because for some reason that's where she was, but for the life I of me I couldn't find her! The sun was out and I found my other grandma but I couldn't relax. I felt awful because I knew I was running out of time and if I couldn't find her I would never get to see her again. I woke up feeling sad and panicked. She was gone and I couldn't find her.

I was then walking to class and the song "He Lives in You" from the Lion King came on my iPod. Maybe it's a dumb thing to have trigger this reaction, but I found a lot of comfort from it. It was something that I found in Drums Downtown last night too- organized chaos. We are all connected. We may not move parallel to each other, we may be finding different patterns in our own lives, but my grandma will always live on in me because of the things we shared and because we loved each other. There are some things that I wish didn't happen to me that will always be a part of me too, things that I'd rather not talk about but that are causing me a lot of pain. But they are a part of me whether I run from them or face them. So I face them, I incorporate them into who I am because they always will be.

I think when I was younger I had this false notion that I would remain unscathed by life, that I would live purely and according to what I wanted. But life isn't like that- there are forced at work bigger than us. And really, to love another person in any capacity is to leave yourself vulnerable to their influence. But I think that's what life is about- we have to open ourselves up to the people around us. We impact them, they impact us. In this way our life isn't about money or our degree, it is about how we grow and learn. It is about how we learn the path to love and find our way back to it no matter what happens to us. Love is always a choice, but it is at the root of who we are. We are love, and our fear is the only thing that keeps us from that love. Now, sometimes you have shit to work through to get back to the love. I'm there right now- SO MUCH SHIT TO WORK THROUGH- but I know that if I face my fear, my fear of "I can't handle it", that I will find my way back to love. Because that's my destiny. That's all of our destinies.

“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.”
― Marianne Williamson

Anger

I should be working on this giant project that is due tomorrow but instead I am dark swirly. Instead the most appealing concept to me irght now is filling up my gas tank and just running, running away from everyone and everything. Everything just gets so overwhelming sometimes and I can't focus.

I went to this place called the New Salem Baptist Church on Sunday and the sermon was on anger and how our society doesn't teach us how to utilize our anger properly. We are taught that it's a sin and that getting angry is wrong. We swallow is up and hold it inside of us and wait for it to explode. It always does, and when it does it's rarely at what you're actually upset about.

I am angry at this 66o project. I am angry at the people around me. I am angry at myself, that I don't know what direction to go.

I am angry that being angry as a woman is seen as unfeminine. I am angry at so many personal relationships. I am angry at myself for all of the times that I let my fear conquer me. I am angry that I don't know what's wrong with me and one second I'm having a conversation and the next second something has been triggered in me and all of this poisonous rage is there. It's always there bubbling just under the surface.

I don't know what to do about it- I'm pretty sure I'm giving myself an ulcer. The guy at New Salem said that a main cause of depression is that anger held in and turned inwards. Am I finally unleashing what has been an an entire lifetime of anger?? I don't think I ever learned how to deal with my anger. I always held it in because it got me what I wanted. I got to keep the friend, go to hang with my friends, be in a relationship. I think my fear of being alone always kept my anger at bay- my fear overrode my desire to protect myself. Instead I silenced myself, I swallowed it all up, bite by bite.

I don't know how I'm going to unwind. I just wish at the very core of my being that someone knew what was happening to me so I know that I'm not alone. I just wish someone understood for a split second. Cause, quite frankly, I am kind of scared.


Alright, back to work- real life calls.

I miss Grandma Joan a lot.
It's weird because I didn't think about how much a part of my life she was until she was gone. I really did think about her almost every day because the things she gave me to watch over me litter my room. My rosary, a book, a little wooden picture of Mary and Jesus.
The rosary is on my bed stand and has lived there for years. Whenever I feel sad or absolutely alone or scared I reach for it. I guess I can still do that, and I still get some comfort from it but it makes me really sad to think she's not around anymore. It's really hard to think about how there will be no more memories formed from the two of us spending time together. I realize that she was human and that she had flaws but for me she became such a symbol of unconditional love and support. She was always there, she was always visitable. I was always in her heart, and there was always someone out there who loved me.
I just miss her a lot I guess, miss her singing and the days where she would drink Manhattans.
It'll be OK, these are just some thoughts that have been going through my head and then I had a dream about her last night that made me need to get this out somewhere.

On the bright side, I'm getting my first private students this week!!! I am so flippin excited to actually TEACH. Bah. This is great.

I'm also taking a modern dance and beginning drawing classes next quarter! Also very excited about that. I like this, "I'm taking charge of my education" thing.

More power to you to make the changes you want to see in your life,
Mariah

Number 9....number 9....number 9......

Repetition. It seems to be a constant in my life. There's this weird kind of synchronicity that the universe is humming at that seems to be throwing the same old things my way.
A song on a radio.
A memory.
A smell.

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."
What. does. that. mean??

I conducted in 66o the other day. The notes that Doc scribbled on the back of the page were,

"Let go.
Make mistakes.
Quit trying to be right."


Why can't I do this?? Why, when so many of the people around me are willing to take risks and I am stuck in myself wondering when I get to join in?
Why can't I get over my fear of failure to create my life to be what I want it to be?

I went for a drive the other night, an hour and a half meander through parts of Columbus I've never seen before. I don't know what made me do it, I felt like I was desperately trying to escape something. It was total dark swirly, with the abyss of the night swallowing me, me sinking into its depths. The trees seemed to claw at me, sucking me into their world, the spaces between the stars.

I have a deeply rooted faith that we all end up alone in the end. Being alone is pretty bad, but I recently had a revelation that my biggest fear is not ending up alone, but to have loved and lost. The quote "Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all." is constantly thrown my way. I can't believe it. I won't believe it. And I don't know why that is- maybe I'm afraid that if I let go of this bitterness that is my shield that I will break. This is something that I've carried my whole life, and try as I might I can't just change my perspective. But sure enough, I keep getting myself into positions where I must face this. I don't even know how to start, and it scares me to think that I might be in this unbalanced limbo position for the rest of my life.

Holly posted a quote that I like a lot, "When one loves, one does not calculate." I want to be love. I want it to overflow to those around me in abundance. I want to be happy. That is my life goal. But I can't let go of my calculations to let that happen.

I can't:
Let go, make mistakes, stop trying to be right.

Here's to better days my friends.
MKH

There Will Be Rest

I have lost 2 grandparents in a month. I always had a hunch that my grandparents were going to go around the same time. It's kind of hard to talk about them collectively because they both meant very different things to me.

My grandpa died around 2 am on the night after Christmas. When I came downstairs that morning and my mom told me that he had passed I had this immense sense of relieve because he had so many health problems and I felt like now he was finally at peace. I don't remember much of my grandfather, he was a very private man and honestly he scared me sometimes. He was 9o when he passed so he was already quite old when I was born and I don't have many memories of him playing with us or anything. I remember he did tickle us all the time when we were little and call us "whipper-snappers" "cuckoo-birds" and "scally-wags". I think that in many ways I get my desire for solitude sometimes from him, my private nature. My distance. When I cried for him at his service I think it was mourning the man the I felt like I never got to know. It's hard to realize that there may have been a chance for me to talk with him, learn about him, and I just didn't. He never made it easy and he sure didn't seem approachable but it's still just sad to think of the connections that I didn't make. He died with my uncle by his side- my uncle said he seemed restless at first but towards the end he seemed peaceful. My favorite memory of Poppi, my grandfather, was how he listened to me practice. He always had a radio on at all times, but after their house burned down a few years ago I was practicing in the house that they temporarily moved into while the other house was being reconstructed. I wasn't playing anything special, just keeping my lip in shape over break. I just remember walking out and my dad coming up to me in the living room and saying, "Poppi was listening to you. He turned his radio off to listen." I don't know why that meant so much to me. Maybe it's because I felt like he was interested, and he was listening to my voice, my vulnerability. Maybe it was because I felt like he was proud of me. Whatever it was, that was a beautiful moment of connection between me and my grandfather. I won't forget that. And I won't forget how he used to change his radio to the classical station when we visited.

My Grandma Joan passed away this morning at 7 am. She suffered a massive stroke this past weekend and was taken to the hospital. They gave her some medication that was supposed to unclot the clot that had caused her stroke. Instead of helping, it made her brain bleed, which in turn put pressure on it to the point where she stopped breathing. They put her on a respirator. Her pupils were fixed in different dilations....she wasn't going to get better. There was no coming back from this. They waited for all of her children to get there, and then they pulled the plug. She died with her 4 children and husband by her side. My Grandma Joan meant a lot to me. My mom got very sick when I was born and it was my Grandma Joan and Poppop that really took care of me during that time because my dad had to work. She would always do nice things for me, slip me money or presents. I was just looking at a book called "42 Gifts I'd Like to Give to You"...she taught me about the rosary and about FAITH. The rosary she gave me for my first holy communion is one of my most treasured possessions. She sang to me. She played with me. She loved me. Her death is hard for me because now I know there is going to be a hole where she was. When she started getting really sick while I was in high school she wrote me a note saying how sorry she was she couldn't make it to my orchestra concerts. I remember crying about it and hugging her. She always said she wanted to outlive her mother, and sure enough she did. Her birthday was on December 2oth, and she went into the hospital about a week later. Then this happened.

Over the break, I went and visited her in the hospital. We talked in a way that we really never talked before. I think to some extent we both had a feeling that this was the last time we would see each other. There was a sweetness and a sincerity in our interaction...I don't know. She was sleeping when I walked in and when she woke up the look in her eyes....I just remember feeling like I was totally and completely loved. I was safe. We talked about my grandpa's funeral, and how Irish Catholics deal with things more emotionally. We talked about Midwest and how I remembered her singing in Lithuanian to me when I was little. She told me a few stories about when she was younger. There was this peace about her.... I don't know how to explain it. It was almost like this gold light I felt around her. I asked her if she was scared at all...she said no. She said she had lived a good life and that she trusted God with whatever was on the other side. After about 45 minutes she was having trouble following conversation and was getting tired so I told her I loved her, kissed her, and said I'll see you in March over spring break.

I still don't know how I'm dealing, right now I think I'm repressing a lot until I get home. You know, people say they're sorry and it helps, but they don't know her. And not to be a douche, but I don't really want to hear other people's stories about how they can relate right now. Normally I am all ears for how they are hurting and looking to help them, but that doesn't help me right now. I want to be with my family more than anything, to talk about Grandma Joan and cry hysterically and laugh about her grouchy moments. I want a hug from my mom and my sister. I want to be able to just mourn. My grandma meant so much to me....as much as I knew this day was coming I was really hoping it wouldn't. I know she is at peace now, but there is this hole now where she used to live. That's hard. That's really freaking hard. I just hope I made it clear how much I loved her. How much I STILL love her and will ALWAYS love her.

I have no grand interpretation of what life means. I have no conclusive thought to bring this all together except that as depressing as death is, it is also very beautiful. It seems to bring out the memories of what you really want to remember and say, "here, take this. Hold onto these moments." I think there is a certain grace in death, a certain otherworldliness at least when the person is old and it is "their time". I just can't believe she's gone.


There will be rest, and sure stars shining
Over the roof-tops crowned with snow,
A reign of rest, serene forgetting,
The music of stillness holy and low.I will make this world of my devising
Out of a dream in my lonely mind.
I shall find the crystal of peace, – above me
Stars I shall find.

5 months later...

As you all can see it's been quite some time since I posted. Honestly, sometimes I can't believe everything that's happened. I have given a kick-ass recital, left the horn studio, mentally changed majors at least 3 times, been reaffirmed, been broken down, been built back up again.
I have met those that I have grown to love and I have had to let go of some of them.
I have begun listening to my dreams again.

Quite frankly, I am still on the road to being OK. Not quite there yet at all, but making progress. But hey, it's the journey not the destination right?

In other news, people are awesome. I love getting to know all these people that have been surrounding me for so long but who I never really got to know. Midwest was an AWESOME opportunity for that. It was also a huge affirmation that music is the path for me. It is no longer my escape, but something that makes me feel connected to everything and everyone around me. It leads me back to myself.
I think my favorite line from Midwest was, "We are wired to connect." That's right, it wasn't a profound statement about music or education, it was a statement about our humanity. Humans, whether we want to admit it or not, are social beings. We need interaction, we need to be connected to those around us. I think that too often on my path to self-discovery I have chosen to isolate myself from those around me because it "should be just about me right now." It can be about me, but I need other people. am wired to connect.

So, yeah...I think I've vomited enough sentence fragments onto this page right now.
Go connect with someone.
Now.
It's the holidays.

Meyahhhhh,
Mariah