As the Year Turns

Have you ever been to a waterpark that has those big floaty water lilies in a series with a rope dangling above, with the notion that you will balance/dangle your way across to terra firma on the other side of the pool?

Yeah, that's about it right now. As 2021 scurries out to make room for 2022, we (Jason and Janelle) are fully engaged in the effort to keep our balance on what feels like fairly unstable footing with not a whole lot to hold on to. I say that as an emotion, not an ultimate reality, but I'll get to that in a bit. First, why does this turn of the year feel so wobbly? Here are a few of the reasons:

1) Janelle is, in case you haven't heard, ending her position as Academic Program Coordinator at EMU's Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, which has been her employer--not to mention so much else--for 22 years. Her last day is January 21. Preparations for the transition have been going on since this past summer, and are near fever pitch now as she grinds through the decades-accumulated particulars of her position with the capable person who will fill much of her role there; without knowing what good hands her responsibilities will be in, leaving would be that much more painful. As she prepares to say goodbye to the students who are currently mid-program and her colleagues throughout the university, it is not simply a professional parting. We've been saying that in a way she grew up at CJP; this ending is something to grieve--an identity release with no clear full substitute in view. One of my roles in all this is trying not to laugh at her when she worries that she's not capable of any other job, and holding her when letting go is hard. 

But let go she must (though she's been saying how glad she is that the relationships formed during these decades with colleagues and alumni don't have to end when she turns in her keys). It's been clear for years now that burnout is real, and it's part of Janelle's life. But CJP was always more than a job for Janelle. It was a place of connection, mentorship, meaning, affirmation, and education for her personally. It took a long time and the help of the best therapist she's found for herself to identify that while she has many sources of stress and anxiety in her life, a large part of her burnout was coming from the intensity of her work at CJP, and that the time had come to move on. Our whole family owes a lot of our paradigm to connections made through the CJP-affiliated community, and we've depended financially on the wages and benefits she earned there...it has felt like a relationship not to let go of glibly without something to replace it.

The trouble with moving on from CJP has been that while burnout persists, Janelle and I have neither the time nor mental space to sort through other options for long-term jobs or careers, and Janelle specifically needs some time for healing before she can re-establish contact (or establish it for the first time?) with her own sense of what she wants for herself. It has felt, as we considered this transition, that we needed to essentially let go of CJP with no plan for a full replacement for its role in our lives so that we--especially Janelle--could take stock of where we are at and where we want to go; we think we have to face the uncertainty squarely to open up a chance for fulfilling work involvements that meet our needs without dominating our lives. That work is part opportunity-selection, part personal transformation; i.e., how do we learn the skill of getting involved without getting stuck?

2) I am starting a small contracting business. This is not thought to be a long-term career for me, but a way of paying the bills in a time-flexible manner as we sort out our minds, our finances, our goals, and our opportunities over the next as-yet-undetermined span of time. My plan is to put a business structure in place that could function over the long term if needed, but which can be dissolved without fanfare if it is no longer needed.

What I have in mind is a simple home repair/improvement business, part time, with more of the work bunched into the gardening/farming off-season. I would help homeowners with their "punch lists," which is something it is very hard to get anyone to do in the current business environment, and in exchange for that valuable service I will ask for a sufficient hourly rate to allow us to meet our minimal financial needs with part-time work, and on a flexible schedule that defers to the work demands of the home farm. I will probably also do some subcontracting for friends who work in various trades. I am looking forward to that aspect socially and in terms of education.

Literal nuts and bolts are usually no problem for me, but working out the figurative nuts and bolts of starting a business is a process I find mostly just about as boring as it is convoluted, so it is no surprise that getting bookkeeping systems, insurance, tax prep, I.D. numbers, legal structure, business plan, invoice and contract templates all in order for the inception of the business has been no mean feat for me so far, and that work is ongoing. Fortunately I am not the first person to recognize that some people benefit from help with this mess; there is a whole Small Business Development Center dedicated to assisting entrepreneurs find the mentorship and resources they need along the way, and I have connected with a mentor there. It's going to be fine and I will keep up with the details well enough, the likely opinion of my sixth-grade teachers notwithstanding!

Would I want to be a part-time, small-time contractor for the remainder of my working life? I am doubtful of that, but I could be surprised. What I am excited about is getting out into the community more, making a social and service contribution and presence of my own, and using this hopefully low-key way of bringing home Federal Reserve Notes to open space for us to consider how we want to shape our lives in the next phase.

3) Mom and Dad Myers have moved here permanently, having now sold their WV Mountain House of Hope to Janelle's sister, Brenda, and her fiancé, Greg. They downsized, downsized, and downsized all year, and we still had way more in the moving truck than anybody expected. Once it was all here it was more downsizing and sorting, but by now almost everything is in its place, and while the grief of leaving West Virginia is real, the relief is also real that they now have one place to manage, and not a very large one. Having them around more has been wonderful, especially for the kids. The natural flow of our two households will be even more appreciated in the coming days as we end a precautionary quarantine time for a holiday gathering that required sealing off the connection between our two spaces and not sharing indoor space unmasked. The "natural migration" of children and things ceased or became much more difficult during that time and we will have a new found gratitude for the normal ease of things.

4) Kali, now 18, is growing up! She's been homeschooled in the Unschooling model all the way along, so we feel like we are improvising many aspects of her budding adulthood. Without a high school graduation to mark the transition, it's hard to figure out what to hang my hat on when I express the feeling that she's seeming more and more ready to branch out. She's got her learner's permit now, and has learned to drive our manual-transmission Matrix, so more independence is on her horizon, but nobody seems to know how she's going to use it, which I guess is kind of the point. Her fall 2021 plans to travel back to the Philippines with Tala was disrupted by Covid and the hope is that that was just a postponement until this spring/summer.

5) COVID. Nuf said (though there is plenty to say). Vaxxed, boosted (those eligible), still not infected as of yet. We have been pretty cautious.

6) Garden plan 2022: With all the other changes, and with some rearranging to make room for Mom Myers to have a garden of her own here at Tangly Woods, it is as yet unclear what modifications will need to be made to our standard yearly gardening effort and layout. Usually we plan in January or February for most of the year, but we are unsure how to do that until we find out how much time we'll feel we have to put to it compared to usual, so we know it's possible we'll have to adapt our plans mid-stream and not be too hard on ourselves if the weeds or harvests get ahead of us. 

7) Tala went home. Our beloved friend, housemate, and chosen family member who had been with us since summer 2020 made the return trip in August to her home in the Kalinga territory in the Philippines. We stay in touch over email, text and video calls, but we all miss each other.

8) HAES (Health At Every Size) learning: Janelle has been engaged in serious study and a deep personal healing journey with the assistance of many podcasts, a book group with colleagues using Your Body is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor and we've read Christy Harrison's Anti Diet book out loud together and talked and talked about these issues. In addition to Janelle recognizing her own history of disordered eating, we've been coming to grips with our family's history of "orthorexia," or righteous eating, and internalized and externalized fat phobias. We don't want to contribute any more to the lionization of diet as the cure for all ills, nor the obscuring of health justice issues that that outsized focus has caused in our health care systems and in our culture more broadly. It's a partial identity crisis for our farm: If this isn't about "pure" or "healthy" food exactly, then what else is it about, and is what we have worked for partially a distraction from more pressing problems?

Wobble, wobble, wobble go the lily pads.

Except that each of these contributors to instability can be looked at in more than one way:

1) Janelle's leaving CJP is an opportunity for improved peace of mind, and for personal growth, transformation, and healing. It's a chance to find new opportunities to contribute our gifts and skills in ways that are well suited to our personalities and life stages. For example, Janelle is in the process of becoming certified as a Birth Doula, and hopes to be able to offer birth accompaniment regularly over the coming years.

2) My business stands the chance of really helping me/us connect in meaningful ways to a broader slice of our community, and could lead to any number of opportunities of who knows what types.

One of the most interesting and frightening questions for me is, what if there IS something more for me beyond home, family, farm, and a little light contracting to make it all work? I can't see myself moving away from gardening or deeply engaged family life, and chicken breeding is more or less a permanent fixture in my life, but other than that and the fact that I am 45 (not 25), I feel really open to what might come.

3) Mom and Dad set a wonderful example for us as to how to make a challenging change with grace and intention, how to ask for help when needed, and how to get it all done a little ahead of schedule! We'll hang on to the cord of that example many times, I am sure, as we navigate the lily pads of life. And we are so glad that our children have the gift of grandparents close by to learn with and from, play with and tease, love and receive love from, and share day to day life with.

4) Kali (and all our children) is such a loving, steady, joyful presence in our lives and we're so privileged to share our lives together. While there are surely trade-offs to the childhood Kali has had, on the whole I don't think she or we would trade the experience of having spent nearly the whole of it together in loving relationship. Oh, it may be (may be) easier to learn certain academic concepts by emphasizing them early and hard, but I'll wager many a psychologist can attest to the near impossibility of learning such relational concepts as unconditional love if you didn't experience enough of it in your childhood, and the same goes for unlearning such practices as self-loathing or shame. I am so eager to see where Kali takes her life, and the process she uses to step forward. About all I know about it is that it will be her own process, done her own way, and that she doesn't owe anybody an explanation for it, even me!

As that unfolds, we will continue to savor life together and the sweetness of our girls getting to spend ample time together. Watching Terah (6), Alida (11) and Kali grow and learn together and love each other so fiercely is one of our deepest joys. 

5) With the advent of the pandemic, we find ourselves in a very favorable position (having access once again to many unearned privileges combined with the fruit of some conscious choices and planning along the way): we have a relatively secure supply of food and energy, we share air space only with those we choose, we have a ready-made intergenerational pod, we've been able to work from home, and we already had plenty of experience being together most of the time. Even our curriculum didn't change, with the exception of the elimination of soccer league participation and regular unmasked indoor play dates. All in good time, we hope.

6) The gardens and the soil are an anchor of security in this time, even emotionally. Modifications will need to be made, but the sprouting of our beloved varieties this year will be, as always, like a visit from a friend. The routines and cycles we've initiated and integrated with the wild ecology are a force for steadiness and calm in the bigger picture, even though they overwhelm us in certain moments.

7) The gift of Tala in our life continues. Her contributions as an Indigenous person, and also just as herself, to our ways of perceiving the world is something we cherish; something we needed and still need. It is joy to be in touch with Tala, to see her working to grow some of her favorite Tangly Woods varieties at her family home, and for she and our family to know we've all got dear friends there on the other side of the world. When Kali is playing internet-based Rook with Tala late at night and I hear roosters crowing in the background of her video call, I smile to myself and wonder at the world we live in. 

8) The realization that we may have gone astray in an "orthorexic" direction in our attempt to establish a sustainable and sustaining life on this land is not only disheartening...it is also potentially quite freeing! So maybe we can pursue these passions as passions, not compulsions. Maybe we can return focus to the most pressing issues of ecological integration. Maybe we can take another step away from a culture that demands our dissatisfaction with self and life and towards "enough." Maybe we can turn some more attention toward working to improve secure access to diverse food choices for all. Maybe we can be advocates for reducing/eliminating stigmas, disadvantages, environmental problems, and other social determinants of health. Maybe this is one of the keys to moving into more truly effective contribution to a world greatly in need. That's honestly what it feels like.

And so, as we move into 2022, we are full. What we are full of depends on the moment, but it is all basically a mix-and-match from this list: things to do, food from the pantry or freezer, anxiety, wonder, trepidation, curiosity, gratitude, love. Never boredom! 

This post didn't lend itself to easily inserting pictures throughout, so if you've made it this far you can enjoy our first-of-the-month family photos from January - December 2021: