Category Archives: Integrity

Interlude: Ordain Me Now

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This post is actually a mini-essay I discovered on my hard drive today. I must have written it in 2002 or 2003, years on my mind right now, as I reconnect with people from that time. What strikes me now is my distance from intimacy in it, the doubt in myself that clearly inspired this. I don’t feel like that anymore.

For many prophets and gurus, their calling comes to them in dreams, a voice across space and time, a light that fills them so suddenly and fully that others respond and follow. For others, it is the conviction in charisma, a sense of self that goes beyond self. When my best friends Erin and Blaine called me one month and asked me to perform their marriage, I took the calling literally and went to the website of the Progressive Universal Life Church. Whereas Satan sat Jesus on a pinnacle and promised him death or power, I was presented with similar but much easier options: Cancel or Ordain me now. I chose the latter.

You can ordain yourself for free with the Universal Life Church, but for $19.95 to the Progressive Universal Life Church, you get a certificate and a wallet-sized card, which my friend promptly laminated for me. The laminated card is important; it is what I pull out to remind me of my duty when times get hard or when someone questions my credibility; and, in a pinch, I can stick it through the collar of a black button-up shirt to double as a priest’s dog collar.

It took me seven years to finish my doctorate in Victorian literature. In five minutes, I was the Reverend Bryn Gribben. In fact, I am the Reverend Doctor Bryn Gribben. Like Martin Luther King. “I can be like Martin Luther King!” I told myself. And it’s not the doctorate that will do that. It’s the “Reverend.”

You can tell when something transcendent is about to happen, sometimes, when the ground on which you stand starts shaking. Sometimes, this is an earthquake; sometimes, it’s the clouds parting. For me, the year I became a minister had been a hard year—all those years in graduate school, if nothing else, make you tired of living for the future. But, like most major religions, they also convince you that in the sweet by and by, there’s manna in the desert. I needed that manna. I’d experienced the ever-humbling double whammy of being terribly in love and of being in my fifth year of teaching. The nearly unbearable sensation of being loved unconditionally holds within it the sneaking certainty that there has to be a hidden condition somewhere. Teaching creates the nearly unbearable realization that, at some point, especially if you’re an English teacher, you are a martyr to budgets and students who view education as a faulty product they want to return before they even open the box. Morever, you’re convinced that this martyrdom is both good and inevitable. How Jewish is that?

And while some say true love and a true vocation are the solid ground on which to plant your feet and find yourself, I was finding my love of teaching and my love of being taught pushing across each other like the plates of some kind of psychic continental drift . . . with the result more like Marx rather than Hallmark: “all that is solid melts into air.”

So when Erin and Blaine asked me to marry them, I felt like I’d been lifted from my sinking ground to a different plane, a better one. Only old friends, who remember you when you were cocksure of your own uniqueness in college, could or would ask you, their last single friend, to perform their marriage, give you credit for knowledge about things you haven’t done. And that means you need to figure out how to be special again.

Combatting egotism is a hard and necessary battle, it seems, for any chosen one. “My God, my God,” wails Jesus, “Why have you forsaken ME?” This, to the god who has it second in the Ten Commandments that “thou shalt not have other gods before me,” who kills nations for what we’d now consider healthily multicultural elementary school displays of mixed idols. When I was 20, one of my male friends insisted I was a goddess. Granted, we were drunk, and he was also insisting he could tell this because he was of “the darkness,” but when my friend Suzanne asked me to baptize her baby because I was the “most spiritual, secular friend she had,” I thought about what it might mean to be a secular priestess without being completely ridiculous about it.

In earlier times, I could have been a contemplative nun, shut away to roam cloisters where doubt was a secret as long as your vow of silence lasted. I could have been St. Theresa of Avila, a contemplative who voiced her criticisms of the Church , paving the way for “contemplative” as I now understand it: as a state in which you analyze it until you can’t stand it anymore and you insist that something must change. But just because I understand my contemplative nature in that way doesn’t mean anything changes, and my doubt never returns me more fully to any god. It just stays full.

The Progressive Universal Life Church insists that its only tenant is that you accept everyone’s chosen path as valid and useful for them. This is the part I have trouble with. I’ve tried to get around it by focusing on the semantic: if someone actually “chose” their path, then I might be able to roll with it. This immediately exempts anyone who’s merely continued along the religious pathway of their culture or family from my ministry, as well as born-again lunatics who insist they were touched by the spirit and couldn’t help but join the Lord. Those kind of sneak attacks don’t count as choice in MY Progressive Universal Life Church.

Years later, I still can’t explain the oddness, the fullness of choice I felt as I clicked on “Ordain me now.” I felt like I’d made a real decision, a decision with weight. I would try, I said to myself—despite the doubt I felt in my abilities, both intellectual and emotional. And I felt special—that suddenly, I had made ground materialize from the air, that somehow, when I said “by the power invested in me by the Progressive Universal Life Church,” it would stick. Or at least, I’d always have the card.

The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook: A Meditation Challenge. Day 2: Immersion as Blindness

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Today’s act of bibliomancy centers on an entry titled “Jared’s Holiday French Toast.” Apparently, Jared made over $1,100 in 3 weeks playing Santa in a department store but lost either Thisbe’s or Erin’s interest shortly thereafter. (You really must get The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook by Thisbe Nissen and Erin Ergenbright –it is truly fascinating how these escapades belong, ambiguously, to both co-authoresses, as if to insinuate that, hey, it could have happened to the best of us–or all of us.) Why? Because he kept role-playing Santa, insisting that she sit on his lap and tell him what she wanted for Christmas.

The lesson here, I decided this morning, might be that obsession or immersion are admirable things, but we can’t expect others to stay immersed with us for very long. Too soon, the joke becomes old; the game becomes creepy. Personally, I’m just not that into French Toast, and romantic breakfasts of sweets alone become tiresome when one begins to crave the savory dish, the less predictable. Thus, we must be mindful of our obsessions, remembering that no matter how much you love it, not everyone will want it all the time.

It didn’t take long today for this particular meditation to sink in, turning to the random page, as I was, on my way out the door to have coffee with my sometimes new lover. The thing is, I’m not very good at the “sometimes.” Ironically, we are starting Wuthering Heights tomorrow in my class, and I have spent a lifetime trying to convince students of what I can never fully convince myself: that such a love, rooted in possession, mired in misidentification, is not love. Merged souls? Bad, bad, bad. Or, as Nelly Dean answers Cathy, as Cathy tries to answer why she has chosen Edgar over Heathcliff, “Bad . . . bad, still . . . worst of all.”

Yet here I was, trotting out hand in hand with someone who cannot be my partner, who, while fond of me, does not love me as, at times, I find myself wanting to love him. This is not news. This was the deal from the start: a role-play of a relationship, a chance to experiment with an old acquaintance in a different way. I’ve sat in his lap and (forgive me) Christmas has come more than once a year. We are not made of the same material. I will never haunt him. I have loved and lost so many that I put Tennyson, who coined the phrase, to shame. (He took seventeen years to write In Memoriam; I took twenty to really accept that my first love had been little more than one person’s chemicals dressed in the sheep’s clothing of romantic murmurs. See my post “These Arms Were Mine.”)

But I don’t go by halves–not even when they’re half my age. I never have. It’s why my first love still calls me when he’s in dire straits. Why my students don’t understand how hard it is for me to cut texts from the survey course, accept that if I teach Wuthering Heights, it means they might never read Jane Eyre or, worse, never read Villette–all texts, by the way, in which there is one speed, and that is All You Have. It’s why I teared up this morning, while having a perfectly good time with the sometimes lover, because I wanted to know again what it feels like to be part of a pair so immersed in the other that there’s no question of what you’re doing that weekend–you’re going to be with each other.

The famous lines from Wuthering Heights, of course, are these:

My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.—My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don’t talk of our separation again: it is impracticable . . . .

It’s disgusting. It’s the paragraph that has warped love for millions of readers, probably young women, who thrill to the notion of immersion in another. The Santa hat stays on forever, and Jared serves French toast for every morning. It’s the paragraph quoted in Twilight, for God’s sake. So, as I drop off my sometimes lover back at his house, I shake myself by the shoulders inside and whisper, “This is not your whole world, and it will never be his. There’s a time to strut and fret your little part upon the stage, but your life is not a stage.”

Why Can’t I Be You?: Great Women I Admire, Qualities I Don’t Have

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This interview series was inspired by my growing awareness that comparing myself to others is–surprise!–not useful. Often, our admiration of others is mixed with envy, the slightly irritating feeling that if only WE had their chances, we could be successful / more creative / happier, etc. My experiences in graduate school and, to some degree, academia, reinforced the even more insidious notion that only certain qualities, certain kinds of personalities are useful or valid. Obviously, certain qualities are suited to certain jobs (you don’t want an irritable yoga teacher, a clumsy dancer), but I was finding myself dismissing my own perfectly useful, perfectly individual ways of being and wondering why I couldn’t be a whole range of things I actually had no real desire to be: more of a perfectionist, more of a workaholic. Ah, but then you run the risk of sour grapes: I would never “want” to be like that person, have their success at that cost. This interview series intends to listen well, to honor those I admire and to figure out how they found their paths in their own ways, while accepting and interrogating my own difference so that, through conversation, I can learn again to listen well to myself.

Interview #1: Carrie Simpson

Who She Is: Carrie is a playwright and poet, new to Seattle via Turkey, where she spent four years teaching English at international schools in Turkey and one year in Barcelona, Spain. It was in Ankara, Turkey, she met Stacy, my friend from our high school days at musical theatre camp; Stacy suggested Carrie look me up. As of yesterday, Carrie had a fourth interview with Alps Language School on Broadway in Capitol Hill. She was offered a high school teaching job elsewhere but hopes to get the ESL job since it would be a new kind of school and teaching for her, and it would give her more time to do that for which she came: to write.

Why She Seems Hard to Imitate / Why I Chose Her: Carrie seems particularly bold, self-possessed, and free, without that taint of escapism that sometimes marks those who’ve spent their lives teaching abroad or moving about. Originally from the East Coast, Carrie spent eight years in Whitefish and Missoula, Montana, in addition to her time abroad. What makes Carrie seem unique—and not like me—is that she doesn’t seem to see travel or moving around as “taking a break” from her real life. I know many people who want to travel, even many who don’t care if anything comes of their journeys particularly; they see travel as a sabbatical from “real life.” I’ve done that. Or I’ve traveled to achieve a very specific outcome: a job possibility, language acquisition, or freedom from another situation. But Carrie seems to combine that carefree curiosity with career-building, to mix devil-may-care with I-care-deeply as she simultaneously works on a play about her father’s death and volunteers to write high school curriculum for the World Affairs Council on the current unrest in Syria. Carrie has no one home base but in no way does she seem at a loss, lost, searching for a path. She’s on one—it just seems to evolve as she moves. To move forward as if it’s ALL real, all part of the plan, without resorting to the cliché of “everything happens for a reason”—that seems to be what Carrie’s about. But I don’t believe in that cliché, either—so, why can’t I be her?

The Questions:

Bryn: How do most people get to your current life position (note: this may refer to your cool job or state of being), and how did your path differ from that? What might some consider unusual about how you got where you did?

Carrie: I follow whims felt in the heart, rushes of feeling that shout, “I want to do that!” Is that called following your bliss? As I move along a certain path, I will have an experience or meet someone who introduces me to a new adventure I never thought of, and if the idea of it rings or shines, then that will become the next step in my journey. You can say I am future oriented, but because I always have just one step ahead of me planned, I am also very much in the present and open to changing that path, looking out for signs pointing to the next step.

Bryn: Ok, part of that sounds like me: I have the clarity of vision, moments that “ring or shine”—that’s a nice one, Carrie. And I can be at peace with the “one step planned ahead”; my job as an adjunct professor has required that I come to peace with that. But I don’t think I embrace that in the way you do—it’s not so much that only having one step ahead makes me anxious, but I think I see that as more of a necessary compromise, instead of a life choice. And maybe that’s why I don’t always feel like I have time or room to notice what “signs [point] to my next step.” Walk me through an example of how one sign pointed to another for you.

Carrie: For instance, while getting my Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, a friend of mine I admired told me of her summer experience as a naturalist for the Student Conservation Association. That sounded fun, reminiscent of my family’s summer vacations visiting national parks out west, so I applied to SCA and was placed as an interpretive ranger at Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota during a college summer. From that experience, I decided that after graduation, I would do seasonal work all over the U.S., seeing the country through its national parks. When I graduated college, I landed a seasonal job teaching outdoor education outside Glacier National Park, Montana. However, I connected to the place and the people so much, I worked there as a teacher-naturalist for four years and ended up staying in Montana for eight.

Bryn: Totally get that connection to place creating the next steps. Once you find a place you love, it’s often just about figuring out what you can do to stay there. I did that when I realized I needed to quit my tenure-track job in Missouri and move back to Seattle. What I did was still important, but it became secondary to staying in Seattle. What I also see in your story at this moment, though, Carrie, is an alternative possibility: that deep attachment to what you want to do can lead to a security no matter where you’re at. Sometimes I feel that way about teaching, but clearly, in the case of Missouri, the love of teaching wasn’t enough to counter the love of a good fit for me, regarding place. You’re starting to remind me of Dishwasher Pete—a man who decided his goal was to wash dishes in every state in the union:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/dishwasher-pete.

Carrie: During [my Montana] time, I began to long for a more creative life again. My writing self was pulling on me. So I went to graduate school to become a high school English teacher. While there, I focused my thesis on working with an at-risk population, which led me to student teach at a therapeutic boarding school in The-middle-of-nowhere, Montana, and it was there that I learned about the world of international teaching. My mentor had taught abroad in Pakistan and Japan and brought his rich experiences into the classroom through stories and slideshows. I decided immediately and with certainty that that was exactly what I wanted to do, so after learning that I needed two years of teaching experience in my own country before applying to international schools, I did just that at a high school in Montana.

Bryn: Ok, THAT’S probably where most of us would get stuck. “I need two years of teaching experience? Sigh.” Or we’d start the teaching and then become afraid to leave the U. S. job . . . although I haven’t taught high school. Maybe two years is all anyone can bear.

Carrie: After two years, I attended an international job fair in Seattle, very open to where I’d end up, and landed my first job in Ankara, Turkey. I thought perhaps I’d enjoy a two-year contract there then return home to Montana, but loved my experience living abroad so much that I stayed three years in Ankara, one year in Barcelona, and one year back in Izmir, Turkey.

At the moment, I’ve just returned to the U.S. to focus on my writing for a concentrated spell, as again my writing self began to pull on me (a theme in my life). I am here to see theatre in English, meet other English-speaking writers, go to writing conferences, all the things I have not been able to do while living abroad. I have a feeling I will return abroad again after a year or two, but I am also open to the possibilities waiting for me in the people and experiences I have yet to enjoy in Seattle.

Bryn: See, this is where the “traveling isn’t a break from real life—it IS my real life” thing comes in. In order to lend solidity and peace to this life style, it seems like you have to accept that you may not be in the “final” place. To some degree, your choice to give up teaching for a “concentrated spell” reminds me of poet and memoirist Nicole Hardy, who quit her high school teaching job to work as a waitress so that she had more time per day for writing. However, Nicole knew that was a life change she could and wanted to make permanent—at least for quite awhile. And she stays in one place. I wonder how much differently I would live if I knew for sure I would be changing careers and locations at least seven times.

Carrie: I am certainly not following a predetermined course; my path unrolls before me as I go. I would never have imagined at 20-years-old, while studying creative writing at Emerson College, that I would one day be in a writing group with other ex-pats in a bar in Spain, celebrating getting my first poem published in a Barcelona literary magazine. However, when I look back from my current position, I can connect the dots and see a solid path.

Bryn: Even though the point of these interviews is to identify and celebrate your unique individuality, do you have a personal maxim, or another’s words to live by?

Carrie: I discovered the poetry and teachings of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi while living in Turkey. Rumi was a poet and the founder of the Whirling Dervish sect of Sufi Islam who lived in
Turkey in the 13th century. Many of his maxims, such as the one below, entail the kind of surrender and faith that I try to embrace in my own journey:

“Are you searching for the river of your soul?
Then come out of your prison.
Leave the stream
and join the river
that flows into the ocean.”

Bryn: What is most important for you to have done or to feel at the end of each day?

Carrie: That I’ve planted seeds. That is, that I’ve put myself out there in good ways so that by the laws of the universe, good things will return one day. For instance, lately I’ve been reaching out to acquaintances, hoping they will return the initiative and friendships will grow.

Bryn: Like me! Good job, Carrie!

Carrie: Because I’m job searching, I also reach out to prospective employers and volunteering opportunities. These particular examples are very indicative of the stage I am in within my current journey: the beginning. A seed that I plant every day regardless of where I am in a particular journey, is that I write every day. Some days it’s not much. Maybe I’ll only have time for a half an hour of writing, and maybe what I write will be so bad that I will spend the next day erasing it. But even a half hour a day adds up to something, and before I know it, the first draft of a play will grow from these daily seeds I plant.

Bryn: Flannery O’Connor used to sit at her typewriter every day for two hours, “just in case anything happened.” It’s universal—as a writer, you have to accept that production is not always about quality but rather the sheer exercise of the desire to care, every day, that something might happen. Another poet friend of mine, Emily Beyer, said that she doesn’t write every day but that when she is on a more regular writing schedule, she feels like she’s “better—a better person.” You become more aware of your own possibilities, the ideas you didn’t know you wanted to care about. That’s what starting this blog has been doing for me: I tend to get bogged down in the generalities: “I’m not like that person. I don’t do that much.” But when I start writing about a long-lost friend or someone cool like you, I find I have more interesting reasons, deeper perspectives on why I am the way I am. In short, I find my own story wasn’t that obvious.

But onto question #3: What’s one compromise you’ve had to make in order to achieve that sensation of a day well lived?

Carrie: It’s not a big compromise. Since I write first thing in the morning, the compromise is that I sleep a little less or go to bed a little earlier.

Bryn: Discuss a particular event you consider a triumph, a failure, or an obstacle that might surprise others.

Carrie: I find transitions really difficult. This may surprise others because of how much I move. I do love change, but every initial landing is always very shocking and full of doubt and loneliness. However, I’ve learned to just acknowledge those thoughts and feelings and have faith that they will lessen each day and finally pass.

Bryn: Why can’t I be you? (You can answer this in one of two ways: a) Based on what you know of me, how are we most different? or b) What’s a defining quality of yours to which you’re more strongly attached than most people?)

Carrie: I’d say the qualities to which I am most strongly attached are a hunger and excitement for the present opportunities around me, [the ability to develop] coping mechanisms for the hard times, and faith that if I live my life well in the present, the future will unfold just fine.

I rarely fear the future or that I’ve made the wrong decision in the past, which helps me enjoy the present. I can throw myself in 100% to the life(style) I’ve chosen for the moment. I have a knack for finding the new or the different or the hidden adventure in most places and situations. I have lots of interests, and can always find plenty of reasons to get out and explore.

In difficult times, I can remember that this, too, shall pass. I have the initiative and courage to make choices that will get me out of hard times, and the coping mechanisms to help me get through them. When looking back on difficult times, I can always find the positive aspects, whether in friendships made or lessons learned, which helps put me back in the present.

Bryn: Ah, the George Harrison answer: all things must pass. That is such an important one. I’m curious and adventurous, too, but it seems like I’m always slightly saddened by the past as it’s passing, always slightly more worried about whether there is a “through line” in my life, if I’m staying true to a kind of personal integrity or if I’m getting sidetracked. I guess one way to find peace is to accept that all lines are “through lines.”

Bonus questions, Carrie:
What movie character do your friends think you’re like?

Carrie: Christopher Robin—the accepting one who’s in charge of all the others. That was, at least, how my friends saw me when I was younger.

Bryn: What movie character do YOU think you’re like?

Carrie: Max from Rushmore—the kid who starts all the clubs. Or Jim Carey from Yes Man.

Next month, I interview Rebecca Brinson, author of the column “Hustle and Prose” on the website The Toast, co-founder of the online editing service NW Essay, and former development director for the Hugo House. She’s responsible–so how did she live abroad for six months? And why does no one seem to irritate her? These mysteries and more–in October.

Walter Pater, You’ve Sometimes Made It Difficult

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This post is a preface to an upcoming series of interviews I’m currently conducting called “Why Can’t I Be You?” Each interview will center on a woman I admire but who seems radically different from me in temperament. Look for Interview #1 soon!

In Studies of the Renaissance, Walter Pater concludes that the secret to genius is to discern, at all times, the most private qualities of one’s experiences—to revel in the process of experience for the individual, rather than in the “fruits of experience,” what others can see or what benefits you later. “To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,” he says, and, in doing so, he ignites the Aesthetic movement, the philosophical and stylish doctrine practiced and extended by Oscar Wilde and others for most of a decade.

I read this first in college, as a senior. I don’t think I actually understood all of it, really. But I do remember thinking that his writing, that phrase, particularly, was the most beautiful reading experience I’d ever had. The fusion of “burning” with “hard” and “gemlike”—the geological solidity with the sparkling of the gem . . . the image stood out, apart from my college reading, and I heard someone who understood how deeply marvelous I thought life was. I burst inside, my own mind a disco ball illuminated with pleasure that this timid man, an Oxford tutor who preferred to entertain privately, found words for what I felt certain ruled each of my movements made in this world.

I burned all through my twenties when, I still maintain, it’s most crucial to do so. I burned, got burned, and sparkled and drank and tasted and kissed and bought plane tickets too expensive for me. I burned into my mid-30’s and read as much Pater as I could, but nothing’s ever been as good as that one line, as effective at exciting that part of me that knows how important it is for me to know that burning is true, that living so intensely is the only real way to live.

But lately, I’ve been thinking more about lines later in the same paragraph as the gemlike flame line—this line, actually: “Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.” And I think of this line because it is often raining in Seattle, and it is cold, and dark, and I am almost 40 and because I worry, more often than not, that I am sleeping and not burning. I get overwhelmed by the tragedy of the “tragic dividing of forces on their way.” I feel myself reaching painfully out to hold onto those things that are leaving, that exceed my reach. Or, worse, I simply look at the frost and sun and cannot discern why I should reach at all. And yet, I am not sleeping—I lay awake at night, most nights, worrying about how to be greater. Really, what I worry about most is why I don’t want to want more. I try to tell myself that letting go of wanting more—of being more productive as a writer or as a scholar or as anything else I want to be, partially—letting go of anxiety about producing is exactly what Pater means when he says that “it is not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end.” I want to believe that I am still burning, but burning in ways that illuminate smaller things, tinier gems—that I am discovering, in my late 30’s, the crystalline structures of an atom, instead of the crystal palace of my 20’s.

Why do I have so much capacity for experience, and so little desire to sit alone and write? Why does writing sometimes make me sad? Is it because I cannot stop burning long enough to write something beautiful, or is it, instead, because I am not burning brightly enough? To really, truly live Pater, I am going to have to walk through these fires, even as I am the flame itself, and pray that, in all that heat, something fuses that can fuel me. Pater says “only to be sure it is passion” that drives me to experience, and that those experiences produce a “quickened, multiplied consciousness,” I am giving myself all that I can, but I wonder what he told himself in the middle of the night, and what it felt like when his flame was low.