Cheetahs

I woke up at my normal early morning time of three am and couldn’t get back to sleep because my mind was too busy thinking about the day ahead and the day behind. To complicate that idea more, it is also the last day of 2023, so I was also thinking a million thoughts about the year that just happened and where I was last year, where I am now, and what lies ahead. I thought about getting up and writing, but I fell back asleep and I had a dream that it was the first day back at work and I was trying to write my blog at my desk that was actually in my sandbox from when I was a child. I was trying not to get sand on the keyboard, or grease from a piece of pizza I was trying to eat. I didn’t get the blog written, because students were crowding around my desk asking me for candy, or cookies, or wanting a bite of my pizza. I shooed them outside and looked out the window. One of my old colleagues was moving along the sidewalk on skates, just gliding and floating like an ice dancer or something. I noticed that she was wearing those kind of shoes with wheels in them, and I wanted some too. I wanted to move effortlessly and find joy in dipping and gliding with every movement. I woke up and snapped on the light and reached for my computer.

Last year, I came across a passage in which a woman writes about visiting a place where a cheetah had been trained to run after a mechanical rabbit that greyhounds run after. When the run was completed, the cheetah was put back in the enclosure and a few minutes later, the animal was standing alert, ears up, sensing something in the wind. She was wild again. And the author noted, of course that happened, because “It’s a f….ing cheetah.” I so related. There have been so many times, that I felt like an animal in a cage. But in my case, I knew that I was in my own cage, and I had the power to let myself out of it. I just didn’t really understand where I put the damn key. 

I went to visit my brother yesterday. I knew he’d be in a bad place because it is getting close to the anniversary of his wife’s death and New Year’s is when it all started going downhill for her. I am not going to lie, I have had a hard time dealing with my brother. His pain is immense and I have nothing to give him to help. But I spent a little time with him. He is a mess, worse than what I imagined. He has basically given up on life and probably if he didn’t have pets, I’m not sure he’d still walking around on the planet. At the same time, I am not sure the pets are enough. When I left, he was crying. I felt so heartbroken for him.

I also went to visit a friend of mine. She and her husband having been building a house on a piece of property in the mountains. It’s been a long, hard journey for her and they have had so many setbacks and problems, and I’ve watched her navigate all the challenges in the past five years. It was such a celebration to see the walls up, and artwork on the walls, and her joy. She was the friend on the skates in my dream, gliding like she was enjoying the ocean breeze at Santa Monica beach or something. I felt so happy for her.

Today, I am taking my son to another professional football game, and then we are embarking on a road trip that has a loose destination of Idaho, one of the states I still need to visit. I set some goals for myself last year–travel more, write more, and find the key to my cage. I did travel and write more and I realized that the cage didn’t need a key, because I could move the walls, or take them down even. It might be hard work and I might have to remove thousands of pounds of granite by myself, piece by piece, but I could do it, if that’s what I really wanted.

Sometimes I can find myself back in my cage. I see all the pain and know there is more that I can’t see. This holiday season I could have climbed right up the craggy hill and joined the Grinch on his mountain. I was so GROUCHY about gift giving and stupid silly bows and ribbons when there are people huddled together under bridges in the snow. I didn’t want to shop or give meaningless things that no one needed and blah, blah, blah, and probably no one would even say thank you anyway. 

At the height of my grouchiness, I went into an art gallery because I knew they’d let me use the bathroom. And I saw a watercolor of a cheetah on the wall. It literally took my breath away. A reminder of the cage I was supposed to be taking down, not putting back up. And then I saw sculptures of fairies make of fabric and wood and random objects. I’m not a doll lover, or a fairy lover, but these sculptures captured something– the essence of something I couldn’t name–wildness, or freedom. The artist was in the gallery. She told me her mother had been a seamstress and dressed teddy bears. When she passed, loads and loads of fabric were left behind. The artist took the fabric home, but didn’t know what to do with it because she didn’t see herself as creative, but she’d alway loved fairies. She let the fabric dictate the mood of the sculpture and because she didn’t feel like she could draw faces, she used things she found to be faces. And then she told me, “I guess I am creative.” Her voice was kind of sheepish, like she really couldn’t quite believe what she was telling, A pride was there, but also an uncertainty. I knew right away that she was also busy taking herself out of her cage. 

I bought one of the fairies and gave it to a friend. All of a sudden, I remembered giving gifts is about love and respect and gratitude for the those who travel along on our journeys and help light our paths. Sometimes gifts can be for others to help light their paths. I also bought the cheetah. I hung the painting in my bedroom. It is the first thing I see in the morning and the last, before turning out the lights, at night. She (the cheetah is a girl) reminds me that I have work to do and inspires me to keep trying.

I don’t know how to help my brother. I don’t know if he can see that working through your pain is the only way to the other side of it. I don’t know if can reach deep into his soul and realize that he has to find his own meaning to life and love and then believe it with all his heart. Last spring, one of my students was telling me about sleeping on the sidewalk with his family as a little kid. He said he remembered unrolling his sleeping stuff and being careful to sleep against a building so he wouldn’t get stepped on. No one knew what to say, so I said, “I guess we remember the bad times, so we can appreciate the good times.” And he smiled at me and said, “Yeah. The bad times make the good times, great. Like when you bring us pink frosted doughnuts.” 

I wish pink frosted doughnuts or paintings could fix all the pain in the world, but I guess everything is a balance. And not everyone sees balance the same way. I wanted 2023 to be my breakout year. I don’t know if it was that. But I walked on the coast of Alaska and peered at starfish under a rock. I drove through fields and fields of grain in Iowa. I walked under opulent buildings in Detroit. I watched my daughter graduate from college. I watched my son destruct again, but also watched him try to pull himself back together and move ahead again. I have met ten year olds and eleven years old that have faced more challenges than most adults I know, but still see have the resilience to face the world with hope. I have watched the power of positivity transform my life. I am grateful for new beginnings, second chances, and my amazing community of love. As I close out the chapter of this year, I am working on taking more of my cage down and seeing what’s out there.