JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

This morning I heard Abigail and Michaela (ages 5 and 3 respectively) asking each other: “Are you voting for Bush or for Kerry?”

Then I saw that Dean Esmay had linked to a newspaper report from Britain where a two-year-old has received a polling card, giving her the ability to vote in an upcoming election. Of course, it was an accident.

But I still won’t tell my children about it. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to vote too…

Thursday morning I was ready for the weekend to begin. Out of the shower, I put on my pale summer pants and my favorite tank top, bright turquoise blue like the Caribbean sea. I put on a pair of my favorite funky socks and my beloved abalone earrings. All set for sun and summer. Then I looked out the window. It was raining.

So the girls and I headed over to Poulsbo, where we walked through the wet to get to the Marine Science Center where we splashed (and soaked) in the touch tanks, played games, admired octopus and anemone.

Then we headed back out in the rain, walking through the parking lot, hoods over our heads, wet inside and out, aquatic creatures that we are….

Emily left a comment yesterday about my garden that reminded me: for a while I have felt that I should post a caveat about my plants. My yard is small, perhaps not worthy of the title “garden”. The photos I post are mostly close-ups: a blossom, a pea pod, a frog. I like to focus on the smaller perspective but I fear sometimes that this may lead to different expectations from the reality of my yard. When I’m writing this blog and posting pictures of my plants, I am choosing what is seen.

I’m also choosing what is said. A friend who is thinking about starting a blog, asked me this week what it is like to publish on the Internet, to write posts the whole world could read. In answering the question I realized that there are a few areas of my life that I don’t talk about on this blog. For example, I don’t discuss other members of my family or other people in my life, besides my husband and children. And there are parts of my past that haven’t appeared on this page.

I’d like to talk about these areas of my life, but this blog is not an appropriate place or it doesn’t feel safe enough for me yet. I have reservations and hesitations about what happens to information I share here. If only “five second cousins and a dog” (to quote yesterday’s NYTimes article) were reading, then I’d feel differently, but the fact that what I put on this page could be broadcast to anyone anywhere anytime is a bit inhibiting.

At the same time, I realized that these omitted areas of my life aren’t that important. What has happened to me, what I’ve done, what I’ve learned in life, has happened to millions of people in the world, in various ways with different players and names. I can still blog about my experiences by writing about the principles and feelings behind/beyond/above them. And I believe that if I share these specifics in the context of personal relationship, it won’t be a big deal. People who love me will still love me, I think, even with this extra information about me. I’m happy talking about them in email or in person with people I know, in appropriate context. But it is this blog’s impersonal side with anonymous audience that I find a bit frightening.

I admire how Liz Lawley is blogging about her Al-Anon experience and I appreciate the line she is walking between public and private, sharing with courage and honesty. What she wrote brought to mind other memories that I’d like to share but probably won’t post, at least for now. Perhaps I could blog in anonymity (somewhere else). But as Real Live Preacher’s “coming out” revealed, people can try to find out who you are.

Then again who I am is subject to interpretation. There are a million versions of me, depending on perspective. Even if I told everything, if I were describing my entire life, how reliable and unbiased a picture of me would that provide? My mother would give you one side, my husband another, my neighbor a third and a stranger from Peru observing me would narrate my existence in a totally different way. Certain people see only certain aspects of me. I’ve got my own biases and blinders as well. How do I describe the fact that I am and who I am? Does any written work or any relationship completely capture a human being? What is the truth of my identity anyway?

With these thoughts swimming in my mind, I came across Shelley Power’s post describing bloggers who have decided to quit, titled Ghosts in the Machine. Even though I didn’t read these other bloggers, I am sad to hear others are leaving. Both in the post and comments, people discussed the split between the self that exists in the blog and the one in reality.

While answering my friend’s question, I realized that there is a split between my blog self and me. But it doesn’t concern me. I don’t feel I am being deceptive. It’s just the way it is. These omitted areas of my life are only known by a handful of friends anyway. They are not part of my public persona (whatever that is). They are not issues I wave like a flag when I meet someone. And I believe that people who have read my blog know me better, or at least can know more about my thoughts, memories and feelings, than a neighbor whom I greet every day when I get my mail. If you know that I grow snowpeas and sweet peas, that I like it when Ted wears a tie, and that sometimes I’m afraid my faith will fail, then maybe you already know more about me than many of the people in my life.

I like the fact that a complete stranger can come and read my blog. Or I can read someone else’s. It’s fun and wonderful in its own way. But there are things most people don’t say to strangers. A depth that this distance in cyberspace can’t cross.

As I’ve gone to more blogger meetings and developed some email relationships, I’ve seen that my blog can open the door to friendships. It can initiate and create bonds that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. (Or strengthened ones that already existed.) And once the relationship has started, especially in person, in flesh and blood, I can be fully myself. I’m there in 3-D for the other person to see. This blog has its limitations. It always will. But it can open the door to something deeper.

At first I thought that meeting bloggers in person was strange. Now though I am finding it is becoming more a goal for me. Perhaps that is because I have had good experiences so far. I’ll probably never be able to befriend everyone who reads this page or meet in person. But we can try. Who knows, perhaps technology will provide a way in the future for better ways to build relationship in blogging, and less anonymous audience than what we have now.

Shelley also wrote that we are writing ourselves out of existence, until like poppies or perhaps daylilies, we are gone – here today, gone tomorrow, ephemeral flowers

We’re writing ourselves out of existence, whether we continue to weblog or not. True ghosts in the machine. Or poppies, hidden behind the larger, showier flowers until one day we notice they’re gone.

.I agree that we are like flowers, here and gone. But doesn’t blogging, or at least writing, add more permanence to our disappearing identity? Instead of feeling trapped into restricted character role on this blog, I feel I am finding freedom to be me, to be myself in a way that I can’t be anywhere else. In some sense I feel I am writing myself into existence – sorting through thoughts and the mismash inside my mind while aligning letters of text. I’m making sense of life, putting it out on a page for others to read. I’m bouncing my beliefs off of others and seeing what comes back to me in conversations. I’m painting a portrait and letting others critique it. I’m making a mark: as temporary and transient as blogging may be, it is still a mark I’m making and leaving behind. When I’m gone, there will still be something of me living in my writing. Just as others speak to me through their words.

I am reaching out through this hypertext to say that I exist. I’m putting my history onto a page. I’m saying I’m alive. I’m here. At least for now.

Wrapping up a few loose ends from earlier this week…

Jay McCarthy this week has posted a couple updates including pictures of his house after the fire (so you know I’m not joking…sure, Jay, I thought you made it up!) , and one describing how things were going for him and his family. Reading the stories about those who cared for Jay whether in person or in blogs or both, and how lives intersected through his tragedy encouraged me.

On a post I wrote earlier this week describing lessons of loss and life, Bob V. commented

I’ve made some life decisions accordingly. Everything I own can fit into my car. With ownership comes attachment. With attachment comes an inevitable loss. With loss comes sorrow.

I also don’t like to develop relationships that will lead to my missing a person. My goal is to enjoy interacting with a person when they are available but to be unaffected by their absense.

I often get criticized for this philosophy. Many people say that it means I don’t want to love.

I am not into amassing material possessions. I’d love to be able to fit all that I own into a car but reality – on moving days – tells me otherwise. (The truth is that we own too many boxes of beloved books!) I admire Bob for his ability to live minimally.

With loss comes sorrow is true. But I also believe that without the possibility of loss, love cannot exist. I have to be willing to risk, to invest, to give of myself in order to receive from someone else. Loving someone involves loss: it’s inevitable, for none of us exist forever here. And it is that intense investment, that reckless abandon to another, that faith and feeling, that becomes a jump into joy.

I have wrestled with fear and love. After growing up with divorced parents, I didn’t want to lose any other relationships in life. Love worked on me for a while before I was willing to risk marriage.

While dating Ted, I was afraid: what would happen if we broke up? It would hurt. Bad. I didn’t want to risk the pain of losing him. But I realized that it wasn’t worth trying to date him, if I wasn’t going to try to love him. I decided that what mattered most in the relationship was what happened between us, not how long it lasted. Whatever happened to us, even if we broke up, I wanted to look back and say I loved Ted. To know that I had loved him as best I could.

When I had children, the possibility of loss hit me hard, in motherhood perhaps more than in marriage. As I held my baby in my arms, I already imagined her leaving, going away. The way I saw it, the picture that came to mind, I would care for this child, pour myself into her, literally body and soul, and then on her eighteenth birthday, she would drive away in a pick-up truck and go far away from me. It scared me. When I married my husband it was for better or for worse, until death do we part. But after legal adulthood, my kids could leave home and never see me again.

Eventually, I saw that my fears were – as an older and wiser friend told me – “premature” …and also unnecessary. I’ve realized that love is a choice. A choice that involves other choices. If I choose Love, then I am not choosing other things.

If I choose that Love is most important to me, then I can lose everything else. Even if relationships end, if I loved that person, I will still have that love. Sure it will be beaten and battered. But love lasts. It is fact. Even after death, Love endures.

So I’ve chosen to love people in my life. I’ve made irrevocable investments. In that sense, I’ve already lost some things in my pursuit of love. It’s a bit of a gamble. Then again, the words “risk”, “investment” and “gamble” aren’t accurate: Life isn’t Las Vegas. Love isn’t a casino. Or Wall Street.

Love is. And it can’t be lost.

So much buzz in the past day about the fix – as blogging is described in a New York Times article. Recently I’ve been thinking about why I feel addicted attached – or at least why I find myself staying up late into the night typing away at my desk. I think that the conversation aspect that Jeff Jarvis mentioned is one factor. Responsibility, for me, is another: I almost feel that this blog is like a living creature, a pet of sorts, that has daily needs I must tend.

But I think that I also feel, as I am sitting here pressing keys beneath my fingers, as if I am sitting at the wheel, clay in my hands, pulling up the walls and pressing out the floor, shaping a pot. I have a hard time describing the feeling, this inner sensation, but it is almost visceral. Three different times in my life I’ve found myself working in a ceramics studio, kneading clay against the table, the feel of grit and smooth on my fingertips. Although I lack natural talent for throwing pots, it is the art I love most for I put my entire body into the process, spinning wheel with my feet, bending my back, my hands immersed in the middle of the vessel I am making. I hold it in my hands and shape it into life. Stress dissolves and elation takes its place as I play with clay.

As I sit here working on this blog, orienting pictures, shaping pretty phrases, I feel as if I am in the pottery studio again. The way I polish words or alter html reminds me the way I might smooth a bowl with a rib, or flatten the lip with my fingers. Throwing a pot is three dimensional, physical, and tangible; by contrast this seems simpler, virtual, much more mellow. But the sensation is the same: I am creating.