(NOTE: I find it so interesting that the last comment on the previous post-- from the luminous Michelle-- says, "bye-bye crazy...hello, well, a new kind of crazy i'm sure..." I had written the below before I saw that comment. Life is so weird.)

How odd is it, now that I have revealed the dark secret of my past--that I once walked the halls of high school with nothing but bare legs between the flat of my white saddle shoes and the swing of my short red skirt?I felt a need to tell you more, to somehow explain the phases of my life.

How I want you to know that fast on the heels of Girl Perfect, was Girl on the Psych Ward, but as soon as I go to type those words the banshees swarm my head like so many deer flies and screech, ?who cares? Who KAY-ay-ay-ay-airs??

Truly. Because my story is not that cheerleading was a pretense?a creative spirit just trying to fit in with her peers. Not at all. I loved being a cheerleader every bit as much as I loved Ode on a Grecian Urn they both filled my soul. Cheerleading was all about the dancing for me. We were not the gymnastic marionettes you see today; we were scuffing, twirling, mis-stepping girls with a steady stream of hormones to keep us spinning.

Anyway. I?m not really here to defend cheerleaders (although, did you know Meryl Streep was a cheerleader? No? Well then, I?m just saying ?). I just want to look the taboo in the face and say, big deal.

There are lots of things that I?m not proud of about my adolescent self?being a cheerleader doesn?t even make the top ten.

God?how I do get off the topic I sit down to write about. When I came in to the computer a few minutes ago?I was going to launch right from one taboo to another, but I got stuck and never made it and now I have to get dressed and go to work. Countdown: four days left.

I wanted to share that the fears and anxieties percolating around my feet with regard to leaving my job are not what you might think. It?s not that I fear losing the income?I have always worked, I have always earned an income, I know my work ethic and I know I?ll find another job?what I fear is opening up to my creativity.

Somehow, for me, getting in touch with my creativity is a direct link to insanity.

I am very safe in my corporate job that keeps me from having any energy to put toward a creative life. I am protected by the extremely normal appearance I put forward when people see I work a corporate job.

And now I?ve left that to find creative work that will allow me to blossom into my own creative self?whatever shape that will be. And it is that, which scares me. It is opening the door to self-expression that causes me to hold back, to freeze.

And then, I pick up a well-worn volume and I am comforted.

And, I screw my courage to the sticking point.

MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE
Ahead of me
they were lighting their fires
in the dark forests
of death.

Should I name them?
Their names make a long branch of sound.

You know them.

I know
death is the fascinating snake
under the leaves, sliding
and sliding; I know
the heart loves him too, can?t
turn away, can?t

Break the spell. Everything

wants to enter the slow thickness,
aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost.

Wants to be stone.

That time
I wanted to die
somebody
was playing the piano
in the room with me.

It was Mozart.
It was Beethoven.
It was Bruckner.

In the kitchen
a man with one ear
was painting a flower.

Later,
in the asylum,
I began to pick through the red rivers
of confusion;

I began to take apart
the deep stitches
of nightmares.

This was good, human work.

This had nothing to do with laying down a path of words
that could throttle,
or soften,
the human heart.

Meanwhile,
Yeats, in love and anger,
stood beside his fallen friends;
Whitman kept falling
through the sleeve of his ego.

In the back fields,
beyond the locked windows,
a young man who couldn?t live long and knew it
was listening to a plain brown bird
that kept singing in the deep leaves,
That kept urging from him
Some wild and careful words.
You know that important and eloquent defense
Of sanity.

I forgive them
their unhappiness,
I forgive them
for walking out of the world.

But I don?t forgive them
for turning their faces away,
for taking off their veils
and dancing for death?

For hurtling
toward oblivion
on the sharp blades
of their exquisite poems, saying:
this is the way.

I was, of course, all that time
coming along
behind them, and listening
for advice

And the man who merely
washed Michelangeo?s brushes, kneeling
on the damp bricks, staring
every day at the colors pouring out of them,

Lived to be a hundred years old.

~ Mary Oliver, "Dream Work"

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