Confessions from an Employment Sabbatical

Forgive me, Father, it's been almost three months since I was last employed. It's not for lack of effort. I can't tell you how many jobs I've applied for. I'm told summer is a bad time to look for a job. What's a seeker to do?

I sit down at the picnic table at the Oxford Park at noon. The bells of the church next door begin to chime, playing "Amazing Grace" as I eat my lunch and read Frederick Buechner's "The Alphabet of Grace." Maybe there is a theme working here.

It's funny, Father, I think I've learned a few things during my employment sabbatical. Or maybe remembered is a better phrase. Or I was reminded. I wouldn't trade the last couple months for any job I could have had.

Here's what I've found:

Family. We've traveled more, done more, and spent more time together this summer, with my wife and the girls out of school than any other summer since we've had the girls. Since school has been back, I've been able to take them to school and pick them up, help with homework, take them to field hockey practice and make dinner. None of that happened while working in DC.

Time. Yes, it's part of "Family," it's the backdrop for everything else, but I'm not forgetting it. The hours in a day didn't tick by the same, and hopefully they will mean something different from here on.

Community. Helping family and friends move things, taking and picking up friends' children from school, reconnecting with our church community, including a former high school chemistry teacher I wrote about, and feeling my own roots here again, where I had been neglecting them.

Faith. There will be more to say on this one. I'm not fully sure what I've got here, but it's been taking a cue from Buechner, who says, "Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." (from "Now and Then"). I've been listening to my life. What else could I hear?

There's more, Father, but let's just keep it to the big bullet points.

I get on my single-speed bike and ride around Oxford: down to the ferry dock, the Strand, by old friends' houses, out to the end of Bachelor's Point, with smells floating on the wind. I come back to the park and sit down again. The sun hits the river and the water sparkles with the sublime. A single piling juts above, oblivious.

A man is overzealously brushing his beagle-looking dog. A girl sits on a bench reading a book with the sun and the river breeze in her face. Cicadas connect the trees in a web of clicks and chirps. A small, overworked outboard motorboat pushes a makeshift barge up the river. The sun lands on my picnic table, lighting my glasses, which rest on Buechner's book.

Yes, Father, I've found a job it seems. back in DC. My employment sabbatical is coming to an end. Yes, it is good to have a job. I certainly need one. Sabbaticals are expensive. But I can't put a price on what I've found with this time. How bout we leave off with Buechner:

"You are alive. It needn't have been so. It wasn't so once, and it will not be so forever. But it is so now. And what is it like: to be alive in this maybe one place of all places anywhere where life is? Live a day of it and see. Take any day and be alive in it." (from "The Alphabet of Grace.")

Save your freedom for a rainy day

"Save your freedom for a rainy day," someone had written on the bathroom wall... It remained there at eye level above the washbasin all summer. No retorts or cross-outs. Just this blank command as you angled and turned your hands under the faucet. - Rachel Kushner, THE FLAMETHROWERS.

Freedom is a tricky one. It's generally owned by your routine and your obligations. Freedom sits doing shots with your commitments and your bills, seeing who blacks out first. It may be that we are the most free at those nondescript times, like washing our hands in the bathroom of a bar, where our next decision doesn't carry the weight of the big ones.

For the past three and a half years, I've worked on a contract as a writer for the Coast Guard. The job in and of itself meant a commute to Washington, D.C., from Maryland's Eastern Shore, a trek I never thought I would make. It was a better job, a better opportunity than the previous eight-ish years working at a museum. The past three-plus years writing for the Coast Guard have been eye-opening, learning, defining. I've been up at 5 a.m. each morning researching and compiling an early morning report that went out before most people are at work.

This morning that contract is over. I still woke up at 4:30 a.m. (I'm a morning person), and wasn't sure what to do. So I started reading Rachel Kushner's "The Flamethrowers," which came as a Father's Day reading recommendation. It's already drawing tightening circles around art and freedom and the things I like to put my head around.

I'm not sure what contract or other opportunity is coming next. There's a freedom there, a reflection point that maybe asks what I want it to be, but also feels like we generally limit our choices before we really consider them.

We've been meandering about Maine this week, a geographic change from Maryland, and our girls first visit here, as a backdrop to mull things over, in odd moments, sipping a Long Trail Ale, looking at what happens when God employs a different palette, Bob Ross-style, painting mountains and rocky coasts and lobster boats, where we are used to seeing corn fields, cattails, and workboats chasing blue crabs.

It's not lost on me that our girls sat atop Cadillac Mountain yesterday in Acadia National Park, a decided and welcome experience and shift in perspective, as I wonder what will fill my work life next.

Grab Bag (aka Three Blind Blog Entries)

Occasionally I have my morning coffee with dead people. The ones I drink with are good company. It's not a Sixth Sense, "I see dead people," kind of thing, mind you. My morning dead peeps include Walt Whitman, William Blake, William Carlos Williams. It is not a prerequisite that their first name starts with "W."

Du Fu (the artist formerly known as Tu Fu) is the most recent to join the coffee klatch. A Chinese poet, he lived during the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), specifically from 712-770 AD. I've never been big on dates and numbers, but I throw those out there to ground our boy Du Fu, who had an f$%^-ing rough time making a living as a poet/writer. He kept trying to land a decent paying government post, make a name for himself, and provide for his family. He lived through rebellions, was separated from his wife and kids for stretches, and relocated his family, on foot, over several hundred miles, a number of times, trying to find peace and happiness. It's never been easy to get by as a writer, particularly as a poet. Funny how contemporary the stuff he grapples with comes across.

I can relate to Du Fu and his struggle to make a living through his writing. I feel fortunate in my own life to have landed a decent writing job as a technical writer. I don't think it's what he would have had in mind for himself, but I also don't think he was bringing bills in from the mailbox, balancing checkbooks, hitting the grocery store, and all the monetary/material baggage that our society seems to feel we all need to carry around. And I look around and see our girls and family and know that trying to make sure they are healthy and happy, well, there's not much more important than that.

--

One week into a new job and I find it has given me back something I had lost, professionally. Beginner's mind. "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few," so says Shunryu Suzuki. I'm not one to call myself an expert in anything, but I realize stepping into something new, how many possibilities there are. A new place to work, a new subject matter, a new way of doing things, new people to get to know and work with. It is truly all a gift. "So I've got that going for me... which is nice."

--

Those who knew me between my NC State years and Washington College years know that I came mighty close to enlisting in the Army (if you were at our wedding rehearsal dinner and listened to Doug Hanks talk, you may have thought I actually left for basic training, but never believe what you hear from a reporter ;) There was something about the military experience that I wanted--to put myself through it, to rebuild myself, Six-Million-Dollar Man style, but without bionics, cool sound effects, etc.

I did rebuild myself during that time, through the discipline and repitition of running, through lifting weights to get ready for the Army, through time out of school to re-evaluate my life and what I wanted, and through meeting my now wife, Robin, among other things.

But I didn't quell that thought/spark about the military and looking back, I sometimes wish I had the foresight to have gone in straight out of high school, or maybe even after graduating college.

This comes back around now, writing for and working with the military, and reading bios and accomplishments of career military--the things they have done and seen, the education, both real world and continuing academics, the service they have given. It rekindles something more than a deep respect, almost a longing to have done it, or be doing it. Funny how as someone who reads and writes, I am not big on sitting still at a desk all day.

But at almost 38, some things sneak by you and I am not one to spend a lot of time on could haves, should haves, or what ifs. I try to honor and indulge that side of myself on my own terms, in my own ways, and now, maybe by being able to be a part of it by working alongside.

Life Studies & Hopping the Pond

I've spent more time with Robert Plant than Robert Lowell. And that's legit--a 15-year-old discovering Led Zeppelin is a bigger life-changing experience than almost any ground-breaking book. I'd still take Zeppelin's first album over Lowell's "Life Studies" any day (though I'd go for the book over Plant's solo "Now and Zen").

But Lowell gets my attention now with his autobiographical/biographical detail and the confessional tone of his writing. What is a blog other than a confessional medium?

In my own life studies I am starting a new chapter. Leaving a job at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum where I have worked for the past seven-and-a-half years.

I started out when our eight-year-old daughter Anna was just a couple months old and our five-year-old daughter Ava was born during my time there. It's been the only place our girls have ever thought of as "Daddy's work."

We moved into the house we're living in now; I finished my first marathon and ultra-marathons; published my first feature article for a nationally known magazine; celebrated our ten year wedding anniversary; and have met folks I now count among my closest friends, all while or because of working at the Museum.

It's the kind of job I wondered if I'd have for 20+ years when I started. The kind of job that isn't just what you do for a paycheck, but is a part of who you are.

It's also become a job, for me, that I know when it is time to move on from. A place in my own life studies when it is time to refocus my creative energies, step up to a new challenge, a new field, one that allows me to better provide for my family (after all, as the Wu-Tang Clan has pointed out, "Cash Rules Everything Around Me, C.R.E.A.M. ;) But Benjamins aren't the only ones speaking here.

I'm going to be working as a technical writer/editor, shedding a bit my marketing skin and doing more of the writing and communications that I truly dig. I've got a D.C. commute, something I thought I'd never do, but that I am looking forward to. I'll be working with a creative team, something I love, which is an aspect of the Museum that disbanded as staff changed until I was the last standing.

So there's a big open road ahead, for which I am grateful, humbled, thankful, and excited. And now it's also cool to look back and reflect.

A friend/mentor/co-worker sent around a poem dedicated to my leaving the Museum. He knows I am a fan of Tony Hoagland (who warrants his own post here sometime soon) and now this Hoagland poem carries another layer of meaning on it for me:

"The Loneliest Job in the World"

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who Loves Me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes,
No one knows why.


CBMM has certainly been a job of the heart and a part of my life studies. Now I'm looking forward to a job of the heart and the mind, looking forward to the next chapters and studies of my and our lives.