Tag: life

Dreamwork

This morning I had a vivid work anxiety dream about a profession I left nearly four years ago. In the dream I was a high school teacher working at a new school in a complicated building–it’s a dream setting I’ve been in several times and in which I’ve had similar experiences over the years. Despite leaving teaching completely I still have these sorts of dreams regularly. Class has started, I’m unable to find the lounge where my laptop and schedule and keys are, the corridors are confusing. When I finally find my classroom the students are unsure about the project they’ve been assigned, there are administrators in the room asking questions, the technology is not functioning. It’s type of dream I’ve had since I was a student; can’t find my locker, the locker combination doesn’t work when I do find it, I don’t know where my classroom is and I’m late. Other variations? Trying to board a flight but my ticket/passport/luggage is missing.

There’s a bunch of science about dreams being the brain’s way of processing the days’ events into memories. My dreams are almost NEVER related to daily events, however. They’ve always felt weighty and full of almost-realized profundity. Even basic anxiety dreams are trying to tell me something about myself.

Inner Work by Robert A Johnson is a practial guide to approaching and interacting with dreams and dream materials. Johnson is a Jungian and they are the analytic school I find most interesting when I think about my dreams. As a young teen I often had dreams where different selves would argue, different personalities with completely different wants and points of view. And I’d wake up with their dialogues and discussions still ringing in my head. At times the voices were like a mutiny and I genuinely wondered if I were going mad.

I first read a lot of Freud, and finding his work very interesting but unsatisfactory I moved on to Jung and his school. Jung’s assertion that there are completely autonomous elements of the Unconscious which need to be approached and integrated felt right and made logical sense given the content of many dreams, which I carefully recorded in journals over the decades.

So why would I have an increase in teacher anxiety dreams AFTER leaving teaching? Because teaching, as onerous as I found the job, pushed me to the maximum in many ways. I was by necessity at my creative, innovative, and intellectual peak. I had to navigate so many relationships and so many roles, and was for over 20 years completely outside my comfort zone. Every time I thought “I’m getting the hang of this” some new leadership role or challenging group of students or suddenly having to teach online during COVID would happen. Leaving teaching and opening a small business in France has of course been challenging and rewarding, but I am not being pushed in the same ways. There is some part of my unconscious which is dis-satisfied with this state of affairs and is trying to force me to feed its needs for intellectual and creative rigor. Gardening, lumberjacking, speaking French, and running a tourist lodging business are apparently not enough!

I’m considering using Johnson’s method for a bit to see if I can pin down what is going on internally. He’s actually got two methods in the book–one for interpreting and doing dream work, and another for using Jung’s Active Imagination.

Another feature of my dreams is that I often am left upon waking with a song stuck in my head on repeat for days on end. I’ll wake from a dream hearing the song and then can’t shake it. Recently it’s been “Vienna” by Billy Joel. I decided to look up the lyrics, which I’d never really thought about:

Slow down, you crazy child
You’re so ambitious for a juvenile
But then if you’re so smart
Tell me why are you still so afraid? Mm
Where’s the fire, what’s the hurry about?
You’d better cool it off before you burn it out
You’ve got so much to do
And only so many hours in a day, hey

[Chorus]
But you know that when the truth is told
That you can get what you want or you can just get old
You’re gonna kick off before you even get halfway through, ooh
When will you realize Vienna waits for you?

I’ve noticed of late a tendency to always be thinking of the things I need to get done instead of just doing what I’m doing. I’ll be petting one of our animals and thinking “oh shit I have to finish splitting the firewood” or “that pipe in the Loft apartment is not going to replace itself” or “am I ever going to finish reading that William Gaddis novel?”

My unconscious is sending me this song on repeat for a reason. I don’t know that I ever really heard the lyrics outside of the chorus until now. So part of the dream is telling me I need a more intellectual, more creative outlet, while another part is telling me to relax:

Too bad, but it’s the life you lead
You’re so ahead of yourself, that you forgot what you need
Though you can see when you’re wrong
You know you can’t always see when you’re right
You’re right

Take a chill pill, man. You’re doing fine!

Some Milestones

These past two months have been a bit exhausting. We’ve hosted an open mic night with a full band, a harp concert, several workshops and a dance performance, as well as the usual run of weekly classes and ateliers. All of this on top of the two rental apartments ramping up into tourist season, the crush of garden maintenance, a quick five-day vacation in Spain AND working at the local street food festival, electrical and plumbing challenges, renovations, etc, etc.

We’ve also adopted a French bulldog, two baby goats, and four songbirds. I’ve put in at least 50 hours on fencing alone over the past three months–building the goat enclosure, then expanding it, adapting it as needed, and repairing it several times as the goats found weaknesses and pushed through.

And with all this work going on I’ve allowed some major milestones to pass unacknowledged here.

The Milestones

As of June 2024 it has been 6 years since we moved out of the USA. We left behind an elaborate social calendar, a Victorian rowhome filled with art and objects, political and business connections, the best next-door neighbors ever, our pet dove Godzilla (RIP), and a city with which we were infinitely familiar, where we’d carefully developed an intricate network of deep involvements over the years. And, of course we left behind beloved family members and dear friends.

But, I regret nothing. All of the challenges and myriad difficulties of being voluntary immigrants were worth the sacrifices. I was looking for a new push, a new means of developing skills and becoming a stronger and better version of myself, and moving abroad definitely pushed all my faculties to the brink on multiple occasions. I often thought about involuntary immigrants, those who have no choice but to migrate, and considered how my difficulties paled in comparison (while the privileges granted by my paleness greased many wheels for us). Our experiences in Panama–living in luxurious high-rises by the ocean, pushing ourselves professionally in a completely different environment than the Baltimore City Public School System at a swank international school, making friendships with locals and other expats from around the world, going routinely to beaches on two oceans, going into the mountains, rainforests, cloud forests, jungles, seeing wild animals, getting the most out of our crippled Spanish–we loved it all. Further, there is nothing more liberating (after the trauma subsides) of getting rid of all the stuff Americans accumulate over decades. So many possessions! It was a lot to let go but we learned how to do that.

As of the first half of June 2024 we’ve lived in France for 2 years. Our French expat experience has been much different from the Panamanian, and for beyond the expected reasons of climate, geography, culture, history, language, as well as living in a decolonized nation versus living in a former colonial power. In Panama we had jobs and an employer with lawyers and an HR department who handled the heavy lifting for us. For the move to France we did much of our own heavy lifting, with the help of an excellent hand-holding service based in Paris. And we had no employer, instead we started our own business, which I suppose counts as another milestone (In June 2024 we marked the two year anniversary of not working for The Man and became ‘self-employed‘).

Our humble abode from an island in the Vezere River: Moulin Sage

We are loving the Correze region of France. The village of Treignac has proved to be everything we hoped when we chose it after touring dozens of small medieval towns across France as we researched moving here. Many people in and around Treignac have helped and supported us as we work toward our goal of creating an event space/concert venue/professional development center/arts and crafts atelier/pop-up cafe/retreat center/eco resort/organic farm/anarchist commune/naturalist resort/vinyard/exposition space. Yeah, we live in a run-down apartment in a largely decrepit old factory building, but it’s the best life! People come here for concerts and shit, which amuses me no end (our first concert was a gathering of about 30 people to hear ellen cherry). People we need seem to arise by magic at the exact moment we need them–could we host yoga classes here? A yoga teacher appears. Can we find a contractor willing to use recycled or repurposed materials found in the mill to create new useful spaces? Tom puts a home-made flier in our mailbox. It’s been a blast, and quite exhausting at times. But it’s different working hard for yourselves and your clients and not for somebody else.

We earn about 8% of the income we had when we had jobs. But our stress and anxiety is way down, and we can afford to live a quality life here on a small income.

Our growing menagerie of small mammals: Cornichon, Capri, and Bou-Bou the Frenchie

On May 13th, I turned 55 years old

So being in my mid-fifties is pretty much the same as every other age I’ve been. Differences? My collection of unguents and gels has grown, my toes suddenly look like my grandfather’s toes, and I go to bed before 10pm every day. 85% of the time I feel physically like I’m in my early 30s–in fact, due to Tai Chi I often feel more limber than I did back then. But the other 15% of the time is where mid-fifties life gets interesting: 5% of the time I feel exactly my age, 5% of the time I feel like I’m in my 70s, and the last 5% of the time I’m stiff and sore and feel at least 90 years old. I can do renovation projects and work in the garden cutting and stacking and digging like a maniac no problem, and then get injured standing up from the couch or opening a pickle jar.

The biggest realization over the first half of this decade? Shut the fuck up. Keep your opinions to yourself, listen to what others have to say and shut the fuck up. Don’t participate in or encourage gossip of any kind. Petty annoyances and grievances? Let that shit go. This is the time to work on the inner self and start preparing for the next stages. What books to read, what books to re-read, what places to visit or revisit?–all of these questions become more delicate and nuanced. Typically American dudes live to be 75. Maybe I’ll get there, maybe not–maybe I’ll go beyond? But it’s time to start considering the fact that you’ve got a couple strong decades left, and how to spend them is a key consideration.

As of June 11, 2024, we’ve been married 30 years. How does this happen? In the blink of an eye we’ve been married 30 years. It really seems like our 20th anniversary party was just a few years ago. It’s been a true pleasure seeing my wife bloom since we moved abroad–unfettered by an employer she’s just madly arranging events and ateliers and adding more and more artists and craftspeople and creatives to her roster. But as my Baltimore 8th graders used to say, “she do too much.” Sometimes I get completely wiped out trying to run logistics and preparing for all the gazillion things she’s got going on, and yet she continues adding more and trying more. We have this amazing piece of garden and an old stone building and sometimes I’d like to rest on my laurels and set a spell in a hammock by the river. Patricia tells me “you have to schedule some days off when you’re self-employed or you’ll burn out,” and then she adds two more retreats and another workshop to the calendar and buys some massive thing on FB Marketplace that I have heft downstairs. But it’s all about the love, and there’s nobody I’d rather spend 24/7 with as a business partner and life partner and lover and animal co-parent. She is a dynamo with a world-changing mission and has no interest in slowing down a bit, and I could not be luckier to see it all up close.