Compliments

The desire to build a glass house

Biking down Egg&I in the rain, I happen to glance back and see a full rainbow behind me. The sky has opened up to the North, a glimmer of blue, and while the rain pelts me here, over there lies benediction.

I glance forward to correct my course, and back again - trying to imprint this rainbow into my mind to join the others held there. I remember one arching over Port Townsend, pierced by the courthouse tower - another a pillar pounding down into the Olympia bay, or the one doubled behind the three great trees that stand guardian of our land - yes, that was my first rainbow - I still remember.

I’ve been watching too long and skid off the road, feet slamming into the mud as breaks. I totter above the ditch. It’s maybe ten feet down before I would hit the muddy water, swirling in its dirty welcome, swelled by the still falling rain. Feet on the slippery ground, I check the momentum of bike and backpack and body, remaining as dry as I can while biking in the rain.

I have been breaking things, ripping things, running into things of late. I am not sure the cause of it. This new Pan is more forceful than he once was - more prone to blunder into pain than he had been, and while he does not throw stones he is more forceful with those around him,  more confident in his capacity to take anything the world throws at him. It is freeing, in a way, to be so careless as this - a memory of younger times, a game played recklessly for stakes that make or break a life.

A pie dish shattered while washing dishes, a pot sent tumbling to the deck to crack while shaking out a rug, A jean leg tangled in a bike’s gear sends me careening to the edge of the road. A pie dish shattered in the oven, a child accidentally whacked in the face, a bowl cracked in its fall, jean legs ripped to the knee on my bike. A window cracked, a water pipe punctured, a waterglass emptied across the bed, a white shirt stained, jeans ripped at both knees.

I went to go buy new jeans online, sleep deprived for no good reason. After I selected  the ones I wanted, I went to Mama for a second opinion. “Don’t buy anything on an empty stomach,” she advised. “Wait for your stepfather, he orders all his jeans from the company.”

I waited. He had little and nothing to advise, but was able to supply the number he wears, which Mama now insisted I get as well. We walked through it together, both a little uneasy with buying clothes outside of a thrift store. We spend the afternoon figuring out what sizes my current jeans are, measuring waist and legs, and arguing. She doesn’t like baggy and I like something I can work in. When we come to color she has no preference.

“When I first started wearing jeans Noms said I looked good in dark blue so that’s what I’ve worn ever since.”
“You do look good in darker jeans,” she concedes.

She doesn’t question that the opinion of an eleven year old - eight years before - should still impact my choice of clothes now. I’m not sure if this is because she knows me, or if she too makes decisions based on ancient compliments. Perhaps in the complicated minutiae of what to wear, everyone navigates based on what those around them say. How better to bridge that gap between what we see and how we are seen?

I treasure compliments - quite literally, in a little gold wire box shaped like a heart on my alter. Inside I write on little slips of paper the things that move me. The reflections that validate my existence. The acts of kindness that make me feel held. The moments when I know that I have succeeded in what I have tried so hard to do.

Like Libra, I remember when she quietly looked up at me and said “You are a perfect mix of masculine and feminine.” Just that, but she didn’t know how much struggle had gone into that. How that balancing act between gender - that pulling away from my Mother’s power and towards my own masculinity - then away from my male nature and embracing what was female within me, and finally finding a balance between them - that was my life’s work until that moment, and then she said it, and I didn’t have to worry anymore.

Other times Libra gave compliments as gifts and not just passing comments with deep implications. One night when we were talking she told me that she had faith in humanity now. This was new, I enquired why.

“Just you I guess. Knowing that there are people so amazing. How could I be hopeless?”

Other compliments come from people I hardly know at all. New to Evergreen, Aletia, a girl in my Belly dancing club turned to me one afternoon as I opened the door for her into the gym, and said “You know, I think you are the sweetest boy I have ever met in my entire life.” She didn’t know me, or, I think, see me in any deep way - but the meaning of it came out of that surface sight. I come off as sweet, I discovered then, and if that’s true - then I have permission to be sweet. Honey tongued I stepped onward.

I wonder sometimes when I rifle through the slips of paper that make up my hoard, why I find them so very valuable. Is it my love of mirrors? The angle of positive reflection of more than body? Is it my appreciation of seeing things out of other people’s eyes - unbound to this single perspective?

Sometimes when standing somewhere public I will be hit by the knowledge that it is pure coincidence that I am myself thinking these thoughts. Knowing that I could equally be that woman thinking her thoughts, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Only in our interaction, in our passing of words, will these thoughts held prisoners in each of our heads be freed, and her thoughts become mine.

Sometimes when standing there I will yell Hey mind reader! as loud as I can inside my head to see if anyone starts. No one ever does. It seems that our thoughts, our perceptions are truly trapped. No one will ever know how much I appreciate them, unless I tell them. No one will ever know what bothers me unless I speak it. Yellow once told me “You are the most annoyingly honest person I have ever met,” and I wrote it down on a slip of paper and put it in the compliment box in front of her.  Honesty. Transparency. I can see your thoughts.

I have for some time desired to live in a glass house. It is a dreamer’s wish. The desire inside of me to make literal the wants of my psyche - to make home visible, to model this sense of centeredness that I feel in home, at home.

I’m living at home right now, in the home where I grew up since I was three and a half. The home where I first learned that other people have other thoughts. The home where I saw my first rainbow. Home where Papa still lives, Mama having graduated from our off the grid sanctuary so many years ago.

When I was learning the Lord’s prayer in Aramaic we were asked to visualize an inner room, the hallowed space into which we invited God - and the image that came was my room - the room at home, but with walls made of glass so that the land stretched out beneath me. To be holy then, is to me, to be so full of holes that everything is visible, transparent to the eye.

Yet to live in a space it has to be waterproof, insulated, contained - and so I seek glass. I like the way that when darkness falls outside it becomes a mirror, reflecting back the monsters within not focussing on the monsters without.

Papa asked me to move out, as he has asked before in more heated moments - but this time was a collected request. I took it, annoyed by the impracticality of it. Renting is such a waste of money - it means finding housemates and putting effort into a space where everything I plant is left, everything I do is a stopgap until my life begins.

We talk about other options. I am questioning my plans to get a masters in teaching, questioning if I can do as much good in a public school as I thought I could, and wondering if that’s really the path I want to take. If I don’t, that leaves me my inheritance, left for my education - to be used for other things. Papa suggests I could buy an acre off somewhere, build my own space on land I own. Why not here? Because that would be a waste of money, he tells me - a paradox that ends in the simple realization that he does not want me here.

It is only later, Mama advising me not take it personally, that I checked in to find the well of emotion open in my belly. This place is home, and being asked to remove myself from it strikes as a blow to my center.  This place is home, and I am seen as doing more harm than good.

In my last year at Evergreen I made a second home in the Quaisar, the math and science lab where tutors circulated helping students with their homework. I was not a good student. My mind is not a thing of logic, I am a creature made largely of emotion, echoing in repetition. I needed a lot of help.

So I arrived when it opened and left when it closed. “Pan,” the chemistry tutor I had fallen in love with told me one day, “I don’t know if you know how great you are. You’ve been here as long as I have today.” I added it to my box. The way she said it, the way she saw me - I was not a drag on the math lab’s resources, I was welcome, even honored for putting in my time.

It is not just the mirroring that makes compliments so complimentary to my character, it is the acceptance in the community. When I tell people that I’m beginning to look for housing possibilities - the community buzzes and I begin to get offers, webs of relationship, people willing to put up with my oddities in exchange for something of value.

I warn that I ferment everything, that wildcrafting sounds cool until there are bundles of green things everywhere, and buckets of lavender to be scraped into jars, and food has little chewy bits of root that you’d never tolerate in a carrot, that I bring chickens with me with all their poop and noise and two roosters besides, and yet somehow that isn’t enough to stop the offers.

I love the grudging compliments, the ones spoken as if against their will - an admission that perhaps against all the faults I know I hold, I’m helpful too. I still remember Graceling, driving me home in her car and admitting “You’re calming. I know I get defensive about sometimes needing to be brought down to another frequency, but you’re good at soothing me.”

Papa and I come back to talk a week later and he’s good at soothing me too. He explains that it’s not that this isn’t my land, it’s that he wants me to postpone my hold on it for a little while. Be patient. I both love and hate being patient. I am both very good and very bad at it.

Papa is getting radiated for a cancerous lymph node right now, his shoulder blackened by the constant bombardment of cancer killing rays. He’s tired all the time - retreating into the solitude of someone who is putting everything into fighting an infection. He had surgery to try and get it out, but it spread - who knows how long he has. It could be ten years, it could be tomorrow.

I explain to him that I don’t ever want to be in the position of wanting him to die. I don’t want to feel like he’s in the way, I just want to love him for however long we have left. I mention that this feels like a time when he needs my help more than ever, and while if I’m in the way, I’ll get out of the way, It feels like I can support him better from here.

There are so many ways to tell someone you love them. It was Libra who introduced me to the idea of love languages so long ago. Papa doesn’t take touch as love. I tried to institute hugging goodbye before I went off to college and he rebelled. He doesn’t love that way either.

We skirt around other ways. I try and give it to him in acts of service and he responds in his own small ways. Words of praise can make me feel loved, the simple edges, Eithne texting me her revelation “Hey you’re one of my best friends in the whole world. Thanks for being awesome.” or the more common compliments on dress or smile.

But Papa expresses love in the time spent together. He shows me he loves me in the way he listens when I talk and the things he finds of interest that he shares. He feels loved when I read my writing out loud to him, or share a meal, or recommend a book.  

I feel loved when people touch me. Mama’s love language passed down in a thousand squeezes, leanings, and hugs. Mama tells me not to take it personally and I find the emotion rising and I know that all it would take is one brush of her fingers to break me and let it all go free.

I know that Papa loves me, in the thousand small ways he shows it, but I do not think he understands how much his words mean to me. Where Mama’s words roll by because I feel centered in her touch, Papa’s words have weight that pushes me against my will.

We talk more about the possibility of building my glass house on the land - four acres of wildland, more than enough to have me out of his hair. He doesn’t want to be put to work and I promise that I can respect that boundary - pull instead on the community to help me.

That to him is almost worse. He knows my mother’s spirit in me - the networking mind that manipulates the people around them. He expresses that he feels it his duty to protect the world from that aspect of me, to never let me be in the position where I’m pulling strings to take advantage of other people’s goodwill.

But he doesn’t see, doesn’t know - the compliments. That people like being put to use, the community is a knotted thing of obligation that pulls both ways, and by using them I give them permission to use me in turn. We are all made stronger by the favors we ask of each other. A cat fed here, a plant watered there, a ride given. My neighbor who has been giving me rides regularly has become a close friend who calls on me often. That could not have happened if I hadn’t asked first.

I do not know if he sees the work I feel like I am doing. The real work. Eithne gave me the best compliment on my writing I think I have ever received. She wrote something beautiful and then said “I couldn’t have written it without having been steeped in your writing these last few months.”

My favorite compliment was given to me by a sword student, in a conversation about what it would mean to be a swordfighter “A swordfighter would be a quiet person with loud actions,” he said, and suddenly I realized he was talking about me. I have never tried to be a quiet person - I fight the quiet that is my birthright with all the fire I can throw at it, forcing myself to speak when others do not. Forcing myself to be the one who takes action to combat that quiet. He saw me as both, and both as valuable, and that value as worth trying to become.

I have so much of value to give, and so much time is spent just building the foundations. Every step back feels like a year lost before I can give as much as is mine to give. Can’t he see?

But also I am breaking things more often than I am accustomed to. I got lost walking in the dark the other night, striding off without a flashlight, trusting in the gifts of ghosts, and finding I usually see in the dark through reflections. Dazzled and confused by the rain I ran into trees and stepped in puddles and grew frustrated with this feeling of myself as an adolescent again - unsure of the length of his arms - forever misjudging, and breaking, and ripping, and shattering.

Is now really the time to live in a glass house?