Clarity is in there. Speak and then be quiet if you're looking for it.

I founded a school once. We worked tirelessly, far after midnight on heated occasions. Eighty one of us wrapped around a common vision, circling church rooms, parks, and eventually classrooms together.

We created a culture out of the nurturance of an idea. After two years of collaboration, nothing, showed itself to us, as a something.

Houston, we had a school!

On opening day, Native American story tellers drummed our children in as a greeting. I lead the teachers in a Responsive system of classroom management which we'd adopted school wide when I wasn't getting under tables with explosive children meeting them eye to eye on the cold floor to soothe them out.

Each Wednesday morning, we'd drum the kids in from every grade as they coordinated themselves in half circles on both sides of the huge room we used.

I'd facilitate a school wide Morning Meeting after walking in to work, which was their school, hand in hand, with my two layered up children each fall dawn.

I was single. 25. I had two children, and I was in graduate school full time.

But each morning, I woke up excited to tend to the children that day despite running on sickness and caffeine to keep up with all of it.

I'd made myself a little slice of green living that I actually felt like I belonged to. It wasn't a corporate cage.

But then...

Politics got involved.

I didn't keep my mouth shut. I was told to.

Then the interim director cut my position and offered me a job making 13K a year less in a department of power hungry women who...no thanks, not my style, nor my department.

The vast majority of the staff that I had a hand in hiring, stood around and watched the system displace a person who placed them.

They kept their mouths shut.

And kept their jobs.

Isn't it the worst when you know you have to walk away from something you love.

And I mean like, Love Love.

When you love something like, my identity is wrapped up in it, I'm married to it, I write secret wishes on paper with seeds-of-flowers-you-can-write-on-and-plant to grow your wishes about how I see it in 50 years, and how I see my part in it kind-of-love.

Innocent and faithful. That was the way I loved our community and all of its layers.

I felt so safe. So a part.

Then without warning...

I felt like NOTHING to this place. A very familiar feeling I'd thought this place had saved me from.

Reminded me of the time I allowed my college boyfriend to infiltrate my whole life, in which he left it with my family (literally), my friends, my connections, and my wallet, but left me, with two kids to fend for by myself.

I felt so used. So unloveable.

Here it was, happening all over again on a larger scale. Another situation in which I gave everything.

Another, I was left with less than a quarter tank in all areas of life. And, alone in the desert with two cubs to find water for while knowing it.

I bet cheetah mothers could teach me a lesson or fifty on this.

I grieved while the interim director left this place he cared nothing for, for his vacation in Africa.

Meanwhile, my children lost health care, a few degrees of heat each winter and our morning walks to school because their mother was too wounded to face it with them.

Somewhere between then and now, I've created a life much less hectic than before and two more children.

We rode bikes in to meet our daughter in the pick up line at our school when I realize I haven't "actually" let it go.

It's a ghost that haunts me when I come to these grounds but that doesn't follow me when I leave unless I see its Caspers flitting through town. Then I must admit the nervous system feels a bit on the edge of an electric chair.

My body remembers more than we'd like.

I stood there as Chris handed our daughter her pink sticker confetti-ed helmet, watching.

Alex. Little Alex, I'd think.

Zoe. Oh, Zoe, I'd think.

That's Sam's mom, right?, I'd think.

"That was 10 years ago Stac. Be fresh. See with fresh eyes. Breathe this in. No comparisons" I softly scold myself.

I can't help it though. The faces, collectively morph and so does my timeline. "I miss those days," I try hard NOT to think.

Now I'm just a stranger, staring creepily from across the street.

I can't help but see the perfectly placed log benches next to living plants under sunroom windows in the library as a pinterest post, which is what it became. Compared to when gloves were shoved inside rain boots colorfully muddied and muddled in a line outside the classroom doors on stained up floors.

It's so different now.

But the faces, morph there through the collective and I see youngsters who are now grown, in the faces of those on the same journey they, and I, once were.

"That's your comparison shit talking Stac" I discipline myself again.

"But I wonder where Alex is now?"

Be fresh. Let this be fresh. I tell myself. Be here.

I've been asked to be on the board, which becomes contemplative in this moment.

Part of me fears I only entertain the idea because I want control of something I felt so out of control of. Or to prove something to those who I hired, who stood around and watched me on fire, whom would now have to go through me to make major decisions. To reverse the reversal of roles I suppose.

Part of me, as a mother, wants to be there on Tuesday mornings to volunteer, and relinquish my duties I vowed to the vision so I can meet my daughter in her world. What my old one became in my absence, without tainting it with obvious licks to my own wounds at the library station. Indeed, this is not my old world at all, in ways. It’s her new one.

Part of me is still written among the puzzle on the wall above the entry, and that part knows of the sacredness of my part. That part gives me permission to relax now, and receive what I have given.

Somehow, this means, it’s ours.

It's not what it once was. But it's exactly what it's always been in a whole lot of ways.

It just looks, and feels...different.

Now instead of live drumming, they play soft music over a loudspeaker upon entry.

Now instead of my older children, they have my younger.

Now instead of me, they have Ms Schroeder to greet the day.

Holding this contrast is tricky. I feel both grief and relief to be disciplined by the cycles of change that've come in life, and with the creation and sustainability of our school.

When we finally gear up to fly down the hill, the baby in the bike trailer attached to me and our daughter on a tandem bike with Chris beside me, I appreciate Miller's face cheering on my existence as our wheels spin past her.

I used to do the same for her, but that too, has been gone and I'm not sure if I've forgiven enough to receive it back. I smile and thank her for seeing me so celebratory.

Miller's wave represents that the wheel of a vision we had is still in motion, just like the bikes we rode in on to joyfully greet our daughter at the end of the day. I find both collective relief and personal grief in this fact.

It moves.

Without me.

My partner of almost a decade doesn't understand my grief, my desire to belong anywhere but where I am, nor the depth of my commitment to it, nor my confusion about the opening to come back in a different capacity.

Riding out of breath up hill, I open to rant and instantly, he held a large mirror to everything I've said about it up until this point in a single sentence, "Just tell them now's not a good time for you."

But...I want to rant. He doesn't understand. Where TF is his juggular?!

This is my school. I committed to it. I told Ben I would. There's no reason I can't serve. This is the wheelhouse of my 20's that I still find myself circling around at almost-40 like an old love that lingers but never actually shows up. Something in me keeps searching for it.

I have so many reasons, so many layers, and then I feel the pang of riding by Becky who is now in leadership and noticing her try very, very hard to act like she didn't notice me.

I feel the pang of rearranging my work schedule to serve for a place that left me as if what I'd left it of myself, meant nothing.

I feel the expectation of either being exactly the same as they remember me, or a more professional, fine tuned version of it. Both expectations feel like a pressure on my chest checking in to make sure I'm worthy to breathe in a position on the board.

I can't rebuttal his statement which felt like a shut down, but indeed, was permission to hear myself sanely and clearly.

I wonder if this is how Tess and Bev felt this week when I upheld a similar mirror.

Both of them ran circles around the thing they were saying so clearly. They were being so obvious in their truth but so unwilling to accept it because sometimes...the truth hurts.

Sometimes, we have to have the break up conversation, or the quitting conversation, or the I-can't-even-though-I-already-committed-to-this conversation.

Sometimes we have to honor our own thresholds that we wish had higher bars, and that we judge for not making sense.

There are layers and layers to those choices other people will never understand the depth of, but when the decision is clear, and we keep talking ourselves out of it looking for validation of it's clarity rather than honoring it's clarity, emotional things get messy and confusing.

I know, that now is not the time though this knowing annoys me because I don't quite understand the limitation. Not now doesn't mean “never,” I remind myself. Just for today, "my decision is, not now.”

I also know that when I originally agreed to it, I agreed for reasons my truest nature doesn't align to, like "proving."

I know that I "want" to be a part, but that I've given YEARS of my life literally, of unpaid work to this place, that doesn't see fit to provide back, and that hurts my heart. Me accepting this position, would feel more of the same, though I hate to admit it.

I thought being on the board would be the transmutation of my relationship with this place. But it won't.

Not with me in "this" place about it anyway.

My relationship with what was, will be transmuted only when I'm willing to open and receive what is now...without needing it to be what it was.

To learn it, here, now, and new.

This time rather from the top down, I’m to learn it bottom up, as merely a parent. Only then, will I be able to stably meet it in the middle.

So whatever that thing is for you...the truth that's clear that you muddy up because you don't think the clarity is justified...you're allowed to honor it, despite the layers, and the wanting it to be.

Clarity is usually there, silent in our guts while our heads talk around why that silent clarity "shouldn't" be what it is.

But it is what it is.

I know what to do and I don't really like it.

But to "be" who I am in a sane and sustainable way, I will.

Despite that I "wish" I had no emotional pangs, no thresholds and no baggage so I was in a healthy enough position to say "yes..", my answer is clear. “Not right now.”

I'm in a healthy enough position to accept what is now. Which honors my clarity more than my codependency. ;)

That's where the "rest" starts.

That's where receiving what is, is transmuted to what Truth would have it become.

And so I will.

Will you?