I called my friend Kevin the morning after I arrived in Chicago, sobbing uncontrollably.

“It gets worse before it gets better,” he said.

I was horrified.  And I was grateful.  Grateful to have this information.  An ominous warning from one who has walked the path – so I might know what to expect and “prepare” accordingly.  Although I couldn’t imagine what I might do to “get ready.”  Or that I could feel any worse than I did at that moment.

Last night, more than four months since that conversation, I asked Kevin, “You told me it gets worse before it gets better.  When does it get better?”  It had been a particularly difficult and leaky day.

What he told me wasn’t exactly new information.  Something along the lines of change is incremental.  The better begins to outweigh the worse.  And the worse, when it creeps in, doesn’t last as long.  Until one day you realize it’s been better more than worse for a while.

It reminded me of a conversation I often have with massage clients – when I explain that healing tends to happen in dribs and drabs.  So often you aren’t aware of it until you are on the other side of it.  And yet it’s happening all the time.  It’s what I call the Jeff Weinstein method of healing. 

The name always peaks their interest.

Jeff Weinstein was the mostly unrequited love of my life in high school.  I thought my heart would never heal.  That I would never recover from him not choosing me.  That I would always feel broken.

And then one day, I realized it had been a couple of days since I had thought about him.  Then a few weeks.  Eventually it didn’t hurt anymore when I would think of him.  And I knew I had healed.

To be honest, I still cringe sometimes when I think of my relationship with Jeff. 

My legs still buckle a little bit under my weight and my hands shake when I run into him, as I do, every couple of years.  Body memory.    

I remember the pain of that unrequited love distinctly.  It is never too far away.  How could it be?  It lives inside of me.  But it takes up different real estate.  And while I recognize it, I really don’t feel it anymore.

This morning, as I was making my usual breakfast of oatmeal with banana, blueberries and soy milk, I realized the Jeff Weinstein method had been working on me.

I looked at a bowl on the shelf.  My friend Stephanie gave it to me when I got back to town, along with some other “starter items” from her own kitchen.  Things she no longer used.

She brought them to me after she heard me say, “I arrived with a spoon.”  It was the only eating utensil I traveled with.  It’s still in my friend Matt’s kitchen drawer – a jelly spoon with ridged edges.

The bowl is thrown pottery with a mustard-color glaze, a flocked pattern inside, and grooves at the top for resting chopsticks. 

I don’t eat breakfast out of Stephanie’s bowl anymore.  I use a Chococat cat bowl I found at the Salvation Army instead.  It makes me giggle and feels decidedly girlie.

I thought about arriving here in September.   Making oatmeal in Stephanie’s bowl and bringing it with me to my morning meetings.  It was a habit I had developed in Seattle.

Lee had asked me for a divorce.  And I just had a somewhat innocent intimacy with a friend.  He acted differently towards me after.  I was devastated.  I thought I knew him.  That I could trust him.   But his actions betrayed his words.   And I saw him all the time.  Both of them. 

I couldn’t eat.  I had never experienced this before. 

My mother put me on my first diet when I was 10, and I have done some sort of battle with my body pretty much since then.  Early on, I learned to eat when I was happy.  When I was sad.  Scared, bored, excited.  I could eat for any emotion or occasion if I let myself.  And now I couldn’t choke down food.

I had heard about this phenomenon, but it seemed like urban legend to me.  Like the Loch Ness Monster or Big Foot. 

Every morning I would make breakfast.  Write my morning pages.  Pray and meditate.  And then go meet others like myself for a dose of what heals us.  I would bring my bowl with oatmeal, bananas, blueberries and, by the time I arrived, somewhat congealed soy milk.

My friends gently teased me about how I barely finished breakfast before lunch.  And about giving new meaning to “bringing my own bowl.”  They knew.  I felt safe with them.  And I was distracted enough so I could eat and not really notice.

I lost 12 pounds without trying.  I decided the divorce diet was a gift to help me in my newly single life.

I looked at the bowl.  I don’t take it, or any other one, with me in the morning.  It doesn’t sit in my car while I drive.  It no longer takes me literally hours to eat.  My appetite has returned.  It did some time ago. 

And I realize I am just a little bit better than worse. 

I have never understood movie dates.    

You don’t talk.  You don’t get to know one another.  Don’t trade information about favorite books, first jobs and secret -private-fantasy careers.  Don’t find out if you both like to eat off of one another’s plate.  You sit in the dark, facing a screen and share an experience.  Not even.  It is parallel play.  People go on movie dates because they are easy.  They aren’t so scary.

The same is true for Artist’s Dates.

Last Tuesday.  I take myself on Artist Date Four—to the Lincoln Park Zoo and Conservatory.   It is overcast and near-40-degrees in January.

I am looking at my watch, wondering how I am going to spend my time.  Just like I did on my first Artist Date.   I have a cold.  It isn’t as warm as I had thought.  I should have brought a scarf, and worn a longer coat.  But I want to look cute.  “It’s a date.”  I have been absurdly literal about this at times.  I even change clothes a couple of times before leaving the house.  I buy myself flowers earlier in the day – red Gerber Daisies smiling at me from the refrigerator at Costco.  Perhaps even winking.  A deep crimson with yellow centers.

 I am flooded with memories. 

My husband is ranting that he does nothing but work and run errands.  I point the car toward the zoo and bring him here.   We leave our just-purchased groceries in the car, and I appreciate winter for the first time ever.  I don’t know if he likes the zoo but we are doing something different.  I show him that this might be a place worth staying.

Years later.  It is spring.  I ask Lee to take me here.  It is days after my breast reduction surgery.  I cannot drive.  I am supposed to be healing.   I am restless.   I walk slowly.  Gingerly.  Men and women, easily in their 80s, zip past me.  I realize I am not well.  That I have no business being here.   

In his book, “It’s Not About the Bike,” Lance Armstrong writes about climbing on his bike for an “easy ride” while being treated for stage 4 testicular cancer.  But it is harder than he imagines.  Tour de France hard.  A slightly-overweight, middle-aged woman rides past him on a clunky, mountain bike as if he is standing still.  This is how I feel.  Defeated.  Demoralized.

 Zoo Lights: We are with my ex-boyfriend Stu and his wife Maria.  We have our picture taken with Santa in the Lion House and drink instant hot cocoa.  I am with my friend Damita.  Raised Jehovah’s Witness, she didn’t celebrate Christmas growing up.  Now an adult woman in her 40s, she is mad-crazy in love with the lights.

My farewell ritual with Clover.  I am preparing to leave my adopted home and move to Seattle.  We visit places of significance for me.  I leave a rock from my hot-stone massage collection in each place, along with a blessing or memory written on biodegradable paper.  The Lincoln Park Zoo is my last stop.  I get on my knees and pray, and leave a rock under a bush near the Conservatory.

 I love the Lincoln Park Zoo for about a million reasons.  It’s free.  It sits in the middle of a city, in the middle of a park.   It has boats shaped like swans. 

I first learned of it my freshman year of college.  I met a boy from the Chicago suburbs who played me a song about a guy caught with his pants down – literally – sodomizing a cow in the petting zoo after hours.  I still remember the refrain: “Moo, Moo, I love you.  I know you’re a cow but anything will do.  Oh yeah, there’s a lot to do, when it’s just me and you.” 

My first visit is 20 years later.  I have just moved to Chicago for the first time.  My step-sister’s personal trainer takes me Nordic Walking (read: powerwalk with poles) here.  It becomes a regular stop for me.

On the way from my Thursday morning Weight Watchers meeting to my office across from Northwestern Memorial Hospital.  I spend the hours between walking from the one place to the next, cutting through the zoo.

It is early and I watch the staff preparing for the day.  I visit the polar bear, watching him swim to the glass and play with any kids who might be watching.  I love his black skin, his white fur and big meaty paws.  How he swims on his back.

I don’t have a friend in Chicago.  Not yet.  So I go see the animals.  It sounds sad.  It is.

Today.  Five years have passed and I have returned to this place.  To Chicago – to live.  To the Lincoln Park Zoo – for this Artist’s Date.

The Zoo Lights are still up but unlit.  The Chocolate Bar stands are also up, but closed.  Chunks of ice, green with glitter, are melting where the carving demonstrations took place. 

I walk on the new Nature Boardwalk, taking photographs.  Reflections of the skyscrapers on the pond.  Canadian geese gathering.   Flower patterns in the ice.  A picture-postcard view of the city.

I remember being here this summer, on my way to Rwanda.  My friend Michael picks me up and asks what I want to do.  “Walk.”  He brings me here, walking so quickly I can hardly keep up in my orange peep-toe wedges.  He insists nothing is wrong but I don’t believe him.  We stop and he shines his flashlight in the water.  Bullfrogs.  He knows their song.  We look at each other and grin and I think, “We’re ok.”

The furry camels are taking turns eating.  The blind leading the blind.  Orderly. Polite.  I remember a phone conversation with my friend Slade just a few weeks ago.  He lives in South Carolina now, but lived here once for a year.  We didn’t know one another then.   I tell him exactly where I am at and describe the camels to him.  We talk about his trip to San Francisco and about making art.  I am excited about our friendship, about knowing him.  It seems a long time ago.

I visit the alpacas.  One white.  One brown.  One black.  The jaguar and the skinny lion when I go in the Lion House to pee.  The polar bear is hiding.  I go to the African Experience to warm up and to be reminded of my trip this summer. 

I am accosted by a volunteer asking me if I “want to learn some things.”  He is about 17, kind of doughy and really excited.  How can I say no?  He quizzes me on the number of bones in the hand.  A former anatomy teacher, I should know this.

72?  27.  

How many cervical vertebrae? 

Five?  Seven. 

“Counting atlas/axis?” I say.  “I guess.” 

He shows me a cast of a human hand and a gorilla paw.  A human vertebrae and a giraffe vertebrae.  He tells me giraffes have seven cervical vertebrae too.  Theirs are just bigger.  And they work like a ball-and-socket joint.  I see this in action when I spot the giraffes.  Inside for the winter.  The tall one winds her head up in a flirtatious gesture and bats her eyelashes.  I may have a new love, I think.

I consider taking a strip of photos in a booth, like I have done with Angel. With Lee.  But it seems sad to do it alone so I don’t.

I wander into the Conservatory.  My lungs fill with warm, moist air.  I feel better.  I am tired.  I walk through the tropical plants, into the fern house, into the orchid house.  I remember carrying orchids at my wedding.  A mess of them cascading out of my hands like fragrant white water.  Gorgeous.

I take a picture of a sign.  “Sensitive Plant.”  I think of my friend Dina.  She used to call me Princess and the Pea because I am so sensitive.  She is too.

I sit on a bench by the sensitive plant and close my eyes.  I am feeling more comfortable on my date.  That first hour is about easing into it.  The second hour is about enjoying it. 

I post my photos on Facebook.  I consider these memories, little fragments of my life seen through a zoo lens.  Stories I would tell someone if I were here on a date.  I tell them to myself.

I slept seven hours Monday night.   Eight Tuesday, and woke up the next morning near tears.   Salty liquid gratitude.   I was restored.  The familiar pain and pulling in my neck and across my face was gone.  The only thing I had done differently was to get appropriate sleep two nights in a row. 

I hadn’t done that since I moved out of the bedroom last April.

I hear this is common during divorce – staying up until all hours.  Literally exhausting oneself, falling into bed and passing out before you can notice you are there alone when you didn’t used to be.

I didn’t move out of our bedroom right away.  I wasn’t ready and Lee didn’t force the issue.  When I kissed a man who wasn’t him, I knew it was time, and I went into my “office.” 

Its walls were painted sage.  Happy curtains flocked with yellow and orange circles covered the windows, shiny, saffron-colored Sari material covered the closet.  I slept on an old Ikea fold-out couch/bed.  “My” art hung on the walls.  A stretched canvas collaged  and ModgePodged with memorabilia from my first travels overseas alone – train tickets, hotel bills, coasters, maps, photographs. And a painting from my friend Scotty called “You Can Take it With You.” It is a woman leaving her home and her tribe.

Now in my own bedroom, I didn’t have to consider anyone else’s comfort or schedule.  I could go to bed whenever I liked.  It was like being in college.

I started the ritual of a nightly phone call with a friend in Chicago – also going through a divorce.  We would speak into the wee hours.  And yet, I still rose early – 5:30 a.m.  I had developed a schedule.  It gave me a sense of purpose.  Of safety and feeling grounded.  I held on to it fiercely.

I stayed up just as late while traveling over the summer.  In Rwanda, my roommate Sue and I would talk in the darkness under our dreamy, diaphanous mosquito nets until we fell asleep.

Since arriving in Chicago this fall, I’ve been mostly sleeping on a couch.  First at my friend Matt’s house.   And then at my own. 

I didn’t want to move into the spare bedroom at Matt’s.  It was small and didn’t have air-conditioning.  It meant I’d have to open up a box and inflate a blowup mattress.  Easy as it sounds, I didn’t have it in me.  Also, it would mean I had really left Seattle, left my marriage.  Sleeping on the couch allowed me to harbor an
unconscious fantasy that this was all temporary.  Besides, Matt said it was kind of nice to see me there in the morning.

On my own, I ordered a top of the line futon and frame.  I made the bedroom a massage studio, while I “camped” out in the living room.  Just inches from the dining nook and my computer, I stayed up later and later each night, seduced by what seemed like connection.  Facebook.  Photographs.  Video clips of a crush playing guitar and crooning.

Last week, I bought a bed.   It came on the heels of completing a writing exercise in Week 3 of The Artist’s Way.  “Describe your childhood room…What was your favorite thing about it?   What’s your favorite thing about your room right now? …”   

I didn’t have a room.  I knew then I could no longer camp out.  I could no longer feel like a transient in my own home. 

I feel anxious and teary writing this, realizing how unkind I have been to myself.  Realizing how much I have depended on others – especially my ex-husband – to give me permission to treat myself well.  To live.  

And, to tell me it’s going to be ok.  That I’m ok.  That I won’t be homeless.  (A recurring fear of mine.)  That I will always have enough to eat.  That I am protected and cared for and safe in the world – not because of him but because of me, the community I create, the order of things.

I didn’t get that reassurance at home growing up.  It wasn’t their fault.  My folks weren’t sure we had enough.  And whether or not that was actually true, they believed it.  At an early age I watched my father with his head in his hands, paying bills.  My mother reminding us of whom we couldn’t keep up with.  Of what we couldn’t have, instead of what we did. 

They were scared.  So I got scared.   I started living tight, rather than trusting in the good of the universe, my own work ethic, and my money-handling skills.

My friend Lisa reminds me that my money fears masquerade as financial prudence to the outside world.  But really, it’s just fear.

That’s what making a bedroom into a massage studio and putting myself literally “on the couch” is – fear. 

I’m alone now and fully adult.  I can’t wait for someone to give me permission to spend money – my money.  To take care of myself.  I have to do it.  It’s a slow learning.

I decided to let go of how much money I spent on the futon and my belief that it “should” work.  I ordered a bed from Overstock.com.  It arrives next week.  A modern, streamlined wood platform with a memory-foam mattress. 

In terms of my work, it means I’ll exclusively do house calls.  Or rent space from my friend, Dee.  Or put the table up in my living room and buy divider panels.  I haven’t decided yet.

I walk into my bedroom and I’m giddy excited to move in.  Probably the giddy excited I should have felt when I moved in to my apartment in October – my first on my own – ever, but didn’t.

I went to Target yesterday.  I bought a Dirt Devil stick vacuum.  A shoe rack.  A humidifier.  Shea butter for my hands.  Organic face crème.  Several kinds of tea. 

I stood in front of the Dirt Devil.  The shoe rack.  The humidifier.  Contemplating.   I heard the familiar refrain, “But do you really need it?”

Yes, I do.

I put them in my cart, took a deep breath, and checked out to the tune of $153.57.  I came home and built the shoe rack.  I vacuumed the closet with the new Dirt Devil and put the shoes back in it.  It looked like an After photo from a room makeover.

I kept vacuuming.  I remembered reading that Iggy Pop likes to vacuum.  So does my mother, and my friend Brian.  They find it Zen – although they wouldn’t use that word.  Right-brain activity, like scrubbing pots and riding a bike.

I marveled at how effortlessly it sucked up the dust bunnies in corners and along the baseboards.  I didn’t think I needed one because I had left the cats and their fur in Seattle.  I was mistaken.  I thought about my broom and dustpan and how I could never quite get everything up off the floor.  I’d tell myself it was “good enough.”  It wasn’t.

As I vacuumed – channeling Iggy Pop – I smiled.  I said out loud, “I think this is self-care.”

In the last 10 minutes I’ve gotten up off the couch at least half a dozen times.  To make tea.  Check texts.  Sharpen my pencil.  

I can’t get comfortable.  I am editing as I write.  I am thinking about the zipper on my jeans that won’t stay up.

I am entering Week 4 of the Artist’s Way: Recovering a Sense of Integrity.  I am anxious and afraid.

I am thinking about the last time, the first time, I “worked” through Week 4. 

March 2012.  I scheduled a trip to San Francisco to reconnect with friends and clean up old messes.  I booked a ticket before asking my friend Rainey if she would be in town.  Turns out, she wouldn’t.  But she assured me I was more than welcome to stay in the house she and her partner share.

Theirs is a great, big, funky house built in the 1970s.  Lots of wood, brick and glass, with a gas fireplace in the center and a panoramic view of the green hills of Marin County.   Zack, a sweet but neurotic dog who likes to poop in a litter box, and a cat whose name I’ve forgotten, stayed with me.

Each morning I would drink coffee, look out at the expanse before me and write my Morning Pages.  And each morning the same words slipped from my fingers through my pen.  “I am alone in this house because I am getting ready to be alone.”  The thought didn’t frighten me.  It just seemed true.  A prophesy.

I visited my former bosses from the Jewish Bulletin.  Woody served me bagels and lox at his house nearby.  We watched the deer eat from his wild lawn.  And we cried.  I don’t recall why.  I met Marc for Chinese food in Alameda.  He looked frail and his skin was the color of cardboard.  He told me he needed a kidney transplant.  That I was a good writer.  That he attributed my “bad behavior” to youth.  And that he was sorry he never invited me for Passover.  Both told me they had not spoken to the other for several years.

Rachel and I drank tea at The Grove.   We recalled meeting at the train station in our 20s and our weekly  Saturday brunch dates.  Often teary, waxing about relationships gone awry – most notably, “the former symphony conductor.”

I met Stan for miso and sashimi salad.  And Lillie at the Cliff House where we ate crab salads and happily paid for the view.

Alex and Cara, my first friends in Chicago, fed me from the garden of their new home in San Anselmo.  Marc, my last boyfriend before Lee, and I sat at the bar at Il Fornaio, drank espresso, and talked about the truth about us.

And I visited the grave of my old rabbi and teacher, Alan Lew. 

I studied with him in my 20s after an orthodox Jewish woman, upon learning my biological mother was not Jewish, exclaimed “You’re not really Jewish.”  We were preparing for my conversion.  But we never finished our work.    

I’m not sure why.  Maybe because I met Lee.  Because I started drinking again.  Because I got scared.  Whatever the reason, one day I just stopped showing up.

 Years later, new to Chicago, in pain, and blessed with competent spiritual direction, I made plans to return to San Francisco to ask if we might complete our work.  I never had the opportunity.  Rabbi Lew died unexpectedly, two weeks before that trip.  And now, several years since his death, I was finally at his grave.

Rain pelted down in sheets all morning, then easing up as I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge.  When I reached Colma, the sun was shining brightly through the usual fog.  I found Rabbi Lew’s grave, dropped to my knees and read him the letter I had written.  I meditated.  Traced the letters of his name on the tombstone.  And when I was done, rather than leaving a stone on his grave (as is custom for Jews), I left a small token that let him know exactly how I had gotten there.

And finally, I met with the rabbi who replaced him.  I told him about our relationship.  Why I was there.   That I wanted to be a rabbi, but I was living in Seattle and working on my marriage.   I didn’t see how it was possible.   “If Rabbinical school is your path, it will find you,” he said.

Lee met me that evening in San Francisco.  Our reunion was awkward and clunky.  Neither of us seemed thrilled to see the other.  We drove around the city, looking for a Wells Fargo Bank and ended up in the branch inside the Safeway on Potrero Hill – the store we shopped at when we first lived together nearly 15 years ago.  Wistful.

We ate ice cream, walked around South of Market and met a friend for dinner.  We drove back to San Rafael through the Marina district where I first met him as a client on his massage table.  I told him about the memories that flooded me over that week as I passed our old haunts and the routes we rode our bikes.  I told him I missed it.  He said it got too hard.  That he didn’t want to do it anymore.

“Ride with me?  Or be married?”

“Both,” he said, quietly.

My tires rolled on to the Golden Gate Bridge.  The calm I had felt writing about this in my morning pages was gone.  I was incredulous.  Swearing.  Shrieking, “Are you telling me you want a divorce?”  And “You’ll be sorry.  One day someone will consider himself lucky to be with me.” 

When we arrived at our friend’s home I told him not to talk to me.  I locked myself in the bedroom, called my friend Kevin, and told him I felt like drinking. 

“Of course you do, Pearlie Pants.  But you don’t have to.  You can do divorce better than most people do marriage.  And you can do it with grace and dignity,” he said.

I told him it appeared Rabbinical school had found me.  

Nine months have passed since that day.  I am free to pursue that Rabbinical calling, and yet, I have lost all desire.  Seems it was lifted from me.  I trust if it really is my path, it will find me again – eventually.

I did recover a sense of integrity that week.  With friends and within my marriage. We could no longer lie to one another about our marriage.  It’s little wonder I’m feeling anxious about approaching it again.

And then there’s Week 4’s suggested “fast” from reading.

Last time, my personal fasting rules included all media, most specifically Facebook.  Posting and checking email allowed.   But no trolling.  Or as my friend Mimi says, “No consumption.”  Same rules apply this time.

I fear “losing touch” in that easy, distanced way that social media allows.  That allows me to believe I am connected, when really I know only a piece of you and you of me.  I fear having to continue to look inside my life rather than inside of yours.  Tthat old adoption fear, that I will be forgotten, pokes at me.  And I am challenged to see what and who is there when I “return.”

Of the suggested fast, Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, writes, “For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction.  We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own.”

I’m tying on my apron.  It might get messy in the kitchen.

Shortly after I moved back to Chicago, I ran into a man/boy I used to know.

We discovered I was moving to his neighborhood and made a date to meet for coffee.  Instead, we got dinner.  The conversation was fun and easy and flowed.  And when the bill came, he picked it up and said, “I’ve got it.  Welcome home, Lesley.”

He drove me to my apartment, “Mrs. Robinson” playing on the radio.  I laughed to myself.  I am eight years older than he.  I wasn’t sure if it was a date or not.

Kind of like my Artist’s Date – my third – this past week.

The plan was to go on Wednesday – between massage gigs.  First stop, Blick Art Supplies, followed by a trip to the Art Institute.  I bought myself a gift membership in November.  The 20 percent discount offered on Cyber Monday had me paying just over $5 a month.   I haven’t been there once since my membership card arrived in the mail.

Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist’s Way, suggests two hours or more for one’s weekly Artist Date.  However, my massage schedule filled up and I found myself with only a little more than an hour to myself.  I opted for Blick, painfully aware I would not have allowed this to happen on a “real” date – meaning a date with another person.  I would have held this time sacred.

Once inside, I immediately felt panicky and overwhelmed.

I remembered working at an art-supply store at 12 Oaks Mall in Novi, Michigan the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college.  I thought it would be the coolest job ever.  It wasn’t.  I sold a lot of framing jobs.  And mostly, I felt like an impostor. 

I wasn’t as naturally gifted as the others who worked there … or so I believed.  And yet, I recall seeing the handy work of just one of the other employees – Doug.  He was quiet and kept to himself.  He had a penchant for airbrushes and purple planets.

Also, I was no longer an art major.  The summer before, under the guidance (read: strong suggestion) of my parents – the benefactors of my college education – I switched from a fine arts to a journalism major.  The rationale being journalism was a more practical education than art.  I was a good writer.  And I could have an emphasis in photojournalism. (Never mind that its application of film and camera seemed diametrically opposed to that of my dream – working as a fashion photographer.)

I had long imagined myself in the shmata (Yiddish for “rag”) trade – initially as a designer.   I sketched ensembles in 11^th grade Humanities class and passed them on to Rachel Plecas and Karen Howard for their nod.  That same year my mother connected me with her friend Marge who taught me how to sew.  Or more accurately, took me through a sewing project.  Together we made a skirt – with buttons.  Advanced skills.

I didn’t seem to have the exacting patience for sewing.  Or for most of my art classes.  My ceramics were sloppy.  Beautiful on the outside only.  The bottoms of my platters and the insides of my slab-built boxes were “unfinished.”  In jewelry class I spent as much time buying saw blades as I did anything else, constantly snapping and breaking mine.  It was only in Ms. Ciotti’s photography class that I found home.

I loved setting up the studio lights and shooting in black and white.  I loved reaching into the change bag, popping open the film canister with a bottle opener and rolling film on to metal reels.   I loved holding the long strips up to the light after they had been developed to see what I had – even when they came out milky because I hadn’t loaded the reels properly and the film stuck together.

I loved the smell of the chemicals in the dark room and its dim lights.  How I could alter bad shooting by good printing, burning and dodging.  I loved hanging the shiny 8X10 paper on clothes pins to dry.  It was an art form with fast-ish results and more immediate gratification than most.  How I saw the world determined much of my success.

When I moved my files from the ivy-covered Kresge Art Building, which sat unassuming along the Red Cedar River, across campus to the modern College of Communication Arts and Sciences Building, I was certain I had sold out.  That I was no longer an artist.  I questioned if I had ever been one at all.  For if I had, how could I have “agreed” to this plan? 

I punished myself for years, saying a “real artist” would not have attended a Big 10 university paid for by her parents.  She would have taken out loans or applied for grants and scholarships to go to art school.  I cringed, recalling receiving the print catalogue from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, fingering its salmon-colored cover and knowing I would never go there.  I wondered out loud if I loved creating art or just the idea of being an artist.  As if it mattered.  But mostly, I just stopped making anything at all.

That summer, working at the art-supply store, I felt guilty and ashamed by my complicity.  But I told no one.  And so no one could tell me that I was a kid.  That I made the best choice I knew how at the moment.  No one could let me off the hook.  Least of all, myself.

Walking into Blick on my Artist’s Date, I felt that familiar flood of shame.  Mixed with excitement and a dose of overwhelm.

I stopped at card stock and envelopes first – thinking I might make cards again.  For years I sent my friends and family mini “vision-boards” in the mail, honoring their birthdays and anniversaries.  They were always met with delight.  My friend Kimmy even asked that I make her one. 

I looked at beautiful papers laid over wooden rods and sold “by the each.”   I wanted to scoop them up and take them home, but wondered what I might do with them.  I picked up expensive notebooks and wondered why they cost so much.  Upstairs I looked at stencils of birds.  Pads of paper.  Pastels.

I located the Modge Podge I needed for pasting words and images on my collage cards.  I looked at brushes, trying to determine which would be best for the job.  I chose a nylon, round “wonder white” 12.  The description reading “good for all mediums.”

I fingered guaches and sets of block watercolors.  I put a package of 20 Staedtler triplus fineliners into my handbasket.  Expensive.  I wondered if I really needed them.  Out of the basket.  Back into the basket.  I remembered buying the same set in Oakland years ago and that I used them faithfully until they dried up – writing entries in my gratitude journal each night.  A different color for each gratitude.

I dropped in a package of origami papers from Japan.  Thin, brown butcher paper stamped with dragon flies, water lilies and butterflies in varying shades of red, orange, green and blue.  I had no idea how I might use them, but I liked them.  And at $4.89 they were a frivolous luxury I could afford.

I looked at colored pencils and supply boxes and recalled that once upon a time I owned all of these things.  Some I had bought that summer at the art supply store.  Others were accumulated over the years, in spurts of faith and sometimes drunkenness, when I dared fancy myself an artist.  Or even a wanna-be artist. 

I gave away my brushes.  My paints.  Crayons.  Pencils.  Scissors.  Canvas boards.  I put them in a box and gave them to my friend Michelle who teaches “Art for the Soul” classes just outside of Seattle.  I didn’t think there was room in the car when I moved back to Chicago.  Room for them?  Or room for me – to create again, no matter how sloppy, unskilled, uneducated?

I smiled at the craft project kits for children and remembered the ones I received as gifts when I was less than 10.  I lingered in front of the bird stencils again.  Love birds, facing one another.  Beak to beak.  Painfully sweet and dear.  I thought they might work nicely with some colored pencils.  I looked into my basket and told my child artist “another day.”  But not, “no.”

My bill came to a little more than $50, and I wondered if I was doing this right – this Artist’s Date. I wondered, am I supposed to be spending money?  Is it even possible to do this “wrong?”  I constantly think I am “doing it wrong.”  Whatever “it” is.  It’s an old refrain.

I decided it wasn’t unreasonable to imagine I might spend $50 on a date.  That’s a nice meal for two.  Admission to a museum and cake and coffee for two.  Besides, last week I was a cheap date – a matinee for $5.75.

I thought about how my heart pounded as I perused the aisles.  Was it fear that someone would find me out?  Know I was an impostor?  Or was I delighted, excited and thrilled at the possibilities in front of me?  Once upon a time, only the possibilities of men tickled me this way.  But now I was enchanted by the pretty colors, tidy packages and thoughts of “what can I make with this?” 

I walked to work pretty clear one hour isn’t long enough for an Artist’s  Date.  I was only getting started. 

That night when I got home, I finished.  A collage card for a friend – the first I’d made in years.  I hope he likes it. 

I just opened the last of the boxes my ex-husband shipped from Seattle.  They arrived a few days ago and have been sitting in a corner next to my futon.  I didn’t want to open them.  Any of them – coming in dribs and drabs since October.

I thought I had already decided what to take and what to leave when I drove out at the end of summer.  But my ex asked me to revisit the issue.  A gift really, for I was in no condition to make good decisions when I left.

I remember talking on the phone to my friend Lisa.  I told her I didn’t know what to pack.  What I could fit in the car.  What to do.  I slid down the refrigerator door and onto the floor.  Sobbing, I said, “I kept waiting to be in a heap on the floor.  I kept waiting.  And now I am.  I am literally on the floor in a heap.”

My friend Michael mostly packed me, me pointing out what I wanted to take.  Clothes.  Some massage sheets.  Paperwork – the kind one accumulates having survived nearly 43 years on the planet.  Leases.  Mortgages.  Attorney and mediator bills.  Client files.  Health records.

He put too-big-trousers and sweaters and dresses (I had lost 12 pounds since Lee asked me for a divorce) into large, plastic Ziploc-type bags and sucked the air out with a vacuum.  He made sure each box was filled to maximum capacity and slid into place in the hatch.

Prior to my leaving, my soon-to-be ex-husband assured me I didn’t need to worry about cleaning up.  To take what I wanted and leave the rest behind.  And so I did.  I left on August 28.  And a few days later, he left for Italy.  When he returned, he came back to the reality of what I left behind.  A lot.  He wasn’t pleased.

I had left the house like a ghost town. 

Some years ago, Lee did a medical rotation in Binghamton.  He said the town, and the neighboring towns, appeared to have closed up overnight.  That if one walked into a house, they might find a hot bowl of soup still on the table – the residents having fled quickly.  I imagine that is what I left the house on Wheeler Street looking like.

We agreed he would ship me my books and my Bianchi road bike, helmet, lock, riding shoes and snow shoes when I found a permanent place to live.  After sending those items, he asked what else I wanted.  Photographs I took in Spain and France?  Artwork we purchased together in Napa?  CDs my friends made specifically for driving cross country?  A travel journal from Amsterdam?  Boots?

I was angry.  I didn’t want to decide again.  I had left Lee to deal with the remains of our 15 years together.  And now he was asking me to share the pain.   It felt like pulling off an only partly-healed scab and my tender new skin oozed and bled when exposed to light and air.  I didn’t want to do it. 

And I was angry he didn’t pay for the shipping.  My entitled, 5-year-old, victim-y self didn’t want to pay the cost to ride the bus of my own life.  But I didn’t tell him so.  Instead, I kept it to myself.  Toxic.

And so we began the process of cataloguing what remained – together, long-distance.

Some decisions were easy.  The cookbooks I hadn’t packed in the first round.  The ones stained with food, dog-eared, and with Weight Watchers Points values noted in the corner.  Vegetable tagine.   Thai coconut shrimp.  Curried lentils with spinach.

Next came CDs.  Ceramic appetizer plates with Chicago landmarks drawn around the rim – cartoon style – a gift from my Thursday morning Weight Watchers group.  A small tray I keep my assortment of vitamins and supplements on – a wedding gift from my ex-boyfriend and his wife.   More massage sheets.  An air-popcorn popper.  An unopened, collapsible lunch box.  A small, iron teapot.  Two books of cut-out art by Nikki McClure.  A print I kept in my office – “Masks of the Healer.”

We argued about splitting up flatware and serving pieces.  He wanted to keep it even though I couldn’t imagine he’d ever have a dinner party for 12.  “You said I could have it, “he insisted.  And I had.

Sometime in November he asked that we “finish this.” It had become too much for him to move around the remnants of me.  He had changed out some photos.  Put my things in the garage.  “Moved some energy around.”  But I was still there. We agreed we would be “done” at year’s end.

I struggled with the final decisions.  I told myself it was because I didn’t know if I wanted to pay for shipping.  Or I wasn’t sure if I really wanted certain items.  Or if it even made sense to ship them rather than re-buy.  In truth, I think I was afraid to be “done.”  Even though our civil divorce was final in September, our Jewish divorce in November.

I let go of my hot-stone cooker and rocks.  Too heavy.  And I told him to keep my cross-country skis.  I was never very good at it.  And our ski trips usually ended in a fight.  I wasn’t sure if skiing was my thing, his thing or our thing.  Same with cycling.  After 15 years together, the lines of me and we had become somewhat blurred.  And I’m now just beginning to figure out what is mine.

Some of it came in those last two boxes.  In one, the karaoke machine he bought me last Hanukkah.  A last, ditch-effort at togetherness.  My friends Mike and Rachel have the same one.  I loved it so much that I asked them to host my 40^th birthday party so we could sing all night.  They did.  Lee and I used ours last on New Year’s Eve 2012.  We rented a house on the river, just south of Steven’s Pass.  It had heated floors and no cell-phone reception.  I sang my “best” karaoke songs.  Dream a Little Dream of Me.  And Easy, by the Commodores.  “I know it sounds funny but I just can’t stand the pain….I paid my dues to make it….Everybody wants me to be what they want me to be….I’m not happy when I try to fake it….” 

In the other box: North Face winter-hiking boots.   Cougar rain boots with felt shafts.  A bowl from Vietnam made of lacquered paper – another wedding gift.  I called it my prosperity bowl, collecting loose change in it and cashing it in once a year. 

Green glass dessert plates, a gift from my client Joanne when we left California for Chicago. We stayed with her our final days, when our belongings were packed on an ABF truck and we had planned to sleep on hardwood floors.  A pair of winter cycling gloves.  I don’t recall buying them.  Two contact lens cases.  Three CDs.  Disc Two of the Donna Summer Anthology.  Neil Young, Harvest – a gift from Lee.  Michael Jackson, Off the Wall.

He also threw in a copy of Eat, Pray, Love.  I read it several years ago but Lee just now read it.  On the phone he would recount stories of her story to me.  How it spoke to him.  And we would talk about our own Eat, Pray, Love trips taken mid-divorce.  Mine to Rwanda.  His to Italy. 

There are no more boxes to open.  Just things.  Many of them still on the floor.  Things I thought I didn’t need.  Didn’t want.  Had already decided about.  Turns out, I get to decide again.  I get to change my mind.  Always.

My mother called a few weeks ago after she saw the movie Lincoln.

“Do you know that your ex-husband looks exactly like Daniel Day-Lewis?”

Over the years many people had called Day-Lewis Lee’s doppelganger.  (Mine, Jamie Lee Curtis.)  Sometimes I could see it.  More often, I didn’t.

Strolling to the Davis Theatre for a matinee the day after Christmas – my Week 2 Artist’s Date –  I wasn’t thinking much about it. Until he appeared on screen.

He was nodding, listening to two black soldiers.  It was Lee – with a beard.  Something I’d often asked him to grow but he refused.  “Too scruffy.”

The smiling creases around his eyes.  Weathered skin (Lee’s from too many hours outdoors without sunscreen.).  Aquiline nose.  Gentle demeanor. 

Tears streamed down my face.  I wasn’t sure if it was the movie or the man.

I’d made it through Christmas — my first without Lee.

He called the day before, telling me how hard it hit him that we weren’t together.  That he went to a movie on Christmas Eve (also Lincoln), and remembered that was what we had done most Christmas Days in our 15 years together.

I told him I remembered too.

And that I remembered all the years I gathered strays on Christmas Eve and made risotto – making sure we wouldn’t be alone.  The habit grew out of our first Christmas together, his first away from the East Coast.  As a Jew, I didn’t celebrate Christmas and he thought that he would be ok with that.  Turns out, he wasn’t exactly.  So we learned to create traditions among our community in San Francisco, and later in Chicago.  Risotto on Christmas  Eve.  A movie on Christmas Day.

I told him I had been at Starbucks that morning and one of the baristas was wearing a Santa hat.  That it reminded me of the year we spent Christmas in Spain, hanging out with the “Christmas Chicas” who donned Santa hats and pulled espressos at a coffee shop in Barcelona.  We sat at the bar and ate tuna with oil and vinegar on baguettes and watched on as others played chess.  The night before we wandered into a church and watched as congregants purchased and lit red votive candles – neither of us quite sure why.

I told him I remembered the years it was 65-plus degrees in San Francisco and we secured our bikes to the roof rack and headed to Marin County.  Screaming down hills into Sausalito.  Looking out at Alcatraz and the TransAmerica Pyramid.  Pedaling through exclusiveTiburon.  Sometimes we’d see a vulture in the trees.

Until now, I had forgotten about the years we went to Yosemite.  That we slept in bunk beds at the Yosemite Bug.  Shared sake on the porch with our new friends Arpi and Heather – never mind that alcohol was explicitly prohibited in the hostel kitchen.  That the three of them attempted to but chains on the tires of our Honda Civic hatch on the way up to Badger Pass.  And that I begged them to pay $20 to the guy on the side of the road whose job it was to do such things.  That they finally relented and watched as he cut the chains to fit the tires, taking mental notes so they could repeat his mastery.

And they did.  The next day we drove to the Yosemite Valley floor for cocktails at the Ahwahnee Hotel and to watch the snow fall.  We chained up on our way out of the park, watching as photographers set up box cameras, shooting trees heavy with quick-falling wet snow.  Images made famous by Ansel Adams.  We spent more time driving than we did at the Ahwahnee.  It was perfect.

I had forgotten about the year we went to visit his parents and Lee holed up with his father in the back bedroom tinkering with the computer, leaving me to “visit” with his mother for hours.  The heat blasting through their New England home.  Me threatening if he ever left me alone with his mother for that long again…

I had forgotten all the years we watched my favorite holiday movie, Olive the Other Reindeer.  Drew Barrymore as the voice of Olive, a dog on a mission to help Santa make his run.  Her sidekick, a shyster penguin named Martini.  REM’s Michael Stipe as the voice of a leather-clad, angry reindeer that didn’t make Santa’s team.

And then I remembered.  All of it.

In Week 2 of The Artist’s Way, the week titled “Recovering A Sense of Identity,” Julia Cameron writes “Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention…The reward for attention is always healing.”

I had paid attention all those Christmases.  And perhaps, now I was beginning to heal.

I’m looking at a semi, see-through bag sitting on my red-leather dining chair.  Inside are three books.  All of them gift wrapped.  They are for me.  A take away from my Artist’s Date last Friday – a core practice from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

It’s my second time around, doing this self-led 12-week course guiding me toward greater creativity. 

I struggled mightily with the Artist’s Date – a two or so hour time block, alone, with the express purpose of filling your senses in any way you please – when I first took on The Artist’s Way in early 2012.  I had a hard time making time “just for play…just because.”

I decided to stay close to home for my first date, exploring my own neighborhood and the independent shops on Lincoln Avenue that I say I’ll stop in “sometime.”

Last Friday was “sometime.”

I began at Gene’s Sausages  — a terribly, clunky and not-very-fitting name for a terribly upscale food store.  A large cow beckons from over the entryway.  And from the second floor window you can look down on it.

Inside I fingered cucumber sodas, ginger gelatos and chocolates from around the world.  I watched customers pull paper numbers and order lamb, chicken, beef, potato pancakes and, of course, sausage.  I saw slices of Sacher torte, tiramisu and mini macaroons being tucked into tiny cardboard containers.  Upstairs I photographed a bottle of cassis syrup and sent it to my ex-husband.  His favorite.  It was once a staple in our Oakland apartment for making snakebites with black.  Seems a lifetime ago.

I felt conspicuous.  Like I was trying too hard to “be” on this date.  Like trying to make conversation on a blind date with someone you feel no connection to.  I looked at my watch – 30 minutes.  How would I ever fill two hours?  I felt defeated, but moved on – assuming it takes a little while to get to know and feel comfortable with one’s inner artist, just as it does to know a new partner.

I was sucked in by the Staff Picks at the Book Cellar.  I love independent bookstores because they lay books on tables and in displays and not just lined up in cases to maximize space.  I can be drawn in by something I didn’t come for.  I picked up A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson and read the back cover.  It spoke to me.  I thought, “A nice date might buy me a book at the bookstore.”  So I carried it with me to purchase for myself.

I told my friend Nithin about this a few days later.  He couldn’t imagine buying someone a book on a date.  I told him I was pretty sure my ex-husband did early on in our courtship, in San Francisco at City Lights Books.  Or maybe we just shopped and bought our own.   Regardless, this date now involved presents and it was starting to look up.

Towards the back of the store, a large Annie Leibowitz coffee table book met me at eye level, a sticker on it reading “For the Photographer.”  That used to be me.

I began my college career majoring in fine arts with an emphasis in photography.  I graduated with a journalism degree, having been prodded into a more practical direction by my parents who were footing the bill.  Lately I find myself wondering if I have “punished” myself for the decision that 18-year-old girl/woman made.  Putting down my camera.  My paintbrush.  My pastels.  Insisting I must not have been that serious about it if I were so easily swayed.  That my school had a mediocre art department.  And I wasn’t “that good” anyway.

I plucked the tomb from its plastic display stand and brought it to a chair tucked in the corner, parking myself.  Next to me, a worker unpacked boxes and checked in new items, stopping only when interrupted by someone looking for Cheryl Strange’s Wild or books about Chicago.

I pulled out my reading glasses and read my own forgotten hero’s words.  She wrote about her family.  Her mother’s creative expression – dancing and swimming.  How her favorite photograph of her mother is the one her mother likes least – because she looked her age.  She wrote about her partner Susan Sontag.  Their travels.  Their apartment in Paris and its perfect light.  The home in New York state that accommodates their entire family.  Her cancer treatment and her death.  Choosing what she would be buried in.  Photographing her in life and in death.

She wrote about assignments for Conde Naste and Rolling Stone.  Photographing the war in Bosnia and how she was greeted by others in the field.  She wrote about her pregnancies and her children.  And how this book honors all of those experiences.  All of those images.

I read all of it.  Every word.  Lovingly fingering each page of photographs.  Some familiar, most of them not.  I felt excited and inspired and filled.  I remembered my aspirations of being a fashion photographer and felt my heart grow hot.  In high school, shooting my friend Michelle, sitting side-saddle, all in black on a stark white backdrop and knowing that it was good.

And when I finished, I brought the book back to its plastic stand.  Across from it a display of the America’s Best series.  I picked up America’s Best Essays and thought it might serve as useful fodder for the work I’ve been doing.  I tucked it under my arm, along with the Bryson book, and headed towards the register.

Paying, I reminded the clerk of a sign reading “Ask about a bonus book when you buy a Staff Pick.”  She handed me a book wrapped in brown butcher paper.  A surprise.  She asked if I needed a gift receipt.  I didn’t.  But eyeing the table to my right, told her I did need gift wrap.

The wrapper cut sheets of the same brown butcher paper and lengths of green and red sparkly ribbon.  I confessed that the books were for me, and told her this story:

When I was 10, my Aunt Ellie stole me away from the flurry of my brother’s Bar Mitzvah and took me shopping at Jacobsons in downtown Birmingham.   My family did not regularly shop at Jacobsons – or anywhere in downtown Birmingham.  It was too expensive.  But she insisted I needed new duds to be ready for middle school.

I still remember what I picked.  Navy trousers.  A navy and cream popcorn knit sweater. And a yellow bag shaped like a roller skate with red plastic wheels on the bottom.  After she paid, she guided me to the gift wrap counter and asked that each item be wrapped in a silver box with J’s stamped on it, and tied in white ribbon.

“It’s a present,” she said.

“But I know what I’m getting.  I picked it out,” I replied.

“I know.  But it’s more fun when it’s gift wrapped,” she answered.

And it was.  Back home, my brother was tearing open envelopes, checks falling onto the kitchen table, while I opened my J boxes.

 I smiled, feeling lucky to have an aunt who made me feel ok and worthy when I felt anything but – a pudgy, 10-year-old Jewish girl with a bad Dorothy Hamill haircut and no waist.

I walked out of the book store feeling smug.  Like I had a secret.  Like I as wearing crotch-less panties to church.  I crossed the street to Paciugo Gelato.  It was 29 degrees outside.  It didn’t matter.  Ice cream is the perfect date food.  It’s portable – you can walk and talk while you eat it.  It’s not-too-serious.  And you can share it – it encourages intimacy.

I ordered a waffle cone with gingerbread, sea-salt caramel, and banana Health-bar crunch.  Pulled up the faux-fur hood of my down coat, rolled on my grey and black leopard gloves and grabbed my cone. 

I thought about humid summer nights strolling with my ex-husband to the Tastee-Freez in Humboldt Park, the heavy air lit up by lightning bugs, and ordering a small twist.  Climbing the hills of Queen Anne up to Molly Moon’s for scoops of Honey Lavender and Earl Grey.  More recently, sharing frozen yogurt with wet walnuts on a steamy sidewalk in Charleston, talking to a handsome stranger I’d just met into the wee hours of the morning.

I walked home and put the bag of books on the chair – saving them, savoring them, to open…perhaps on Christmas?  I didn’t have to wait for someone to buy me a gift.  I bought my own.  And, my Aunt Ellie is right.  It IS more fun when it’s gift wrapped.

I had a clairvoyant reading with my friend and colleague, Debbie.

We’ve been talking about it for weeks, but I couldn’t seem to put it on my calendar.  She wasn’t surprised.  (Why would she be?  She’s clairvoyant.)  She said I wasn’t ready to look at things yet.  In fact, she wasn’t even sure I was going to get there this day.  But I did.

This is what she told me:

There was a white, murky energy at my throat.  It was heavy and had the consistency of curdled milk.  It was the energy of a lie.  And it obscured everything.

I was sure I knew what it was.  Who it was.  I asked her about it.

“He’s not telling you something.  He’s married. Or has a girlfriend,” she said.  “He’s not sober.”

“Physically or emotionally?”

She evaded the question, replying, “He’s not sober.  But this isn’t about him.  This is about your marriage. But it’s not a lie.  It’s lie energy.”

I didn’t understand.  I was fixated on the lie.

“It’s not that Lee lied to you.  Maybe the marriage was a lie. Or it became one.  Or he couldn’t lie to himself anymore or something like that.   But it’s not A LIE.

“Oh, and the other one….he’s really cute.  He’s not telling you something.  And in fact, that might be perfectly appropriate.”

She moved on, telling me things about myself that she couldn’t have known.  Things that resonated deeply and made me teary.  And she told me about what was possible.

She spoke of a primary wounding when I was 3.  That my father pushed me away because my female energy was “too much.”   “He couldn’t have it,” she said.  I have no recollection of this, but it made sense to me.  I asked if she was referring to my adoptive or my birth father.  She was uncertain.

She said I am beginning to “clear” that, to love and accept that part of me.  And in doing so, I will find myself surrounded by others who can not only “have” my powerful female energy, but embrace it.

She said that I could have more.  So much more. Financially.  And in every aspect of my life.

I want to believe her.  But I don’t – yet.  I hold onto things, experiences, people  – like a pit bull.  Because I cannot yet trust that there is more, better.

Thinking about the cute one who isn’t telling me something, I had the following conversation with myself.  Out loud.  Driving:

“You seem to believe he is the only sober artist you will find attractive, who finds you attractive. ”

And then, “I don’t want a sober artist.  I want to be the sober artist!  I want to fall in love with myself.  With my big, sexy, gorgeous life.”

I felt excited by this idea. Untrusting. But excited.

The next morning, I told my friend Lynn about this conversation.  I told her about Debbie and the “lie energy.”  About Lee and the artist.

“Maybe the lie isn’t about either of them.  Maybe it’s about you.  That you are the artist.  You told yourself that you weren’t, but you are.  That is the lie.  That is what is obscured,” she said.

It’s what Julia Cameron calls “the shadow artist” in her book, The Artist’s Way. An individual attracted to those who do what they only dream of doing.

I’ve dated symphony conductors. Pianists.  Sculptors.   Shadow artist.

More recently, I fancied myself a shadow Rabbi.  I had thought Rabbinical school was my path.  And it was not lost on me that I had slept with a Rabbinical student in my 20s and had a crush on a Rabbi in my 40s.

Me as the shadow artist – that is the lie.

Debbie said the milky white started to clear toward the end of our session and a fluffy pink energy flowed into its place.  Like cotton candy.

About six weeks after my ex-husband and I decided to divorce, I got a call from my friend Michael.  I remember it vividly.   

I had just gotten back from a workshop with Rabbi Rami Shapiro.  Lee and I were fighting, loudly.  When the phone rang, I took it as a sign to stop.

 “So….can you tell me about this divorce thing….,” Michael said.

I was shocked.  And then I wasn’t.  Their marriage mirrored ours in so many ways.   This is what I told him:

“Divorce is highly inconvenient.  The only thing that makes sense is walking.  The Artist’s Way has been my constant companion through it all.”  And, “I love you.”

It was funny telling him all I had learned in six weeks.  It was like being six weeks sober and telling someone who just put down a drink everything you know about not picking it back up.  There’s so much to say, but not a whole lot of experience behind it.  And yet….

My divorce was highly inconvenient.  And I remember the miles and miles I logged in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood.  No special shoes.  No special clothes.  Just out the door, usually in my brown suede boots, up the hill and around “the crown” – a mostly circular loop designated by brown, instead of green, street signs.  It boasts wonderful views of downtown, West Seattle and on clear days, the Cascades, the Olympics and Mount Rainier.

I would often talk to Michael, literally for hours, on these walks, coming home just as the first stars made themselves known.   In many ways he was my divorce companion during those weeks between his first call and my summer sojourn to Rwanda.

Going to bed in the spare room wasn’t quite so lonely knowing we would talk or text into the wee hours, until exhaustion gave way to sleep.  He gave solid counsel when we met with our mediator.  “Get a good night’s sleep.  Draw up a fair agreement.  Don’t fight.”  We assured one another that we would not be alone, that we would both find companions again.  One day.

I sent Michael a copy of The Artist’s Way, thinking it might bring him comfort, direction and a sense of creative purpose as it had me.  I don’t know if it did.  I never asked.

Sometimes I forget that it was my first divorce companion.  Before Michael.

Sitting at my friend Rainey’s breakfast table in California, writing my “morning pages” – three handwritten pages written straight out of bed, stream of conscious.  Definitely not art.  One of two core practices from The Artist’s Way.  

She and her partner John were away in Hawaii, but they had offered me their home to stay in while I tended to some business in San Francisco.  Each morning, looking out into the green hills of Marin County, I wrote the same thing. 

“I think I am alone, because I am getting ready to be alone.”  And, “I am not scared.”

When Lee arrived at the end of the week to join me, and asked for a divorce, I wasn’t entirely surprised.  The universe, my spirit guides, my higher self, already knew.   I had already spoken it.  Written it. 

It happened during week 4 of the 12-week Artist’s Way program.  The week titled “Recovering a Sense of Integrity.”

Returning to Seattle, I continued my weekly Artist’s Way work.  I read.  I wrote daily.  I collected stones on hikes and shells at the beach.  Went to museums and fabric stores.  Took a week-long break from media – including Facebook.  Wrote letters to myself from my 80-year-old self.  And about imaginary lives I might lead.  Sent postcards to friends.  Listened to music.  Bought myself really good socks.

And when the 12 weeks were up, I put the book on the shelf.  And later in a box, bound for Chicago.  Even though its author, Julia Cameron, suggests beginning again when the cycle is complete.

It’s been about six months since then.  Michael and I no longer talk every night before bed.  We haven’t for a long time.  But we still support one another in this “inconvenient” process.  I know if I need anything he is there, as I am for him.  But he is not my divorce companion.

Nor is Mark, a man I knew in Seattle who was also going through a divorce when I was.  I thought he might be a different kind of divorce companion.  And he was.  But just once.

My divorce was final three months ago.  I am without a companion, or the prospect of one.   It seems right.  But I don’t necessarily like it.

There’s been a date.  The suggestion of a date, but no follow through.  A make-out session in a parking lot.  A letter from a friend in Seattle disclosing his feelings for me.  But no companion.

Earlier this week I discovered that in updating software on my phone, a voicemail I had been saving was deleted.  Gone.   It was sweet and a little bit sexy and reminded me how it felt to connect in a profound way.  I cried.  Really.  I felt so silly.  I knew my reaction wasn’t congruent to what had happened.  But I couldn’t help myself.  I felt like one more thing had been taken from me.

My friend Lisa told me I didn’t need it anymore.  She reminded me that this is my time to learn to be alone.  To be less people dependent and more G-d dependent.  It was not what I wanted to hear.  It never is. 

And then I heard my own words, followed by my friend Slade’s.  I had told him about The Artist’s Way being my constant companion in divorce.  And how I had offered it to Michael as well.  “Pretty great companion,” he said.

And I knew he was right.

Yesterday morning I pulled my copy of The Artist’s Way from the shelf.   Today we begin our courtship – our companionship – starting at the beginning, with Week 1.