The Pirate Zinnia

Jenn and I both left our respective jobs last week--she after five years, and moi just short of four. When I first started, it took two solid months for tribal members to start trickling in to see the new guy. Thus, during my first eight weeks of "work," I literally saw zero-to-one client per day. This led to me happily barging into my boss's office at the six week mark and declaring, "Hey, I just figured out I'm getting paid $5.75 per game of computer solitaire!"

In actuality, I did everything I could to drum up business short of traipsing up and down the main drag wearing a sandwich board, and I still contest this would have worked. What client wouldn't want to receive counseling from a therapist crazy enough to don a "Will Counsel for Food" sign on his back? At the very least, I would have been amused by my own joke. (As an illustrative detour on the topic of self-amusement, hypothetically, if one wanted to get a really good laugh--I mean one of those laughs where tears are streaming down one's face--one might consider asking one's partner to pull one's toe using the clever ruse of, "Oh, ow! My toe is cramping up,"  and then when one's partner does tug on one's toe, one may, if one so wishes, use that opportunity to let go with a ungodly blast of flatulence. A word to the wise ... or at least the emotionally immature.)

Back to point: Aside from a periodic need to uproot and move to a different clime, why leave such a plum position? The pay was good, I had a great boss, wonderful benefits, regular three day weekends, and plenty of down time for surfing sports sites and squeezing in the occasional in-office nap. The job appealed  both to my inherent, sloth-like desire to earn a livable wage for minimal effort while simultaneously fulfilling my need to feel--and when I was willing to let spirit work through me, actually be--of use in the world.

For a while, however, it had felt as if I was only batting one-for-two. I had the sloth part down well enough, but couldn't tell how much I was actually helping the community. The Course of Miracles discusses the true use of therapy, stating that a therapeutic alliance is a partnership where the counselor is perhaps a little further down the road than the client, but both are working together for the betterment of the other. The Course also suggested that many clients come to therapy not to become happier per se, but to find a way to be more comfortable in their suffering. Thus. despite my better efforts, I had started to wonder if I had become part of the problem. Maybe it was time to give up some keys.

One of the unique symbols of freedom for me is watching the polar icecap of my key chain melt away prior to a big move. After years of relocating to various cities--and sundry apartments within those cities--a dwindling key chain has come to represent a leap into the unknown. The more lockable rooms to which I am privy, the more tied-down I feel. Perhaps tamed is a better word. The more doors I can open, the more domesticated I feel, and I start to get a little antsy and bored, as if I had hit the cruise control button on my life. The jangle of a growing set of keys often creates for me a gnawing fear that I have stagnated in my life and become too rigid. I also see it as a cue that it may be time to take a leap.

All of this at least partially explains why I left a well-paying job to move with my six-months-along pregnant wife and two cats to a landlocked city 1400 miles a way. For the first two-and-a-half years of our relationship--growing set of keys or no--there was nothing in Jenn that was remotely drawn to the pale greens, burnt browns, and reddish hues of the Southwest. In fact, she recently relayed the results of her climatic research to her mother, noting that Albuquerque has only five days a year when Mister Sun does not actually make a visible appearance. Five days, this native of Portland emphasized, as if that wasn't the craziest thing she ever heard. 


Jenn thinks she will have an easier time under the Southwest skies and heat than I did in the gray gloom of the Northwest. She bases this theory on the fact that I rarely stopped bitching about the weather in Oregon for my entire four years there. She may be right, but Jenn spending an entire Summer in the New Mexico will separate the sun-drenched wheat from the dripping, drab, Northwest chaff. We will see if she is able -- in the parlance of a young actress in a teen flick we saw recently -- to grow some girl balls under the daunting heat of the August sun.

Is the bar set a tad high? Possibly, since Jenn will be experiencing her first ever Summer in New Mexico while carrying anywhere from forty to who-knows-how-many additional pounds during her pregnancy. This, of course, is what makes her decision to move all the more puzzling: after three straight years of my cajoling, pleading, tempting, and mocking my wife into relocating, she finally gave the move the green light after she had gotten pregnant. Yes, dear reader, Miss Lukesh made the conscious decision to waddle about in Albuquerque's sweltering heat until the day arrives when the telltale sizzle of moisture on scalding sidewalk announces that her water had indeed broken.

So why now?  It bears repeating: Why, why, why?

We can chalk it up to a few things. The easy answer is, something inside of my wife switched. Call it intuition. Additionally, Jenn ... wait! How do I spell this in a way that truly reflects the proper amount of emphasis? "Jenn really ..."?  "Jenn reeeally ..."? "Jenn REALLY ..."? (Lets go with option "C".)  Jenn REALLY wanted to leave a job that she was struggling more and more to feel challenged by. Perhaps, too, the knowledge that she had already met and been accepted by virtually all of my friends in New Mexico--they love her without exception--may have made the move more palatable. And presumably my ever-present longing to return to the Southwest had the slightest, lets call it, the merest scintilla of influence as well.

But there is a deeper answer, one that borders on the mystical/spiritual. Last October, the psychic whom Jenn consulted with on her birthday proposed to her that our baby-to-be wanted to be born in the Southwest. We are having a child of the desert, and I can't argue with this. At this point, Jenn and the baby's spirit are completely entwined. If the soul of our little daughter wishes to be born amidst a sea of sand, heat, and prickly pear, it makes sense that little Zinnia would let her desire be felt--like a food craving--in the depths of Jenn's soul. My wife said yes to the move, in part, then, because our baby made her preference be known. What a powerful little desert bloom she already is. It gives me a sense of wonder that such a tiny being is already captaining our familial ship.

Maybe hijacking is a better word.