The Energizer Bunny Learns the Rhythm of Nature (Part 1)

The Rhythm of Nature

strides as the turtle

who wins a race

he doesn’t know he’s in

 

Ever evolving,

neither static, nor constant

 yet slowly progressing

beats the rhythm of Nature

 

Even when we see not

the burbling beneath the volcano

the plates shifting into an earthquake

the atmosphere transforming into a tornado

the waves building to a tsunami

 

Even then, even when we see not the signs,

the Rhythm of Nature is ever evolving

neither static, nor constant

 yet slowly progressing

             I was trained not to stride to the rhythm of nature, but to the drum of the Energizer Bunny, that mascot toy for the battery that keeps “going and going and going” and, even after everyone else’s batteries are dead, is “still going.”  My mother is wired like the Energizer Bunny, and by some genetic quirk, I am not.  Vacations were full, as Mom booked each hotel with a “guaranteed late arrival” and even planned in which rest stops we’d take for our picnic lunches.  Her errands at home, however, were not planned and seemed to follow a random order, defying geographic logic, zigzagging out of the way, and then returning to previous stores that had deals three dollars better than the later stores.  Like all of the competitor bunnies in the Energizer ads, I, her tag-a-long had batteries that died part-way through, but hers were “still going.”  Thinking I should be wired – or “batteried” -- like her, once I had hit my wall, Mom had one of two replies: “Quit whining” or “The world doesn’t revolve around you.” 

            In time, I gained the endurance to quit whining and eventually grew into an Energizer Bunny myself.  Early in our marriage, my then husband teased me for my to do lists that also kept going and going and going.  I had a love-hate relationship with these lists; part of me longed for days with short lists, but the other part reveled in those days when I crossed out a multitude of items on a long one.

            By the time little ones arrived, my love-hate relationship with the lists turned to a hate-only relationship.  One sheet was no longer enough for all that I had to do; multiple sheets were filled, and included only what needed to be done at home; at work, I had another list.  My anxiety grew with the lists.  My chest, neck, and face flushed with a pinkish glow; my heart rate beat fast; my nights were endlessly sleepless, with a cherished hour or two of sleep.  My doctor prescribed me with Prozac.

The lists had to go, and so too did the Energizer Bunny still in me.  In 2005, while juggling a toddler, a preschooler, and a teaching position, I decided to pray every day of the year for a quiet and gentle spirit, and miracles came that began the process to loosen, layer by layer, that Bunny that didn’t belong in me.  Still, for years, vestiges of this battery remained, insisting that I keep going and going and going.

 My body knew what really needed to go were the batteries and that the rhythm of nature needed to come.  What my body might have known, I did not.  Having already been greatly healed, I didn’t know quite how much of this Bunny still beat its drum within me.

             Then came the pandemic.  “Stay at home.  Save lives.”  This was no time for an Energizer Bunny.  Even Mom learned to slow down.  The word Blursday was coined, time felt different, and the process in me was reignited to discard more of the conditioned Bunny within me.  Part of me rebelled; I got out more than most of my friends, but I also acquiesced to begin to learn the Way of Zen.  To my blog and my social media page, I posted this meme with my intent to learn this Way of Zen. 

        

         The Way of Zen is hard for an Energizer Bunny to learn.  In the summer of 2020, we had begun to “flatten the curve,” and we were all getting out more. Feeling I had had my zen, I was eager to get out. My inner Bunny was relieved.

Then came the wildfires, 1800 of them raging throughout the western states.  Our masks returned, we once again retreated indoors, and even more of the Bunny in me was called upon to let go.

             The West burning in flames mirrored my life, as both my marriage and my career also ignited with burning embers.  My husband and I were compatible for projects and parenting, but not for love-making, nor for my soul’s transformation.  He met someone else with whom he shared the right mix of love elements to maintain a thriving marriage.  The following year, after months of marriage counseling and a trial separation, we chose to close our marriage with friendship, which still continues. 

Meanwhile, the university where I taught as a non-tenured track (second-class) faculty member was grappling with a severe budget crisis and turned my employment ladder upside down.  Instead of downsizing and laying off those on the bottom rungs of my ladder, they transferred assignments from many of us like me who had earned the highest promotions to our lower paid colleagues at the bottom of the ladder.  I was eventually downsized all the way, and given with notice, citing a loophole, that I was to be laid off.  But I found a loophole of my own: Emeritus, the university’s honored form of retirement.  My promotions and 23 years of service qualified me to apply.  I did, and I got it, but I was also too young to actually retire. 

The anxiety, tight chest, rapid heart beat, and insomnia returned.  It was the summer of 2021, and I was now both separated from my husband and without work, a financial double-whammy.  I had put out applications, had interviews, and even had completed new hire paperwork, a month earlier, but still had not yet been called with a start date.  The Bunny in me begged to make phone calls and put out more applications.  But the whispers and synchronicities encouraged me to wait.  It will come in its own time.  And it did. 

But first, I had to wait and learn the rhythm of nature.  It was then that I decided to hire myself for the landscaping project to the side of our house that had been itching at me for four years.  Roughly 40 feet long by 14 feet wide, this plot had previously housed two vegetable gardens and a play sand pit, each bordered with bricks and stones.  But our kids had grown; the gardens had been left to waste; the bricks and patio stones were broken, scattered, and buried; what amounted to seven 20 gallon tubs of stones to be collected that were then also mostly buried; and weeds, many thigh high, had taken over the entire plot. 

Since the plot is right outside my bedroom window, every morning when I opened the shades, this disaster welcomed my day, and then it presented itself to me again in the evening at my favorite outdoor spot, also immediately adjacent to it, our hammock. 

For the plot’s neglect, I mostly blame the wildfires, of which we had already had three since 2012 even before the 2020 fires.  While one came as close as three miles, most were further away, but we live in a valley, where the smoke from all of the neighboring fires comes to settle itself as an unwelcome guest for weeks of choking, hazardous air.  How does one care for vegetable gardens in the likelihood of such toxic air?  To those who do, bless you.  By 2018, after the third set of fires, I was done.  With some help from my then husband, I began to clear out the plot of weeds, bricks, and stones and hoped to clear enough to hire a professional landscaper to build a stone patio, for which I was also saving money. 

In the summer of 2021, I needed peace at my window and on my hammock.  And between jobs, I needed that savings for the landscaping.  Why not use the stones and bricks I was collecting and hire myself?  

Continue to Part 2

© 2023 by Karina Jacobson.  All rights reserved.  Please use only with permission from the author.