The Life

It is 1994 and this is the view out the window of the house I am renting in Echo Park. 

At some point during this year, I moved from the basement of this house (tricked out as a college dorm room studio) to the small one-bedroom upstairs because my friend and roommate fell in love; married and left me in her Echo Park bungalow for an extremely reasonable rent.   I'd lost my condo to foreclosure and my credit cards to bankruptcy. 

I can see my 30-day "chip" in this photo, hanging from the black lamp in the corner.  The longest thirty days of my life. 

Listen, we all have something to recover from - if we're very lucky.  This was my recovery house.

I was working in Westwood, going to my writing classes and spending a lot of time in rooms like this.

There were no blogs in 1994 so I was writing a lot of letters, like this one:

I was at a loss late this afternoon, after all the company was gone and my obligations fulfilled. That restless, listless, nowhere feeling that usually precedes panic or despair.

Fortunately, the dusk and the sweet scent of the night blooming jasmine drew me outside, where, without a thought, I fell to my knees and started weeding the garden. Stooping and kneeling and breathing and weeding and moving and stooping and kneeling and breathing, repeating to myself, like a mantra, "this is enough, this is enough, this is enough. I don't need to achieve or become or produce anything more than this. This tending, this caretaking, of what is directly before me, is enough."

Pulling each tall, spindly, red-rooted weed with its wicked serrated leaves, out of the rock path leading to the compost heap, away from the rosebushes, clear of the artichoke plot, off the dirt-packed steps curving down by the bare wisteria vines, my finger-tips touching the cool damp soil around the stem of each one, pulling it slowly until I feel the tug of the earth give way and the dirt fall from the weed's feathery white roots, clearing first this patch of garden and then that one, the green piles of limp weeds growing as I move about the yard, knowing I can't do it all today, thinking I'll just clear one more area before the sun goes down, until a clean, blue strip of the horizon turns pink and magenta, vermillion and then blue-black, the lights of the city come up in the valley below me and the garden turns dark and rustling in the warm breeze.

At some time during this work, my head stopped yammering about how I should be doing something else, something more productive -- starting a new story or planning some activity that will start my new life. I just let that cranky, complaining voice yammer on while I continued to move and breathe and stoop and kneel and weed and pray, "I am doing your work, God. I am tending your garden," until a new voice said, "just as the dusk and the jasmine drew me effortlessly out into the yard to pull these weeds, I will move toward the next story and the next plan and the next activity, when it is time, when it is right, when it is effortless."

Move, stoop, kneel, breathe, pull, pray . . .

I wrote the first short story I'd written in more than twenty years during this time (Dangerous Places) and it would later be published in an online journal named Kudzu, which appears to have gone out of business just this year.  I was also writing poetry, some of which would later be published in Poet Lore, The Ledge, Kalliope, and Transformation, A Journal of Literature, Ideas & the Arts.  I also published one literary non-fiction piece in the Southern New Hampshire University Journal.  Eventually, I'd become part of Law Professor James Elkins lawyer-poet project, Strangers to Us All:  Contemporary Lawyer Poets.

In 2004, I celebrated ten years of sobriety and founded the r.kv.r.y. quarterly literary journal which I continue to edit to this day (and of which I am very proud)

The Law

I was recruited in '94 to come back to BigLaw and for the first time ever had the courage and conviction to refuse.  I had time - precious time - and enough money to suit my newly reduced needs.  My life and my heart were full.  I was, frankly, afraid to return.  I had too much to lose.

Eventually, however, I did return, working on larger and more sophisticated cases than I ever had before.  Still, something continued to be missing.

Next:  Mediation and why any of this matters to negotiation.