Hygge: Creating Community at Work

I'm a sucker for a good breakfast potluck.

Every morning I climb the stairs to the second floor where my office and classroom are, and if it's early enough, only a handful of students sit sleepily on the bench outside finishing up homework. 

It's taken the better part of 10 years, but I've found people that make me happy to walk into the building every morning and I'm lucky. They challenge me. They are passionate and intelligent. I can leave personal things behind if I want to and talk about ideas.

Lately, however, I've been talking about personal things, and in my ensuing crisis I began looking for community. I spend a lot of time with the people at work, and because I feel they are my people for once, I latched onto a very United States interpretation of a Danish idea: Hygge and food.

Breakfast burritos turn into breakfast nachos when we are in faculty meetings all day.

Hygge has been difficult to explain with language. It translates sloppily to "coziness" but the implicit message is the comfort. The presence of community in a place of darkness. The simplicity of that presence and the way it pulls me out of a darkness I can't control.

I want to know who you really are, I say. I want to see you in all your light and all your darkness.

William Styron once wrote a book called "Lie Down in Darkness" about the collapse of a southern family, and I felt the story so strongly that I still flinch at the title. I read it at both the wrong and the right time. It pushed me, and in my pushing back I realized that the light isn't always enough. Sometimes we lie down in our darkness, fold it all around, and when we let go of our grasping we find who we are.

So, I made breakfast burritos together with a group of people who can see me, and now it is integrated into our work rituals. It was pivotal life moment.

Work is community.

Work is healing.

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Hygge can come where we are. The Danes experience long bouts of darkness during winter season, but hygge does not fight or ignore; it folds into the darkness and sees what is there. 

Hygge at work is essential. For us, we eat breakfast burritos and talk about our weekend plans preceding our discussions of student progress. The potluck softens our disagreements, allowing us space to breathe, to reframe and understand. We could have faculty meetings without the food, but the shared ritual reminds me of our common goal in these meetings. 

Workplace culture becomes personal culture. 

Hygge was born for us in the winter, when we missed the light during the day and found ourselves grasping, living in stress, waiting for a time in the future instead of appreciating what is here and now. 

It started with a bowl of soup and became connection.

Pain is a Teacher

My daughter has been sick.

All things in bloom and everyone feeling better.  

Her father woke up one morning and found her lying on the bathroom floor unresponsive from fatigue. He's an EMT. He's responded to calls before, children unresponsive, distraught parents; the children later die and this was his own daughter. It was traumatic for both of us - him holding her in the bathroom until she started to talk again

Me, miles away. Helpless.

When I became a mother, I did not anticipate having to learn to let go so soon. My daughters spend half of their week away from me, and in the ache of their absence I  remember my own mother talking about her fears when I left for college. "What is she doing now?"  "Is she ok?"

Are they ok?

My daughter wasn't ok - and then she was - but in the letting go, I learn how to be a mother in an imperfect world. I learn to embody the imperfection and let it teach me.

This is what it says.

I am a mother in all things. I am strong and tender.

I visit my close friend with a newborn and I can soothe him to sleep while she eats a real meal. I put my nose to the downy hair on his head. I listen to his deep baby snores. 

I love him as my own son because I love his mother like she were my sister and for a moment the pain of separation from my children lessens just a little.

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The garden is my happy place.  

I come to the door of my house and my dogs do not bark. They know that this is the time. After they eat, we all sit outside to watch the sun set. They  require nothing from me but my presence and in this I am able to pause; I put my phone away. I brush my fingers against the herbs on the porch and there is a wave of contentment as they release their fragrance into the air. The pain of separation lessens and I watch the sun go down.

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I spend most of my week around the international community. I teach and guide towards a common language, English, but I use my philosophy degree every day to understand their histories, religions, perspectives. I am lucky in that I am confronted each hour with rich questions that have no answers in the way that interacting with many people from other places does. I am challenged to understand, to reimagine, to think critically of not only their second language use but their whole person. Not many people are given this chance. I connect and learn across cultures and the pain of my separation lessens.

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Some days, we return to the wild, eat on a dragon sheet and color until the light fades.  

It's the pain I keep returning to as if it will burn away what isn't needed, refining my self perception and turning me into a hollowed space. I can store the memory of my previous life there. 

"Hollow" isn't where I'd like to stay.  

I don't place enough value on the other side of this pain, the slow rediscovery of self that happens when you are given time alone in the quiet. I sit with this pain and remember who I am. I sit alone at my kitchen table and draft plans in ways I thought weren't possible anymore. The afternoon light hits the plants just right and they are golden for a moment.  

I reconsider this pain. I rearrange it. It becomes something else, a shared experience with the world. We all belong to clubs we want no part in but it makes us see each other with a compassion we could not have had before. 

We transform. 

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And then it is my time, and my daughters return. I spend a long time listening to them sleep.  

I am reborn.  

How Does Your Garden Grow?

My front yard has gone so long without being mowed that my neighbor offered to do it for me. 

Will you look at this flowering collard green? It's glorious.

I love plants. I didn't mow the first day of mowing season because out of nowhere Star of Bethlehem started blooming in my yard and they were so beautiful. 

Then it was the wild violets, and obviously I can't mow those down because the flowers look amazing in salads and burritos. 

And now I have a concerned text from my neighbor, and I'm pretty sure they've been watching me standing in my front yard early in the morning munching on the weeds and thinking about what to do with all the Crepe Myrtle babies that have popped up in between the bushes. 

I need a plan for the landscaping. I want edibles and flowers, but I don't plan out what the space will look like. I buy half dead clearance plants from hardware stores because they call to me and now everything is a hodgepodge of some living and some not so living things. No wonder my neighbors are worried.

It's warm now and all I think about is digging around in the dirt. I've resolved this year to finally draw out a plan and stick to it, but we will see how that goes.

The rosemary and sage survived the winter and are thriving now in warmer, more humid temperatures. I'm hoping the clematis survived as well, but I haven't seen it yet. I let the lettuce and greens garden go wild and now they are all flowering like mad and I'm enthralled.

Really, the moral of this story is that I need a plan for the garden, much like everything in my life and I'm experiencing plan fatigue. I suppose you just sit down with a blank notebook and draw up all these different systems for things like finances, house repairs, yard sales, outdoor space design, blog direction, etc. etc.

All the etc.'s 

Instead of insisting that I can do everything myself, I said yes to my neighbor cutting my yard for free, even though I feel bad about it, and even though I will miss the yard violets. I'll draw up a plan for the landscaping later. At least the front will look like I have things together. 

Go where your wildness takes you.

Finding Minimalism: The Beginning

Can we talk about this for one minute?

I will be sleeping in the guest room tonight.... for the next year.

I found a literal bag of trash in my attic a few days ago that I'm pretty sure went on the moving truck for my current house... 6 years ago. Nothing gross, just shredded papers and cardboard meant for recycling and instead filed away in the attic with all the other things I neeeeeeeeeed to have but never look at. 

It's insanity. 

I have about 3 feet of counter space in my tiny kitchen, one foot of which is next to the oven. Do you know what's occupying that precious foot of space?

That's right. Another tiny oven. Toaster oven to be exact. Life makes no sense.

I'm one person. My daughters are 5 and 3 and they are here 50% of the week. My dogs don't cook their food in the toaster oven. 

Right above my head is another 500 square feet of stuff laying on more stuff all in boxes just waiting.  Every other weekend I head up there intending to clean everything out, and then I find a birthday card from my first daughter's first birthday and I cry and nothing seems real anymore so I come back down with my tail between my legs and binge-watch Supernatural. I have no fancy tips for figuring this out.

The way is rough. I could donate everything, or burn it for warmth, but I'm practical and I think "If I get rid of this pair of socks, will I need them someday? My great-grandparents would know how to fix them. They will end up in a landfill and someday my great-grandchildren will stand before me with accusing eyes and ask why - when my socks are the one piece that sends the environment over the edge -  I chose to throw them away starting a chain reaction that ended with the death of the planet."

Or I think "You could sell everything in the house and finally have the money to do that crazy idea you been thinking about since 5 seconds ago."

So here's my plan. I'm throwing everything into one room in the house and closing the door. I can open that door up after several glasses of wine and put my hand on one thing that will be dealt with, thrown away, fixed, donated, sold,

burned in the back yard while I dance around it cackling. 

Whatever way your minimalism works.

At the beginning of spring

Sometimes, things are ash.

Sweet Pea experiment: Gardening indoors.

Sometimes, what we think is a permanent piece of life is only a feather-light weight. What weighs us down is our own expectations, met or unmet, and under all these separate pieces we think we will never have the strength to get back up.

But it's all ash.

This morning I woke up and realized that I'm $300 short in paying bills. This even after I've borrowed money, so the actual number in the red is more. I wonder about all my neighbors, if they wake up in the same moment and think "Dear god/goddess/universe/something, how did I get to this place?" If we think we are all alone in our houses that back right up to each other. 

I've been thinking of my own mindset lately related to money matters. I never thought that I had any sabotaging behaviors, but early one morning I realized that spending money to feed myself was something I viewed as loss, as an unworthy expenditure; feeding myself. What is that? Where did I learn that lesson? It informs everything that I do. I don't deserve anything. I don't deserve to be here on this earth.

you think you will die but you don't. instead you leave yourself behind and the snow is white ash.

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Speaking of snow, the weather is warmer. The snow peas are coming up and the brussels sprouts survived the winter. 

The sage survived too and now it's taking over a section of the yard, snaking through the wild violets and the clover. I admire its ambition and I've promised not to cut it for 90 days - let it go where it will. 

The collards burst into bloom and I'm hoping that soon they will be as prevalent as the weeds.

The dirt is meditation.

I will leave it under my fingernails until I've forgotten what my hands look like clean.

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Sometimes, before the sun is up, I sit with my coffee and pretend all is well. 

If we pretend long enough that dream will inform reality, or so I've been told.

My children run through the house even at this early hour. They are unaware of my anxiety, blissful, carrying their treasures in baskets left over from their father's Easter celebration. I breathe into the pressure in my chest. It comes and goes in waves until I have to sit down, and they are in my lap, decorating my body with stickers and necklaces. This is what it feels like to be beautiful, to be a circle of women celebrating together our existence in this life. 

For one moment I feel peace. 

Let me remember this.