Robbin L Marcus
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Clarity - Day 20

3/6/2026

4 Comments

 

Act 3 - Trusting the Search

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As a teenager, this comic used to hang on the bulletin board in my bedroom. Even then I knew there was more to life than high school and its drama.

There IS a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker, but in today’s world, we’re all with Charlie Brown. Sound bites. Quick bits. Catch phrases. Stuff that fits on a meme (or on a bumper sticker.) That’s what’s in the world, online, everywhere we look. Billboards. Windows. Ever present TV advertising.

It’s a bumper sticker world, and a black and white one, at that.

So how does a thinking person, a person who prefers the earth and sky and colorful tactile experiences, process their thoughts with any sense of clarity? Or act on a philosophy? 
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I’ve been processing this one since the start of the challenge. What exactly is it that drives my searching? What am I looking for, diving deeply for, craving? I seem to see a road ahead of me and I seem to be following it reasonably well without getting lost in the woods, but exactly where am I going other than deeper into my life? Deeper into who I am, authentically? And what is urging me on to keep going? I could just spend the rest of my days sitting at home, or shopping, or driving, or doing all those things that most semi-retired people do – and yet, as I do those, I also pause a lot. I look at flowers. What am I passing and not seeing? Hearing? Feeling? How can I add that in to my current experience? 
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With more time to pursue them, these are the things that intrigue me most lately. I am looking for meaning in the everydayness presence of my life. Nature attracts me, distracts me. I could follow a butterfly all day.
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Case in point - look who was on my Ironweed for more than 36 hours last August. And guess who checked in on her often enough to know that?
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After asking those questions of myself for quite a while, last fall I decided to do something concrete. I signed up for an 10-week course in becoming a Certified Master Naturalist in the state of Georgia. Every Tuesday I spent the night at a friend’s house, then got up early Wednesday morning and drove another 40 minutes for a full day of classes for almost two month, gaining over 56 hours of training. Taking this course validated my own trust in what I already knew about mushrooms, birds, native gardening, etc, and opened me up to a lot more, like tree care and water quality testing. Once I get up myself up to the nature center to volunteer, I’ll be able to take school groups out in the preserve in my backyard, or lead hikes. This feels exactly right. 
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Now, going a step further, I’m about to embark on a class on fabric dyeing with plants and flowers grown at the John C Campbell Folk School. It feels good to unite my love of fabrics and nature - and I need a new creative outlet for Act 3 that isn’t musical. 

With this, my toolbox as Earth Mother is expanding yet again.

Did I find the clarity I was searching for in this challenge? Not exactly. I am clearer on what is not acceptable in my world. I am clearer that love is everything. I am clearer that the road I am on feels right, and true. I have set intentions for the rest through my writing.
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Perhaps that’s enough, at least for right now.

4 Comments

Clarity - Day 19

3/5/2026

1 Comment

 

​Bitter Sweetness

For many years, I mentored a young woman who is now in her late 20s. 

She and her family arrived in the US as legal refugees when she was about 14. She could only read English on a kindergarten level, having learned what little she learned in the camp school. What she could do, though, was play the piano. No one quite knows where her talent came from, but it was fierce. She had learned to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on a plastic keyboard with about 3 octaves of keys. 

Within a year here, in a wonderful school for refugee girls, my lovely mentee was studying piano with me at a very high level and had increased her English speaking and reading from zero to “we think she can graduate from this program a year early and go to high school with her peers.” 

She was, and is, a marvel. I love her dearly, my “other daughter.”

I worked with her through middle school, private high school (on a full scholarship) and even into college (more scholarships) - helping her family get settled, buy their first car, their house, fill out financial aid forms for their daughter.

It’s been a journey. It’s hard to say who learned more in the process, the family, or me. 

I will go down this tangent, and then back to the story - Most Americans have no idea at all what legal refugees have to go through to get here. Her parents were in a refugee camp for more than 25 years, from the time they were teens, until they were finally granted  asylum in the US in their 40s. Every year they applied to get out. Every year they were vetted and approved. Then they waited. Finally, it was their turn to go. They had exactly 6 months to pay back their airfare. They were given an apartment for a month and then the rent was theirs. They were given English classes and job training for about 3 months. After that, you are on your own. It’s not easy. You have to work hard at menial jobs. The thought that we are now displacing these people, who contribute to the lowest levels of our economy cheerfully, happy to be here, who work for next to nothing 6+ days a week, is disgusting. It’s awful. In a normal world, it would be illegal.  End of rant. 

During my mentee’s senior year of high school, we went on a college visiting trip. I took her to Maryland, to see a couple of colleges I thought might be a good fit if she were willing to go that far from her family. 

She wasn’t, but we had a lovely trip anyway.

At some point, she asked me to show her my houses. I’d owned 3 over 25 years in the area, so that sounded like fun. Going back “home” is never really what we expect, however. 

My former houses were different in all the predictable ways - and that was just on the outside. I think the most painful part for me, as a gardener, is seeing my gardens decimated, or planted over with lawn. I put love and time and energy into growing them, and I really wanted them to succeed. 

I’ve also put love and time and energy into the daughters I’ve been fortunate enough to raise. I want them to succeed and flourish. Seeing my “other daughter” living in fear of deportation and daily stress for her community is quite the opposite from what I hoped for for her as an American citizen, which she became before she went off to college. 

At this point, US citizenship doesn’t mean as much as it should. 


1 Comment

Clarity - Day 18

3/4/2026

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The End of the End

It scarcely seems possible, but June of 2025 was the fifth anniversary of my ex-husband’s death. With each passing year, and with the possibilities of awkwardly running into each other at family events long gone, it’s become easier to remember and talk about the good times in our early marriage. I’ve been working hard to share those with my daughter, who needs to hear that it wasn’t all bad. A lot of forgiveness has happened, for my actions as well as for his, in these five years. 

I’ve written enough – too much, perhaps – about the pain of those last 10 years of our marriage. Suffice it say neither one of us was the person we wanted to be for one another.  He was a narcissist whose world revolved around making himself feel better by making everyone he loved feel bad. I know that when I’m wounded, I can lash out and be incredibly hurtful to others. You’ve really got to push to get me there, but, when I was younger, it was easier. I learned a vicious tongue well from my grandmother. Undoubtedly, we said and did some awful things to one another.

I’ve reached the point where I’m done writing about that pain. 

When my first marriage ended, I was mostly working on survival. I honestly didn’t know exactly who I was anymore. Was I a likeable person? Did I still have value? What were my interests? What did I want out of life? 

At the time, I was certain of two things:
  1. I wasn’t going to live in the scarcity model anymore. Scarcity doesn’t mean being poor, it means expecting the worst. Doing without because you should. Withholding emotion. Not believing there was hope for a better future.
  2. I was tired of being stuck and depressed. I needed to find out who 40-year-old Robbin was, and who she wanted to be for her second act.

I’ve talked a lot about how becoming an Alexander Teacher during the end of my divorce was the best possible thing that could have happened to me. Without a doubt, it saved my life and provided the clarity I needed to be able to move forward, to examine myself from the inside out, mentally and physically together, as a unified whole going forward. 

This is where my search for my passions began. 

I consider myself a life-long learner. 
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Clarity - Day 17

3/3/2026

0 Comments

 
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Meeting


​All my life I’ve been looking for someone to tell me “why.” 
Why am I here? 
Whose hand is guiding me? I’m not here alone. I’ve never been here alone.
Why can’t I meet you? 
What is my purpose?
 
JUST TELL ME already. I’m 66. 
Obviously, I haven’t been able to figure it out on my own. 
 
Some would fill this hole with religion. I tried that. Did it for years. 
Came out with the same questions I went in with. 
 
All I’m asking for is a little help. A few answers. 
Surely there’s somebody out there who can do more than point me in a particular direction?
 
It’s time.
I surrender.
Show me.
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Clarity - Day 16

3/2/2026

0 Comments

 
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Liquid Love

Coffee is my love language.

There is nothing better than waking up to the smell of a house with coffee brewing in it, except someone bringing a cup of that brewed coffee to me. When the coffee is prepped to my liking, with just enough oat creamer or half and half to make it medium, not light, not dark, I am in my happy place in the morning. Waking up gently. Feeling loved. Feeling incredibly grateful.

This week I am traveling, just touching base at home midweek and then taking off again for another 10 days. We are at the home of a good friend in Knoxville, TN – and when the smell of coffee started perfuming the air at 7:30 am I knew I could now pry myself out of bed and start writing. 

Without coffee, there is no clarity to my morning. 

My regular routine, whenever possible, is to get out of bed, do my ablutions and start the coffee. I climb back in bed or into a comfy chair and do the daily Wordle to pull my brain back from the depths. By then the coffee is ready. 

During the writing challenge my routine is different, which invariably provides Dave less opportunities to speak my love language and bring me coffee in bed or the comfy chair. I’m up at least an hour before he is, clacking away on the keyboard up in my office, over his head. 
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It’s me who gets to wake the house up with coffee perfume. 

I’m very grateful this morning for travel, for the variations to my routine that will keep me from reading or watching the news for almost two weeks - for playing music with and for friends, teaching Alexander Technique at my favorite upcoming music teachers conference and stretching my creativity at a class at the Folk School after that.

There will be plenty of time on my return to dig in and take a stand. I’ll be refreshed and ready to do it.

Right now, I’m grateful for the chance to hang out with people I only see once or twice a year, at best. Much coffee will be drunk while conversations are had. 

I pick up my coffee cup and inhale deeply. I’m ready.
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Clarity - Day 15

2/27/2026

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Heat

People talk about love at first sight. I’ve never heard anyone else talk about love at first touch. 

When Dave Marcus and I met, we were at a weeklong gathering of dancers and musicians. I heard his laugh ring out across the dining hall the first night and looked up. A big guy with a huge smile and cowboy boots was holding court at a table. “Nah,” I thought. Not my type.
 
A few days later he asked me to dance. Looking into his eyes was mesmerizing, but I do like to flirt with my dance partners and that wasn’t that unusual. It was after. As we left the floor, he put his arm around me, and it was like it had always been there. Heat pulsed between our bodies. The sensation was beyond description. In what I can only explain as a past life experience, we turned and greeted each other as old friends do. Five minutes later, I was still trying to process what had happened. I was intrigued. So was Dave. 

A few months later, he flew up to visit me unexpectedly in Philadelphia. Seeing him again for the first time since that week with only a few hours of notice made me very nervous. I had no idea what was ahead of me, but I knew it was going to be something big. Something that mattered in a way I had never known before. 

He came down the ramp to where I was waiting, on the outside of security. Dave hugged me tightly, and he describes the moment as feeling my heart beat wildly, like a small bird. I felt it too and had absolutely no control over it. He held me tighter to calm me down. Best feeling in the world. I was where I belonged.

A homeless man was sitting on a bench on the side of the ramp. Neither one of us can remember exactly what he said any more, but he asked us if we were married. When we said no, he said something like “You will be.” We exchanged a few words, and he blessed us as we went on our way. Angels are everywhere, if you pay attention. 

Early on in our relationship, before either of us had studied energy work in any official way, Dave used to enjoy putting his hand on my thigh while I was driving – just to play with the heat it produced. Eventually I would have to ask him to stop, as it felt like he was burning a hole in my leg. It was odd and wonderful and a little scary all at the same time. 

None of this has ever really stopped – through our trainings we have learned how to control it until we really want to use that energy in our hands.
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I feel blessed to get to spend the rest of my life with someone with whom I’m so deeply connected – defying time, space and quantum physics on a daily basis.
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Clarity - Day 14

2/26/2026

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​Love Song to the Light 

I live in the woods, and despite the yearly similarity of seasons and weather, the daily view I see out my window or off my deck is never quite the same. On a rainy winter morning like this, the sky is light grey. The deep browns of the tree trunks mute to dark greys. Even the evergreens become a soft grey. The lighter grey mist provides a contrast, and yet the forest floor stands in glorious, rusty brown contrast – as if to say, “here’s the ground.”
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The light out here never ceases to fascinate me. It plays with creating shadows of trunks in the winter. In the summer, the deep leaf cover is sometimes penetrated by single shafts of light, illuminating a spot on the ground while all else is in shadow. I understand the idea of finding a pot of gold in these moments. I want to throw on my shoes, grab a shovel, enter the golden light and find out why this spot is illuminated, just for me.
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Oh, and sunset. We don’t get to see much of the sunset itself, here in the woods. Vista, a huge panorama of earth and sky, is what we lack. But what we have is just magical. As the light angles lower, it becomes gold, then orange, and then even takes on the reflected pinks from the clouds. It illuminates sections of the canopy in brilliance. This is my favorite time of day.
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Just before the sun sets, only the tops of the trees are illuminated, washed in golden light against the darkening sky. And then, it’s dusk.

If I pay attention, notice, become part of this environment, it never ceases to fill me with awe. It’s in these times I get clarity on what matters, what’s important, what is timeless.
It’s not senseless humans, running around, getting triggered at the slightest insult.
It’s not hate. Or war. Or arbitrary divisions.

It’s love. It’s connection – oneness, even - with the whole.
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More and more I believe this is the reason I am here.

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February 26th, 2026

2/26/2026

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Clarity - Day 13

2/25/2026

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Letting Go

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When I look back on my life, it seems most of it has been a push and pull between what I really want – a meaningful career, a lasting relationship, true happiness, choices that feed my soul – and what someone else wants for me. 

Early on that someone was my parents, particularly my mother, who had definitive opinions on who and what I should be. More than anything, I believe now that she wanted me to be financially comfortable. “You can be a lawyer who plays the piano!” she said, often.

Perhaps it was the opening of career horizons to women in the 1970s that was influencing her – I had career possibilities that didn’t exist for my mother and all of that was very exciting. So, my personal choice to be a lowly teacher of elementary music was a huge disappointment to her. After all, women had held those kinds of jobs for many generations. She wanted more for me. I wanted something fulfilling and rewarding - and with the ignorance of the young, who cared about money?

Later there were people – mentors, friends, colleagues – who wanted me to pursue a full professorship. I observed my friends in that job and the stress they were under for no more money than I was making teaching elementary school. Publishing. Worrying about tenure reviews. Backbiting in their departments. No thank you. My compromise was to become an adjunct – again, low pay, no job security.  But so rewarding to go in, teach my classes, help younger teachers, turn in my grades and go home. I loved it dearly. 

Always, always, people expected more from me. “Publish a book!” they said. I guess I projected an air of confidence. Or something. But each time I really thought about adding more, doing more, achieving more in whatever field I was interested in at the time, I just said no. I know there were regrets along the way for opportunities not taken – seeing colleagues from grad school having highly successful careers, in demand all over the US for speaking engagements  and prestigious workshops to music teachers, could make me feel jealous. And yet, I had a family. A life outside of music teaching. A community I loved.

At this age, do I regret the choices I made? Not at all. I was already too busy for much of my adult working life. All I ever wanted was time – time for family, for listening, for being in nature, for learning about all manner of things. And now I have that. 

It’s actually a little weird. There is no one now (except the voices in my head) to suggest that I do more – only a beloved spouse who still urges me to do less. Financially, we're comfortable. Working is optional.

I’ve spent the last 3 years letting go – this is the last year of running my own piano studio. Next year I will only teach in a private school one afternoon a week.  

I have no more committee responsibilities, no more Boards, national or local. 

From the time I quit full time teaching, I began turning my search, my lifelong-learning desires, into deeper things. Starting with Alexander Techinque, I’ve continued to peel those layers back slowly and carefully. Now, I stand exposed, fully accepting of exactly who I am.

It’s time for myself, for expansiveness, for additional clarity on what fulfills the Real Me. 
I might write that book. I might not. 

Right now, the whole world is open. I stand looking out at it from the top of a mountain. 
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The way down is up to me.
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Clarity - Day 12

2/24/2026

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And I Was

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photo credit, Doug Plummer
I live my life surrounded by music. 

I spend time doing it every single day. I play piano, I sing, I teach, I practice, I perform. 
I’ve spent a lot of time wondering in the last year or two if making music still brings me joy. Often (and I know this breaks my husband’s heart) the answer is “it’s just work.”

Dave would like it a lot if I, his bandmate, loved to practice and dig in and analyze and find new angles on the same old tunes as much as he does. He’d love it if I really explored the new tunes he writes. Time for music in his life is his joy. He can’t understand why it’s not mine. I hate disappointing him.

Except… 
Been there, done that. 
For about 60 years. 

When I think about retiring, I think about silence –  
the only music from the wind, the water and the birds. 

Except… 
The music that brings me joy is that I haven’t tried to play, haven’t dug into, have kept as a guilty unprofessional pleasure out in my car.  The stuff I quickly turn off when someone else gets in for a ride. Pure ear candy. Pure listening joy. No chord analysis. (Well, there was once when I used Psycho Killer to teach I, IV and V chords. But that was a long time ago when teens could relate to that.)

Music from the Prog Rock Era through the early New Wave. 

Bring on the Genesis, the Peter Gabriel, the Police, the Pretenders, the Joe Jackson, the Talking Heads. Now we’re talking, indeed. Smile on my face, singing at the top of my lungs in the car where no one can hear me. I still know every word.
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And if I narrow it down even more, the song that makes me happy every single time I hear it, that defines what I’ve always wanted out of life? And She Was by the Talking Heads. 



"And She Was" 
And she was lying in the grass
She could hear the highway breathing 
And she could see a nearby factory
She’s making sure that she’s not dreaming
See the lights of a neighbor's house
Now she’s starting to rise
Take a minute to concentrate
And she opens up her eyes….
The world was moving, she was right there with it 
and she was
The world was moving, she was floating above it 
And she was
And she was drifting through the backyard
And she was taking off her dress
And she was moving very slowly
Rising up about the earth
Moving into the universe
And she's drifting this way and that
Not touching the ground at all
And she's up above the yard
She was glad about it, no doubt about it
She isn't sure about what she's done
No time to think about what to tell them
No time to think about what she's done
And she was
And she was looking at herself
And things were looking like a movie
She had a pleasant elevation
She's moving out in all directions, oh, oh, oh
The world was moving, she was right there with it
And she was 
The world was moving, she was floating above it
And she was 
Joining the world of missing persons
And she was 
Missing enough to feel all right
And she was
And she was.
David Byrne, take me away. 
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    Robbin Marcus


    ​
    An occasional post from me, about stuff that interests me.

    2025 blog series:
    Cleaning Out the Old

    2024 blog selections: Resistance

    ​2023 blog series:
    Slow Forward 
    ​
    2020 blog series:
    1) Processing - Experience, Thought, Action
    ​2) Diving for Light - Shedding     light on a dark time
    ​

    2019 blog series: 
    Exploring the Power of Habit 

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