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Clarity - Day 20

3/6/2026

Act 3 - Trusting the Search

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Perhaps that’s enough, at least for right now.

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Clarity - Day 19

3/5/2026

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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.

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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:

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.
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

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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

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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.

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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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

Clarity - Day 20

Act 3 - Trusting the Search

Clarity - Day 19

​Bitter Sweetness

Clarity - Day 18

The End of the End

Clarity - Day 17

Meeting

Clarity - Day 16

Liquid Love

Robbin Marcus

2019 blog series: Exploring the Power of Habit

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Bitter Sweetness

2019 blog series:
Exploring the Power of Habit