over the edge

I'm leaving my job two weeks from Friday.

The fear claws at my solar plexus. What have I done?

I remember about a week after I had started this job, as an associate at a small public interest private law firm in downtown Oakland, that I had already started counting down the days until I was finished. At the moment, I was reading prior briefing in a California Environmental Quality Act suit, having to do with UC Berkeley's expansion plans; I was preparing to write the reply brief to the court of appeal. By all accounts, it was an important issue -- the classic town-and-gown dispute, the fate of downtown Berkeley's land use plans -- but to me it was the drudgery of the law. I thought, "I'll give it a year here."

In mid-winter and spring, my work was so dull it was physically painful. I spent about two months writing a terrible brief for a client who objected to the expansion of his neighbor, a fast food restaurant, because he was going to lose a few parking spaces. I remember being at my women's circle and asking to be held, needing the touch, the soothing. I crawled into the center of the circle, heaving a great sigh. I sobbed and sobbed. Meanwhile I was working feverishly to develop the Southwest project that just took place successfully in September. My health suffered; my hair started falling out in clumps. Through spring and summer I started cancelling my social plans, going into survival mode. I skipped all the festivals.

And then the apple moth came along. I'd heard about this issue in December or January, and brought it to the attention of my boss; it turned out that one of our clients was also interested in suing, so I was given free reign to do the research and write the complaint. It turns out that EPA actually made a pretty grievous error in purporting to exempt from normal registration processes the pesticide used for the aerial spray; I caught the error, and wrote a great complaint. After months and months, we finally filed it last Tuesday. To me, it felt like "mission accomplished!"

In June, I wrote an e-mail to a community list of which I'm a member, sharing my dilemma with them about whether or not to quit. I wrote: "there's a natural break in September, when I'll be doing some work in the Southwest for about three weeks, so it would be a full year here. When I feel into this possibility, I feel excited, scared, relieved, anxious, and doubtful. I'm not sure whether it's the right time for me to do this, I'm not sure whether I'd be making a huge mistake (i.e. my job isn't great, but it's not *that* bad, I'm getting paid, I can hang in there, I shouldn't abandon the moths, etc.) I'm secretly hoping that someone or something will tell me what I 'should' do; the deeper truth is that in my life I haven't cultivated a great deal of trust in myself to guide my life, since I've been doing (or attempting to do) what I 'should' do for such a long time."

Eventually, the quickening of the life-energy inside me moved me to decide to quit. I agonized and agonized down to the very last minute, but I finally gave notice in August, saying that I'd be working until the end of December. Pretty much immediately I went into a major fear contraction. What have I done? How could I leave my job, which isn't that bad, in the middle of a recession? What am I going to do instead?

That's the question my parents have always asked me. What would you be doing instead? I wasn't exactly forced to go to law school, but one could say that I found my father's strenuous recommendation that I go to be unopposable. And it was miserable, in a lot of ways, but I wouldn't trade it now for anything for the healing and strength and community and experience that it brought. In the midst of so much tearful suffering they said "what would you be doing instead?" And I could never answer that question with any kind of comforting specificity. There has never been anything more than a sense of the truth inside of me.

What would I be doing instead? It comes down to this: I'd be letting the life inside of me live. I'd let the truth about my life force, which is that it is not about conflict and adversariality, but instead about healing and collaboration and creativity, to emerge and be my guide. I've never done that before. I've been squelching and squashing and boxing it for a really long time; putting it aside in favor of what is the "right" thing to do. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but it is some combination of writing, advocacy, community weaving. All, ultimately, in service of the healing of the earth, our Mother Earth.

So I agonized and agonized some more. At my therapist's office I did a sand tray, and basically built an intuitive altar to the two choices I was facing. In one corner, a figurine of the goddess, in the other corner, a figurine of a postman. In the goddess' quadrant there was a red glass heart at the center of a circle of amber and green stones; there was a sand dollar, an angel, a spiraling shell. In the postman's quadrant there was a little girl riding a speedboat surrounded by paper money and fake pennies. Next to her stood a figurine of a woman doctor, an upstanding and powerful citizen. Between the two quadrants was a tree -- the driving force behind both energies -- and a roaring lion's head.

She took a polaroid of the array for me, and I called it "Confluence." I gazed into it like a crystal ball for several days, knowing that the movement of my heart and soul was towards the feminine quadrant, but feeling so much fear about stepping away from the masculine quadrant. Am I just a spoiled, lazy brat? Am I ridiculously naive for making this sort of decision? Who am I kidding?

I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but finally, several weeks ago, the fog lifted and I found peace with the decision to walk towards the feminine and to leave my job. To leave the security, the prestige, and even the excitement of working on the apple moth case. To leave this thing that's not half-bad, that's really okay, that pays a good sum of money, that gets me by. To take a leap off the edge into the absolute unknown, hoping desperately that my wings will sprout or that the ground will rise to meet my steps.

I remember that I have done this before, and it has always led to something greater: when I was supposed to be in my third year of law school I took the fall semester off. It gave me time to rest and heal, and it allowed me to have a third summer. I got an internship at NRDC that summer, which was the best law job I've probably ever had. And last summer I was offered a prestigious job clerking for the Supreme Court of Colorado, a year-long position which would have started this fall. I agonized over that one, too, but finally realized that my heart was not at all in it. And then this current job came along, which has been nothing if not a learning experience.

And I pay attention to the fact that in the few months since I've made the decision to quit, my health has been rapidly improving. I've lost about 15 pounds; my whole relationship to food has changed. A weight has, literally, lifted.

And still the fear plagues me. What have I done? Time will tell. My fervent prayer is that I will be shown what is needed of me, how I am to give my life over to the Earth's healing. My fervent prayer is that even if this quitting, this leaping is a terrible and foolhardy mistake, that I will learn from it. That life will not mete out punishment instead of blessings because I have leapt so blindly. That if this is a mistake, it will give me the wisdom that I'll need in order to leap again and soar. And my fervent prayer is that it is not a mistake, that this is not a figment of my priveleged imagination; that there really is something to this powerful, pulsing, unformed call that is so indescribable, so subtle, and so wholly irresistable.

I am in a great and painful birth canal, and when I emerge nothing will be the same. This is what I have done; I have said 'yes' to being born.

May it be so,
may it be so,
may it be so.