The twenty-ninth day of February 1996 -- the bonus day, if you will -- marked the first time I felt that I could hear a spirit speaking. The voice wafted over Diamond Head where doves flew in meditative circles telling me that if one wished to change the circumstances in which one was living and working, one could. The change that I put into motion that day was radical. It put me on a path of turbulence, chaos, doubt, uncertainty, joy, and utter freedom, lightening a load of obligation that I had imposed upon myself. But not everyone who knows me saw that moment of change in a similar way.
"You know you always wanted to be a professor," one friend said with a retort. "That's been your dream ever since I've known you."
"You've only known me since graduate school. How do you know that's always been what I wanted to do?"
"Well, look at your family, your father. How could you not be a professor?"
"All you ever talked about was being a journalist," replied an old friend who'd known me since the early 1980s, where we met in the smudged ink and manual typewriter era of the newsroom. "How can you give it all up for this?"
"I presume you're planning to teach," said another friend from the rapidly professionalizing newsroom of the dot-com epoch of the late 1990s.
When I replied that I had no plans beyond going to graduate school, a look of fear passed over his face. He looked at me as if I could no longer be trusted, and has not spoken to me since.
"You're pursuing your dream as a teacher," a colleague declared in a congratulatory e-mail when I announced that I had received a job offer as an assistant professor, some fourteen years after the spirit spoke.
"What dream?" I couldn't help wondering. "If it were such a great dream, why did it take so long to materialize?"
The truth of the matter is that spirits often don't speak in clear, rational terms. The dictates that they prescribe often put one on paths that feel less like paths and more like bewildering mazes. They have no reason nor logic. If one spirit led me out of the newsroom and into graduate school, another one took me away from the narrow lens of research libraries and into a wider world of talking again to real people and creating works with words that were not exactly, well, academic in nature. That then took me into a realm of freelance writing, where everyone longed for the kind of security that a staff writer position in a newsroom could promise.
"Can't you go back to journalism?" asked a relative who worried in the summer of 2007 about the family I supported and our seemingly deteriorating economic plight.
"That would be a step backward," I countered. "I went to graduate school to move away from that."
After walking the path to a doctorate and the path through freelance writing, creative non-fiction, and adjunct teaching, I thought I found my calling as a non-traditionalist. I could engage not only with classrooms, newsrooms, and libraries but also with the world. I could write with footnotes and with direct quotes. I could tell stories with pictures, and video. I could hold a class on Twitter, or I could arrange for students to meet me at a lake outdoors. It seemed like a perfect fit.
Only, as it turns out, spirits who call people to certain places like colleges also put their respondents on a complex circuitous path. Years of understanding the world in terms of what was possible evolved into a new mode of fighting to keep possibilities and options available amid an atmosphere of constriction.
I think back these days to the doves that circled Diamond Head and the voice of the spirit that spoke. I know I was right to heed the voice. And I think about the hawks that swoop gracefully over my farmhouse on their own paths deep in the woods. I thank the stars that they ignore the hens, the bellowing rooster and fast-growing cockerels that run free in a large space of the backyard and hope that the chaos and joy of freedom might continue.
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