You know I live in a constant state of confusion. That’s true in many ways, but particularly when it comes to the topic of squirrels. I’m a vegan. I love animals. It’s true because it says so on my FAQ page. It’s right there in black and white, “I love animals.”

But I don’t love squirrels. Bitter bile builds up in my system at the mere sight of them. They stand for everything I’m against such as selfishness. It’s probably why they’re so squirrely. And that brings me to another probable reason I hate squirrels. My sisters used to call me “squirrely” when I was a kid. We could go into some psychoanalysis about what this really means, but I think I have cookies in the oven.

Another reason I hate squirrels is that I have three fruit trees in my backyard: a pear, a plum, and a peach tree (I didn’t plant them, but I do love the alliteration). In the many years I’ve lived in this house I have only had one pear. That’s it. This year I hoped would be different. I sprayed cayenne pepper religiously. I even gave an offering to the squirrel gods hoping they would have mercy on me.

Squirrels are not merciful creatures. In fact, they would taunt me while perched on the bough of one of the peach tree limbs sagging heavy with burgeoning fruit. No matter how many times I would run out to the backyard arms flailing yelling non-obscenities (I don’t want to offend the neighbors), I would barely get back to my kitchen window before they were back at it again.

Although I started the summer with high hopes, this year has been no different than the others. All the peaches are gone. All the plums are gone. We are left with only three pears…which I am guarding with a wire contraption (I can tell you more about that later). My dreams of making peach cobbler have been foiled yet again.

Then one day I took an unexpected journey to my family farm in southern Missouri. My dad left this land to me and my sisters last year. For many reasons I hadn’t made it to the property but most of all I think it was hard to return because I knew how special this land was to my dad. And now he’s gone.

Imagine my surprise when I trundled past the waist-high undergrowth (OK, weeds) and saw to the left of the barn a peach tree. And it had some ripened peaches ready for the picking. My spirits lifted immediately.

I thought to myself, “I think I’ll have to steal a couple of those peaches.” And then I realized that I wasn’t stealing. These were my peaches growing on my land. A gift to me from my dad. The trepidation of this trip and the agitation of my “unfruitful” summer vanished. At that moment, I knew everything was as it was supposed to be. It was all worthwhile.

If we were to observe human behavior, it wouldn’t take long to notice that most of us work very hard to try to control life. We strive to move linearly in defined directions. But Mr. Piccard wants to remind us that life is more like ballooning than we realize. It seems the only way to actually steer a balloon is by understanding the atmosphere through which it is traveling. Earth’s atmosphere is comprised of several layers of wind flowing in different directions. To get to a destination 100 miles east, you don’t actually start flying your balloon in an easterly direction; instead you go up. In order to reach an intended direction in a balloon, you have to move vertically, not horizontally. It’s in changing altitudes that moves you into the jet stream that is headed toward your destination.

Mr. Piccard encourages us by saying, “Life is no longer one line going in one direction in one dimension.” Instead, life is made out of all the possible lines that go in all the possible directions in all the possible dimensions.

So how can you change altitude? Well, in a balloon one way to change altitude is to drop ballasts or weights. But how do you know what ballast to drop and what altitudes are flowing in the right directions? This is not always easy for the pilot in the balloon to know.  You need someone who is not in the balloon to provide assistance. Balloonists use weathermen. Mr. Piccard describes how early in their journey the weatherman asked them to fly at a low, slower-moving altitude. The two balloon pilots were frustrated with this recommendation because they only had so much fuel and didn’t think going so slowly would  allow them to make it to their destination.

They disregarded the weatherman’s advice and went higher where they found a jet stream that was moving at a much faster speed. Bertrand said he was feeling great pride in his piloting skills and called the weatherman to boast of their progress. He said the weatherman’s response was one he will remember his entire life: “If you fly too fast now, in a couple of hours you will be forced left and end up in the North Pole. You, the good pilot up there, do you want to go very fast in the wrong direction or slowly in the right direction?”

They listened to that weatherman and changed their altitude. As a result, 20 days after taking off  their 45,755 kilometer journey ended at the desired destination. Mr. Piccard said in a Popular Mechanics article that “all the journalists were saying it was the last possible adventure in the atmosphere,” but he’s off onto other atmospheric quests. His next goal is to fly around the world, nonstop, in a solar-powered aircraft. You can follow the progress of his adventures at the Solar Impulse site.

Mr. Piccard’s metaphor provides so many great questions for life. What destinations are you headed toward? What altitude is the best one to get you there? Who are the good weathermen that can help you know the best directions? What ballast (aka “baggage”) can you let go of? With this new year before us and Mr. Piccard’s advice under our belt, may we all soar to great new destinations in 2010!

If you doubt the impact that changing a name can have on a life, consider Barack Obama. Yes, it’s true that his given name at birth was Barack. So how, you may ask, did he change his name?

When he was a child everyone referred to him as Barry, the same derivative of Barack that his father chose. The story goes that his father chose a nickname just as a lot of people from other countries do when trying to fit into this culture. It seemed only natural then, that Barack who was given the same name as his father, would use the same nickname.

It appears that Barack took comfort in the name Barry. A black boy growing up in Hawaii with a white mother and grandparents would want to fit in somehow. A Newsweek article on Barack’s name shows that when questioned about the nickname, he described, how “he didn’t want to have to explain his name. ‘Barry’ was just a way of simplifying things—a small compromise to smooth the way in society.”

He continued to go by Barry until his early twenties. In college his struggle transformed from trying to fit in to trying to find himself. Friends encouraged him to claim his heritage and go by Barack. I can imagine how that must have resonated with him.  How better to stake a claim for new territory than putting up a flag that labels who owns the property. A name is like the flag testifying who lives here; who owns this life!

You may still think that changing a name from a nickname to a birthname is not technically a name change. But I would argue that it requires the same steps. It requires courage to ask people to call you something different. It’s why there can be comfort in being around new people where you can call yourself what you want. It’s when you’re around people who have known you for years that it’s difficult. People don’t like change. They don’t like it for themselves and they don’t like it for those they love.

Asking people begin to call him Barack wasn’t always easy. Some members of his family insisted on calling him Barry. Through the years he must have won this battle. I think he is a better person for figuring out who he is and how he would be named. Larry Ackerman describes one problem with politics: the expectation to try to be someone you’re not. Maybe having gone through this this process of figuring out who he really is can help him be an authentic leader. I also think the name Barack suits him much better. We all would be better served for this opportunity. To be self reflective. To consider our identity. To choose how we will be named.

I called her Rachel. We received hand-stitched towels and blankets with the name “Rachel” in soft pink hues. I loved the sound of it then, and still do.

When she was little I would sing softly to her as she would fall asleep, “I love you Rachel, oh yes I do. I love you Rachel, to you I’m true. When I’m away from you, I’m blue. Oh, Rachel, I love you.” This love affair between me, my daughter and her name continued until she was about 8. And then one day, things changed. Another Rachel in her same school. Believe it or not, up until this point she wasn’t really aware of many other girls with the name Rachel. In that regard, she felt rather unique. But no more. At an age where she was beginning her search for individuality, her name made her feel too common. Rachel was too passe.

Around this time she became Adee. A derivative of her middle name, Adele. A middle name we both share. Not aDEE, but AHdee. Rhymes with daddy.

It didn’t spill off my tongue right away. It felt a little awkward at first. Some of her friends refused to call her Adee. Some adults still won’t call her that. Her life was a precious gift to me. And I named that life Rachel. But her life is her own. How better to claim it for herself than by choosing her own name? Her own life’s label.

She calls herself Adee. My gift to her is to recognize her life. Her choice. I call her Adee.

To me that egg represents the birth of something new. The generative nature of life on this earth.

With life teeming all around us, it’s interesting how easy it is as humans to get stuck. We can get attached to things as simple as hairstyles. Or we can remain fastened to more complex things such as how we react to others.

I remember being invited to a bat mitzvah once. I had never been to one of these before, and I thought it was a wonderful recognition of this young woman’s transition from being a child to becoming an adult. What an incredible rite of passage and opportunity for celebration.

I think we pass through many rites of passages in our lives. Lewis Carroll reminds us of this—both whimsically and metaphorically—in his book, Alice in Wonderland. Here is one quote as an example:  “Who are You?” said the Caterpillar. “I…I hardly know, Sir, just at present,” Alice replied, rather shyly. “At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.”

We have robins that lay eggs each spring in a nest outside our bedroom window. It is a family event to watch the robins preparing the nest, laying the eggs, and then caring for the young, tender brood up until and long after they’ve left the nest. The thing is, we need that when we’re emerging into a new world. We need to be nourished to build our strength to survive. It takes two robins working non-stop to get the baby robins to fledge and then to care and protect the younglings until they’re ready to be on their own.

Maybe this is why I keep that glass jar of shattered eggshells; symbolic remnants of birth. A reminder of rebirth and the need for self love and self nurturing to prepare for life’s next phase.

The last 10-12 years of his life, however, were different. It’s almost as if the sense of his own impending mortality caused him to realize that he needed to connect with his children. All I know is that this complex relationship with my dad made searching for the right Father’s Day card difficult and it makes grieving for him now hard as well. I wish he could have been there for me, but at the same time I’m glad to have had the relationship with him over the last several years. I want to ask, is it still ok for me to grieve since my dad wasn’t perfect?

But grieving is like a river, it runs its course whether you want it or not. Unless you build a dam; in which case you can have a stagnant, toxic cesspool backed up behind it. Grieving doesn’t consume my life, but it has eaten around the edges. My grieving is more like a shallow creek than a river, but it still slows me down at times. Walking through water – whether a shallow creek or a river – would slow anyone down.

But then again, maybe that’s part of the ebb and flow of life. Maybe things like this happen to help us learn to slow down and be more reflective. I think that may be an important thing to do when your dad dies, because dads are larger than life to their kids. I know my dad was to me. I thought of him like a god and even referred to him as Zeus in a poem I wrote once. He played college football, was a boxer, and star fast-pitch softball player in our little hometown.  He was a good-looking man too; I thought he looked like Paul Newman. And he had a great personality to boot; people loved him.

I have finally decided that it is ok to grieve for my dad. That as much as I wanted him to be like Zeus, he was, in the end, only a man. So, I’m choosing to remember the strong, fun-loving man with the booming voice, that scared me as a child, but seemed endearing as I became an adult. The man who hated his name and instead went by CJ or Mac. He would tell people that they could call him “hey, baldy” if they wanted to, as long as they didn’t call him by his name. I loved things like that about my dad. The way he had of putting others at ease. I want to take those traits that I loved about my dad and live them in my own life and reaffirm them with my daughter. It makes me realize that maybe the only true immortality for any of us comes through what we pass on to others. In that way I can give my dad the best Father’s Day gift ever: a bit of immortality in having his traits carried forward.

There have been other chapters that have left me wondering what the heck was going on. I’ve gone through periods where nothing was making sense to me then, and some are still a mystery to me even now. But one thing I have learned: I am going to keep turning pages. Sometimes I’m just curious to see what’s going to happen next and the anticipation of what I can apply in this current, nebulous (if not strenuous) chapter of my life. It helps curb the dread in an otherwise dreary day. Not only “this too shall pass,” but “this too might come in handy again some day.” It’s a double dose! Today may be difficult, but I get to look forward to better days while at the same time learning new life skills, because  today’s difficult situations, I’m certain, will help me through something in the future. How exciting! It reminds me of the concept of reincarnation…except living it all in one lifetime. I either figure it out in this chapter or it will come again in another chapter.

I just read a recent blogpost by MJ Ryan where she suggests asking three very critical questions when facing difficult times:

• If anything could be right about what’s happening, what could it be?
• How could I turn this to my advantage?
• What opportunities has this situation created that I could capitalize on?

These are key questions for taking today’s life lesson and translating them into the currency of tomorrow. Sometimes the lessons are profound: knowing you will never allow someone to treat you like a meaningless, bumbling fool again. Other times, the lessons are not so extraordinary, but still important: you appreciate this summer cold because you know how incredible “normal” is going to feel soon. It’s taken me some time to reach this point and I confess there are more days than I care to admit that overwhelm me. But I’m learning, and it encourages me to know that even if I may not like this page or this chapter, overall, its a really good read!

Maybe that’s important for us to do as well – discarding of the old in order to make room for the new.  I’ve read about this in books on removing clutter from your life too.  Get rid of some of the old before taking on anything new.

Live your best life. This is a popular mantra right now. And I agree. We should figure out what our purpose is and follow it with passion.

However, I ask this one thing. How can you live your best life without “killing the mother?” Of course, I’m speaking figuratively here. The mother in this statement represents a lot of things such as expectations of others for your life. How can you live YOUR best life if you’re saddled with the weight of others’ expectations for you?

Look, we all know this happens all the time. Your dad wanted you to be a doctor or your mom wanted you to be an accountant or whatever. I’m convinced my mom wanted me to be a minister’s wife. I’m certain I could have been a good minister’s wife, but I diverged from that path in my early 20’s. Having my life mission to be the wife of someone else just didn’t seem to satisfy me. I also questioned religion as a theme of my vocation. I questioned it to its very core and decided to follow a path of spirituality vs. organized religion. This is another huge area of disappointment for my mother. If I wasn’t going to be a minister’s wife, it was assumed I would at least stay in the religious fold.

I carry the weight of these choices in my life. Even though I’m at peace with it and know I’m on the right path, my mother’s disappointment at times is palpable. It doesn’t matter how many other accomplishments I achieve, the disappointment eking from my mother never ebbs. I’ve decided, in the end, that this is a good thing. Wanting my mother’s approval and not really feeling that I had it, made me come to a realization. I can’t seek approval from others. Sure, it is important to be respectful and kind and appreciative of others’ contributions to my life. But in the end, I have to be true to my own path.

In that same vein, I think that changing a name is a great way to make the noted break from familial expectations for a life. Speaking of religion, name changes have been a part of noted biblical life transformations.  Abram became Abraham. Sarai became Sarah. Simon became Peter.  Popes also change their names when they become pope.

Throwing out the old, making way for the new, for the life you want to live. Not a one-time thing, but a continual process. Sounds like what they’re doing right now out on the banana plantation. You see, each banana plant only produces one set of fruit. Once that’s harvested, a way has to be paved for the new plant growing right behind it. Sounds like a good journey for us all.