Biography: Chris Rummer
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Cultivating the Garden of your Mind - Take time out of your busy life to access the wisdom of your right brain and culitvate the garden of your mind.
Reweaving your Life - a workshop for women whose children are leaving home
Home2me Workshop
Six Things Life Taught Me About Successful Relocation
Chris Rummer Copeland
Up till the time I was eighteen, I hadn’t been much farther than around the block. Exotic adventure meant a trip to the vacant lot around the corner or clambering atop a swing set in a friend’s backyard. But that’s okay, because I was flexing the muscles of my inner eye to see beyond the mundane landscape of my existence to the realm of possibility--- which, I can assure you, really helps in circumstances where someone demands your address and phone number, but you don’t have either; or you can’t figure out how to use the washing machine, or make the car alarm stop; or unlock your front door, or you don’t know which end of the queue to stand in to catch a bus.… But wait! I’m getting ahead of myself!
In June of 1972, I graduated from the University of Rochester in New York and Congress declared my husband Dave an officer and a gentleman and gave him four years of all-expense-paid travel and adventure. As we hopped from New York to Florida to Texas, and onto San Diego, San Francisco, and Hawaii, I found that I could hang pictures on walls before the boxes were all unpacked. Never mind that sometimes those walls were battle-ship gray and thin enough to pound a nail clear through to the other side. This just meant you could hang twice as many pictures per nail, and nicely illustrates the first lesson of successful relocation: “Claim the space where you land.”
Things never went quite the way we expected, like the time we arrived in Hawaii with the snow tires and skis we thought we’d need in Maine. As our Samoan mover said upon unpacking them, “Everyone needs these here,” which brings me to the second principle of coming ‘home’: “Be prepared for surprise!”
While most of the Navy wives were busy collecting porcelain elephants and bamboo furniture, I collected rusted umbrellas done in by the daily ‘Mauka’ showers at the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii. Two moves and many months later, on the night before my second daughter was born, I turned in my dissertation, and soon after collected my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology. I then turned to my next tasks: raising my daughters and getting licensed as a psychologist in Washington, which nicely illustrate the next ingredient of finding ‘home’ within yourself: “These things take time.”
Between 1982 and 1997 my acquisitions tended toward Tupperware, carpool miles, and Happy Meal boxes, as I raced between my private practice in Kent, WA and my children’s various and sundry activities. Then Boeing offered my husband another relocation opportunity we couldn’t refuse--- this time to England. Any inclinations I might have had toward excessive souvenir collection in the next five years were nicely staved off while I walked through the beautiful British countryside, moved three times (from Lancashire to Somerset and back to Lancashire), presented developmental and cross-cultural transition workshops in England, New York, and Maryland, and wrote the first two drafts of a novel set in Seattle and Wales. Which brings me to the fourth principle of successful relocation: “Make space for what matters.”
My most recent series of moves began in 2001, upon the loss of my husband to cancer. These included leaving England, and renting a condo while selling one house and buying another. This also meant a reunion with the mountain of stuff we had stashed in storage for five years, and which I had secretly hoped would mysteriously disappear. Instead, I had the somewhat dubious privilege of sorting through thirty years of effluvia, including the twenty-three-year-old avocado- green washer and dryer, the television whose on-off knob had been replaced by a plastic balloon stem some twenty years ago when a toddler absconded with the original, and every check we had ever written since 1968. And as you may have guessed, this nicely illustrates the fifth principle of successful ‘homecoming’: “Travel light!”
So now (minus the avocado washer and dryer) I live in Ballard, a traditional community in the Northwest corner of Seattle, where I intend to live happily ever after with my black cat Radar-- or at least until the next adventure pops up on my screen. And this brings up the last last, and most important, relocation maxim of all: “Laugh, Play, and Share well with others.”