Welcome to my blog..


"We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

When I started this blog in 2011, I was in a time of transition in my life between many identities - that of Artistic Director of a company (Apocryphal Theatre) to independent writer/director/artist/teacher and also between family identity, as I discover a new family that my grandfather's name change at the request of his boss in WWII hid from view - a huge Hungarian-Slovak contingent I met in 2011. Please note in light of this the irony of the name of my recently-disbanded theatre company. This particular transition probably began in the one month period (Dec. 9, 2009-Jan. 7, 2010) in which I received a PhD, my 20 year old cat died on my father's birthday and then my father, who I barely knew, died too. I was with him when he died and nothing has been the same since. This blog is tracing the more conscious elements of this journey and attempt to fill in the blanks. I'm also writing a book about my grandmothers that features too. I'd be delighted if you joined me. (Please note if you are joining mid-route, that I assume knowledge of earlier posts in later posts, so it may be better to start at the beginning for the all singing, all dancing fun-fair ride.) In October 2011, I moved back NYC after living in London for 8 years and separated from my now ex-husband, which means unless you want your life upended entirely don't start a blog called Somewhere in Transition. In November 2011, I adopted a rescue cat named Ugo. He is lovely. As of January 2012, I began teaching an acting class at Hunter College, which is where one of my grandmothers received a scholarship to study acting, but her parents would not let her go. All things come round…I began to think it may be time to stop thinking of my life in transition when in June 2012 my stepfather Tom suddenly died. Now back in the U.S. for a bit, I notice, too, my writing is more overtly political, no longer concerned about being an expat opining about a country not my own. I moved to my own apartment in August 2012 and am a very happy resident of Inwood on the top tip of Manhattan where the skunks and the egrets roam in the last old growth forest on the island.

I am now transitioning into being married again with a new surname (Barclay-Morton). John is transitioning from Canada to NYC and as of June 2014 has a green card. So transition continues, but now from sad to happy, from loss to love...from a sense of alienation to a sense of being at home in the world.

As of September 2013 I started teaching writing as an adjunct professor at Fordham University, which I have discovered I love with an almost irrational passion. While was blessed for the opportunity, after four years of being an adjunct, the lack of pay combined with heavy work load stopped working, so have transferred this teaching passion to private workshops in NYC and working with writers one on one, which I adore. I will die a happy person if I never have to grade an assignment ever again. As of 2018, I also started leading writing retreats to my beloved Orkney Islands. If you ever want two weeks that will restore your soul and give you time and space to write, get in touch. I am leading two retreats this year in July and September.

I worked full time on the book thanks to a successful crowd-funding campaign in May 2014 and completed it at two residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Wisdom House in summer 2015. I have done some revisions and am shopping it around to agents and publishers now, along with a new book recently completed.

I now work full-time as a freelance writer, writing workshop leader, coach, editor and writing retreat leader. Contact me if you are interested in any of these services.

Not sure when transition ends, if it ever does. As the saying goes, the only difference between a sad ending and a happy ending is where you stop rolling the film.

For professional information, publications, etc., go to my linked in profile and website for Barclay Morton Editorial & Design. My Twitter account is @wilhelminapitfa. You can find me on Facebook under my full name Julia Lee Barclay-Morton. More about my grandmothers' book: The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick & Jani

In 2017, I launched a website Our Grandmothers, Our Selves, which has stories about many people's grandmothers. Please check it out. You can also contact me through that site.

In May, I directed my newest play, On the edge of/a cure, and have finally updated my publications list, which now includes an award-winning chapbook of my short-story White shoe lady, which you can find on the sidebar. I also have become a certified yoga instructor in the Kripalu lineage. What a year!

And FINALLY, I have created a website, which I hope you will visit, The Unadapted Ones. I will keep this blog site up, since it is a record of over 8 years of my life, but will eventually be blogging more at the website, so if you want to know what I am up to with my writing, teaching, retreats and so on, the site is the place to check (and to subscribe for updates). After eight years I realized, no, I'm never turning into One Thing. So The Unadapted Ones embraces the multiplicity that comprises whomever I am, which seems to always be shifting. That may in fact be reality for everyone, but will speak for myself here. So, do visit there and thanks for coming here, too. Glad to meet you on the journey...

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Waiting on my room...

I may have written a very similar blog post about a year and a half ago.

I am back at Kripalu, a yoga retreat where I have come since 2003. 2003 was a potent year. It's also the year I found the Orkney Islands (well many people for millennia have "found" the Orkney Islands but you get the idea...).

Now - as in December 2016 - I am waiting for my room. Over the years, the place has grown and become more hotel-like and hence rooms need to become available. On the other hand, the view to mountains and lake is the same, and an undercurrent of deeply healing energy.

I came today on purpose, because it's the 11th anniversary of my miscarriage, the one after my wedding on our honeymoon. In Cornwall. It was a beautiful day, and a very sad and painful day for me and my then husband. I never got pregnant after that. Should not by rights have been pregnant then. I was 43, no IVF, had had an operation on my uterus to make it possible, but that somehow seemed to make me feel worse for a long time. So it was all a surprise, a happy one, and then it wasn't. I was 12 weeks pregnant, so it was painful, too, physically.

So for the first time since that happened, I have taken myself away from all that is familiar (well Kripalu is familiar, but not home and I'm not here with anyone I know) to walk through or screech through the feelings as the case may be.

Coming up by bus I felt the closer we got an almost exquisite sense of loneliness. I say exquisite not as in beautiful but as in so rarefied I almost didn't know what it was. Like distilled water, not mixed with any other emotion, either worse or better.

I then doubted whether this was a good idea, but then I realized, oh, of course, this part of grieving is that. It is lonely business. People can wave at you from their own shore and tell you about their own experience of such grief, and be holding you with love, but still you are alone in this ice floe.

It is grey and cold up here today, too, as if to kind of make the point. Underline it. On other hand, the weather in Cornwall was beautiful, the whole damn week that followed, too. We stayed there. What else to do? Go back to London and see everyone from the wedding and have them be pitying towards us. That somehow seemed worse. Would it have been? I don't know.

I think I was - I definitely was - in shock. So through all the blood and pain I hiked and hiked. Pad after pad soaking, trying to find places to throw them out. Why? Afraid of the pain? probably. Afraid of being alone and crushed by grief and loneliness. Definitely.

So, here I am. Alone. Waiting for my room.

Last time I was here, I posted a photo of this same view, and my stepfather David responded to it. He loved Kripalu, too. He died a couple days later, the day I returned - so that turned out to be our last communication. I found out the next day, as we all did. He was alone. He must have called 911 because an ambulance had come and brought him to the hospital, where his friend finally found his body. He was probably dead when he arrived. Massive heart attack. Out of nowhere. Boom. Alone.

So, coming up here felt way harder than usual. Was afraid even.

But as the volume goes down on the outside the world, the pain has a chance to surface. I do know from experience not just fortune cookies that experiencing pain mitigates suffering, but in the middle of it of course it can be hard to remember.

I haven't written a blog post in a while but this felt like the right time, if for no other reason than I am in the cafe drinking coffee and waiting for my room.

My temporary home for 3 days.



This is the view. I never tire of the way the mountains layer in color and form in the distance. One of the best things about getting out of the city is the ability to see distances. Even if misty and obscured.  There are literally shades of grey here today. And dark greens and blues...but mostly grey tinted by blue...

There is a lot of wind today - intimations of Orkney. Where I will be again this summer. These refuges I have been so lucky to find later in life. Where things change a lot, but there is something underneath deeper than these changes that remains.

It is precisely that to which I can attune more easily in these places and to which I attune more and more each year.

That is where that which can hold me through the healing resides. It doesn't make it less painful, but it makes it possible.