Sometimes it is vital to let one thing rest to fully engage in another.
My family has arrived to celebrate the holiday season.
So I am setting everything else down for these next days, to be fully in that.
The art of relationship.
The craft of being fully in an experience.
The skill of sitting in all the delight and tension of being in family.
When I let go of the notion that healing is about being fixed, restored to an unblemished state, scarless and pure, unbroken, then I feel that true healing is possible and available.
I have come to see how constructs of purity exist all around me, and around all of us, and how harmful and oppressive they are.
We are not pure, it is unobtainable. We can strive to be and do better, but purity is a ploy. It is a lie. Worst of all it is used to degrade ourselves and others. It tears us apart as individuals and collectives. It is a form of violence.
Purity dogmas are ruthless and unforgiving. They offer no redemption, only judgment, and punishment.
I embrace the path of being broken open, of being a wounded healer, the way of compassion, integrity, and love.
I welcome anyone to join me here. We all are included. We all are worthy.
I know one thing about light. It returns.
Today is the darkest day of the year.
I notice how I have followed the season. Embracing the dark. The way it leads me deeper in, to places worth knowing.
Darkness then becomes a welcoming. I do not transform it, it transforms me. It shows me what it really is. A place to land, not to escape from.
I can be here, and honor it, what it offers.
The light will return slowly, steadily. I welcome it too.
I see beauty. Intentionally.
I make a spiritual practice of it.
I adjust my eyes for it.
It is my faith.
It keeps me afloat.
It fills me with wonder.
To be here living in this beauty.
I am a part of it.
You are too.
Getting clean.
That means a lot of different things.
Today I did laundry, vacuumed, mopped.
Tomorrow, more laundry and bathrooms.
I am getting my house extra clean for holiday guests. As much as I rail against it, I care what people think.
Coming clean. Owning all that I am, quite often a set of contradictions. I am coming to terms with that.
I am trying to do writing that comes clean.
I am an addict. I use various things. Addiction is not about the thing I am using it is about what I am numbing, what I am escaping.
That is step one in getting clean.
My daughter stands at the cooktop carefully considering the frozen dumplings she is cooking.
She lamented that she is not old enough to cook. I disagreed. 12 is old enough to do so many things. I let her use the gas stove. Fire.
I think about how scary it is actually to let them become grown, independent, self reliant.
My son comes home from college tomorrow. I will breathe easier when he is here back under my roof and I can try to assess his state of being. Not that I think I can undo anything he may have chosen out there on his own. I know that, but it does worry me, it stirs my fear.
We want to keep our kids safe, but we can't if we want them to know freedom.
Freedom is not safe. Freedom is risky. Freedom is dangerous.
It is reasonable to steer them away from recklessness, but I even wonder about that.
When does our pursuit of safety become oppression?
Where is that line?
I say I want freedom. Am I willing to give it as well?
I realize that my writing these days may come across as bleak, a downer, brooding. It may even bring to mind a descriptor I truly dislike, "pity party".
I am finally at a place in my life where I can say, maybe it is, so fucking what.
I am going through a cavernous depression. I use the word cavernous because it closely describes the feeling for me. Hollowed out, cold, lonely, pulled away, withdrawing.
It is not that I am devoid of happiness, or contentment, or gratitude, but right now other things are prevalent, needing my attention.
Sadness, grief, uncertainty, loss, transition. These bring me to the cavern, the dug out place, a temple of heartache.
This temple is not unholy, quite the opposite. It offers great and sacred riches. But we can't unearth them when no one will come help tend the fire. It is too painful to stay the vigil alone.
I am not suggesting we languish there.
I am suggesting we do not defile or defame these states of being and run away never looking back, or even looking at all.
Take the time to look. To be curious. To be there. To know that place. Light a fire, gather your people and tell the stories that live there. Write your name on her wall. Give her some respect.
It isn't that I don't want to talk about happiness. It is that I do not want to make happiness into cheap fodder, the bland currency of life, the common, basic, drivel.
Happiness, and not just happiness, but joy, ecstacy, jubilation, along with sorrow, grief, despair, all the depth and nuance of human experience, deserves better than that.
What is real?
I am deep in daily inquiry around that question.
I look around and witness people living in different realities, seemingly different worlds. They engage in fierce battles over "what is real". I participate sometimes.
I fight within myself over what is real.
Every. Single. Day.
I confront fear, anxiety, depression, all the dark corner phantoms. They insist on their power, their realness. I tell them they are not real. Sometimes I win, and they retreat at those words, a banishing incantation.
They come back.
Are things that we can't catch hold of real or unreal? Truth or untruth?
I go out in the woods and down to the river. That is the realest real there is. The dirt, the water, the trees, the sky. The wordless depths of nature. Life, death. The pure struck note of beingness.
When I am back in civilization and all the questions come flooding back. I try to remember that right now the trees are there, the river is flowing, things are living and dying, coming and going, and that pure note is being struck.
I am here, and someday I will be gone.
That is real.
There is a yogic practice called tapas. It is the practice of discipline or zeal in practice. It is a principle of fire and will.
There is another practice called santosha. It is the practice of contentment. It is of the qualities of surrender and faith.
I make lists for myself. Things I need to attend to, or wish to accomplish.
I write my lists on paper, old school.
I check the items off one at a time as I get things done.
My lists are not lofty or shooting for the stars. They are deeply ordinary for the most part.
Groceries
Household chores
Appointments made and to be made
Emails to send
School functions
Things to look into for myself
Write
Photograph
Plan a class or for classes to come
Organize this and that...
These lists are a form of yoga practice. They keep me disciplined and moving forward even, and especially, when I want to waste away on the couch.
When I get a list done I feel that state of contentment.
Maybe this does not sound transcendent or even transformational.
It probably does not occur as a profound or highly evolved path.
It is a simple practice. It is chop wood and carry water. It is a way to hold things up and care for myself and those who rely upon me.
In that sense it is powerful, potent, and more than enough.
I see the starlings nearly every day right now.
They appear at the tree line, flying together, in formation. This is called a murmuration.
The other day Harper and I stood outside with the dogs at sunset in complete wonderment as they filled the sky above us for at least twenty minutes. Thousands upon thousands of them swooping and soaring through the darkening sky.
I am struggling with loneliness.
I have lived in my new town for six months and have only one friend anywhere nearby.
I think about friends who have come and gone.
We always say we will keep in touch. But I am not good at that and I seem to choose friends who are like me.
Birds of a feather flock together.
But now I am a flock of one.
I am out running and the starlings fly overhead. I think of running pals I have had over the years.
I used to run with a group. We were a flock, but I moved away. They moved on.
Then in my next town I had a single running friend, so dear, like a sister.
I moved away. Far away, across the world, but we held on to each other.
I found out I would be coming back, we were so excited and had big plans, but she was also very sick.
I am back, but not living in that town and she passed almost a year ago now.
I was out running alone yesterday and the starlings appeared in their numbers, staying together so magically, a mystical dance. Such grace.
I couldn't hold back the grief and heartache of my solitude.
I stood in the street and cried.
Living with trauma.
Wounds that stay tender.
Sometimes they split open even after many years.
They bleed.
I am not exceptional in this experience. It is common, though extremely diverse. We all share this wounded way of living in some way, or I feel we do.
I am only exceptional perhaps in my willingness to give it a voice, publically, unapologetically. I am not the only one doing that, but we are not the norm.
To stay with our pain with tenderness and compassion is to be split open. It is deep acknowledment of a rich and sacred part of being human.
This is not wallowing or reistance to healing. This is being together in honesty. This is being real. This is the healing, to stay with each other and hold each other as we bleed.
May we not be split apart, but split open, just as seeds split so they can grow. May we stay and grow these hearts again and again, together.
As a matter of our culture in general, but especially this time of year I feel something needs to be said firmly and clearly.
Sadness is not a character flaw.
Grief is not a character flaw.
Loneliness is not a character flaw.
Living outside traditions is not a character flaw.
Having painful stories and life histories during this time is not a character flaw.
Having a full spectrum of emotions and claiming the right to your own experience, even when it seems to be one that leaves you apart and in the wilderness is not a flaw. It is beautiful. I am out here with you.
We are busy preparing for the holiday.
We are hosting family and a friend of Avery's from Taiwan. It will be a full and noisy house, unlike the quiet I have been immersed in these days.
We are decorating all out, lights, wreath, garland, a huge tree we went and cut down at a family farm, buckets of ornaments old and new.
Santa is figuring heavily throughout.
Stockings are hung over the fireplace.
Preparing to gather is bringing me a warmth that softens my resistance to the increasing cold outside, and the deep feeling of loss and loneliness which I am walking with.
Deck the halls, hold my hand.
My heart lightens.
A teacher told me there are really only two prayers, "help me, help me, help me" , and "thank you, thank you, thank you".
I know those prayers. I say them often. Mostly together, both, not one or the other.
Sometimes I hold them pressed gently together between my hands, drawn to my heart. Soft hum of breath. I feel them echoing in me like ripples of waves, gentle wind. Steady but moving, shifting things in me. Tender but powerful.
Other times I grasp them in fists and launch them toward heaven. I stomp them into the earth. I howl and scream. Then they are like tempest gales, seismic waves.
But there are other prayers in me that live outside the bounds of language. I feel them in my bones, deep in the center of my heart and lungs, flowing in my veins, river of my spine. Prayers of embodiment, of nature and knowing. Ancient, wordless. They need no response. They are the answer.
I am a misfit.
I always loved the island of misfit toys on the Rudolph Christmas special. I belong to that place, those kinds of beings.
I sometimes feel like I belong. With my husband and kids, in certain rooms with certain people...I mostly belong to nature.
I have always felt safe, protected, and held out in fields and forests. I don't have to be anyone to belong there.
I love people, but I usually feel askew and awkward with them. I feel like I have to hide, perform, wear my mask.
Outside, no mask, no performance.
I wish I could make my island of misfits.
I know there are others like me. I love you and us. I love the way we are the splash of color, the interesting angle, the what if of everything.
We belong.
Thanksgiving just passed and my energy is pulled toward considerations of the latter part of the word.
Giving.
What do I give? Is it what I should be giving? Are my motivations clean and clear? What is my impact?
I have given large parts of myself to bringing up others. It seems selfless looking at it from certain angles, but looking from the portal of my own heart's truthful acknowledgment I see it has been earnest, and intentioned from love, but flawed. Because I am flawed.
Giving is not pure. It is complicated and nuanced and sometimes it is harmful.
It is important to acknowledge harm we have done when we get clear vision to see it, or it is told to us. We must learn to soften around being people who do harm even in our best intentioned giving.
Forgiveness is not easy and sometimes not possible. The healing power of forgiveness requires the vulnerability to be honest and know none of us are innocent of doing harm.
Perhaps the best giving I can do right now is this acceptance and statement of being both someone who gives and loves, as well as being someone who does harm intentionally and unintentionally, and seek a way to forgive myself.
My guest is gone and boys are still asleep.
The familiar quiet permeates this house.
My dog gets up. I hear his paws on wood floor, his breath, he is drinking water noisily.
His sounds come warm to my ears, soothing. The quiet is less dense, lighter.
I take a deep breathe myself.
I heard so many positive and loving things about myself as a teacher this past week.
I know they are true and real, but here I am back in this new place, quiet house, stripped bare of identity.
Anything could happen, but I am having trouble making out the first step.
Or I hesitate for fear of a first misstep.
It is cold outside now. I remind myself that this is the season of turning in and gathering.
It is ok to pause, to not know, to take time.
Quiet is still a gift. Still a gift.
I have missed writing this week.
I was away doing work that uplifts and sustains me.
Sustenance and nourishment is something we all seek and deserve on all levels.
I have found it challenging to acheive a state of consistent nourishment, resulting in episodes of sharp discontentment and depression.
The reasons why this happens are many and complex. Some are beyond my control, but others like not believing in my own worthiness, and acts of self sabotage are mine and mine alone.
I have a frequent intense inner ache, a painful unsettled feeling that something vital is missing.
In those moments what I am missing is myself. My true, bright, shining, fully expressed self.
I will continue steadfastly and relentlessly to claim her, love her, be her.
I refuse to go missing.
I am hurrying to pack up and get on the road.
Five and a half hours to my son's dorm.
I did not drive in Asia. I liked not driving, but I didn't like not driving.
Relationships, even with things as mundane as driving, are complicated.
I am most prone to panic attacks while driving, especially on high overpasses and bridges. This drive has three bridges, big bridges.
I remember my breathing exercise and affirmation to stop panic attacks.
I breathe slowly and sigh out softly on the exhale, I tell myself, "This is not real."
It mostly works.
I look out the window and it is raining leaves, yellow and rust color.
They twirl and glide as they descend. So graceful, a dance.
Language is limited. I can't fully describe the beauty of this rain of leaves.
A photo or video would fail too.
Experience is a true wonder.
If all of us looked out my window right now and then wrote a poem, we would have as many unique poems as people.
We are a wonder just like those leaves dancing and twirling, separately but together.
We would do well to walk through the world and remember that.
I will try.
Yesterday I noticed a big groundhog curled up in a ball in my yard. I tried to rouse him, stomping, clapping.
I got close enough to see the rise and fall of breath. He was curled into himself, on the way out of this world.
Yellow leaves falling around him.
Today he is fallen over, laid out on the ground. Gone.
My girls are sad. The youngest wonders why I didn't do something or call someone to save him.
These things do not get easier. I asked myself the same question. Why can't I rescue things?
Death and loss are not things I have matured into being at ease with, even though I contemplate it as much as I do.
Honestly, I am afraid. Terrified.
This need to examine dying is a fundamental piece of me. I am pulled toward relationship with it. I have sought extended forms of support around it. It has my name on it.
I wish it didn't.
I have a little plastic porpoise on my altar.
A dear friend gave it to me one summer on retreat. He smiled and said, "I heard you are trying to find your life porpoise."
We laughed. But it was true. A deep cutting truth.
Purpose. What is it?
I have four beautiful children.
I have done other things, but motherhood has been my vocation, and I have done it pretty well. I have made mistakes and done harm, but if we are honest we all do.
It should be enough. I tell myself that.
But I remain hungry, unsettled.
Haunted by things that might have been. Hunted by what the world seems hell bent on having me believe.
I should have done that. I should be doing this.
Get followers, make a brand, market and package and push.
I have swallowed these messages, even though they hurt me. I do not judge myself for that.
That same friend also drew an angel for me. The angel of discernment. This angel is stark, shadowed, and weilds a mighty sword.
I call on that angel. He sits on my altar and holds my little plastic porpoise.
To live in a body. We all do.
These bodies of pleasure and pain.
These bodies of lost and found.
These bodies of light and shadow.
These bodies of smooth and scarred skin.
These bodies that hold our secrets.
What we hide the body keeps, loyally, dedicated.
Sometimes some of us hate our bodies. I do sometimes.
I get claustrophobic in my own skin. I want to claw my way out.
I love my body when I let go of fear and take her as my one true love.
We dance, we run, we play. I am lucky to have this body.
I think about her death. I look at my feet and imagine them lifeless. I grieve myself.
The loss of me already well on its way.
Is that morbid? Unseemly?
I think it is essential.
I am not so good at parties.
My small talk escalates too quickly to things that are not small at all, and if there is a dance floor me and my body take it by storm. Unabashedly embodied and fully alive.
Mondays come and bring with them an empty house. A blanket of quiet.
I eat my breakfast. I notice the sound of knife and fork on plate, the hum of the refrigerator, my dog snoring, a crow outside.
I am tempted to turn the television on to add a layer of human presence into the space.
I decide not to. I stay with the quiet.
I probably will not speak out loud to another person until the middle school bus pulls up.
That is not a very long time, but quiet stirs my impatient nature, rubs up against the raw skin of my insecurity. I get agitated at the space.
Why?
I sip my coffee and consider the gift of space to feel. To sense. To experience. The discomfort of being with myself. A great gift.
I go back to unwrapping it.
It was not supposed to rain today, but it is.
We went running anyway.
An older man came down his driveway, he grinned and said, "Hey it's raining!", he finished his proclamation with a chuckle.
We chuckled back and said, "It is?!"
I need to run most on days like this one. It keeps the dark, the chill, the heavy energy from sinking through my body and settling into my spirit.
I am running away from things, literally.
Running from depression, from anxiety, from these internal foes that seem committed to pursuing me.
I may be outnumbered, but I have stamina.
I used to be a person who got stuff done.
That came after the time when I was an abject failure, a loser, a criminal.
My life was over, then it wasn't.
That is when expectations came marching in. I started marching. Fell in line.
Get things done. Once you get those things done, do more things, bigger things, better things.
I just finished sweeping the floor, now I will fold laundry. I get some things done.
But these days I don't get me done.
I am not even sure what that means anymore.
Who am I?
Really, I want to go out deep in the woods, away from the world and all its doing, and be done.
But today the laundry.
Even to signal the completion of this post, I have to click on the word "DONE" with a check mark in front of it.
We can hide from so many things. We can even hide from ourselves.
We can bury things out in the backyard, or way out in the woods, where we think they will remain forever.
Things once hidden come calling. Someday.
Truth telling is hard work, and it is slippery. Truth changes. It is hard to get hold of, and as soon as I think I have it, it shifts like the light and shadows in this room. The arc of story is not fixed. It is moving, just as the light of day will move through this space, into darkness, and back again.
I wonder what I am hiding, from others, but more from myself. I know some things, I can touch them. Others are there, things forgotten, neglected, things denied, things that hurt too much to exhume.
So they wait.
Movement is life.
That is a line from a poem I wrote in anticipation of my son moving away to attend college.
If the heart stops beating, blood stops flowing, lungs stop expanding and releasing, we die.
Since my son was born we have moved, and moved. 5 states, 3 countries, 2 continents. 8 homes in 18 years.
Each time we move is like dying and being brought back to life. It seems like it gets harder each time now. It takes so much out of me.
I love to dance, to run outside, to hike forest trails, do yoga, swim in a lake. Movement calls to me, and I go to it. It is a powerful agent of healing in my life.
I have been in this house nearly 5 months now. I force myself to my healing movement practices. My heart beating, blood flowing, lungs expand and release.
But in truth I am tired.
In truth I have endurance and stamina.
So when there is mention of a recruiter calling from London, I tighten, and want to brace. Curl up hard as stone. Become immovable, but that is not life.
Movement is life.
My 12 year old is standing in the kitchen dressed up as a Pink Lady. She is sweet, she is so innocent, well adjusted. She has a life full of abundance and privilege.
I started smoking at 12. I look at her and try to imagine her lighting up, like Sandra Dee at the end of Grease. It blows my mind. It is absurd.
I was not well adjusted, not even trying to be good.
I knew I was bad.
Halloween in the traditional sense is a day when we can more easily contact spirits and ancestors. It is also a day to fend off evil, to protect ourselves from malevolent forces.
I pause to consider today in that way. What forces and spirits I want to draw close, those guides out in front of me and within me, and what I want to ward off.
But I think all of it just wants to be seen, loved, set free.
A friend of mine and I have been discussing, belonging, goodness, and our culture of purity and performance.
I was not bad at 12, or 16, or 20, or ever. I performed a role I was pushed into. I surrendered to what I was told I was. I performed, and my performance lived. I embraced it. I wore a mask. Badness.
I perform now too. I wear a mask. It is one of goodness. Good mom, good citizen, repectful, trying hard to please, trying hard not to offend. Being good.
Neither mask in the end serves my truth, they both stifle and oppress.
I am conflicted and confused in all this. I am my own labyrinth. I think maybe we all are. We are complex, so much bigger than simplistic notions of good or bad.
I carry that with me today. I walk with it, dance with it, light a candle to it. May it all rise to its highest, most free form.
Rainy Sunday. Staying inside.
Laundry, grocery list, unpacking, cleaning.
Domestic day.
Content with that because the weather is inside weather. I can see the trees through the window. Rain drips down the glass.
I sent a text to my son who is away at college. Call me, I said.
I look out the window, through rain, grey, out into the trees. I miss him and I wonder what he is looking at now. Maybe he is still in bed, in dreams.
I wonder what he dreams about.
I start to sort the socks.
Hiking this morning with hubby. Feeling so alive out in the woods at the rivers edge, off trail, skirting around rock ledge, on an almost cliff, just enough danger to warm me up from the cold air.
Earth will hold and sustain us, but she also demands presence and respect, attention, when we dare to go out in the wilds, the water, the cliff edge...if we are not respecting her with our full attention she will fuck us up. It isn't personal, it is just her way.
Even if you are fully present and aware, things can happen out there, and they do. That is reality, we are vulnerable, things get destoyed, it is not personal. It is inevitable. We are guaranteed nothing.
Being born, existing, dying, are all we are entitled to in the natural world. And none of that is inherently personal.
Nature is beautiful, nature is brutal. That is honest. We are part of that nature.
The song "Lovesong" from the Disintegration album by The Cure was on the radio today. I listened to that album nearly every night of my freshman year of college. It lulled me to sleep with its deep and earthy tones, sadness and falling felt. Letting go into weighted, heavy, grieving places.
To disintegrate is something I pray for too, it is like death but still breathing. That way of dying in life. A way to freedom.
What I want most is freedom.
