I sometimes feel as though I am whipsawed between two polar opposites who war in my body, and my mind. The “responsible me” who makes choices based on what is “safe” or “smart” and “dreamer me” that is trying to push past my fear, take risks, be brave and who (if I listen to my gremlins) risks sending us to certain doom.
Truth is I am neither of those people. I am fiercely resilient and a problem solver and someone who can look at any situation and give you best and worst case scenarios in the time it takes to say my name. I am a planner and an implementer and a person who can see all sides of a situation with a clarity that is alarming. I can see into hearts with tenderness and know what frightens and gladdens you without needing to hear your whispers. But, when you do whisper, I cherish what you shared as though it were the secret to everything. I am not religious but I am deeply spiritual, even when (especially when) I seem to lose my faith. I have known deep pain, and real loss, and given myself over to the Universe time and time again, only to find a new way emerge out of what at times felt like an impossible tangle. Several times over I lost sleep desperately afraid that I would lose everything. Indeed, I have lost lots of things (more than I would like) but never myself. No, even though its been very dark at times, and I have stumbled and tripped and turned about in circles, I never lost hold of myself.
Let me tell you a little secret. I am both extraordinarily happy and flat out scared these days. Often both at the exact same time. The happiness and fear–well they stem from the same piece of news in my life. I am, as a single mom, with no other means of support and barely any savings, planning to head back to school to open up a new life that has been calling me.
It is a choice that will mean student debt and a reduced salary and a choice to stop climbing the career ladder that has for so long defined me. It means financial gymnastics and the end to luxuries like bookstores and movie theaters and take out food and new clothes and air conditioning (and who knows what else). It means the end of my own house as I take in a housemate and the end of saying “of course” to Max without thinking about what we give up. Its means thinking about the price of gas before dashing across town. Its a choice that may mean giving up on providing Max a solid chunk of change for college in exchange for teaching him about following his heart and doing what others might say is impossible.
It is also a choice that means embracing something that feels as natural to me as breathing–finally choosing a path that may at times be challenging but never is hard.
The fear shows up sometimes as that exhilarating kind of scared you get right before jumping out of an airplane or riding the latest roller coaster. Sometimes its a dark kind of scared, like you feel when all the lights have gone out and the snow is piled up and you think you might just never get out again. But then, when my mind stops and I can listen to the song of my life, there is a happiness, a contentment, a feeling of relief and peace that comes when I no longer thinking– just doing–taking steps, shuffling one foot in front of the others, knowing that slowly, slowly I am making my own life– not simply making do and dreaming of a way out–but making my own way.
I am making my way as I make my bed and I sit in meditation and take my vitamins and drink my water and eat my breakfast because I know that self-care is fundamental especially when going through transitions.
I am making my way as I make Max’s lunch and discuss what we learn from TV (good and bad), as I drive him to school and help him with homework and put medicine on his feet and read him to sleep because even though he and I are both changing and growing with dizzying speed, my love for him is the North Star, the one true constant in my life.
I am making my way as I make my train, make appointments, make my meetings, make conversation, make eye contact because I know the most important way (perhaps the only way) that I make a difference is simply by showing up.
And yes, I am making (and remaking) budgets, making choices, making phone calls, making proposals, because this forward moving action, however slow or small, is the only way I will welcome in the change I seek.
I write here on this blog to a small circle of friends. Some I know in “real life”, others only by your sweet comments or lovely emails. I never mind the silence here but on the scarier days I need to know that I am not alone. If you come here, tell me so and hold my hand as I keep making way.
The daffodils that Max and I planted with John are now in full bloom
Six months ago, by the light of the bright moon, my friend John and I dug in earth and planted a daffodil with a wish wrapped around it. He had come to the house, after hours of writing his law school essays. He was frustrated and blocked, momentarily out touch in with his own amazing potential–the big dream of his life loomed huge, a mountain insurmountable. So he came to take a break and I dragged him out to plant daffodils.
Max and I wrote our wishes for John on pieces of paper and he too played along. We went outside and planted them, and then having declared what we hoped for him we all gave them over to the earth and recognized that like the daffodils–they too would bloom in time. I told him that now that the Earth was holding those big dreams he could let go of the “biggness” and focus on what was immediately in front of him. I think he thought me a bit crazy (as he often does when I drag him out to do these things) but he listens to me because I cook him dinner and tell him I am old enough to be his mother.
We watched the Caps game and cleaned the house. We stayed up late talking and even spent some time trying to break open the stickiness he was feeling around his essays. Somehow the weight of that essay–the need for it to be amazing as though it was a magic key that would unlock his dreams (or forever keep them hidden away)– made it so big. But I told him if he could just let go of all the meaning he was putting on the essay and write he would have no trouble. He is a gifted writer.
The next morning after Max’s hockey game John went home to write one of the best essays in the history of law school applications. I am sure it would have happened anyway but some how letting go of the big huge massive vision of the change we wanted, trusting it to the Earth or to God or to whoever makes sense to trust, made it easier to take the immediate steps. Its a lesson I keep forgetting but remember frequently with joy.
This weekend I have a heart both heavy and full. Yesterday, 6 months to the day when John planted his daffodil, he left the city where we became friends and headed out to begin his new life at his first choice law school, a top ranked school which not only accepted him with open arms but offered him cash as well. I am so incredibly proud of him for all the tiny steps and big leaps he took to walk the path toward his dream and I miss him because he was in every way a daily inspiration.
For so long now I have been overwhelmed by a very big dream myself, a dream of becoming a healer. On a good day it feels still just out of reach and on a bad day I can think that I am bat-shit crazy. To even get to the place where I thought I might be able to do this has required so much transformation and change and release of fear. All fall, I planted hundreds of daffodils myself, each one of them a prayer that I asked Mother Earth to hold. The flowers are blooming now and for me well its time to get cracking.
All spring, I have been consumed by hundreds of small steps that may just open up the path for me. Truth is I have been walking it already but now after months of slow wandering, it feels as though I am sprinting down it at lightning speed. There are thousands of tiny (but huge!) things that need to be done to pull me a long and I run the risk of getting paralyzed by each of them. We are renting our basement and I need to find the right tenant, line up the contractors to do work on the house (so said tenant can come in). Line up my financing, apply for scholarships, restructure my current paid work, figure out new ways to plug the gap between what I will be making part-time and our current expenses. And yes, I am doing all this while trying to keep our life humming along. To quote a dear friend of mine, I feel like I am balancing a refrigerator on my head. I could at any moment just give up and let the whole thing come crashing down, declaring that it is too damn hard.
But instead I keep remembering what I told John that chilly October night. Give the big dream over to the Earth and let her hold it and just do what is in front of you–right now. Don’t give it too much importance. Just walk, tiny step by tiny step and trust that if you do that, one day, that dream will blossom.
Seven years ago this weekend, Juan and I stayed up all night and he told me he was leaving. It took him another year to leave and several more for the divorce to become final. Its taken 3 years for other details to be laid to rest, property to transfer, documents to be signed. Years later we are still navigating and negotiating–consulting about rides to karate and child care back ups and sick days. Nothing is ever gained or lost–it is just transformed and so too it is with the kind of commitments one makes to our children. But something feels big about crossing over the threshhold of seven.
Even as I write I am crossing a big milestone. I am putting stamps on the final document I need to send in–at least what I think is the final document to lay to rest another detail, the final big one.
One last big step away from an us that ceased to exist that night 7 years ago and one more step deeper into the magical and marvelous life that I am building–step by step, breath by breath, glorious morning by morning.
Seven years is a very long time. When things take that long to fully dissolve it can create a kind of inertia. The documents that needed to be mailed sat on my desk all week. In a timeline that has unfolded this slowly, a week is but a blink of an eye.
Sometimes I can get so frustrated with myself and the slow pace with which my life has seemed to unfold lately. Even the simplest of tasks seem to take longer some days. And yet, the landscape of my life has not changed by earthquakes but has instead been shaped by a slow steady rain, years and years of patient life giving rain that has worn new paths, shaped stones, grown trees and moss. Looking out at my garden I am in awe of the beauty that has resulted. Yes it is transformed, quietly, slowly. When I look at the results, who am I to curse the pace?
Some things take longer. Lifetimes or centuries. Millennia even. In the scheme of things, what is seven years? Seven years to finally put to rest something I thought would last a lifetime doesn’t seem that long, even as it feels like an eternity.
And yet there is something about the passing of seven years that makes me stand and take notice. Springing out of bed, as though an alarm has sounded. Enough already. Lets get moving.
Seven feels like a complete number, magical and round. Time now to dust off my hands and whatever inertia is left and move up and out and all around. Shake the earth and move the boulders. Its time. Its time.
I just made the mistake of reading a long back and forth on someone’s facebook page–the kind of rants inspired by wars and Wisconsin. I never should read those diatribes. They never lead to anything good. Case in point: I am having a hard time breathing.
I am having a hard time these days with lines drawn so firmly in the sand. With open hands turned into tight closed fists. Mine. Yours. Fights and struggles over who deserves what. Name calling. Power plays. People not wanting to share.
The illusion that seems so real to so many, the illusion that we are separate seems to be all I see and hear and feel these days. It hurts my heart. The constant infusion of fear and hatred (You are going to take what is mine! you have more than me! You don’t deserve the (fill in the blank)! ) is suffocating. Crushing.
Truth is we are one. Connected and intertwined whether we like it or not. Your poverty hurts me. You joy creates space and openness in my life. Its that simple. When your blood spills it pollutes my water. We are in it together though we like to pretend that its a zero sum game.
I don’t know how to stand in such a mindset anymore–that place where someone has to lose so that someone can win. One where we only get richer by making sure that someone doesn’t get what we have. One where we are constantly vigilant for the thief who will rob us blind, or the neighbor who will take too much if we are not careful.
I am not naive. I know that thieves and liars exist. I know that those who worry that no one will ever feed them in the lean times will horde now leaving still more to starve. I also know that those who share everything they have risk going hungry by giving. Recognition that we are so interconnected and acting upon this recognition requires the greatest act of faith.
And yet I am beginning to see that there is no other way forward.
The Journey
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice–
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do–
determined to save
the only life you could save.
Mary Oliver
Some days are harder than most, the days when even the most simple of tasks weigh heavy and it is as though the entire universe has dug in its heels and says NO! Days when disappointment and frustration is palpable and progress is laughable. When everything feels impossible. On those days there is only surrender.
And then, sometimes, in the silence that follows the giving up, there are quiet whispers that promise a way forward, or at least change of some sort. Perhaps its an idea, more often its a flower, or a bird song, or the kindness of the guy at the mechanic who is more upset than I that I still have no windshield wipers and the rain is coming…Something that holds me gently and suggests a step in a new direction, or maybe just another breath.
So often, however, I don’t hear the wisdom through the silence but instead am wailing and gnashing my teeth at the unfairness, consumed by my own despair over the endless spinning. The pushing and the wailing both feel so noble but they are no more than an exercise in exhaustion.
I am learning sometimes that giving up and giving in is the wisest of moves. Ironically, it is the only thing that allows me to conserve the energy I need to keep on keeping on.
I don’t know how to teach my son stamina–how to teach him to keep moving forward when the winds of life are pushing back, sweeping sand into his eyes. So much easier it is to sink into the ground, on knees, crumple into a heap, or lay in a position of rest with face to the sun, like a cat with her belly exposed and the sunbeam warm. Is there wisdom in that place of laying down? More wisdom than in the pushing forward against the wind to no avail. What can be learned in that place?
Are we really weak when we admit we can’t go on? Or are we strong to admit that now is not the time to push forward anymore.
You can be brave now…That is something that my friend Jen likes to tell me and I believe her because she really knows about bravery. When I was a little girl I used to think brave people were people who didn’t feel fear. I know now that the brave ones are those who lean into their fear–feel it fully, let it wash over them and then get up and get moving. They feel the fear and then make the right choice, take the leap, run the risk, stumble through the forest in the dark.
I have been doing some major rearranging of soul furniture over here this fall–trying to imagine a different way of living–or to be more accurate, trying to manifest a path toward a life that I have dreamt for a long time. Truth is, I have no idea how I am getting there but I am tired of waiting for answers and saviors and everything to neatly come together. Not having my ducks lined up feels very scary but I am starting to just set out on path and make it as I go, step by step. I am ready to be walking, even if the path is twisty and not straight and clear, instead of sitting by the side of the road waiting for directions. I am trusting that everything that happens from here on out, the good, the bad and the downright ugly is just a necessary step on that journey.
Living faithfully means giving up a certain bit of control, something that is not always easy for me, trusting that the Universe knows what I need to learn and what is good for me and trusting that the experiences that show up on my doorstep are good ones, even if they are painful or challenging. It means reframing every difficult circumstance so that I see myself as a student. Its hard to imagine that leaning into the bad times is a good exercise but of course, deep in my heart I know that it is.
“Not knowing” does not mean “not moving”. But it does mean being brave in the dark.
9 Ways to Be Brave When the Night is Really Dark
1. Sing yourself a lullaby
2. Dig into the dirt and ask the earth to hold your dreams.
3. Pay attention to self care: sleep as long as you need to, nap, eat well, move your body.
4. Take walks with dear friends.
5. Get really still and listen to what your heart tells you to do. And then do it: Bake cookies. Play with art supplies. Play your guitar. Clean the kitchen. Dance in the kitchen. Read outloud in bed. These are the things that will carry you forward in the most unlikely ways without you even realizing it.
6. Ask for what you need. Ask and ask again. Be fierce about it if you need to be.
7. Reunite with old loves and old friends and remember all that has always been good about yourself.
8. Wear your favorite t-shirt, your favorite kick ass boots and your favorite jeans.
9. Cry when you need to. Get angry when you need to. Then sing yourself a lullaby and start over again.
I am opening a space here in my heart, in my house, in my life. I am opening up a wide open space for miracles. I am feeling a huge shift, as though everything is about to change and I am trusting that all will be well…all will be well and all manner of things will be well.
Things are blowing up, unlocking and transforming all around me. It started this summer when someone I love got really really sick. It was then when I was faced with how quickly change happens. One minute we are lounging by the pool and the next minute we are sitting on the side of the road, with our arms wrapped around our knees in tears. In the space of 5 minutes everything changes.
And then in small and big ways the “way things have always been” started to get unglued. Everything started to unravel. In every corner of my life I am being asked to let go of something. And I am simply trusting, after all that I have learned, that this letting go is simply to create the space for something to be born. I don’t know what that something is yet. I can’t even begin to imagine and so instead, I light my candles, go about my work and leave the door open for miracles.
The other night I made chocolate chip cookies and poured tea and cuddled my boy while I climbed in bed and talked in whispers with some of my dear ones huddled in their hotel rooms. We talked until I was so tired I no longer made sense, long after everything that needed to be said had been said. Its this kind of self care and kindness and compassion that is necessary in times like these. Tonight I practiced music I love to play, watched old music videos from the 80s and then curled up on the couch and listened to my friend play guitar while the kitten nestled herself into my lap. These are the things we can do to simply be, to squeeze the pleasure and beauty out of a day some would call awful. This is how I open to miracles.
Last night at midnight I slipped outside into the sharp autumn and sat down on the cold slate pathway in front of my house. And I breathed. Counted my breaths, one, two, three, four all the way to ten and back again.
And now, I am listening to the rain. That soothing, melodic rain. Its like a lullaby and I am half asleep already. Comforted in the arms of some invisible angel who whispers to me in time to the rain, “all will be well….all will be well…”
I have no idea how this will turn out–these sudden crazy shifts. It could simply be we are experiencing earthquakes but after the shakes it will look pretty much the same around here. Or it could be that new mountains will be born. Either way, the world will keep spinning and I will be wiser.
Yes I am holding out for miracles: little miracles and big ones too. Miracles that will set the world spinning in the most delicious and unlikely of ways. Miracles that will heal and miracles that will inspire and miracles that will reorganize and miracles that will hold me.
Sometimes in order to get moving you need to break up, break out, break through,
Smash apart something that you once settled for to make space for what is meant to be yours.
Sometimes you need to stomp your feet and bellow in order to open up the space where you will shine instead of being forgotten in the foot lights.
And sometimes you need to strongly draw a line that cannot be crossed, no matter how innocently to protect your heart from folks who stumble blindly and don’t want to open their eyes.
Sometimes you need to walk away from the thing that only sometimes sorta works, even though you have no idea if anything better will be found. Even though it means you will lose everything that you thought kinda sorta held you once upon a time and you think that maybe that thing was the closest you’ll ever get.
Sometimes you need to be fierce.
Because you can’t play this small anymore.
Because if being compassionate does not always mean being “nice”. And sometimes you need to stand completely on your own in order to see how the universe does provide.
Because you need to remember who you are–even the parts that scare you.
Because that is the only way forward. That is the only way.
1. Listen to the wisdom of 4 year olds.
2. Dance freely without worry about what you look like.
3. Curl up on the couch and let someone sing you to sleep.
4. Say yes when you want to and no when you don’t.
5. Go on secret missions with young friends (like my dear John) to leave message of hope around the city with sidewalk chalk.
6. Welcome someone who needs you into your home.
7. Then, let the kitten sleep on your bed (as if you have a choice).
8. Call your cousin (or whoever it is in your life who you know loves you to your toes).
9. Take pictures of everyone you love and the things that fill your heart with gratitude.
10. Drink chai tea.
11. Laugh completely and entirely–don’t hold back, even if you need to lay down on the floor and tears are pouring down your cheeks.
12. Take a long bath followed up with a warm shower.
13. Skinny dip every chance you get.
14. Read out loud. Snuggle long after the little one has fallen asleep.
15. Make guacamole and eat the entire bowl–or save some for lunch. Or eat the entire bowl and then make some more for lunch.
16. Get lost in a book.
17. Take the metro. Take walks.
18. Tell the people you love that you love them–even when, especially when, it might seem like it is coming out of the blue.
19. Get new glasses so that you can see clearly.
20. Clean out the closets. Clean the floors. Clean the bathtub.
21. Head out into the woods and stay there for a few days.
22. Cry when you need to.
23. Play your guitar–loudly (even if its badly). Play only for yourself if you want.
24. Wade in the water’s edge. Let your feet sink into the mud and get all sticky.
25. Move into action even as you sit in stillness.
26. Cook dinner with your dear ones and eat it outside.
27. Go out for icecream and let it drip down your face and get on your nose.
28. Drive to a farm and pick fresh berries, peaches, plums or whatever is in season.
29. Light candles and say prayers just sit silently and hold hard moments for what they are. Trust that “All will be well and all manner of things shall be well.” Whisper it until you believe it.
30. Throw your arms around the people who delight you.
Inspired by the gorgeous Jen Lemen and my dear cousin Leenie both who have reminded me that the only time I am ever unhappy is when I find myself wanting the joy I don’t have and ignoring the crazy joy exploding around me.
