Loss
Pauline Boss, a Family Therapist, coined the term "ambiguous loss." Ambiguous loss is, in part, a conceptualization of grief that dismantles the popular idea of five tidy stages that once endured, end with closure. Closure is a seductive idea, but the reality of loss and grief, at least in my experience, has never been linear or finite. This summer I was startled to find fresh grief over something I thought I was through mourning. The poem that follows came out of that experience.
I am diving into that
bottomless blue pool
exploring the margins
that grow wider
with each approach
Where is this pain?
Where does it live
on a cellular level?
And can it be excavated?
I know the answer
to this last question,
and still I dive deeper.
But there it remains
in an unreachable
fiber of my being
My world has grown larger.
This pain will make it
grow larger still.
Just when I think she’s gone
Grief reemerges,
and crawls into
bed next to me.
I know this pattern,
and it is not
without tenderness
that I greet her.
Several of my dearest friends are dealing with their own losses and manifestations of grief this week. As we talk, the line from Rilke’s poem, "I live my life in widening circles..." floats in the back of my head. The widening circles may provide a new perspective on, and relationship to, grief, but the process of saying goodbye to loved ones or to cherished ideas or hopes or expectations is revisited again and again throughout a lifetime.
I have been delighted to discover in my own life that keeping grief as a companion does not preclude joy. That closure is not in fact necessary for a happy life. And that living my life in widening circles ensures that there is in fact room for the full spectrum of human experiences to comfortably co-exist.
Containing Multitudes
Privilege has afforded me the opportunity to see first hand myriad ways that a person can choose to live his or her life. And this exposure raises the question again and again: How is it that I want to live in this world?
Whenever these thoughts arise it is Sylvia Plath’s image of the fig tree from The Bell Jar that comes to mind:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
This image of the figs of possibility has resonated so much with me that I internally refer to the different life paths I could take as “my figs.” Imagining all those figs twinkling out on the branch, and knowing that in choosing one I give up another gives weight to Kierkegaard’s insight that there is such a thing as “a despair of too much possibility.”
So how do you choose (if you are lucky enough to have such choices)? Because the truth is you cannot have them all. Or rather, you can perhaps sample many figs, but if you want to truly savor one, then you have to let some doors close and let some paths remain unseen. And I'm getting to a point where I know that while a feast might be alluring, a simple meal is what I actually want.
Every time I have elected to let one life path go, I’ve been filled with sadness, and sometimes even incredible grief, and always a curiosity of, “what would that path have been like?” I think these feelings are normal, but not altogether helpful for finding contentment in the life I am actually living.
Walt Whitman gave voice to one of the greatest paradoxes of human life when he asked:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
I have to imagine that the many figs on the branch are manifestations of the many aspects of an individual human being. One thing that feels essential to me, is that whatever life path I pick, it must have space for the multiple, contradictory elements that are part of my sense of self. There is not enough time, even if I live to a ripe old age, to live out each and every life fantasy, but I do believe that it is essential to choose an external path that creates space for exploring the full inner landscape. And perhaps that is all the guidance I need for making my choices.
The Art of Becoming
I’ve been a teacher for seven years. My classrooms have been diverse: working farms, wilderness areas, and brick and mortar schoolrooms. Universally, the most rewarding part of being a teacher has been bearing witness to my student’s “A-ha” moments. I say bearing witness, because no good teacher would claim that they produced these “A-ha” moments—the most any teacher can do is create conditions conducive for profound learning to take place, and from there the student is responsible for making the magic happen. Indeed it works this way outside of formal scholastic settings too. To have an idea become part of the fabric of our being it has to—at some point—feel as though it is coming from us, rather than to us, a personal revelation that recalibrates the way we see the world.
When I began the collection that is the foundation stone of this website—Collective Wisdom—I realized with some measure of disappointment and also a good deal of relief that the wise people in our world whose work I was reading regarding the human experience were all saying the same things. Not word for word, but their core ideas were comparable. And yet, despite this enduring collective wisdom, each individual must rediscover the pulse of the human experience for him or herself.
Several years ago when one of my personal “A-ha” moment was beginning to crystalize, I was charged with teaching a sixth grade science course that began with a unit on plate tectonics. The unit guide I was given advised me to make a pudding (to represent magma) and layer cookies on top (to represent the plates making up the Earth’s crust), and heat the confection and watch the show. The cookies would jiggle on the heated semi-solid pudding, and the young scientists would understand the world in miniature. In truth, it seemed like a lot of work on my end, and a big leap on my students’ end, to equate a small bowl of pudding with the Earth.
Perhaps it also seemed like an insufficient lesson, because just a month prior to teaching that unit on plate tectonics, I’d been a student myself on a backpacking course in the Wind River Range where giant, shifting boulder fields had been my first tangible lesson on the Earth’s fundamental tendency to shift and change. This “A-ha” moment, of the uncertainty of the world we live in shattered me. I cried for hours in camp that night, wishing to un-learn what I knew, and knowing that I couldn’t. It seemed unlikely that pudding and cookies would create the conditions for this same kind of learning.
In a recently aired conversation with Krista Tippet, Dr. Xavier Le Pinchon, the French geophysicist who helped create the field of plate tectonics stated: “I was educated in a world that we call “fixist.” Things were not moving. And we discovered that was completely wrong. Actually, the Earth is an extraordinary living being with motions of the oceans and continents and thousands of miles and continuously changing, evolving.” It was 1968 when Pinchon formally introduced this idea to the world. Darwin’s publication of On The Origin of Species predated Pinchon’s discovery by 109 years. The ideas of plate tectonics and species evolution that move on the scale of geological time seem to me to beg the question of change on the scale of human time. Are we, in tandem with our species changing over the long haul, fundamentally changing as individuals over the course of our short lives?
The notion of “Human Becomings”—that we are individuals in progress, always unfolding over the course of our lives—is not original, and still it has been one of the grandest revelations of my life thus far. It was the “A-ha” moment of my twenties, and it continues to fuel my studies now. This sense that we are all human becomings is an intuitive one, born out of self-study. But like all ideas (unless you are a rare bird like Darwin, who even must share some of his limelight with Wallace) this idea is a shared idea by many people.
In the recently aired Invisibilia podcast: “The Personality Myth” co-hosts Lulu Miller, Hanna Rosin and Alix Spiegel explore the question of “whether there is such a thing as a stable personality.” Psychologist Walter Mischel, in a follow up article about the podcast states: “It’s no wonder that we’re drawn to this idea that personality is important and stable. It makes us feel better…when it comes to human beings, we really don’t have tolerance for realizing that there is an enormous amount of instability…” If fear is one side of the coin, Mischel points out, possibility is the other. The possibility of growing and changing into someone kinder, someone more patient, someone more compassionate.
Still, if the world under our feet is shifting (albeit slowly) and the people around us are shifting, then we are left to navigate our lives without the hope of clear direction and without the possibility of guarantees. We are good at building up a false sense of security and making plans that feel immutable, but the world is even better at reducing these fairytales to dust. If the revelation of my twenties was the reality of the uncertainty of the world and all of the inhabitants of the world, myself included, the question that I hope will guide my thirties is: how can I acknowledge the fear that accompanies this instability while simultaneously breathing into the possibilities?
On Death and Dying
I was late to get my period. Years later than all the rest of my peers. Late enough that it was decided I should see someone about it. A slew of tests and exams yielded nothing—nothing good and nothing bad. The doctor I was seeing recommended one final test to rule out his list of potential bad things that might be going on. He thought it was unlikely, but possible, that a tumor on my pituitary gland was the culprit of my missing period.
Just months prior my beloved grandmother had been diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor and had died shortly thereafter. It was hard for me not to equate tumor with death sentence. At home that evening, sitting with my dad on the couch, I asked, “What happens if they find a tumor when they do the MRI?” He responded, “We’ll do everything we possibly can to take care of you.” “And what if it’s incurable?” I asked. “We’ll hold you and love you while you die,” he replied.
I’ve grown up in the southern culture where people candy coat bad news and criticism to the point that you are never quite sure if they love you or hate you. In a sea of sugar, my dad’s reply stood out in sharp relief.
My MRI turned out to be just fine, and my late period showed up on its own accord a few years later—an imaginary brush with death. I spend my days working with, and for, healthy young people. I lead high school aged students on extended backpacking trips, and my colleagues are the sort that find pleasure in running ultra marathons and ascending sharp peaks. As such, I’ve had very little experience with the only certain eventuality we all face.
Last summer, however, on the bus ride back to town from a month spent leading a backpacking trip in the Wind River Range in Wyoming, we came across a devastating wreck on the side of the highway. My co-instructors and I were all trained in wilderness first aid, and we stopped, leaving our twelve students on the bus, to see if we could be useful.
There were multiple victims, from a single car crash. Most had been unbelted and were flung forcefully from the car, which was overturned, in the sagebrush. The man I helped was conscious but unable to say more than “My chest, my chest, help!” You take extensive first aid training when you work in the wilderness because help is often delayed. I had done scenarios with fake blood and fake patients many times before. Walking towards the scene from the bus it felt like I was walking into a scenario, but once I had the man’s head in my hands holding his spine stable, nothing about it bore any resemble to a scenario.
I knew the man needed advanced medical care and quickly. That care was on its way by virtue of the first responders--a family who witnessed the crash and provided initial and ongoing first aid. While we waited for the paramedics, my goal was to keep his spine stable and keep his airway open, and if he stopped breathing or his heart stopped beating, to start CPR. These tools and this knowledge felt woefully inadequate however. I think they felt woefully inadequate because they were. Because sometimes no amount of care, advanced or otherwise can save someone. I didn’t know that the man whose head I was holding was going to die in the Emergency Room later that day, but I did know that beyond protecting his spine and his airway, I could shade his face from the sun, and I could talk to him and tell him what was happening with compassion and calm.
When he was airlifted away, and the other victims had left in their respective helicopters and ambulances, and my co-instructors and I returned to our bus full of sobered teens, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. From a joyous morning waking up in our tents, feeling the glow of accomplishment of completing a thirty day course in the wilderness to kneeling beside a man who was dying on the side of the road, was perhaps the widest arc of emotions in the shortest time span I’ve ever experienced.
When my supervisor wrote to ask me about how I was doing with regards to the wreck, I said to her in part: “I know even the most trained medical professionals are not magicians, but that reality doesn’t change how sad it is for a person to die young in a sudden accident. I’m glad we stopped. I’m very sad for the family. I’m grateful our students saw what they saw from a distance and hope it will encourage them (and us) to not gloss over the risks we flirt with everyday in the front-country.”
That sadness and hope remain a year out from the accident. The addendum I would add now is a question—How, do you remain sensitized to the fragility of life, and allow that knowledge to cultivate gratitude for each moment you are not in catastrophe?
Not So Special
Recently, I spent a week in Cataloochee Valley in the Smoky Mountains. A few barns and houses built at the turn of the century remain from the days before Great Smoky National Park came into being. From a distance, these historic buildings are remarkably beautiful, but when you come close, you see that the rough-hewn boards are littered with graffiti. Initials, names, dates, and other proud proclamations of “I was here” are carved into the bones of old buildings. Graffiti, it seems, is one verse in the song of the generation of “special" people.
It took humans a few decades to realize that the chemical fertilizers that initially seemed to be the unbridled miracle that would feed our growing population, were in fact degrading the soil—the very foundation of our food system. It seems now we are experiencing similarly delayed shockwaves emanating from years of children being steeped in the “You are special” message.
I grew up in the rising tide of “special.” I was part of that first wave where every child on the sports team, regardless of ability, received a plastic trophy commemorating the season. As one of those “special” children, it’s been a bumpy ride into the adult reality of my utter ordinariness. And I have to wonder if I’d been born a few decades earlier would it have taken so long for this realization to dawn on me.
The lazy scratching of a name into a board that took somebody else hours to harvest and cut, and real skill and ingenuity to fashion into a building is, I think, an unfortunate cocktail of perceived specialness paired with the uniquely human desire to be immortalized through and by stuff. Perhaps I’m being too hard on my generation. Perhaps every generation has been plagued by the notion of being deeply special (and therefore pardoned from the burden of thinking about anyone else’s needs).
Of course graffiti is just a canary in the coal mine. Our more insidious manifestations of specialness come to fruition on the grander scale of complete environmental degradation. And while I’ve never personally defaced a historic building, I am certainly complicit in leading a life that is net harmful for the environment.
In a recent public conversation, poet David Whyte shared the following reflection: “I often feel that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid 40s or 50s…But another step of maturity is actually realizing that the rest of creation might be a little relieved to let you go. That you can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up, and make way for something else…”
If we are to leave this world habitable for future generations, it seems we must learn how to re-write this now embedded perception of specialness. It may seem rather Eeyoreish to wake up each morning and look in the mirror, and say to yourself: “I am not special—I am an ordinary part of the whole,” but maybe with time, the message could shift from sounding like a dark lament to sounding like a reality worth celebrating. What if the monument we sought to create did not exist in the tangible world? What if leaving our mark became vilified, and erasing our traces were exalted?
This “leave no trace” way of being in the world is perhaps best captured by the philosophy of the original inhabitants of the land that now comprises the Smokies. Native American culture emphasizes living alongside nature, rather than dominating the natural world—on treading lightly rather than leaving a mark. In his novel, Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier writes: “For as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we’d be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.” We’ d do well to set down our pride, and open up to a new (to us) but in fact, ancient way of being in the world.
Wholehearted Qualities
The following blog post is a collaborative effort. The qualities described below are inspired by, and modeled after, Ruth Gendler's The Book of Qualities. In a spring equinox gathering in the NC mountains, we each wrote the quality we wanted to invite into our lives going forward. The results, we feel, are descriptive of wholehearted living.
Authenticity by Hannah Barry
Authenticity called out to me in the most inconvenient of times. Her voice was quiet at first, so finding her wasn't easy. I traversed mountaintops, scouring their peaks with the belief that she waited above. But each summit I crossed paths with Suffering, Loneliness, and Unhappiness. Finally, it was Intuition's purple candle that guided me through the wilderness, beyond Fear's shadow. I found Authenticity in the deepest crease of the valley, washing her face in the moonlight of a pond. She beckoned me to her, and as I reached the water's edge it was my own reflection smiling at me sweetly.
Clarity by Shelley Heath
Clarity likes to meet up for coffee in the mornings. She sometimes wears the most beautiful sundresses, but most days she wears her favorite pair of jeans, the ones that fit so well she'll wear them 'til they fall apart. She's one of those people who carries the most interesting things in her purse, always that one bizarre thing that you need at the time. She seems to remember everything; not because she has an eidetic memory, but because she turns everything into a song. If you've ever heard her sing, her voice is unmistakable. You can hear it for miles even when she sings at a whisper. Her melodies are so catchy you'll find yourself humming them for weeks, unable to get them out of your head.
Compassion by Anna Kavalauskas
Compassion was born in the cold, bright water of the fountain of youth. Her cries were soon soothed by the rippling, chirping, and hushing of the world around her. She grew up holding hands with her cousin, Intuition, and at night they danced in circles around a crackling fire, the deep, starry sky singing above.
When Compassion encounters Jealousy, Fear, and Self-Consciousness, she brushes their hair out of their eyes and sings them lullabies from her childhood, and they melt into the ground, humble Black-Eyed Susans blooming where they once stood.
Compassion skips and jumps rope, and the rays of the sun beam from her chest. She loves you.
Enough by Maggie Howe
Enough is a soft spoken but powerful women who is the childhood best friend of Wisdom. She can be hard to pin down at times, but whenever she speaks you know her words are full of truth. Enough used to be the CEO of a fortune 500 company, which was pretty unheard of at that time. When she retired she turned her focus to improving the lives of inner city kids living in impoverished neighborhoods. She is always trying to make the world a better place, but seems to know how to leave time for herself too. Enough is a complicated women. She's a total feminist, but she still likes to get dressed up and wear make up sometimes. She tries to live simply, but she definitely splurges on unnecessary kitchen gadgets and luxury vacations. She takes pleasure in life's little indulgences, but she doesn't let them them rule her or ruin her strong work ethic.
Sometimes in the morning I hear Enough's voice whispering in my ear when the alarm goes off, asking me what I will accomplish that day and how it will serve the make the world a better place. Sometimes her words in the morning give me a little anxiety... but in a good way. These are the words that remind me to use my body and my brain to reach new heights and achieve my goals. I like it better when Enough calls me in the afternoon and invites me to go for a walk outside and enjoy a cocktail on her screened in porch while we watch the sun set together.
Enough is the kind of friend who can weave in and out of your life. It's easy to lose touch when you or she gets busy with a project at work or a volunteer commitment or marathon training. She's around though, and if you can take the time to pick up the phone and call her she will always answer.
Expansiveness by Arrington McCoy
Expansiveness wears fur coats and red lipstick in the winter. She can identify snowflake patterns by taste. On cold nights, she leaves her spare mittens in the woods for the mice, and other small creatures, to find. In summer, she carries a basket full of ripe berries and wildflowers. She always goes barefoot in the rain. One time she walked from the forest to the seashore pressing her ear up against the trunks of trees and then against conch shells. Expansiveness sailed around the world when she was a girl. Now, she does open heart surgery.
Simplicity by Jennifer Vickery
I once thought simplicity was so boring. I always tried to give her necklaces with beads and jewels-bright flashy jewels--but she insisted she was perfectly content with her little gold strand necklace. She never made a scene or spoke loudly but her presence was astounding. In her home the colors on the wall were calming and tranquil.
She lived very small- everything she owned fit into the bed of her truck but she never seemed to be lacking in anything she did or wore or gave away as gifts.
The children and birds would flock to her. They spoke her language and were best at appreciating her gifts. The older I get the more I envy her beauty and strive to be more like her- in every way possible.
Stillness by Carlisle Rankin
Stillness...
...is picky. She requires certain factors in order to truly come out of her dark corner. Stillness has been stifled for so long that she feels naked and confused. She has to start all over a lot of the time. Structure is surprisingly important to Stillness. Too much free time can swallow her whole. She knows her role is important--crucial in fact, but she fears that the feelings she may bring forth may sour her existence.
Value by Sophie Ehlinger
Value has no discerning tastes. Value begins her day hobnobbing with the best of them, and ends it, with simple gratitude, in the mud with the pigs. Value happily resides here- she gleefully resides there. Value both blows kisses and steals them.
Value stores tsunamis, firecrackers, confetti, and salt and pepper all on the same shelf.
Value reeks of lilacs and spritzes a perfume of musk and mold.
While blindly sitting in the front row of life, Value takes everything for granted. When she blinks, she's sharing the balcony with death- a little higher, and infinitely more humbled.
Value is an open, engaging, and gracious hostess-
She takes Greed's coat
She serves tea to Yearning
She tucks Generosity in
Value keeps her head on straight-while she flies off the handle
Value solves the puzzle with the right and curses the unlucky draw with the left.
She hitches the ride, takes the leap, and stays put, heels in the ground, head like an ostrich
Value's heart shrinks for peaks and expands for valleys, peaks and valleys, peaks and valleys- thump, thump, thump.
Value needs not a yes or a no. Value is a goddess.
Whimsy by Shelley Heath
Whimsy is this sweet little sprite that loves to dance in the rain and giggle at silly words like "world". World, world, world; such a weird word. She's spontaneous and fun and loves to play pranks. She's petite. People always underestimate her power until they realize how memorable she is.
Tomorrow will be different
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
I borrow the title of today’s blog post from a woman who was in her mid seventies when I met her at a yoga and meditation retreat. She paired her yoga attire with bright red lipstick, and while the rest of us sat a row back, she took her place, front and center in the meditation hall where she flirted shamelessly with our introverted, reserved teacher.
One night we found ourselves at the same table in the dining hall, and conversation soon gave way to peels of uncontrollable laughter. The details of her loves and losses were so fantastically unique that by the end of the meal I was imploring her to write a book. She said she already had the title—Tomorrow Will Be Different—and that she just needed to put pen to paper.
As I’ve moved towards my 30th birthday, this phantom book title—Tomorrow Will Be Different—has become a kind of mantra in my life. Not because today is bad—far from it—but simply because this is the kind of truth that life teaches you whether you want to receive the lesson or not. A year ago today, on my 29th birthday, I shared this website with friends and family for the first time. In my first blog post I wrote: “my life is very different from what I imagined it would look like.” That statement still rings true a year later. What has shifted over the last 365 days is my attitude towards the inevitable uncertainty of life.
Over the course of this year, I changed the title of this website from Collective Wisdom Circle to Human Becomings. Collective wisdom is still at the heart of this project. The patterns of thought from great thinkers from a variety of traditions were some of the initial rungs on the ladder that led me out of my hole of despair, and the personal stories friends and family shared with me made up the rest of the rungs. The name “Human Becomings” is, of course, a nod towards personal evolution—a process I imagine I’ll be engaging with until the end of my days, and a process that I hope will become a lifelong vocation as well.
In a few moments, in celebration of my 30th birthday, I am putting on my running shoes and heading out my front door to run thirty miles. I'll hit my tenth marathon at the 26.2 mile marker, and the last few miles will be entirely new territory. Beloved friends, family, and dog will join me for sections of my self designed "Dirty Thirty Ultra." I imagine the experience will be terrible and wonderful, mundane and exciting, painful and joyful—in short a microcosm of life itself. Then tomorrow, after the celebration, I'll wake up to a new decade and a path of unknown miles stretching out into my future.
Regrets
“Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be.” –Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things
“Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.” –Tim Lawrence from The Adversity Within Blog Series
I work with teenagers who are fond of saying things like: “I don’t believe in regrets.” When I hear them say this, I silently add on: “Yet—You don’t believe in regrets yet.” My life is not riddled with regrets, but I do have some, and it seems to me that only an unstudied life could yield a life without regrets. There are, as Tim Lawrence suggests, things in life that “cannot be fixed…[things that] can only be carried.”
I regret hating my body for so many years. Like most women I fell prey to believing my body would only be beautiful IF. If it was a certain weight, height, curvature. Mostly now, I love my body. Not in that tube top wearing, belly dance shaking, “I don’t give a f*ck what you think" kind of way, but in a slightly more self-conscious, “I still care what you think, but not as much as I used to," kind of way.
I regret letting jealousy of my brother consume me for so many years. As a teenager and young adult he was perfect in all the ways the world we grew up in defined perfection, and I seethed about it. I can’t reclaim the time I dedicated to ugly fuming over his success. On the whole I don't know that he was too fazed by it, but my venom was definitely a poison for me.
My biggest regret is hurting the man I loved because I was too scared to be honest. I loved him, but I never should have said yes when he asked me to marry him. At that point, I was a partial version of myself, desperately unhappy in the life I was leading, and I was in no way ready to commit to lifetime partnership. But still, I said yes. Then when the doubt was so thick that there was no other option but to face the truth I did not know if I could survive, I called our wedding off. Most adult decisions don’t fit neatly into the categories of right or wrong. I find that language is inadequate in providing a genuine descriptor for this most heart-wrenching decision in my life. The decision was right in many ways, and it was deeply horrible in others. I will always feel guilt and sadness for hurting a man who was good to me, who loved me, and who I loved in return.
In her closing to Tiny Beautiful Things Cheryl Strayed writes: “Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.” I am very much a student of forgiveness. The man I loved, and will always love (even if marriage is not in our cards), says he has forgiven me, and I believe him. I’m learning—continually learning—how to forgive myself.
The horrible things that happen to you, the horrible things you do to other people, the horrible things you do to yourself—they linger. There is no point in running from what hurts—tempting though that fantasy may be. And there is no point in entertaining the fairytale that some bright day we’ll rid our lives of the darkness and just dwell in shiny happiness.
The wise Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron advises us to lean into our discomfort. Leaning in does not make discomfort go away, but it can change the nature of your relationship to your fears or regrets or sorrows. So I remind myself to continue to lean in, even on the days when I feel like the heel of the universe, even on the days when something senseless and unspeakably horrible has happened. And on the days when I can listen to this advice, I find, remarkably, that I can still breathe in the darkness.
Women’s Circle
The culture of women gathering together has roots as old as human history, and with good reason. Gloria Steinem once stated: “Groups run by women are our psychic turf; our place to discover who we are, or who we could become, as whole independent beings. Somewhere in our lives, each of us needs a free place. A little psychic territory.” December marks the one year anniversary of a Women's Circle I helped to co-create, and it has become, as Steinem posits, a place of genuine discovery and wholeness.
We have explored the themes of vulnerability and connection, choice and comparison, intuition and ego, confession, mother-daughter relationships, letting go, inviting in, contentment and complacency, and our stories. Our stories, told sitting around a candle lit circle, infuse every gathering whether they are the focus of, or the vehicle for, discussion. Above all our circle is a place for un-masked sharing--with no pretense of perfection.
And the result is a kind of perfection--a kind that looks like real women, experiencing all of the devastating lows and enlivening highs that life offers. Real women permitting access to their inner sanctums of crazy and divine so that others can bask in the knowledge that crazy is in fact a shared experience and so that we can revel in each other's light.
A guiding question for our first gathering, December 2014 was: "What do YOU want from this Women's Circle?" My answer from a year ago stands--I want, and have gotten, a community of truly remarkable women.
We close each of our gatherings with the following song:
Woman who loves herself, though she may be broken
Woman who loves herself, will never fall.
Woman who loves herself, though she may be shaken,
Woman who loves herself, will never fall.
And I wanna sing a song about our healing
And I wanna sing a song about our wholeness
And I wanna sing a song about us,
I wanna sing about our love.
With profound gratitude for the wonderful women I have as mentors and friends--may the practice of self-love replace our cultural norm towards self-denigration and may the practice of women gathering continue in perpetuity.
The Stories We Tell
"Speaking isn't neutral. Every time we speak, we bring forth reality...If the realities we inhabit are brought forth in the language we use, they are kept alive and passed along in the stories we tell." -Jill Friedam and Gene Combs, Narrative Therapists
Like many children on Halloween, after my brother and I were done dashing around the neighborhood collecting candy, we came home and set about the business of sorting our loot into like piles. I found the sorting both fun and practical. I could take stock of my larder (low value Baby Ruths on one end with top dollar Reese Cups on the other), which allowed me to bask in my accomplishment and be more efficient in my trading. “Collective Wisdom” is my grownup candy pile. The collection process has been lengthy and is ongoing, and the sorting process has been fun, practical and very healing.
Apophenia (a term coined in the 1950s) is "the unmotivated seeing of connections"--an idea that speaks to a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information. Being apophenities (a term coined just now) goes along hand-in-hand with being story telling creatures. Indeed, our life stories are really the ultimate expression of our ability to layer meaning onto random events.
Joseph Campbell is the godfather of seeing patterns in stories. His book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces outlines the Hero's Journey, "a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the worlds mythic traditions." Campbell's study of myths spanning throughout the ages and across the globe, resulted in his outlining of the phases of the Hero's Journey (both the outer and inner), which are shown in the graphic above. The universality of this theme speaks to the idea that at our core--we are the same. When you strip away the names and the scenery and the details and the nuance--you get down to the reality that we just keep telling the same story over and over again. The bad news, for those of us who like to imagine that we are deeply original, is that we are in fact deeply unoriginal in the grand scheme of things. The good news is we can stop worrying about making the next big contribution, and instead can recognize and celebrate that we are most likely adding a new flavor to an already existing product, which makes us co-creators with the rest of the human race as opposed to rarified gurus.
Brene Brown's most recently published book, Rising Strong, comes on the heels of her books which focus on the importance of cultivating vulnerability in our lives. In Rising Strong Brown talks about the inevitable falls that will accompany living wholeheartedly, and she explains that the choices we make when we are "face down in the arena" about rising back up are as life defining as our initial choice to open to the world. The parallels between Brown's "Rising Strong Process" and Campbell's Hero's Journey are striking and in fact explicit. Her process includes three broad steps: 1) The Reckoning--walking into our story, "where we recognize emotion, and get curious about our feelings and how they connect with the way we think and behave." 2) The Rumble--owning our story, where we "get honest about the stories we are making up about our struggle, then challenge these confabulations and assumptions to determine what's truth, what's self protection, and what needs to change if we want to lead more wholehearted lives." 3) The Revolution--writing a new ending to our story, which we do "based on key learnings from our rumble. [We] use this new, braver story to change how we engage with the world and to ultimately transform the way we live, love, parent and lead." Brown's steps in turn, pair nicely with Byron Katie's Thought Inquiry Process, which is a practical way to navigate the Reckoning, Rumble and Revolution recipe.
Story telling serves many functions in our lives. The two functions that have stood out in the sharpest relief as I've squirreled away "collective wisdom" are: a tool that breathes meaning and connection into our past life events and a tool that helps us chart a different future.
As important as stories are, they are not implicitly helpful. They can be powerful meaning makers, but they can also keep us trapped in cutting narratives that swirl around in our heads. The ability to discern which stories serve you and which do not is an art. Brene Brown and Byron Katie offer a toolbox for this kind of examination, and Joseph Campbell shows the scaffolding of this journey that we humans have been experiencing since our inception. To use Campbell's language--it is helpful to be able to look back on an 'ordeal' in your life and see it as a gateway to your own 'resurrection.' Likewise, it is useful to know when to pause and take a good hard look at the thoughts we so often mistake as reality and ask, as Byron Katie encourages us to, "Is it true?" And, if in fact, it is not true, then the soul searching work of letting go of an old story, and adopting a new story, begins.
Books for the Ride
My first yoga teacher would frequently end class with this prayer:
May you be happy,
May you be healthy,
May you ride the waves of your life,
And may you know peace,
no matter what you are given.
I've found that certain books are good company for certain waves in your life. Here's my list of the books that keep me company when the water is choppy.
For when you feel deeply alone and like nobody else could possibly relate to your challenge:
Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. An unconventional, previously anonymous advice column gone book that is built on radical empathy and delivers the reminder through raw stories to “trust yourself,” above all else.
I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) by Brene Brown. Social worker and self proclaimed “storyteller/researcher,” Brene Brown unpacks what causes shame, and reminds us that the “experiences that make us feel the most alone are actually universal experiences.”
Post Secret by Frank Warren. An artistic project that invites people to share, via a creative postcard, a secret in their life. Post Secret cards have been turned into several coffee table books, as well as a blog. It is helpful to see that whatever secret you are harboring, you have company.
For when your world falls apart and you are sitting in the shattered mess of it:
Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. In this book Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron reminds us that “suffering is part of life, and we don’t have to feel it’s happening because we personally made the wrong move.” She gives guidance on how to sit with suffering and lean into the discomfort.
Comfortable with Uncertainty also by Pema Chodron. In this book, Pema Chodron reminds us that uncertainty is the truth of life (in both good and bad times) and that we can learn to rest in the ambiguity.
For when you need to gather tools to make your world larger:
Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. In this book Tara Brach reminds us that self-compassion is not a luxury for the idle, but rather, is vital for our health and a key ingredient to living well.
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. In this book Brene Brown makes the case that practicing vulnerability is the most courageous act a person can do, and that doing so is the gateway into wholehearted living. She shares ways in which we can take off the “armor” and start nourishing genuine connection with others.
For when you are ready to weave your struggles into a new story:
Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser. In this book, Lesser focuses on the power of the breakdown to be a moment of transformation rather than a moment of defeat.
Rising Strong by Brene Brown. A follow up to her previous books on the importance of cultivating vulnerability in our lives, this book talks about the inevitable falls that will accompany living wholeheartedly, and how the choices we make when we are "face down in the arena" about rising back up are as life defining as the initial choice to open to the world.
For when your soul needs stirring:
A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. A short story that masterfully captures the full spectrum of heartbeats which living can elicit.
Contentment and Complacency
Written on September 19, 2015
I find positive psychology to be somewhat maddening. Choose happiness! Think yourself thin! Re-frame, re-boot, re-imagine! It seems far too reductionist. Can you really fit global warming or genocide or deep personal tragedies inside the Happy Meal Box? Or what of the smaller sadnesses that are part of life? Do they have a place?
I’ve learned that generally when something makes me mad, it is not because I’m right and therefore my anger is justified. Quite the opposite—usually I’m fighting against a reality, and I’m mad that I am wrong, or at least partially wrong. I attach to my ideas and throw out the proverbial “baby with the bathwater.” This is particularly embittering when you are pitting yourself against “positive psychology” because it just makes you feel like the ultimate Scrooge.
When I read Thoreau’s Walden for the first time as a 15 year old, I was hooked. I don’t remember a lot of content from my high school classes, but I do remember Walden. One line that was particularly striking to me was: “The fault finder will find faults, even in paradise.”
Krista Tippet’s recent conversation with social psychologist Ellen Langer on On Being, delves into the science of mindfulness and the ways our ideas can quite literally shape our reality. Langer has done studies where some test subjects are told their task is work and others are told that the same task is play, and the power of these suggestions have real life implications—those who are “playing” are happier in the task than those who are “working.” Her studies also link different ways of thinking to physiological changes. In one study, simply labeling the work of chambermaids as exercise, rather than labor, initiated weight loss, even though the chambermaids were in fact doing the exact same work.
Shawn Achor, a psychologist and champion of Positive Psychology, shares in his beloved Ted Talk: “We’re finding it’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality…90% of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world…if happiness if on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that’s because we think we have to be successful, and then we’ll be happier.”
Walden was published in 1854. Among his many titles, I don’t think Thoreau has ever been called a champion of Positive Psychology, but his line about fault finders is indicative to me that nuggets of truth have deep roots in human history. I’m sure Thoreau was not the first to make an observation of this nature, and the Positive Psychology champions of today won’t be the last. Your outlook shapes your reality. I find no argument with this truth. Where my blood starts boiling is whether or not adopting an internal positive lens is always the appropriate response to life's varied challenges.
When is being happy with life as it is in this moment choosing contentment and when it is it complacency? Contentment is defined as: “the state of being happy and satisfied,” whereas complacency is defined as: “the state of being satisfied with how things are, and not wanting to make them better.” The implication of these two different terms is that sometimes things are good and you should just appreciate it, and sometimes things could be much better and you are lazy or unimaginative or uncourageous if you stick with the status quo. The quicksand is figuring out what’s what.
I am part of a generation of “greener grass seekers.” Settling is reviled. A lifetime career seems like a fantastical notion. My life is good—no great—in a million ways. And yet, like focusing on the twisted ankle instead of the rest of your body, which feels fine, I find myself currently expending extra energy on the parts of my life that hurt. And the question that invariably creeps in, when I hop into this particular washing machine of thought is: “Should I go?” Implicit in this question is the grain of hope that somewhere or someone else will hold the key to greater happiness.
Twice in my life I have left a place or a person. Those decisions were accompanied by heartbreak and indecision and feelings of utter hopelessness. But both times the decision to go was the right decision for that particular moment in my life. Both times, a switch in my external situation gave space for an internal shift. Both times (in hindsight) I have found real value in my struggle.
I do not want to be fickle. I do not want to be a "fault finder, finding faults in paradise." I also don’t believe that you can simply think your way out of every sticky or uncomfortable or challenging situation. The “baby” of positive psychology to me is that our internal lens is powerful and malleable and we should seek to shape it in ways that serve our lives as well as the greater good. The “bathwater” for me is that despite this truth, there are other truths that feel even truer that positive psychology doesn't seem to fully acknowledge. Ellen Langer rightly points out that many of us convolute inconvenience as tragedy. As practiced catastrophizer, I am guilty as charged. I will readily admit that catastrophizing is a habit worth breaking. But I think the danger of convoluting tragedy as inconvenience is just as significant, if not more so. It is crucial to take time to mourn sad things. A meditation teacher once said to me, “grief is the admission ticket to the present moment." You can't skip grief. You can't just scratch heartache off the to-do list. I also believe in my core that sometimes external change is as important as the internal change. How you find the clarity to know when it’s time to go is still incredibly elusive, however.
There is a lot of wisdom I would like to glean from positive psychologists, but I hope to do so from the perspective of honoring and celebrating the shadow parts of myself. I want to dive into the nugget of truth, but please hold the Happy Meal.
Embracing Aloneness
One of the fallouts of having an incredibly nurturing childhood was that I developed a fairly unrealistic sense of what I could expect from other people. I had parents who happily let me go on great adventures, even as a young child, but before I left, my dad would always pull me close and whisper in my ear: “If you want to come home…if you need to come home…just say the word, and I’ll come get you.” The fact was, having the sense that I could always come home, meant that I felt an unrestrained freedom to explore. And before reality came knocking, I had this pie-in-the-sky view that no matter where I was, I was not alone—my dad would find me and come get me, if only I said the word.
The thing is, “saying the word” can get fairly complicated. At 26 years old I found myself hiking through a boulder field in Wyoming, with rocks the size of cabins and cavernous cracks between them. I was scared and unsure of my footing and had several heart-stopping, blood-rushing, face-flushing stumbles. It seemed from my vantage, in the midst of the field that the boulders would never end. And though I was out there with other people, we were all struggling through the same terrain, and I couldn’t very well call on them to help me. And I wanted at that point, more than any other time in my life, to call my dad and have him come and get me. But that, of course, wasn’t an option. I had no phone (and no reception for that matter) and there were no homing pigeons in sight. And so I was left with a belated, but nonetheless heartbreaking, realization that as much as my dad meant what he said, there was no way he, or anyone else, could follow through on such a promise.
The raw aloneness terrified me. Especially so because it opened me up to the reality that I wasn’t just alone in the boulder field—that aloneness was a fundamental part of the human condition. Always. As Brain Doyle says in his exquisite essay, Joyas Volardores: “So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart.”
To be comfortable, even grateful, to be alone in the “house of my heart” is gift that I’m tapping into now, at age 29, for the first time in my life. As a child and young adult, with my fantasy in tact, I was sated by the belief that others would make me feel whole. When that fantasy was interrupted, first in the physical world and then in my own emotional world, I was initially shattered.
The last few years of my life have given me an education in aloneness, and it no longer feels terrifying. I am now able to answer the question Oriah Mountain Dreamer asks in her poem “The Invitation, “I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments,” in the affirmative.
Being content alone however does not preclude a desire for partnership. I want partnership. Absolutely. But I know that the reality of dwelling in my heart and mind alone is steadfast whether I am coupled or single. And while the fantasy of another human being having the capacity to make me feel whole is still alluring, I can at least recognize it as a fantasy.
The question that keeps knocking around inside me now is: how wide do I want to open that window into my heart? And thus far, the answer is wide, wide open. Perhaps too wide, too fast. That I don’t know. But I do know that I haven’t come up with a reason to fasten the window the tight (or even to close it just a hair) besides fear, and while compelling, fear doesn’t seem like a good enough reason in the end.
We can never fully know or be known by another person, but I’d wager that the capacity to open windows wide and move in so close that the lines of separation feel blurred is as equally profound a gift as “liking the company you keep in the empty moments.” Maybe especially so, when you’re moving towards that other heart from a foundation of your own wholeness.
Embracing Slow
“I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed”
-Excerpted from “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
I live in a town (Asheville, NC) that embraces slow food and slow medicine. Cherokee Purples, Ruby Golds, Brandywines…the language of heirloom tomatoes trips off of peoples tongues at the farm stands on Saturday, and the bumper stickers touting: “Local food—thousands of miles fresher” are ubiquitous. Likewise, tinctures and herbal remedies are widely embraced, and acupuncture and holistic healing centers are on practically every street corner. Slow is definitely in. Or more accurately, slow is in in some specific facets of life.
Michael Pollan, one of the champions of the slow food movement, makes the point in his book In Defense of Food that we have fixated (to a fault) on nutrients, believing that all we really need is Vitamin X or Mineral Y, and forgetting that Vitamin X and Mineral Y are a part of a whole, and that when we extract a single part from a vegetable and insert it into a processed “fortified” breakfast cereal, something vital gets lost in translation. In terms of nutrition, we’ve developed tunnel vision and allowed the micro to flood our lens to the point that we’ve forgotten that the macro even exists.
It seems to me, that we’ve done the same with the various slow movements that have gone from niche to trendy to mainstream in the last decade. Slow food and slow medicine are worthy, indeed, but deeply insufficient when stripped away from the context of a slow life.
Mary Oliver writes in her poem “The Summer Day” that she knows how to be idle and blessed. I do not know how to be idle and blessed. Or rather, I don’t intuitively know how to be idle and blessed.
But I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in situations that encourage leisure, and so while I’m predisposed to keeping frantically busy, I’ve also had occasion to taste the slow life.
This summer was one such occasion. Backpacking trips aren’t always leisurely--especially when you are leading the trip. But this summer, my particular backpacking trip, was an exercise in slowing down. Our mileage was modest and our groups’ needs were low. More importantly, we were far removed from cell phone range and Internet connection. We were away from our normal social outlets and social obligations. And we were away from our mundane obligations like mowing the lawn and sweeping the floor and folding laundry. This meant that there was more time to read. More time to journal. More time to make elaborate backcountry meals. More time to engage in conversations. More time to play games. More time to sleep. More time, period.
Except of course, there wasn’t really more time. Days are still 24 hours whether you are in a tent in the mountains or in your high-rise in the city. But the days out in the mountains felt expansive and long, and yes, sometimes, when the chapter was finished and the journal entry complete and the mac ‘n’ cheese cooked and the banter done…sometimes, the days even felt boring. A product I suppose of not fully knowing how to revel in idleness.
But here’s the thing: I can remember each day out there. I can remember where I slept. I can remember specific meals I cooked. I can remember views I took in. I can remember conversations I had. I’ve been back in the front country for a couple of weeks now, and already I am back to my routine of stuffing my days so full that I can’t possibly metabolize all of the experiences, and my memory doesn’t have a prayer of keeping up. And with the side-by-side comparison fresh, it feels clear that something very fundamental is sacrificed on this alter of productivity.
On my last night out in the mountains, I set the intention of bringing slowness into my front country life. My successes are small, but in the face of the many temptations towards busyness, they feel very real. I’m starting my day off with walking my dog, not checking email. I'm not saying yes to every social invitation. I’m leaving work with items still glaring on my to-do list. And it’s been lovely. But it isn’t nearly enough.
Annie Dillard pointed out: “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives,” a statement that is both obvious and startling. I hope that the taste of leisure this summer will linger in my heart and mind long enough for it to become a habit in the front country. And I pray that when I get to the end of my life I won’t be writing poems saying: “I know how to be frantic and busy,” but rather, I too will have truly learned the art of being idle and blessed.
Unless
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not." -Dr. Seuss in The Lorax
This reflection on conservation was written during week three of a four-week long backpacking trip in the Wind River Range in Wyoming:
When I am out in the mountains living out of a backpack (well a team of backpacks really), I remember what it means to live simply and tread lightly, marking the world with only a few bent blades of grass and a little greasy residue from my evening meal. I remember why it is important to walk as Thich Nhat Hanh says--with my feet kissing the Earth--because everything from the fragile nectar-filled tail of the Columbine to the hulking, jagged body of the mountain it lives on is heartbreakingly beautiful, and the crime of destroying such fierce beauty is self evident.
I become a better person out here. More of my problems are real; more of my actions are intentional. Laughter floats up freely. Generosity feels essential. To bring these qualities, and this awareness, out of the mountains and into my life of excess and rush and me, me, me--this is the challenge.
These mountains in Wyoming, and the lower crumbly Appalachians that I grew up in, do not exist in a bubble, as far removed as I may feel sitting on this lichen covered rock, mosquitoes buzzing in my ear, Indian Paintbrush catching the slant of sunset light in front of me. If we ruin the world out there, we ruin this world. They are two sides of the same coin. I can't feign ignorance. I know. I know that it is not acceptable to live a life that is complicit in the rape of the world. But most days I do.
I do not trust that technology will save us from our missteps. I do not trust that we humans will electively stop our destructive ways. And also, I do not think it is time to party while the ship sinks. A life of partying leads to bloat and indigestion…half-cocked ideas and vapid memories. If the ship is sinking, I want to go down caring for her as best I can because there is a richness in living this way that is even more life affirming for the practitioner than it is healing for the land. It is both-and.
And as bleak as it looks, some stubborn streak of optimism lives in me: that someday I will have children who will also be brought to their knees by the beauty of this place.
Rat Snake
Rat snake
Muscles her way up the post
Tongue flicking
Smelling bird eggs
Pale blue
Yolks the color of sunshine
Unsung notes
She wraps around the box
Coiling her body inside
Until only the tip of her tail
Peeks out
Jaws unhinged
She eats her fill
Then backs out
And slips away
A circle of light
Floods in the opening
Warming an empty nest
Mama bird
Is winging home now
To a new reality
Yesterday morning, out on a walk, I watched a rat snake coil into a nesting box, and I felt my heart sink. They must have still been eggs because no noise accompanied the snakes arrival. It seemed a wildly unfair match...unhatched eggs against a strong snake.
Since most of my food comes from the grocery store, I am cushioned from the daily reality that to sustain life, I have to take life. I understand this truth on an intellectual level, but don't usually engage with it on a visceral level. And yet, as a privileged member of the human race, I am complicit in taking life and harming life, not just to sustain me, but also to thrill, pacify and delight me.
My self righteousness and indignation at the snake prevailed until yesterday evening, when I was out on a hike and my dog, Pia, stopped to sniff what appeared on first glance to be a dark earthworm. On closer inspection, it was a baby black snake who was pinned by the gaze of my six pound dog, trying desperately to flatten into the rocks. Baby rat snakes, it turns out, are just as heart melting as a clutch of eggs. Back home from the hike, I read that black snakes only eat bird eggs if desperate.
If only all the heartache and harm we humans cause could be chalked up to something so worthy as quelling genuine hunger.
Spring Peepers
The peepers are rioting
in the garden
The sound is so full
I nearly have to cover my ears
Life dancing in the margins
Inside, the roar is dulled
But the ache in my chest pulses loudly
Alone, but not lonely
Well, sometimes lonely
I want to join in
the riotous dance outside
To be like the peepers
Ecstatic at moonrise
Dancing and singing
for all the world to hear
Confession & Anonymity
Confession isn’t limited to the Catholic tradition. It is common practice in many of the world religions and is an integral part of twelve-step recovery programs. Today’s blogging, tweeting and posting seem to be modern day forums for confession, with the notable distinction that the audience has swollen from one to many.
I’ve been an off and on journaler since I was 13 years old. My first journal had a mini padlock and accompanying key. The pen that came with the journal had a built in flashlight so you could write under the cover of darkness. Secrecy was paramount. Around the same time I started journaling, I read The Diary of Anne Frank for the first time. I could appreciate that her journal chronicled the horrors of the Holocaust in a very intimate way, but my 13 year old self couldn’t really get past the idea that her journal—her secret repository of her secret thoughts—had been published for the world to see.
So why go from being a journaler who kept my thoughts under lock and key to a blogger?
In her book I Thought It Was Just Me, social worker and author Brene Brown writes: “One of the most important benefits of reaching out to others is learning that the experiences that make us feel the most alone are actually universal experiences.” This, in essence, is my answer to why I decided to crack open my façade and expose what is most raw in me. So many people in my life opened up to me in this way, and this was perhaps the only truly effective medicine, besides time, for my own healing. Even though I was alone with the particularities of my story line and my unique cocktail of thoughts and emotions, I felt real kinship with the experiences of my friends and family and this commonality kept (and keeps) assiduous loneliness at bay.
Frank Warren’s community art project, Post Secret, is a visual representation of the value of sharing with others that which you’ve kept hidden. In November of 2004 he printed up 3,000 self-addressed post cards that were blank on one side and had instructions on the other: “Share an artful secret that you’ve never shared with anyone.” His project quickly grew and today is represented in several coffee table books as well as the world’s most visited ad-free blog. Many of us are hungry to share, or to know, what lies beneath the shiny, happy exterior. When I have revealed parts of myself that feel ugly and messed up and bad, and then have heard from others, “I have those parts too,” the relief has been palpable, and I have been able to move closer towards those elusive states called “self-compassion” and “accepting reality.”
Both confessing and receiving confession are healing. So why not share everything with everyone all the time? Why pair confession with anonymity?
In another book, Daring Greatly, Brene Brown states: “Vulnerability is based on mutuality and requires boundaries and trust. It’s not oversharing, it’s not purging, it’s not indiscriminate disclosure, and it’s not celebrity-style social media information dumps. Vulnerability is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them.”
Deciding who belongs in your circle of trust is immensely important. The people who will scoff at, or poke and prod, those raw places in you do not deserve to hear your full story. Intuition has been my best guide for choosing which people to open up to. I’m not far enough along my own path at this point to want to attach my name to my blog, or to truly blog about everything—some topics will always be reserved for in person conversations with people I already hold dear. But in my experience, the longer I sit on a secret, the larger it looms in my mind and heart and the more self-flagellation (proverbial) I endure because of it.
So find your people and share your secrets, or if you can’t yet share them directly find a way to release them anonymously to the wider world. Write them down on slips of paper and throw them into a fire. Send your own postcard to Frank Warren. Find a private place and simply say them out loud.
If you need to be on the receiving side of confession visit postsecret.com or read Cheryl Strayed’s advice column gone book Tiny Beautiful Things and luxuriate in the realization that no matter what it is that makes you feel broken, you are not alone—you are simply human.
Boulder Fields
Several years ago I hiked through boulder fields in the Wind River Range of Wyoming for the first time, and they terrified me. I am a person who wants firm plans, guarantees, iron clad promises, detailed itineraries, the feeling that I can always count on certain people for comfort, help and love. Leaning into the inevitable uncertainty of the real world felt like something to be avoided as much as possible. Walking through the Wyoming boulder fields was like physically treading through my personal existential crisis.
This time last year, I was treading through the even more treacherous boulder field of my own mind. It is bad enough when something someone else does triggers your breakdown, but when you are both the source and the expression of your suffering the reality of how little control you have flares so bright that you cannot ignore its message.
I've led a charmed life, but despite the luck and love and beauty that has fallen into my lap, I couldn't stop myself from tripping into my personal rabbit hole of dark thoughts and deep sadness. So I spent a winter wading in the muck of my heart and soul, feeling wretched and damaged and unforgivable. And as I cracked wider open, wonderful people came into my life, and people I'd known forever opened up to me in ways that made me feel like I was meeting them for the first time.
I wanted one of these remarkable people to have my answer for me, and it felt achingly lonely that nobody could provide what I so desperately wanted. And so “Collective Wisdom” was born. Seeking my answer, ending up empty handed and also, paradoxically discovering a growing sense of fulfillment anyways. I turn 29 today, and my life is very different from what I imagined it would look like. I still chaff against the uncertainty and am still learning how to give myself permission to be forgiven, but I am doing the best I can, and in some moments--and even some long stretches of time--I am profoundly happy.
I've spent the last nine months rooting into the lower, craggy Appalachian mountains, whose shiftiness is much more subtle. While out in these ancient mountains this fall I wrote:
I feel as full as a womb carrying a child
I feel my sitz bones grow roots that curl below the leaves, below the moss,
down into the Earth
where they gnarl like old lovers hands
around Birch, Rhodo, Oak and Chestnut roots
I can drink the air here and be cradled by the ground.
These mountains are so old and strong that they can bear my bad
The heft of my insecurities, fears, hurt, wrongdoing,
And also, my love, my passion, my joy
there is room for all of it
The unbearable weight of my humanness barely dimples this land
Pain, so fresh and fierce to me is able to float out here
I find laughter gurgling up
I feel beautiful and bold
I am a wise, old, child-woman
I am an Amazon River Princess
I am heft and lightness
I do not even think of the dark hole I have called home
It exists in another universe
Where dark and twisty stories kept the key to my cell
How fresh and light to walk along the ridge line now
To look purposefully up towards the silver moon and to call out
with all the wildness in my being: YES!
(If you hear shades of Carl Sandburg's "Wilderness" and Oriah Mountain Dreamer's "The Invitation" above, you are right. They are always in my pack when I am out for an extended trip.)
To express profound gratitude for the many people who didn't give me my answer, but who were with me along my way, I am marking my birthday this year by starting this blog. In so doing, I hope to live in alignment with one of the truths that stands out most clearly from this year of study, articulated by Brene Brown: vulnerability fosters connection and connection is why we are here. Here's to another year of walking through boulder fields in good company.