Sometimes, and maybe mainly when I’m very tired, and haven’t exercised enough, and usually late in the evening when I don’t really feel like reading and journaling feels like work, I feel an aching sort of emptiness, and a question starts to form inside:  Is this all there is?  It’s a mist that hints at form and substance, but, like mists do, wafts away when I try and look at it too closely.  Or maybe it’s more of a dark and unyielding chasm, and all I can bear is getting close enough to know it’s there.

Life is achingly beautiful, but for me, part of the deal is this ache for something I can’t yet name.

One of the things I’ve been doing in the last couple weeks—since that conversation I told you about—is a kind of meditation.  I do it when I feel my peace getting wobbly.

The whole thing came about because of an image I got in my head.  It was an image of me being spread out over too much space.  Like the parts of me worrying about things in the past and the parts of me thinking or scheming about my future and the parts of me trying to keep track of laundry or groceries, say, or whether or not Elijah will stay asleep long enough for me to finish a task—in other words, the present stuff, too—all those parts of me are spread around.  That’s a truckload of space!  I picture taking up a broom and going around collecting all of it.  I picture sweeping it all into here, right now, into this very skin I’m wanting to inhabit.

Once I’ve done that, then I try to be more mindful of what it feels like to be in this moment, with all of myself here.  I start to listen; what are the sounds in the space around me?  Even a quiet room has some.  I try to feel what the chair or ground or bed feels like beneath me, what the air feels like on my face.  I even take note of my itches (have I told you the mites are back???).  The great thing is I can do all of this anywhere—even walking down the street.

Something is so peace-inducing about this process for me.  I imagine it’s like a parent feels when the teenager out doing who knows what is finally back in the house, safe in their room.  The parts of my psyche given to worrying about past or present or future get to relax, knowing that all of me is here right now; their work is unnecessary for the time being. 

It makes me feel calm, and, quite literally, collected.

Sometimes when the sky has turned a soft shade of green and the trees are dark silhouettes and the earth is growing cold, I feel held.  Not so much personally as cosmically, like I get to be nestled onto this planet with everything else there is.  Like I have my corner of earth, too, and we’re all of us getting wrapped up together in darkness.  It makes me feel quiet.  It makes me feel a sweet sort of sadness that I can’t speak the language of trees.

It is a mysterious thing to be so responsible for a life, so elementally connected to it (I wipe his poop; I pick the dear boy’s nose), knowing it’s only for a season.  This must be what breaks my heart wide open when I hold him in those tender moments, when I put my face on the ground next to his and we laugh.  It’s the knowledge that he will grow up and be his own person, and that as he does so, I will step respectfully away—of course not in every way, but truly, and significantly—and that this is the way things are supposed to be.  I grieve the loss already, even as I’m glad for him to grow, and bless him to do so; in fact the prospect brings great joy.  He is mine, but not mine.  Part of me, but separate. 

I have to wonder whether this is true of our own selves in our own dear bodies, whether this isn’t part of the grief that accompanies dying.  We’re given these connections (bodies, children), but sometimes have to notice that they aren’t ours forever.  We notice how much we love them while they are, and that maybe, too, they never were ours altogether.  The mystery.

Elijah had a rough day with naps today. N left yesterday for a conference, and I wonder if he senses it. It was late afternoon before he finally fell asleep on my lap.

I looked at his rosy cheeks, his film of dark hair, his little brow unfurrowing, and all of it—his hands, the scratches on his face from his untrimmed nails, that dent between his lips and nose—it all made me want to weep. What is it about pure innocence, such uncomplicated thereness that makes me cry? I wanted to tell him I’m sorry for the things he’ll suffer. I’m sorry that the world is so big, and we’re small. That I’ll miss holding him like this when he grows older. That the way he looks up at me lately, with eyes so full of wonder, so full of hope and anticipation, and sets his hand on my cheek, it fills me up with holiness. It makes me believe, even for just that second, that maybe this, this is tasting God. And that maybe he’s literally getting what I long so deeply for: to reach out for and actually touch the face of God. To look into her eyes, maybe after a fit of crying because I wonder if I’m alone, and get to see and feel and even smell that she’s real, and warm, and present, and smiling on me.

Sleep well, dear boy. Sleep in a cloud of lovedness. May we fill each other’s lives with God.

Lately I haven’t been in a blogging mood.  And I think I understand why.

About a week and a half ago I had a really great conversation with N, in which both of us discovered how sick we are of feeling the weight of trying to become superstars.  It sounds silly saying it outright like that, but that’s the burden I’ve borne for who knows how long—the burden that it’s my responsibility, indeed, my obligation to become some kind of star.  Writer, speaker, counselor, pastor-type, doesn’t really matter what.  Just be really fantabulous at something and you’ve succeeded.  That’s what my inner voices say.

Problem is, I haven’t remotely succeeded at that.  In fact, it’s that very pressure to succeed, I think, that keeps me blocked from doing it.  It’s like there are two kinds of fuel inside of me, pushing me forward.  On the one hand there are my interests, the things I love to do, the things I’m consistently drawn toward.  Writing, music, soul care, healing work, art.  On the other, there are these voices:  be a superstar, or you’ve failed.  Now I can’t go trying to be a star at things I hate to do, so I go ahead and plug away at the things I like.  But those damned voices really get in the way.  They taint my efforts.  They freeze me up, sometimes, and make me sick of doing what I do at others.  They make me ask questions like Why aren’t you better at this by now? and If you love this so much, why do only ten people know it?  They chastise me for not having more published, for example, and inject me with fear that I’m hopelessly behind at accomplishing anything worthwhile.  And as if that isn’t bad enough, they add a final blow:  You’re the one who loves doing these things.  We’re only saying all of this because you’ve said you love to do them.  Aaaagh!  As Pirsig might say, these voices are the worst gumption trap ever.

So what I realized about a week and a half ago is that I’m just sick of feeling like I need to be (or be on my way to becoming) a superstar to be worth anything.  I literally visualized taking that burden off my shoulders and testing out what it feels like to use only the other stuff—the things I genuinely love to do—for fuel.  Yow!  What a difference!

I’m discovering, among other things, far less need for others to know my thoughts.  I love to write, and I plan to continue doing it here, but I’ve realized that part of my motivation to blog has been a need for people to know that I’m thinking and doing worthwhile things.  There’s nothing at all wrong with that motivation, it’s just that it happened to shrink when I took that be-amazing burden off my back.  For me, the two were connected.

So here I find myself feeling like I’m experiencing life anew.  Again.  Is it Sue Monk Kidd who talks about life being a perpetual waking up?  Just when I feel like my eyes and limbs have adjusted to a new view, everything shifts again, and I feel like a baby, or a newborn fawn.  Or maybe only one tiny thing shifts, and I realize just how connected all of it, all of my life, actually is to that thing, and that in effect, that one tiny thing is as good as enormous.

Anyway.  I won’t presume to have my burden permanently gone, but for a really nice week, here, I’ve felt what it’s like to be content with who I am and this little life that I’m living.  I’ve begun to think my thoughts and go about my business with a lot less need to be acknowledged for it.  To let the trajectory of listening to and following my soul unfold as it will, without so much worry over whether or not it’s enough.

I need to say again how much fun I’m having with this guy.  Every week he’s learning something new—to laugh more, to reach out and grab hold of things, to prop himself up a little better on his elbows.  Yesterday he started doing this funky thing with his tongue, where I swear it looks like he’s sucking on a marble.  There are no marbles in our household, but I was actually checking his mouth for one yesterday.

Since before Elijah’s birth I felt this crazy drive to avoid talking about him or motherhood too much—in “real” life, and on this site.  I’ve nursed a lifelong fear of motherhood sucking me into isolation and into being dismissed and/or ignored and/or found irritating by people who aren’t parenting.  I want to be interesting to people, and I’ve feared that motherhood is just plain dull to the general populace.

But here’s the thing:  by “general populace,” I’ve unwittingly meant those with public power.  As I observed the world around my childhood self, I think I did a kind of power analysis and came to conclude that those who “matter most” don’t really talk about babies or housekeeping or food.  They talk about work (the kind that makes money).  Politics.  Religion.  Sports.  The majority of them are (or were, in my life) men.  Eager to be taken seriously, I began a life-long quest to avoid the topics that power people avoid, and, conversely, the topics to which the mothers all around me flocked.

There is good sense to this quest—in wanting to be valued and heard and respected, and in wanting to build, rather than burn, bridges with people in different stages and roles in life than my own.  But the sense I’m now making of it all adds this to the mix:  by my avoidance of openly embracing most things maternal (i.e. talking freely of them with people not involved in the task)—and by maternal, maybe I should say historically so, because times are definitely changing—I don’t want to buy into an unfair game.  A game that says public life is more valuable than private life, men more valuable than women, earning money more valuable than literally putting the food on the table.  I don’t like that game.  I think it sucks, actually.  I don’t like the parts of men and women that it stifles and closes down and builds to over-hugeness.  No, I am not only a mother (as no mother is).  I am lots of things, and have lots of interests in life to pursue.  But one of them is definitely motherhood.

Anyway, here’s me realizing that I’ve been playing that game on this blog a lot more than I’d like, and that instead, I’d like to play the post-more-about-the-motherhood-I’m-enjoying-so-much game. Right now that sounds a lot more fun.

It’s okay to be a beginner.  No matter how old you are.  No matter how slow you are to pick up on things that others have mastered long ago. 

It’s okay to not know how to do things that you wish you knew how to do.  It’s okay to ask for help.  It’s also okay to say, "No thanks," to help.  "I’m going to do this on my own this time."

It’s okay to write shitty first drafts.  And seconds, thirds, and fourths.  It’s okay to never win a Pulizter.  It’s okay to do your art just because you have to, and not because anyone wants you to, or to do it because it makes you feel happy.  It’s okay if it doesn’t make money.  And it’s also okay to try to dream of ways that it might.

It’s okay for people to reject your work, or not connect with it.  It’s okay for people to rave about it.  It’s okay for people to have little reaction to it at all.

And it’s quite alright that you have your personality, and not someone else’s.  That you get tired in crowds.  That you actually like light beer.

You’re okay.  You’re actually far more than that.  And you can rest now, all you voices that say otherwise.  You can stop trying to keep this girl from flying.  Thank you for working overtime to try to protect me.  I want to take it from here.