I’m at the library, supposedly working on my book. My mind is scattered, though, spread wide across time and people and circumstance.

My uncle died this week. I’m traveling to the funeral Thursday. His family relationships were strained, so his funeral will be a ritual I can’t really imagine (though I’m glad for the chance to be present for). I feel nervous about it. I feel nervous, too, about being away from Elijah for more than a day.

There are other things, too, though—friends working through physical and relationship challenges of their own, a surrogate brother leaving the country indefinitely, a book I’m almost done writing, but that’s challenging me to soul-search, to admit my feelings of inadequacy around writing a climax I haven’t personally lived, and then go ahead and write it anyway.

All of it’s swirling around inside, mirroring the wind and rain that have howled outside all week. I care so much about the people involved in each of these swirls. I care so much I want to howl, too. If I had a magic wand, I’d make everyone’s hearts hurt a lot less.

This week I’m getting a crash course in “dealing with it”. There’s nothing like health problems and neverending bug bites to really unveil the depth and breadth, or in my case thinness and narrowness, of one’s character. I am just now trying to crawl out of the mire of feeling sorry for myself and actually realize the sun is still shining, and there still remains a wealth of things for which gratitude is most called. There still remain outcrops, for example, where mites do not live. I don’t know where they are, and if I did, I would be there, but just knowing they exist brings a small kind of ecstacy.

Maybe some of you have seen ads for a new book, Perfect Madness:  Motherhood in an Age of Anxiety, by Judith Warner.  I haven’t read it yet, but I looked at the pages Amazon posts and it seems interesting.  From what I gather, it’s a book about the feeling many mothers have these days–particularly middle and upper-class moms–that there’s some optimal standard of parenting that they’re never quite able to reach.  A "choking cocktail of guilt and anxiety and resentment and regret" Warner calls it.

This cocktail really is poison, but I wonder whether many of us sip on it daily.  And this, whether we’re mothers or not.  Parents or not.  I wonder whether this book is a microstudy of a much bigger problem, and whether those of us who struggle with the feeling it describes–the "not enough syndrome" I might call it–might be helped to realize we’re sipping not on something of our own making.  What if it’s a feeling that’s actually perfectly normal and even to be expected, given the way our society runs? 

If we stopped working so hard to hide that we’re feeling this dis-ease, could our energy and creativity and confidence be freed up to actually address some of the causes of it–not causes of a personal, this-is-a-product-of-my-upbringing nature (which surely need to be honored and addressed as well), but causes that are broader in nature, and maybe simultaneously closer to the roots of this beast than the individual households that it’s ravaged?

This all sounds so abstract, but I don’t think it has to be.  I’d love to sit down with 15 or 20 people and name our experiences of this poison, this cocktail of not-enough feelings (which includes things like rage and bitterness and depression and anxiety).  We could start to brainstorm ways our culture produces this poison and is set up perfectly to peddle it.  We could begin to imagine what resisting the poison might mean. 

Could this be a way to depersonalize shame?  A way to more effectively lessen it than all our private attempts at willing it, or praying it, or therapeuting it away?  Warner says yes, when it comes to mommy madness.  What about the madness of us all?

I need to vent. The mites are back AGAIN. Do you know what I spent a good part of today doing? Caulking floorboards and window sills. I don’t know what else to do. Exterminators have fogged the attic with borric acid. Rat traps don’t catch anything. Vacuuming twice and thrice a week doesn’t help. They come in waves, and, very much like the ocean, one never knows how big or small the next swell will be. This wave is nearly as big as the first. Bites everywhere. Elijah is now getting them too.

Can I just tell you what a BUMMER this whole thing is? It’s getting me depressed. There is nothing so unnerving as feeling things crawling on you, biting you, but not being able to see them, and having no idea where they’re coming from or what to do to make them go away. Crazy-making, I tell you. I’m all for loving all creatures, for seeing each as important in the grand web of the universe, but I have to admit there’s not a whole lot of love in me for this particular crew.

Back to scratching…

Today is my birthday!  I’m 30!  :)

Last week I wrote about a meditation I’ve been doing lately. This week I discovered a much shorter version that’s become possible now that the images from the first one are in my muscle memory (soul memory? psyche memory?). It’s just a deep breath. As I breathe in, my breath itself is what I visualize collecting all those parts of me that get spread so far away. As I breathe out, I visualize my breath creating an invisible skin that keeps me all here, all present in this moment.

As I write this, and even as I physically do the meditation, I’m aware that this kind of centering isn’t original to me at all. I’m aware that people of many religions and/or lacks thereof do these sorts of things, and that there are books written and lectures given and CDs recorded and workshops offered and meditation centers founded all around them. They aren’t new.

Somewhere along the way, though, I became tired of trying to find God and find peace and find community and ways of waking all the parts of me up by studying what everyone else does toward such ends. My studies became a way of saying to myself over and over again, you’re not enough, you can’t begin until you have some coherent thing figured out from all the pieces, you need something more. Something someone else has. I’m all for apprenticeship, and think there’s Life to be found in many forms of imitation, but at this point I need a healthy dose of trying things out “on my own.” I put that in quotes because what I really mean is playing with what’s already gone into me (and I’ve poured in quite a lot) and coming up with practices that feel honest, and make some sort of sense to me, even if only to my gut. Things that say to me and whoever else is listening: this is who I am, and these are things that make me feel thankful or peaceful or connected to something bigger. And all of it’s enough.

The day that I get certain voices out of my head, voices of people I love, but who have strong opinions about what the “right” way to be spiritual is, the right way to do religion, is the day I will rise up from this earth of nettles and legs made lame from thick constraints and feel my wings go soaring. Feel wind beneath them, and like Spirit is the one blowing it, and hear her singing while she blows, “Fly, dear soul! Become the woman you were meant to be!”