I’m sick this weekend, tired and congested and wanting to curl up in bed.  N and I are swapping childcare duties, though, taking our turns at work-beyond-home, so here I am with a very sweet boy at my feet.  No sleeping right now for me.

I’ve been listening to Jewel all afternoon, feeding and changing and lounging with E in between, and am inspired again by her spirit.  I particularly love Life Uncommon.

Lend your voices only to sounds of freedom
No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from
Fill your lives with love and bravery
And you shall lead a life uncommon

It’s a rally to set down the chains that keep you living small.  The bravery piece is an acknowledgement that living fully, in the best sense of that word, will not be without opposition.  And my thought is opposition comes from inside of us just as much as from the outside.

Come on you unbelievers, move out of the way
There is a new army coming and we are armed with faith

If each of us is made of different voices, different people at our inner table, her "move aside" could be spoken to the voices inside of us that would thwart a robust life.  Isn’t that a great phrase?  I want to live robustly!  I want to use my words to bring life.  I want to stand at my own life’s threshold like a superhero, muscles flexed, fist held up and out above my head.  Haha!!!  Take that, nihilism!  Watch me live!!!

It’s moments like these, when my heart swells to bursting, that become my buoys in life’s day-to-dayness.  The trail markers that keep me going where I want to go, even as my feet are killing me and I’m sick of the food I brought and…I’m wiping poopy bottoms in between blowing my own nose.

Life is real.  Even the uncommon kind.  For some reason that’s okay with me right now.  For me right now, right this second, love and bravery have to be about the quality I bring to loving E.  Beyond that, we’ll just see. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go blow my nose.

I’ve been meaning to tell you what I thought of Gilead all week, and am finally in a space to do so.

I really loved it.  Especially the first half.  I loved the honesty of the narrator, and the humility.  The way he told you what his weaknesses are, and the things that fill him up.  The way, like any of us, he couldn’t tame his jealousies or resentments like he wanted—or his tongue, even when he knew the ones he burned with it did not deserve the burning.  The book is a rambling letter he writes at the end of his life to his young son.

I also love the ways he deals with religion.  The narrator is a minister, and comes from a line of ministers, but even in all of that history, all of the holy wars within his family and between denominations and even races that he talks about, his take on his vocation is fresh, is earnest.  It makes it sound like an honor to be in his position.  He’s one of those people who’s read all sorts of things, all sorts of angles on God and faith, theism, atheism, and holds it all loosely together somehow.  He’s read enough for his convictions to be gentle, lived enough for his faith to be strong.  I’m not religious, but I could totally appreciate his views.  I was endeared to them.

One passage I particularly liked was this one.  He’s just written how he and a childhood friend baptized a litter of kittens.

I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand.  Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing.  It stays in the mind.  For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them.  It still seems to me to be a real question.  There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily.  It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that.  I have felt it pass through me, so to speak.  The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.  I don’t wish to be urging the ministry on you, but there are some advantages to it you might not know to take account of if I did not point them out.  Not that you have to be a minister to confer blessing.  You are simply much more likely to find yourself in that position.  It’s a thing people expect of you.  I don’t know why there is so little about this aspect of the calling in the literature. (23)

A little later he’s still reflecting on blessing, and writes this beautiful scene:

That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church.  There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me.  The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet.  On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t.  It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth.  I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.  I wish I had paid more attention to it.  My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really.  This is an interesting planet.  It deserves all the attention you can give it. (28-29)

Amen, dear sir.

A book I well recommend.

Anyone out there read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead?  What’d you think?

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 just met a great lady this week, and think you all ought to go check out her new blog, Chameleon Chronicles.  Her theme will be spirituality, and it looks like gender/feminist issues will get their time there as well.  I’m looking forward to reading more! 

Welcome to the blogosphere, Tess!

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them–ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,–seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d–till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
                                                                                                ~Walt Whitman

I don’t stop searching for places to belong, people to love and be loved by, anchors to build a life on.  I muse, I venture, I throw into oceans of space, “seeking the spheres, to connect them.” This is why I read, why I write, why I take classes and attend lectures and strike up conversations with strangers.  This is why I love friends.

Last night, filament clad, I made my way to a dramatic reading of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  And really, why hasn’t anyone ever told me about this guy?  I was captivated.  The whole time I felt like I had just stepped into a hot bath.  I closed my eyes and just sank down into it, goose bumps and all.

Leaves of Grass, for those of you who don’t know, is an expansive collection of poems that grew and grew over the course of Whitman’s life.  It speaks of nature and humanity and the divine.  It speaks of life and death and the cycles of things.  It challenges sexism, racism, classism, religiosity, body-fear.  It lifts us all up, cosmic things like planets, comets and stars, small things like birds and plants and dung beetles, and everything in between, inviting us to notice.  To notice.  To hallow, while not taking too seriously.  To recognize interconnectedness and unity in everything.  To find a holy spark in even what’s lowly and forgotten.  It’s spiritual, sensual (!), playful, contradictory, prophetic.  Amazing.  Truly.

I’ve found a new friend.  A new bard to help divine the times.  My throwing last night was so not in vain.

P.S.  I’ve often found poetry inaccessible, like it’s written for insiders rather than me.  I’m thinking it’s time I change my view on this and actually do some exploring in the field.  Get my feet wet in it.  Suggestions gratefully welcome (anthologies and otherwise).

In my last post I promised a show and tell.  I’ve been working the last few days on a collage, first just in my mind, trying to imagine how to respond to The Eye that wants me not to try anything too risky.  I decided I wanted to treat it as a scared child who needs to be held and reassured.  I considered fighting it, like a warrior, but concluded that would only keep it kicking.  Violence and rejection are the very things she’s afraid of, so giving her a dose of them would only mean her fears coming true, and her drive to try to protect me from them needing to intensify.  The gentle approach won out. 

I thought of depicting hands holding her, and the hands being made up of all the things I can do to reassure her—self-care things, like journaling, dream work, therapy when needed, conversations and connections with helpful others.  Attentiveness to what’s inside.  In the end I took a picture of my own hands.  When I see it, I think of all of those ways I can protect my inner self.  It’s a commitment I’m making to The Eye:  I’m going to take care of us.  You don’t have to do it any more.  Rest.  Relax.  Be held.

My next task was to imagine what it might look like to risk—how in the world I might live if not bound by fear.  Jumping off a cliff.  That’s what that felt like.  How could I make such a leap?  Here’s what I came up with:  1. If I trust that what I’m leaping toward is worth it, and 2. If I trust that there’s a safety net, able to catch me if a fall is too long or hard, or the thing I’m jumping toward is further off than I expect it to be.  Again I saw hands as I imagined this, this time much bigger than mine alone, ready to catch me and hold me—even clap or cheer when that’s needed.  I pictured them made up of all of the people in my life who love me and believe in me, people I know, and have yet to know.  I pictured faith, which is really what taking that leap requires.  I pictured G-d, and the pulse of the universe, and all of the lessons that nature surrounds me with, buoys me with.  And the pulse of my own soul, which has been since the beginning, and which, despite all set-backs, tenaciously keeps on living, calling, speaking, prodding, pulling…thriving.  I can trust these things.  They hold me up.  They won’t let me fall.  Or fall to my death, rather.  And, though sometimes surprising me, they’re often as familiar and known—mundane, even—as my own two hands.  That’s how I depicted them.

Across the top of the page I wrote Safe to risk living Bigger, imagining bigger to mean all things opposite of fearful, apologetic, ashamed, controlled, predictable.  Things that could make people depend on me.  Things that could make me well-known.  Things that would involve voicing my opinions and convictions publicly.  Heck—things that might involve a lot of hard work to actually get good at.  Living bigger means letting loose the tight control I’ve tried to have over everything and just seeing what’s possible.  The flowers and their surrounding brightness are this beauty and bigness I’m leaping toward.

Yay!  I stare at this picture with joy.  I feel fear, too, but it’s those hands that make that be okay.  Safe to risk.  Safe to risk living bigger.  Yeah.  That’s what I think I am.

This has been a really important week for me.  I started the Artist’s Way this week, which is a kind of workbook/recovery book for people whose artist-selves have gotten thwarted along life’s way.  I’m pretty sure the author would say the book is for all of us.

With the help of some guided meditation questions, I’ve been identifying some really important stuff that’s kept me living small most of my life—living with a lot of fear, holding me back from thriving in all my glory (that sounds so pretentious, doesn’t it?—all my glory?  It does unless you think everyone has it.  Which I do.).  I’m feeling so hopeful and energized.  Something new is underway inside.  Something really good.

One thing I’ve noticed this week, and which only adds to my conviction that important things are happening, is this weird…Thing has woken up.  It happens nearly every time I have a break-through in inner-work-type stuff—every time I feel that zing of fear going away and the accompanying magic of knowing, even for a moment, what it’s like to confidently pursue my dreams.  Or to have dreams.  I’ll have a day or two, maybe three, of a natural sort of high, and then as that starts to level off, I’ll feel like I’m being watched.  Quite literally.  I’ll find myself looking to see if someone’s in the room.  No one is there, of course, but It is.  I’m pretty sure It is a projected persona from inside myself whose job it is to keep me from doing anything risky.  Anything at all.  When I start to imagine doing such things, it shows up.  A nebulous threat.  An Eye, making sure I know I’m being watched, sure I know I better not do anything great or fantastic or free, or I’ll be sorry.

My pattern has mostly been to try to ignore The Eye (think Tolkein’s depiction of it), to try to keep doing what I set out to do.  But would you believe that within a day or two of it being set on me, all the fears and insecurities and reasons to get depressed and deflated about life I’ve ever known have been set on me as well, and I have a minor melt down.  I recover from it, but as I do, it sets me gently back into the smallness of life I was originally so happy about leaving.  Mission accomplished.

Yuck.

So anyway, that whole cycle happened again this week.  But here’s what’s really great:  In the midst of my minor meltdown last night, my husband got mad.  He got mad.  Not in some stereotypical male way, but in the "I’m on your team and I hate this cycle right along with you" way.  He said he was tired of me coming up against freedom and then backing down.  He said I’ve got to fight.  I’ve got to face that demon, that Eye, and push through to the other side.  I need to do it.  He (my husband) needs me to do it.  Our son—our whole family system needs it.  “You’ve got to do something to stand up to it!” he said.

At first I was just annoyed.  I don’t like being told what to do.  And frankly, I don’t like having to stand up to this Thing.  It’s really scary.

But you know, I think my husband’s right.  And I sure as hell would rather be told what to do in this instance, by him, than be told to live small every day of my life.

So here’s what I’m aiming to do.  I’m going to make a collage.  I’m going to make a collage that depicts, somehow, me standing up to this Thing and proceeding to thrive.  Some signpost of what I want to do and what, with any kind of luck (read help from God/Spirit/Universe/husband/friends/inner muse), I will do.  I needed to write this post to make public this commitment.  I’ll show you what I come up with when it’s done.

I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s Pilgrimage, the non-fiction tale of Coelho’s spiritual journey.  Much of the journey is quite literal - a walking path taken across Spain when Coelho was 30.  So far I can hardly put it down.

Monumental current events have a way of worming their way into much that I read, so it isn’t much wonder that Katrina came to mind as I read the following passage:

Everything in our surroundings [along his path in Spain] reflected an uneasy peace, the peace of a world that was still in the process of growing and being created - a world that seemed to know that, in order to grow, it had to continue moving along, always moving along.  Great earthquakes and killer storms might make nature seem cruel, but I could see that these were just the vicissitudes of being on the road.  Nature itself journeyed, seeking illumination. (36)

Do you think this could be true?…a way, maybe, of depersonalizing the devastation that nature inflicts on itself?  Or, rather, personalizing it in a different way than we often do?  Rather than nature being cruel, maybe nature is traveling its own path, doing its best, like many of us are, to balance and counterbalance its own self out.  When too much pressure builds up here, an earthquake or volcano gets released.  When too much moisture or heat builds up there, a huricane spins and dumps the access where it wasn’t before.

I don’t know.  A journeying nature is somehow easier for me to respect and relate with, easier for me to swallow than one that’s malevolent or randomly unfair.  It doesn’t diminish the suffering so many bear because of that journey, but it puts the suffering, for me, into a different light.  It also begs we ask the tough questions of why, when nature does its thing, the poor are so often those that suffer most.  That’s a different set of questions than the ones around why nature is so mean.

I’ve also been reading Mary Oliver this week.  Two of her poems have been echoing again and again in my mind as prayers…prayers in response, again, to Katrina.  Prayers for hope that light follows darkness.

The Lily

Night after night
darkness
enters the face
of the lily

which, lightly,
closes its five walls
around itself,
and its purse

of honey,
and its fragrance,
and is content
to stand there

in the garden,
not quite sleeping,
and, maybe,
saying in lily language

some small words
we can’t hear
even when there is no wind
anywhere,

its lips
are so secret,
its tongue
is so hidden–

or, maybe,
it says nothing at all
but just stands there
with the patience

of vegetables
and saints
until the whole earth has turned around
and the silver moon

becomes the golden sun–
as the lily absolutely knew it would,
which is itself, isn’t it,
the perfect prayer?

At Black River

All day
its dark, slick bronze soaks
in a mossy place,
its teeth,

a multitude
set
for the comedy
that never comes–

its tail
knobbed and shiny,
and with a heavyweight’s punch
packed around the bone.

In beautiful Florida [or the Gulf region…]
he is king
of his own part
of the black river,

and from his nap
he will wake […or she, Katrina]
into the warm darkness
to boom, and thrust forward,

paralyzing
the swift, thin-waisted fish,
or the bird
in its frilled, white gown,

that has dipped down
from the heaven of leaves
one last time
to drink.

Don’t think
I’m not afraid.
There is such an unleashing
of horror.

Then I remember:
death comes before
the rolling away
of the stone.

A couple of weeks ago I watched Phantom of the Opera (the movie) for the first time.  I have no idea how it compares with the stage production, but as it was, I really enjoyed it.  Since watching it I’ve thought a lot about the ways the show depicts so much inside all of us.  So much inside of me.

The scene in the dressing room where Christine meets Raoul for the first time since childhood, though – that was hard for me to watch.  Not the part with Raoul, but the part after Raoul leaves, where the Phantom gets jealous and possessive and Christine says to him (he’s still speaking to her from hiding), “Angel, I hear you.  Speak, I listen.  Stay by my side, guide me.  Angel, my soul was weak, forgive me.  Enter at last, Master!”  Oh, that was hard to watch.  Hard to hear her desperate pleading, offered to the tyrant she mistook for a god.

It was hard to watch because that was me in that scene. 

I have phantoms, too.  Things that pose for a long time as promise – promise of safety, of popularity, of being in on some insiders’ game – but that ultimately reveal themselves as threat.  The hardest part about that dressing room scene was the way it reminded me of the phantom I mistook for God for so many years.  A God who really seemed to talk to me, coach me, comfort me, stay faithfully by my side.  But who had a really awful flip side, too.  One that was gamy, pouty, insecure, demanding, self-centered.  One that would intentionally cause me harm in order to make me a better person.  One that would objectify me in order to get his own agenda accomplished, and be glad when I bowed my head and broke my will and silenced my voice in order to make that possible. 

He wasn’t all bad.  No – if he were, he wouldn’t have had such power over me.  Christine wouldn’t have been mesmerized by her Phantom if he had shown his cards too blatantly or soon. 

But he wasn’t an angel.  No.  Most definitely not.

I think phantoms come in many forms.  I think they can be blogs.  I think they can be self-talk.  I think they can be clubs or churches or jobs or people.  Alcohol, even.  Pornography.  Anything that’s magic for us, pulling us in with a sense of promise, making us lose ourselves and our better judgment in a swirl of assurances of wished-for things…or warnings of all that would be lost without them.  Our phantoms do all this, but simultaneously seep poison into us.  Jail us.  Demonstrate themselves to be dictators, twisted and jealous lovers.

I want to be free of my phantoms – the ones posing as God and otherwise.  I want to cultivate my inner Raouls, and friendships with outer ones, cause Lord knows I can’t get free on my own.  Lord knows the second our phantoms whisper in our ears, we’re melting again, swooning again, relocking our handcuffs willingly.  “Don’t leave me,” we say to our offended kings.  “I’m sorry I thought about freedom.”

In my moments of clarity, I say no to all that.  I say no to captivity and darkness.  No to un-gods.  And I sing a massive, operatic YES to freedom.  This kind of move may not let me live anymore in the magic of a personal “angel,” like Christine long thought she had.  I may no longer sing the songs that such “angels” can inspire.  And I grieve both losses.

At the same time, though, I think life outside the caves, outside the haunted opera house, is magic enough for me right now, and is full of hope and love and light around so many turns.  This makes me so happy.  This truly makes me want to sing.