becoming available to yourself

Recently, I pulled out my journal to see if I could remember when I started working on this new novel.  I found the answer back in the July pages.  The months before I'd been wrestling with the balance between what I felt were two distinct callings.  One required availability, the other - writing - required isolation and focus.  I couldn't see how to make both of these callings work, so all through the month of June I am writing out an explanation to myself about what I think is the correct choice: availability.  The writing must not be important in the long run, I say to myself.  It's always about people, it's always about showing up.  In June, there is a sense of relinquishment.  I can remember the feeling of release, a certain peace.  Writing would wait.  Then in July, a succession of unexpected events.  These were small things:  conversations, decisions by friends, a gift from someone close, a paragraph in a book.  These were sudden and illuminating, like matches being struck in dark corners: Oh, I see.  By the end of that month, I had decided that I *must* write, even if it was just 250 words a day.  I would inch my way along both trajectories.  I told other people about my decision, committed myself, made it hard to back out.  I made it to 10,000 words, 15,000, 20,000.  At that point, the landscape began to shift.  Decisions were made apart from me, obligations, relationships sifted, time opened up in a new way.  There were more small things.  Every book I picked up - some I'd bought years before and left on the shelf only to randomly select them again now - was the story of a woman coming into her truth.  Every time I grabbed a magazine, it was a woman telling how she made the hard choice, how she chose her path and stuck with it even when it meant disappointing others.  Friends who all along had been counseling "availability, availability" began to say "it's time for something new."   I began to admit things in the journal I'd never allowed myself to say.  Things I wanted but hadn't given voice to.  In the space of four months everything heaved and buckled, became new ground.

What's interesting to me about all this is in hindsight, I'm not sure if the changes were  inevitable and I was just awakening to them, or if the changes came in response to my decisions.  When I look back, its almost as if this life had been lying in wait for me to choose it.  Each step I've taken has been met with a surge of reassurance, clarity, and confirmation.  But I sense that if I had not taken the steps...if I had stayed on the path I was already on, there would have been reassurance and confirmation there too.  I'm almost certain of it.  That scares me a little, to think I could have just gone on with what I knew and what felt comfortable, that life itself would have risen up and affirmed that choice too.  What might I have missed had I not taken the small messages, the little match flares that were revealing another way?  May Sarton suggests it:

"The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up."

I have felt this stagnation, an underground current pulsing, not allowed to find release.  When I think of so many women I know, I am struck by how their deep thoughtfulness, their tremendous strength and creativity is put to use holding relationships together, managing dysfunctional family members, being the emotional center of their homes or jobs or communities.  I cannot imagine where we'd be without such women, but I am also struck with the inequity of it.  What have we lost in terms of wisdom, art, culture, science, diplomacy, language, and much more by allowing ourselves to be available to everyone but our own selves?

It's something to think about.  Questions to ask ourselves in moments when we can be honest.  Step back, look.  What is pulsing underneath the surface?  What longing hasn't even been allowed the words to describe it?  What would you do if there was no one who needed your daily involvement?  There are seasons, certainly, when these longings and gifts have to take the background, but in my own life, they weren't just in the background, they were in a tight little box labeled "probably never" or "probably too late."  What about yours?  Are they somewhere they can be nurtured and watered even in a dormant season?

"And now we who are writing women and strange monsters

Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,

Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands

More gently and more subtly on the burning sands." ~ May Sarton

Sending love and courage to all my brave-hearted friends today.

tonia     

overcoming resistance

I went to the gym for the first time in almost thirty years this morning.  I went with my husband, who has been asking me to come with him for almost as long.  It's the kind of thing he thinks will be "fun," and I think will be dreadful.  It wasn't dreadful.  Just as he'd promised, no one paid any attention to me as I learned how to operate the bike and the weight machines, and just as he'd promised, it was kind of fun to be there with him.  It wasn't until I was heading out of the gym and on the way home that I remembered why I'd stopped going to the gym in the first place.  I was 18 years old and terribly self-conscious of my body and my fitness level  - and my semi-regular visits to the facility were drawing attention from an older man.  I can remember him waiting outside, leaning up against the concrete wall with a water bottle in hand, asking me in that slow male drawl how my workout was, telling me with a glance up and down that I was looking pretty good.   It was the late 80's - and it was a man's world.  It never occurred to me to stand up for myself and tell him to go away, or to complain to the gym, or even alter my schedule.  I felt uncomfortable so I quit.  In the Christian subculture I grew up in, that was my role in the world: submit, yield, or get out of the way, and I did.I'm at midlife now and I ditched the ideology of the subculture a long time ago, but the muscle memory is still there.  Someone makes a demand on my time or emotional energy and I instantly assume it's my duty to meet it even when I am mentally certain I should be doing something else.  The limbs twitch with conditioned motion, thoughts race along the grooves of practiced belief, and dopamine arrives to validate the action. In the old days, I called this comfortable, assured feeling "peace."  Conforming provided its own reward - and kept me from growing into anything more.

I'm most vulnerable to this kind of reaction directly after I assert myself and declare my intentions.  I've come to expect that any new burst of personal determination signals not a season of productivity, but a major catastrophe looming in the wings.  As soon as I hit the gym, the creepy old guy shows up in the doorway demanding attention, plucking the strings of my ingrained responses, encouraging me to yield to his demands.

"Resistance," says Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, "obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, spiritually."

she makes it happen

Learning to recognize Resistance can be complicated - especially when it comes to us wrapped in religion, ideology, and gender-roles.  Some people learn early to recognize and defy it, but for me and many others, it's a lifetime's work.  We get there one revelation, one deliberate, defiant act at a time.

We can claim the truth that we are makers, artists, builders, weavers, nurturers, truth-tellers, poets, and our work matters.

So go to the gym.

Show up for yourself.

Tell the creepy old man at the door to leave you the hell alone and mean it.  (If he sticks around, show up again anyway.  He'll get bored when he realizes he has no power to disturb or distract you. )

You can do this.  We can do this.  We owe it to ourselves - those selves that sat back, that let other people succeed, that fixed all the problems and carried all the burdens, that pushed down feelings and desires, that made dreams smaller so they didn't disturb anyone else.  We owe it to ourselves to grow our dreams and find a way and be faithful to what has always been real and true inside of us.  So let's do it, okay?

Love you, my friends.

tonia

rabbit and bone

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Night closes gently over the desert sky in a curtain of pink and amber.  The dark, when it comes, spreads slowly down, as if from the center of a dome, pushing at the last of the pale light, driving it into the horizon. Then the stars come out, hundreds of them, a sequined carpet unfurled against the blackness overhead.  In the middle of it all, the Milky Way, shimmering faintly, hinting at color - purple, blue, a thin shaft of gold.  There is almost no sound.  Somewhere out in the miles of open land around us there are creatures stirring, moths that flutter toward any hint of artificial light, coyotes after their rodent prey, cattle sighing and squirming, adjusting themselves to their prickly beds, but we hear none of it.  It is only the two of us, wrapped in blankets, puzzling out constellations in a whisper, watching for stars to fall.

It was my daughter’s idea to come.  A birthday gift, to write, to connect.  Out here we have no internet to call upon, no cell phones to hunch over.  There is each day, there is each other.

We write.  We read each other’s stories and talk through possible plot lines.  We agonize over edits and the stubbornness of characters. When the words begin to blur together, we go for walks. Together. Alone.

The cabin is perched on the high point of a rolling hill, from there, you can see the jackrabbit trails winding through the sagebrush. Down on the ground though, the trails are invisible.  I head out for a walk alone.  There is no destination to aim for, no obvious route to follow.  I keep the cabin in my sights and begin to wander.  After a half hour or so, I find an old dirt road.  It is criss-crossed with the tracks of dogs (or coyotes), the occasional set of elk prints.  No one has driven or walked it for a long time.  I follow it uphill to a barbed wire fence, then turn around and follow it downhill till I find another.  A mile away I can see the roof of the cabin shining in the sun.  I wave to it, wondering if my daughter is sitting on the porch, watching me amble around on roads that lead nowhere.  If I were doing this in the city, the French would have a word for me: flaneur - the stroller, the passionate wanderer.  Out here, I look more like a simpleton, coated in dust and sweat, stumbling into rabbit holes and over rocks, snagging my ankles on the prehistoric flora, walking uphill, then down.  But there is no one here but my daughter to see and she understands.  While I walk my mind unknots.  I can feel the muscles in my legs contracting and expanding, hear my breath pulling in and pushing out.  I am here.  I am alive.

Just off the highway on the way to the cabin, we’d seen a hand-lettered sign on the side of the road.  “Beetle-Cleaned Skulls For Sale,” it read.  We were fresh from the city, sealed into our speeding car, dust-free, oblivious.  We looked at each other and laughed.  Who would want a beetle-cleaned skull?  That was ages ago, when I was young.  The sun is just descending into the western half of the sky, the landscape stretching unvaried before me, sage and grey and yellow-brown.  I search the ground, confident that in this liminal space I will find some bleached white testimony of a former life - a tibia, a jawbone, a knot of vertebrae.  Memento mori.  What is life without the awareness of death?  I find  the brittle grey bones of the sagebrush, and they crumble beneath my feet.

When it is time to leave the cabin and return home, we stand in the doorway, reluctance making us heavy and slow.  We are unshowered, grit in every crevice; we’ve eaten endless bowls of beans and rice; we have no idea of what is going on in the world outside the desert. At home we will be warm and clean and well fed.  There will be stories to tell and hugs to give, but we do not want to go.

“Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think,” said Tasha Tudor.  I do not have to think very hard.  How long since I saw the stars as I did in the desert?  A year?  A decade?   How long since I felt silence deep as water, slipped bodily into the stream of slow time?  Long, so long.  We clean the cabin, load up the car, stand in the dust and look out over the hills one last time, then once more.  "The wonder of it!"  I am here.  I am alive.  I make no resolve save to place myself here again and again.

rosehip ceremony

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The idea of ceremony and ritual as a vital practice came to me in my thirties when I traveled across country to visit an online friend.  Her home was a masterpiece of dedicated observation and ritual.  There were candles to light for different times of day, music to set moods, books to be read at dinner, an altar in the dining room that mirrored the seasons of the church year complete with tactile symbols for the children to handle.  When I left my friend's home after a few days, I was changed.  Ritual and ceremony, I realized, make the world of the soul tangible, touchable, real.  And oh, how we need to be able to grab hold of that soul-world in our materialist, cynical age.  We have left so little room for acknowledging mystery and wonder, or the forces that work inside and through us.  These are not things we can speak of easily, even among friends and family.  But ritual and ceremony can provide a framework for it, giving solidity to things we are at a loss to describe, binding us together by experience, lending us a shared understanding.

Last week, I was invited to join in a very special ceremony for my sweet friend Lesley as she marked her passage into the Rosehip season of her life (the time after menopause).  This is such an overlooked time in a woman's life and I was thrilled to be part of creating a tangible doorway for Lesley, a point that she can look back on, knowing she has entered into a new and vital territory.  I believe it is so crucial we honor this landscape ourselves since our culture insists on treating our elder years as a time to delay and avoid, as if we stop being vibrant, living, powerful women because our bodies have moved beyond youth.

Having said that, this was my first time joining other women in such a ceremony (though you can be sure I took notes, because I will definitely be doing this in a few years) and it was such a moving time.  Everything was planned with Lesley's characteristic simplicity and beauty, honoring the earth and her own spirit, as well as ours. We shared food and drink, moving around our host's home and yard just as if we were traveling through the stages of our lives.  At each station we had a special drink (sangria, tea, Greek coffee, wine) that represented the time of life we were remembering, and we sat for hours telling our stories and sharing our experiences.  When all the stories had been told and we had completed our circuit through each life stage, we wrapped our friend in hugs and a lovely shawl that represents her new status as a Rosehip, an Elderwoman.  (Afterwards we wore our floral crowns out on the town and celebrated with dinner.  And here, too, I had something to receive:  I was self-conscious about wearing the crown in public, but all the attention we received was joyful smiles and happy questions about what we were celebrating.  The whole thing was a lovely, transformative experience.)

There's something so powerful about women coming together to bear witness for each other, to accept each other's wisdom, isn't there?  I am full up this week, thinking about how I can honor the femininity and vitality of the women in my own life, how I can stand with them and allow them to stand with me in ways that bring our hidden experiences into the light and lend them solidity.

Just as I was getting ready to post this, a friend sent me a post on Instagram that fit so perfectly with this, I had to include part of it here:

"While talking to my therapist about why I feel such a need to complete so much so fast I realized that my vision board & 99% of images I see in media are of young successful women. No wonder I felt rushed. In media, if you aren’t successful by 30, it doesn’t count..Where are the women who have nurtured their craft for years, the women who have stepped into their success with grace and depth and time. Where are the women who have built families and homes and businesses and learned happiness and self love in a different capacity than you could ever have at 30? They are missing. And that is a disservice to all of us..I will not disappear as I age. I will only shine brighter, love deeper, become wiser, have more to give and be more free. I will be here to show young women you have a lifetime to unfold. Slow down, breathe deep, live fully."

(Just a note: I don't believe older women are "missing" because they have hidden themselves, but because we are conditioned not to value and see the women who are before us.)

Tell me, how do you mark your own passages?  Have you ever participated in a ceremony like this?

And also, who shines bright for you? Are there elderwomen in your life that are pointing the way?

I'd love to hear about them. 

mentors: William Stafford

I first discovered William Stafford through his work as an Oregon poet.  His poem Traveling Through the Dark is probably his most well-known piece and justly so:

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:that road is narrow;

to swerve might make more dead. By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;she had stiffened already, almost cold.

I dragged her off; she was large in the belly. My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated. The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;around our group I could hear the wilderness listen. I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

His poetry contained an accessibility, intelligence, and gentleness that resonated with me.  Later, I learned that his writing had been developed and honed as a young Conscientious Objector interned at Camp Belden (California) during WWII.  This helped explained the strange camaraderie I felt with him, as I consider myself a pacifist of sorts.  "He believed in the fragile but essential community of the world, and he wrote on behalf of what he called "the unknown good in our enemies," writes his son, Kim.  At the heart of Stafford's work lies what I hope my own work gives witness to: a commitment to wholeness and to the dignity and humanity of every person.

(Side note:  I included a Conscientious Objector character in my first novel in honor of Stafford.)

After he was released from the camps, Stafford went on to teach at universities and write poetry the rest of his life.  Though he was well-respected, and well-known (he was the Poet Laureate of Oregon for 15 years), he refused to be pretentious.  He wrote for himself, and his vision of the way the world could be, but he carried no hubris when it came to publishing:

"I have genuinely felt throughout my life a sense that any acceptance of what I write is a bonus, a gift from other people....I've always felt the editor's role is to get the best possible material for the readers...not to serve the writer...So I never have felt that I needed to push this stuff into the world. If it's invited in, then it will come."

In art, as in many fields, it is rare to come across such humility, such self-contained awareness, and it speaks to a deep part of me as a writer.  It is vital that I believe in the work I do, that I push myself to the limits of excellence as much as I am able, but then, to let it go, to believe that it will find its place in the world without my desperate striving or need for validation.  Stafford embodied this posture and I read over his work frequently to remind myself it is possible.

He has contributed so much to the formation of my own writing, it would be difficult to record it all in this post.  His meticulous habit of daily writing; his belief that you create good writing by living a life that enables good writing to come about; his refusal to be dismissed as simplistic or sentimental by people who didn't understand his motivations; his ability to be at home within himself and in the world; his rejection of cynicism, all touch me deeply.

About the latter, Stafford says:

"Certain writers create a zone of language that deliberately offends but stays within its own invidious conventions. Challenging genteel culture, these people attain a swagger, in effect saying like a child, "Look at me, I am being bad."Indulging in this kind of affront could be temporarily interesting, but relying on it for a main accomplishment becomes tiresome and petty. And to live by it is to narrow one's ambitions, is to forsake a host of more satisfying accomplishments.These writers reveal an obsession about gentility. Most of us are not permanently shocked enough to be amused for long, but apparently these dabblers in making mud pies can derive a lifelong charge out of defying something they profess not to believe in. Further, if they can maintain their pose of being bad, they can ascribe any negative assessments of their accomplishment to the narrowness of their audience, and thus avoid being judged on the adequacy of their vision, liveliness of invention, depth of realization, flexibility of language, or other such criteria.Gaining attention as they do is as cheap as attempting such by bribery, advertising, demagoguery or any other false means. Timid critics help by not wanting to appear squeamish; they give attention to what is outlandish and fail to remark the shallowness of such attainment that lives by being bizarre."

In my work, writing novels and stories, I often wonder where I fit into the publishing world.  I dislike naivete in writing, I abhor moralism and sentimentality, and yet I find I naturally write of goodness that rises out of darkness, of redemption, healing, love that endures.  Is there a place for my work in a cynical world that seems to hunger mostly for the kind of realism that shatters hope rather than guards it?  I don't know yet, but Stafford holds a lantern for me:

"What if we could all hold in mind the same good dream? That is what a literary work accomplishes momentarily...The myth I hold is not that of the curse on the family, the guilt hovering forever as a result of a bad deed; but instead the vision of life haunted by some unerasable good deed: a life that can’t lose for long, or at least forever. Not Oedipus doomed, but Aeneas bearing the unshruggable potential for later life - this is the pattern I note."

The pattern I note in Stafford's life: peace-making, humility, optimism, dedication, goodness, vision, and excellence, have impacted me greatly.   I'm incredibly thankful that his work was invited into the world and I was allowed to learn from it. 

Recommended books:

Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford You Must Revise Your Life*

The Answers Are Inside the Mountains*

Down in My Heart: Peace Witness in War Time

Every War Has Two Losers(There is a 30 minute film related to this book here.)*

Both these books have a rambling, organic style which can be hard to follow, but they are littered with gems.  I look through them regularly.

 Stafford's son Kim has written a fabulous book on writing as well:The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft