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.