not done yet :: July 20, 2023

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              I’ve been born again many times: in a crowd, at an altar, in my seat, on my knees, on my feet. Those were jarring rebirths, laboring under the strain of my supposed corruption and persistent doubt, brutal attempts to bring a roving mind to heel. Always, the newly born me would flourish for a time and then falter, would need another altar, another crucifixion. It was years and years before the realization that all this monitoring, repenting, dying, rebirthing was someone else’s idea of living, a system I inherited but didn’t want. Slowly, finally, I killed off my attachment to it. (Don’t bother looking, the grave is in the woods; I burned the bones and buried the ashes deep.)

You must know that no matter what they tell you, nothing can really destroy the original self, the core person. She sleeps, she waits, and when the time is right, she rises.

“Practice resurrection,” Wendell Berry wrote, as earnestly as if he had just pilfered the power from the coffers of the divine. The idea lay in my spirit for years simmering like some stolen jewel, until one summer afternoon when I was alone outside, journaling and watching the bees in the honey locust. The old life was done, had been ending for so many years, but I had not been able to admit it yet. Words began to form themselves under my pen, words I didn’t even know existed in my mind. The moment they became visible on the page, I began to shake. A door behind me clicked shut, the sleeping girl opened her eyes, I was through to the other side.  

            When I try to write about this, I often end up splitting myself in two, the way you do in dreams when you both experience an event and observe yourself experiencing it. I am the girl who was silenced and the girl who held a hand over my mouth. I don’t know how to reconcile this, but the original girl does. “Forget that,” she says. “We’re going to live.” She signs up for school, makes friends, gets a tattoo, plans solo trips, buys a pair of walking shoes, piles of books, a tarot deck for the hell of it, ditches a life’s worth of anger because it’s not worth our time.  The woman who has done my hair for the last 18 years tells me, “You get younger every time I see you.” She is not talking about my appearance. Though I can only seem to write about it in a fractured way, what she recognizes in me is a wholeness, a completion, a freedom. I am the girl who lives.

            As I write this, I am sitting in a café in the little beach town I sometimes dream I have moved to. I’m eating coffee cake and drinking my third pot of tea. I am a little footsore from a walk and frizzled by the mist that comes off the ocean here, and I’m happy. I am halfway through my life and I am happy in a way I didn’t know I could be happy. Now I face the task of nurturing and growing up the original girl. How to do it?

  Find joy, I think. Joy is the path.

            My oldest granddaughter taught me something about this recently. She is 7 now, and most of those years have been spent with a pencil in her hand, drawing. She’s been calling herself an artist since she was around 3. Last time I visited her, she told me she was writing a book. It’s about a rabbit named Thorna and she has written 14 pages of it so far. She has plans for “about 30” but no one can see it until she’s done. Every couple of hours or so she would go to her spot at the dining table, take out a basket of paper, ignore the chaos around her and work on that book a little. Then she’d put it away and go play or read or eat or whatever life had brought her at the moment. She’s been working on this project for several months. No anxiety, no pressure, no deadline, no self-loathing, no avoidance, just claiming her truth, doing her work, day after day. I can’t quit thinking about it. When I look at her, I see what could have been, what still can be.

            My life is not quite so simple and straightforward as a 7-year old’s, but the path is still the same.  Play a little, work a little, follow the quiet strings of joy’s pull day by day, that is the way to grow a self.  Maybe especially, a self that has been forced to sleep for so very long. I have spent a good amount of time grieving those misspent years, but something inside me keeps promising: it’s never too late. As long as I am here and breathing, I am becoming who I am, who I always have been.

            A couple of years ago I put this framed encouragement from Lucille Clifton in my office. I’ll leave it here where it might encourage you too:

 i am not done yet


as possible as yeast

as imminent as bread

a collection of safe habits

a collection of cares

less certain than i seem

more certain than i was

a changed changer

i continue to continue

where i have been

most of my lives

is where i’m going

            

(I know before I publish this that friends who read here have their own experiences, different than mine; that some of you have found peace where I found pain. I honor your story and your choices and want only for you to find joy and wholeness, wherever that is for you.)

 Reading and thinking: