a helpful exercise

Even though I set myself a deadline, I find myself taking frequent breaks to watch the hearings on a live stream on my phone. There are so many of these hearings I’ve quit keeping track of what they are. At any rate, they all contain the same cast of characters leaning forward into mics, foreheads furrowed, cloak of righteousness and/or indignation. When they break for lunch or duties or press conferences, I write furiously, try to keep my characters from suddenly becoming indignant and/or righteous and/or spiraling into hopelessness at the demise of everythingtheyeverbelievedaboutdemocracy.

At regular intervals I have to stop and wrestle with the idea that two people, equally desirous of justice, can watch the same never-ending hearings and draw different conclusions. My brain does not want to accept this. Even now I do not want to write this down. I want both people to see the truth. Which is the way I see it. Which is the way all reasonable and justice-loving people see it. On my phone screen is a montage of interviews which defy my desire. A teenage girl in a Woodstock t-shirt flips off an alt-right reporter, a woman with hair the color of old foam scowls to a news network, it’s all a pack of lies and machinations. I make a mental note to use “machinations” in a sentence sometime soon.

I think about what I’ve learned from the Benedictines and the Buddhists and Mr. Rogers and the Pacifists, how everyone has goodness in them and it is our work to find and welcome it. I think about how peacemaking is listening and understanding the other side and I think how I’m tired of hearing the other side and I just want them to quit being wrong but I know that somewhere out there someone is thinking the same about me, and I stop for just a minute and sigh.

I take a break for lunch. The geese have been sleeping on the porch and I shoo them away. It is almost about to rain but I put on my boots and get the old broom and sweep away the mess they’ve made before a delivery driver or a neighbor decides to drop by unexpectedly as they did last week and had to tiptoe around piles of goose shit to reach the front door because I was down in my office writing my novel and didn’t know there was shit happening on the porch. I feel like this is a metaphor for my whole life but I don’t know exactly what it means. Also, I think, while I’m sweeping, that DISTRUST is the common denominator. None of us believes anyone anymore, so we go with the narrative we’ve already been constructing for a long time. This makes sense to me. My whole novel is about the fallout of broken fidelities. I decide that lunch is a bowl of peanut butter and chocolate chips and get back to work writing with renewed purpose.

On the checklist for “How to Be a Writer,” is point number 3: “Know who you are writing for.” There is a helpful exercise accompanying it: “Write a paragraph that states clearly who you are writing for.” This reminds me of the old Slylock Fox comics in the Sunday paper. “How to draw a Fox: Draw a circle. Now draw a square. Now draw a Fox.” At first I was discouraged, because how can I be a writer if I cannot even complete point number 3 on the checklist? Over time, I have realized that the exercise, like Slylock Fox’s drawing instructions, is pointless. You do not discover your readers by paragraphical declaration. You discover them by process of elimination. Is anyone still around after you have written your truth? That’s who you are writing for.

The hearings are done for the day and so now all there is left to do is reconstruct a future for myself which does not include despair. I write some more and I think about the readers who will read this novel and understand what I am saying about shit and cloaks of indignation and disbelief and truth and that little thread of hope that keeps us moving forward and I don’t feel quite so bad. Maybe I even feel like these are the machinations of hope: to be as real as we can be, to keep ourselves from easy categorizations, to make art, and conversation, and mistakes, and stands, and contradictions (I am large, I contain multitudes), and sense, and love, and dinner. I think about how much I want something to trust in again, and I look outside and see the geese are sitting on the porch and so I shoo them away and find the broom and I think, well, there’s that.

what's working

In some ways, shifting my focus is like starting a brand new job but going to the same old office. It’s hard to make new routines in a familiar place. For two decades I trained myself to accomplish certain tasks on certain days in a certain order. (Old habits and old dogs come to mind.)

My family and I talked it out.

“I need specifics,” I said. “What do you need me to be doing?”

“Handle the food,” they said. “The rest we will split up.“

OK. Just food and words. Food and words. I can do that. I can do that. During the day, when I start to get distracted by other jobs, I stop and ask myself if what I am doing is related to feeding my family or to my writing career and if the answer is no, I have to stop doing that thing and get back to work. I’m like a graying kindergartner. ;)

But, some things that are helping me focus on the real job:

1. Listening to and reading about writers and their work. Melissa turned me onto the Commonplace podcasts, which are long, lush conversations between poets and artists about how their lives and work entwine. Every time I come across someone whose work interests me at all, I chase them around the internet for awhile and read whatever I can. (Then I tell myself, we are doing the same work, these people and me. They have bodies and families and houses and demands and they get the work done. You can too.)

2. Starting the day with a little ritual: journaling, exercise, then reading poetry out loud to myself. (Currently working through the latest Poetry Mag, as well as Kyce Bello’s gorgeous new book, Refugia.)

3. I just added another practice to that last week, inspired by Kortney’s Ursula project. Copying one poem a day into a copywork book. Something about reading the work aloud then writing it out by hand fires up the creativity in my brain. I’m ready to get to work!

(On the food front, today I’m making this lasagna for dinner. It’s the kind of thing I can make in stages throughout the day and will provide lunches for tomorrow! Win.)

tonia

P.S. working on the newsletter this week! But it might come out a few days later than usual. I’m sooo close to meeting my goal of finishing the draft of the novel this month! Wish me luck!

small shifts

So often in my life, the biggest changes hinge on the smallest shifts. Just recently, in fact, I was with a friend and happened to see her daily planner. She was showing me some odd bit of something she’d collected and scribbled down for later. Her book, I noted, looked nothing like mine. I stared at her pages. They were perfectly ordinary, no elaborate decorations or cute drawings. No washi tape or fancy clips. But at that moment, a door in my mind swung wide open.

I’m a quasi-bullet journaler. By this I mean, I absorbed the idea of a planning notebook and I write down all my tasks in a neat row and check them off when they are done. At the beginning of the year I make an index in the front and never write anything in it except: “January, p 1.” Sometimes I keep one of those vertical calendars and then get confused by it. Occasionally I use a symbol to mark a task, then forget what the symbol means; later when I notice that task still hasn’t been done, I write it again in a daily task list. My task list includes everything I need to get done in a day: yoga, walk, clean bathrooms, water plants, call X, etc. It works for me.

My friend, as far as I could tell, used a similar method for keeping track of her to-do list: a list, some checkmarks. What caught my attention wasn’t her method, it was her content. She’s a busy woman with multiple jobs and a family. Her day probably has a hundred tasks she could put down and mark off. But her task list didn’t have any of the mundane suspects my own does. She didn’t write down, “feed animals,” like I do - as if I don’t feed the animals every single day of my life, as if somehow, if it doesn’t appear on a list I will just look blankly at the meowing cats and shrug, clueless as to why they keep bothering me. Instead, my friend’s book was a collection of her notes, inspirations, ideas, and specific tasks related to her art.

When I got home, I looked in my notebook and found endless lists of household chores. The same things every day on a rotating carousel. Monday always has “clean kitchen.” Thursday always has “meal plan.” If an archeologist digs up this book someday they will not know I am a writer. They will believe I spent every full day of my life cleaning and cleaning and cleaning some more. (Occasionally, you will find in a task list the all-purpose word “write.” That’s it.)

I’ve thought about this a great deal in the time since I saw my friend’s book, the reasons why such a complex and demanding part of my life rarely shows up in my own notebook. Part of it has to do with fear and claiming ownership of myself. It’s hard to fail at a task like “scrub toilets,” after all. Part of it has to do with a natural period of transition from one career to another, and this, I am still trying to work out.

But I do know this: the next day I didn’t write down anything I usually would. I didn’t note down that it was the day for cleaning bedrooms and doing laundry. I didn’t remind myself to exercise and give basic care to the animals. I wrote a detailed list of what needed to happen next in my novel. And when I came across things I needed to remember for writing articles or ideas for future posts, or notes for my newsletter, I wrote those down there too. Suddenly, my whole approach shifted. In the past, I have struggled to take the time for my writing work the way I should. I would sit down, write frantically for a couple hours, then look at my task list and see a whole list of chores still hanging over me. Now when I look at the page, there is nothing but the vital work calling to me and I am free to attend to it. Amazingly, so far, even without my lists, the house is still standing, the animals are alive and I am still clean and healthy.

Such a small, yet transformative shift.

I’d love to hear about the ways you nurture your own vocations.

peace keep you.

tonia

one month later...

Judith. Probably on her way to dig up and destroy something I planted.

The first fear I had about leaving social media was that if I went off-line, I would disappear. Fourteen years ago, I was homeschooling, raising four children, deep into the years when it is easy to feel you exist only to make other people’s lives run smoothly. On top of that we had a child with intense behavioral needs. We couldn’t leave him home, we couldn’t take him to other people’s homes. We were stuck. I often felt trapped and lonely. I desperately wanted to be seen and understood. I’d married young, skipped college, had children early; I was in a slow fall-out with church and religion which had previously been a constant in my life. I didn’t know anyone doing what I was doing every day, no one who thought the way I did.

Then I found blogging.

I discovered that writing helped me order my life, helped me process the hardships and joys. And eventually, it helped me find other people. The relationships I made became a lifeline for me for over a decade, seeing us through the hardest times of our lives. I found my voice, I found my calling, I found friendships - all because of the online world. I can honestly say my time online changed my whole life for the better. At some point, however, the balance tilted, and the online world (social media in particular) began to feel like less of a lifeline and more of an anchor. I told a friend recently, Instagram et al, began to feel like I’d moved into the dorms and was never going to be able to move out again. I thought about this for several years, going back and forth. On the one hand, instant connection, beauty, friendships. On the other, this deep knowledge that I was cheating myself from something more. That I was frittering away time and energy that I didn’t have to waste. It took a long, long time before I was brave enough to hit that delete button and face what it meant.

After that decision in June, it took a couple of weeks before the emails slowed down and the conversations began to die out. Every day, things are a little more quiet. It was disconcerting at first. By the third week, I lost all motivation to work. What was the point? No one was reading. No one knew if I was writing or not. I moved around my house in a fog for several days, feeling forgotten, useless, questioning my whole life. It finally hit me that this was what withdrawal feels like, my brain searching eagerly for some instant affirmation, a little hit of dopamine to assure myself I exist, people like me. Once I realized what was happening, I could begin facing those feelings and dealing with them.

“We must do our work for its own sake,” says Stephen Pressfield, and I’m just beginning to understand what that means. My inner self knew all along…if I want to go deeper, to discover what I am capable of, I need to move on. I need to do it alone, just me and the page, me and the work, me and the fear. But I also needed that beginning place, that safe space in which to find myself, to try out words, ideas, to make connections and understand possibilities. A month later, I’ve quit thinking of social media as a waste of my time. I feel grateful, and more gracious toward all of it, but I also feel more confident that its usefulness in my life has passed. I’m visible. I exist. I’m writing.(Even slow-blogging again!) I’m connecting with good people. I’m happy. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.

My advice now? Do what’s right for you. You’re the only one who knows what you really need. (And don’t be afraid to move on when the time comes. It’s all good!)

Love to you, friends.

tonia

mentors: the body

The quasi-Pentecostal world I grew up in was a world of the spirit, of feeling.  Our bodies were present of course – our legs carried us to church, our hands leapt skyward in worship, our voiceboxes grew hoarse with singing – but the body was only a container for the spiritual.  And it was easily led astray, easily tainted, and destined to be abandoned one day.  The idea that the body itself had wisdom,  that it, like the rest of the physical world held old echoes of order and knowledge, or thrummed with the power to guide the spirit, was completely foreign to me.

On top of that, I was a sedentary, bookish girl.  I got an F in the one Physical Education class I didn’t manage to avoid.  If ever there was a person disconnected from their own muscle and bone, it was me. The discovery of my body as a wise mentor has been a slow one.  I’m sure it began with a connection to foods and nutrition, but I think my real awareness came when I began to do yoga daily.   The quiet focus, intentional alignment, patient postures, slow breathing, all began to work on me, ironically, in a deeply spiritual way.  One morning, my online teacher said,  “Breathe deep, spread your arms wide, take up space,” and something clicked for me.  I could take up space in the world.  I didn’t need to apologize for my belief or unbelief, for my difference, for my feeling.  I could stretch my arms, speak out, inhabit the ground where I stood.  Trying to hold a balancing posture gave me an idea of how muscles can work in opposition, one leg pulling, the other pushing, but both aimed at creating a beautiful form, a powerful line.  It’s the embodiment of what I’m constantly facing with my work – the push of family against the pull of words.  Tension, the body is teaching me,  is not the enemy, but a friend.  The lessons are plentiful, and every time I roll out that mat, I learn more.

Yoga gave me confidence to push my body even further.  I took up running in January, something I’ve tried and given up on about every two years since high school.  But the strength and balance I found in yoga helped me confront the challenges of running in a new way.  And as I’ve stuck running out, my body has responded with more to teach me. For example, the beginning of a run is always terrible.  Every single time.  But it gets better, and thirty minutes later, I feel like the Queen of the World. Progress is made incrementally.  I’ve worked my way up from couldn’t-run-a-full-minute to three miles straight by going just a little further each day.  First I make it to that post, then the next day, the tree, the next day the stop sign.  It’s not that much different from writing a novel: press through the mental blocks, each day get a little distance, and the results will come.  I never saw it so clearly until I’d practiced it with my own legs and lungs.

As Jigar Gor, an Ayurvedic physician, says, “Yoga is not about touching your toes, it’s about what you learn on the way down.”  One of my most important mentors lives with me every single day and I'm pretty astounded by that.

I’ve got another couple mentors I want to share, so more to come.  Feel free to add your own thoughts about the body as a teacher, or to share the mentors you’re encountering in your own life.

As Adriene Mishler says, “The awesome in me bows to the awesome in you.”