Category: Misc.

A few weeks ago I was part of a workshop on Proprioceptive Writing. During the freewrite portion, I allowed my thoughts to flow, not knowing quite what would surface or where they’d go. To be honest, the experience has haunted me a little. Not in that scary way one associates “haunting”, but in an almost relentless way in which the words that came simply won’t leave.

They’ve hung around, whispering in the background , in nearly everything I’ve done since.

After a lot of thought, I’ve decided to give them a bit of life, within this space. Perhaps they can, in turn, dance and play here while I move forward with some peace…

The voice that criticizes me for constantly being in over my head, incapable of reaching the goal or outcome I aim for, is the rhythm timed to my mind. I see the air trails of this voice, as I flip back in memory of the moments of my life.

It is always present.

Every gym glass.

Every art project.

Each new friendship, relationship or job.

Every attempt at anything.

Always.

Predetermining my failure, and then ridiculing (relentlessly) my fall.

What do I mean by this voice? Whose is it? As I flip through the faces of my childhood, seeking one to match its sound, the scrolling land on the face of my mother. This comes as no surprise. The unexpected twist is that the voice is also infused with the sound of my father, a man I did not know.

Woven, deep inside of the voice there are also traces of me.

Of my own voice- my own sound.

There is five year old me, but also sixteen year old me too.

And now, who I am no lives there within that vocal range.

My living room is filled with windows. When one sits on the couch, in any direction looked, the panels give access to the world beyond these cottage clay walls. The cardinals play in the holly bushes beneath these window sills, and squirrels busy themselves in the trees beyond. Through every season there is so much beauty offered, though it is winter in which I find the most comfort.

I call it our snowglobe. As snowflakes drift from sky to ground, we sit warmly tucked in the middle.

It is magic, this radiant white light.

I do not love to venture out into the winter. I do not love being on the roads or the footstep crunch of ice, but warm within our snowglobe, time slows just right. This reminds me that, though nearly a year into this Pandemic way of life, we are still being called to slow. My own soul still needs this prompted reminder.

On an ideal day, this magical space within our globe smells of fresh baked cookies and is filled with the sound of vinyl records giving music life. Most days aren’t as idyllic as we’d like though, are they? On normal days, today type days, I am holed up in my office with the tiniest single window, showing me its pinhole views of the flurries outside. I work for myself, can’t I call a snow day?

Sure. I could, but also, more would fall on tomorrow, and more the day after that. Instead I sigh, sip my earl grey tea and hunker down to work. click. click. click.

I hope that, in the Great Beyond, I remember these moments. Both the tiny window-work day ones and the snow globe (or other season globe) views of life beyond the pane.

Beyond the pain… That’s kind of it, isn’t it? The point. We slave away to overstimulation and busy schedules (or at least we did, in the Great Before) because these are the most entertaining and/or productive ways to act out our denial. We pretend we’re “taking control”, but instead we are really drowning ourselves in the chaotic noise of anything but.

These January weeks within the snowglobe have left me challenging what it is that I understand about balance. Is it maintaining the work hours and also the rest? Is it tuning in to listen to what my inner soul is encouraging when it comes to needing solace and still? I’m finding that pre-pandemic, it wasn’t unreasonable to spend a day running errands, grabbing a coffee and spending a few coffee shop hours writing. This side of the topsy-turvy that feels incomprehensible. Back to back zoom meetings, while dressed in sweatpants and a messy bun, followed by a sixty minute writing session depletes my brain like a tree spout left on.

Today I will wrap up work and curl up on my couch, in a cozy throw. I will watch the snow swirling beyond the globe and sip something wonderful. I will realize that I leave the house so much less, and yet also seem to accomplish so much less within my days. It may not make sense in a pre-pandemic world, but in this snowglobe life of today, it kind of does.

It has to…

Today is National Nothing Day. It’s purpose is to give Americans one day to sit and do nothing. No festivities, no celebrating, just nothing. The day was established in 1972 and it begs the question: what was all of this happiness causing so many celebrations that this became a necessity?

Is it merely my Pandemic mind that cannot comprehend this? I mean, I personally have reached the point of this non-choose-your-own-adventure where I am ready for a DO SOMETHING day. When is that on the calendar?

And I say that as I stare ahead at a very busy weekend. Busy weekends, anymore, usually revolve around some form of Zoom (as in the case of my weekend) or other video conferencing services. While I am so grateful this insanity hit when we had such luxuries, I’m also ready for a really brilliant outdoor music festival.

I’m itching to watch a live musical.

I long to host a dinner party where conversation flows with ease.

I’m ready to meet friends for drinks and laugh, without the conversation always coming back to the death toll, or crazy D.C. developments.

What even is nothing anymore? While we live in it, are we wasting it?

The busyness of normal life used to leave me craving a Nothing Day, and now I have more of them than not. Perhaps the beauty of nothing is when the mere idea of it is the unicorn within our crazy normal…

And about that: crazy normal. Do we really want that back?

I remember sitting in a ladies networking luncheon a few years back, and a woman mentioned all of these ideas she had for someday. She was the guest of a colleague, and though excited for the someday dreams, she admitted she couldn’t possibly do anything as long as her kids were home. On Mondays there was soccer. Tuesdays the school paper to help with. Wednesdays her son had Karate, and Thursdays her daughter dance. She was on the PTA, she was a room mom. She was clocking nearly 200 volunteer hours a month, all revolving around her kids school/activities/interests. She admitted she hadn’t had an actual conversation with her husband since her kids had been in elementary school, unless it was about her kids. (who, at this point were in 7th and 9th grades.)

“We chose to be parents”, she said. “When they are grown, we will have all the time in the world.”

I wonder how she is.

What it has been like for her, in the nothing.

We were, so many of us, so busy going just so that we could avoid the hard things… and now, now we are stuck on the carousel of hard things, with nothing else in sight.

I am so eager for the someday things, that may return. When they do, they’ll be different.

We’ll be different.

I am different.

Even though I deeply miss such things, I don’t want to waste the nothing either.

On National Nothing Day, I’ll be navigating my way through my busiest Saturday in January. I’m ok with that. I want to believe there is magic in the nothing. There must be something they knew, back in 1972, that we’ve lost sight of, along the way. To honor the day I plan on not celebrating, as this is what the day was made for. I also plan on deep breathing in the peace that comes with nothing.

I will not stress today, about all of these hard-dark things beyond my control.

As I approached 2020, I intuitively knew that my word would be Bloom. As a flower lover, I LOVE the word bloom. As an enneagram 4, I cringed when I realized this beautiful word made its way onto most Word of the Year lists. (we Fours do not like to follow trends.) Even so, my gut beat on: bloom is your word.

And also, I was scared. I was scared because my words of years past had always seemed soft enough, and benign. Then, as the year would unfold, I would begin to realize how absolutely brutal the process of living out an innocent word could be. Being a lover of the word BLOOM scared me because i didn’t want to come out hating it, in the end. As a lover of fresh cut flowers, I went into January declaring this would be the year I had fresh cut flowers in my home at all times. THIS would be the year I planted beautiful flowering bushes in my yard. This would be the year my creativity blossomed! This would be the year that I found the things which made me feel beautiful and ran hard with them…

I was right there with everyone else, optimistically looking ahead at the new decade. The 20’s were incredible, one hundred years before, and we’d collectively had a string of rough years. Manifesting a beautiful new year, new decade, new ______________________- I danced 2019 away in my favorite bar, with my favorite guy…

The rest is mostly history, where 2020 is concerned. We all know how that went.

Regarding bloom…

I did begin to lose hope along mid-may. I had recovered from presumed covid. I had crossed the threshold of the one year mark since my daughter severed her relationship with me. That I had survived both things, and was not a damaged shell of a person did help- the truth was I was worn thin. I had watched a business venture I had poured myself into, tank. I saw my freelancing opportunities dry up, as the entertainment industry ground to a halt. Trips to see loved ones were cancelled. Isolation was setting in. My husband was hit with a substantial pay cut, and for awhile I wondered where we’d be sleeping in a few months time. (also… no flowers. The flower industry was hit hard. When flowers slowly made their way back into the supermarket world they were ugly and who could afford them anyway? not me.)

As the year continued its rampage, my mother’s cancer returned. Due to restrictions, I wasn’t able to be there for her. Her Alzheimer’s guaranteed she did not understand my absence. As a girl who spent her entire life wishing she could one day be enough for her mentally ill mother, I have become this passionate advocate for “my people.” She is my person and the thought of her spending the last days of her fragmented memory of me believing I didn’t care- it gutted me. In addition, missed birthdays, weddings, milestones… My losses and stressors were not any more significant than anyone else’s, but they were levelling.

For months I didn’t even acknowledge my word. We were at odds, as if the choice of the word itself had somehow promised me a year other than the one I had…

Sometime around September I took the courage to face the word. How did BLOOM look, in my year? I had laughed sarcastically to myself, as I pulled out my notebook.

When a seed splits wide open, and life begins to stem from it, is the beginning of a journey towards bloom. It takes an entire season, within the life of that plant- a season of growing and stretching, tearing and agony. Thirsty times, and burning ones. As mesmerizing as a time-lapse recording of a plant’s growth is, have you ever paused to consider what the real time process would feel like?

We love the idea of blooming… I LOVE THE IDEA of blooming… but from seed to petals bursting open, the journey is akin to hell.

Just like a flower, I reached my loveliest point in the last quarter. My mind was ripe with ideas, creativity, productivity and so much more. Things I could never have thought myself capable of months before, are now happening beneath the surface of what my online life shows. It is like a part of me CAME TO LIFE. I am networking every day with the most incredible women. Just as with the years before, I know the Words of the Year which proceeded 2020 set the stage for my journey with BLOOM.

I also know that BLOOM paves a step for what comes next, in this journey. I won’t lie, I am a little intimidated by my 2021 Word of the Year. I have known what my word would be since that afternoon with the notebook, in early autumn. Those three little letters revealed themselves to me and I shivered. Between you and me, I have been dreading it ever since. This new word, which I’m not ready to share quite yet, is a lot less benign. While it has the potential to be incredibly empowering, it also has the probability of undoing me. ( if that’s the case, it will be something that needed to be undone)

As a list lover, I thought I’d share some of my expectations for the year, verses a few of the unexpected:

Things I didn’t expect to do:

• develop an appreciation for cute face masks.
• Join the NAACP
• Have to choose between Trump or Biden.
• Spend 2/3rds of the year deep in a video game 
• Self publish a project.
• Expand my business creatively.
• Not make it to NM, AZ, ID or TX.
• Rescue a litter of abandoned kittens.
• have one die in my arms.
• Keep one.
• Fall out of love with going to the movies.
• Have to write out & formalize my ‘last wishes’, in case I died.
• Stop going to church.
• Share an office space with my husband.
• Unpack and resort my beliefs.
• Realize my country isn’t what I thought it was.
• Sell my beloved Kate Spade collection.
• Stop going out, almost entirely.
• Host ZERO parties/dinner parties.
• Only see my mother once, from the other side of a this plastic tent.
• Fall in love with liturgies.
• Stop working from my favorite coffee shop 1-2 times a week.
• Reprioritize & realign
• Find new and creative ways to hang out with the people I care about.
• Spend 10-30 hours on zoom, most weeks.
• Laugh more than any other year before, by a lot.

Things i planned on and succeeded:

• completing the first draft of my memoir.
• Working on a book proposal.
• Read more books.
• Collaborate with empowering women.
• Expand my reach, in order to connect with and support other women.
• Grow my platform.
• Expand my knowledge.
• Explore my creativity.
• Dance more.
• Write more notes/letters.
• Practice intentional stillness.

When you reflect back- how was your personal journey? Beyond the pandemic, supply shortages and unexpected isolations, how did you grow?

The first Christmas that I was a mom, found us with a sweet little four year old in our home. Though the adoption would take years to happen, and nothing would go according to hopes or plans, in those very early days life felt saccharine in the best of ways.

On that Christmas eve, as her chubby little cheeks rested pinchable perfect, breaths deep and peaceful, we set about to do the things that parents were supposed to do. We pulled out the gifts “from Santa”, which had been hidden in the back of our apartment closet, and began assembling, wrapping and displaying them. I sat, stuffing her embroidered stocking, filled with this indescribable feeling one gets when their moments far exceed anything they’d hoped for.

It was a beautiful time- precious between my husband and I.

We had been through so much to get there. So much grief and loss, while it still mattered, felt somehow worth the journey that Christmas Eve. The air was electric with something neither of us could explain.

As I stuffed the last bit of what would fit, into her stocking, a thrill shot through me…

What if, as a mom now, I was about to learn that Santa WAS real? What if, while we slept, he’d creep throughout our apartment disappointed that my husband had eaten his cookies and our dog had munched the reindeer’s carrots? What if other gifts, gifts we hadn’t bought, would appear beneath our tree? It was all at once ridiculous and thrilling. What if...

To this day, I remember the magical away that question felt. The real magic being both the question and the possibility. The even realer magic being the sleeping child on the other side of that wall.

“Christmas, my child, is love in action. Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.”

~ Dale Evans

Nearly a year later Christmas magic would show up once again. Our home had been the ninth one to this little girl, and on what was her fifth Christmas, she gently unwrapped ornaments on the evening we decorated our tree. With each piece she opened, her eyes would grow bigger. At times there were tears as she swam through the overwhelm of seeing decorations she remembered, and things she had helped pick out. That poor child had never known that feeling before.

This was the night she told us she no longer needed the suitcase she’d come to us with.

This was the first night she allowed herself to sink into the feeling that she belonged somewhere.

The magic of those moments superseded the questions of Santa, by a lot.

Once again, the Christmas morning stocking had too many belongings, so it sat nestled into the pile, on the couch. This would remain a tradition for years, borrowing its way into the Easter baskets months later.

Christmas magic would reappear here and there. For years it was in the very same jolly Santa we’d visit, each December. Sometimes it would nestle in sweetly within a snuggled-up favorite movie, Christmas light ride with cocoa or some other unsuspecting moment that would take my breath away.

The magic of my motherhood journey stole my breath often. And though a forever motherhood journey was not in the design for me, those beautiful frozen moments are there, and along with the tissue wrapped glass balls and stars, I unwrap them and remember. Sometimes things are hard. Sometimes we lose what we hoped for, and sometimes in the process we gain what was lost. We fall prey again and again to this one-set idea of how things are “supposed to be” and sometimes, they just can’t be.

Sometimes we have to let go.

In the releasing, we are allowed to keep the proceeding moments.

This year the holidays are finding most of us vulnerable, uncomfortable and different. Whatever you’re facing, it is ok to unpack the moments that hold light for you. While we cannot live in the past, or the what if’s, or the same- it is ok to visit the fragments reflecting life differently. It is ok to remember that moment, and allow that they happened to be a bit of Christmas magic all it’s own.

Happy Christmas, friends, to you and yours. Stay safe and make time to nurture yourself.

It is in those moments of self love, releasing of resentments and spreading kindness that we make room to let the light in. Today is Winter Solstice, the light is coming!

Sliver by sliver, the light is on its way…

~ M