humble beginnings | hopeful future
THAT I WOULD BE FREE
A few things I know.
Sometimes when I get quiet here it’s because I feel like I don’t know anything. Nothing. And that’s not completely true. So here’s a list of a few things I do know.
- I know if you are looking for sea glass on the beach, the best place to find it is in the patches of little pebbles.
- I know that butter and flour and baking powder and salt, mixed together and baked at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes produces crispy, little pillows of heaven (aka biscuits).
- I know that as I get older, my body gets less forgiving and sometimes that means that little aches and pains will never be cured, they will only be managed.
- I know rainbow painted toenails will make approximately 60% of the general public smile.
- I know that lasting change comes from compassion.
- I know that compassion for others, only comes after compassion for self.
- I know despite everything, this hunk of flesh in my chest keeps moving and keeps showing me that it is amazingly capable of love.
Seventy
I talked to my dad twice yesterday because it was his 70th birthday, and I couldn’t be there to make him a chocolate sheet cake and spell out 7-0 with candles (because 70 candles would poke too many holes in that delicious frosting!) But that’s probably why I woke up this morning thinking about him. My dad is a wonderful dad, and probably the last thing he would want is for me to write a blog post about him. He is a quiet type in most settings—a known introvert and a person with, what I suspect, is a full internal life.
The memories I have of my dad from my early days are him working out in the garage, building furniture, cabinets, then a new garage, then a barn in the back. He is absolutely a creative type, though he shies away from that label. To entertain his little girls in church, he drew faces on the program with faucets for noses, both silly and accurate. I remember the feeling of his hands, thick fingers with rougher skin than mine.
He loved having girls and always said (and still says) without reservation that he never felt bad for not producing a son. I remember as I was preparing to leave for college, he told me that he wished they had more children because the years we were at home went by too quickly. But my dad, always independent, raised independent daughters. We never felt bound to the place of our birth, in part because of my dad’s example.
When he left the actual, physical homestead, the one started by his great-great-grandmother and her sons, my dad left to pursue the life and career he wanted, and my grandparents encouraged him to do it. When my parents moved across the country to Tennessee for his first job, my Grandpa Whipple gave my dad a bag full of change and asked him to call along the way. Their family culture was imperfect, like all families, but this aspect has become very important to me—the culture of being held and free at the same time. I believe this was created in the the union of my dad’s parents. I see it in the combination of what I know about their family-of-origin cultures. And it was practiced by my grandparents throughout their marriage: held and free.
Dad retired from his work at the University of Wyoming around the same time that I left my marriage. For the past few years, many of our conversations have been a commingling of our explorations and experiments walking a new path in a new phase of life. My dad spent all of his adult life until retirement at institutions of learning. I might have expected someone in that situation to want to take a break from new ideas but he has not. When I went through my Brené Brown phase, he read everyone of her books along with me, not because I asked him to, but because he wanted to understand what I felt so strongly about. He has read and listened to many of the things I have spoken about in the past few years, not because I asked him to, but because he wanted to know.
He coached me through buying my first house, through home repairs during the pandemic when he really wanted to come fix these things himself. He has empowered me, bought me tools, sent me YouTube videos on how to replace my spark plugs, even told me, “Michelle, I am an old man so I have opinions about lots of things but that doesn’t mean they are right for you. Ultimately you are the best person to decide.” He has listened to me, watched me make painful choices, and been interested in how I think about the world and myself and god and the universe as I turn all these things over and examine them closely for the first time.
I remember sobbing to him and my mom on the phone a few years back when I was sorting through my feelings about my marriage. The world felt so small and scary and tight. He said, “Michelle, you’ve gotta be happy.” After years of my happiness being secondary, if considered at all, it was a permission slip to freedom.
I guess this is the biggest gift from my dad so far—he trusts me. And by doing that, he has been teaching me that I am someone worthy of trust, so I can learn to trust myself. This gift is enormous for anyone, but especially for a woman, and probably the best gift any parent can give to a child.
Happy seventy to my dad! The man who plays war with my 6-year-old over FaceTime. The mountain-biking, 4x4-exploring, builder, craftsman, all-around-handyman, ice-cream-loving champion of me. I am blessed.
From the ashes -> Contentment
I just finished listening to a Tara Brach podcast about contentment. And it brought me back to this question I’ve been asking myself for several years, How do I relax and enjoy my life?
It’s an enigma, right? And I think it’s compounded by social media where it feels like everyone is doing just that. Totally nailing it.
Take Tieghan, with Half Baked Harvest. Her recipes are amazing. She lives in some picturesque corner of Colorado (recipe book is conspicuously missing those famous Rocky Mountain High Brownies, so I’ll stop you right there if you thought she was THAT kind of Colorado cook) and shoots all of her photos and demonstrations in a monstrously beautiful kitchen. Damn, that girl has something figured out that I don’t. And she’s completely self made. No training. Just a killer instinct for food and bev.
Or take Kate Hudson who is getting serious about working out for the first time since the baby. And she is putting out beautiful family photos and videos of intensely sexy workouts [I have yet to try the one where she balances a shoe on one foot with the leg is extended while performing a completely log roll…and I have no excuse because the equipment is literally leg and shoe]. Meanwhile, I’m in my comfy Snoopy jammies while she’s posed with a fancy bottle of vodka downing cool little drinks poolside with friends. Am I surprised I’m not as glam as Goldie Haun’s daughter?!
In the meantime we run into this ever-present crossroads of, Do I embrace eating or exercise or neither?… because the two kind of conflict. Actually, I remember when I realized this. I was almost 30 and I had spent the better part of my 20s dialing my domestic skills, including cooking and baking. I was working at the Idaho state mental hospital and I realized, after a cold winter’s mild weight gain (Seriously cold! The water in the toilet froze one Sunday and I had to run the oven, which was a convenient three feet from the toilet in our strange shack, just to thaw it!) that I was spending all of my time in this cycle:
It might have been my first step toward awakening because I remember thinking to myself, There has GOT to be a better way!
Then in my 30s I sort of went the other way. I separated from my ex-husband and started weight training. [Highly recommend that, incidentally. It was a very helpful practice to show myself I was strong as I was taking on something so scary.]
So I was weight training and eating basically whatever I wanted, which meant I was gaining weight because exercise has a way of making bodies hungry! I liked the muscles, but was thinking, I CANNOT be getting divorced AND large at the same time! So I got into this keto diet and it was super effective, in part because I had this great layer of muscle built up, but also because I realized how much emotion I was buffering with food.
And when your comfort item is a veggie or can of salmon, it becomes very, very dark, very, very quickly.
This was a mixed blessing. I did end up with a weird relationship to food, but I also got a lot better at listening to my body. I developed this ability to stop eating when my body said “full!” To taste the first bite of cake and then realize only a few were needed because only a few were really enjoyable. It required me to get really present with my body and subsequently my feelings.
It was also during that time I began to feel like a raw nerve. I wrote this post: Floating Like A Rabid Ghost, titled after a line from Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things. It’s interesting because, of all the things I’ve written, that’s one that gets frequent search engine hits, likely because I quoted Strayed. But I’ve received some really beautiful feedback from readers who were going through their own rabid-ghost phase.
So back to the raw nerve! In PA school we learned what a deglove injury is. It’s basically what you would imagine, the skin pulled from a person’s hand like a glove. And that was the image that kept coming to mind.
I felt EVERYTHING.
Deeply.
Intensely.
It was like I had been walking around in a sumo suit for my entire life and finally took it off. I felt freer, but it was also terrifying and So. Damn. Loud. [in my head].
It was during this period I started asking myself that question, How do I just relax and enjoy my life?
I felt like I was messing something up because I couldn’t. Life was not that enjoyable. The days were hard and they started so early because the nights were hard too! I would wake up early and on the days when I didn’t have R, I would walk the neighborhood in the pre-dawn light because the bed became so unfriendly.
I remember feeling like I had to change something and so I tried. I tried lots of things. And I tried lots of NEW things because I felt like the OLD things had gotten me to this point of great suffering.
And people might have looked at this new life, however it appeared on social media, and thought I was killing it. Interesting job. Cool hobbies. Fit body. Cute kid.
Those things were all true. And I was incredibly brave during those months and years. I earned massive chops on adulting and life. A lot of that is documented in the pages of this blog, though I still cringe about some of the things I’ve written, the way I’ve handled some things, the way I launched myself into things that didn’t work out.
But maybe that cringe is exactly what we need to focus on here.
That cringe is what kept me from writing all through my 20s. I had this sense that I might change my mind about some things. I might learn something that would then make my previous writing a record of my past stupidity. And how could l tolerate that kind of legacy!?
If I’m being honest (which is my current life’s work), I also had a sense that I was living in a manner that wasn’t true to me and when that’s the case, you kind of always worry you will be found out. And then people will know you are a fraud. I still carry this worry to some degree. It’s my fragile ego, that thinks I need more letters behind my name and more money in the bank before I can attempt to create anything that might be useful to anyone, anywhere.
And this question!—What if it turns out I am completely ridiculous!?!
Yikes! I might be!
I might completely mess this life up. Like what if I get to the other side and realize that I should have kept all those Mormon covenants? What if I get addicted to alcohol or shopping? What if I feel like I’ve got the weight thing figured out and then get fat? What if I write a blog and no one reads it? What if I tell people I want to write a book and then I never finish or it never gets it published? How will I LIVE with myself!?!
Last year I went to family court to try to get my kid enrolled in transitional kindergarten at my neighborhood school. I started the process before any of us knew what covid would be and in retrospect that might have played a role in this failure. But I went into that hearing and lost custody time with my son.
I lost.
Family court never wants ANYONE to feel like a winner, so I got a FEW things changed that improved my schedule, but I lost. And I walked out of there feeling all the feelings you would guess.
I actually fail at lots of things. I failed at refinishing my kitchen cabinets. For this reason, they have never had doors, as long as I’ve lived here. So far I’ve failed at talking my five year old out of right-wing conservative politics (election years are really difficult in this family!). I don’t save money as quickly as I want to. My car hasn’t been vacuumed in months. I gave up on cleaning my own house and now pay a wonderful, god-sent woman to do it for me. I kill plants on a regular basis. I broke an heirloom pick axe earlier this summer.
But seriously. I fail in relationships. I say the wrong thing. I judge people. I am unkind to myself.
And THIS is where contentment lives. I guess it HAS to because I keep failing and I don’t see an end to that.
Contentment is acceptance. Tara Brach defined it as a state of needing nothing and pushing nothing away. I love that, particularly because so often I am pushing things away more than I am needing. Her advice was to make a practice of noticing the moments, when nothing is needed and nothing is being pushed away. And her promise was, by noticing those moments, we would build a gravitational pull to bring them near more often.
I love that.
We tend to fear that if we let go of the wanting or the pushing away, we never improve. We will fester and engorge ourselves or languish and die.
Maybe some people will. I can’t speak for everyone on this.
But, for me, I’m into this experiment—> What if I trust in my own goodness? What if I believe I have a good compass inside of me and it will tell me where to go and what to do, but also when to rest or when nothing will help?
I believe this is an inner goodness we are all born with. It gets muddied and covered over by life. By trauma. By socialization. And, so far, every little fleck of it I pick off reveals that inner goodness.
Shhhh…let’s listen to her for a minute.
She knows.
She knows when to push.
She knows when to fight.
To write.
To love.
To relax.
To enjoy.
The whole ball of wax that is
Life.
The Marco Polo Prayer
Sometimes I can’t feel god. I used to think this was because of something I had done. That god had withdrawn from me. I learned in church that god cannot dwell in unholy places so I assumed if I couldn’t feel god then something unholy was going on inside of me. I felt shame about this. I thought it meant something bad about me. But I was wrong.
I am not sure exactly when I figured this out. It was sometime after I had given up on doing everything correctly. After I had shed another cage. I observed that there were good people—people that I knew to be truly good at their essence—that didn’t keep all of the commandments, that didn’t worry about all the things. I wondered if they felt god. I believed they did. I wondered if we could really distance ourselves from god. And why would a god, who truly loved us, want distance from us?
This didn’t make sense.
I thought about the times when bad things happen to good people. Like when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 21. Like when my friend’s babysitter was picked up for a DUI with her kids in the car the night she left for a trip across the country. Like when my sister’s daughter had her first seizure the night she left on vacation. Like when my grandmother’s oldest son was born with a heart defect. Like when my friend’s daughter developed leukemia and was maimed by the treatment. Like when my other friend gave birth and then broke her leg four days later at the same time as her dog was dying of cancer. Where is god in all of this? Where are you, god!?!
“I’m right here. I’m right here.”
God is always here. Right here.
I learned this in the midst of my own suffering. Mark Nepo related his experience with terrible sickness from chemotherapy to Oprah on her Supersoul podcast. After a night of vomiting to the point of vomiting blood, Mark’s wife asked, “Where is god?” And Mark, in a moment of excoriated clarity, declared the knowing, “He’s right here.”
This idea of suffering and god has formed a new kind of prayer for me. I find myself, in moments where god feels particularly distant, asking, Are you there, god? Then I answer for god, I’m right here. It's like a game of Marco Polo, where I call out and god responds. And it always feels true. God is right here, in the happy, in the suffering, in the mundane. God is here inside of me.
God is in the peace AND in the suffering. God is both. God is all.
So if god is in all of it, all of the human experience, then surely it is sacred. Sometimes we get this confused in our minds. We think god will preserve the righteous. The scriptures are filled with this sentiment. Yet bad things continue to happen to people we know and love and people we’ve never met that we only hear about in tragedy via the news. That voice in my head that wants to distance me from god would say, If you would have done this differently then this might have gone differently, or If you were really listening to God you might have avoided tragedy. Or prayed harder or been kinder or read more scriptures or donated more money or whatever things are on the to-do list of the "righteous."
Cheryl Strayed wrote this in a life-changing (for me) installment of her advice column, Dear Sugar. It was in response to a letter writer who was struggling with her belief in god after her infant daughter developed a brain tumor that required invasive surgery. Please visit this link for the full piece, as it is beautiful:
“Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking if there were a God why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life threatening surgery?—understandable as that question is—creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.”
The very half that makes rising necessary—is first having been nailed to the cross. Maybe we are all to be nailed to the cross in this life. We are meant to be set ablaze. And even as this is happening we are meant to reach out to each other and up to god. Maybe god is the love the burns between us in such moments of vulnerability and pain. Maybe that is a close as we get to understanding god’s love for us. Maybe that’s when we touch it.
What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?
What if god was here, right here, always?
Cover art for this piece: I saw this on display at The Broad museum in LA. It's by Edward Ruscha, The Right People and Those Other People, 2011.
The golden cord
Last year a wise friend said to me, “Michelle, it’s okay to hope for good things.” I’ve spent most of my adult life releasing hope as a means of protecting myself from disappointment. It’s actually a very efficient way to make oneself disappointed. I now call it pre-disappointed. It happens when I decide I will be disappointed in advance for something that might (or might not) happen. That way, I beat disappointment to the punch. It’s very smart because then you get to be right about being disappointed and being right is the best, right?!?
This largely shut down my ability to dream and hope. My therapist described this process as "turning to stone." It happens when you are not allowed to be your true self, either by a threatening environment, or by you holding yourself back. Slowly, you turn to stone. The divine sparks inside of me became layered over with sediment that hardened until the light was almost completely vanquished. I distinctly remember feeling that at two points in my life. I described it then as feeling like a shell. Hollow. A cast of myself but with no substance within. The truth is, I was living for everyone else’s expectations. I wasn’t living for myself. And I had been doing this for so long I couldn’t imagine what living for myself would even look like. Most of the work I have been doing is to encourage my self—that fun, motivated, divine being that God created, lodged inside of me—that it’s safe to come out.
As I’ve done this, I’ve started to see this image of walls being removed from around me. I used to press my hands and feet into them to know where I was in space. The walls were things in my external environment that gave me a sense of who I was and how I was doing. Gradually the walls, roof and ceiling have all dissolved. I’ve pictured myself reaching out in all directions feeling for the limits of space and finding nothing. At times it has been extremely disorienting. Sometimes I haven’t been sure which way was up. As I have considered this image, I wondered, what do I hold on to? What do I know?
I know love. I envisioned love as a golden cord, extending from the heavens, coming down through the center of my head and my body. As my limbs reach and struggle in an effort to examine and understand the space, my being is suspended from this thick golden cord, which is love. Love is the anchor. Love is the guiding light within me. My sense is that if I can stay in love then I don’t need the walls. Love will hold me. Love will center me. And love is the basis of hope and trust. I trust the golden cord, that I am anchored in love, that it will support my weight and my flailing about. And this allows me to hope for good things. For aliveness. For expression. For the surge of spirit that gives me the sense that I am awake, I am here.
This is the golden cord. This is love. With it, I can be human and I can be free.
Hello, Anxiety. Who are you exactly?
I read an article recently that suggested that when anxiety appears, you have a conversation with it. Being the eager guinea pig that I am, I decided to give it a try and it was really helpful. At the risk of revealing my inner crazy, I’m sharing it here.
Me: I think there are two voices here. The first is the Judgmental Older Sister. You obviously need to go first.
Judgmental Older Sister: You know when all of this ends badly? I’m going to say I told you so. I’m going to look at you with disgust and remind you that you knew better. I’m going to be sorry for you that you are hurting, but I’ll remind you that you could have avoided the pain if you only did the smart thing.
Disclosure: I have two older sisters and, for the record, neither of them talk in the voice of the judgmental older sister. It’s just the way I picture this particular voice. Love you, sistas!
Me: I think what I am unsure about is how will I know when it’s time to REALLY let go? And will I be able to do it? That’s the deep essence of my hesitation. I am not sure about that. I guess I can say this. I knew when it was time to let go of my marriage. And I was able to do it. Why the hell would that not give me all kinds of confidence about this? I just made it through the divorce finalization which was hell. I did it. I made the decisions that got me through it. I did it with my eyes wide open. It wasn’t perfect but it was pretty damn good. So how can I be unqualified for this? I AM smart. It doesn’t mean I always do the smart thing, because who even knows what that is? Certainly not me. I spent a long time doing the “smart” things and it was totally stupid. It was my best, but if I had to do it over again, I would totally do it differently. So I’m not looking for the smart thing anymore. I’m looking for the precise thing. That’s all I can do. Because smart is too subjective. It’s too hard to call. So, Judgmental Older Sister—you are ego personified. Ego is the real fear—that I’m going to look or feel stupid. That’s the worst case scenario. I can handle that. I do stupid things all the time. Let it roll. I can get through that. Okay, let’s hear from the second voice.
Fear-of-Pain: I just don’t want us to hurt anymore. Haven’t we been through enough?
Me: You mean well. You really do. I get where you’re coming from. Pain sucks. It hurts. Sometimes it comes and stays a while. It makes me cry in front of people which can feel awkward. It makes doing little things seem hard. But it’s also where all the growth is. And avoiding the right thing or the true thing to avoid pain never works because pain is there either way. Pain shows up in the avoiding and it shows up in the embrace. Pain is on either side of the equation. It doesn’t matter how you solve it, pain will be there in some measure. So, my dear Fear-of-Pain voice, you can be present, because, you’re right—pain hurts. But you can’t drive the car. You can’t run the show because pain is coming along too, at least for part of the trip, and we have to make room.
Then I wondered… could I have a dance party with Judgmental Older Sister and Fear-of-Pain? Is that possible? Does Judgmental Older Sister dance? She can sit on the side and watch with mild loathing. Fear-of-Pain will probably only safely sway in the background. It’s okay—I will dance for all of us.
Benediction
Remember that part at the end of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold goes on a rant about his boss? That's how I felt walking out of my divorce settlement conference tonight. It's over. The papers are signed. The orders are written. It's over. Hallelujah! Holy shit! Where's the Tylenol?I wrote this last night and it's a good thing because I am completely spent tonight.
On this, what I suspect will be, my last evening as a married woman, I want to write a little about what my marriage meant to me. I entered into it as a smart, naive, 20-year-old woman. I intended it to last forever. I was willing to work, and I worked. Oh, how I worked. I poured every bit of work I could muster into this. I reduced myself to putty to fill in the holes and surround the sharp edges.
I worked. I learned several occupations. I learned finances, grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, housework. I learned how to navigate medical insurance and billing. I learned how to live with less. I learned how to change a car tire and patch a bicycle tire. I learned how to shovel snow. I learned to trust an old car.
I traveled. I learned how to live with the contents of a backpack. How to show up in a foreign city without a place to stay and trust that I would find one. I learned how to navigate the country with an atlas. I learned to sleep in places I never imagined I would. I learned to walk. I learned to carry a heavy load. I learned how to endure heat and cold. I learned how to start a fire and fire a gun. I learned not to be scared as I walked in the woods alone. I learned how to paddle a canoe and bait a hook. I learned to notice the birds in the sky and the fish in the river.
I studied. I worked more.
But mostly I waited. And the sun set as I was waiting and then it became dark and I knew it was time to be done. So I walked away, into the night, into the most painful and fearful moments of my life. And in this dark, I have learned to trust myself. Even that naive young woman who decided to jump on a ship that would ultimately descend beneath the waves. I have been changed for good.