You can make anything!

Ruby and Don

There are two places in the world where you can find evidence of my great-grandmother, Ruby Evelyn Hines.  One is a stretch of farmland situated on Marsh Creek in Southern Idaho.  I grew up visiting my grandparents on the farm every summer and every Christmas.  From the beginning of my remembering life, Great-grandma Ruby stayed in a little yellow trailer house, next to the original farmhouse where my grandparents lived.  When we arrived for a visit, we would often pass Ruby, out for a walk on the narrow lane.  My sisters and I would venture over to her trailer house after greeting my grandparents.  I remember her answering the door with a generous smile, asking, “Now, who are you?”  Ruby had Alzheimer’s and didn’t remember our names but she always invited us in to examine her trinkets and treasures and feed us a snack.

Ruby married my great-grandfather, Vivian (yes, you read that name correctly), when she was only sixteen.  Ruby didn’t seem to shy away from work.  She frequently worked along side V (as she affectionally refers to him in her journal) in the fields, kept a garden, kept bees, sewed, knitted, crocheted, and cooked for her family and the farm help.  

Four years after their marriage, my grandfather, Don, was born.  He was their only child and she was a powerful mother.  She traveled once a year with my grandpa on the train to Oregon to visit her family.  I like thinking of them as a brave, little duo, working hard and loving hard.  My grandpa speaks of his mother with such affection that I know this must be true.  With a twinkle of admiration in his eyes, my grandpa recalls that his mother had BIG arms.  “I could never milk a cow as fast as she could!”

The other place you can find Ruby is a little quarter-acre lot in Southwestern Arizona.  When my grandpa was experienced enough to take over the farming operation, V and Ruby retired to the desert in a travel trailer for the winter months.  I didn’t visit this place until several years after her passing so I don’t know, first hand, what it meant to her, but her spirit is alive and well there.     

Flowering cactus surrounded by quartz

When I visited a few weeks ago, I found a journal of hers from 1960.  Ruby recorded, in a few sentences, what she did each day of that year.  Most days there was a report of the weather, including high and low temperatures.  I imagine that spending the winter months in the mild climate of the Southwest felt like a luxury worth recording.  The weather report was usually followed by some tasks she completed, like knitting, baking bread, letter writing, cutting V’s hair or sewing.  There were days they spent on the road, days V spent fishing, evenings Ruby spent rock hunting, trips to Mexico, trips to beaches of the Baja peninsula, and evenings spent playing cards with friends.  The theme of the journal was her constant creativity.  Even in retirement, her days were spent creating.

There is a shed on the quarter-acre lot that houses a hodgepodge of artifacts, evidence of her creative life beyond the typical domestic arts.  Ruby collected hundreds of shells on the beaches of Mexico.  She drilled them and strung them on wire to make decorative baskets.  There are snuff containers of tiny colored shells that I imagine she purchased for a project that either never came to being or has since been lost.  I wonder if she collected the shells, simply for the pleasure of holding and having them, the same way I enjoy colored paperclips.   I find a tiny lizard skeleton in a lidless canning jar.  The desert holds onto him in the same way it retains these pieces of Ruby and V.  

Ruby's collection

Ruby moved around a lot as a girl.  Her father was one of those people that hated to stay in one place. During her childhood they made their way from Kansas to Colorado, back to Kansas, to Oregon, then back to Kansas, back to Oregon, then Idaho.  They moved three times while in Idaho before Ruby married V at age 16.  I imagine it felt good to stay in one place! But I also think all of this moving may have taught Ruby from a young age, to love the place that’s in front of your face.  For a woman who spent much of her life trying to make green things grow, and visiting her extended family in forested Oregon, she clearly loved the desert.  She must have been an avid rockhound because the barren ground is covered in unique mineral specimen, deliberately placed at the foot of decades old cacti.  This is the bit of Arizona that I remember from traveling there as a kid.

What Ruby created on the desert floor around her 1950s Spartan park model trailer, is completely worthy of designation as American folk art.  Mosaics constructed from naturally colored stone stretch out in each direction.  And what I love most about it, besides the fact that it still exists today, disturbed only by the spring weeds and some years of desert dust, is that she did it for the pure love of making it.  Why else?!?     

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote this:

“Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise—you can make anything.”

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

Sometimes creativity feels like a crushing chore, but when I think about Ruby it feels more an attitude.  An irrepressible impulse that played out in the bread she baked, the cows she milked, the clothing she sewed, the baskets she constructed, the beets she hoed, and the rocks she laid.  Her mosaics matter enormously and not at all, in the same way that each life matters enormously and not at all.

Ruby Jr.

I have a niece who shares her great-great-grandmother’s name.  Along with the name, she bears a physical resemblance and the same penchant for artistic expression.  My 93-year-old grandfather cannot look at Ruby without tearing up, overwhelmed with memories of his mother.  I’m reminded that maybe that’s the greatest creative legacy we leave behind—the people.  I see her strong arms on my sister.  I see her precision and artistry in my father.  I see her quiet, enormous heart in my grandfather.  And I see her ability to make any place feel like home in me. To carry Ruby forward in the world in our spiritual DNA--what a sacred privilege!

Practice makes practice

When I was first learning to surf, my experienced-surfer friend, Clare, encouraged me to practice my pop-ups.  She recommended lying on my stomach on the living room floor and practicing the process of paddling, then pushing up and popping up.  The pop up is important in surfing and something most beginner surfers struggle with.  It’s the movement that allows you to go from lying prone on the board to being up on your feet in two quick movements.  First, you push your chest up off of the board (think upward facing dog, not push up), then you bring your feet forward in one movement placing them on the board and becoming upright.  Many people will hesitate meaning they only get to one knee, which can work for a while but will eventually, if not immediately, hold back some success. 

I practiced this on the floor at home.  I practiced it with her in the sand on the beach before we would paddle out.  I immediately understood the importance of the practice—to build muscle memory. Muscle memory is procedural memory. It’s building the coordination between movement in a way that allows you to complete the movement without conscious effort.  Practicing the pop up is helpful for a beginner (and really any) surfer because it allows the movement to be made without conscious effort. 

Imagine yourself sitting on a board, watching the waves come in.  You finally decide there is one that is coming at you in the right way that you can be in position to paddle for it.  You are paddling forward checking the wave’s position against yours as you paddle.  The paddling requires a big effort so you are paddling hard, the wave hits, you start to feel it pushing your forward.  This is the moment for the push up/pop up sequence.   If you are like me, a lot of mental energy already went in to getting to that point.  I am still a little hesitant that I might nose in causing the board and me to pushed under the water.  In that moment, the muscle memory of the pop up allows me to commit without much mental energy and get to my feet.  I’m getting better at this but it has taken A LOT of practice.   

I see this pattern repeated over and over again in my life.  Practicing the piano, when I was young, was building muscle memory.  Learning to type.  Learning to play the saxophone.  Cheerleading stunts and dances.  Volleyball skills.  The repetition builds muscle memory which eventually makes the activity unconscious. 

Muscle memory is another term for motor learning--the repetition of a movement until it become automatic.  It’s easy to think of physical examples of this, but what I want to write about today are the other practices I do that are kind of like muscle memory.

I want to create so I write.  You get to see some of it here but I write way more for myself than I publish.  When I first decided to start writing, I wrote at least five times a week for 6 months before I published anything.  And even when I started publishing, it wasn’t because I felt ready.  I just recognized that I would never feel ready.  It would always feel vulnerable to share my writing, and I wanted to do it anyway.  So most days I write something for myself, even it if’s just a short paragraph.  And I try to post here three times a week.  I’ve said this before, but this has been the single greatest sanity builder.  There is something healing in the creativity of this practice.  I process things through writing that I can’t process any other way.  After I wrote the post on Sunday, I emerged from my bedroom and my mom, who was visiting, said, “You look lighter!”  On days when I feel blocked, I remind myself to simply keep writing, to keep showing up for myself.

I want to have courage so I ask myself what feels brave and I do it.  At least I really try to.  I live with a lot of fear.  It wakes me up in the early morning some days.  It makes it hard to fall asleep some nights.  I have found that the best antidote for fear is to remind myself that I am brave.  A while back, I wrote a courage list in my journal.  I made a list of everything I had done in my life that required courage.  What a helpful exercise!  Now, I have made it a conscious practice to be brave in my life.  When I do my morning thought download and empty out what’s in my mind, I sort through it to identify which thoughts are the fear voice.  This consciousness allows me to know when fear is driving the car so I can kindly ask fear to get in the backseat.  There is not much that feels better than the feeling that comes after courage. 

I want to be sane to I expose myself to the outdoors and exercise.  If it's been more than a day or two without it I start to get antsy.  That's the muscle memory.  That's the intrinsic reminder that I need to recharge in this important way.

These are a few examples of mental/emotional muscles I’m trying to strengthen.  Here’s why I care.  When life is going good, I don’t really need these things.  It’s when it gets hard that they become so important.  It’s when the wave is about to roll me that I need the muscle memory of the pop up so I can get to my feet and ride the wave.  Because—there are days when I absolutely need to write and I don’t feel like it.  I don’t want to face the reality of what’s in my mind.  There are days when I hesitate to do the brave thing—so many days when I want to let fear drive the car.  There are days when it’s hard to do the mom thing and go to work and run the household and care for the friends and family around me. 

Those are the days I need the muscle memory.  I need my body and spirit to know what to do because I’ve been practicing it.  It's the physical manifestation of my intention. 

Something I'm just starting to work on is play.  Brené Brown calls it "laughter, song and dance" in her research.  I used to be really good at this but it's been buried in the seriousness of life.  My life, even the things I enjoy, has become a checklist of activities that have a function for my mental or physical health, household function or work.  I think I need a serious intervention to bring play back into my life, so if you have any suggestions, please help me out!    

Malcom Gladwell wrote, “Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”  I’m less concerned about getting good at any of this and more concerned about being freed by it.  But, I like his acknowledgment that the power is in the process, not in its perfection.  So let’s be intentional about what we practice and let’s be kind to ourselves as we do it.  Namaste. 

Just in case you ever feel ungrateful

I’m going to let you in on a little secret.  I’m not thankful.  At least, I’m not thankful for probably 95% of my day.  I don’t walk around in a cloud of gratitude and satisfied bliss.  For all my talk about mindfulness and the positive spin I work to put on my life, I spend a huge amount of time buried in unimportant details and worrying about the future or the past.  I am often investing my thought energy in other people’s business (their thoughts, actions or feelings) or God’s business (things that are fully out of my control), instead of my own business.  And none of this makes me feel very thankful. 

Sometimes this fills me with incredible guilt.  Moms of small children get this a lot from older women  who say things like, “Just enjoy these moments because they go by so fast.”  Now, not only am I suffering from the barrage of toddler emotions, but also the weight of guilt that I’m not enjoying his cute little hands placed on my face after he’s just handled a public toilet seat.  Seriously people!  That IS too much to ask. 

I shared with my sister a couple of months ago that I made a short gratitude list in my journal.  I felt particularly edgy because I only put on there what I was feeling gratitude for in THAT moment.  When I told her this, she was unimpressed, “Yeah…so…what?” 

Me: “I mean, I didn’t put all the stuff on there that I’m SUPPOSED to be thankful for!”

Sis:  “Oh [pause] I guess I never think other people will read it so I don’t really worry about what's supposed to be on there.” 

Of course, then she was the empathetic genius she normally is, and tried to make me feel LESS crazy for writing gratitude lists that no one will read but anyone COULD read because they are complete and thorough and no one is left off.   Gratitude felt like a chore for a lot of years (not surprising given this little glimpse into my psyche!).  It was something I was supposed to feel but was terrible at summoning, which only resulted in more shame and it’s impossible to feel gratitude when you’re in shame.   

I think I’ve learned a little about gratitude this past year.  I’ll try to shed some light here incase you are in the same boat as me. 

First, stop living in the future.  As someone who spent seven and a half years in college and grad school, and THEN put her then-husband through four years of grad school, I know a little about this.  I spent a lot of years waiting for my life to start.  I held on to the belief that something magical would happen when school was finished.  And it would transform me from this limbo state into the rapture of fully formed adulthood.  I’m guessing no one is surprised when I say—that didn’t happen. But putting that aside, I spent a lot of years waiting for the next thing, instead of living in the now.  When I was always anticipating the next vacation or step in my education, it was impossible to feel much love for the present moment.  The truth is, there are different phases in life and they each have things that are easier and harder.  Things that I liked more and less.  But anticipating the next phase never did anything but litter the current phase with discontent.

The second is to be kind to myself—to give myself what I need to truly feel cared for.  Giving that responsibility to others is a quick path to resentment and discontent.  Ignoring my own needs leaves me feeling depleted and it’s hard to feel thankful when I’m an empty vessel.  So make yourself a sandwich, fit the workout in, go to bed early or stay up late, binge watch The Office, clean off your desk--then let go of the guilt for things that go undone while you do this.  

The third is something I’ve been learning from my therapist.  It relates to time.  There are two types of time.  Chronos is the time of the world.  It’s the actual minutes and seconds until bedtime.  It’s the hours spent crawling in traffic.  It’s the two minute time out.  It’s the time that passes slowly, that we feel. 

Kairos is the time that we don’t feel.  It’s the hour that goes by when I’m writing in the flow, where I suddenly remember to look at the clock and realize I’m going to be late for work.  It’s the quiet moments floating on the rippling ocean surface watching for the next swell and taking in the sky and the sea.  It’s catching up with a girlfriend over the phone.  It’s late night pillow talk between lovers that leaves me floating and sleepy in the morning.  It’s a long kiss on the lips from the 3-year-old love of my life. 

Chronos is always ticking away, but Kairos only visits, often just for a moment.  And Kairos is where real gratitude lives—sparkling, warm, immersive, flowing gratitude.  The key is to catch it.  To notice when I’m in it, or even after the fact, that I WAS in it. 

Gratitude is a practice, which means it takes practice.  I can’t beat it into myself with shame. I can only hope that as I gently nudge my brain back to the present, I will more readily notice all that I have and all that I am, for which I am thankful.  Namaste.

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.  Eckhart Tolle