humble beginnings | hopeful future

THAT I WOULD BE FREE

7/9/22 7/9/22

I See Light Because I See Shadow

I cannot imagine a God, who created this world, filled with so much diversity, so much light and so much in the deep, to have meant for us to skim the surface, not when the landscape of human experience is so vast and rich. So this is a reminder, as much for me as anyone, do not neglect the shadow.

I just finished watching Under the Banner of Heaven on Hulu this week. It’s the true crime story of a horrific murder that occurred in American Fork, Utah in 1984. The perpetrators of the crime were a couple of Mormon men who became interested in fundamentalist Mormon principles and began to practice them. The series is based on a book by Jon Krakaur that I’ve never read, but the portrayal in the series does an excellent job of showing how the generally accepted teachings of the church, might lead its members to accept acts and opinions and rules that, when carried out fully, are actually quite offensive to even the most devout.

The Mormon church is the church I grew up in and the church I participated with fully from birth until age 35, but I was somewhat protected from that end of the continuum because I was raised by fairly liberal parents (depending on your frame of reference) in a community that was not predominantly LDS. My dad is a deep and critical thinker, university professor, descended from Mormon pioneers. But he had a grandmother who left the church around the turn of the century, when her husband, John Whipple, wanted to take on a second wife. She left him and she left the church. She found a new husband and took her two adult sons to homestead a farm in Southern Idaho.

Her name was Melissa Charity Adams, and she was my Grandpa Whipple’s grandmother. She was described as stubborn and not particularly generous by my grandpa. My grandpa was not raised in the LDS church, but he grew up surrounded by Mormons in Southern Idaho, and while they did not participate in the local church, his parents adhered to a high moral code.

My grandpa was baptized into the LDS church in the Pacific Ocean after the end of World War 2. He was stationed in Southern California and my grandma joined him there, where they lived in a converted chicken coop until he was released from the service. I’m not sure what influenced my grandpa to get baptized, but I suspect it pleased my grandma and he had no intention of violating the covenants that were required; he may have even been a believer, of this I’m not sure.

Suffice it to say, one of the main diversions his family had from general Mormon culture of that time, was that his family was shaped by a strong matriarch, his grandmother. Perhaps this is something that appealed to my grandma. My Grandma Whipple, had a similar story in her family history with a different outcome. Her grandmother faced a similar situation around the same time, the turn of the century.

My Grandma Whipple’s grandmother, Susan Tucker, also had a husband who wanted to take on a second wife around the early 1900s. He married the daughter of a friend, a woman who was much taller and more gregarious that my great-great-grandmother. They were living in Wyoming at the time where polygamy was not accepted by the general culture, so her husband and the new wife had to flee to Southern Idaho, leaving behind Susan and my great-grandmother, Zella, who was only 12 years old at the time.

Years later Susan and Zella followed him to Southern Idaho, bringing only one piece of furniture, the piano that stands today in my living room. Zella begrudged her father. This I know because my dad knew his grandmother and he heard her speak, with contempt, that her father, “Traveled with a pillow under his arm,” between the houses of his two wives.

This is what I know of my family. My family has seen the light and shadow of the “gospel” enough to recognize that it is not all light. Some might argue that Mormon men practicing polygamy after the practice was officially banned by the church is not a reflection of the gospel. In the word’s truest sense, I would agree—gospel means good news. But in the sense of the way life actually plays out, these men were empowered by a system that told them their desires were paramount to their wives and sanctioned by God. Whether we call it culture or doctrine, similar themes were played out starting in the days of Joseph Smith.

Going back to the storyline of Under the Banner of Heaven, the writers skillfully weave together the perspectives of three groups: the modern, devout, LDS members; the tribe of men moving from the fringe of mainstream Mormonism to fundamentalism; and those entirely outside of the church. As the story progresses it becomes increasingly apparent to me that what most put people in jeopardy, what most deluded and darkened their sight, was the inability to examine shadow.

The culture of the mainstream LDS church has mostly been to avoid looking in the shadows. Much of the church’s early history has been honed down to, what is now the official telling of the stories, and anything outside of that can feel dangerous to members. I say this because it felt dangerous to me.

But to avoid the shadow is to avoid half of life, half of intellect, half of feeling, half of experience, and it’s easy to see how this can muddy discernment. In the years since I’ve stopped participating in the LDS church, I have not looked for dirt. I’ve never been a history-buff sort of person, before or since. I have never had much enthusiasm for church history and there are people on both sides of the argument, for or against the church, who would criticize me for this. It simply does not interest me as much as what is happening in front of me right now.

…Which brings me to what is happening in front of me right now.

The most moving scene, for me, in the Under the Banner of Heaven series was in the last episode. Dianna, who escaped execution only because she fled the state with her children to escape her physically abusive and wildly egomaniacal husband, returned to attempt to rescue her sister-in-law, Matilda. She completes the rescue, but they are caught by the younger brother of their husbands at a gas station. On-lookers stand by as he physically attempts to force Matilda into the car. On-lookers. Stand. By.

Dianna, in a show of emotional strength, yells to her brother-in-law, calling him weak. She implores Matilda to break free, to show him her strength. In that moment, Dianna is transformed into a beacon-warrior, not because she physically fights, but because she speaks the truth. She knows the shadow and she knows her strength.

But instead of this moment feeling triumphant, I feel a hollow ache in my chest as I watch. These women would never have been here, so deep into an insane situation, except for the years of training and coaching and counseling to avoid the shadow. Don’t look in the dark places, don’t listen to the anger, don’t give voice to the shame. Smile, and be quiet, and look like we expect you to, and answer the questions the way we expect you to, and don’t ask the questions that would require us to look into the dark. In short, don’t trust yourself, trust us--whoever us may be.

I had no reason to violate these admonitions. I believed it all. I lived it all. When I left the church it was because I was confronted by the shadow; it came to me, in the same way it came to Dianna in this series. I saw, what seemed to me, subtle, at the time, but now feels enormous and looming—the shadow of misogyny, colonialism and bigotry—woven throughout church doctrine and culture.

I’m not writing this to disparage the church. Many of my most important and loved people are still very much aligned with it. I am writing this with hope that we can embrace the strength that comes from examining the shadow and rid ourselves of the weakness produced by hiding from it.

We all have light and shadow inside of us—all people, organizations, organisms and entities. This could be said of the deer that, in seasons, overpopulate and overgraze the landscape, bacteria which in one setting are helpful decomposers and in another, infect and colonize the body to the point of death. Even personality traits carry light and shadow! Of course they do. The introvert shines at quietly filing his alone time with meaningful projects and pursuits, but shies away from public speaking or parties. The extrovert struggles to be alone.

Carl Jung wrote, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” Avoiding the shadow only gives it more strength. But we do avoid it because it is uncomfortable. Self-examination is uncomfortable.

So last week in The Artist's Way we were encouraged to explore our negative emotions, to begin listening to them. And this week we are talking about integrity. The link I want to make clear here is that unless you are willing to explore the shadow, you will always be out of integrity. If the shadow is ignored it automatically creates a facade, so this is constant work.

Just yesterday, for a moment, I wished I could return to my previous life, where everything was laid out before me and simple, and I only needed to endure to the end to be richly rewarded. I, like Eve, now live in the lone and dreary world. I make my bread by the sweat of my brow. I am daily reminded of the shadow, but my life is not dark. It has become a rich topography of peaks and ravines, forests and deserts, snowy pastures and luxurious seascapes.

I cannot speak about your experience, only my own. But, for me, I cannot imagine a God, who created this world, filled with so much diversity, so much light and so much in the deep, to have meant for us to skim the surface, not when the landscape of human experience is so vast and rich. There is freedom when I remember I am strong enough and humble enough to trust myself to see the shadow, to explore it and to emerge from it.

I see the light because I see the shadow.

6/6/22 6/6/22

Walking today

This came out on the page this morning. Creativity is medicine, my love. It makes it possible to start again over and over and over and over...

Walking todayI saw a bird in the tree overhead,I heard her first,Belting wildly, naturally,Into her head (or out of her heart).She tipped forward and backOn the branch next to the telephone wireWhich might have felt precarious,Except that, so clearly,She was meant for song and this light.Could you help but love her?Silhouette against the sky,Teaching you to sing with herWhole body, whole life, the momentDawn creeps into the sky?

This came out on the page this morning. Creativity is medicine, my love. It makes it possible to start again over and over and over and over...

Happy Monday!

And please take a look at what starts Wednesday! I'll be taking you through The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron this summer. This book, this activity, this exercise can be life changing! It's about unlocking your creativity and confronting fear and it can be useful for anyone who feels they are living, not for themselves, but for anyone or anything else.

5/29/22 5/29/22

Prosperity

The purchase of my house closed on March 9, 2020. The world was shutting down, no toilet paper on store shelves, the streets becoming more and more still on my morning commute. Days before the close, I went to yoga on a Sunday morning at the kundalini studio near my house, and I was the only one who showed up for the class.

Shar, the teacher, guided me through the kriya, and then at the end we spoke about what came up for me. I told her about how lonely I was, going through this house buying process without a partner, as the world was about to enter a similar state of isolation that I was already feeling on the inside.

I had begun a sadhana (which is the yogic word for daily spiritual practice) doing the Subagh (or Sobagh) Kriya. I was not doing it absolutely daily, but I did it several times each week. The Subagh Kriya is for prosperity, and anyone who teaches it will remind you that there are many forms of riches and prosperity. They will direct you to put your mind on what prosperity means to you.

I’ll link to the kriya here so you can see what it is like. The word, “Har,” is chanted repeatedly. Har means, “God as the creative infinity,” and the intention of the mantra is to affirm our ability to co-create with God, or the Universe, or whatever name works for the power that is outside us and bigger than us.

At this point, I'd guess I've spent more than a hundred hours with that kriya, but as I was getting ready to buy my house, I had only been in the practice for a couple of months, imagining the life I wanted to create. Shar was delighted to hear how soon this big piece of my own idea of prosperity appeared after starting that sadhana.

That day, she looked at me with fierce, glittering eyes and said, “You will learn to become very good company for yourself in that space.”

It felt like a prophecy.

The idea of being very good company for myself began to figure into my own definition of prosperity. I had a direction, something to work for that did not require a partner or family nearby. And since that time I have come back to that over and over again.

I learned to be good company for myself during long weeks last summer when R was away with his dad. I learned to create little moments of play and luxury. I learned to go to yoga even when I didn’t feel like it because my body would be thankful and repay me in some small way later.

I learned to feed myself delicious food and put my hands in the soil when I needed a friend. I learned to sit and write long letters to myself on the nights when I could not sleep. I learned to watch TV. I learned to listen for which internal voice was talking, that damn inner critic so often so loud. I learned to take something to help me sleep when I needed it.

I learned to be less afraid of myself, my choices, my desires. I learned to climb to the roof to look at the stars or watch the sunset for no one’s benefit other than my own. I took myself on dates and vacations. I bought myself nice clothes and allowed myself to change them multiple times a day, so I could wear the right costume to the dog park or the grocery store.

I watched over myself and held my own hair back as I leaned over the toilet on nights of horrifically big feelings. I watched myself panic that something inside of me might be irreversibly broken. I reminded myself that the morning comes. It always comes. And I gently put myself to sleep in the dawn light, made myself a cup of coffee when my son awoke or it was time to go to work, after a night too short.

This is prosperity--to become very good company for myself!

Sat nam.

5/22/22 5/22/22

It takes imagination.

The Nuvaring

Before I got married, I went to the student health center for a pre-marriage gynecology appointment. I was a student at Brigham Young University (BYU), 20 and a virgin. I didn’t think of myself as prude or naive, but I was probably both of those things. Raised in the conservative Mormon faith, I was taught that sex was sacred, reserved for marriage, but also should be fun (Woo-hoo!), and I was looking forward to trying it out.

At BYU I heard whisperings of women sent home from the initial gynecology appointment with devices to stretch their vaginas, something to make the wedding night more pleasurable, less painful. I wasn’t particularly worried about pain, I just knew I wasn’t ready to be pregnant.

So I got a prescription for contraception. I knew I wouldn’t be good at taking pills every day so I opted for the once-a-month Nuvaring. My fiancé was a little concerned about being able to feel it during sex, a little ring of plastic resting around my cervix. I hadn’t even considered this, but I felt good about the method I had chosen and I was undeterred.

I imagined putting on sexy underwear beneath my clothes in time for my husband to return home. He would discover this and then we would engage in hot-steamy-sex in whatever room of the apartment we happened to be in. Life never really lives up to fantasy.

Pheochromocytomas

A pheochromocytoma (pheo for short) is a tumor that causes high blood pressure by secreting hormones that are normally secreted by the adrenal glands. Pheos are extremely rare, occurring in <1% of people with high blood pressure. I joined a ragtag Facebook group for people with pheos few years back, and in this group they refer to themselves as “zebras,” after the med school adage that goes like this: “When you hear hoofbeats think horses, not zebras,” horses being much more common than zebras.

I was a zebra. And I had been for several years though I didn’t know it. It was these tumors that caused my chronic headaches and exercise intolerance. The first tumor was discovered in March 2005. I had a nose surgery that I hoped would solve the chronic headaches couple of months before this. During that surgery I became very hypertensive on the operating table and stayed in the recovery room all afternoon, while the attendants tried to get my blood pressure under control. I was lucky I didn’t stroke out that day.

The initial tumor was discovered after a series of tests and I was advised to use two forms of birth control until it could be removed. They said if I were to become pregnant there was an 80% chance I would die. Since then I’ve looked back through medical journals, and I’m not sure where that statistic came from. There are only case studies of pregnant women with pheos because it occurs so rarely. There are not enough data points for a more robust study. But it was clear to me—pregnancy likely equals death.

So we started using condoms in addition to the Nuvaring.

I had three more surgeries that year to remove what ended up being four tumors total. One tumor remained. It was located on or in my heart (difficult to determine on cardiac MRI at that time) and I was terrified. It felt like a precarious place and the distinction between on and in felt important. Because it was small, and in a risky place, they recommended it be monitored rather than removed.

There are only case studies of pregnant women with pheos because it occurs so rarely. There are not enough data points for a more robust study. But it was clear to me—pregnancy likely equals death.

And I didn’t become pregnant. No pregnancy scares. Nothing. My periods came like clock work. But even after the hormone-secreting tumors were removed, I was advised to continue two methods of birth control as my doctors predicted a high likelihood of recurrence.

Insurance

The first pheo was removed two weeks before my college graduation. Right after graduation I became a full-time employee of BYU for the marketing department where I had worked as a student graphic designer. Before the tumor, I had plans to return to New York City where I had been the previous summer doing an internship for Young & Rubicam on Madison Ave, but I scrapped this in favor of the excellent employee health plan awarded to full-time

BYU employees. It covered 90% of my medical bills.

My husband was bothered that we had to pay for contraception (I think it was $20 per month) and asked me to write a letter to our insurance company requesting they cover the cost of contraception as I had a very legitimate medical reason for using it.

I wrote the letter; I even had my physician write a letter. It was denied. They generously covered tens of thousands of dollars worth of diagnostics and treatment but NO to a $20/month contraceptive that was, according to all of my doctors, an essential precaution for keeping me alive and safe.

So we paid for the Nuvaring. And we paid for the condoms.

Preventing Pregnancy

A year or two after all the surgeries I was chatting with my mother-in-law in her kitchen. I was rattling on about what was on my mind, as I am prone to do. I brought up how I had been considering different forms of birth control and verbally weighed out the pros and cons of each method.

When I paused she remarked, “I just knew I wanted to have children so I didn’t worry about it.” I believe what she meant by her comment was that it was something completely outside the scope of her experience. She had five children. Maybe she never prevented pregnancy. I never asked about something so personal.

But at the time, I felt embarrassed for using contraception in the first place. Her comment was a reminder of our shared religion and culture that placed so much emphasis on a woman’s primary role as mother. Mormons do not condemn the use of contraception, but the value placed on a woman’s role as mother is so elevated, I felt I was doing something wrong by preventing pregnancy. I wanted children. But, more than the actual role of mother, I wanted to follow the righteous path. Even with the risk of recurrent tumors, I felt some guilt for playing it safe. Part of me believed I should just have faith, get a family started and hope for the best. Faith precedes the miracle, right?

I wanted the carefree sex lives that I imagined were enjoyed by my friends and family in their early years of marriage.

Another part of me felt envious. This is around the time envy became a quiet companion of mine. You see, sex had already become stressful due to the stakes around pregnancy. I was comfortable on some level with taking reasonable precautions and then letting the chips fall where they may, but my husband was not. He was scrupulous. Understandably so. But I wanted the carefree sex lives that I imagined were enjoyed by my friends and family in their early years of marriage.

Methods

During my time using contraception (which has been almost the entirety of my adult life), I’ve tried numerous pills, rings, injections and an IUD. Trying the gamut of contraception is absolutely not unusual for women. Contraception has numerous side effects from weight gain and acne to heavy bleeding, depression and mood swings. Most of the women in my life have done the same because, in our culture, prevention of pregnancy falls upon the one with the womb—the one who has the most to lose by incurring an unwanted pregnancy.

I gained weight and felt impossible depression on the Depo Provera shot. I felt horrible on any of the pills called Tri-. I did better on the consistent low dose pills. But my husband was terrified of impregnating me so any late pill or missed pill threw a wet blanket on our sex life.

Even then, even while we lived in his parent’s basement, waiting for more tumors to appear, I still enjoyed sex. I just did’t have the freedom around it that I imagined I would—that I wanted.

During those years (more than a decade) I would guess many people within our conservative, Mormon cultural sphere, assumed we had fertility issues. I even had a few acquaintances ask me about infertility directly, like it was common knowledge that was the reason I had no children. I felt guilt around this too. Many of my friends struggled with infertility through those years, and they were looking for someone with whom to share the experience. But that was never the case for me. Our lack of children was due to eleven years of constant vigilance.

A New Sex Life

I didn’t ever think my marriage was great, but I didn’t think our sex life was part of the problem. I see that differently now.

Before we separated, and one of the last times I had sex with my ex-husband I told myself, Just enjoy this because it may be the last time you get to do this for a long time—and I did. In the event we divorced, I was planning on keeping my temple covenants by not having sex outside of marriage. I also still carried the belief that masturbation was a sin, so I was preparing for a sexless life.

The sexless life was okay for me for about six months after I separated. During that time, I was extremely stressed and terrified of all the kinds of divorce-related repercussions that might be headed my way. I worried about my physical safety. I worried about how I was perceived by friends and family. I worried about finances. I was working and caring for one-year-old son. Sex was the last thing on my mind.

But I remember when I started to notice I had a natural sex drive. I have to chalk it up to being natural because I definitely wasn’t looking for it. Esther Perel, psychotherapist and best-selling author wrote, “Eroticism is not sex per se, but the qualities of vitality, curiosity, and spontaneity that make us feel alive.” This tracks. I started to sift through my experience as a wife as I was getting out of the marriage. I became very aware of how I had become a shell of a human during those years. I was a walking to-do list, measuring life by accomplishments rather than joy. The weekends felt pressured as I tried to check off the box marked FUN.

I became curious about what would bring me back to life.

I became curious about what would bring me back to life. I was a vibrant and joyful child, and I wanted to reclaim that. So, like I said before, this absolutely tracks with Perel’s definition of the erotic. I began to focus on the present moment, in part because future and past thinking was gnarly enough to demand a reprieve! I found joy in those little moments, sensory experiences like eating breakfast, walking with my son in the stroller at night under the stars and the palm trees, putting my feet into the sand, letting the freezing winter ocean swirl around my ankles and toes. I was moving out of my head and into my body in those moments.

I waited a year and a half after our separation to start dating. I felt like enough time had passed that I was ready to move into the next relationship. I was so wrong. But, I was ready to start that process.

I had a conversation with one of my close friends who had pre-marital sex experience (being as I had none!). Sex had been on my mind, but I also felt that desire in my body, to my core. I had been putting it off because I didn’t know what to do with it. I brought up masturbation because I was trying to figure out what to do with my sex drive as I had no outlet. She had a different opinion than I expected. She believed there was a place for masturbation. And she sort of gave me the permission slip I felt I needed to explore that which had always been forbidden, and so forbidden in my mind, I didn’t really even know how to do it.

I sat with that for a while. Around that same time, I learned that the paraganglioma tumor in my neck was growing (paraganglioma is just a broader term for neuroendocrine tumors like mine). It was not secreting adrenal hormones like the pheochromocytoma had, but it was growing— a little reminder that life is precious, and I am not permanent here. As I said before, the whole divorce brought the preciousness of MY life to the surface. The fact that I had spent more than a decade (a decade I didn’t plan to live through at its beginning) in a marriage that didn’t make me happy seemed to punctuate time, but also life LIVED during that time, as the most precious commodity.

Sex was always a good thing in my life, even if it had never been a great thing. I wanted to explore it further. Yes, there was a part of me that was that casual about it. But there was also a deep longing in me, something beyond simple horniness. A part of me knew that it would be healing, but I resisted this because of the covenants, because of the garments I wore every day reminding me of those covenants, because I loved going to the temple, I loved my faith, and my community at church. All of that was on the line—if I chose sex. For the first time in my memory, I chose my desire over all of those other things.

The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands

I left my ex-husband once before in 2010. I felt unseen, unheard and uncared for in my marriage. But I took him back after two weeks for a couple of reasons. The first and most powerful was fear. I believed no one would want a 27-year-old, divorced, cancered woman. That is what my culture of origin taught me. The worst thing I could be is a spinster. Divorcé wasn’t even on my radar of possibilities.

And it stemmed from purity culture, like it or not. By purity culture, I mean placing high value on virginity. For example, teaching young women that losing their virginity effectively turns them from a fresh stick of gum into a wad of disgusting used gum. Even though I had followed the rules, I knew in my LDS community, I would be much less desirable as virginity, this one, pristine quality had been lost in my first marriage. I wanted children and a husband, and I believed that if I ended this marriage I would never have an opportunity for those things.

The second reason was because I was convinced by my bishop (male clergy) and some family members that the problem had been that I was unclear in my communication. My ex claimed that if he had only known how I felt and what I wanted, things would have been different. He believed I kept those things from him. And it was believable to me because of the great lengths I had gone to keep the peace! I knew I had quieted some of my important desires. With the time that has passed, I now see that I had not been secretive or withholding of my desires. Simply put, a girl learns to stop asking when the answer is always No.

I was convinced to reunite with him, and this was again related to the culture around men and women. Women are taught to expect to be patient with their husbands, to understand that men are not emotionally evolved creatures. I read Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands in my first year of marriage. I think my husband recommended it. The premise of that book is that if a woman is unhappy in her marriage it’s most often her own fault, and what she needs to do is be nice to her husband (care for and feed him and put out) and happiness will flow.

I’m not a man hater. I love men. But also, that advice is complete horse shit. I did my best to properly care for and feed that man for years. And what I received in return was the blame for his inattentiveness. After all, we can’t expect men to be responsible for their thoughts about the naked female form, about their roll in unwed pregnancy, sometimes even sexual assault and rape, so how could I expect this man to know how to listen to me? It’s not in his chromosomes.

...how could I expect this man to know how to listen to me? It’s not in his chromosomes.

It seemed that it was also my job to carry responsibility for the success of household communication. And more precisely, to do it without being a nag, and initiate sex but only at the right time, and to pursue career and personal interests, but only as it aligned with husband’s wants and needs and his picture of womanhood.

So I invited him to move into my apartment after two weeks. He seemed repentant and I was the eternal optimist. It was almost instant after that when he began to punish me with silence and a cold shoulder. After all, it would take HIM a long time to forgive ME….for what? I guess for wounding his pride and humiliating him in front of the very small handful of people who knew about the split.

I took Celexa, an antidepressant, for about six months after the split. It took the edge off of my anxiety, made it easier for me to tolerate my wintery partner and almost impossible to have an orgasm. I regret it now because I didn’t need to be medicated into docility. I was appropriately outraged, wounded and bereft.

Optimism

I accepted that my wagon was eternally hitched to this man. He didn’t want children for many years. Not yet, he would say and then name a dollar amount we would need in the bank or the completion of school, or money for a house, and then retirement…it was always something.

He told me just before we conceived our only child that he thought he was too selfish to have kids. I insisted we proceed, but I think he was being honest. Again, culture around men influenced my thinking. I expected men to be selfish creatures, their wild nature meant to be domesticated and improved by a wife and children. Insisting upon this next step was my role.

I was 31 at the time, and I felt my biological clock ticking. I also felt the foolishness of all of those years of, what ended up being unfounded, fear about my tumors. Plus, I was the eternal optimist, blindly hoping that a child would give him a reason to think of someone else, even if having a wife, even a wife with life-threatening illness, couldn’t.

That sounds like I’m answering a biggest weakness question in a job interview. You know, when they want you to state what’s wrong with you so you twist a strength into the format of a weakness, something like, “I just work so hard it makes other people uncomfortable sometimes.” But the dark side of being an optimist is it is tied to the belief that, I am exceptional. I believed I had some power to transform this indifferent creature into a good husband and father. I believed I was special.

He saw me as a wife in the conventional sense, as a helpmeet, a vessel, a source of labor and income and dinner and grocery shopping. And this is why I left. The more I tried to be myself the more clear it became that there was no space for me outside of my designated role.

Why am I choosing to share this very personal story at this time?

Excellent question. I’d love to tell you. I suppose some of my readers are voyeurs and only want the dirt on my life and my marriage. I didn’t write this for them. I wrote it with hope that this meandering tale of marriage, contraception, sex and womanhood would build imagination in my readers. Imagination is the first ingredient for empathy.

I never spent any time studying feminist issues until about three years ago. I didn’t like or identify with the word feminist. It felt like a word for loud, annoying women who want to be men and don’t value family and children. I was raised in a family and religion that places the highest value on those connections, so that definitely wasn’t me, until I realized how those values (the ones I possessed) had, in a very real way, marginalized me directly.

I suspect that some women feel the way I used to feel about “feminist issues” such as abortion, access to contraception and access to sex education. Simply put, it doesn’t affect me directly, so I don’t want to think about it. I get that sentiment deeply—in my bones. Most women I know have a lot on their plate. They are properly feeding and caring for husbands, children, extended family, neighbors, congregations, and communities.

I was raised in a family and religion that places the highest value on those connections, so that definitely wasn’t me, until I realized how those values (the ones I possessed) had, in a very real way, marginalized me directly.

I don’t personally have any experience with abortion, and yet, I found myself crying in the car on my way to work after I learned about the leaked Supreme Court document that revealed a plan to reverse Roe v. Wade.

Let me explain. Women have been socialized to be a vessel. We have been socialized to believe that our central purpose is our use and our highest value is selflessness. What greater act of selflessness is there than to become a mother? A woman gives over her body, her sleep, her food, her earning potential and her hobbies to bring a baby into the world. Sometimes she must sacrifice her friends, her family of origin, work, colleagues, or possessions because she has a baby. It is beautiful. It is important. It is an experience I absolutely wanted for myself.

The problem is that not everyone gets to do in the way they imagined. I think most of us imagine having a baby with a loving partner, someone who can support us through those major sacrifices. But we don’t all get that. I’m not sure that it’s even a majority of women who get that.

My ex-husband has always loved our son. He always wanted to be involved, but he didn’t ask to get up in the night to help with feedings and he wasn’t the first one to jump up when the baby needed changed. I didn’t expect him to. I assumed that role. And I took it because I was socialized to do so, by my culture, but also by him who had required for so many years that I provide HIS care before the baby even came.

I wanted to be a good wife. I believed a good wife was patient, easy-going, selfless, quiet, and small. And I did my damnedest to embody those things. Sisters, do we really believe the pinnacle of the feminine being is without a self?

For my 20s I struggled because I was not living life for myself. I thought I was going to die of cancer by age 26 so I focused on my role as wife and tried make things easier on my someday-to-be-grieving-widower. At the time I could see that I should be living like I was dying, making the most of my time left on earth (however one does that!). But this was an impossible puzzle, because what I wanted was to be a good wife and a good wife is selfless. The resentment of this paradox festered within me. I wanted to live and I wanted to be good, but to be good, I had to be self-sacrificing.

When my ex-husband and I started to talk in earnest about divorce, I remember he said to me one night that I had to let all of that resentment go in order for our relationship to have a chance. He was absolutely right, and I knew it. And beyond all reason, when I offered up that resentment to god, because I had no idea how to rid myself of it, it vanished instantly. It was replaced with a keen sense of what was true in the present moment. What was true was that my husband had no intention of giving me space in our relationship to have a self. What was true is that if I stayed I would shrink to nothing, like one of Ursula’s emaciated shrimp that litter the floor of her sea cave.

Since that realization, my life has opened up. It happened gradually, but I started to believe that if god loved me as much as I loved this little boy (or even more), then my happiness might matter. That was actually my big feminist awakening. I was holding my son in the rocking chair as he nursed from a bottle and peered back into my eyes. It was a picture of selfless motherhood, mother love. Maybe it’s poetic that that is when I could finally hear the voice of my heavenly mother, the divine feminine. She told me I was important. As important as this baby boy in my arms, as my husband, as my father, as my grandfathers, as any man who has ever walked the earth or ever will.

It happened gradually, but I started to believe that if god loved me as much as I loved this little boy (or even more), then my happiness might matter.

I know we have laws for a reason. I hate the idea of killing babies. I hate the idea of abortion. I don’t think anyone, or rather extremely few (to eliminate hyperbole) feel joy about abortion. Most of the women I know that feel strongly about abortion believe in a higher power. They love babies, others and their own. They are trying to be good and do good in the world. They are kind. They are ambitious and generous and they’ve got grit.

My argument is that what women are asking for is not unreasonable. It’s not unrighteous. It’s simply to have the ability to direct their lives, to have babies when they are ready to have babies, to explore their ambition and creativity and vitality.

Sex After Divorce

I chose to break my temple covenant, not because I was horny and needed an outlet, but because I felt like I was missing out on precious years of my life. I was compelled to claim my own sovereignty. I wanted sovereignty over my life in all ways. I wanted to feel the full impact of my choices. I wanted to be completely awake and alive.

Me! Who never questioned the church, my marital vows and covenants, the culture that told me my needs were secondary if they were to be considered at all. I was complicit with all of those things for 35 years. I lived those values.

I found a man to date who was interesting and interested in me. Our physical relationship progressed quickly. I found myself drawing imaginary lines around parts of my body, places clothes had to remain, the same way I did when I was making out with my high school and college boyfriends. All the same it lit me up in an entirely new way and I found those lines slowly disappearing.

I was terrified. I was still wearing my temple garments. I was still attending church. I didn’t even have proper panties! I was trying to figure out how to honor myself within the confines of my religion. But I gave myself the space to explore and figure out what was right for me. Sex after divorce was incredibly healing. I needed that experience. I needed to give myself the grace to be awkward, but also hot, sensual, complex and adventurous. I needed to feel whole as a woman. Sex was exactly what I needed, when I needed it.

It was my new partner’s unmitigated enthusiasm for my body that transformed me. He was a completely new exploit. I had only dated Mormon men previously, and Mormon men who were trying to stay inside the same imaginary lines I was. This man had no lines. It was freedom I had never experienced.

For most of my sex life, I was criticized—only in small ways, but a multitude of small ways. The hair on my body, that grew from my nipples, was unexpected. My vulva was described as, “so weird” (…that’s right…So weird.) I tried to make sense of that. I had no vulvas for comparison, except my mom and sisters, and I had never examined their parts up close. At the start, I was pretty sure my genitalia was in the neighborhood of normal. But years and years of anything will create ruts in the mind that are hard to grade out.

My new partner looked up at me once from between my legs. I had made some mildly apologetic comment about the state of something down there. He said point blank, “Michelle, this is a world-class pussy.” That moment is cemented into my mind. I remember the part of the bed we were on, the time of day, the lighting—I remember because it was healing.

A big, lingering question was answered: Am I defective? No.

Imagination

I used my imagination to open up life for myself. But I had lots of practice with imagination before that. For all of my 20s, I used my imagination to relate to the women around me. Women who had what I wanted. Women for whom life dealt the hand they more or less expected, a supportive partner, to raise babies with. I used my imagination on their behalf as I watched them face miscarriages and difficult pregnancies, infertility and too many children too soon. I used my imagination to care for them as they faced these difficulties, all while I waited for my own motherhood story to unfold.

It feels like a great tragedy when women don’t use their imagination on behalf of their sisters with other types of difficulties than the ones they’ve faced. I felt compelled to tell my own story so completely because I have realized that I, too, sometimes lack imagination, and I have particularly in the past. What I mean by that is I had a lot on my plate. I didn’t have the mental or emotional space to consider stories of women I didn’t know and, because I was in a fairly homogenous culture, the women I knew, were mostly facing the same things.

Now think about your own story, if you were to write an essay like this. Wouldn’t it take paragraphs and pages to flesh out the complexity?

How you thought about sex before you tried it.
What your first experiences were like.
How you navigated sexual desire and its relationship to your own worthiness.
Finding partners or not finding partners.
How you handled menstruation, contraception, pregnancy and post-partum.
Even things like sexual assault and childhood mistreatment.
Devastating miscarriages and the shame around an unwanted pregnancy.
And what about menopause? I’m not even there yet and my story is already long.

Life is messy. How can we legislate the creation of life? Something so personal, something so ancient, something so sacred. Legislation around abortion is something, I am convinced, we as a society would not tolerate, if we had not been, for millennia, swimming in the ideology that a woman, at her highest use, is a vessel.

My appeal is for the women who read this: Would you lend your imagination to the women who have walked a very different road than you? Would you consider that the lines religion draws around this very personal, ancient and sacred part of life, might not be universally applicable? Making abortion illegal places almost all of the risk of sex on the partner who has the womb. Sex. Something that is also so personal, so ancient, so sacred.

Abortion is only one part of a much larger sifting that is taking place right now. I have a Ruth Bader Ginsburg calendar on my kitchen wall because, without her, after my divorce, I would have needed a male cosigner to buy this house. I would have needed a male cosigner for my credit card, my bank account. She paved the way for me to attend college and graduate school on equal footing with my male peers. I am paid a good salary, equivalent to my male peers, and I had maternity leave and did not lose my job when I chose to have a baby, thanks to RBG and people like her. My life would look very, very different today had our legislative process gone differently in the 20th century. The lives of all women would.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how life might have been different for you. What would it cost you personally to put down the stone, and write in the sand while the crowd disperses? To give a woman her freedom? It takes a willingness to see oneself as human and fallible.

It takes imagination.

5/8/22 5/8/22

Who is Heavenly Mother?

Now that I better understand the feminine divine, I see that, because of her nature, she doesn’t fit easily into organized religion. She is too big and complicated for that. There are no instructions for breathing! How would you teach someone to inhale? Yet, I notice very quickly when I am becoming oxygen-deprived.

Note: This post is a throwback, originally published in June 2019, and it still feels true. Feels relevant to the LDS community right now. Feels relevant to the ongoing struggle for the sovereignty of women. But most of all it feels relevant to my role as mother at this point in my life, as co-creator and a witness to the life of my little one (as he become increasingly bigger!). Happy Mother's Day to the divine feminine in each of us.

I’ve been trying to understand, FOR ME, what is the most useful way to think about God. In the Mormon theology I was raised with, God is male and usually referred to as Heavenly Father. Mormonism has the beautiful, and added, benefit of a female counterpart to the male God, termed Heavenly Mother. The idea is that we are all part of a massive human family with Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother and all of humanity as our siblings. There’s a lot that I like about this model. It’s reflective of the family structure most of us have experienced so it’s familiar (it can also be fraught for the same reason).

Little is said of Heavenly Mother in Mormon doctrine and culture. This has usually been explained to me to be because she is so sacred that Heavenly Father protects her from the profanity of human conversation. From a feminist perspective, this explanation is infuriating and degrading. From the perspective one who views herself as a child with heavenly parents, it’s confusing. Kids need their mom. Why would you withhold that?

Maybe strangely, this issue has been of little bother to me for most of my life. My religious persona has been quite accepting of these sorts of problems and explanations, pushing them under the umbrella of, I’ll understand that better someday. Sometimes that umbrella is useful because some of these topics can only be explored with time and life experience. They live like little ghosts in the back of my psyche until an experience brings them to the foreground.

This past week, I was talking to my parents about a problem, I’ve been trying to figure out for months. I presented them with my current thinking about it and my dad said, “That seems really sensible.” To which I replied, “I’m not going for sensible! That’s not how I’m making decisions anymore. I want it to FEEL right.” And he, so humbly and happily said, “Oh! Well that’s your mother’s domain.” He’s so great! I can’t remember what my mom said to this, but I remember the energy of it, and it was something about self trust. And I’m going to come back to this in a minute.

I want to write a little about what I’ve observed in the nature of the feminine. And to use Elizabeth Gilbert’s term, I don’t want to get “gender-freaky” about this. I’m talking about the iconic feminine.

The feminine creates. This is the energy in the universe that calls to us to experiment and imagine. To me, the feminine creative energy feels like lying on my back looking at the clouds and seeing figures of airplanes and unicorns. It’s not overtly practical or directional. It might even feel superfluous, but, like air, its necessity is recognized mostly by its absence.

The feminine is the ether. I like to think about this from the perspective of a child in the womb. We are swimming in the feminine. She is all around. Think about the idea of mother earth. She is the rock, the water, the sky and everything in between all of it. Maybe this is why we feel close to the divine as we connect with the natural world. It’s like pressing a fetal hand into the wall of the womb, becoming slightly aware of the being that is carrying us. The problem is not locating the feminine, it’s becoming conscious that she is all around me.

The feminine nurtures. The feminine says, I will go on doing all of this, holding all of this, whether you notice or not, because I am doing it for my own purpose. This is the subtle strength of feminine care. All of this carrying and holding and love is not contingent upon outcomes and results, it is intrinsic.

I’m sure there is more that could be written about this, but maybe that’s enough to nudge your mind in the direction I’m intending. I’ve been thinking about these things in the context of Heavenly Mother. And I’ve realized that most of the spiritual practices I’ve adopted this past year are things that put me in the way of this divine, feminine energy.

Nature. I’ve noticed that one of the most universal ways of connecting with God or finding peace or hearing the inner voice is to be in nature. While some are getting dressed up for church, many are heading into the mountains or the sea. Church is sort of a masculine, direct pathway to God. It’s like following a map to the divine father. These are my office hours, so to speak. But nature is always open—curious and diverse and meandering. I believe this is where the divine mother lives.

My body. I feel super cool about my body these days, because I feel like it is this beautiful echo of my divine mother’s voice. I’ve come to experience this in several ways—child birth, exercise, meditation, sleep—but the yoga mat has been an excellent teacher. There are truths embedded in my flesh that are revealed only when I am paying very close attention and yoga has given me a way to notice them. Each time I get on the mat, I have to strip away all the expectations of myself for performance. My intention is usually to listen or to let go—surrender, release, acceptance. My mind becomes the servant of my body and my spirit becomes the quiet observer. Teach me, I say to my self—to the part of me that already knows—the divine feminine.

Honesty. Some of my most powerful connections with the divine, come during intimate conversations. Isn’t this how it’s always been with women? While men are hunting beasts and conquering legions, women are in the back room making dinner or folding clothes and talking about the heart of life. The feminine divine is in these quite conversations, in the quiet honesty. She is in the utterance of fear and uncertainty and the humble declaration of faith. The feminine divine can hold all of this—the ugly and the beautiful, the weak and the strong. It’s all safe with her.

Art. Honesty is the birthplace of art. The feminine divine cheers us on as we attempt to excavate those sacred jewels within and bring them into the world. She is in the music and the poetry. We do ourselves a disservice by relegating this category of expression to entertainment, because it is so much more than that. Heavenly Mother is constantly asking us to dance with her, to sing, to write, to draw, because that is the way we can come to know ourselves in the way SHE sees us. In the same way I encourage my son’s fledgling attempts at creativity, she is doting over my bad poetry, messy relationships and off-key singing with the hope that I will not let the world close my mouth.

Linger and rest. The iconic feminine meanders. My therapist taught me this months ago and it’s something that frequently comes to mind. The feminine is like the path along the cliff line that has amazing views but takes a little longer. I’m someone who naturally values efficiency, so it has taken a conscious effort to allow myself to walk the scenic path. The feminine suggests, maybe it’s okay to just sit here for a while and enjoy the beauty of this place or moment. Maybe it’s okay to linger. Maybe it’s okay to take a nap if you’re tired. There may be miles to go, but there is time and it’s okay to be kind to yourself.

So back to my story about the conversation with my mom and dad. I don’t feel bad that I can’t remember my mother’s exact words because the words were not as important as the feeling. And this is true to the feminine divine. She doesn’t write instruction booklets. She is unstructured and unshaped. And because of that she can fit into the spaces where other things can’t.

This is me in the flow: quiet mind, open heart. I think of these moments as glimpses. I just try to catch a peek of that feeling as often as I can. P.S.-- Heavenly Mother thinks SnapChat filters are fun too!

Heavenly Mother is the essence of self care. A while back, I realized that the only thing that REALLY qualified as self-care—that really worked—was the activities that cleared the crap off of my soul. The things that helped me to hear my inner voice. This is Heavenly Mother. So maybe you can pray to her. Maybe you can visualize a heavenly being with kind eyes and a loving embrace. If that’s helpful, then do it!

My advice on this topic is really DO ANYTHING. Reach out into the ether and you will find her because she is everywhere and all it takes to access her is a quiet mind and an open heart. The practices that will be most helpful are the ones that create those two things. And when you find her, tell me about it because I live for this stuff now! Namaste.

5/3/22 5/3/22

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.

4/3/22 4/3/22

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.

9/7/21 9/7/21

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 Tieg h an, 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.

3/6/21 3/6/21

Be.

 Rest in cool water. Dance in flame. Lick up morsels lobbed onto my plate. I was born in ease, In the universe,In myself.Hung the world round my neck,Its weight pulling nearer, nearer to the floor.Stop that. Let it clatter on the floorboards.Skip into the mud forest.Find a shelf fungus,Haunt a cardinal tree.Be.

8/5/19 8/5/19

Sit and smile

I’m going to pause here because THIS is mind-blowing for me. I’m not required to constantly shift and work and adjust and strain until perfection is obtained? Really? There is space in life for a moment’s pause to sit and smile?

I was reading tonight in Eat Pray Love and I came across a passage where Elizabeth Gilbert is learning from a Ketut, a Balinese medicine man. She writes:

He tells me that there are many ways to find God but most are too complicated for Westerners, so he will teach me an easy meditation. Which goes, essentially, like this: sit in silence and smile. I love it. He’s laughing even as he’s teaching it to me. Sit and smile. Perfect….

You make serious face like this, you scare away good energy. To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

When I read this it made me smile because it made me think of my own yoga experience. I used to be so annoyed when the instructor would tell us to smile in a particularly challenging pose. My brain didn’t know what to do with this request, so I would paste on a smile or roll my eyes and ignore the instruction. As Princess Buttercup said to the Dread Pirate Roberts, You mock my pain!

But there is power in this simple request: sit and smile. Actually I think this is one of the most important disciplines to master for one who is seeking happiness. Sit and smile. Let’s break it down.

Sit. This implies stillness. A quieting of the monkey brain, which, for me, initially feels like a wrestling match. And when it becomes clear that the monkey is going to win, then a release or surrender. It’s like the decision to relinquish control IS what ultimately grants it. So one must first learn to sit in stillness.

Smile. A smile is just a facial expression, but I love what Ketut instructs, Even smile in your liver. To really smile it has to come from deep inside—at least, to really mean it. It’s the letting go that really allows for this. It’s hard to have a genuine smile through your entire body when you are white-knuckling in anyway.

Thank you, yoga, for teaching me this. I’ve noticed this when I’ve continued to hold the pose, but understood that perfection is not required. And furthermore, constant shifting of the pose until theoretical perfection is obtained—also not required.

I’m not sure I was ever conscious enough to notice my constant shifting and adjusting, let alone to decide when/if it was necessary. The truth is, I do want to be better at the yoga pose and at life. I’m going to naturally shift and progress, but there is something to be said for holding the pose without adjustment.

This brings me to my main thought of the past month. I re-listened to Sue Monk Kidd on the Oprah Super Soul podcast while I was in Santa Cruz. She, so pleasantly, told Oprah,

“I remember thinking, It’s time to start finding things…There’s a hunger in you and I think it’s appropriate to follow that, but we should also be finders at the same time. It’s one of those paradoxes that I’m getting more comfortable living with. That we can be a seeker and a finder at the same time.

We have to acknowledge sometimes that this moment is enough, this place is enough, I am enough, it’s okay. And if I never seek another thing, it’s enough.”

Sue Monk Kidd on Oprah Super Soul Sunday

This is where I’m trying to live for the time being: This moment is enough. This place is enough. I’m enough.

I'm learning to sit and smile.

6/9/19 6/9/19

Who is Heavenly Mother?

3/5/19 3/5/19

How to start feeling

I grew up in a house with four women which meant there was a lot of estrogen going around. We were pretty adept at late-night sessions, hashing out the latest crises in our lives, letting our advice spill over into the wee hours when judgment for such things is waning and emotions are running high. I was always the more detached, cerebral unit in this group. I used humor as an escape and a facade to avoid these tell-all episodes when possible. For years, these sessions were the glue that held the women in my family together. They defined our get-togethers. Sometimes they left us feeling closer and sometimes they just left us feeling more crazy and isolated. The outcome was always a gamble.

Thankfully, these sessions have changed. My sisters came to San Diego for a getaway weekend this past week. We’ve become better at this over the years. It’s easier. For one thing, the facade is starting to come down. We’re not faking the always-clean house anymore. We’ve dropped the idea that we should have it all together.

Another change that is coming about is emotional autonomy. We aren’t perfect at it yet, but we’ve started to trust each other to take care of our own crap. We are adopting the philosophy of I’m going to assume you’re okay with whatever is happening unless you tell me it’s not okay. Maybe in some family dynamics this would be moving in the wrong direction, but in ours it’s magic. We have a history of being endlessly caretaking to the point that no one will say where they want to have dinner for fear that someone will be disappointed but go along with it anyway. It’s enough to make anyone bonkers.

The third things is that we’ve started to cool it on the advice. Advice, usually, just sucks. It’s not helpful and it often makes the advised person feel like an idiot. We probably suck at this one the most. We still relentlessly advise each other because how do you not try to help your sister when she is telling you about something in her life that is causing her pain!?! That’s why I said we’ve STARTED to cool it. No miraculous change here—just incremental.

So I was actually really honored when my sister opened up to me about avoiding her feelings. She realized she was doing this a lot and had been for years. Numbing out the negative emotion with food or TV or whatever. She said, with the bravest honesty, that she wondered what it would take to give that up--and if she even wanted to.

Her simple utterance rang all my truth alarms. I told her that that was a VERY valid question. It’s a lot to feel. It’s so much. And at first you won’t know how to get it out—how to unbury that stuff that’s been locked away under layers of food and TV and shopping and piles of subconscious. You’ll notice yourself binge eating or binge watching and, now because you’re slightly more conscious than before, you see it. You think, I’m just numbing—what am I numbing? And you won’t be able to figure it out at first.

And you’ll judge yourself because that’s what you’ve always done. Your brain will say things to you like, You’re weak. You always do this. And then you’ll feel some shame about the numbing behavior which will really only feed it and you’ll wonder if you will ever get off this cycle. But what you don’t realize is that your foot is already on the path to consciousness. Because you noticed the numbing! You identified it. So a few weeks or months or years will go by and sometimes you’ll notice the numbing and identify it as it’s happening and sometimes you’ll see it after the fact and sometimes you won’t see it at all.

Then one day, as you reach for your first handful of Cadbury Mini Eggs—or maybe it will happen because you’re surprisingly out of chocolate—you’ll stop yourself and decide to really drill down. What is the feeling I’m numbing? You’ll search for a word, the chocolate smell heavy in the air. Anger…fear…jealousy…tired…disappointment—DISAPPOINTMENT! That’s it! I’m disappointed.

You’ll retrace your feeling steps back through the events of the last ten minutes or ten hours or ten days or ten years to realize that what you’re feeling in this moment is disappointment. And then you will wonder what it feels like--without the chocolate.

You’ll picture a time when you felt disappointed. You might even have to reach back to childhood if you’ve been numbing for a while. You’ll lean into that memory as you lean into the current moment. The lean means that you are getting into your body. You will pull that feeling through your gut, to your fingertips and as you let go of the stoicism you will begin to cry. You might be driving down the freeway sobbing over your steering wheel. You might prostrate yourself on the kitchen floor as the disappointment takes over. You let it.

Part of you thinks this is completely ridiculous. Another part of you worries that now that you’ve started crying you might never stop. But you’ve already come this far so you continue to sob. Tears are now coming from the darkest corners of your psyche. DISAPPOINTMENT. It’s such a simple emotion, so familiar, so easy to bury under layers of chocolate or busy-ness or novels or TV. But now it’s racking you in full force. Your face is covered in snot and tears. You feel strange as the sobs start to slow—no wait, now they’re back again full-force—okay, now they are slowing.

That’s the thing about emotions—they can’t last forever. This is as equally true for the good ones as it is for the painful ones. You look in the mirror and see your swollen eyes and snotty face, but it’s not pathetic. There’s a little fire that’s started in your chest. It’s the fire of self-respect because you did the hard thing—the brave thing. You faced the disappointment dragon. You shouted and beat your chest at the mouth of his cave and he devoured you. Yet here you are on the other side of it, soggy but intact. And that simple fact is proof that you can do it again. Over and over and over again. You can be devoured by the dragon because you were born to do this. You were born to feel—not to numb, but TO FEEL.

The weeks and months and years will pass. Your emotional vocabulary will grow. You will begin to see the dragons on the horizon and the fear of being devoured will become less. Still, there will be times when you put on the sumo suit of chocolate or TV or exercise or podcast. You will check out and the dragon will pass by, but it will secretly be waiting.

Sometimes you will notice these moments and you will judge yourself for it. I should know better! I am enlightened! You really suck at this! But another voice will tell you, you are human and the balance is what it’s all about. Be kind to yourself. Be patient with yourself. Love yourself. That is the way to freedom. At first the shoulds will be loud in your ears. You will wonder if you will EVER be good at this.

The weeks and months and years will pass and you will realize that good is silly. Good is a box and no one is shaped like a box. We only come in human shapes. By then you will suck less at this enlightenment business. But that saying that goes something like, the more I learn the less I know will have come to pass.

You will be very brave about being devoured by the dragon then. For this reason, some people will think that you have too many feelings. You won’t worry too much about those people because you will understand that we all have dragons lurking on the horizon.

Sometimes you will succeed at standing firm while the dragon devours you and other times you will find yourself running to food or shopping or TV or drugs or incessant napping or alcohol or social media or sex or gambling. But because you are conscious more often than not, you notice when you do these things. And the reward of it becomes less because you see it for what it is—not an escape but a delay.

And you start to be kind to yourself, to understand that sometimes you NEED a delay. You aren’t yet ready to be devoured by the next dragon. But because you know you are someone who faces down dragons, you trust that you will eventually summon the courage to be devoured and you will love yourself as you wait for that day.

Here’s to the journey, sister. I'm on it too.

THAT I WOULD BE FREE

WILD OPEN