Putting Spark to the Cold Ground

I once spent a night alone in a biologist’s cabin in Garden Valley, Idaho. It was January and the entire valley was padded with a foot of powdery snow.  I was doing a clinical rotation in that small town and the doctor I worked with had an arrangement with the family that owned this cabin, that it could house PA students during their clinical rotations, when it was not otherwise in use. 

My 1998 Saturn SL with bald tires couldn’t even make it through town without getting stuck, much less the one-lane mountain road on which the cabin stood. The doctor drove me to the cabin in his Suburban, handing me a key and pointing me to the porch of the snowy structure before driving off into the dark. There was no cell service.

The cabin felt lived in. The bed sheets carried the scent of the last sleeper. Personal objects were left about in a way that suggested someone would be back soon to resume their use. A layer of cat hair rested over the couch and carpeting, but it was interspersed with downy feathers. The owner was a falconer—at least I knew this much to explain the mice in the freezer. 

There was an electric heater in the wall of the kitchen that ticked and clanged softly as it warmed and then cooled and then warmed again. The thermostat read 50 degrees—certainly warm enough not to freeze, but not warm enough to be comfortable. I worked on that thermostat attempting to adjust the temperature up, but it would not respond. So I cooked my ramen noodles and stood over the counter eating them while dressed in my coat and hat. Standing while eating a meal at the kitchen counter, or over the kitchen sink, is a lonely way to dine but somehow feels less lonely than finding a seat. 

When I finished, I set out exploring the space. I found a wood stove off of the living room in the back of the cabin and there was some wood stacked neatly beside it. I had some experience with wood stoves so I thought I could probably get a fire going and that might keep the space more comfortable until morning. But I couldn’t find an axe or hatchet to hew the quartered logs into kindling. I knelt on concrete, pulling and willing pieces of wood from those logs, praying for the crackle of a fire to break the silence of the alien landscape. I worked and I prayed and I struck matches and watched them burn out. 

There would be no fire that night. I would unroll my sleeping bag in the bedroom nearest the kitchen, and therefore the warmest, the one that smelled most strongly of cats. I would dress against the cold in my heavy sweat pants, jacket and hat before zipping myself in. I would lie awake in the dark smelling the absent cats and listening to to the tick, tick, tick of the electric heater and then the deafening silence, until I wandered into a dream and onto the cold, morning light.

If fire represents spirit (think Moses’ burning bush or offerings consumed by flame), isn’t there a similarity happening this time of year? Each year, as darkness overtakes the land, a stagnation, a silence settles in me, like ice on the pond, and I can’t imagine Spring because I am entombed by the layer crusted overhead.

I guess we have different words to describe this, like “seasonal affective disorder,” “winter depression,” or just “hibernation.” To call it a disorder has always felt a little unfair to me. After all, isn’t there a rhythm to existence that nature consistently bends and sways with, but we, as humans, do our best to ignore? 

When I consider the way humans have lived through most of history, without magical boxes in the walls that produce heating and cooling, it seems obvious we’ve moved away from the natural rhythm of life. Especially in December when all the world is shutting down but we are rushing to buy gifts, make charitable contributions to offset taxes, and fit in last minute medical and dental procedures because we’ve met a deductible.

But what happens to the home fires with all of this rushing around? I have a good friend and a sister with only a wood stove for heating their homes. They must think about the fire before leaving the house if they want to return to warmth. And when the fire goes out, it takes time and energy to heat the space again. Keeping the hearth fire going, or at least having the ability to make a fire when needed, was a critical job throughout most of time.

I remember the cold of that night when I couldn’t start a fire and I wonder now, how do I tend to the fire? Now that darkness has settled in. Now that the chill of night only gives way to a stiff wind and puff of rain. How do I nourish myself and others? How do I generate warmth and light? 

Joseph Campbell wrote, “Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again. You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia—a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. I think everybody, whether they know it or not, is in need of such a place.”

We all need a place, a designated time and space, where we can tend to the hearth of our creative spirit. We need conversation with our gods, whether they be personal values, ethical codes or actual deity that influence life here on earth. After all, our relationship with the spiritual is a reflection of our relationships with each other.

But, as that cold night reminded me, fires built without ignition must be built with the tiniest pieces first. Lying bits of wood and paper, gently blowing and then feeding, blowing and then feeding, laying a foundation from which to coax the flames into a roaring inferno. The creative life is no different. There is something very beautiful about putting a spark to the cold ground, protecting it, feeding it, as it grows slowly to the point where you have an actual fire in your life—an understanding of your purpose here, your inspiration, your selfhood, your meaning. 

There is nothing more fulfilling or more important than building such a roaring flame, if for no other reason than when it goes out, you know how to bring it back.

Attention

I smell the ocean on the warm breeze flowing steadily past the skin on my face and arms, which are slightly sticky from the drying salt water. The sun is headed down but the days are long and it will be hours before it sets. There is a seagull walking past, eyeing the abandoned beach blanket next to mine, likely considering if I pose a threat to her pillage of my neighbor’s lunch. Children fly toward the shore on boogie boards and frothy waves. It is summer in San Diego.

When I sit down to write, this is often how I start. I ground myself to what is in front of me, under me, around me and above me. My journal is full of descriptions of the plants, insects and animals in my backyard. It’s a way for me to shut off the constant flow of chatter in my mind and connect to the deeper things. So today, it’s the sand and the wooshing border of this vast ocean, the click of wooden paddles on balls, and the delighted screams of playing children, that  will guide me to connection. 

A couple of years ago I went back to the property that was purchased by my Great Grandma and Grandpa Whipple. It was a one acre lot in Quartzsite, Arizona, a town known for its bustling snowbird community and annual rock show. Quartzsite is the epitome of an Arizona desert with looming saguaro cacti and prickles on every living thing protruding from the earth. I was there in February but in the summer it bakes like an oven. 

My great-grandparents were snowbirds. They started heading south to escape the Idaho winters when my Grandpa Whipple was there to tend to the farm in their place. At first they wandered like nomads through southern Utah, Arizona, Nevada and into Mexico with a travel trailer and a pickup truck. As they went, they collected shells, rocks, and fragments of iron wood which they turned into beautiful pieces of art. When they finally settled into Quartzsite they put a single-wide trailer on their acre lot, complete with miniature blush-pink appliances. 

That trailer has since been replaced, but I visited it once when I was about ten years old. I remember my grandpa giving Grandma a pat on the bum as he squeezed behind her in the tiny kitchen, and smiling, as he said that was one of the good things about the small kitchen. I couldn’t go back there without remembering the quiet, peace of that place, when my grandparents wintered there. 

My mom and dad were there to retrieve any wanted objects from the property before listing it to sell. We found a diary my great-grandma, Ruby, had kept one year as the moved around in the travel trailer. It was filled with short entries about the weather and the plants and the little chores they had done, like baking bread or giving my great-grandpa a haircut. It conveyed a sense of the rhythm of their life. 

It reminded me of the visits I had with my grandparents, both my mom’s parents and my dad’s parents, on their farms in Idaho. We took joy in the land, the yards around their homes and the fields with cultivated crops. We admired the roses, even bigger than last year, and the trees with promising blossoms or ripening fruit. And were the pie cherries on? Or had the birds got to them already? And Grandma had rearranged the flowerbeds, with this one raised up on a little berm and that one reduced in a way that made everything slightly more suited to her vision. We talked about the rain and the cows and the frost and freeze. My grandparents were farmers and that connected them to the land in a way that I will never fully know. But I may carry something in my blood, in my bones, that I inherited from them, and that is attention.

“One of the great misconceptions about the artistic life is that it entails great swaths of aimlessness. The truth is the creative life involves great swaths of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive,” Julia Cameron writes. Cameron and I have this in common, grandmothers who wrote letters and kept diaries and spoke of the “series of small miracles” unfolding in everyday life, in nature. 

Camron writes, “My grandmother was gone before I learned the lesson her letters were teaching: survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention….The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” 

Attention is how I got through the harrowing pain of my divorce. I wandered the neighborhood, watching the passion vine blossom before turning to fruit. I watched the morning doves nest and hatch and fly away. I saw the cactus bloom an incredible white starburst. I felt the quality of the air shift as the seasons passed. My son, before my eyes, began to speak full sentences and run and climb and race pieces of chalk, like cars, on the cement in front of our apartment. I was preoccupied a lot. My brain was a savage landscape of fear and anxieties, so it became necessary for me to find an escape in the world in front of me. 

The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.

Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

“The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain—the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, ‘unutterably alone.’ More than anything else, attention is an act of connection,” Camron says. 

My Grandma Hurst’s fifth child, Brent, was born with a heart defect. He was not supposed to live two days, but he lived 18 years. After Brent passed away, Grandma Hurst took up painting. She started taking oil painting classes. She worked in chalk pastels, water color, and ceramics. She is one of the most prolific artists I know. We, all of her children and grandchildren, have her art in our homes and her basement is filled with canvases that have to be rotated because, even among all of us, there is not enough space to display her enormous collection. 

In the last five years, I have come to see Grandma Hurst’s art as an enormous labor of feeling. I have never had to endure losing a child, but I have known heartache and I can imagine that art became for her what writing has become for me: a way to confront and process and heal the the things that cannot be worked out in any other way.

Pain is the place where so much art is born because pain demands our attention. The physical pain I endured with my first laparotomy was so intense that I laid, with closed eyes, focused only on each breath. Even speech was too much of a distraction. When I gave birth to my son, the last hour of labor I was told not to push because I was not yet dilated, yet every ounce of my flesh wanted me to push that baby out that very second, and to hold that back required every bit of the presence and focus I possessed. 

Physical pain gives you something to hold onto but emotional pain has brought me to a similar place. I have crumpled to the floor, but once the wave passes I am left to feel my cheek against the hardwood, sticky with tears. I am left with the physicality of the present moment. When I see a bougainvillea I think of the hours I spent, lying in the hammock looking up at fuchsia petals backed by twilight sky, wondering how I would make it through the next minute, next hour, next day…what would save me from my suffering?

And it has mostly been art, the product of paying attention to the flashing fragments that make moonlight appear ductile, as Richard Adams must have when he described it so beautifully. Noticing the ache in my chest, the wonder of the sticky anemone closing around my finger, the beauty of the tracks chalk race cars leave on the sidewalk, the beauty wrought by my own hand. 

Attention is conduit to aliveness. Please, please, please pay attention.

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.

Something good :)

Writing poetry about hard things is easy in a way.

But, what about that whisper from inside that says good things are coming?

The things you've waited for, even silently, as they seemed too big to speak?

They are in motion.

They are nearly here.

All you must do is keeping going.

Keep crossing that bridge.

On the other side, it's still just life, but something sweet is there waiting.

My morning pages are usually a list of my mundane worries, to-do list, things I am mulling over for the 64th time. But today this came out! A strangely auspicious premonition...I guess we'll see!

Still, it reminded me of this from Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things:

"Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”

I also made my TikTok debut this week with something very important! I look kind of serious--please! know this is concentration--not me thinking I'm a serious dancer.

https://www.tiktok.com/@michelledwhipple

Who is Heavenly Mother?

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.  

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. 

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. 

A few things I know.

Sometimes when I get quiet here it’s because I feel like I don’t know anything. Nothing. And that’s not completely true. So here’s a list of a few things I do know. 

• I know if you are looking for sea glass on the beach, the best place to find it is in the patches of little pebbles. 
• I know that butter and flour and baking powder and salt, mixed together and baked at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes produces crispy, little pillows of heaven (aka biscuits).
• I know that as I get older, my body gets less forgiving and sometimes that means that little aches and pains will never be cured, they will only be managed. 
• I know rainbow painted toenails will make approximately 60% of the general public smile.
• I know that lasting change comes from compassion. 
• I know that compassion for others, only comes after compassion for self.
• I know despite everything, this hunk of flesh in my chest keeps moving and keeps showing me that it is amazingly capable of love.

Seventy

I talked to my dad twice yesterday because it was his 70th birthday, and I couldn’t be there to make him a chocolate sheet cake and spell out 7-0 with candles (because 70 candles would poke too many holes in that delicious frosting!) But that’s probably why I woke up this morning thinking about him. My dad is a wonderful dad, and probably the last thing he would want is for me to write a blog post about him. He is a quiet type in most settings—a known introvert and a person with, what I suspect, is a full internal life.

The memories I have of my dad from my early days are him working out in the garage, building furniture, cabinets, then a new garage, then a barn in the back. He is absolutely a creative type, though he shies away from that label. To entertain his little girls in church, he drew faces on the program with faucets for noses, both silly and accurate. I remember the feeling of his hands, thick fingers with rougher skin than mine.

He loved having girls and always said (and still says) without reservation that he never felt bad for not producing a son. I remember as I was preparing to leave for college, he told me that he wished they had more children because the years we were at home went by too quickly. But my dad, always independent, raised independent daughters. We never felt bound to the place of our birth, in part because of my dad’s example. 

When he left the actual, physical homestead, the one started by his great-great-grandmother and her sons, my dad left to pursue the life and career he wanted, and my grandparents encouraged him to do it. When my parents moved across the country to Tennessee for his first job, my Grandpa Whipple gave my dad a bag full of change and asked him to call along the way. Their family culture was imperfect, like all families, but this aspect has become very important to me—the culture of being held and free at the same time. I believe this was created in the the union of my dad’s parents. I see it in the combination of what I know about their family-of-origin cultures. And it was practiced by my grandparents throughout their marriage: held and free.  

Dad retired from his work at the University of Wyoming around the same time that I left my marriage. For the past few years, many of our conversations have been a commingling of our explorations and experiments walking a new path in a new phase of life. My dad spent all of his adult life until retirement at institutions of learning. I might have expected someone in that situation to want to take a break from new ideas but he has not. When I went through my Brené Brown phase, he read everyone of her books along with me, not because I asked him to, but because he wanted to understand what I felt so strongly about. He has read and listened to many of the things I have spoken about in the past few years, not because I asked him to, but because he wanted to know. 

He coached me through buying my first house, through home repairs during the pandemic when he really wanted to come fix these things himself. He has empowered me, bought me tools, sent me YouTube videos on how to replace my spark plugs, even told me, “Michelle, I am an old man so I have opinions about lots of things but that doesn’t mean they are right for you. Ultimately you are the best person to decide.” He has listened to me, watched me make painful choices, and been interested in how I think about the world and myself and god and the universe as I turn all these things over and examine them closely for the first time. 

I remember sobbing to him and my mom on the phone a few years back when I was sorting through my feelings about my marriage. The world felt so small and scary and tight. He said, “Michelle, you’ve gotta be happy.” After years of my happiness being secondary, if considered at all, it was a permission slip to freedom.

I guess this is the biggest gift from my dad so far—he trusts me. And by doing that, he has been teaching me that I am someone worthy of trust, so I can learn to trust myself. This gift is enormous for anyone, but especially for a woman, and probably the best gift any parent can give to a child.

Happy seventy to my dad! The man who plays war with my 6-year-old over FaceTime. The mountain-biking, 4x4-exploring, builder, craftsman, all-around-handyman, ice-cream-loving champion of me. I am blessed. 

New Year! New You?

New Year! New You?The daylightbegins to spread slightly fatherinto the edges of the day.Still, it’s cold.I don’t like how my body looks,How it feels.I don’t like how my brain is moving,Either creeping in a carb-laden haze,Or ping-ponging between things that might lift me from misery:a home remodel,new budgeting software,a new job,a gardening service,a new gym,a new car,A complete Marie Kondo of the sum of things I have attempted to plug this hole with?

Do I need to completely change my life, or is it just January?!?

So far 2022 has been a 2.0 version of the question from my last post: Do I need to completely change my life, or is it just (now) January?

Turns out, it’s still me here! I did not get a new me in the new year. WTF. 

I survived, even enjoyed, the holidays. I relaxed into the drama of coparenting with an angry man through the school break. I slept. I ate. I talked to friends and family. I opened beautiful gifts. I watched TV. I took time to rest. I remained attentive to my work. I left it behind when I could. I thought about this blog. I thought about my book. I mean, I think I checked a lot of the December boxes. 

And still, I find myself limping into mid-January. Obviously still in need of some recovery. Today, I’ve had the day to myself to do this very recovery thing I’m writing about. But this is one of the tricky things about self care. What works one day, doesn’t always work the next. And sometimes, you don’t know if it worked until after the thing is done. I’ve taken whole trips where I wasn’t sure if I accomplished a damn thing in the realm of self care until I returned home and noticed that something had shifted back into place. I didn’t even feel it move...but now it’s there.

So I wanted to make a little reminder list for myself of the things that work, not every day, but some of the days, to keep my soul intact and help to flick away the little bits of crap that tend to collect over the top of it. Here it is:

1. Acceptance. The fastest way to where you want to be is through where you are right now. I cannot kick my own ass into gear. Those days are over! It’s like the alcoholic say, You can’t hate yourself sober! I can’t hate myself into anything anymore. All there is for me now is acceptance, and what that looks like is this: Today is a day to feel tired. That’s okay. This is a day for sadness. That’s okay. This is a day for anger. That’s okay. All things are welcome and this means I have to welcome the days when I don’t feel great. That’s okay. 
2. Kindness. First to myself. My internal dialogue is sooooo godammed demanding, pretty much all the time. I have to live with this person in my head telling me everything I should and shouldn’t do and how I’m so screwed! I have no control over her. But I have also learned that she has no control over me. What I mean is that she may speak, but I don’t have to listen. Still, it takes a concerted effort to ask myself what would be kind to me. So I try to do that. The answer changes and I have to practice listening in order to hear. Meditation helps me separate the mean voice from the kind one. 
3. Honesty. Again first with myself. I do the morning pages practice (3 pages of stream-of-consciousness, handwritten journaling every morning) and I notice when they start to get hollow. The onset is insidious. They seem fine and then gradually I’m writing the same to-do list and captains log I’ve been writing for a week. It’s not helpful, except that I am still showing up on the page so I have a greater chance of noticing what’s happening. And it reminds me that I have to drop into a deeper place to access the real truth. I try to do that as often as I can. 
4. Curiosity. I have a thousand questions a day about what I might want to do to change my life in small and large ways. Curiosity is a spiritual practice because it keeps these things light. I’ve been considering building a studio over my garage. Sounds expensive and that’s terrifying. Curiosity asks, how could this be affordable? What timeline would make this feel comfortable? Curiosity is not a task master. It’s light, and it’s comfortable with the answer, I don’t know. Being comfortable with not knowing, has produced some pretty amazing results.
5. Movement. Being stuck is one of my most uncomfortable sensations. For this reason, I move a lot. My feelings move, my body moves, my heart moves, my brain?….My brain is like the feet of a duck. I actually put on audiobooks and podcasts to slow its pace when I can’t sleep. Because I need so much movement, sometimes I believe this means I can’t rest. But what’s actually true is that I need the movement to rest. This includes physical exercise, but also exercise of all the other parts of me (brain, heart, mind, etc.) Movement is a very important part of my spiritual practice.
6. Elements. I’m gonna quote some unoriginal meme I’ve seen a few times now: I am effectively a glorified house plant. I do a lot better when I have enough water (both inside my body and out), sunlight, and earth. This time of year it can be hard to get those things. Today I made myself climb to the garage roof and lay in the sun for over an hour. Yesterday I forced myself into the freezing Pacific Ocean to surf (although with my 4-3 wetsuit and booties I was not a bit cold!). But I say forced because that’s how it FEELS a lot of times. I want to surf or garden or exercise or have a warm bath, AND there’s a big part of me that wants to be at home under a blanket. In the winter I have to force myself to be out! to take the dogs for a walk, or pull a few of the thousands of weeds that need pulling. But again, being in these elements of nature, it’s like medicine.
7. Car maintenance. Just a reminder to rotate your tires because I learned that lesson the hard way last month. 

God speed. It’s January. We all need a prayer right now.

Tis the Damn Season

Do I need to rethink my entire life?… Or is it just the holidays?

I found myself texting this to a friend who casually asked me how it was going? 

Not good. Not good at all. 

I mean, there are good things happening. But I think I wandered into the holidays a little off kilter. You see, I had the double whammy of Halloween and my son’s birthday this year. It’s something we probably didn’t think through very well when we set out the holiday schedule in our first parenting plan. 

These two near holidays fall to the same parent each year and this year, felt like expectations were high. I think five-going-on-six, might be the year when kids become fully aware of and have full buy-in to such events. By this age they’ve got a little track record of their prior celebrations and other celebrations they’ve attended, so they now know enough to get whether they are at a fantastic or weak-ass celebration. 

So the pressure was on.

I did the birthday party at the Air and Space Museum and invited his entire kindergarten class because we are new to these people and still making friends. It was a great success but way outside my comfort zone to invite 25 strangers and their parents to a museum to eat cake and open presents. I walked away feeling really thankful for the community we have with school. It was an enthusiastic, generous, beautiful group of people.

The week before that was Halloween. We did the regular thing of changing costumes last minute but luckily it was to the astronaut costume he wore last year. He wanted to be a fighter pilot originally and when we were looking at costumes, I asked if he thought I should be one too. He liked the idea back then (like late September!) but as Halloween grew closer, he grew out of that age where it’s cool to dress like your mom, so my Lucille-Buster Mother-Boy fantasy slipped away and not only was I not permitted to wear the fighter pilot costume, but he asked that I wear NO costume—just regular mom clothes. 

I now see how this arrow found a weak chink in my armor of self confidence. I started to ask him if he was embarrassed about how I dress. I started to rethink my bohemian Free People clothes, not just for their over-pricedness and impracticality….but was I humiliating my son….who is in kindergarten!?!

It took me a couple of days to shake that off but eventually returned to my usual mantra of, Ain’t no man gonna tell me…not even the short one who lives in my house.

Then I made the theme park mistake. 

For Veteran’s Day we were invited to go to Knott’s Berry Farm with some friends. To understand my tentativeness, you’ve gotta understand my theme park experience. I liked theme parks as a kid, but I was mostly terrified of the rides. I remember huddling on the floor of that giant rocking boat, The Tidal Wave, screaming in terror while my mom giggled and implored me that this WAS fun. 

When I graduated high school, someone advised me to make a sort of bucket list of things to do before I graduated college. Roller coasters were on the list. I grew up in Wyoming so it wasn’t like theme park rides were plentiful, but I had never chanced a ride on a big roller coaster and I wanted to face my fear. I planned a trip to Elitch Gardens in Denver. I took ginger root to ward off any motion sickness. And I rode all the roller coasters. I even paid an extra $15 to ride the SkyCoaster, which was really just a harness attached to a cable, attached to a sky arch. I strapped in with two other people and the harness raised hundreds of feet in the air until the employees counted down and one of the guys I was strapped to pulled the rip cord. We plummeted in a free fall until the cables caught, swinging us gently back up toward the sky. I liked it! It was what it should be—exhiliterating. 

After that I learned I liked rollercoasters!  It was within the same stretch of a few years I found out I had these adrenaline-producing tumors in my abdomen.  A while after they were removed, I remember visiting Lagoon in Utah on a slow night in the Fall. The park was empty and we ran from rollercoaster to rollercoaster and the adrenaline reminded me of how I used to feel somewhat regularly with all those little adrenaline-junkie tumors inside of me. 

It was when I became a single mom that theme parks changed for me. Gosh—the dark Disney Land days of 2019! I bought a discount pass via the military because I was still not divorced.  R and I would make the trip by ourselves, he would refuse to ride 99% of the rides, talk me into spending more money on overpriced toys in Cars Land and then fall asleep in the stroller, leaving me to drink alone in California Adventure, until he woke up and we could walk around for another hour before we got in the car to drive home. Those trips were a lot of work with a very minimal reward and they left me mostly feeling very alone. Dark, dark days indeed.

So in 2020, I declared NO THEME PARKS. Ummmm...I guess so did everyone else. 

So by Fall 2021, I felt like I *should* (always a dangerous word) be ready for another theme park experience. And I wouldn’t be going alone. And I wasn’t driving up and back in the same day. So it *should* have been fine. But apparently everyone thought the same thing because Knott’s Berry was packed! Literally a two hour wait for lunch. If we’d have known, we would have walked out of the park and driven to a nice restaurant and then home! It was sort of a disaster. 

So on the heels of that and in the midst of being a kindergarten parent for the first time, I find myself a little overwhelmed. 

The sun is going down at 2:30pm when I walk out of work. 

I find myself complaining about the cold when it’s 66* (but it’s humid! and there’s a breeze!—people in California are suffering!!!)

After a week-long hiatus from the mom gig, while R traveled with his dad, I thought I would be rested and ready for the business of Christmas. I planned to get a tree ASAP (terrorized by some goddammed article on Apple News that  promised they would be scarce and expensive). I took R to Lowe’s (our traditional California Christmas tree lot, since the mountains of Wyoming are no longer accessible). We picked a good tree and got a few other home essentials followed by a full on Kris-Kringle-meltdown on the drive home because I said it was bedtime and we would have to decorate the tree tomorrow.

Rather than giving toys, I have been taking them away all week because it appears I have given birth to the mouthiest kid on the planet. I am tempted to tell him that I AM Santa just so I can garner some of the awe and fear I deserve! (Don’t worry, I’m not a monster…I won’t do that—but I’m not above shoving his precious toys in the top of the closet if it buys me a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t.)

I scheduled family photos this week because the week before Thanksgiving felt too busy (Note: This week was also too busy and there is not a good time to take family photos around the holidays). My friend Nick is an artist with a camera (and a wizard apparently!) because he got several great shots even though I was struggling to look easy-breezy while my kid and dog barely held still long enough for a 1/500 shutter speed in waning light at 4pm. God bless you, Nick. 

I’ve been so out of sorts I took a pregnancy test this morning just to be sure that wasn’t it—it wasn’t. No announcements here! [Including this because it occurs to me that this is something men never have to worry about, holidays or not.]

I’m guessing you are picking up from my tone that I am sort of crash-landing into this first weekend of December, which prompted my initial question:  Do I need to rethink my entire life?… Or is it just the holidays?

In the words of Eleanor Shellstrop: “I mean somebody royally forked up. Somebody forked up. Why can’t I say ‘fork’?”

On Friday I went to the gym today for the first time in two years. It felt kind of gross to me—you know, such a collection point for viruses after the pandemic changed everything. So I was reluctant. But I did back squats and box jumps and hip thrusters and I walked out of there feeling slightly better, which bloomed into decidedly better over the course of a few hours. I suspect because, I finally put the thing that my body and soul had been asking for, for months, at the top of the list—for just an hour. 

I think the holidays are hard because we have the expectation that we can bumble into this darkest part of the year eating garbage food and giving up on the beach body of summer, substituting the religiosity of the holidays for any meaningful spiritual practice. Maybe the extra pounds become the padding we need as we attempt to embrace all the feelings of family and holidays, past, present and future, which, for many of us, are a mixture of beautiful and horrific. 

We stay busy and satiated so we don’t have to feel because some of us are haunted by loneliness and loss. Some of us are compelled to see and talk to people who have inflicted some of our deepest wounds. For most of us, there is a sense of loss that comes with the rift between the life we thought we would have and the one we had to leave behind, or left us behind. 

It feels incongruent with the tinsel T-rex sitting on my bookshelf, the happy-colored lights outside my house, even the nativity of Christ or the victory of the Maccabean army—because those are stories of hope—and sometimes hope feels dangerous.

Cheryl Strayed wrote, “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”

Sometimes the holidays feel like a small, quiet room to me, even as I go through the insane motions to make them noisy and crowded. Some of the bustle is just me trying not to notice the small, quiet room. The place where I have to sit with my idea of what I thought my life would be when I was a bright-eyed, silly, enthusiastic, hopeful little girl, and the reality of what it is today, which is actually something much more complex and rich and deep and interesting than what I could have imagined back then. 

That’s hard. It’s forking hard. 

So please, take care of yourself. Let the dark nights and cool whether, drive you to the small, quiet room.

Pain is on the other side of the door. But so is peace.

How To Attend Your 20-Year High School Reunion:

(In 38 EASY steps…because that's about how old you will be when you need this guide!)

1. Graduate high school.
2. Go to college and learn that you might have been too big for your britches. Let the bitches get you down. Aim sights a little lower. 
3. Get married before you age out of the college dating pool. (Yikes! Mormon women become old maids at 21?!?)
4. Learn you’ve got five tumors and five years to live. (How did that Tim McGraw song go again? Sky diving, bull riding?!? No thanks!…and what’s a Fu Manchu?)
5. Keep living. Get confused. 
   • (You: I’m not dead!
   • Cart-master: 'Ere!  'E says 'e's not dead!
   • Man: Yes he is.
   • You:     I'm not!
   • Cart-master: 'E isn't?
   • Man: Well... he will be soon-- he's very ill...
   • You:     I'm getting better!
   • Man: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment…
   • You: I feel happy!)
6. Go to grad school to have health insurance to pay for the tumors that aren’t showing up to kill you. 
7. Work. Wash dishes. Grocery shop. Cook. Exercise to burn off the calories. Repeat for three or four years. 
8. Run a half marathon. (Because that’s what medical professionals do when life isn’t complicated enough—duh!) 
9. Have a baby. (Because that’s what married people do when life isn’t complicated enough.)
10. One hundred tiny steps make you realize that your marriage is leaching your essence. Look into your baby’s eyes and know that you must end it, for him.  
11. Realize YOU can actually live YOUR life for YOU. Start doing it. 
12. Start a journal. (Start being honest with yourself.) 
13. Start a blog. (Start being honest with others.)
14. Spend a few years posting the most literal and vibrant and wounding parts of your life. 
15. Enjoy kind or thoughtful comments from your parents, sisters and a few other people. 
16. Wonder if anyone else thinks it’s any good. Wonder if you’re any good. Play whack-a-mole with ego…for years? ...Forever?
17. Make mistakes. Write about those. 
18. Win victories. Write about those.
19. Get to know yourself. Write about her. 
20. Discover that it’s been t-w-e-n-t-y years since you graduated high school. 
21. Decide that you can attend your reunion because now, unlike 10 years ago, you can show up as your ACTUAL self.
22. Get really nervous that you’ve made a huge mistake. Go down the rabbit hole of past failures and insecurities. No one will like you because they know you walked out on them 20 years ago and didn’t look back. They will know you are ridiculous because they read that blog, or because they saw you do mediocre cheerleading or that strange scholarship pageant or they remember when you sang that bizarre choir solo that was more of a wail than song…There are so many you cannot list them all. And some of them are more memories of feelings that actual events. That gripping in the abdomen--I’ve made a huge mistake.
23. Be saved by the fact that Oprah is constantly talking about intention. 
24. Realize that all the fear and anxiety is based on THIS intention: You want people to be impressed with you. You want to be liked. (You’re basically screaming, Love me! Fear me! It’s NOT a good look for you.) 
25. Remember some people will like you and some people won’t because you’re not for everyone and everyone’s not for you.
26. Set a new intention: To show love for the people who grew along with you. 
27. Put on eyeshadow per the directions of the instruction card that came with the palate because this is the most makeup instruction you’ve had since you were 17. (Choose the one called Disco Nights because, you know…you’ve gotta look gooooood.)
28. Walk into the reunion mixer. Hug the first person at the door, your best friend from elementary school. 
29. Get lost in each interaction, one after another, after another. 
30. Choose the people who also choose you.
31. Hug all of them.
32. Boldly call people the wrong name and watch them forgive you.
33. Soak up their goodness.
34. Soak up their giddiness, honesty, laughter, dance moves, serious faces, wide eyes, clever remarks, humble brags, shrouds, curiosity, and acceptance. 
35. Realize that, Yes! Love is patient and love is kind. But love also disrupts. It flips tables. Love is angry. Love is uncomfortable. Love holds opposites. Love is patient—yes, but it moves! Love has no boxes. Love forgives because love sees the whole. Love defends. Love disrupts again. Love holds. 
36. Notice how you all bruised each other because you loved each other. 
37. Feel held. Feel free. Remember you ARE love. All of you are love.  
38. Wake up. Raise three glasses of water, a cup of coffee, and a couple of Advil to the class of 2001. To you. To all of you. Reunited. 

Happiness: The Basics

You know, Michelle’s not happy.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend who recently went through divorce. She mentioned that in the course of her separation process, someone we both know, pointed to me and my situation and said THAT.

First, WTF. How does someone in another state who I talk to extremely infrequently make a judgment on something so cryptic as my level of happiness? 

Secondly, I turned inward. Am I happy?

If you’ve been following my blog you probably have sensed that this is a question I throw around, of my own accord, from time to time. I am very interested in what makes a good life. Time seems finite—how do I avoid wasting mine? And what’s the end goal? Is there an end goal? 

My family calls this the Deep Michelle and I’ve always been a little embarrassed about it. There’s a voice in my head telling me to lighten up quite constantly. But also—it’s just who I am! I like deep existential questions. I also like dance parties and stupid jokes and rainbows and brightly colored nail polish. 

So I guess I am writing this post to myself and any other reader who may have been tracking this journey of mine and wondering, Did any of this make her happy?

What is happy? 

Happy is a feeling. It’s one of the things I ask about when I am screening a patient for PTSD: Are you able to feel positive emotions like happiness or love? Yes! I feel happy from time to time. It’s happening more and more lately. I notice it when I laugh out loud at something.  I think laughing at myself feels the best—when I do something so brilliant it fills me with delight or so stupid that I can’t help but laugh.  I felt it today when I smiled to no one as stood on my garage roof in pajamas and slippers trimming my overgrown palm tree. Yep! There’s happy again!

How often should one feel happy? 

Psychiatry has taught me that no one lives on Planet Happy. Another thing I ask my patients to do is rate their mood from 0 to 10, where ten is best and 0 is rock bottom. Where do you live most days? 

I raise an eyebrow to anyone who states they live at a 10. Delusional? Manic? Lack of self awareness?  I think most of us want to live between six and eight. We want to hit a ten on occasion, maybe even three times a week, but to live there would be exhausting!  

And we could get picky about which words we use to describe which number. Is ten ecstatic, euphoric, delirious? While nine would be delighted, enthralled, jovial? Eight we call happy, joyful, cheery. Seven is well-fed, content, open-hearted. Six—relaxed, engaged, straight-faced. And at five we're getting into mildly worried, barely hungry, and I’m-fine-but-my-neck-is-kinda-tight. It drops off from there all the way down to zero, which is either catatonic or suicidal. 

What I’ve learned from asking this question over and over again is that the answer varies depending on the person. Some of us are pleased hitting a ten once a year. Some of us feel we are in a depression if we didn’t get there at all last week. So I think the answer is, You get to decide!

And I mean that literally—no shame however you choose. I purposely avoid writing about happy too much because we have this kind of hyper-pressure on getting it and keeping it. I remember when I was a BYU student there was this culture on campus of smiling and saying hello to people as you passed them on campus. I did this most all the time, because it was my duty as a fucking delightful person.

Did it help sometimes? Probably. Was there a cost to obligatory smiling? Most certainly. 

So I say this with all sincerity. YOU get to decide what your personal goal is for how often you hit happy. And there’s not a wrong answer…unless you picked catatonic, in which case your family will be annoyed by having to feed and toilet you….

Which leads me to my next very basic question—

How do I feel happy more often?

If I knew the easy answer, I would not be revealing it here for free, I would be pointing you to my book for purchase on Amazon, or better yet, from some independent, ultra-kewl hippie bookstore in Portland.

There is no easy answer. 

Boo!

Okay, but I will let you in on my strange inner life and you can glean from it what you will.

First thing is to stop chasing it so hard. I stopped looking away from the things in my life that were hard and terrible. It turned out I was putting a decent amount of energy into avoidance, convincing myself and the world that I’m fine fine fine! Fine is a state of detachment. Instead of trying to make life look easy, I started to sink into it. To let life be life.

And this brings me to my second experiment—start to pay attention. Open your eyes and look at what is in front of you. My journal is filled with passages about my postage stamp backyard. The orange tree. The tiny birds that come pick the bugs off of it. I still debate in my mind whether I should know what the birds are called. (Eckhart Tolle would say, No, just notice the being-ness of the birds! And my ego is like, You are looking at those birds every day and you don’t know what they are called?!? No winners here. If you care to help, please send a bird book!)

Paying attention puts me in the moment. And most moments are pretty okay if they aren’t being wrecked by my overly analytical, anxious brain. It also puts me in my body.  Noticing the feeling of the sun on my skin, the breeze, the fountain chattering away, light coming through the bamboo.

I have a confession. All these years of yoga and I still never understood how breathing was such a freaking pleasure for these granola munchers. I think it’s because inside of me was a secret yoga competition. Who is the stretchiest, breathiest, zennist yogi in all the land? Sometimes I was competing with that one girl (you know her) or the guy in the back who I’m not really into but I still hope he’s checking out my ass… or even myself at my last yoga class or when I was 19. That’s right, I am fully capable of turning a sun salutation into a full-blown tryout for the 1996 women’s olympic gymnastics team.  I’m coming for you, Dominique! 

But I got over that. And here’s how: I started paying attention to it. I think that’s how it shifted. At first I noticed I didn’t like thinking about how everyone else in the class felt about me. So I shifted over into being competitive with myself. But still, what was this dark cloud over yoga? 

It was me. 

And the watching was the answer. Because if you can get competitive about yoga (which I clearly can), then you can get competitive about the very practices that should be liberating your mind (which I clearly can). I effectively took and take myself out of contention for the Olympic Zen team and put myself in the stands. My job was and is only to watch and listen. 

I watched the competitive thoughts, meaning that they came up, I tried my best to not judge them and let them go. Bless and release those precious, little demons! And what I learned on the yoga mat became meaningful in the rest of my life. 

I began to watch myself at work. While I interact with my son at home. With the dog. With my family. On a date. Watching became my practice. 

This was a natural pathway into happy, because watching is fun! There’s a reason we like to watch shows and movies and sporting events.

Well now my life is a big watch fest! So I can laugh out loud at the dog when he falls off the center console into the back seat because he wasn’t expecting me to make that left turn. I can notice that my nerves are fried—and this moment of reading bedtime stories is too much—and also absolutely perfect. And it can be both at the same time. All this is possible because I am the watcher. 

It’s like slowing down and tasting your food. The central thought in my head has shifted from I know to I wonder. Wonder!!! What a fantastic feeling! 

Instead of flailing my arms as I drown in life or militantly perfecting my backstroke, I’m sitting in a floaty with the water lapping up onto my legs and feet. The water analogy actually really works, because sometimes I get slammed by a big wave. I’m knocked off my floaty, gasping beneath the hair that’s all in my face when my head pops up above the water. But I remember that I HAVE a floaty. So I locate it and climb back on and continue to watch.

Is that happy? Feels pretty good to me. 

Can we circle back to the initial WTF? You know, Michelle’s not happy…that one?

For years, I showed the world I was happy. I was really convincing—hell, I even convinced myself. I’m sure this is why some people were surprised when I jettisoned the husband. And I’m still a little sensitive about my life choices—I noticed that as I was writing this. They affect people who I love and have loved in a big way.

You know, I spend my days trying to assess patients for depression, happiness, well-being and I get it wrong. Because I’m not a psychic. All I have to work with is what the patient is showing me AND what I’m open to see. Maybe the most powerful lesson from becoming the watcher is this: life is experienced through a filter. We project, avoid, get defensive. We are coded to do this.

The practice of watching lets me glimpse the filter. My job is to wonder, not to know. And so all I will do is wonder about that WTF statement, [I’ll write a blog post about it] and then I’ll let it go. Because the only person I can really know is me and I feel pretty good about her.

• 

  Got er done.

• 

  Megan was here!

• 

  Topanga Canyon

• 

  Rio on the Ruby quilt.

• 

  Fall skies are the best.

• 

  The ocean is cold now :(

• 

  Trimmed palms. No broken limbs.

• 

  Happy?

Conversion

I was thinking about the boom box at Baskin Robbins the other day. The tinny sound of Mix 105.5 floating over the trickle of water through the scoop basins and the chorus hum of freezers.

I can’t hear a Billy Idol song without thinking of that boom box (was every night 80s night?). Natalie Imbruglia, Alanis Morissette, Harvey Danger, Eve 6. Ryan would bring his Discman so we could add Wyclef Jean into the mix and every night he worked he would play Closing Time at 10pm to hint to the lingering customers that they needed to clear out so we could mop. 

This was my teenage job that paid well below minimum wage but dividends in free ice cream.

So. Much. Sugar.

I used to buy a large Coke at McDonald’s on my way in and then I would add vanilla syrup. I think that combo might kill me instantly now. I used to eat hot fudge topped with whipped cream with a spoon. A taste of this or that. Suffice it to say even my 17-year-old cheer captain self lost five pounds when I quit that job.

The N’sync cake. *Sigh*

I probably need to come clean about that.

So when you rise through the ranks of BR and become 17, you get some responsibility. One of them is to decorate cakes.

One day there was an order for a birthday cake with a drawing of the band members of N’sync on the top. We didn’t have photo cake technology. No—we had a device with a mirror and a light that would reflect the image on the top of the cake and I would trace the image in icing. This worked well for simple line drawings, but photographs…? Nevertheless, I attempted it. How hard could it be to freehand Justin Timberlake in icing?

The answer is—really hard.

Like, no one—especially me—should attempt to freehand Lance Bass in icing. No one. But I did it. 

So, the birthday girl’s grandma came to pick up the cake. I don’t think she even looked in the box. But she paid for it and carried it out the door. And I was like, “Phew! It worked!”

I don’t know if I imagined no one would open the box. Or maybe I had magically nailed their vision for an avant gard rendering of teenage heart throbs, but I was relieved for about 30 minutes until the mom returned with the cake. Shit!

She asked me if I could fix it. Ummm…no. That is my absolute best attempt. Pretty sure. 

She was upset. Which seemed reasonable at the time but thinking back on that, I’m not sure that was well-placed. After all, it’s just 17 year old me with a few bags of icing and a mirror light—should we be surprised that I’m not creating Pinterest worthy N’sync cakes? Seems like that one is kind of on you, lady. 

Thankfully, it’s just ice cream and I let her select a cake from the case, probably the 9” round cookies ’n’ cream with Oreos on top—always a safe bet. She took the new cake and I hastily tossed N’sync in the trash.

When I’ve told this story over the years, people ask me, Who would take an order for such a crazy cake in the first place?

I have no idea! I would exclaim. I was just doing my best!

But no—that’s a lie. I know exactly who too the order. 

It was me. 

Whatever part of me that took that order, it’s the same part that decided it was a good idea to run against Veronica Shreibeis for senior class president. (Even without knowing her, you can tell just by the sound of her name, what a fearfully, beautiful creature she was with long, blonde hair and an air of effortlessness that I would never attain.)  

It was the same part that made me jump into the swimming pool at age five even though I didn’t know how to swim, and just because some older girls told me I couldn’t do it. (I still remember the image of the tiles on the side of the swimming pool bouncing up and down as I jumped to reach the surface, and the watery silhouette of my mom as she bent over to pull me out.)

But it’s also this part that emboldened me to go back to school to become a PA (I didn’t consider myself a science person…still don’t!), choose to stay in a marriage, choose to leave that marriage, have a baby, buy a house, surf, post a video of me singing on the internet, and write this terrifying blog.

It’s a freaking bad ass part of me. 

But this is the question I am most interested in at this moment in my life: What can I control and what can’t I control?

I know I have some power, daring, courage. 

I also know how it feels to be kicked in the teeth and fail miserably.

Which, I think, leads me to elusive faith. 

Over the years I’ve observed so many church ladies who seem to be in conversation with the divine constantly. What is that? A delusional construct? God on speed dial? Some kind of coping skill?

I’ve looked on with contempt as they seemed to hand over the outcome of their lives to an unseen being. And maybe that’s because it seems to get sucked up into the martyr role that women so easily assume. Women who are told their desires don’t matter and their functions in this world are preset and predetermined. Women who are told to be quiet and small, their means to creative power leashed to covert influence on a husband.

No wonder the church ladies turn to god. 

But where does my power end and the divine begin? 

I felt the answer as I was pulling laundry from the dryer. This quiet confidence. God is in me.

The image of a god in heaven hearing and sending and receiving and cursing and blessing didn’t get me there. I had to pull god out of the sky or maybe, more accurately, I stopped worrying about that version. Because that version has so much baggage.

The version of god that gives me faith is the divine that lives in me. Only YOU know, Michelle. I say this to myself all the time. 

I know I am on my path. I know because I am listening. I am in constant conversation with myself—not my thoughts, but the deeper voice. The knowing. There is a fluid connection in my life that guides me through my desires, curiosity, envy, anger, joy and peace. They are all speaking to me.

What I have learned to do is listen. 

And believe in my ability to do that.

Maybe that’s faith.

• 

  inktober

• 

  Current stage of puppyhood

• 

  Sunday mornings

• 

  Our comic book comes out Nov 2021

• 

  I'm the bad guy...duh!

• 

  Working on our contouring

• 

  San Clemente!

I don't know.

Today when I got home, I walked into my backyard and heard a loud meow. 

MEOW. MEOW. MEOW. 

I was not expecting this. I don't own a cat.

I peeked around the side of the house and saw a GIANT, long-haired, charcoal cat. The cat had a blue collar, so I’m going to use male pronouns (but I recognized that female cats may choose blue as well).  

I greeted the cat.

I asked him if he would like to follow me through the open garage door to the world outside my fenced backyard. 

MEOW. MEOW. MEOW.

“Here, kitty, kitty!” I called in my sweetest cat lady voice. [See--I KNOW cats. Though I will admit I did not want to touch him.  He was HUGE.]

“Here, kitty, kitty!” Over and over again until he followed me through the garage and out to the tall grass in my side yard. And the giant cat was gone as mysteriously as he came. 

I did not expect that cat. 

I was talking to my sister on the phone, relaxing on my new outdoor couch, when I looked down at the deck and saw Rio, sitting with a curious look on his face glancing from my face to the dead rat at his feet. 

Now, I am proud of myself because I did NOT scream, which happened the last time he presented me with an entire rat carcass.

But this time, the rat was not completely dead. I could see a little rise and fall in its chest. Rio, seeming to read my mind, attempted to pick it up again. I stopped him. Obviously, I’m the adult here. I need to take action. I grabbed a stick from under the orange tree and returned to the rat.  The rise and fall had ceased. 

• 

  Not as big as the last rat.

• 

  Earlier that week, looking very distinguished.

I poked. Nothing. 

When R saw the rat, he said, “Now we get to look at rat bones!” 

What?!? No! 

Last week, we dissected owl pellets at our friend’s house. I did not know what an owl pellet was. In case you don’t know, I will describe. When an owl eats a mouse or rat or bird or whatever little creature, it is digested partially in the first stomach.  What can’t be digested is held in the first stomach while the digestible material passes into the second stomach.  The owl then vomits a tight packet made of the contents of the first stomach (hair and bones). This is what makes an owl pellet.   

I knew none of this until Rachel presented me with a paper plate holding three clumps of matted hair. With the kids and me looking on, she pulled apart the pellets to reveal evidence of three rat skeletons. And I knew that her daughter was going to be just fine in online kindergarten this fall. 

• 

• 

But back to the undigested rat on my deck. 

Because this isn’t my first rodeo, I knowledgeably covered my hand in a poo bag, picked the deceased rat up by the tail and carried him to the trash can. He left a small pool of blood on the decking, which I doused in hydrogen peroxide and then rinsed with water. (I have a large supply of hydrogen peroxide now, after learning that is what’s needed to rid your dog of skunk smell). 

My backyard is tiny. 

The whole lot is 1/3 of a regular sized lot in my neighborhood. 

And yet. 

It is full of surprises. 

This afternoon I was talking to my sister. 

I’ve been going through another existential crisis following family court and my birthday marking another year. I didn’t really expect it. Not my first family court rodeo. Not my first birthday rodeo. I have been to lots of rodeos—duh! 

My sisters are a good audience for my crazy moments. This past week, I made a recommendation that my sister moon her husband in response to a marital dispute.  I was meaning to be silly but the more we talked about it, it seemed like the idea had real merit. If you want any free marriage advice, DM me, okay? I’m a secret genius on this stuff. Still waiting to hear if the mooning worked….

So I was talking to my other sister and she gave me the idea to write a blog post about why Fall feels hopeful. She said that was the article she wanted to read. 

First I thought about the fall when I trained for the half marathon because my then-husband didn’t want to have a baby yet and I was bored with my career and making dinner and washing dishes. I am not a runner and it felt really cliche because so many people in medicine run out of ways to punish themselves after school ends, so they take up punishing habits like running. But the half marathon was a really good choice in that moment. 

I ran three or four times a week under the massive oak trees in our historic Omaha neighborhood. My mom was so delighted with my decision to do this, that I flippantly said, “If you think it’s such good idea, why don’t you do it too?” And she did.

This is what 15* looks like.

The race was on Thanksgiving day. In Omaha. It was FIFTEEN degrees when we started. It was EIGHTEEN degrees when we finished. The bagels and bananas they provided post-race were frozen solid. We had McDonald’s for Thanksgiving Dinner that year.

But the running put me in a really good place for the winter. Since I left my home on the range in Wyoming (aka—where the skies are not cloudy all day), I’ve struggled with mild depression in the winter—this is part of why I love living in San Diego. And the regular endorphin boost of that exercise made a big difference. 

So there’s one idea. If you need a Fall boost—run a half marathon. 

…I GUESS. 

But it also seems unfair to ask anyone to train for a half marathon when they are working from home and home schooling kids and worried about the upcoming election and the health of their loved ones. And there’s also racism and terrorism and thieves and rapists and Facebook.

That’s a lot. 

Already. 

So if the half marathon’s not your thing, this is the one other idea I have. 

Be open to being surprised. 

Liz Gilbert talked about this in such a lovely way on her instagram stories last week. She called it a spiritual practice, to which cynicism is the opposite.  

Cynicism is the voice inside that says, I know how this goes. I know who that person is. I know what’s coming. The writing is on the wall. I know. I know. OH—I know. 

And we cling to that because we want to feel in control. And knowing feels like control. 

But you know what? 

I DON’T know.

I don’t know how this going to go. 

I don’t know if Trump is going to get another four years. I don’t know if I’m spoiling my son or being too hard on him. I don’t know if the tumor in my neck has grown. I don’t know what that greasy stuff in my patient’s hair was today. I don’t know if I’ll catch any waves. I don’t know how to make sense of the COVID-19 news. I don’t know if I’ll sleep tonight. I don’t know if there will be a goat in my backyard tomorrow. (If there is it will certainly be a distinguished city goat with a neatly trimmed beard!) 

i. don't. know.

Of course I have opinions and fears and anxieties about all of these things. But I’m willing to be surprised.

I’m willing to be wrong. 

That’s the equivalent of faith to me. That’s accepting divine will. It’s not, I know how this goes. It’s not that I get what I pray for. It’s not that I have all the answers. 

It’s that I don’t! And there’s some energy, some force, some goodness in the universe that is working it out for my specific growth. So let me leave it to said universe.

That’s hope. 

That’s spirit. 

Notice the cat and the rat and the owl pellets with wonder. 

Anything is possible.

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  Watch dog.

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  "That's my navy face!"

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  Minimalist. Chocolate. Perfect.

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  Birthday air fryer. Goes well with wine and dancing in the kitchen,

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  These were delicious (thankfully I like crispy), but I read the directions (afterward) and you shake to avoid burned edges.

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  Charcuterie--makes working from home feel fancy.

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  Avid scientists in action.

"Embrace the incarnation."

I’m not huge into new year’s resolutions.  If I see a change I want to make in my life, I don’t wait until January to do it, or I'll procrastinate it for the same reasons I do during the rest of the year.  But the new year does mark the passing of time and it has a way of forcing some reflection. So here’s my inventory for 2019.

I had some real growth in healing my relationship with the feminine. I learned the sensibility of rest.  I learned to stop running from pain and running at things so hard.  I learned how to sit alone and tolerate (even love) myself without having 7000 things to distract me.  Maybe learned is too strong of a word—I GLIMPSED this on more than one occasion.  And that was pretty powerful. 

I finally finally finalized my divorce.  It seems it’s never really over but I have a paper showing it’s done.  There’s still a human in the world with a seemingly large amount of animosity toward me that I am going to raise a super fun little boy with.  That animosity is a weight.  It ties us together and will probably continue to do so for years to come.  And I will live with it.  

I tried dating.  I did my best.  I got my heart broken.  I ended up confused.  I realized I still have a lot of healing to do in my relationships with men.  I carry very little judgment for how people behave during and after divorce. Marriages that don’t work are gnarly.  Marriages that do work should probably be a little gnarly too if everyone’s being honest. No benefit from judging.  Overall I learned that I like men. I probably can’t live my life out as a celibate monk or a lesbian (believe me—the thought has crossed my mind because it would be so much simpler… !?). So I will keep trying. 

I learned four is way better than three. R is four now and he is FUN! There were so many hard feelings that lifted somewhere in the transition from three to four.  I learned I really like building things with Legos—definitely my favorite of his toys.  I learned pretend play with cars and jets is my least favorite.  Jets on Navy Missions, as he loves to play, are doomed to missile attacks and death.  Cars always crash.  It’s a lot of carnage for my delicate soul.  But let me build a house, car, car wash, desert buggy, phone, record player, elephant, airplane, gas station with Legos and I am in!

Puppies are no picnic.  Even if they only way 2.7lb.  Even if they are the most adorable thing anyone has ever seen.  If you don’t like the idea of excrement everywhere or if you're not in the habit of going outside for two minutes 400 times a day—puppies are a great mental exercise. 

R has been asking for a puppy (and a dog and a cat and a kitten and a baby sister) for a while.  I realize that you don’t buy a dog for a four year old—that’s delusional. But if I’m being honest, the decision to get a puppy came out of grief from said masculine relationships.  Something about swearing off men.  It would have been seven cats except that I couldn’t tolerate the cat hair.  If I’m REALLY honest, a part of me wanted to become that old woman that crochets with her ten cats by her side and drinks chardonnay while watching Dateline and soap operas.  I saw the appeal for a minute.

But maybe this is where that masculine energy I’ve been working off of since my teens came in handy.  I couldn’t do that.  At least not now.  So I have this sweet little ball of fur that absolutely loves me even though I’m not sure why.  And we have a plan for potty training now so I am starting to love him too.

So there’s the update from 2019.  Now what about 2020? First a little story.

I took R to the swimming pool at the rec center with his cousins when I was in Utah over the holidays.  I was excited because he’s been doing swim school and has made such great progress.  We arrived at the rec center full of anticipation.  When we entered the pool area, everyone was out of the water for a swim break.  R looked over the massive play structure in the wading pool and cried, “This pool is awesome!”  We waited on the side.  The jets of water began to spray throughout the play structure. The life guards blew their whistles signaling that we could enter the pool. This followed by an eruption of delighted screams as children charged the pool from all sides.  

R screamed with terror.  I spent the next 30 minutes trying to entice him into the water, trying to get him to relax and enjoy the pool.  This concluded with me carrying my screaming child to the side where I dumped him into grandma’s capable arms.  I was angry.  As it was happening I saw how ridiculous it was.  How many of my friends and family have I observed wanting their kids to participate in “fun” things and then get frustrated when their child responds with fear and anxiety?  A lot. Maybe all. I should know better. Still here I was. Indignant thoughts about how much I had spent on swim lessons--“What are we even doing this for!?” I asked my sister.  She has four kids and with a kind, been-there-done-that attitude, she listened to my rant.

It was shortly after this I realized that maybe I should just let myself be 36.  Maybe I should let myself embrace the incarnation.  I’ve done all this soul searching and learning about consciousness, spirituality and love.  Part of this has been motivated by the hope that maybe it will help me skip some of the suffering.  I’ve realized that my suffering is all of my own creation.  So why can’t I stop creating it?  

Elizabeth Gilbert wrote this of Ram Dass’ quote and I found it particularly helpful:

“Embrace the incarnation.” Essentially what he meant was this: He had spent enough time in meditation and transcendental and psychedelic states to understand that what we call “reality” is all an illusion. He knew that we are in fact not these bodies, nor are we these lives. He knew that consciousness is a divine dance—that it’s all projection, that none of this is actually TRUE. He knew that we are all ONE, all God. And yet, he also understood that on another plane we ARE here. We ARE separate beings in these weird meat bodies, with these particular personalities, dramas, and gifts, performing in this strange play. 

The trick of life, he said, was to understand that none of this is real, but to embrace the incarnation, anyhow. Throw yourself into life, despite the fact that it’s all a dream. He knew that he was not really this guy named Ram Dass (he was actually God in disguise, just like you and I are) but he played that character beautifully—with big-hearted compassion, with endless curiosity, with love and humor, and with a mischievous wink that seemed to say, “It’s all just a game, but ain’t it Grand?”

Elizabeth Gilbert, Instagram 12/23/2019

So my resolution (if this can even be called that) for 2020 is to embrace the incarnation. 

• I’ll make all the mistakes that 36 year olds make. 
• I’ll hustle in the way that 36 year olds hustle.
• I’ll spend money on stupid 36 year old things.  
• I’ll worry about vain things the way 36 year olds do.
• I’ll mistake accomplishments and material things for happiness.
• I’ll give the passionate speeches that 36 year olds give about political, religious, corporate and educational institutions. 
• I’ll make the parenting blunders that 36 year olds make.
• I will worry too much about the cleanliness and furnishings of my house.
• I’ll modify my diet in ways that probably don’t make sense.
• I’ll read the books that 36 year olds read. 
• I’ll write the stories that 36 year olds write.  
• I’ll talk to god the way 36 year olds do, in moments of pain or as I relax into sleep.  
• I’ll let my heart bleed for the suffering in the world.
• I’ll put on my big girl pants and go to work and make dinner and pay the electric bill.
• I’ll waste time watching TV.
• I’ll wash the dishes and wipe little boy bottoms and snuggle and kiss and yell…

…because I only get one year to be 36.

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 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’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.

Engage in small c creation

“We do seem to be living in a universe that is in a constant and unending state of creation.  It’s never stopping.  It’s never stopping here either.  We are not witnessing that.  We are PART of that.  We come from that.  We work into that.  

So if the energy of the universe is in constant creation, when you are in creation, yourself, you’re in alignment with it.  And that’s why it feels so good, because you’re in the river of the thing that is happening from here to the outer extent of the universe, always.  And when you’re not in creativity and when you’re not in creation you’re against that flow and that’s why it feels like depression, and that’s why it feels like despair, and that’s why it feels so heavy.  

So for me, the best way that I can feel healthy, which means a sense of belonging, not just belonging to other people, but belonging to this whole weird story that’s happening that we’re in, is if I do creativity “small c" on a small scale.  So if I make something, then I’m also creating just the way that the universe is always making something and for some reason that feels deeply good at the soul level.  And when I’m not doing that I’m stagnating against a power that wants me to create with it.  

So for me it’s profoundly spiritual because there is no greater way to connect with capital C Creation than to engage in small c creation.  And that c can be as small as you want.  There’s something about making something with your hands that just makes you healthy and I think it’s what we are supposed to be doing so we don’t despair.”

Gwyneth x Elizabeth Gilbert: Can Creating Something Small Heal Something Big?

This is taken from an interview Gweneth Paltrow did with Elizabeth Gilbert on the Goop Podcast.  I heard it several weeks ago and I have become enamored with the idea of “small c” creativity.  There is so much power in it. 

A few months ago I felt inspired to put some of R’s artwork on my kitchen wall.  He was in a phase where he loved drawing and I felt inspired by his art.  Then I started to add my own art to the wall and the art of some of my friends (some of it made while they were watching R for me).  It’s become my visual memorial to small c creativity.  Each morning while I’m making breakfast and packing lunches I have several examples of small c energy reminding me that this is where the power lives.  

small c art wall

Starting with the small c has helped me to move onto some middle-sized c creative work.  I finished this oil pastel drawing while I was Santa Cruz.  I just got started with watercolor this weekend (something I have zero experience with).  I’ve been knitting too, which feels pretty chill but still adds and element of small c connection to my life.  

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The piano and my voice continue to be sources of small c.  I think of singing along with my car stereo in that context now.  Learning to play piano by chords has really freed up the piano to become a small c-type exercise.  I can play almost any song and process the emotion of it through the keys and my voice.  It’s powerful.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhVQdrbCUMQu0026feature=youtu.be

So what’s the benefit of small c?  What can you really get out of it besides mediocre art?

The main benefit I see is that I have developed a comfort level with myself.  I have come to know myself through small c.  I’ve started to hear my inner voice through the writing I do here and in my journal.  The inner voice has grown more recognizable as I assuaged the inner critic with a reminder that this doesn’t have to be good.  My inner critic told me the leaves of the watercolor plant should be green but my inner voice thought rainbow might be nice.  

When I do small c creativity, I start to hear the difference between the two—the inner voice and inner critic.  But small c dials back the intensity so a risk becomes less scary.  

I use small c in the way I live my life, as I’ve left behind the manual for living that I used to follow.  Small c invites curiosity, What if I told the truth? What if I said the hard thing? 

What kind of small c are you doing?

Who is Heavenly Mother?

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.  

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. 

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. 

Put your arms down!

I found yoga after I began to have trouble with tolerating cardiovascular exercise during my sophomore year at BYU.  I enrolled in an intramural class, probably at my sister's recommendation.  I didn’t know it at the time but I had several tumors growing in my body that were producing adrenal hormones.  One tumor was positioned behind my pancreas, in between my aorta and vena cava.  Knowing what I do now, I suspect that when my heart started pumping vigorously, the mechanical stimulation from the movement of these vessels triggered a dump of adrenal hormones into my system from the tumor.  This resulted in cold sweats, a severe headache and sometimes feeling faint.

So yoga was a way for me to exercise without ticking off my tumors.  And that’s really how I’ve looked at it all these years—exercise.  I found it incredibly helpful for back pain.  I was blessed with an ample bosom when I was young (nursing a baby and gravity have fixed that).  I suspected this contributed to constant pain and tension between my shoulder blades.  I also took a header off the top of the cheerleading pyramid as a high school senior.  I believe this was related to the aforementioned tumor as well. The fall resulted in a concussion and a bulging cervical disc (i.e. neck pain).  The gentle stretching and strengthening of yoga gave me relief that years of physical therapy and chiropractic work didn’t generate.  

I had lots of reasons to practice yoga and I have been doing it with varying levels of consistency since my class at BYU.  

Several weeks ago, I was talking to my therapist about cancer.  She asked me if I ever resented my body through this process.  I had to pause.  I don’t think I’m someone who is resentful of my body.  I guess I haven’t had to be.  After that first year of surgery and then a couple of years of acid reflux and irritable bowels, my body has been pretty okay.  It really has been able to do everything I’ve asked of it.  

A couple of weeks ago I felt drawn back to yoga and have re-entered the practice in a very different way this time.  The exercise benefit is secondary to me now.  I am there for the spiritual benefit.  I already wrote about my first experience in The Journey of the Warrior.  That class opened me up to the power of an intention.  I am familiar with the idea of setting an intention, but I think I rarely did it before because it felt like something I was going to be bad at.  Inevitably my mind would wander and then when I noticed this I would feel shame about it.  So maybe all this personal work I’ve been doing has helped my yoga practice!

The next few classes I attended resulted in me crying silently on my mat during savasana or before the class even started.  I found myself able to immerse into the practice more deeply than ever before.  

One day, as I sat cross-legged with my hands in prayer position, I set my intention to listen.  I remember thinking, I’ve already heard from my mind and my spirit today, now it’s time to hear from my body. (It seems I have become open to all of these woo-woo types of things now...still struggling with essential oils and dietary supplements...one step at a time, people!)

As we began the vinyasa practice the instructor guided us into warrior II.  This pose requires you to stand with arms outstretched in front of and behind you.  It’s a pose I’ve done thousands of times.  For some reason, on this day, those little tiny muscles on the front of my shoulders were on fire.  They screamed at me as I held the pose.  

I observed my brain say the following: You are young, you have well-developed shoulders!  There is no reason why you should need to put your arms down!  You can hold this pose!   I heard those tiny muscles scream back, Put your arms down!  This went back and forth a few times over the course of about twenty seconds.  Then I remembered my intention and I responded (of course I am in conversation with my brain and my shoulders—isn’t everybody?!?).  I told them, Today is about listening and I’m going to put my arms down.  And then I did.  

What is interesting is what followed.  As I stood in warrior II with my arms resting by my sides, I was overcome with respect and humility toward my body.  MY BODY!  Which is such an amazing tool for all the things I love.  My body! that has tolerated cancer for 14 years.  My body! that was inhabited by my son for nine months.  My body! That can paddle a surfboard, ride a bike, lift heavy weight, and walk long distances.  My body! That holds my son close, that can smell his hair and pat his thighs.  My body! That hears and tastes and sees and smells and touches. 

But that word—tool—clued me into the work I need to do in relation to my body.  Yes, my body is a tool but it’s more than that.  It has a voice—clearly, it was speaking to me that day.  It’s pretty used to me not listening but, I wonder, what would change in my life if I listened to her more.  It feels like an opening into another phase of growth.  When does your body speak? Namaste.

The Marco Polo Prayer

Sometimes I can’t feel god.  I used to think this was because of something I had done.  That god had withdrawn from me.  I learned in church that god cannot dwell in unholy places so I assumed if I couldn’t feel god then something unholy was going on inside of me.  I felt shame about this.  I thought it meant something bad about me.  But I was wrong.

I am not sure exactly when I figured this out.  It was sometime after I had given up on doing everything correctly.  After I had shed another cage.  I observed that there were good people—people that I knew to be truly good at their essence—that didn’t keep all of the commandments, that didn’t worry about all the things.  I wondered if they felt god.  I believed they did.  I wondered if we could really distance ourselves from god.  And why would a god, who truly loved us, want distance from us?  

This didn’t make sense.  

I thought about the times when bad things happen to good people.  Like when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 21. Like when my friend’s babysitter was picked up for a DUI with her kids in the car the night she left for a trip across the country.  Like when my sister’s daughter had her first seizure the night she left on vacation.  Like when my grandmother’s oldest son was born with a heart defect.  Like when my friend’s daughter developed leukemia and was maimed by the treatment.  Like when my other friend gave birth and then broke her leg four days later at the same time as her dog was dying of cancer.  Where is god in all of this? Where are you, god!?! 

“I’m right here.  I’m right here.”

God is always here.  Right here.   

I learned this in the midst of my own suffering.  Mark Nepo related his experience with terrible sickness from chemotherapy to Oprah on her Supersoul podcast.  After a night of vomiting to the point of vomiting blood, Mark’s wife asked, “Where is god?” And Mark, in a moment of excoriated clarity, declared the knowing, “He’s right here.” 

This idea of suffering and god has formed a new kind of prayer for me.  I find myself, in moments where god feels particularly distant, asking, Are you there, god?  Then I answer for god, I’m right here.  It's like a game of Marco Polo, where I call out and god responds. And it always feels true.  God is right here, in the happy, in the suffering, in the mundane.  God is here inside of me.

God is in the peace AND in the suffering.  God is both.  God is all.  

So if god is in all of it, all of the human experience, then surely it is sacred.  Sometimes we get this confused in our minds.  We think god will preserve the righteous.  The scriptures are filled with this sentiment.  Yet bad things continue to happen to people we know and love and people we’ve never met that we only hear about in tragedy via the news.  That voice in my head that wants to distance me from god would say, If you would have done this differently then this might have gone differently, or If you were really listening to God you might have avoided tragedy.  Or prayed harder or been kinder or read more scriptures or donated more money or whatever things are on the to-do list of the "righteous."

Cheryl Strayed wrote this in a life-changing (for me) installment of her advice column, Dear Sugar.  It was in response to a letter writer who was struggling with her belief in god after her infant daughter developed a brain tumor that required invasive surgery.  Please visit this link for the full piece, as it is beautiful:

“Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking if there were a God why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life threatening surgery?—understandable as that question is—creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.”

The Human Scale, Dear Sugar

The very half that makes rising necessary—is first having been nailed to the cross.  Maybe we are all to be nailed to the cross in this life.  We are meant to be set ablaze.  And even as this is happening we are meant to reach out to each other and up to god.  Maybe god is the love the burns between us in such moments of vulnerability and pain.  Maybe that is a close as we get to understanding god’s love for us.  Maybe that’s when we touch it.  

What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?

The Human Scale, Dear Sugar

What if god was here, right here, always?

Cover art for this piece: I saw this on display at The Broad museum in LA. It's by Edward Ruscha, The Right People and Those Other People, 2011.