I just entered my nominations for the 2012 Bloggies. So much fun! I have never done this before and I wish I had. Maybe it’s like voting: it’s not just a right, but a responsibility.
Please do your part and enter your nominations here.
blogging
November: Pain
I spent the month of October in pain. First an injury, and then an illness, each of which is particularly painful in their individual categories. Not at all fun. I realized how little physical pain I’ve had in my life, with gratitude and also guilt – how could I not have appreciate all those many, many days of feeling just plain fine? I spent more days that I’d like to admit curled up in my bed, trying to work on one laptop and write on another, closing my eyes when I just couldn’t do anything but breathe through the pain.
I thought I had a high pain threshold. After my two childbirths, I really thought I was strong. In fact, those epidural-free deliveries were my benchmark (clearly a 10) whenever a doctor asked me to rank my pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I was somewhere between 7 and 9, on and off, for most of October. I’m still at 4 or 5, most days, and some much higher.
I don’t know about my pain threshold anymore. I do know, in a way I never did before, that pain is its own country. I have tremendous empathy for people who live with substantial pain on an ongoing basis. Often I looked at Grace, trying to listen to what she was saying, her voice muffled by the ringing of pain in my head, feeling like I was across a moat in a different place altogether from her and my regular world. A regular world I had never appreciated until it was stolen from me, replaced by this foreign place full of pain. It is both exhausting and terrifying to ride the day-in, day-out ebb and flow of pain, the peaks of agony and the valleys of oh-maybe-I-am-okay-now almost-normalcy. Every time I breathed a sigh of relief and thought, yes, finally, I’m on the road to recovery, something would flare up, and I would return to bed, eyes full of tears and heart full of fear.
It is the helplessness of it, as well as the emotional content, that shocked me the most. I would get pulled under by a riptide of pain, unable to do anything about it. And the incredible fear, that I had never anticipated. I am familiar with emotional pain, in all its range, but I did not realize that physical pain carried with it a big emotional burden. My mind would get on its hamster wheel: will this never improve? Am I going to live like this for the rest of my life? I can see how quickly chronic pain leads to immense depression. I am not depressed, though: right now I am marveling, more than anything, at the power of pain.
My other observation is that pain is absolutely exhausting. A few weeks ago I wrote about being tired, and about feeling quiet. Some of that is surely seasonal, and the particular rhythms of my spirit and mood. But the tiredness stuck around, persistent, thick, heavy, and I began to wonder if it was also partially caused by my pain. Now I suspect it was (and is). I am wading through thigh-deep snow these days, slow going, feeling spent, both emotionally and physically, more quickly than usual.
I read Kristin Noelle’s beautiful post last week with tears streaming down my face. She writes of a harsh few months, of a demanding season, and of the release of finding herself in a soft place. These lines in particular moved me:
What if becoming (painfully, gut-wrenchingly, sometimes) aware of our fear is not always a sign that we’re far off from peace, but actually quite the opposite: a sign that we’re actually close enough to peace to start collapsing into it, to start admitting to ourselves or someone else how hard things have been?
Clearly, the ways that this last month have been difficult for me are more physical than emotional, though, as I said, there was a soul component that I had not expected. What have this pain, and the pain’s handmaiden, fear, come to teach me? I ask myself this over and over again, in the day and in the night, wondering, wondering. Perhaps they are a sign, as Kristin says, that I draw ever nearer and nearer to peace. I’d like to believe it.
Note: I believe, firmly, that both of my ailments were helped, not impeded (and certainly not caused by) the cleanse I was on.
Darkness and light
In the last few years I have grown more aware of, and more intimate with, the powerful relationship I have with both light and dark, but the truth is it’s a theme that has run through my whole life…
I am honored to share my thoughts on the solstice today at Rebecca’s beautiful blog, Altared Spaces. The winter solstice may well be the holiest day of the year for me, and it was an immense privilege to write about it when Rebecca asked me to.
Please click over to read the rest of my essay about the solstice, about darkness and about light. Many thanks to Rebecca for hosting me at her beautiful blog, which is its own special space, and altar, for me.
Capturing this year
I was honored when my friend Rebecca asked me to contribute a prompt for her Relish 11 project.
My prompt was:
What quote, or line from a poem or a song, most captures what this year was for you?
I’m actually totally flabbergasted by how hard this is for me to answer. I have books and books of quotes, compiled over years (since 1985) and filled with my own handwriting. I regularly walk through my days with particular lines of poems or songs running through my head. And yet, sitting here, trying to pick one, I find myself stymied and frustrated.
Life gives us what we need it when we need it. Receiving what it gives us is a whole other thing.
-Pam Houston, In My Next Life
I think this is what I have to go with, on the shortlist of my favorite quotes, ever. It’s kind of a boring choice because I know I’ve shared it many times before. But it’s also just so apt for 2011. What is true is that I recognize in a new way the gifts that every day life holds for me, even though they are painful almost as often as they are glorious. But I’m still not receiving these gifts, at least not gracefully. It often feels more like life is forcing them down my throat. I write so much about letting go, and learning to do so; I even wear those two words around my neck. I have made progress on that front in 2011 – loosed my grip, maybe – but I’m nowhere near there yet.
But maybe there is no there at all. Maybe it is an endless process, this acceptance, this receiving, which, paradoxically, only happens for me once I’ve fully let go. I have to let go in order to receive life’s copious and overwhelming gifts. Which brings me to the other quote that’s sparring for the title of quote of the year. You knew I couldn’t just pick one, right? Same theme, different words (and another that I’ve shared many times before).
I will try to give thanks for gifts strangely, painfully, beautifully wrapped.
-Rebecca Wells, The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
I’d love to hear your thoughts here, on this: What quote, or line from a poem or a song, most captures what this year was for you?
What the writing life looks like for me
Now, time for more answers … another group of questions emerged, around the logistics and reality of blogging and writing. Do I ever feel like I’m running out of ideas? Am I a quick writer or do I linger over words? When do I write? Do I write lots of posts at once? How do I find the space/time to be so connected to my thoughts and emotions?
So … Yes, yes, and yes, I often feel like I’m running out of ideas. In those times I will write about what I see out my window, or I’ll share photographs, or an old post that I love, or a quotation or poem. Often I find that just when I think I’ve got nothing to say I’ll be inspired or triggered by another blog post, or by something I read offline, or by something my kids or friends say or do. Sometimes life just comes to the rescue.
I am a quick and careless writer. This question actually made me chuckle, because almost 100% of my posts contain typos or grammatical errors and I often catch them midway through the day with horror. I do everything quickly, and sometimes a bit haphazardly. I wish I was more methodical and cautious, to be honest.
Mostly, I write in the evenings. It is pretty hard to get me out of my house during the week; my strong preference is to stay home, read, write, and go to bed early. I know! I’m so much fun it’s hard to stand it sometimes. But my kids go to bed early so I often write for an hour or two after that. Those are calm, quiet hours that I really enjoy. At other times I can squeeze in a blog post or a page of offline writing during the day, between meetings or sometimes when I get up early. I guess the answer to “when do you write” is both simply and totally unhelpful: when I can. And yes, I often write several posts on the weekend and queue them up for the next week.
There’s no question these are busy years, that most days are so full of commitments and obligations and experiences that often I go to bed feeling a weird combination of overwhelmed and drained. I wrote a piece for Talking Writing this summer about how the reality of life with small kids permeates the experience of writing for me right now, for better or for worse. I don’t have advice, necessarily, for people wondering how to balance writing with a demanding life and career. I guess my only advice is : don’t let that stop you. Sit down. Even if it’s for ten minutes. Just put some words down. They will probably take you somewhere you never imagined, and following that trail is hugely illuminating.
The question about space and time to be connected to my emotions and feelings flummoxed me a little. I don’t feel like I have a choice about that. My emotions are so insistent, I can’t imagine not dealing with them. I’m a lousy compartmentalizer and I can’t stuff things down and ignore them. So I just deal with things as they arise. This is not an ideal way to be, truthfully, because the spiritual weather changes I go through have a real impact on those around me, most of all Grace and Whit.
A couple of you were interested in the book I’m writing, on whether blogging creates momentum for it or not, and generally about its topic and status.
There’s no question in my mind that I wouldn’t have written a book if I hadn’t started blogging. So yes, absolutely yes, writing here fuels my other writing. For sure. It also interferes, of course, because it’s another place to spill my words that isn’t my manuscript. But for me, that’s worth it: I am certain my “other” writing benefits enormously from the discipline of writing here daily as well as from my now-ingrained habit of recording the smallest nuances of my daily life.
It is hard for me to even put out in public that I’m writing a book. It really is. Pathetic, but true. But I can hear Lianne in my ear urging me to put my dearest dream out there into the universe so, gulp, here it is. I have a very rough draft of a memoir about the way my unexpected pregnancy with Grace and the bleak postpartum depression that followed her birth have indelibly altered the way I approach the world. I don’t know that the book in this form will ever reach the world, but I think it’s an important and universal topic and I’m working on figuring out how to tell it meaningfully. I also have about half of a novel written about friendship and first love, and while I had put it aside for over a year, lately I’m waking up at night with those characters in my head. I think I’m supposed to turn back to it, so I plan to do that very soon.