blogging

Best of 2009: Gwen Bell blog challenge

Today: Moment of peace. An hour or a day or a week of solitude. What was the quality of your breath? The state of your mind? How did you get there?

I attended a marvelous yoga class in August that I’ll never forget. It was at the start of what went on to be a fantastic weekend. I blogged about it at the time and will share my words now. I felt visited by the spirit in a way that happens to me rarely but always powerfully. It made me think more about topics I find very interesting: the genesis of creativity, the home of the soul, the ways that emotion can rise in us, unbidden, and almost knock us over with the sheer force of feeling.

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Last night in yoga class the teacher (wonderful, jivamukti-trained Alanna) spent a while talking about sound, vibrations, e=mc2, listening, and being open to the universe. She asked us to think about someone who could benefit from our being more present, from our listening more carefully. I thought immediately of Grace. No hesitation: her little face with tangly hair falling in her eyes popped into my head.

At the end of practice Alanna turned the lights off and did a little bit of singing with the room lit only by candles. I would not normally describe this as my thing, but somehow I was porous to it last night and found it very moving. We did a call-and-response chant of Om Nama Shivaya (again, not my thing, but Alanna was singing it rather than chanting it, with acoustic guitar accompaniment … really just a hop away from some of my favorite music!). She asked us to put our hands over our heart and to think of the person we had dedicated our practice to. Tears streamed down my face as I imagined Gracie sitting next to me. My awareness of my own limitations was a physical ache, and I felt the desperate desire to be a more present, patient mother for her running through my veins in a visceral way.

I was reminded, then, of an experience I had while pregnant with Grace. When I remembered it I can’t believe I’ve spent so many hours whining about how her name was going to be Eloise. I was 20 weeks pregnant and at a new prenatal yoga class (that I actually never returned to, because there was a little too much breathing through our chakras and not enough downward dog). After a long shivasana, the instructor asked us to “go inside” (what does this mean, really?) and to “feel our baby” (and yes, I rolled my eyes here). We were supposed to listen for a single word, a message from our child, and to share it with the room. I was skeptical and, frankly, trying to figure out how I could leave the room without getting busted. And then this happened: a voice in my head said, clearly, “grace.” Her name has always been Grace.

Incidentally, these two experiences, separated by a wide gulf of years and many, many not-very-spiritual moments, make me think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk. Yes, I am biased, because I love Elizabeth Gilbert. But still. I find her premise fascinating and compelling: that creativity should be thought of as an external force that visits us (with frustrating inconsistency) rather than something inherent to an individual. This, she posits, is a way to release some of the pressure to be inspired every single day. She also supports her theory with interesting data points from Big Name Philosophers.

This notion is central to a Philip Pullman’s extraordinary trilogy, His Dark Materials (which I could not recommend more highly). In Pullman’s beautiful books, both quick, enthralling reads and dense explorations of religion, identity, and the soul, children are accompanied by “daemons,” companions who are an external embodiment of their creativity. When we are children, our daemons shift between the shapes of various animals. As adults, they take a firmer form and settle into their final shape. Pullman seems to claim that children are comfortable with the fluidity of creativity and identity, and that as we get older this relationship grows more static, the exchange less easy. I find this idea fascinating and it clearly has the same root as Elizabeth Gilbert’s argument about artistic inspiration and whether its locus is internal or external to the artist himself.

If you agree with Gilbert and Pullman, which I think I do, I guess whatever we believe that spirit is visited me last night. And reminded me, in no uncertain terms, that Gracie deserves better from me.

Best of 2009: Gwen Bell blog challenge

Yesterday: Blog find of the year. That gem of a blog you can’t believe you didn’t know about until this year.

Eek. Impossible. Really, honestly, impossible. There are a handful of blogs that I discovered in 2009 that are both new and permanent to me: new voices that I’ve been reading for less than a year, but voices who already ring in my head on a regular basis. People who uncover truths and tell stories, funny and serious. People who write poetry and share pictures. I read a lot of blogs every day, and there are certain ones that I always pause to read in full.

I can’t possibly name one. So perhaps I’ll just say that 2009 was the year that the blogosphere really tightened its grip on me, convinced me of its value. It is the year I started to write more regularly (though little known fact: I’ve had this wee blog since 2006) and the year I began to read more widely and voraciously. It’s the year I began to connect with other bloggers out there, began to feel the tenuous strands of a community forming into a real net that I sense below me. This is very meaningful to me, and I am grateful every day for the wisdom and candor I read in other bloggers’ words and for the support of my writing that I sense from them.

Thank you all.

More Kelly

I am honored to again have my writing featured on Kelly Diels’ site, Cleavage. It is a high honor indeed to read my own sentences within the gilded cage of Kelly’s words. Hers is, in her own words, the “flesh poetry of experience.”

Kelly writes about art, religion, politics, philosophy, and Bratz dolls with equal adeptness. Her voice is, over and over again, a tour de force of bravado and brilliance, laced with self-deprecation and self-doubt. She is wildly impressive and deeply human. I am privileged to be writing on her site.

Please click over and read my piece about Why I Blog (Why I Write).

Best of 2009: Gwen Bell blog challenge

Today: Workshop or conference. Was there a conference or workshop you attended that was especially beneficial? Where was it? What did you learn?

Well this one is easy. September 26 firestarter with Danielle LaPorte. I wrote about it then and I’m not sure there’s much to add beyond what I wrote then. I’m sadly not much further along in answering the questions. I did have a one-on-one with Danielle in early November, and had the same experience of tears bubbling to the surface without the words to explicate them. Danielle reaches into me with a touch that is both firm and compassionate and pushes me to find ways to explain and express the emotions that she accesses.

Today was a fascinating day, so full of thoughts and emotions that my head and heart are both full to overflowing right now. I spent the day at Aidan’s house with Danielle LaPorte and a fascinating, diverse group of 23 people (22 woman and 1 man). We started with introductions. Most people talked for 2-3 minutes about where they were in their lives, what they did and wanted to do, and what their challenge was. I spoke for approximately 15 seconds and ended my brief sentences with a shrug. I was reminded today of how, in a group of strangers, my default is to feel awkward and shy. I felt very shy in that room. I didn’t talk again all morning.

Danielle spoke about her own story, commenting on the inflection points and decisions, wise and unwise, which had brought her to where she is today. Among the comments that she made that I remember verbatim was that you have to ask for what you want. A promotion, readers, success, a contract. You cannot expect good things to simply come. You have to meet grace halfway, she said. Asking for what I want – or for help of any kind – is something that makes me both nervous and uncomfortable, so I don’t like hearing this, but I know that it is true.

Danielle asked several thought-provoking questions, among them:

What are you sarcastic about? (this may indicate a place of defensiveness)

What do people thank you for? (gratitude is tied to your own genius)

How do you want to feel?

This last one led into one of Danielle’s key points. She asserted that we are all driven by our need to feel a set of core desired feelings. That all of our behavior and decisions are in search of these feelings. To figure out what those are, therefore, is a critical step in clarifying what our life should look like. What professional and personal infrastructure should we have to maximize how often we feel the way we want to feel?

I don’t even have answers to Danielle’s searching questions yet. Just more questions. More than once today – in fact, over and over – I welled up with tears. I found myself in the grip of a swell of emotion both powerful and inchoate. This is not the first time I’ve felt this. I have moments where I feel full to the brim with thoughts and feelings that I am powerless to control and unable to name. I know there is a tide turning in my spirit, but I don’t exactly understand where the undertow is taking me.

I struggle to remember that there is a design in what looks like utter lack of order, a reason why things happen. I know in my core that I believe these things. I fiercely want to trust that there is a place where I will feel unfettered and like I am doing what I should be doing. I have never felt that, have not felt passionate or intellectually alive since college. For all of my grandiose aspirations and big, inarticulate dreams, I know that I also, truly, fundamentally, want to feel useful. I want to contribute. To whatever it is I am doing, to the big or the small, to something.

I end today with many more questions than I began it with. Zora Neale Hurston said there are years that ask questions and years that answer. I’ve had a series of question-asking years in a row. I look forward to the fruition of some answers.

Similarity and Difference

I’ve had Kristen’s post called Validation in my head since I read it yesterday morning. Kristen asks herself (and us): “Do I simply search out people who reflect back to me what I want to see in myself? And, if so, is that a bad thing?” She goes on to talk about how she gravitates towards blogs whose general perspective feels familiar, and wonders if this reflects a “preference for a pot unstirred and waters untroubled.”

But I’ve been thinking more about this today, and about the comments, particularly that by BigLittleWolf. It was on my mind when I commented on Kristen’s post: I thought about blogs I read that are “different,” and realized that those that are the most different, the most off-topic, don’t really push my thinking about parenting or identity or presence or love or any of the big questions that roil my brain daily. Yes, I read a bunch of technology blogs, and also some superficial celebrity blogs. Both of these groupings I would call very different, in both topic and worldview, from my own blog. But that very difference opens up a gulf, and in that space the ability to influence my own thinking about my own thorniest personal issues is lost.

In my comment I defended what Kristen worries is a tendency towards validation as something more fundamental. I stand by my overall belief that those who feel “like us” in the blogosphere are probably much more legitimately “like us” than people we meet in real life. In a world where we are represented by words on a page a lot of the superficial identifiers that we use to sort through other people are removed. So when we resonate with another blogger we are, in large part, resonating with a very real and honest part of her. Not, for example, whether she has a kid at the same school or is wearing the same jeans we are.

And so what I’m mulling over now is that in order to really expand our horizons about topics like mothering, does a blog (or a person, or a point of view) require a baseline degree of familiarity? If something is too foreign, don’t we all instinctively dismiss it, some psychological version of graft-versus-host disease? I agree with BLW, in fact, that while there are some similarities in theme and tone among the blogs that I read most passionately and loyally, they are hardly identical. I am sure that those of us who blog about parenting, for example, actually differ quite widely in the ways in which we mother. I’m sure we have different points of view on bedtimes and food and time-outs and appropriate behavior. And none of us is right, by the way. The learning comes from hearing other people talk about why, and how they think about it.

At least for me. I think the most valuable conversations – be they in person or in the blogosphere – are often (not always) with people who are relate-able enough that their view is credible to us, their input valued because we know we respect their opinion and perspective. Of course this respect is earned multiple ways, and similarity to ourselves is neither the only way nor a guarantee of it. The people whose input I esteem the most highly in this world are not all like me; they are not all mothers, not all women, not all like me. They are, universally, intelligent, thoughtful, caring, and deeply engaged in the business of living.

And this is what I look for in blogs I love – in fact in all media that I consume. I am drawn to people whose outlook on the world makes me think, people who are able to spin words into a dazzling gossamer web, people who are honest about their struggles and challenges and weaknesses. I think that having this, ultimately, is the similarity of which Kristen speaks: the willingness to share candid stories, to actively engage in the effort to live more thoughtfully and consciously, and to admit difficulty. If that’s what the blogs I love best have in common, then I can only aspire to call myself similar to that. That’s a community of “sameness” that I would be proud to be a part of.