overcoming resistance

I went to the gym for the first time in almost thirty years this morning.  I went with my husband, who has been asking me to come with him for almost as long.  It's the kind of thing he thinks will be "fun," and I think will be dreadful.  It wasn't dreadful.  Just as he'd promised, no one paid any attention to me as I learned how to operate the bike and the weight machines, and just as he'd promised, it was kind of fun to be there with him.  It wasn't until I was heading out of the gym and on the way home that I remembered why I'd stopped going to the gym in the first place.  I was 18 years old and terribly self-conscious of my body and my fitness level  - and my semi-regular visits to the facility were drawing attention from an older man.  I can remember him waiting outside, leaning up against the concrete wall with a water bottle in hand, asking me in that slow male drawl how my workout was, telling me with a glance up and down that I was looking pretty good.   It was the late 80's - and it was a man's world.  It never occurred to me to stand up for myself and tell him to go away, or to complain to the gym, or even alter my schedule.  I felt uncomfortable so I quit.  In the Christian subculture I grew up in, that was my role in the world: submit, yield, or get out of the way, and I did.I'm at midlife now and I ditched the ideology of the subculture a long time ago, but the muscle memory is still there.  Someone makes a demand on my time or emotional energy and I instantly assume it's my duty to meet it even when I am mentally certain I should be doing something else.  The limbs twitch with conditioned motion, thoughts race along the grooves of practiced belief, and dopamine arrives to validate the action. In the old days, I called this comfortable, assured feeling "peace."  Conforming provided its own reward - and kept me from growing into anything more.

I'm most vulnerable to this kind of reaction directly after I assert myself and declare my intentions.  I've come to expect that any new burst of personal determination signals not a season of productivity, but a major catastrophe looming in the wings.  As soon as I hit the gym, the creepy old guy shows up in the doorway demanding attention, plucking the strings of my ingrained responses, encouraging me to yield to his demands.

"Resistance," says Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, "obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, spiritually."

she makes it happen

Learning to recognize Resistance can be complicated - especially when it comes to us wrapped in religion, ideology, and gender-roles.  Some people learn early to recognize and defy it, but for me and many others, it's a lifetime's work.  We get there one revelation, one deliberate, defiant act at a time.

We can claim the truth that we are makers, artists, builders, weavers, nurturers, truth-tellers, poets, and our work matters.

So go to the gym.

Show up for yourself.

Tell the creepy old man at the door to leave you the hell alone and mean it.  (If he sticks around, show up again anyway.  He'll get bored when he realizes he has no power to disturb or distract you. )

You can do this.  We can do this.  We owe it to ourselves - those selves that sat back, that let other people succeed, that fixed all the problems and carried all the burdens, that pushed down feelings and desires, that made dreams smaller so they didn't disturb anyone else.  We owe it to ourselves to grow our dreams and find a way and be faithful to what has always been real and true inside of us.  So let's do it, okay?

Love you, my friends.

tonia

rabbit and bone

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Night closes gently over the desert sky in a curtain of pink and amber.  The dark, when it comes, spreads slowly down, as if from the center of a dome, pushing at the last of the pale light, driving it into the horizon. Then the stars come out, hundreds of them, a sequined carpet unfurled against the blackness overhead.  In the middle of it all, the Milky Way, shimmering faintly, hinting at color - purple, blue, a thin shaft of gold.  There is almost no sound.  Somewhere out in the miles of open land around us there are creatures stirring, moths that flutter toward any hint of artificial light, coyotes after their rodent prey, cattle sighing and squirming, adjusting themselves to their prickly beds, but we hear none of it.  It is only the two of us, wrapped in blankets, puzzling out constellations in a whisper, watching for stars to fall.

It was my daughter’s idea to come.  A birthday gift, to write, to connect.  Out here we have no internet to call upon, no cell phones to hunch over.  There is each day, there is each other.

We write.  We read each other’s stories and talk through possible plot lines.  We agonize over edits and the stubbornness of characters. When the words begin to blur together, we go for walks. Together. Alone.

The cabin is perched on the high point of a rolling hill, from there, you can see the jackrabbit trails winding through the sagebrush. Down on the ground though, the trails are invisible.  I head out for a walk alone.  There is no destination to aim for, no obvious route to follow.  I keep the cabin in my sights and begin to wander.  After a half hour or so, I find an old dirt road.  It is criss-crossed with the tracks of dogs (or coyotes), the occasional set of elk prints.  No one has driven or walked it for a long time.  I follow it uphill to a barbed wire fence, then turn around and follow it downhill till I find another.  A mile away I can see the roof of the cabin shining in the sun.  I wave to it, wondering if my daughter is sitting on the porch, watching me amble around on roads that lead nowhere.  If I were doing this in the city, the French would have a word for me: flaneur - the stroller, the passionate wanderer.  Out here, I look more like a simpleton, coated in dust and sweat, stumbling into rabbit holes and over rocks, snagging my ankles on the prehistoric flora, walking uphill, then down.  But there is no one here but my daughter to see and she understands.  While I walk my mind unknots.  I can feel the muscles in my legs contracting and expanding, hear my breath pulling in and pushing out.  I am here.  I am alive.

Just off the highway on the way to the cabin, we’d seen a hand-lettered sign on the side of the road.  “Beetle-Cleaned Skulls For Sale,” it read.  We were fresh from the city, sealed into our speeding car, dust-free, oblivious.  We looked at each other and laughed.  Who would want a beetle-cleaned skull?  That was ages ago, when I was young.  The sun is just descending into the western half of the sky, the landscape stretching unvaried before me, sage and grey and yellow-brown.  I search the ground, confident that in this liminal space I will find some bleached white testimony of a former life - a tibia, a jawbone, a knot of vertebrae.  Memento mori.  What is life without the awareness of death?  I find  the brittle grey bones of the sagebrush, and they crumble beneath my feet.

When it is time to leave the cabin and return home, we stand in the doorway, reluctance making us heavy and slow.  We are unshowered, grit in every crevice; we’ve eaten endless bowls of beans and rice; we have no idea of what is going on in the world outside the desert. At home we will be warm and clean and well fed.  There will be stories to tell and hugs to give, but we do not want to go.

“Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think,” said Tasha Tudor.  I do not have to think very hard.  How long since I saw the stars as I did in the desert?  A year?  A decade?   How long since I felt silence deep as water, slipped bodily into the stream of slow time?  Long, so long.  We clean the cabin, load up the car, stand in the dust and look out over the hills one last time, then once more.  "The wonder of it!"  I am here.  I am alive.  I make no resolve save to place myself here again and again.

body, soul, earth

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{A repost from the archives (2015), as I visit these themes again.}

The story goes that Ned Ludd, a young textile worker, grew worried about the safety of his job amid the rise of "labor-saving devices" in the 18th century garment factory in which he worked...so he took his apprehension out on a couple of stocking frames in protest.  Other workers saw what young Ned was getting at and began to try and thwart the industrialization of their own jobs in the same way. Before long the "Luddites" were a group to be feared - known far and wide as people who hated technological advancement to the point of destruction.   I have a lot of sympathy with the farsighted Ned and his companions most days.  I don't fear the loss of my job, but there are plenty of days I fear the loss of my humanity.

I wrote about this back at the end of last year.  I was sawing through some deep cords, trying to free us from the entanglement of the ever-present internet.  We lived for two months without internet connection at home - going to coffee shops and libraries when we needed to connect and leaving home for books and games and conversation -  and we loved it.  And then one day,  by unspoken yet mutual consent, we turned the internet connection back on.  We'd learned some important things:  that internet access is a privilege - sit at a library table competing for bandwidth and take a look around you: at the guy with half his teeth and a halo of old tobacco researching veteran's benefits; at the woman wearing a stretched-out tank top and the remains of breakfast, humming along to Prince; at the couple in the corner trying loudly to fill out a job application in the spaces between when the connection drops and surges again, and feel the frustrated desperation of having to get email read and bills paid and appointments made before your one hour is up - and then realize this whole thing is a choice for you, but these people do this every single week because they have no other choice.  We learned that our relative geographical isolation makes digital isolation less desirable and that maybe it would be different if we had neighbors who dropped by or family members in the same town, but we don't.  And we learned that as much as we (okay, me) are drawn to asceticism what truly matters is redeeming the world we live in -  among, and with, and in, like everyone else.

I'm learning that the modern age requires of us a lot more concentrated awareness than some times past.  We have to learn skills the generations before us never imagined.  Things like decluttering and voluntarily simplifying and asking questions about origins and working conditions and saying no thank you to gifts and not getting addicted to "likes" and "followers" and learning when to share and when to be private, and on and on.   And this concentrated awareness is required of us at a time when everything is conspiring to keep us unaware, distracted, numb.  "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" Just keep spinning, churning, consuming, pressing yourself into the one by one dimensions of an instagram photo.

Lately I've been wondering how to keep after that initial push to bring myself into awareness, how to trigger the body into claiming its own space, tell the mind it's had enough flickering and blinking for awhile.  On a recent Saturday morning I listened to poet Marie Howe talk about simplicity, about how that connected to reading the Little House books with her daughter and something clicked.  Whenever I think of the Ingalls' family I think of a log room, a fire, candlelight, Pa's fiddle - an image that feels like all the best parts of home and hope and humanity.  All my good dreams, I realize,  are accompanied by candlelight, by wood fires, by warmth and hearth.  I'm at the age where I've learned to give notice to such recurring symbols, to make tangible space for them in my life.   Frederick Buechner describes it so:

“You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it…. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”

You must imagine the kind of long-suffering husband I have, that when I say, "I have an idea..." he does not roll his eyes or sigh loudly but looks me straight on and says, "Tell me about it."

"After dinner, we dim the lights," I say.  "Candles, soft lamps in the bathroom and kitchen, oil lamps for going room to room.  No screens.  It will be a signal for us, a hard stop, so we can turn off the outside world and rest."

"Yes," he says.  (He's priceless, I tell you.)  And so every night since he has gone around and flipped switches, put things in order, lit the lamps one by one.  It feels like a holy ritual, an ushering in of magic.  We are still a part of the modern world, but for a couple of hours each night, we are also a part of the old world, more subject to season and time and natural limits.  These nights when I look around the darkened rooms with their golden corners, watch shadows dance on walls, tilt my silent book so the lamplight will fall across the words, I feel my soul inhale and exhale.  We're not separate from the world, and we're not Luddites - our fists are not raised against all the changes that have come.  We're just people.  People who are finding a way, carving a path through, intent on reminding ourselves that we are not just mind, but also body, soul, earth.

rosehip ceremony

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The idea of ceremony and ritual as a vital practice came to me in my thirties when I traveled across country to visit an online friend.  Her home was a masterpiece of dedicated observation and ritual.  There were candles to light for different times of day, music to set moods, books to be read at dinner, an altar in the dining room that mirrored the seasons of the church year complete with tactile symbols for the children to handle.  When I left my friend's home after a few days, I was changed.  Ritual and ceremony, I realized, make the world of the soul tangible, touchable, real.  And oh, how we need to be able to grab hold of that soul-world in our materialist, cynical age.  We have left so little room for acknowledging mystery and wonder, or the forces that work inside and through us.  These are not things we can speak of easily, even among friends and family.  But ritual and ceremony can provide a framework for it, giving solidity to things we are at a loss to describe, binding us together by experience, lending us a shared understanding.

Last week, I was invited to join in a very special ceremony for my sweet friend Lesley as she marked her passage into the Rosehip season of her life (the time after menopause).  This is such an overlooked time in a woman's life and I was thrilled to be part of creating a tangible doorway for Lesley, a point that she can look back on, knowing she has entered into a new and vital territory.  I believe it is so crucial we honor this landscape ourselves since our culture insists on treating our elder years as a time to delay and avoid, as if we stop being vibrant, living, powerful women because our bodies have moved beyond youth.

Having said that, this was my first time joining other women in such a ceremony (though you can be sure I took notes, because I will definitely be doing this in a few years) and it was such a moving time.  Everything was planned with Lesley's characteristic simplicity and beauty, honoring the earth and her own spirit, as well as ours. We shared food and drink, moving around our host's home and yard just as if we were traveling through the stages of our lives.  At each station we had a special drink (sangria, tea, Greek coffee, wine) that represented the time of life we were remembering, and we sat for hours telling our stories and sharing our experiences.  When all the stories had been told and we had completed our circuit through each life stage, we wrapped our friend in hugs and a lovely shawl that represents her new status as a Rosehip, an Elderwoman.  (Afterwards we wore our floral crowns out on the town and celebrated with dinner.  And here, too, I had something to receive:  I was self-conscious about wearing the crown in public, but all the attention we received was joyful smiles and happy questions about what we were celebrating.  The whole thing was a lovely, transformative experience.)

There's something so powerful about women coming together to bear witness for each other, to accept each other's wisdom, isn't there?  I am full up this week, thinking about how I can honor the femininity and vitality of the women in my own life, how I can stand with them and allow them to stand with me in ways that bring our hidden experiences into the light and lend them solidity.

Just as I was getting ready to post this, a friend sent me a post on Instagram that fit so perfectly with this, I had to include part of it here:

"While talking to my therapist about why I feel such a need to complete so much so fast I realized that my vision board & 99% of images I see in media are of young successful women. No wonder I felt rushed. In media, if you aren’t successful by 30, it doesn’t count..Where are the women who have nurtured their craft for years, the women who have stepped into their success with grace and depth and time. Where are the women who have built families and homes and businesses and learned happiness and self love in a different capacity than you could ever have at 30? They are missing. And that is a disservice to all of us..I will not disappear as I age. I will only shine brighter, love deeper, become wiser, have more to give and be more free. I will be here to show young women you have a lifetime to unfold. Slow down, breathe deep, live fully."

(Just a note: I don't believe older women are "missing" because they have hidden themselves, but because we are conditioned not to value and see the women who are before us.)

Tell me, how do you mark your own passages?  Have you ever participated in a ceremony like this?

And also, who shines bright for you? Are there elderwomen in your life that are pointing the way?

I'd love to hear about them. 

lepidoptera

In her hand lay the remains of a moth.   She'd found it on the bedroom floor as she shuffled past in the baby blue slippers Devon had bought her last month.  It was in the doorway, orange and brown, one wing tilted, the other torn, its legs bent tightly into its abdomen.  Or was it thorax?  She'd look it up in the field guide: moth anatomy.

Retrieving it from the floor took some time.  She had to take off the slippers, give herself some traction.  Her bare feet, purple-veined and thick-nailed, gripped the floor as she bent over.  Time was, she could angle from the waist and reach the ground without a thought.  Now she had to hitch her nightgown above her knees and bend.  The small of her back cracked, she wavered an inch or two above her destination.  Bend the knees more.  Ridiculous.  One hand held the door frame defensively, the other scrabbled at the floor.  There.

She straightened, heard the bones in her back creak and pop, felt a wave of dizziness from the sudden departure of blood in her head.  She caught sight of herself in the long closet mirror.  White hair standing on end, her face a bluster, satin nightgown hitched above her knees - the legs, once smooth and muscled, sagged and spotted, a curdle of veins in a knot along her thigh - her breasts swinging, two long-necked squash beneath the peach fabric. 

"It will make you feel pretty," Devon had said when they went shopping for the nightgown.  Pretty.  What could the girl be thinking?  She straightened, let the nightgown descend, fumbled her feet into the slippers.  With her left hand she clawed at the recalcitrant hair; her right hand protected the moth.

She shuffled to the living room bookcase.  Field guides, middle shelf:  North American Butterflies and Moths.  She carried the guide to the couch, shook the stiff insect body from her palm onto the coffee table.  It landed softly, wings down.  "...three pairs of jointed legs on the thorax."  That was it then, thorax.  Forewings, she read.  Compound eyes, probiscus, antennae, abdomen, hindwings, legs.  Straightforward.  A no nonsense creature, this.  She pinched the tilted wing between her shaking fingers and lifted it from the table.  Death had flattened the features of the head, she couldn't tell the antennae from the probiscus, couldn't even distinguish the compound eyes.  Or perhaps it was her own eyes that had flattened, made detail impossible.  She blinked and a viscous fluid slid over her eyeball, blurring the moth even further.  She dabbled at her eyelid with her free hand.  The world had fewer edges now, but it wasn't softer.

She let the moth body fall into the palm of her hand again.  It was spotted, the wings papery and translucent on the tips as if it had been dead for a long time, enough time for the scales to unhinge and drop away.  She imagined the moth crawling beneath the bed unseen, crumpling in on itself, time eroding the once lovely body.  It had stormed last night, perhaps a gust of east wind through the window had dislodged the corpse, sent it skittering to the doorway.  She tilted the moth into her lap, opened her hands.  Time would erode her to translucence as well; it was not far now.  Her own skin would darken and shrink around the bones, tear away into dust.  She accepted this without fear.  When she was younger she had feared death for its potential pain.  She could die underwater, or trapped in a cave; there could be a mudslide, earth in her mouth and throat; a car crash, the piercing of metal.  But she no longer feared such things.  She would die, she was nearly certain, in the same bedroom as the moth.  In a year perhaps, in a month.

The phone rang.  Devon, no doubt, calling to make sure she was awake and ready for her appointment today.  She rolled her eyes.  The girl was too efficient, bustling around with her oversized behind, clicking her long, decorated nails on everything she touched. 

"You want to keep your hair up Nana, it will make you feel better,"  she'd said when she made the appointment for her, as if a girl of twenty-five could know what would make her feel better.  Well, she was young, and she cared.  Martha Drubky had rotted away in a nursing home with no one to annoy her at all.  At least she wouldn't go like that.   She scooted to the edge of the couch and hauled herself up.  The moth fluttered from her lap onto the bare floor.  The phone was on its third ring.  By the time she reached it, the machine came on.  Devon's chirpy recorded voice, telling herself to leave a message after the tone.

"I'm on my way over, Nana.  Hope you're up and around.  It's salon day!"

She sighed and shuffled back to the couch.  If she was forty again, she'd cancel the appointment, braid her hair, put on that yellow sundress she'd bought in Carmel and hike up Paulson's Butte, watch the butterflies flirt with the meadow flowers.  She'd done that once, skipped work, left a note for Don, spent the day under the sun alone.  Marvelous day.  She leaned her head back against the couch, felt the remembered sun on her skin.  She must have dozed.  When she woke, Devon was standing over her, face shining vaguely with sweat, lipsticked mouth frozen in a patient smile.  She was supposed to be dressed by now.  Devon tilted her arm to look at her watch.

"Ten minutes," she said.  "Let's get you dressed."

She nodded, offered her arm for the hauling up.  When they were upright, she remembered the moth.  It was there on the floor, wings frozen open, a wild tilt to the left, hovering almost at the shadow of the couch.  Devon's foot in its strapped sandal came down heavily, just missing it, the disturbed air pushing the moth under the edge.  It slid out of view.  She almost cheered.  She imagined it in the darkness, resting on its tissue wings.  Devon led her to the bedroom, began the indignity of suggesting the wrong clothes, watching her wobble her ruined body into pants, a knit shirt, the sensible shoes. Lepidoptera, she thought, the same Order as butterflies.  Life span: one week to eight or nine months.  She was of the nine month variety, she supposed.  Somewhere under the couch now, the little brown and orange moth lay with its eyes fixed on the horizon of the floor and the wall trim.  She imagined its wings flexing, the eyes focusing, the threadlike legs straightening and bending.  Any time now it could take off again, bank toward some softly suggested light, follow the cant of some unseen road.