Tipping Point

It is raining, hard. It is a rare experience to wake up to a heavy rain. A part of me wants to climb back into bed with my coffee and enjoy it. I still might do that. But first I want to write a little. My coffee is the perfect temperature. It is just a little bit painful as it hits the back of my throat. My feet are throbbing still from a twelve-hour day on Saturday at a market in Louisville. I can hear the dryer spinning my duvet cover, which was still wet when I stopped the dryer last night.  

I am both lonely and happy. The happiness is the kind that emerges from the self if not restricted. I can feel the natural state of joy, of being. But one unexpected result of starting to finish my home renovations is that having a beautiful space to entertain without people to entertain, of creating magical corners for only me, underscores my loneliness. I do create for myself, but with this house in particular I think part of the reason why I made so many changes was a way of inviting in the family that I want: a partner, more kids, and also a chosen family of people that I love. As the renovations wind down, and none of these things have materialized, I realize that there was a certain amount of my energy, a certain amount of emotion, that I was expending on transforming the space, as if I was directing my loneliness, my longing, at this project. As it wraps up the loneliness and the longing accumulate without an outlet.

Now I experience a kind of hollowness in my own space. Being here underscores my own sense of having been abandoned in some way. Yes, my husband left, but I’m not even sure that is the cause. I think I’m talking about some unwritten contract which I perceived with the universe that said that if I showed up, was vulnerable and hard-working and a woman of integrity, that I would have a beautiful life. I do have a beautiful life, but somehow it feels like there has been some sort of violation. Someone has not come through for me. Many people have not come through. I can carry the weight of it to a certain degree but we seem to be tipping into a new place, a weight that I cannot carry. Each day I show up to the world wide-eyed, joyful, beautiful, but the string of characters that I am meeting just keeps changing. There is an injustice in the degree of change I absorb. Here is someone to love, someone to care for, someone to get to know, then they are gone in one way or another and then there is another. I am so worthy of being accompanied, witnessed, delighted in, and yet here I am still, at thirty-seven, yet to meet someone who is approaching me with open hands, wanting to walk with me, wanting to know me.

I believe the universe to be an abundant place but there is also something gaslighting about it, something in the laws of things that is not just. I am tired of the subtle reassurances: the hummingbird that visited me three times last week, the dancing birds on the powerline, the majestic sky. I am tired of the refuge of the natural world. I am weary of being a woman who needs refuge from her life, a life to which I have brought my whole self for so long. I don’t want to manifest or to envision or to dream. I want to possess. I want to live. Something about this phase feels like window-shopping, looking in but never invited in, always on the outside. Or am I the one on the inside? I have the sense of being on the Truman Show, being watched somehow, but in such an impersonal way that there is not the benefit of connection, only the paranoia of a presence that is unnamed, unreachable, never in physical form.

I don’t have the will to mourn, to hope, to invite. I don’t want to build something new. I want all the work I’ve done before to add up to something. Other people are building in containers worthy of their investment, in jobs, in relationships, worthy of them. I am always beginning anew, ever beginning. Nothing accumulates, except a wisdom I would be happy to live without, a wisdom I despise having earned through a persistent, quiet despair; a wisdom that separates me even further from those around me, living their normal lives, loved and accompanied.

Healing the Intellectual v. Creative rift: My Interview on the Stepping Off Now Podcast with Kendra Patterson

Annie and Kendra in 2012!!!

I had the great honor of being interviewed by long-time friend (and lifeline) Kendra Patterson. The episode posted this morning. In the conversation, we discussed my creative practice, the ways that I prepare to enter a flow state, my teaching philosophy, whether my practices are “creative” or “spiritual,” how I (don’t) identify with labels like writer or creative, and the current state of our institutions and concepts.

Listening back to the episode, I realized how the conversation itself had been a part of my own healing process. Since my early twenties, when I entered graduate school, I have had a tenuous relationship with intellectualism. While I was drawn to the depth that I thought the academy would offer, I found that most of my companions on the route were approaching but not really diving into the human experience. They were striving to produce something “in genre,” that is, largely following templates that dictated what knowledge would look like. I often found their questions uninteresting, the answers they offered obvious or convenient and guided by a pretentious concern for methodology with too little concern for substance.

Meanwhile, among the poets, David Whyte was calling me to ask beautiful questions:

“John [O’Donohue] used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind and that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. The ability to ask beautiful questions, often, in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. You don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking, and before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.”

[The real “beautiful question” is if Ann Wainscott can write a blog post without citing David Whyte…]

The way I reacted to this tension was to build two different lives, one academic, the other poetic, romantic, sustaining. The conflict is reflected in my Twitter bio: “mystic masquerading as political scientist; not fooling anyone.” The point is that I started to bifurcate - divide my life into two spheres. It was a survival mechanism. I bracketed my respect for the mystery of life, relegated it to my writing or flower-arranging practice, re-fashioned my interest in how religion shapes meaning-making systems into a historical institutionalist analysis of Moroccan counter-terror policies [come on, you’ve got to admit that was impressive LOL], soothed my spirit with On Being podcasts and skinny-dipping in the poetry of the mystics, and did fieldwork in breathtaking places like Morocco or Senegal, interviewing bureaucrats and intellectuals with one eye on the respondent and the other on the brilliant bougainvillea growing over the wall of the nearby garden.

It wasn’t sustainable. But it worked for a season.

Lately, working my way through Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, it became harder and harder to maintain this separation. Her damning critique of what she calls “The Ivory Power,” broke me and buoyed me, for naming the undeniably catastrophic impact many “creativity” programs have had on young artists. I wonder how many young writers’ motivation I have destroyed, by being too critical in my response, too strict with unnecessary conventions, too caught up in my own questions to recognize the beauty in theirs.

I will confess that these spheres are still so separate that I was even surprised when Kendra began to ask me about my teaching, as if that is irrelevant to my own creative practice. Something about the way she wove the two together "moved me back and forth into the change,” as Rilke says - in my life poem. It was fun, even, reflecting on what I am doing in the classroom, how I have tried to redeem my own disappointing educational experiences, what it looks like when a class “works,” who is doing the creating in a classroom, etc. The conversation helped me to recognize how for many years the classroom was my creative outlet.

There was a relevant angle of my experience that wasn’t fully captured by this conversation though, that readers of this blog will immediately recognize. Because the topic of the conversation was creativity, it was not clear how many of my practices play a dual purpose - processing grief and facilitating flow. Kendra is right to point out that I have a lot of practices. I’ve been in an experimental state for a long-time, about three years now, and most of the practices that we discuss were actually embraced not to facilitate a writing practice, but to help me get out of bed in the morning. And if I had to chose, I’d say that the majority of my practices are primarily grief-related, not for the purposes of creativity. But I don’t have to chose; they can serve both purposes.

My point is that intense periods of mourning or transition require more grounding practices than stable periods. Personally, I am coming to a place of greater stability now. I know many of my current practices are probably no longer necessary, but I am going to let the new normal arise organically, in its own time, rather than force some sort of transition prematurely. The connections between grief and creativity are myriad, already well-documented and explored by others, but I do suspect that the healing potential of participation in “the flow” is over-looked, and under-valued by most of us. Here’s to hoping that Kendra and I record a second conversation some day, digging into the beautiful questions at the frontier of grief and creativity.

Intense.

I’m not sure where I would have to go, or with whom I would have to be, to stop being told I am [too] intense. Of course it’s rarely said with that language, but it’s said in other ways. Am I too intense or am I just more honest? I cannot imagine living the things that I have lived and then tying them up neatly with bows and ribbons, and tucking them into the closet. This seems to be the implication of the censure. I look for different ways to process my life experiences, Instagram captions or entries in my memoirs, emails to friends or lovers, voicemails left on WhatsApp, drawings in the margins of my notebooks, yoga sequences, dreams, poems, watercolors. I distill them into other forms.

I’m not trying to take the edge off. I want to capture the edge - something of my life and my own orientation toward it, my own development, the questions that I am asking or avoiding, the answers that I am considering, the resources that prove meaningful, the companions that pass through, all these things which I hold so sacred, but for which there is no standard altar. We see the art that others have created out of the intensity of their experiences, and we praise it. But would we have answered the phone if the creators called? Maybe if we answered the phone, the art never would have been created. I guess that is the hardest part of it all—suspecting that my own legacy is better off, with no-one to walk with me on the journey.