Healer, heal thyself

My nervous system has been acting up. I’ve been giving it too much to do. Yesterday on the way home from Orange Theory I was in an accident. We’ve all been driving and wondered what we would do if someone just pulled out in front of us.  What I noticed when this actually did happen to me at a stoplight just outside of town is that a moment of your response time gets wasted in incredulity or confusion. Is someone’s car in front of me? Slam.

God bless the woman. She was on the phone when it happened, but she was cool and collected. At first, she was acting like it was my fault, so I was confused for a few minutes until a witness emerged who had seen the whole accident and confirmed what I had seen – I had a green light, she had a red light. She turned left on red directly into my lane as I was trying to go straight. I think we have all had to stop ourselves before from going on a red light, not on purpose, but because somehow one forgets for one instant that fundamental lesson – red means stop, green means go.

I was pretty calm during the accident and while waiting for the sheriff. It definitely helped that the witness pulled over and waited with me. It also helped that she had a guardian angel vibe. “Misty,” what a perfect name for an angel. She pulled her car up to mine and chatted with me while we waited for the Sheriff. I was so grateful that she stayed even though it was an inconvenience for her. It probably saved me thousands of dollars. In that sense I felt very protected. I could feel how having just worked out and having recently been with Marc gave me a different ability to be in the situation than I would have had under other circumstances.

But as the day wore on, and I cleaned the garage, and Jack came home, and I got good news from the body shop and bad news from the mechanic, I felt my nerves fraying. I was having to hold on to good behavior, as if part of me wanted to throw a temper tantrum, wanted to kick the dog, wanted to scream. There was a very active effort to say to that part, “We are not going to throw a tantrum,” “We are not going to kick the dog,” “We are not going to scream.” Jack’s questions seemed to come one after the other, constant questions about his video game and about dinner and about every conceivable subject. I was grateful for his sake that I was under control, and my heart surged with compassion for the children whose parents lose control in that moment, and I felt compassion also for the parents themselves, not supported by their communities, partners or their own mental health, for them to find the end of their ropes.

There are a series of herbs that we have been studying in my class called “adaptogens.” Plants like burdock and nettles that lower your stress response. When we studied them, I had a distanced reaction to them. Interested in them for other people’s benefit, noting all the people who I would like to prescribe adaptogens in my life. But yesterday I found myself rummaging the cabinets on my own behalf, don’t I have any nettles?

That’s the crux of all of this, isn’t it? We envision ourselves as helping others, but we can barely help ourselves. We have to trick ourselves into learning things that we really need for our own benefit. I want to believe that my toolkit is full, and in fairness it is a pretty impressive set of coping mechanisms, but some days remind me that I remain the person most in need of my own wisdom, my own tenderness, my own attention. Healer, heal thyself.

Thoughts from Mexico

A massive hickory at Maraica San Pancho, a divine resort in Nayarit, Mexico.

I am sitting on a balcony in San Pancho, Mexico. I can see the ocean from my chair. Three REALLY WEIRD birds that look something like chickens and something like small peacocks just marched by, our second interaction in the last few minutes. As they walk tiny lizards scurry out from their path. Someone is using a buzz saw, but if I listen carefully I can still hear the waves lapping the shore, like a bass note to the chorus.

I am under the boughs of a massive hickory tree, the oldest I have ever seen. Its boughs reach down around my room and hang below the balcony. It feels something akin to how I feel with Marc, sitting in the shade of his care. It is odd to think that a week ago I did not know this person at all, and this week he figures into all of my decisions. Some change is gradual but some is tectonic, reshaping the landscape in one instant. From this vantage point I wish I had had more anticipation for good things to happen in my life, though maybe that is what I felt last Friday, as I lay in the heated, rooftop pool at the Denver Sheraton, killing time before my panel. There was a sense of a ripeness but I had become impatient and needed to get out of my normal environment to find myself again.

Years ago, when Alexander and I were engaged I had this image of getting married barefoot under a giant tree. It wasn’t possible then, for various reasons. Now I am glad. It almost feels like a sacrilege to include Alexander in the sacred symbols of life. He told me once that I was not in his inner circle anymore. I found the comment childish and kind of silly, especially since I am the mother of his child, but I feel something like that toward him. I would use different words though. It is not about excluding him. He excludes himself by the person he chooses to be. Despite his meticulous praying, he does not honor what is holy, on the earth, or in woman, or in mothers, or in himself. He is fundamentally closed to life.

My people are those who are somehow finding a way to say “yes” to life, whatever their circumstances, opening into it, unfolding, becoming, surrendering. I can often identify them in one instant, one conversation, like a hidden tribe amongst all the people of this precious earth. The cleaning lady assigned to this room is one of them, the lady who works the self-checkout line at the grocery store back home, my college French professor, Greek by birth, quietly studying the Arabic alphabet taped above her desk. Sometimes there is a student in my office and I recognize them as one of my people, or a yoga teacher, or a friend of a friend. I wonder what thread is connecting us to one another, how we know one another when we see each other, a human epistemology.

I don’t think these are static categories. It is not that some people are in the flow, and some are not. We are all in the flow, but some of us are resisting it more than others. I was resisting for a long time, but didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. I was confusing agency and resistance. I could not have imagined how fundamentally out of control it feels to pick up one’s feet and be drawn forward by the current, to accept the pace that it takes, sometimes violent and rushing, other times gentle and barely perceptible. It is so much more socially acceptable to be moving quickly, it is easy to prefer it, to see it as better than the slower times, but it is all part of the flow.

Years ago, I dreamed of a mighty river. I was thrown from the boat and pulled underneath in a current. In the moment where I wanted to fear, I had a knowing: don’t resist, the river will bring you back to the surface when the time is right. I relaxed into the water. For years, I have been below the surface, thrust forward by this unknown force, becoming intimate with it. I don’t know if the God of my childhood exists, but I know the force of creation that beckons the bulbs in spring, the drives me to this damn laptop every day, that erupts in riotous colors in the fecundity of creation. I know something of that force, its insatiable need to birth something new, its quiet search for receptive vessels, the flirtatious way it returns again and again until embraced, its hushed whisper, drawing all things forward. Lifting my feet, I give myself to the current, feel again its mighty power, and prepare to be drawn under. I know, when the time is right, I will surface again.

Tiny family

My tiny family Thanksgiving 2022

Friday night, we went to the Christmas tree lighting in my hometown. My mom served dinner later than I expected, and we were all taking a leisurely pace at the house. I kept saying things like “we need to get ready to head downtown,” but everyone was acting like there was no reason to rush. By the time we finally left, the parking was a total nightmare. I’ve actually never had that much trouble parking in my hometown before. Things change.

As Jack and I were walking toward the tree, I noticed how slowly the families with small children had to walk. Jack and I moved quickly. Jack kept starting to run then looking back at me and saying “I don’t want to lose you.” He didn’t mean he was afraid of getting lost; he meant that I needed to run faster.

For once I did not feel jealous of all the happy (and not so happy) families. I enjoyed the pace at which Jack and I could move, nimbly, just the two of us. I enjoyed the intimacy of having only him to focus on. When Santa was doing the countdown until the Christmas tree lights would illuminate, Jack climbed into my arms. “My back hurts just looking at you,” my mother said. Even though he weighs well over fifty pounds, I am used to carrying him. He didn’t feel heavy and it didn’t feel like a strain to hold him for a few minutes. It was a pleasure. We counted down together. Then, after the lights came on, he put both hands on my cheeks, he turned my head, so my ear was next to his mouth, and he sang quietly “Merry, merry, merry Christmas mommy,” into my ear with an innocence that might never be repeated. Time stood still.

The Christmas tree lighting was the last thing that we did as a family, in 2018, before Jack’s dad left. I had felt discomfort as the day approached, fearing that I would again feel an absence, the absence of a partner, of a “real” family, of Alexander. Instead, when the day came, it felt whole and perfect just as it was. Jack and I have built something just the two of us. While I have the sense that this will be the last year that he and I will be doing these rituals alone, I feel less grief over the partner and children that are not here yet. I love the simplicity of my tiny family.