The Path

This work, the work, it takes it’s toll. Searching now for words, sun on the back of my head as I sit on the couch, dappled leaves dance across the coffee table. It’s takes just the right music (thanks Tracy) and I am walking that road to find new words. So many levels to hold at once, but that’s not what bothers me.

Carrie said it best. It’s a fog. Sometimes the best kind of contact is so impactful, everything rearranges internally, and I walk around in a fog for days. The writing workshop was way more than a writing workshop. It’s becoming something deeper. A path is widening out before us that we can hardly see, but we know we signed up for this wholeheartedly. I can’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than with this circle of women.

We scale a mountain where each step in traverse, every problem resolved, affects all of us, and together we ascend, agreeably connected. It takes a village.

And yet. The body aches, perhaps from crying in a way that I seldom allow. And that’s good, right? But the kick is that healing is not pleasurable, not comfortable. Really uncomfortable and really satisfying all at once. And for some reason, because I was raised like everyone to expect clearly delineated feelings of good and bad, striving for the good feeling, rejecting the bad, it takes awhile to accept that there is sometimes a very good marriage between the unpleasurable and the good.

Surviving abuse is a gnarly business. Some places in me – hard as steel, stubborn as silence. That’s what got me through…and now, it takes skillful finesse to open those doors for all the best reasons.

Last night, the tyranny of terrible twos asleep upstairs, I sat alone, feeling into the fog, and then, suddenly, I heard it coming. Before I could run to the doorway, the earthquake rolled under me, the boom in the belly of the core far below came alive. If you live in California you always know it’s there. Terrifying to watch your favorite photograph of yourself thrown off the shelf. River screams through the monitor, “Mama, cared…cared!” I’m scared, too, and I leap the stairs, three at a time, to comfort my little one.

That lifts the fog – good when the outside movement matches the inside movement. I dream that I have twin girls and I search for hours to find the right names, study them like math equations – Talulah and Imogen.

This work, the writing of things I do not want to say, leaves me bereft of feeling this morning, as I push my husband off. Not a shred of pleasure. He says sorry. At my back, arms around me, “I want it to go the way you want it to go.”

In the shower, after small limbs make their way out the door with Daddy, I rest against the wall. Water helps. And I know I am ok. Where there were always empty lots of land, now seedlings sprout. I realize that it’s not his fault, and not only that, it’s my responsibility to find the pleasure that’s missing. So I do. And that makes me happy. The unpleasurable with the good - healing happens. No beginning, no end. Healing is as close and alive as my next breath – a spiral of lifeforce spreading into realms, a thousand directions. I’m on my way - always and continuously, devotedly, unabashedly, on the journey.