Settling more deeply into my new space/life, I'm moved to spend 2 1/2 delightful weeks gathering much of my web site writings
into a hard-copy manuscript that I send off to the agent who'd solicited me 8 years ago.
More and more deeply I settle into this delicious new space and into what seems like my equally delicious “new” life. The year of endless challenge and turmoil that began in March 2004 appears to have ended while I was moving and “making home” here through all of this March and much of April. It’s such a gentle, sweet relief to be surrounded by so much simple peace and stillness again. It was always possible to find such moments, such islands of calm even in the midst of those challenging times. Still, it feels quite different to be so awash in the quietness of a less upheaving season.
Walking in the mountains more often and for longer stretches again. The wildflowers continue to bloom but there are fewer of them around now. Wild brilliant red columbine was a new sighting this month. Also, some lovely pink morning glory-like flowers carpeting my little private meadow. And, on the trail, some delicate starburst tendriled white flowers that I don’t remember seeing there before. As the temperatures begin to climb, the wild grasses on the mountains are slowly turning to their summertime golden beige and tan. Most of the creeks along my paths are, because of the long hard rains this winter, still flowing. Such a treat to have water still running here in June! I even wandered back to my old neighborhood last night to sit by the side of one of my favorite creeks.
Slowly the wild birds in my new neighborhood are discovering my feeders. The hummingbirds came first, almost as soon as their feeder was hung. Of course the blue jays came almost immediately, too. Then, slowly, mocking birds, house finch, doves, phoebes, sparrows and, this morning, the first tufted titmouse. Nothing particularly exotic, but sweet company nonetheless.
I spent the first two weeks of May putting together a hard copy manuscript of all the musings, cards and stories from my webs site. It involved a lot of reformatting from how they had been stored in my computer files. A lot of proofreading and a good bit of re-editing of earlier pieces. The writing itself has taught me (over the past 5 1/2 years) that I can preserve the conversational flow I like while using shorter, less convoluted sentences. It was a delightful treat to be able to go back to those earlier pieces to make them more easily readable.
It was a slow and potentially tedious process but I just loved every minute of it. Even the work of making a table of contents “by hand” instead of using Microsoft Word to do it for me! I often seem to persist in making the slower more “I’ll do it myself” choice rather than taking the time to learn how to let the computer/software handle things more efficiently. My friend Barbara (my computer mentor and collaborator) shakes her head over this a lot.
Almost at the end of the project, I recast the whole document into double-spaced pages. When I realized that I’d just undone all my careful work on the hand-made table of contents, I was inconsolable. A plaintive call to Barbara brought her up to Ojai. After a long day of work in the world, she arrived here at dinnertime to teach me how to use Word to make a new table of contents. This was the only “icky” moment in the whole process. I couldn’t focus at all, felt overwhelmed by the input and just needed to give over the reins. Barbara, as always in such times, was willing to take over for me. I found it hard even to sit and watch her do the tweaking it all involved. I wandered in and out of the study feeling anxious and agitated. Barbara knew to let me be. She just continued to make the table happen. She even stayed beyond the time she’d set for leaving just to make sure it was completed. (She’s always amazing in just this way when I’m at the end of my rope!)
It took hours after she’d left for me to recover from the tumult that had been let loose inside me. As I calmed, I came to see that a good part of the tumult had not come just from the table of contents challenge. Rather it seemed a lot to do with the having to open up to include even such a close collaborator in what had been a two week long solitary process. It was utterly necessary and, at the same time, completely discombobulating!
I’d known all along that, when the manuscript was completed, I’d want to bless it ceremonially in circle with Barbara before sending it on its way. Were it not for her willingness to listen to the Grandmothers and keep gently nudgering me over the early years, I would never have started the web site. (And, she had to put up with a lot of very crabby, stubborn, resistant responses from me during those times.) Without the web site, I might never have gotten around to writing the tales for each of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards. Without the tales, no manuscript would even exist! All this notwithstanding, it was so agitating to need and to allow in the absolutely necessary help that was needed to complete the process.
After all these almost 10 years of collaborating with Barbara, I could–at least–not also have to feel agitated about receiving the generous gift of her help. I’ve learned that I can trust her to help only when and how she can. That when she stays longer than she meant to, I don’t have to pay a price for her decision. And, too, that she will always see things through to completion when she gets involved. Being able to feel and to trust all of this trusting is such an amazing thing in my life. Barbara’s gifts, willingness and persistence as a collaborator/mentor/being are what have made so much of this healing possible for me. The gratitude I feel to her and to the Grandmothers is enormous.
The very next night, we did do a beautiful ceremony together at her house. We blessed the manuscript itself and all the other parts of the package I would be sending the following morning. Part of our spontaneously evolving ceremony included my reading aloud the introduction that had come for the manuscript. Hearing what I’d written (with so much help from the Grandmothers) brought lots of tears and sometimes took my breath away. So much feeling and history had been condensed into those short pages.
When I came back home to seal the package, I found myself making a little blessings-from-the-Grandmothers pouch to include in it. An owl feather for the north/air and the thinking self; a shell for the south/water and the feeling self; a piece of sage for the earth/west and the embodied self and a piece of red lava rock for the east/fire and the spirit self. All the pieces came from my altars and went with a note about what they represented. All the parts of me involved in the tales. All the parts that I hoped the reader would bring to reading the tales. That night and the next morning before I went to the mailing service in town, I kept gathering the sealed package in my arms. I cradled it and rocked it and hugged it and kissed it as if it were a dear little live creature! I sent it forth to find its way in the world without me. And then, I let it go.
I’ve no idea of how long it will take for Debra (the agent) to get to and through it. I also have absolutely no idea if it will work for her as a possibility. Or, if she will see a way to use any part or parts of it. What I do know is that it was right that I waited all these years. That I waited to come to just that moment when it was absolutely right for me to create a manuscript. That I enjoyed and delighted in all the niggling and picky parts of the process as much as I enjoyed and delighted in the “more creative” part of writing the introduction. That all of it brought the same joy that the monthly little bits of writing have all through these past 5 1/2 years. That because I waited till it was “time,” none of it felt like “too much work.”
Now, I’m surrendered into the “between” time, the “not-knowing” time with no agenda and no urgency. I do know that if it isn’t right for Debra, I will find some way–with the Grandmothers help–to send it forth. For now, this is enough. In this between space, I’m hoping to gather all the monthly journal (Bulletin Board) columns, to begin to edit them for a second manuscript. And, I’m just going on with the simple, so far uncomplicated flow of my more ordinary new/old life.
A special bonus delight in all of this came when I made a single spaced formatted manuscript for me (and for Barbara and for my friend Carol). I tried, on my own, to use Microsoft Word to make a table of contents for this version. Voila! I’d osmosed enough, even coming and going as Barbara worked on the original one, to be able now to do one myself!
The manuscript on its way (May 18th), I began to wend my way back into the “world.” To make space for some in-person time with my four closest women friends. To re-emerge after being so long immersed in the relative solitude first of transplanting myself as I did the move and then of incubating as I did the manuscript. My small circle of close women friends always brings such nourishing intimacy, such deep resonance. Even when the combination of my time-outs/drop-outs and their schedules of work or travel make in-person time less available, we seem to hold the thread of connectedness firmly in our hearts. Sometimes the more easily arranged phone visits help, too.
Coming back to contact was an immersion of its own. Traveling the very next day to a magical retreat place in Big Sur with one friend for a weekend of celebrating her birthday. Then, the very next weekend, having my oldest friend from the East Coast here as a houseguest. Both of these 2 and 3 day times of non-stop being together came and went without my feeling even a shred of psychic claustrophobia. A claustrophobia that’s usually in the past been involved for me–to one degree or another–in such circumstances.
Somehow the ancient engrained psychic vigilance that I learned as a survival skill with my unpredictably erupting biological mother seems less always-at-the-ready. Without that pervasive undertone to any prolonged together time, I become much more able to simply flow in and out of closeness and separateness in a moment to moment way. No longer needing to be closely (if less than fully consciously) monitoring the emotional climate of the person I’m with. A monitoring that once seemed essential to feeling safe (with my mother) and then has lingered on in my psyche long after it served any real purpose.
The change seems far enough along for me to have rather cavalierly made plans to spend a week with one of my friends this August. We’ll share the driving to, and a hotel room in, Santa Fe. We’ll move as part of a cohort with all the others attending the annual Creativity and Madness Conference. All of us collecting continuing education credit that we each need to renew our licenses. This seems an enormous leap from what, till now, would have felt okay to contemplate. Yet, oddly, at the same time it doesn’t even feel like much of a stretch to imagine it!
All of this opening out seems to mirror and be mirrored in the move to my new home. I live, for the first time in over 22 years, in a physical space that affords easy access both to “civilization” (a short walk into town) and to the “wild places” (an equally short walk to a couple of favorite trails). It seems to be becoming much easier for me to be “in the world” without losing the fullness of staying in myself. My not-always-monitoring “wild” inside places can more happily travel with me anywhere I find myself. It’s all quite intriguing. The changes
notwithstanding, when these weekends-with-friend’s were over, the return to my solitude was incredibly welcomed and very juicy. It seems that even though being-with-another isn’t as taxing as it’s always subtly been, I still find the time in solitude much more inviting.
So much changes and so much stays the same!
Originally published June 2005
