Eyes of Love

I went to the ocean today because the wind was picking up, and I wanted to feel the force of it. I wanted to see the birds and the waves and to look out at the horizon and see the line fade off to sea and sky.

I want to see past the things I know. I have lived my life a certain way for the last 54 years, and in two months I will be 55, and I want to change. The thing is, how do you change when you aren’t sure what you want to become? I do know I want to be less reactive and more loving, less predictable and more spontaneous. More willing to sit in the seat of joy and be okay with imperfection or flat-out disaster or a rapidly-aging face and body.

I have been doing more Write or Die sessions lately and I am noticing a theme. It’s like the people I work with all hold a firefly in their fisted hand, and they are unwilling to let the light shine. They are afraid of the light, that it won’t be enough or that it will be somehow wrong or painful or silly or ugly or too bright. The thing is, this light is all we have, and if we don’t share it, we’ve blown our one chance to fully show up in this life.

My mom used to do this thing with her right hand: she’d wrap her fingers around her thumb and squeeze as though she was trying to suffocate it, just as you’d clamp your hand over a mouth to keep someone quiet. I used to take her hand in mine and open up one finger after another, as if by freeing my mother’s thumb, I would also free her and she would finally be the happy mother I knew existed under the worried surface of not enough money or time.

I want my daughter to be able to look into my eyes and see herself reflected in love. I want my eyes to be clear, a church for my daughter to step into so she can see that she is safe because her mother is also safe.

It has occurred to me recently that more than anything, I needed my mother to look at me in love, not in distraction, not in pain, not as a drowning person who needed someone to save her. I think my nervous system would operate at a more gentle level if it wasn’t programmed to think it had to take care of both my body and my mother’s body.

The thing about putting on your oxygen mask before you put it on your child is a real thing. Our brains reward us when we worry. Our brains tell us we are doing a good job, that worrying is a form of control, and that as long as we worry, everything will be okay.

But looking into the eyes of worry is no picnic.

What I want to tell you is that I am so happy I am on the Vineyard. I am trying to write things that feel out of my reach. Today I sat in a coffee shop for three hours and wrote two paragraphs. It feels as though words are bricks instead of river.

It feels as though everything matters.

Tomorrow a handful of people arrive to do a workshop with me.

I am not sure what will happen next.