Creativity, Gathering, Cry, Cry, Cry

Yesterday I started crying. This is fine, cry, cry, cry, unless, say, your daughter is visiting and you have to try to explain what is happening.

I don’t know. I have this pressure. I feel like I’m about to give birth only there’s no baby. I’ve had this feeling before, lots of times. It makes me moody, excited, impatient, angry, depressed. I’ve had it now for days, weeks, maybe years. It’s like a clock being wound, around and around and around, no sense of tick tock tick tock, only silence. Or it’s like a bow being pulled back and back and back until it feels like it’s going to snap, 

So much waiting. The target nowhere in sight.

It’s such a lonely, troublesome feeling. 

It’s like a magic genie tells you that you’re going on an adventure and hands you a map, and you see it’s blank. 

What if I’m going nowhere?

One of the people I work with as a writing coach told me she thought she’d get so much more done if she weren’t so lazy. I asked what lazy looked like. She told me she lay around, read, watched movies. I think this person is spectacular, so interesting, so surprising, so lovely, so talented. 

I told her that sounded like a creative life, like gathering. I told her that her life supports her writing, that she is living just as she should. She’s allowing when she takes out judgement and lets the process happen.

I said this in part because I hope to god that what I do, wander around, look, take pictures, wait, is not laziness and is my own form of work.

I don’t want my gravestone to say LAZY. I also don’t want it to say SHE SURE COULD CLEAN A KITCHEN. 

I want it to say THANK YOU, or HI.

I want to say SHE DID IT.

What’s it? 

I don’t know!! That’s why I feel pregnant with no baby. Just swollen and uncomfortable. Potentially useless.

This time of being at home, this time of fear, of hope, of realizing all we did to the planet is finally in our masked faces, is a time of rebirth on so many levels. 

But here’s the thing: When you think of what it’s like for a baby to be born, you may realize that was the worst day of your life. You went from one world to another, and the transition was awful!, life-threatening. Your skull was squeezed so hard it might have changed shape for a while. You went from a place where you were the center of the world to a place of bright light, sharp objects, and hunger. 

I wrote about thresholds in my last post, and there’s good reason to hover, to try to change without actually taking the leap into the unknown. We walked through that door on day one, took that leap, and it really hurt!! We were an entirely different person, a baby out in the world, skin open to touch, a mouth hungry for breast. 

 What if we leap and hate who we become?! What if we hate what we do?!

Worse: what if nothing happens? What if we leap and fall on our face, the universe laughing at our arrogance, our hopes, our dreams?

What if there is nothing special about us? What if we are a plastic Easter egg with no candy inside?

 What if we are a song no one wants to dance to or that no one can even hear?

 What if we have nothing to offer the world?

Sometimes I think I am being punished for being who I am because I don’t have a partner. I think there is something so wrong with me that the universe can’t make a match. This is a terrible feeling. 

 But when I’m grounded and in my body, I know this isn’t true. I know I’m headed in the right direction, and before I can be loved, I have to love. 

I know I’m at Spirit Hill to start clean: seed, dirt, light, growth. Love the seed. Love the dirt. Love the light. Love the hands that till the soil. Love the water. Love the day. Love the table, the plate, the fork, the knife. 

 The feeling you are not enough.

Love it all until something happens, and then do it all over again.