Power, Love, Courage, Wonder

I think it started the first time I saw my mother’s legs in stockings. I saw something she didn’t: she was glamorous. She could have been glamorous naked, pale and spotted, but because she believed she was…I don’t want to write ugly because I don’t actually know what was in her head…but I do know that she treated herself roughly, as I treat myself, skin rough from lack of attention, weight chart taped to the refrigerator with a picture of someone else—was it Christie Brinkley?—above as incentive.

Look like her. The one with whom I share no DNA. The one who has on more makeup than I will ever wear in my entire life, even during Halloween. I want to be perfect. Flawless.

What I saw was the gap between how my mother saw herself and the reality: she was stunning. And then I started seeing it everywhere: what people thought of themselves versus the reality I could see or feel. It’s like I was the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes, only opposite. I didn’t see people as naked—I saw them in all their splendor. 

Hold on. 

I guess I saw them naked. 

In The Emperor’s New Clothes, two weavers promise the emperor a new suit of clothes that they claim is invisible to those who are stupid, unfit for their positions. No one, including the emperor, then, wants to say they can’t see the clothes. It takes a child to state the obvious, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”

Now I know what I am saying.

We are most gorgeous when we are naked, and by naked I mean ourselves. When my mother pulled on her stockings to go to work or to a party, she also pulled on a tightness, a fear of being seen as not good enough; she pulled on a desire to be special, the best, to be in the spotlight. She also pulled on shame for these desires, a scolding voice that told her she was stupid, ugly, fat, dumb. 

You can be naked and wearing stockings if you wear them to please yourself, if you wear them because you love how they make you look, if you feel wonderful when you pull them on.

When you are a child of a mother you see as beautiful but who sees herself as not good enough, it’s easy to jump to the assumption that if the object of your adoration does not like herself, then you should not like yourself, either.

Note to self: you are not helping the world by trying to be better by trying to not be so yourself. Your daughter is watching. 

What I want to tell you is that today a friend wrote to me about something she had created, and I replied Power, Love, Courage, Wonder. I felt like the little kid in The Emperor’s New Clothes, crying out the truth of what I saw. 

When I compliment the writers I work with, many balk at my words. They fear I am praising them because they pay me, because I’m trying to be nice, trying to keep them believing in themselves.

 This is one reason I dread saying positive things about people and their work to their faces. It takes energy for me to say these things, and instead of the words landing like a seed in soft soil, it’s like I tried to play a cello with a hacksaw. It’s not pretty when people (say it! when I) can’t bear to listen to what is good and true about them and the things they do. It’s like Serena Williams trying to play tennis match with a goldfish.

The world is constantly trying to tell me how good I am, how true, how real, and I sit there and fight. I will be bad. I will be ugly. I will be a failure. I will be these things ahead of time so that I can judge myself before you can judge me. See? I can take myself down faster than you can.

My friend saw me the other day for the first time in a while and told me I am glowing. She said that these months at Spirit Hill have changed me, and they have. Living at the pace of nature is amazing. I don’t walk around smiling all the time: this morning the well emptied--perhaps because I forgot to shut off a hose that was filling a fountain--and so I couldn’t shower, couldn’t water the plants, but maybe smiling isn’t a true gauge of amazing.

In order to not go crazy here, I’m having to learn that I can’t make nature perfect. I can’t control the aphids and the gophers and growth and death. I can’t make nature look like a magazine. I can try. I can try to level off all the hydrangea bushes so they are all the same height, but after a while I have become an insane person with a pair of clippers, trying to make everything even.

Another friend gave me access to some long meditations, and I have been doing them every morning and night. I’ve been learning to pull my mind out of my body, cleaning out the old in order to experience the present and to lean towards the future instead of the past. Creating space in the body is incredibly liberating. Emptiness is not terrifying! It is so peaceful, so soft.

My body, my mind, Spirit Hill, COVID-19, social isolation, the bees fighting to stay alive on the surface of the pool. 

The bees. Every morning after I dive into the pool (totally disregarding, of course, the No Diving sign) I make the rounds and do bee rescue patrol. One side of the pool is edged by lavender, and the bees either fall into the water or think they can just drop in for a drink. I don’t know how they end up in the pool, usually on their backs, legs waving, but they’re there, and I soothe (Hi, Baby, hold on), scoop, and throw. Sometimes I misjudge and throw my handful of water and the bee straight into the hot tub that luckily, when it is off, is a cold tub. Then I have to get out and do a second rescue (Sorry, Baby, hold on). The bees seem like miracles after all I’ve read about their disappearance, and so each one feels like a treasure we desperately, as a planet, need. 

Yesterday a friend sent me a box of cookies. This was a surprise! Six different kinds of cookies delivered to me in the middle of the day!!

Oh, the kindness!!

It makes me teary just to write about it.

Power, Love, Courage, Wonder. 

I see you.