Ten Things, part six

Updates from my body, spirit, and brain

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A song I’m loving:

A familiar portal, 35mm film

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5

TEN THINGS, PART SIX

1. Discipline is hard for me to find in times of challenge, whether the challenge is in my heart or my home or one I’m watching unfold on the tiny screen that is my phone. It feels easier to wallow or numb out than it does to stay focused, to reign in my commitments, to keep to the task at hand. I looked up the definition of discipline, and the gist of it is, “training oneself to do something in a coded and habitual way.” And it led me to ask the question: What, exactly, am I training for? What, exactly, am I needing more training or practice in, and why? And, how might really knowing the answer to these questions aid in the practice of discipline, of effort, of Doing The Thing? How might asking this question when I’m struggling aid me in finding the next right thing to do? I believe the answer to why we do what we do changes, often, and getting clarity on it has been illuminating as I figure out how to keep going amid life’s constant pulls.

2. Yesterday, my husband and I took a walk downtown with our daughter. We stopped at a favorite thrift store and told her she could pick out a Christmas ornament from their display. Out of all the sweet options, she grabbed one, a half-broken wooden boy figure popping out of present, one of his eyes missing, his fake hair scraggly and the paint on his face entirely chipped. It was honestly terrifying, in my humble opinion, like something out of a bad dream. She looked up at me and said with a smile, “how ‘bout this one?” I started cracking up in the middle of the store, tears collecting in my eyes. I want to keep putting myself in the way of people who can find what many of us consider repulsive and still say, this deserves a good home. I want to keep finding people who can grab one person’s garbage and see its potential. I want to keep noticing what I might normally overlook. I want to laugh, from the very center of my belly.

3. After four years of marriage, I still feel very strange using the word Husband. Something about the word irks me. Maybe it’s the traditional tone of it; maybe it’s the stereotypical role or way of relating we assume the word Husband comes with; maybe it’s the assumptions we make about Husbands; maybe it’s the desire to stay distant from narratives I’ve been fed about what it means to be married, to be partnered with a man, to be partaking in a handed-down life set-up. I usually call T my partner, even though we are married, perhaps to stay rooted to what our relationship really is: a partnership. I just noticed the distaste for the word Husband as I typed it in the last paragraph, and I think it’s powerful to take stock of when distaste arises with the words we use, the ways we associate with one another, the curiosity about our own responses to even the most mundane tidbits about ourselves and our lives.

4. Speaking of discipline: Lately I’ve been waking up, immediately grabbing my phone, and checking the news/updates on what’s unfolding in Gaza. I know this isn’t “healthy” and isn’t best for my emotionality; I also know the impulse, the grief, the rage, and the desire to understand has been so strong that it feels impossible to look away, even before the sun rises, even before I see my own child’s face; I also know the privilege of choosing when to look and not look, and that privilege feels gross. I don’t want to look away, as though I am separate from what is unfolding. I also don't want to look so much that I dissociate from feeling. Typing this out, I am setting an intention to engage in a more monitored and paced way — not as a method of avoiding, but as a method of staying with my ability to truly digest and take in what I’m witnessing, to let it change me. We talk so often about phone boundaries, yet I also have a lot of compassion for when it feels fucking difficult to look away, to pause, to create parameters for paying attention so we can actually respond to what we witness. I am working on it so I can stay in it.

5. There are streaks of salmon pink cutting across the light blue sky right now as I look out my window from bed, where I’m writing to you from. It looks like marbled paint on a canvas. I just looked away from my screen and paused to take some breaths while I watched the pink get darker, deeper, the sky brightening and seeming to open up. Blackbirds glided across the landscape, from the left to the right and off to wherever they were headed. Sometimes, taking time to care for ourselves is this small, this ordinary, this quiet.

6. It is bizarre to experience deep healing alongside deep grief. I used to think it was one or the other — that I’d either be grieving or healing. Now, more than ever, I am feeling the truth of grief being an in-road to healing. And, my idea of healing has altered entirely; There’s truly nothing to fix or change anymore. There is just an ever-widening opening to be with all of it, just as it is, right now. And right now, it’s being with a lot of grief — and with that, a lot of aliveness.

“Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force.... It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled, and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from the soul.” — Francis Weller

7. Inspired by this writing prompt: Let Them Live. It’s Too Much. It Must End.

8. So many people are experiencing different kinds of pain right now. It isn’t easy to continuously break up with binaries, with This or That, with one person’s pain or another’s. Yet I can’t help but feel my own humanity widening when I choose to hold all of it as valid, as real. I can’t help but feel my own compassion grow when I don’t turn away from anyone’s pain, even if it is different from my own. I can’t help but believe we must find ways to stay with difference when we can — to not throw anyone away — to not turn against our own values, our own morals. My morals tell me not to throw anyone away; my morals tell me all humans have dignity, even when it has been thwarted by trauma fear, rage. My values tell me to cling to the dignity and humanity of everyone. My heart tells me it can hold it all, even when my anger tells me to shut people out. This isn’t as easy to practice as it is to type; typing it is a way of practicing it.

9. I’ve been thinking about what I shared last January, in this letter, about loneliness and a longing for more community. Nearly a year later, I still feel it. Something that has shifted, though, is an interior sense of companionship in ways I haven’t fully felt before. This inner sense of friendship and care is slowly making the task of cultivating new friendships feel a little less daunting, a little more doable. And tending to the parts of me that are still afraid of intimacy, afraid to let my guard down, afraid to be seen up close, feels like the kind of care that eventually leads to letting people in, even if it takes time. In 2024, I hope to make more space to keep building true relationality, to create new friendships, to do less alone, even when there are parts of me who still feel safer keeping people on the edges of me. If you have a hard time letting yourself be deeply seen by others, just know you are not alone, and it is never too late to practice.

10. I wrote this whole letter this morning before looking at my phone. That feels good, like momentum, like a reminder that we can notice what isn’t working and choose something different. That feels like hope. I am turning toward corners of hope wherever I can find them these days, and holding them close, and imagining them as a place from which bigger hopes can grow, out from close in, into all the pockets of the world desperate for hope right now. It isn’t everything but it is something. Isn’t that always true? May we keep finding the hope, the Something.

Thank you, as always, for reading — so grateful to hold you in mind as I write.

△ This wisdom amid turning 40, from Stephanie Danler

△ “I Love What Miriam Klein Stahl Is Doing” from Kate Schatz

△ A Year In Practice — a nourishing new book by Jacqueline Suskin

△ On emotional immaturity

△ Swaddling Clothes by Erin Boyle

△ I found this convo with Naomi Klein to be so grounding and insightful

△ I also appreciated these voices on finding compassion across difference

△ Don't forget to write

△ This moment, this open door, this space of pause —

Finding the openings where they are

With so much care,
Lisa