“Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light,
so when we are in sorrow,
then this light is nearest of all to us.”
Meister Eckhart

Dear Reader,

You may have saved my life.

I will explain. But first, a story. When I was in grammar school, I used to take piano lessons and practice each morning. The music building was on the lower part of campus with the high school separating me from my classroom. My mother and I would leave our Sonoma county home in the dark, and she would drop me off with my satchel and music at my Marin county school. Sometimes she would use the restroom in one of the nearby high school buildings before getting a few hours of independent time.

One day when she picked me up, she showed me a letter she found in the hallway. Handwritten on binder paper, I have no memory of the contents, but I do remember what she said after I read it: this is why you should never write.

In the generosity of time, I think she meant don’t write anything you wouldn’t want a stranger to read, but that is not what I heard at the time.

More on this later.

*

No one knows for sure, but it feels like we may be emerging from this pandemic both in body and in spirit. In spite of the fact that people are actively getting ill and dying here (and blaming both on the vaccine), it feels like it. I hope so.

Now that the baking Ohio heat is finally receding, I look around at what we have created and have yet to create. Ideas mid-thought juxtaposed with how much has been done in a year plus. But more, I think about the journey of our souls during these months in a new place. The journey that happens when we are alone, looking inward. The journey that happens when we are a bit more awake, because everything is new.

Following this line of thinking, I can tell you that I know G far less today than I did when we arrived here. She keeps stepping into the soul space that she sought in her imaginings. As Meister Eckhart also wrote, “when the soul wants to experience something, she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.” Somehow, G knows how to manifest her vision. A vision I cannot begin to understand. For years I have said: I do not understand, but I support you nonetheless. I support you blindly, intuitively, because I believe in you.

[And not said: because I wish someone had done the same for me. We always give what we wish we had received. My bounty was in what my mother lacked, and in the generosity of time I see what bounty that was.]

I know G wishes I understood more of how she works inside. I do, too.

As a mother, I fell in love with loving and caring for someone, and in so doing, I fell in love with change itself. And in so doing, one day I woke up alone.

This is not as bad as it sounds.

I have been returned to myself. I have received the space and freedom to uncover parts of myself that were hidden and afraid.

I have loved and lost and loved again. The one I’ve loved again? Me. I am vastly kinder, gentler, more tender and compassionate with myself than ever before.

*

A bit more background. My life launch recipe included a few defining features. One, parents who gave birth to me, their first and only child, in their forties, in 1969. My mother said she was a circus attraction in the Modesto California maternity ward.

A consequence of this is that none of their closest friends had children anywhere near my age. In my earliest years, my only living grandparent, my mother’s mother, already was dying, one stroke at a time until the fatal one, when I was four.

Then we went to England, and when we returned, I stopped going to school in my hometown. School friends were forty-five minutes away. A long distance phone call that my parents had to approve. Next was boarding school, three and half hours from home. Also a long distance phone call even to reach my parents, but they said I could call anytime. Even collect, if need be. Then college, three thousand miles away.

The consequence of my schooling being far from where we lived is that I made very few connections in our town. Even on holiday, I spent little time in the one home my parents owned from the mid-1960s until both of their deaths. While I went places, our house was always there. (This may be why I yearn for home, any home, with the greatest longing of all.)

Another consequence of all of this is that I have friends far and wide. All over the world.

But never next door.

Many of them would be there for me if I asked, but that is such a hard thing to do, to say: I need you.

I found myself weighing too much at times last year. Too much to ask a friend to carry. Especially when I am notoriously the bringer of light. It was eerie to have my therapist say I hope you have friends, and my friends say I hope you have a therapist.

Both consciously and unconsciously, I believe my mother prepared me for death from the beginning. I watched her mother die and was in the house when she took her last breath (although they promptly whisked me away, and I have spent a lifetime trying to understand what happened that day). I watched my mother grieve like it was the end of the world for many moons. She said her mother told her she would never die.

She did the opposite, I suppose, even openly considering her own death as a way of saving our family from her sadness. She actively—even aggressively at times—encouraged my independence.

One of the little quiet hidden parts of me emerging recently would say: too soon.

With the generosity of time, I see she may have been trying to save me the pain of losing her.

For the past seven years since she left, she did.

*

Recently I reconnected with an old friend. I have been reading your writing… She started.

I think it may have saved my life, I interrupted.

I still wonder what she was going to say next. But like many good conversations with true friends, she guided me to my own answers, to insights I needed help to tease out. Writing and K-drama, I half-joked as I walked the puppy (another savior). I have been so alone.

On the I/E cusp of the Myers Briggs introvert/extrovert scale, I titrate as I go along: my answer to the blues is to do something for someone else and push myself into the “E”; my answer to over-stimulation is to retreat, soften and expand into the space of the “I.”

For a long time the latter is where and how I restored myself as a mother. It is where and when I wrote. Words collected in scrapbooks that were put on a shelf that no one read. Words written to an imaginary G that was an extension of me; words I wanted to receive as a young mother trying to make sense of parenting; words that kept me from repeating unhealthy patterns of the past. Words that revealed me to me.

You should never write.

I closed the fabric-covered binders with ribbons I hand-sewed to the edge, a surrogate lock.

But about a dozen years ago, mid-way through Natalie Goldman’s Writing the Bones, I recognized my need to write more honestly, unabashedly, bravely. Unedited. Following her suggestion, I got a basic one-subject notebook and wrote the story of my breaking heart, our fracturing life, my latent desires. The inner truths of how it all felt. This wasn’t entirely new. I had been scribbling these truths for years, but they were hidden on scraps of paper, written as neatly as possible, tucked away in treasure boxes.

Scattered for my protection.

The one-subject notebook was the beginning of putting it all in one place, and in a way owning my whole self. It was also about not being precious with neatness, mistakes, starting a fresh page. I am about to start notebook 25. I have told G to burn them if I don’t first. They house, release and transmute my pain as the written word always has.

Writing is private.

*

Almost exactly five years ago, I went to a day-long writing workshop with the pure goal of meeting Elizabeth Berg, the author whose stories had nurtured me for years. Eight of us met for the first time at the New England home of one of the attendees. After several prompts and exercises—including walking around the village not far from Boston with a detailed observer’s eye—we gathered around the dining table and read our last prompt aloud.

I remember writing my piece at a coffee shop. Stopping and starting. Trying to use Elizabeth’s input and apply her magical flair to my words. At a point I gave up, started a new page, and wrote my heart in the same language I had been using for years, writing to myself and to a projected G of my imaginings.

Work I never shared. Work I never read aloud.

This time, I truly couldn’t. Half way through paragraph four, I found myself choked up, and by paragraph seven I could not speak at all. Flooded, I passed my words to the person next to me who finished reading them for me.

Elizabeth said two things: that is your voice.

And: put it out there.

This prompt was the first thing I posted in my new blog [ https://whereiendandshebegins.com/2016/11/06/adding-second-blog-page/ ] although I post-dated several previous pieces to fit the timeline of their conception.

While I did put my writing out in the universe, I gave it no push. I was not on social media at the time and was terrified merely launching the site.

*

Reflecting on what I have shared thus far, I acknowledge that I did write, before this. And I did put it out there. I used to write long letters to family and friends. When G was born, we created a website with photos and narration. When G and I went on our giant road trip, I posted photos and narration periodically. Again, to friends and family. Curated and codified. A one-way discourse from our travels. My mother would have approved.

Maybe it was the Ohio Project. Maybe it was the pandemic. Maybe it was the extremity of the emotional solitude. Maybe it was a dose of greater bravery. I do not know, but at some point things shifted, and I learned about having a reader.

I have begun to wonder about all of the writers in the world who have hit “send” on their words. About the fine artists who take their oils out of the studio and into the gallery. About the courage it takes to give and receive as a creative person.

The vulnerability and fear of judgment. The doubt and insecurity. The desire to hide under a rock, to “un-send.”

Followed by this filament of recognition, like a spark catching paper and spreading into flame.

It is not about being read so much as it is about discovering I have said something that has meaning to someone else.

Not the flame, but the warmth produced by it.

I did that? I can do that? I can reach someone else through this portal that my inner-critic calls so very selfish?

The idea that writing my heart warms someone else is nothing short of a miracle to me. The idea that my words might somehow reach another soul looking inward, and offer a flash of clarity, is a consequence of freeing my writing to the world that I never expected. This makes me feel small, humble, in awe. All in the best possible way. Maybe, in this exchange, we truly are all feathers touching the great universal bubble of existence.

If I had not been so alone, I may not have had the need or found the space to write, to speak from this place. I never would have known that we could reach each other like this. In some ancient way, I am answering questions I have been asking my whole life: can we speak, soul to soul? Can we reach each other’s truest essence? Can we talk of our discoveries? Can we share our despair and our hope? Can we hold each other, somehow, as we walk our own unique paths, and in this holding, find greater ease?

I am hearing: yes. And this answer fills me with light, with possibility, with life.

And so, possibly, hopefully, promising-ly nearing a break from this pandemic, we walk onward, carrying what we have uncovered in the quiet of separation, in the forced isolation.

On the balance beam of I / E, I feel fear and thrill. A desire to stay internal and a desire to roam the world.

In Robert Macfarlane’s Underland, he describes exploring cities beneath our feet from catacombs to chambers to caves. And then he describes emerging from this darkness and seeing the light, the colors. His senses explode from being freed of deprivation. Not long ago it was the equinox, and it struck me more powerfully than ever that we were holding light and dark in equal measure. At the same time, I have been doing some work on embracing the shadow. “The gold is in the dark,” as Jung once said, inviting us into wholeness by embracing the things that have a strong charge, whether positive or negative. Curiously I also have been revisiting Internal Family Systems, and I am finding common threads between the two, real tools for holding inner space around triggering energies. IFS would say that it’s a “part” responding out of protection. Some fields of shadow study would say something is only triggering because it needs our attention. Different languages, similar work. Internal yet so deeply external, too.

Considering the gold in the dark, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Thank you for telling me that my words reached you, somehow, during the darkness of our separateness. Thank you for warming me in return.

Having spent most of my conscious life responding to my mother’s strict dictums with survival-honed reflexes—fight, fly, freeze, adhere or hide—I am uncovering what happens if I rise above her admonitions and stand on the shoulders of her fear. It has taken me a long time to say this, but I thank her, too, even for the pain.

I have begun to miss my parents in a fresh but settled way. Gone for so long now, the essence of what I miss, I am realizing, is distilled in the experience around my writing: a chance to open, to hold and be held, to be heard and to be received.

You could call it love.