Reflections on living a cantilevered life
small brave thing #226
Hello beautiful human,
One year ago I was beginning to explore ideas around collaboration and community within the context of An Inviting Space. Hardly knowing what I was about, moving by feel, I was just starting to reframe the ideas I had about what I was up to here, asking myself,
What if it’s not about what I create, but what I contribute to?
What if we’re part of a growing chorus?
What if the connections and conversations we have are exactly the point, in and of themselves?
What can we weave, together?
1.
As I like to repeat on occasion, this is An Inviting Space. Here, we have permission to try new shapes, create new words, and more or less make a bit of a mess. It’s intentionally open, radical and free in its parameters. But that doesn’t mean it’s raw. Generally, by the time this reflection gets to you it’s at least a little bit polished and formed because structural questions interest me. Also, I want you to be able to follow my train of thought even if it leaps to a new track.
Intentionally mixed metaphor. Stay with me.
People sometimes think writers sit down and the words flow just as they appear on this screen. I promise you that’s not the case. I like to say a writer is not the person who writes something down but the person who writes something down and then scribbles it out and says, This word is better. Here’s what we learn—and it’s not an easy lesson: we have to start somewhere. Behind the screen and behind the scene, this is the promise I make myself every time I sit at this desk, as I wrote it down a few mornings ago sitting in a parking lot in my Odyssey:
Just back to the car and to write it all down in whatever order until it is all written that is my promise to myself with these early drafts—be brave enough to write all the mess and let it be as messy as it needs to be.
2.
The parking lot was in Appleton, Wisconsin. Last week I had the very adult pleasure of taking my grown-up child out for breakfast. To sit across a table laden with coffee, eggs and orange juice and hear someone interesting and smart talk about their plans and ideas is a still-new phase of this parenthood journey for me. College is such an accelerated growth experience, you can drop a student off after winter break thinking you know something about where and who they are and a few weeks later it’s good to check in again. They may have changed. I wanted to listen.
I went to listen but listening is a hard assignment. To have two now grown children choosing their paths in the world offers me ample opportunity to reflect on my own choices. Who asks for that? When I was my kids’ ages I don’t think I knew how much I wanted a life like my mother’s: I wanted to be a homemaker, wife, mother and writer. To write my books and raise my kids on a quiet street somewhere, making bread from scratch, planting trees and vegetables. I can look at those years now and know there was real, experienced value that contributed meaningfully to neighborhood, community and beyond. I tried that life and made something of it for a while and…ultimately it maybe didn’t pan out for me as well as it has worked for her. But it certainly has led me to an interesting life.
Midwesterners, you hear me.
3.
My kid is just over half way through their sophomore year and for the first time, stepping onto campus this morning I had the physical, embodied sensation that I was coming to visit him in his place. He belongs here I realized. In this community I am not part of. Away from me.
My next thought was I don’t have a place. If you can picture it, I’m a woman who lives in a floating house. Unmoored, unrooted.
This is simply facts: I have no kids in school. I have no church. I have very little professional identity, nor professional networks to lean on. The town I live in does not yet know me. I left the social and legal institution of marriage behind with no intention of going back. And now it is clear my kids are readying themselves to launch into the world and while I will always have the identity of mother, I will soon leave behind the day to day structure and shape of that domestic institution as well.
By hook and crook, one choice after another, whether I meant to or not, I have freed myself of most institutional supports, constraints and identities. I am a woman with very little definition except what I create for myself. It’s an exhilarating opportunity. A bit terrifying also.
4.
As is often true, Emily Dickinson has something interesting to say.
I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know! How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog – To tell one’s name – the livelong June – To an admiring Bog!
I’ve always loved this funny little poem, but I’ve never before focused on the last line and that image of the admiring bog. It could be heard as a bit of an insult, I suppose, to those followers of the famous. To reduce the stadium audiences of the very famous to a bog feels like Emily’s giving us a wry, possibly superior, smile.
I don’t hear it as superior this morning just acknowledging something I’ve long believed: we can only admire what we recognize and, to some degree, comprehend. We can only award what seems excellent to us, but what seems excellent is often already yesterday’s news, we just don’t know it.
I have a feeling that right now we need people to be brave and to push beyond acclaim and recognition. Move by feel. Steer by gut. Make something that maybe makes no sense but feels right. See where the path leads.
My one year ago self asks me to consider again: What if it’s not about what we create but what we contribute to? I’m interested in contributing to something. And I’m interested in stretching myself into new shapes and question marks in order to do so, even if not immediately familiar. And I’m interested in what can happen in conversation between you and me, reader, as we forget our “somebody-ness” in the flow of co-creation, existing right now in the tension between communion and new. One year later, out of the back and forth between us, the new word weavery appeared… it feels like a word we may need right now.
What does weavery sound like to you?
Where does it lead you?
If you want a definition, let’s start here: it’s the opposite of thievery. In the words of Johnny Cash at Fulsom Prison, How’s that strike you, Bob?
5.
I sat in my Odyssey in the parking lot in Appleton, Wisconsin. I made choices to get here, I thought to myself. Step by step I can trace each one.
Maybe you’ve had those moments too?
And then the next morning I woke up and thought, what if that’s the wrong way to phrase it? What if, instead of focusing on the choices I did or didn’t make, I could understand that this life chose me.
Imagine it: again and again, when faced with a fork in the road, something nudges us in one direction or the other. Something internal, some future self or the Universe or the threads and hands of Fate.
However it works, what would it shift to believe that instead of thinky-think-thinking our way to this moment, we were led?
That’s not a new idea for many of us I know, but in our secular, radically and rugged individualist society it feels a little new. To believe this life chose me is a revolution and revelation. I’ve repeated it out loud a few times to myself—maybe you want to try it and see how it feels?
This life chose me.
We don’t have to understand it.
We simply have to be ready each day.
6.
When you’re writing a story, however long or short, whatever the form, something has to shift by the end.
This life chose me. And I want to be ready for it. What’s coming my way these days is gardens, glamours, small trinkets and baubles. New shoes and earrings, dressing up a little bit to enter this room and write (something I did not think I would ever do). I’m making dates with myself and keeping my ten-minutes-a-day resolutions. I’m writing stories with unreliable narrators because all narrators are unreliable (except maybe Death in The Book Thief—that’s the only example of a narrator who might be completely reliable that I can think of). I’m building an imaginary bookshop out of thin air and passion, and trying new recipes for curries and cakes and writing these reflections, week by week, that hinge and swing wild and wide…and somehow still hang together, odd contraptions, rickety decks and bridges that I hope bring us a little farther out, peering into the mist, cantilevered and suspended out over the dark deep waters.
xo
S
A Celebration Corner for sharing the Good Goodies
I’m shuffling things around a bit at Bakers Dozen, my imaginary bookshop, as usual, and we’re still open for a visit. If you find something on the admittedly rather random and jumbled shelves, I get a small percentage that still adds up. And thanks to my host, bookshop.org, your purchases there even outside of my little spot will support independent bookstores and help them continue to thrive.
And remember, I’m always looking for recommendations to add to the community shelf. What are you reading? What books do you love so much you go back to them, time after time? Drop a line and share. What’s more fun than talking about good books?
As someone who just hung a Ukrainian flag next to the LGBTQ windsocks on my front porch, this speaks to me.
“Words are man's first and most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together, and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds” - Aldous Huxley (writer’s note: not loving his erasure of half the population here but with a few mental gymnastics we’re all too practiced at, I can get with what he’s saying)
I believe our world needs new stories. what if those stories lie curled within us like seeds? This is An Inviting Space to experience where and how we might discover, recover and nurture the secret, magical gardens of soul day by day. Starting where we are, as we are.
(Not quite ready to subscribe, but want to show a little gratitude? You can always buy me a coffee.)
Your attention and time are the true gifts. Thank you. xoS
