Wrapping up 2015 and setting intentions for 2016

Setting her Intention by Jessica Kantrowitz

My attempt to draw the Anjali Mudra. She is naked for aesthetic and symbolic reasons, and not at all because I don’t know how to draw clothes.

I’ve written about how Savasana, the meditation at the end of a class is one of my favorite things about yoga. Another of my favorite things is setting an intention. At the beginning of the class you place your hands, palms together, in front of your heart and decide what your intention is going to be for the class. You decide it yourself — the instructor never tells you what it should be. It can be anything you want: to be present, to strengthen your body, to connect with God, to let go of anxiety, or anything else you feel you need.

Your hands in front of your heart — Anjali Mudra — seal your intention. I’ve been doing it in other areas of my life, too, like before bed, sealing my intention to rest and not worry about the next day. Or on the way to work, sealing my intention to be focused and engaged. I’ve been doing it on a broader basis, as well, for years and even decades. It’s different from a to-do list or a list of New Year’s resolutions because it holds itself: You don’t have to do anything more once your intention is sealed in your heart. It’s not something you strive to accomplish. It’s more like turning in a particular direction so that your natural movement takes you where you’ve decided to go.

For me, for the last two years, this has had a lot to do with writing. The rest of this post is a summary of the last two years, my intentions and what has come of them. If you only have a few minutes, though, and want to skip to the action point of this post, here it is: What is your intention for the coming year? Is it different from last year? Take a few moments to sit with your eyes closed, hands together in front of your heart, to breathe deeply, and to consider what direction you want to turn for 2016. Set your intention, and then let go, trusting that you have placed it in your heart.

In May of 2014 I turned 40 and I set my intention to write. In a post entitled Forty: A preface I wrote:

I have some ideas, some thoughts I’d like to share, some stories I’d like to tell. I have some inklings and some convictions, some anecdotes and some parables, some bluntly factual reports and some metaphorical fictions.

They’re in me. I feel them brewing.

Ever since I was five or six I’ve wanted to be a writer. I still have stories from those days, mostly about cats and unicorns, with an overabundance of commas and adverbs. I’ve kept up my writing in various ways over the last thirty five years, through journaling, writing poems and short stories, several brief attempts to formulate novels and, most recently, blogging. I sent stories to literary journals in my late twenties, had a writing partner for a while in my early thirties. Yet I remember thinking, as early as college, that as much as I wanted to write, I didn’t have my stories yet — my life experience to draw on. I kept writing anyway. But I had this strong feeling that it wasn’t until I was forty that I was going to be able to write anything real. That feeling has stayed with me.

Three weeks ago I turned forty. And I feel it. It’s time.

For a while now I’ve been thinking about what Anne Lamott said in Bird by Bird:

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.

There are other people in my stories. Some haven’t behaved that well, and their bad behavior is part of my story. But, still, this doesn’t feel quite right to me. *I* haven’t behaved well in other people’s stories. And other people have blogs (and theoretical book deals) too. So I’ve been worried, not wanting to be unjust or to write to validate myself at another’s expense.

But then Glennon Melton posted this the other day:

When internet writers ask me for advice- one of the first things I tell them is: ”If you can avoid defending yourself for being human, you might have enough energy to keep writing. Don’t defend yourself, and don’t get your needs confused. You don’t need to be right- you just need to write.

So, I am going to write, knowing that I may not be right about everything, but knowing, too, that I have to write. “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer,” said Maya Angelou. “It sings because it has a song.”

I have a chronicle, a myth, a fable; I have a memoir and an apologue. I have a saga, a romance, a spiel; I have a scoop and a cliffhanger. I have a song.

After that post I started blogging more frequently and writing longer posts, more like essays than the brief observations I’d been posting before. And that year I wrote, among other things, a post entitled Things I’ve been wrong about for most of my life, part one. It was the processing of a difficult time in my life, and of a difficult relationship, and I needed Anne, Glennon, and Maya to help me know how to write it. To tell my stories. Not to be right, but to write. Not because I had an answer, but because I had a song.

On New Year’s Eve of 2014, I set my intentions for 2015:

My new year’s resolution this year is to mostly keep doing what I’ve been doing, because I think I’m on the right track. I will not be dieting because diets make you fatter, and I will not be hitting the gym — though I would love to, actually — because I have a bunch of little chronic injuries at the moment. The one big thing I want to do next I’ve already signed up for: A writer’s workshop through The Frederick Buechner Center at Princeton Seminary. I am really excited about it. It’s the first time I’ve spent money on my writing, the first time I’ve been to a conference in seven years, and the first time I’ve been to a seminary in nine years. Don’t tell Gordon-Conwell that I’m cheating on them with Princeton.

But the things that I want to focus on next year are the same things that I’ve been focusing on this year. Nothing new or particularly ambitious. But they work for me.

1) Be the best nanny and editor I can — focus on being present and paying attention.
2) Write weekly (I can’t swing daily right now, but I’m getting good at weekly).
3) Do yoga and bike when I can.
4) Keep seeing friends and family in person as well as connecting online.
5) Eat mostly healthy food and resist equally the temptations to eat too much and too little.
6) Look for ways to connect with God, and don’t be discouraged when I can’t find Him in the same places I used to.

To briefly touch on nos 1 and 3-6, I did those things mostly well, but not always. Being a good nanny got harder when I moved from a family with one little girl to one with three children under five. I felt like a good nanny a lot less. But I think I still mostly did my best, so that counts. I did yoga and biked when I could, but a knee injury slowed me down, and when my wheel broke at the end of the summer I made the difficult decision to pay down my debt and wait till the spring to get my bike fixed. I saw lots of friends in person, and stayed connected with many others online. I ate too many pastries when the winter got tough in February and March, but I started eating mostly healthy again in the spring. And I did keep turning my focus toward God, setting God as my intention and focus again and again throughout the year, even though that looked different in 2015 than it did in, say, 2006 when I was doing daily Bible readings and intercession-style praying. Prayer in 2015 looked more like a deep breath and lifting up a person, a thought, a worry, a hope, a fear, a praise, or simply gratitude to God.

Back to writing. Thirteen days after I’d set my New Year’s intentions, my friend Glennon shared Things I’ve been wrong about for most of my life, part one on her Momastery Facebook page, and 30,000 people read it. Thirty thousand people read about a time in my life when I’d felt isolated and alone in my confusion and struggle, and hundreds of them said, “Me, too.” Thirty thousand people read something I’d written, which is kind of more than I’d ever dreamed, except that in my dreams they were holding my book in their hands. My 12 year old self was impressed but confused when I told her about it. We hadn’t published a book, so were we a writer or not? The internet is a weird and wonderful place, I told her. You’ll get used to it; but not really.

For three weeks in a row there were blizzards Sunday into Monday.

At the end of January, 2015, it started snowing, and pretty much kept snowing all the way through February. For a couple of months most of my blog posts were about the weather and living through it in Boston:

The darkest night of the year

Florida: A true story

Boston in January

Self-talk

Of monster and men

Consider the birds of the air

Dear February

Before we move on from that topic, I would just like to add that there was so much snow in Boston last winter that it didn’t completely melt until July 14th. Here is the NPR article for proof.

On April 1st I moved on from the weather to write about something that had been weighing on my heart for a long time. Someone who disagreed with my essay asked me why I felt I had to write it, and I said: It wanted to be written, and I couldn’t write anything else until I did. Bake for them two went viral on a scale I never expected, and I have spent a lot of the rest of the year trying to figure out what that means for my writing career. Was this my big break or just a freak vicissitude of the internet? Where did I go from there? Was this a subject about which I had more to say? I processed with my writer friends, two of whom rolled up their sleeves and helped me wade through the 1500+ comments (thank you, Judi and Heather!!). I went to the writer’s workshop and was able to pose some of my questions to Rachel Held Evans, as well as other wonderful writers and editors.

by Denna Jones

Some of my questions had answers, and some of them still don’t. But one thing going viral taught me is that I don’t have much control over what happens next. All I can do is to keep writing whatever is on my heart. I’ve had posts I’m proud of only reach 100 people, and others gain traction and reach 500, 1000, or 15,000 (the latter was my June post about Sam and Anne Lamott). But I don’t get to decide which ones catch on. All I can do is keep writing what is in me, and keep being curious about where and for whom my writing might be relevant. Going viral didn’t lead to a book deal, but it did help to get noticed by editors at Think Christian and The Good Men Project, who published my Bake for them two piece and my Sam and Anne Lamott piece, respectively. (The Good Men Project also gave my piece the gorgeous artwork above.) And that, in turn, helped me to write a respectable author’s bio.

The answer to, “Do I have anything more to say on this subject?” turned out to be, yes, but really only three things. In my follow-up posts to Bake for them two I wrote about why we need to stop saying “love the sinner, hate the sin, about how my dad’s choice influenced my own, and, in answer to those who asked me why I as a Christian supported gay marriage and full inclusion of LGBT people into the body of Christ, my testimony.

In September and October, continuing to follow my intention, I took part in a six week writing contest for Mythgard Institute. This was pure fun — I got to write micro-fiction and even a poem, inspired by Tolkien-related prompts and specific word limits and guidelines. They are going to do it again next year if anyone would like to take part. I was completely surprised and honored to win the literary prize (judges’ choice) for my “minute mystery” and the popular prize (readers’ choice) for my poem. They will be a part of an ebook, available soon from Oloris Publishing. (My twelve year old self was much more impressed that we won an award for writing a story than she was by going viral for an essay. She still doesn’t get what an ebook is, but, honestly, I don’t either. A book with no pages? Maybe in another 29 years we will start to get the hang of things.)

I swung and missed a few times, too: I entered a poetry contest and another micro-fiction contest that I lost, and sent three or four article proposals to magazines that were turned down. But rejection letters are badges of honor, and proof that you are writing and moving forward. I also received the discouraging news that it was next to impossible to get a book of essays published unless you already had a successful book, or, “Unless you are Anne Lamott” as one editor told me. But that is good information, as well.

I have some ideas for where I’d like to go in 2016. But, since the best laid plans of mice and men “gang aft agley” and since “We live the given life, and not the planned” I am not focusing so much on specific goals or resolutions. Instead, I am setting the same intention I did back in May of 2014: To write. My friends Heather and Glennon shared with me this great TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, in which she wrestles with similar struggles, and comes to the same conclusion: Write. I probably won’t go viral again in 2016. I may not get a book deal, or publish another article, or win another contest. But I know what I will be doing, week after week: Paying attention to the world around me and then sitting in front of my computer trying to organize my thoughts and write them down.

Other intentions for 2016:

1) Be the best nanny and editor I can — focus on being present and paying attention.
2) Look for ways to actively work for racial justice.
3) Do yoga, bike and walk when I can.
4) Keep seeing friends and family in person as well as connecting online.
5) Eat mostly healthy food and resist equally the temptations to eat too much and too little.
6) Look for ways to connect with God, and don’t be discouraged when I can’t find Him in the same places I used to.
7) Keep breathing deeply, forgiving myself and others, and letting go of pain from the past.
8) Read books!
9) Go outside!
10) Take care of myself, even if that means saying no to things I really want to do, or that others really want me to do.

What about you? What are your intentions for 2016? Let me know in the comments. And thank you so much to all of you who have visited Ten Thousand Places this year, who have shared my posts, and especially to those who have left such thoughtful comments, even those that disagreed with me. Will, Brian, Meredith, Hope, Suzy, Juanita, Rachel, Soundtek, Somewhat Anonymous, Judith, David, Dawn, Mary, Linda, Elaine, SueAnn, Cindy, Liza, Michelle, Frodo, Beth, Debbie, Steve, Scarlett, Alethea, Julianne, Donna, Mike, Rachael, Monique, Olivia, amgregory, patiencewithquestions, joyfulmelody, Robyn, taracope, and everyone else who took the time to share, your words meant so much to me. I hope to see you back here next year.

Love,
Jessica

Homelessness and acts of kindness

Dec19

*Quick note about the snow: For those of you who are bothered by the snow falling on my blog, I apologize. To tell you the truth, I set it up several years ago and can’t figure out how to remove it. It only lasts through December. I love it, myself, but if you are having trouble reading the posts because of it, please send me an email at tenthousandplacesblog@gmail.com and I will send you the text of today’s post. Thanks!

Yesterday evening I smiled at and greeted a homeless man outside of CVS. He asked me to buy him a soda and I was so excited! Something I could actually do! (I usually say no, sorry to people who ask for money. It’s a complicated issue, and I know some people feel strongly about giving to whoever asks without judgement, but based on various experiences and trainings, my decision for now is to acknowledge people, look them in the eye and treat them like a human being, and say yes whenever they ask me to buy them food or a drink, but no to money.) Anyway, it was so fun to be able to say yes this time. I asked him what kind of soda he wanted, and then told him I was getting a flu shot so it might be a couple of minutes and he said, “That’s okay, no hurry.” I loved that our roles had reversed, that he was extending grace to me. I needed someone to tell me it was okay to be a little late. I’d been on time all week.

The painting I made at Common Art

*****
It’s actually not that hard to find food in Boston — there are churches and soup kitchens that serve hot meals, and several food pantries open throughout the week. I had a homeless friend a few years ago that I hung out with quite a bit, and he took me to a few meals, as well as some other services and activities. I still have a painting that I made at an Episcopal church that supplies materials and space every Wednesday for anyone who wants to participate. I kept whispering to my friend, “Is it okay for me to be here? I’m not homeless.” And he answered, “Yeah, it’s okay. It’s for everyone.” You could keep your painting or leave it with them and they would put it on display and/or for sale, and save the profits for you for when you returned. I kept mine, feeling it would be dishonest to have someone buy my piece thinking it was by a homeless person.

*****
I was homeless for a month, but not really. I had a lease signed for an apartment for October 1st, but the community where I’d lived for seven years had changed their guidelines and even though they didn’t have another tenant for my room for the month of September, I wasn’t welcome there anymore. I have tried for two years and three months to think of how to write those last two sentences truthfully without sounding judgmental and bitter. I don’t feel judgmental and bitter. I have done a lot of work on forgiving them and forgiving myself. But I think I must still be because it keeps coming out that way. I don’t want to write to judge people and to garner sympathy. I want to write to find the deeper truth of our common humanity. I want to say, look at us, we are all broken and doing the best we can, living on scraps of grace from one another.

But that September was a hard month. My things were in storage in the basement of the apartment where I’d live in October. One of the women in the community generously babysat my 10+ houseplants. If I hadn’t had a job in Boston I could have stayed with my parents in New Hampshire, but that would have been too far a commute. My best friend lived in Burlington, about 45 min to a 2 hour commute, depending on the vagaries of Boston’s rush hour. One of the families I babysat for had a guest room, but they could only offer it for a few scattered days that month; the other families might have offered if I’d asked, but they didn’t have space.

So I pieced together the different options, stayed in NH a few days, in Burlington a few, and with my local friends a few. I lived out of my trunk, and spent hours and hours in rush hour traffic. But of course I was never unsafe. I was never in danger of having to sleep outside or in my car. I had lots friends and family outside of Boston who would have taken me in, given me a couch if they didn’t have a bed. And I had a steady income and a signed lease, for which I’d written a check for first and last month’s rent plus a security deposit. Honestly, being able to write that check was a miracle. I can’t really explain it. I mean, I know I worked and people paid me and I deposited their checks, but I don’t know how I managed to set aside that much money. I never had before, and I haven’t since.

*****
It’s Saturday today and I’m tired. I’m up to a 35+ hour work week, which is the most I’ve worked in ten years. My health is somewhat better, but more what makes me able to do it is years of practice pacing myself, emotionally and physically, and knowing what I need on days off, which is often to be alone and do nothing, or just little things. And I’ve been paying down my debt from when I was sick a few years ago, and that’s necessary and feels good.

Still, I don’t know if I can keep up this pace indefinitely. I started volunteering at a homeless shelter at the same time that one of my nanny jobs added a shift, and it’s really good to be out in the world physically doing something, caring for kids and families that can’t pay me the top rate for a Boston nanny. It’s only two hours a week, but it’s hard, for many reasons.

I am doing it for now, but I’m praying and wondering if there might be a different way for me to serve at some point in the future. We’ll see. For now it’s going okay, putting one foot in front of the other, just doing the next thing that needs to be done. The thing that encourages me the most is that despite the busyness I’ve still been able to write and post something on the blog almost every week. The other stuff, the sodas, the volunteering, the Love Flash Mobs (I’ll get to that in a minute), that’s good to do, but I feel like Someone gave me a job description a while back, and that’s the priority for me: “Pay attention. Write what you see.” Do any of you have a job description written on your heart like that?

*****
I have a friend, Aimee Parrot, who is also a writer. Three years ago she came home to find that her husband and writing partner had taken his life. Actually it was two years, eleven months, and 29 days ago. This Monday, December 21st, will be the three year anniversary of that day. Aimee has started a Facebook page called Dispel the Darkness, to help us work together to bring light to those who are struggling. For the past 29 days, Dispel the Darkness has been doing 31 days of kindness, leading up to December 21st. Back in November Aimee wrote,

Today is the first day of the month leading up to the third anniversary of my husband’s death. He is gone, but so many are still struggling with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other diseases of the brain. For many, the world is a dark and threatening place. They feel there is no kindness. No light.

Will you join me? Starting today, and for each of the next 30 days leading up to December 21st — the shortest day of the year — I am going to do everything I can to spread light. I am going to be kind. Some of my acts of kindness may cost a few dollars, while others are free. I am going to start today by making a few kindness cards — just card stock with a few kind words and maybe a drawing — and leaving them for people who live in my apartment complex.

Every day, I will post a new idea for an act of kindness, and a video or image that demonstrates the importance of casting light into the darkness surrounding mental illness. If you are so inclined, please share. I want the coming month to be one that helps people who need it in a concrete way. The month will culminate with what I hope will be a massive, worldwide day of kindness on December 21st.

I meant to share this with you when it started, sorry, but there’s still a chance to be involved with Aimee’s worldwide day of kindness coming up on Monday. Do you know what? Aimee’s not asking anything of us. She’s offering us something. She’s showing us our own power. We have it in us to heal others. We have it in us to change someone’s life, and even to save it. You’re not just another cog in the machine, going about your day, working to pay the bills. You hold the light that another soul needs. Whether you follow Dispel the Darkness and share your act of kindness, or do it quietly on your own, you can be part of something bold and bright on Monday.

Coincidentally, and also miraculously, there is going to be another Love Flash Mob over at Momastery on Monday. As big as the other ones have been, this one looks like it will be even bigger. And what a big love flash mob means is that lots of regular non-millionaire people like you and me give small amounts, and because there are so many of us it becomes HUGE. Subscribe to Momastery and watch your email on Monday morning (or follow Momastery on Facebook), and watch the magic happen. I’ll be making my donation in honor of Aimee and Tony, and looking around for a way to show kindness to someone in person, too. After all, we’re all in this together, doing the best we can, giving each other scraps of grace. And that’s the best I can write about it all, at least for today.

Love,
Jessica

We must love one another or die

Dec9

Created with Microsoft Fresh Paint

This is the thought that has haunted me for months now, and has become more and more urgent as the primaries approach and things get more and more polarized: How can we listen to each other? Brilliant writers and theologians have done their best to parse and explain and preach, but I wonder who is really listening? Those who lean towards the left, towards what is called liberal or progressive theology and politics (I’m speaking as a Christian here) write essays and op-ed pieces which are shared by other left-leaning folks, and those who lean towards the right and what is called conservative theology and politics write and share essays and op-ed pieces that say the opposite things, and those are shared by other right-leaning folks. And the left gets left-er and the right gets right-er. But is anyone really listening to each other?

It’s hard, it’s really hard, I know, to stay open to people you disagree with. I want to block them all and unfriend them all, and live in a world where everyone makes what I call sense. It’s so reassuring to scroll through Facebook and Twitter and read posts and essays that support my views. But even if that were an acceptable way to live, it’s becoming destructive now, played out in America in truly dangerous ways.

I do think we have to stand up for what we believe in. I agree with my friend Laura Parrot Perry that we have to speak up loudly against injustice and racism and fear. Yes. And, I think we also need to be asking, Why? and How? Why are people afraid? If we assume that even those we disagree with are acting out of what they think is true and right, then why do they think that? What information or misinformation do they have that is making them think these things? And how can we address their fear and misunderstanding in a way that they may actually hear us? I just don’t think I’m changing anyone’s hearts and minds by posting article after article that supports what I believe. I think they are just blocking me, unfriending me, or tuning me out, as I am tempted to do with them. But how can I speak so that they will really listen? I don’t know, but it may start with listening myself.

Yesterday Jen Hatmaker joined many other Christian leaders in speaking out against Donald Trump and his statements about Muslims. I was grateful and proud that she took that stance, since I think many of her readers are more conservative than those of other writers I follow (like Rachel Held-Evans, Jonathan Merritt, John Pavolitz). And I was grateful, too, for the opportunity to read the comments. I would rather not have. But I settled myself down with a cup of tea and prayed to be able to set aside my own fear and anger and just listen. It was hard. But I learned a lot. I learned that many people think my views are ignorant and dangerous and ill-informed, just as I might think theirs are. I learned that there are rumors going around about Syrians that many believe, that they regularly rape young boys and that US soldiers have been commanded to overlook this out of political correctness. I already knew that people believed that most Muslims endorse violence and want to kill Christians and Americans, but I got to read some of the statistics that were being shared. It was really hard, but I’m glad I listened.

But now, I am frustrated with my own limitations, my big-picture mind that doesn’t hold on to details very well, my lack of energy to do much beyond working to pay the bills. I’m frustrated with my introversion that makes any kind of conversation challenging, much less impassioned debate. I’m frustrated by this bad cold that is fogging up my brain. I am frustrated by my lack of resources, that I don’t have the statistics on hand to counter what I believe to be false claims. I’m frustrated because I see what needs to be done next, but I don’t know how to do it.

I was reading comments several months ago on a Facebook post by Glennon Doyle Melton. I forget what the post was about (sorry, Glennon – it’s my big-picture brain), but I remember one of the comments was from an angry conservative who believed that all Muslims were violent and out to get us. And, somehow, Glennon’s sister Amanda and I managed to respond to that woman with gentleness, affirming her perspective and her value as a member of Glennon’s community, and also sharing what we knew about the peacefulness of most Muslims. I expected that either she wouldn’t reply, or that she would reply angrily. But she responded with gratitude. She had been expecting anger in response to her own anger, and our loving replies surprised her. And she actually heard us. She said she didn’t know that about Muslims, and she appreciated us telling her. She said she just never heard that perspective in her circles. Overwhelmed, I messaged Amanda, “Did you see that? LOVE WINS.” We saw each others’ humanity, and acknowledged that we were all trying to do the right thing, as best we could. And love won. Listening won. Theologian Paul Tillich said, “The first duty of love is to listen.”

So I know it’s possible. I’m just not sure how to do it on a larger scale. Of course, in one sense, it’s not possible on a larger scale, because it took that individual attention and love to make the difference. But there has to be a way to magnify it, because it’s only that love that can get us to listen to each other. What W. H. Auden wrote 76 years ago at the start of World War II is just as true now: “We must love one another or die.”

I really don’t think we have any hope in America unless we learn how to bridge the gap, to stop the polarization process, and to really listen to each other.

I think I and my fellow progressive Christians are really good at following Christ’s mandate to “love your enemies” when we see our enemies as foreigners, as people of other religions, as people different from us. But I think we have to take Jesus’ words and apply them to our fellow Americans, too. What if those Jesus is calling us to love are actually the people who hurt and anger us the most? What if the man who was beaten by robbers and left for dead is actually a conservative Christian, sporting a “Make America Great Again” cap? What would it look like for us to love that man, to succor him, to bind up his wounds, even though he stands for all that we despise? What would love like that mean?

I really don’t know the answer. I’m posting this in case someone else knows. Maybe I have one piece of the puzzle, and someone else can take it and fill in another piece. Wouldn’t that be just like the kingdom economy of Christ, who said that we need each other, every one of us, just like a body needs not just a head and hands but feet and ears, too? Maybe my big-picture brain needs to be complimented by people with detail-oriented brains.

What do you think? How can we listen to each other? How can we speak the truth and also love each other, be bold and gentle, confident and humble? How can we learn to love each other, before we all perish?

Love,
Jessica

Welcoming the dark

Dec7

Sunset at Arnold Arboretum

Sunset in Boston these days is at 4:12 pm. Today it finds me sitting on my couch finishing up an editing job, glancing now and then out my eastward facing window at the darkening sky. More than the cold and the snow, winter in New England is defined by me by these early sunsets. It’s still day by the clock, I still have two hours of work on work days and two hours till dinner on non-work days, and four hours after that till bedtime, but night has set in and the next six hours will be passed under artificial lights.

There is something called Seasonal Affective Disorder which means that the person becomes depressed in fall and winter, but I don’t know many people who aren’t affected by the encroaching darkness. It’s just harder to move about in the dark; even with all the lights on you can’t trick your body and spirit into thinking it’s light out. So I’ve found that it helps me to acknowledge the difference. I try to notice when the sun is setting, to take a moment to look out the window, say goodbye to the light, and welcome the darkness. Sometimes it’s just a brief glance and a deep breath, others I take the time to light a candle, say a prayer, or put my hands over my heart in anjali mudra, the gesture of greeting that is also how you set an intention in yoga. I would rather stay in sunlight, but since the night is here I welcome it, acknowledge the sadness and fear that accompany it, and set my intention to move through it as well as I can.

Anjali Mudra by Claudia Tremblay

Scraps of poems and passages help me, too. I’ll share a few of them here in case they are useful to you, too.

Steadily and continuously that process went on, till now, as he faced his enemies, he felt the interior loss which had attacked him at other stages of his pilgrimage grown into a final overwhelming desolation. He said to himself again, as he so often said, “This also is Thou,” for desolation as well as abundance was but a means of knowing That which was All.
~Charles Williams, War in Heaven

(Sometimes I say to myself simply, “This also is Thou.”)

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins

I love to think of those lines while watching a winter sunset.

Goodness is stronger than evil;
Love is stronger than hate;
Light is stronger than darkness;
Life is stronger than death;
Victory is ours through Him who loves us.
~Desmond Tutu

Light is stronger than darkness, even when it seems like the darkness is winning.

O holy night!
The stars are brightly shining
It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary soul rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
~Adolphe Adam

Gregory Boyle writes movingly about what it means for the soul to find its worth in his book Tattoos of the Heart.

The Welcoming Prayer
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today
because I know it’s for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons,
situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem,
approval and pleasure.
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation,
condition, person or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and
God’s action within. Amen.
~Father Thomas Keating

That’s a lot to let go of all at once; it helps me to just focus on one or two of those things at a time.

Do you have a ritual for welcoming the dark?

Love,
Jessica

On jealousy and the need to be special

Nov27

greendragoneye I had a relapse yesterday. It wasn’t depression or cancer, I didn’t get drunk after months of sobriety, but those are pretty good analogies to the way jealousy tries to take over and destroy. What happened was, well, two things. First, my family is getting together this weekend for our Thanksgiving celebration, and since I’ve had a really busy work schedule this month I decided to stay home alone Thanksgiving day to rest and get in some much needed introvert recharging time. So I chose to spend that day alone, because I like being alone.

But despite that very good logic, something happened when I looked on Facebook and saw all the pictures of friends and families gathering for meals. One picture in particular, of a group of friends of mine eating together, sent such a feeling of grief through me that I had to do a breathing exercise to recover. I knew those friends loved me, and I knew I would have been welcome at the table, and I knew that the very good reason that they hadn’t invited me was because I live several states away, but still it triggered that deep feeling of being left out, that feeling that has not only plagued me since I was a kid, but somehow defined me.

The other thing that happened was that Sarah Bessey commented on the post I wrote for her synchroblog, and instead of feeling excited and happy that she had read it and like it, I felt sad that she had read and commented on all 133 submissions. How can I be special if everyone else is special, too?? If you could somehow scan my brain, you would find that question etched into the deepest parts of it. If everyone is special, how can I be special? That’s not even what the word means, right? Just like something can’t be very unique, as I learned from the West Wing:

But the thing is, I believe exactly that. I believe we are all special, all unique, and all deeply loved. And I believe my own specialness, my own calling, does not lie in convincing others that I am more special, more unique, and more deserving of love, but in noticing and affirming the ways that others are unique, special, and loved. I believe the ways I am different from others are not as important as what I have in common with others.

A little while after Sarah commented on my blog she posted a few of her favourites (with a u because she’s Canadian 🙂 ) on her blog. Mine was not among them. And I had to have a little chat with myself. Listen, self, I said. You do not have to be told you are special all the time. And the times that you are told that — when a blog post goes viral, or your friends share and compliment a post, or you win a contest — those are not the things that define you and your writing. Those are nice things, those affirmations, but it’s not why you write. You write to bring the deep, scary things to light, to express as well you can your own struggles and perspective, not to show off how deep you are or how clever or how good a writer, but to know you are not alone, and to tell others that they are not alone. If you were so unique and special that no one could relate to your experiences, then no one would want to read what you wrote.

It has taken 41 years to get to the point where I believe that. And I mostly did, yesterday, after the breathing exercises and the firm but gentle self-talk. But there was still a part of me that felt left out and lonely, over-looked and unimportant. And then this morning Sarah posted the winning submission, the entry in the synchroblog that had most stuck with her, that she most wanted to share with her readers. It is an essay by Rachel Roth Tapling about her struggle with faith, with the Bible, with church and leadership, and it is gorgeous. It spoke to me; in fact, it did what great writing does, what I aim to do with my writing, it described my own experience in a way that helped me understand it better. It made me say, “Oh my gosh, me too!” It was healing. And as I read it and found healing in it, I also found the final piece of healing for yesterday’s relapse into jealousy. Because I realized Sarah had chosen this essay because it needed to be read — because I needed to read it. I realized that Sarah’s end goal, that Rachel’s end goal, and, ultimately, my own, is not to choose who is special and who is not, but to help us all to find healing, to find our way through the struggle and doubt and trauma back to Christ. And I absolutely agree with Sarah — Rachel did that best. You can read her wonderful essay here.

Friend, you are special. You are unique. You are loved. Just like me, just like everyone else. If you don’t believe me, here’s one of the only people I ever believe when he says it. If you want to, if you’re ready, listen to him singing this song and imagine it’s God singing it to you.

Love,
Jessica

Please be as weird as me

Nov21

Me dressed as a cat for Halloween

I talk to myself. It’s something I’ve inherited from my mother, who got it from her mother. Not long conversations, but little exclamations of external processing that keep me sane. Sometimes swear words, sometimes prayers, and sometimes just little expressions of how I’m feeling or what I’m thinking.

I also talk to inanimate objects. Things like alarm clocks and telephones are the obvious things to anthropomorphize: “Okay, okay, I’m awake!” or “I’ll be right there!” or, more often, “You know I never answer you, so why even try?” But when I am with kids, that’s when I feel free to let it all come out, being as silly as I want to be.

I’ve been five year old Arslan’s nanny since he was an infant, but about a year and a half ago ago he began to have mixed feelings about my habit. He and his older brother were swinging at a park, and I took their soccer ball, put it in one of the baby swings, and started pushing it.

“What are you doing?” Arslan asked.

“He was sad that everyone else got to swing, so I thought I’d give him a chance,” I said. His big brother thought that was funny, but Arslan said indignantly,

“Jessica!! Soccer balls can’t talk!”

“Sure they can,” I said. “Listen to him: ‘Thank you for pushing me, Jessica!'”

“That’s not the soccer ball, that’s you!”

As the week and months went on, Arslan and I played the “things talking” game off and on. Sometimes he played along, but sometimes he insisted that “things can’t talk, only people can talk.” I thought it was interesting, his desire to play imaginatively butting up against his desire for the world to have clear rules and delineations. I never pushed it if he seemed to be actually getting upset, just as with any kind of joking or imaginative play if a child asks for a clear answer about the way the world works — “But there aren’t dragons, really, right?” — I’ll tell the truth. No, as sad as it is, there are no dragons, really, and no unicorns. (About things like Santa Claus my answer is usually, “What do you think?” or “What did your parents tell you?”)

The other day when I picked up Arslan after school, as he was getting his things he told one of his friends,

“Guess what? My babysitter thinks everything talks.”

The other boy glanced at me and I smiled at him.

“Like she thinks windows talk, and shoes, and backpacks,” Arslan explained.

They laughed, and I said,

“Listen! The window is talking, and the backpack, too.” I put my ear to Arslan’s backpack and said in a high pitched voice, “Ooh, it’s so nice and warm here on Arslan’s back!”

They laughed, and I laughed and smiled, too, and said,

“Everything talks if you listen hard enough.”

Then another boy came over with his dad, and Arslan said to them,

“My babysitter thinks that everything talks!”

The dad laughed and said, “That’s so silly!”

I smiled at him, but I didn’t make the backpack talk. Suddenly, just for a moment, I felt like they were laughing at me, not with me.

Another dad came up with his daughter, and Arslan told him the same thing.

“Of course everything can talk!” the second dad replied. “Listen!” And he bent down and put his ear to his daughter’s jacket and told us, in a high pitched voice, what the jacket was saying.

***

A few weeks ago a Twitter user who calls herself Common White Girl tweeted, “‘Please be as weird as me, please be as weird as me, please be as weird as me’ ~me every time I meet someone.” It was liked and shared by thousands of people.

I think most of us can relate. Most of us feel a little weird (or a lot) and try to hide our weirdness. When you have, or work with, kids it can be harder to hide. And sometimes, even without kids, it slips out. I’m sure First Dad meant well, and probably didn’t even think about it, just laughed at something the kids were laughing at then went along with his life. But, oh, how wonderful to meet Second Dad, to be braced for more laughter and to find unexpected affirmation. Someone as weird as me! What a treat! It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s so nice. I hope that Second Dad could sense the gratitude in my smile.

I think there’s something deeper going on, though, than just some of us being weird and some of us not. First of all, I think we’re probably all weird, in our own ways. Finding other weird people just means finding people who are weird in that particular way that we are. The Enneagram divides personalities into nine types, or 18 subtypes; Myers-Briggs into 16. There are so many different ways of being. And it can be so hard sometimes to understand people who aren’t like us. It can be so easy to look at the ways people are different as flaws, to view them with suspicion. It can be easy to get together with people who are similar to ourselves and to look down on others who do things differently. If other people are weird, it helps us to feel normal.

Tina Fey wrote a wonderful essay, Tina Fey’s Rules of Improvisation That Will Change Your Life and Reduce Belly Fat. The number one rule of improv, she says, is to always say “yes” to your partner’s idea:

The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun,” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, “Freeze, I have a gun!” and you say, “The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!” then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.

Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you.

As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.” What kind of way is that to live?

Say yes! Isn’t that just what Second Dad did for me? And what a gift. What if we could take on that yes in our interactions with others. It doesn’t always happen in such an obvious way in real life. But when someone says something that to us seems dumb or weird (in a different way than we’re weird) or wacky, what if we tried assuming that there was something good in their perspective, something we could work with? In her essay Fourteen? Glennon Doyle talks about a man she met in the mental hospital who would only say numbers:

There was one man on our unit who spoke only in numbers. I ignored him at first . . . it’s hard to know what the appropriate response is to “Twenty-one ninety-six forty NINE?” But one day I decided to take a guess. “Fourteen?” I responded tentatively. I remember his face changing from empty to surprised to happy. Then back to empty, quickly. But I definitely saw happy, for a moment there. That taught me to try, at least once, to speak each person’s special language.

Maybe we’re all weird. Maybe the point of connection is not so much when we find another person who is weird like us, but when we acknowledge the validity, or even the beauty, of another person’s weirdness, even if it is different than our own.

In the intentional Christian community where I lived for seven years, there were many times when we failed to see that beauty in each other, when we made assumptions, and blamed each other, and struggled. But there were times, too, when weirdness turned into an opportunity to know each other more deeply and to love even when we did not understand. When instead of saying, “That’s silly,” or, “That doesn’t make sense,” or even, “That’s offensive,” we said, “We hear you. How can we help?” And those were the most beautiful times.

***

Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and let’s be weird together!