A Love Letter to Indie Bookstores.
Thank you for your love of books, of stories, of community.
Thank you for standing strong in the face of e-books and on-line selling.
Thank you for not only knowing what book I am trying to describe but offering another book I might like as well.
Thank you for being a third place for us to gather, allowing neighborhoods to thrive.
I love how you support writers, how you give them a platform to connect with their readers.
I love how you respect your customers by knowing us, knowing books and knowing the communities you are part of.
I love how when I walk into an indie bookstore anywhere in the world, my soul feels like it has come home.
Things are going good right now. Great even.
My almost 30-year marriage is strong.
Our daughters will both be done with college by this time next year and are making their way out into the world.
I love creating and holding space for my yoga students.
I am connected to my writing on a daily basis.
I’ve lost over 30 pounds and feel amazing and strong and my back keeps getting stronger every single day.
My best friend of over 30 years moved less than a half an hour away so we get to play whenever we want.
I have a beautiful community of women to lift me up toward my best self.
So, why is this there this sense of unease lurking at the corners of my life? This sense of don’t get too happy, too content because that’s when the rug will get pulled out from under you.
It happens. I know it happens. Loved ones die, marriages end, diagnoses are made.
It happens all the time so it’s only matter of time before it happens to me, so I better be prepared. Better be vigilant and not get too complacent or too smug in my life, in my joy.
The first time I heard Brené brown describe “foreboding joy” I felt chills. That’s me. I do that. all the time. Of course, I never connected it to vulnerability. I didn’t know that the antidote to it is gratitude.
Now, when I feel the shadow of foreboding joy hovering over me, I take a breath and practice gratitude.
I lean into the joy.
I make a conscious decision to choose joy in that moment.
Holding Space for all of Me.
When we gather in sacred circles, we hold space for each other.
We allow others to have their feelings without intruding on them with offers of tissues, or our own reactions to their feelings—even supportive responses.
This got me thinking about how I do or don’t hold space for myself.
I don’t hold space for myself when I keep myself so busy or so distracted or numb that I can’t feel what needs to be felt.
I don’t hold space for myself when I berate myself for falling short of my own high expectations.
I don’t hold space for myself when drink or eat my way out of loneliness or anxiety or anger.
I do hold space for myself when I have compassion when I have chosen to drink or eat my way out of an uncomfortable emotion.
I do hold space for myself when I ask for what I need rather than feeling resentful when my (unspoken) needs aren’t met.
I do hold space for myself when I make time for self-care through yoga, walking, meditation, writing, reading.
I hold space for myself when I allow myself to see and feel all that needs to be seen and felt rather than banishing it to the shadows.
I hold space for myself by inviting each guest in, welcoming each and every one.
the music of the wind.
Today I walked unplugged and listened to the breathings of my heart.
to the beauty of life that surrounds me.
When I was little, my fears were tangible things: tornados, house fire, being kidnapped, snakes. These things never happened but I was aware of them and knew that they frightened me.
As an adult, fear is a much more nebulous thing. Sure, I still have concrete fears but it’s the subconscious fears that trip me up. If you’ve ever taken any kind of therapy, read any self-help or spiritual book, you’ve probably heard that most of our challenges come from fear. Most negative emotions can be traced back to fear. Angry? Dig deeper to find what you’re afraid of and using anger to mask. Procrastinating? Pause and try to unearth what fear lies beneath the procrastination.
Our human brains are wired for fear. Our survival depends on it. Fear alerts us to the danger around us, triggering our fight or flight response. These days our fight or flight can be triggered due to the content state of stress we are under.
This is where yoga and writing come in for me. They allow me to track fear. They keep me grounded in the present where everything is okay. Yoga allows me to stay present to exactly what is happening in my body and in my mind. Writing allows me to stay present to what I’m really thinking and feeling beneath the surface.
Both yoga and writing do not permit me to hide. They require me to dive deep and that is where I discover the fear that is holding me back. Once I am aware of it, I can release it.
Once that happens my life expands. And I expand to fill it.
The Solace (and Necessity) of Walking.
I’ve started walking about three to four miles several times a week.
I take my dog, a podcast and head out either through our neighborhood or to the parks nearby. Walking has become my antidote to the constant barrage of awful news. I get outside, into the real world, away from the on-line world that feels like an echo chamber of doom. I step into the sunshine, into the fresh air, see the beautiful sky, the trees and feel a certain solace.
It reminds me that there is more going on than just what I see in the news or on-line.
So many writers are proponents of walking. Julia Cameron suggests walks as one of the tools for creative recovery.
Listening to my podcast doesn’t leave me free from all worldly engagements but it does leave me not quite as tethered to them.
It’s not surprising that writers are especially drawn to walks. I think it provides a necessary complement to all the sitting, to the stagnation we can begin to feel in our bodies and our minds.
Walking is helpful to literal digestion but think it also helps me digest emotions, news, idea. I digest what I am reading, what I am writing.
Not only that, but walking seems to stimulate our creative juices. According to a study from Stanford University found that walking led to more creative thinking than sitting did.
Exorcising my demons is exactly what it feels like. And that is both a solace and a necessity.
What If It Isn’t Up to Me?
Rachel Brathen talks honestly about her back pain and her struggles with blaming herself when it goes out every 3-4 months. This time it happened when she picked up her baby girl.When she saw her chiropractor he said that of course she had to pick up her baby and suggested that maybe her back going out or not going out wasn’t up to her.
If it’s not up to her then maybe it’s not up to me, either.
Maybe it’s not to me when my own back goes out.
Maybe it’s not up to me to make sure everyone is happy around me whether it’s my family, friends or students.
Up to me, me, me.
I hear those words and I feel I can take a deep breath for the first time ever.
What is up to me?
Surrender the need to fix and just be present to what is.
“Fear compass.” I heard this term on NPR this morning and it reverberated through my whole being like a tuning fork.
It got me thinking not only about fear as a compass, but any strong emotion. They all reveal something.
Envy reveals what I desire for myself.
Anger reveals where a boundary has been breached.
Fear reveals what is important to me.
Liz Gilbert’s suggestion to live life with curiosity rather than fear also resonates with me. Wonder becomes a door into and through fear.
I wonder if this agent is a good fit for my novel, instead of only focusing on if they will like it.
I wonder what happens in this next scene, instead of being paralyzed into writing nothing because I have no idea.
I wonder if I could be a yoga teacher, instead of letting anxiety about my looming empty nest crush me.
Wondering if I could combine writing with yoga led me to find my authentic voice and create a sacred space for students to find theirs.
So, it seems that fear points me in the direction of curiosity, leading me to live a creative life in awe of the wonder around and within me.
Where does fear point you?
When I First Heard about Columbine.
There are certain events that I will always remember where I was when I heard about them.
I was on the school bus when I heard about the death of John Lennon.
I was standing in the kitchen when a friend called to tell me about the (first) plane flying into the World Trade Center on 9/11.
I was in my bedroom, packing to fly out to my sister, when a nurse called to tell me that my brother-in-law had died from his injuries sustained in the car accident.
On April 20, 1999, I was on a pay phone at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico, attending my first ever writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg.
It had taken a lot of convincing on my husband’s part to get me to go. I objected that we couldn’t afford it, that even we could afford it there were better things to spend that money on, that I couldn’t leave him with girls for a whole week, that my oldest had to go to Kindergarten Round-up. My husband assured me that none of those excuses were actually based in reality, so I went.
Obviously, this was before cell phones, texting and FaceTime. I tried to call once a day from the pay phone. The work was intense. Because I was so secluded from the world, I dove deep into the process of writing, filling three entire notebooks in seven days.
On April 20, after I spoke with both of my daughters, my husband got back on the phone. I heard something in his voice. When I asked what was wrong, he didn’t want to tell me. He didn’t want to burden me with it, knowing that I was pretty much off the media grid and hadn’t yet heard. After some prodding he told me about the shooting at Columbine.
Even just hearing about it, without seeing the constant barrage of images on a TV, was chilling. As the news began to spread throughout the rest of the participants, a palpable heaviness descended on the repeat. That night the wind was intense at the base of the mountain. Natalie shared that Native Americans believe that wind like that is carrying spirits into the afterlife.
When I got to the airport a couple days later, the images were splashed over all the televisions. I remember watching the line of kids, hands on their heads walking out of the school and thinking it didn’t seem real. There was a subdued quality to the crowds of passengers huddle around the images.
My youngest remembers being on lockdown in kindergarten. A real lockdown, not a drill. She remembers hiding behind a desk and seeing the silhouette of a man slide past the window and she didn’t know if it was a police office or the bad guy.
Last month she ended up on lockdown again, this time up at Central Michigan University when a shooter was at -large. It turned out that he didn’t have a gun with him while on the run after shooting and killing his parents in his dorm.
Nobody knew how bad the carnage would be.
We didn’t know because we’ve seen how bad it has been.
I pray that the next life-changing event I remember will soon be the passage of sensible, national gun control.
Because we know how bad the carnage has been.
Shame on us for ever letting it happen again.