Conversations With an Empty Chair, #365StrongStories 53

One Friday, my Mom and I spent the day in the kitchen talking about a revolution.  Well, we were whispering about the stuff that eventually leads to revolution. We were talking about the state of the world and daring to examine our fears and entertain all the “what ifs?” What happens when we all find out that Al Gore has been right about the climate?  What happens when people really start to run out of water? How many links in the chain have to break before our global network of food distribution is disrupted? In what part of the psyche and the spirit should stories like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road reside?

It has been six years since my mother and I had the luxury of marinating on our 3 a.m. worries together. We lavished so much attention on hypothetical global crises and never spared a thought for the private tragedies that could be so much harder to bear.

We had no idea then that mom had a few hundred thousand minutes left to live. She’d be dead of a sudden heart attack by mid-summer and she’d never know if any our great big global fears would change our comfortable American lives.

Now that I sit alone at the same kitchen in 2016, I don’t have any clarity more clarity about the fate of western civilization. I’m not even sure have any more perspective on the unbearably brief and precious nature of an individual life. I still wish away time as I long for spring and pray that the tougher phases of childhood will pass quickly.

But then I dive deep into this line from Natalie Goldberg: “Give everything while you can.”

I think it’s easy to misread this as “do more!” After all, we live in a “lean in” and “manifest 6 figures in 30 days” kind of world. But I guess I have learned enough about mortality and personal tragedy to reframe these words into those that heal rather than strain.

That winter day in 2010, my mother and I didn’t leave the kitchen. We didn’t solve a single problem or even take the dog for a walk. We snuggled my new baby girl and we loved one another and we dared to be vulnerable and speak our truths. Though I cry as I type these words, it’s just because I am overcome with gratitude for knowing that on that particular day, we gave each other everything while we could.

Held by Earth, Air, Fire & Water - No Matter What, #365StrongStories 52

Thanks to taxes and a toddler, I’m working on three hours of sleep. It’s like being underwater and floating in the air and mired in mud and burning with delirium all at once.

When I put it that way, it almost sounds like a spiritual experience.

I’ve roamed across faiths and devotional practices for half my life. Finally, I’ve found myself in the hinterlands between the Catholicism of my childhood and the Mother Goddess dirt worship that I’ve picked up during the quest. Ultimately, my home is made at the crossroads. You might choose to see this as a symbol of the cross. But I’ve never found much solace or inspiration in that part of the Christ story. Give me a divine birth and miraculous healings, please. Give me the goddesses who guide the travelers’ way.

North, east, south, and west and the elements that resonate with each - that is where I always come back to. It’s the very essence of being alive as I understand it.

The earth is our very bones. The air is breath in our lungs. The fire is the spark of movement. And the water all the sweat, the tears, and the blood that wash us full of life.

In these years of mothering young children when I feel almost perpetually off balance with exhaustion and a poorly tended body and soul, I would tell you I’d lost track of these elemental marks of aliveness.

But as I drown and float and burn and feel so stuck, It seems that nothing could be further from the truth. Even when I’m sleepwalking through a Sunday, I’m held by these forces, by the energies that compel this world, these bodies, the collective spirit.

We're losers. We're divine. We're bizarre. We're boring., #365StrongStories 51

“Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.” I wasn’t the only one! When I heard this John Lennon quote sometime in my sophomore year of high school I was relieved to know that at least one other person lived the same sort of split existence. (And yes, this deepened the Beatles crush - even if it was 30 years late.)

Turns out, John and I don’t share some secret bond across time and space.

Unless you’ve reached enlightenment, every human on the planet suffers from some sort of epic inner conflict. And though “I’m brilliant! I’m shit!” is one of the more common examples, this sort of double consciousness cracks our psyches in all sorts of ways.

Columbia University graduate non-fiction program chair Phillip Lopate sees another brutal internal split that silences storytellers before they even begin. As he says:

The fledgling personal writer may be torn between two contrasting extremes:

a: “I am so weird that I could never tell on the page what is really secretly going on in my mind.”

b: “I am so boring, nothing ever happens to me out of the ordinary, so who would want to read about me?”

Both extremes are rooted in shame, and both reflect a lack of worldliness.

I’d love to say that I’ve outgrown my fraud/goddess complex, but I admit I’m still a human stuck in the middle. I also must admit that I still worry that my stories are too bizarre or hausfrau dull.

But somehow, I’ve learned to be grateful to my dualities - even when shifting between the poles makes me feel seasick. All my contradictions are turning out to be essential to telling a year’s worth of stories…

So the bad news is that we’re all embroiled in inner conflict. The good news is that we’re not alone. Please share one of your creative conflicts in the comments or tag me when you share a strong story about one of your contradictions!

Doubt and Annie D. by guest storyteller Suzi Banks Baum, #365StrongStories 50

I wake up almost every morning happy. I crank open my eyes to assess the weather, then turn to my prayer practice.  I tug on wool socks, light a candle because Rumi says, "learn to light the candle." I close my eyes again. This seals the deal on my internal climate. I can handle calamity. Though I have ridden out usual mothering storms and some complicated travails, today's stratospheric turmoil has rocked me. Caused solely by my college-aged son, who'd just spent 18 hours with us, who left at 7:30 AM because he wanted to get back to school to the library. Here I am, saying goodbye, again. He is not off to the military, not off to the fields. He is not off to the hunting grounds or climbing on to a horse or a camel or a tank. He is getting in to his little car and taking his clean laundry and going back to school. But my heart cracks anyway, because wherever the destination, it is away and that changes me.

So I find myself in a curiously quiet house, no alternate sound track running in another room. The girl child is off on an arctic adventure in Manhattan. After 22 years of being accompanied, I am alone. They will be back; this nest is not cleaned out and orderly after the upheaving of babies, toddlers, or teens.

But look who has moved in! Doubt, the cold sister of possibility, has already chosen her bedroom. She chimes in before it is her turn to talk. She tugs away my equanimity and questions every choice. She loves to dangle the "who do you think you are" banner across my daylight. She glories in my prolonged dithering.

Then, Annie Dillard shows up:

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

There is a bootstrap and I will pull it up today. I know what it feels like to show up blind with love, daring to move forward, even when I don't want to, even when Doubt casts her pallor over my day. I have 22 years of experience showing up for two people. Some days, I did not feel like oatmeal or elastic waist jeans pulled over thick-diapered bottoms, but I got them on anyway. Oats and jeans. Doubt. Take a seat. Take a number. Get in line.

Daring and love snuck in and I have work to do.

Suzi is an artist, actress, writer, teacher, community organizer, and mom. She’s passionate about helping women find their creative voice and live focused, joy-filled lives.

Curious? Go to  SuziBanksBaum.com. 

No, you can't have chocolate with your whine. Mama can. #365StrongStories 49

There comes a moment in every child’s life when she stands at the top of the stairs crying “mommy, I need you!” It will be thirty years before she understands what mama is really doing when she calls, “Yes, darling, I know. Let me just get your cough medicine!”

Mother is actually going for a mouthful of Cadbury chocolate and a slug of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Good night, dear.