On Wolves and Missions

By Catherine DiMercurio

In Italian, to wish someone good luck you say “in bocca al lupo,” which literally means, “in the mouth of the wolf.” The person you are wishing good luck to would reply, “crepi” (crepi al lupo”), which means “may the wolf die.” It seems that Italians have a good sense of what a dangerous place the world can be, though of course it is an older expression and probably had at one point really referred to wolves. With this expression, used in modern times, folks are expressing a sense of hoping that their loved ones escape some kind of danger or threat. We face different dangers than wolves these days. Sometimes the wolf is the forty-hours of work required to keep a roof over our heads, but which leaves us nearly too spent to enjoy anything but crashing on the couch under that roof. Sometimes the wolf is depression, anxiety, longing, fear. Sometimes it is a loose dog chasing you. Sometimes it is grief and loss threatening to eat you up alive. And sometimes it is much worse than all of that, depending on where you live in this hurting and hurtful world.

When I first drafted part of this essay, the air was cool and the sun was shining and I was outside with my dog, who contentedly sniffed around the yard. Maybe contented is a strong word. He seemed relaxed. We had some good walks last week, having only had to skirt some deer grazing in neighbors’ yards. I find it surprising that I feel like I know less about helping this reactive dog feel okay in the world than I did raising my children, though I suppose when I was in the thick of things when the children were little, I didn’t feel much like I knew what I was doing then either. In both situations, raising the kids and raising the dog, I was/am in the position of trying to help these other souls feel that the world is a good and safe place and that they can be happy, when in fact, the world is often insisting on something else. I am often tuned into my awareness the world is in fact something else.

It is as though I must gently lie to myself so I can gently lie to them because it is only when you believe the lie a little bit that you can relax your sense of vigilance and hold on to and share luminous flecks of hope and peace. They are like fireflies, dancing around us and not wanting to be caught, but luring or lulling us into a sense of calm. But we need that calm, and hope, and peace, to manage existing in this world. Telling these little lies to ourselves is a skill, whether offensive or defensive I’m not sure, but perhaps necessary for thriving. When the kids were little, I struggled with this, how to teach them both how to feel at peace in the world and how to protect yourself from its threats. In the end, I feel as though all I was able to do was love them as hard as I could, while the world taught them the rest, against my will.

Still, I feel safe and good sometimes too. I often feel safe and good when I’m alone in the woods, or in my garden, or by the water, or when I’m with people who don’t want anything from me, don’t need me to be a certain way in order for them to enjoy spending time with me, for them to love me.

But I confess that nothing made quite so much sense to me as did the sense of mission I felt as the parent of my two children. Perhaps the sense of mission is retrospective, and at the time, like I said, all I did was love them as hard as I could. But I suspect that even then a sense of purpose thrummed through me that was different than anything I have felt since. Now though, whatever it was that rose up in me and thrilled to that purpose, still wanders around in the emptied rooms within me, trying to attach itself to other endeavors. But it doesn’t know where to land. I don’t need it to pursue my writing—I’ve always had a different sense of purpose for that; it is like a separate spirit with a unique set of skills that knows how to keep me trying even when I get discouraged. But whatever animated that sense of mission as a mother seems to hover and wait, and maybe it helps me with my dog, but for the most part, it lights up when I interact with the children and then settles back in to wait and wander. On the one hand, the children have blossomed into independent adults, which was the whole point. But on the other hand, I don’t know what to do with this feeling. Some people have that sense of mission about their work, which is a beautiful thing and I’ve watched amazing things bloom from this type of mission in many of the people around me. It’s hard for me to feel that way about my job, and maybe right now there are factors, the job included, that are clouding something that I need to see about where I should be training my focus.

All of this can be exhausting. Does living this way—in a state of looking for purpose, while confronting our fears, and searching for the safe people and places—also make us stronger? I don’t know. What is strength? When I think about the obstacles I’ve encountered in my life, I don’t look back on them and feel like the silver lining is that they made me stronger. I certainly have learned a lot about myself and other people, and perhaps there is strength in that wisdom. Still, I think it is easy to confuse strength and toughness. There is beauty in the idea that we can turn hardship into strength, that what we go through builds us into something fortified, able to both endure and grow. But too often we simply armor ourselves, we build walls, grow scales, we keep out what makes us feel weak or vulnerable, and in doing so, keep out lots of other things, good things. There is some gritty toughness to that and depending on what the world is throwing your way it is a natural and understandable response, and I think it is more common than whatever true strength looks like. There is that same question again: how do we both protect ourselves from the world and find peace and goodness in it?

How do you keep facing the wolves but also keep being open to good things, keep growing? I wish I knew. I wish the world made more sense. Sometimes I feel like I just landed here and am wholly perplexed by this human world we’ve constructed. Sometimes it feels like it makes sense to everyone else but me, but I know that’s not true.

Everyone metabolizes the unease of the human experience differently. Maybe I’m not afraid, maybe we’re not all living life while managing an array of fears; maybe it is something else entirely. It sometimes looks like fear but perhaps it is more accurate to say that our true selves, maybe our souls, are intuiting a dissonance—that clanging gulf between the way the world is constructed and our ability to access what we need to thrive in it. We show up every day into a world that seems designed to keep us in a state of agitation. Everyone puts on the masks or armor that they need in order to live their lives while scared or confused or hungry or grief-stricken or wobbly or exhausted.

And I’m trying to figure out how, in the course of doing things while afraid or exhausted or hurt, people remain open to a better way. If we lead ourselves through the world by our open hearts—yes, scared hearts and hurt hearts, but open—then maybe it can begin to change a little something in this place and we can feel like we belong here, belong with each other.

Maybe that is the mission, to keep living in an open, loving way in a bruised and bruising world. It was perhaps, the mission all along, and maybe I am supposed to be applying the same methods to my own life that I applied while parenting my children. What if we love ourselves as hard as we can? I don’t know why it feels like that doesn’t satisfy the sense of mission but maybe it doesn’t until I wake up and see that it matters. That adults, even those of us lucky enough to still have our parents around, have to parent ourselves sometimes, in the way a loving parent would nurture a child. We still need that. Life doesn’t get any easier and we are still confused and still growing up, aren’t we?, and no one really knows us better than ourselves at this point. Maybe nothing makes more sense right now. Good luck. In bocca al lupo.

Love, Cath

On Adjustments, Distractions, and Tools

By Catherine DiMercurio

On a mid-May morning, mid-week, I take my dog out to the backyard. It’s just after 6 a.m. We won’t go for a walk today because it’s garbage day, and though he is fine with walking past the loud trucks and even the workers, he struggles with the people dragging cans to the curb, sometimes with an unleashed dog tagging along. A month after a loose dog attacked us, I try to minimize the risk of another such encounter. So instead, I train in the yard, running Zero through commands that he does without fail in the house. This is a training step I skipped over when he was smaller, working through familiar things but with added distractions. I was eager and impatient to add walks into our routine and pushed him through a lot of things too quickly. So now I’m taking a step back, trying some things again, but still endeavoring to keep several walks a week incorporated into our schedule. We walk early these days, armed now with an airhorn and pepper spray. Walking just after the sun begins to rise, we see mostly rabbits, and deer. We know the schedules of the folks who have to leave their house before 6:30.

As I try to extend the duration of a “stay” command in the yard, with Zero battling the distractions of birds, squirrels, scents of all kinds, I myself get distracted by the sweet and slightly herbal scent of iris blossoms, newly bloomed. It is hard for both of us to stay focused sometimes.

Mid-May also marks the one-year anniversary of the death of my older dog. It took Zero and I at least half a year at least to stop expecting to see Phin in his favorite napping spots. With every walk I take with Zero, avoiding his triggers, I think of walking Phin, and his joy at being out, trotting along in front of me, excited but also in his own peaceful, exuberant state of mind. He was friendly with everyone, afraid only of loud noises or being left alone. Without Phin, Zero and I have made adjustments, to our schedule, to the way we interact with one another, to the way we interact with our space, a home without Phin in it.

And just before that sad anniversary, we celebrated my son’s graduation from college. I’m now the parent of two college graduates, two people who are healthy and strong and surrounded by people who care about them. I make adjustments in this area of my life, too. I have to, to the way I think of my children and how our relationships have evolved, and will evolve now that this milestone has been achieved. It’s been a while since either of them has lived at home. They’re self-sufficient, and I’ve marveled at how readily they’ve taken on various forms of independence in the years since they’ve been at home. I wonder and worry about how our relationships will change, even though we’re close. We talk and text often; we visit as frequently as makes sense for everyone’s schedules. They have full and wonderful lives of their own and whenever we see one another it strikes me how honored I am to be a part of their current worlds.

In my relationship with my boyfriend too, we are often making adjustments. We navigate, communicate, gain deeper insights about the other as things come up. I’m learning that there is and there isn’t a trick to all this. There isn’t some magic that eliminates the need to do any work. There’s nothing that makes everything easy all the time. But there are ways to make communication more effective. There’s a way to listen with an open heart and a way to speak without defensiveness, and when both people are willing and capable of those things, tough conversations unfold differently than they used to for me. They don’t leave me feeling confused or attacked, but rather, heard and respected.

Life is constantly throwing things at us. I’ve spent long portions of my life believing that you could wait things out, that there would be periods where nothing was being thrown at you and in those times, happiness awaited. But then you learn that not only can you not predict when those “down times” will be, you can’t expect them to last, and when you’re in them, you’re not always aware of it. And even if you are, you might be recovering from the stuff you’ve just dealt with, or feeling anxious about what’s coming next. I get that this is why we get so many messages about “living in the moment” but that can be incredibly difficult to do. For me, this is another adjustment I’m constantly making. I often need to tweak my perspective, and not beat myself up for not having everything figured out. If I was adroit at planning several steps ahead, maybe that would lessen anxiety a bit, or maybe that would simply extend future-worry even farther ahead in the timeline.

So how do we manage anxiety about the future, or concern over how we’ve handled things in the past? How do we cope with the ways things are changing, constantly in a state of flux? How do we accomplish not just making the most of the times in between turbulent parts of our lives, but find some sense of calm even during the storms?

For me, there is a lot of reframing, a lot of conversations with myself where I try to put various things into perspective. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves: I’m safe or I’m strong or I’ve got this or I’m loved. When I’m worried about whether this scenario or that will come to pass, and I’m doing all the what-iffing worriers do, I have to remind myself of things I have handled, have gotten through.

When I was spending time with my son recently, I was marveling at the way, throughout college, both he and his sibling handled their housing situations. After the first stint in the dorm, they each found living situations that they could afford based on the jobs they’d secured for themselves; they found housemates, they signed leases. They handled things. No one was calling me to ask for advice on how one does this, or what does that mean in the lease, or how to handle a roommate or landlord situation. Of course, I would have tried to help if they’d needed it or asked, but they both figured out so much. I was telling my son how impressed I was that both of them did this and my son replied that they’d learned it from me, from the way I figured things out after the divorce: how to be a single parent, how to find and adapt to a full-time job after years of freelancing, how to refinance the house, how to sell a house, buy a house, and how to navigate relationships and grad school in the midst of all this. My son reminded me of how much I hadn’t known how to do or hadn’t been prepared for, and how I just kept figuring things out. He said that’s how he had approached things he wasn’t sure of.

What a gift, to have this conversation, and for him to be able to share that with me. And it was such a timely reminder for me, that even through all the recent changes in my life, I can keep figuring things out, that I do know how to do that.

There are so many things in my life that I thought I’d get to keep. Various loves, imagined futures. I also thought that once I’d achieved a belief in myself, it would simply thrive inside me without needing attention. I’m learning that it needs to be nurtured like anything else. You don’t get to keep anything without taking care of it. Nothing is free, nothing a given. We know this is true for all the relationships in our lives, but I sometimes forget that it is also true for the relationship we have with ourselves. I don’t only need quiet time to myself, and good sleep and exercise, and time to write and do pottery, I need to continually cultivate a healthy mental state, be a supportive friend to myself.

Sometimes this surprises me, that something in me calls for my own attention in that way, but I’m also pleased to observe that other things that I’ve tended without apparent payoff have come to fruition in their own time. A couple of years ago, I divided the irises I’d inherited in this yard and moved some to other locations in the yard. Last year the transplants were still alive, but hadn’t bloomed. This year, the plants are filled with snowy white blossoms, and deep purple ones too, which are about to open. I worked hard and then I waited and things came together on their own timeline. The thing about the waiting is, I didn’t know I was waiting. I had not given up, but I also was not actively hoping. I thought, who knows if these will ever bloom? It makes me wonder what else is preparing to bloom in people’s lives, things we’ve put work into, things we’re not consciously waiting for, things we keep nurturing anyway, because it feels like the right thing to do, it feels like we’re compelled to. It’s the same reason I write, going long stretches without anything getting published. Why I keep signing up for the next semester of pottery. It’s why we try.

There is so little sense to be made out of life. But it is also sort of ridiculous to think it is supposed to make sense. This is another way I try and reframe things. It doesn’t make sense to want it to make sense. All we can do is make our own order here and there, make the adjustments and do the work that allows things bloom in our lives, try to do good and be good. I feel like we do get guidance here and there, about where to direct our energy. Trying to lean into the things that make us feel connected or safe or exuberant or peaceful or joyful—this makes sense. But the world is going to knock us around anyway, and we’re always going to have to make adjustments to the way we respond to all that happens in our lives. I think it is such a delicate endeavor, recalibrating our responses and perspectives as life unfolds, and change is inevitable. We need a variety of tools and skills to keep being able to make the necessary adjustments, and maybe the most important one is patience, with ourselves, as we learn to keep adapting and blooming.

Love, Cath

On Mud, March, Skinned Knees, and Transitions

By Catherine DiMercurio

The season is changing, but at times it has felt too early, given the stretch of warm weather earlier in the month, including a few days around 70 degrees. Though I do get out and enjoy the warmer weather, it doesn’t come without a feeling of worry about the overall warming of the planet. Will it be 90 in April? Part of the seasonal shift often leaves me unsettled in a different way. I’m not entirely ready to move away from the cozy feeling of winter hibernation. Sometimes my energy level lags behind the shift in seasons. More daylight is so delightful but it also leaves me with a sense of obligation to make the most of it. I will get there eventually, I always do, but at my own pace, like with everything.

I feel as though I do a lot of monitoring of my own energy level, and I tend to associate feeling good with having lots of energy. But it is certainly true that even when we have less energy, we can also be in a good state. It is hard to remove the judgment from it all sometimes. Maybe it would be better to simply assess, in the same way I check the temperature to see what to wear for the morning walk with the dog, what our energy level is and what expectations we should have that are commensurate with that level. Sometimes I forget that it is just data. Instead of saying that my energy is “low” and that I feel “lazy” maybe it makes more sense to simply say my energy is at a 3 or 4 out of 10 so today I’ll plan to manage these set of tasks and save some other tasks for another day. The world has taught us so much language that is rooted in the idea that productivity is equivalent to value and worth. We feel obligated to “make the most” of sunny days or having lots of energy. We feel good when we “get a lot done.” There’s certainly nothing wrong with getting things done and our jobs and our lives require it. In fact, there is so much required of us it’s no wonder that when we have down time we don’t want to have any expectations about our time or what we do with it.

March has been a sluggish month for me so far. Creatively, I’ve felt muddy. I am not sure why this is, as I have writing projects at all stages of development, from drafting new work to submitting finished pieces and book-length works to contests and journals and publishers. I am at the end of a pottery semester and though I don’t always get the results I want, I’ve been practicing and learning and exploring. But right now, I’m feeling like I don’t have that much to show for my efforts. Intellectually, I know that the “point” of it all is the effort, not the result. A finished or published story, or a ceramic piece that comes out of the kiln looking beautiful are wonderful things, but as many people know, the lift we get from such things is fleeting. Because that lift is simply a feeling. A great mix of feelings, actually, but of course it is the doing from where we derive our true satisfaction. Yet we do need some successes to keep us motivated. The lifts are not insignificant.

Right now I have the sense of something churning that hasn’t revealed itself, as if my brain is working on something in the background it hasn’t shared with my conscious self yet. Will it be a new writing idea, a new mindset, is it processing past emotional turmoil? It feels like something is at work beneath the surface, which makes sense for March, as roots are busy waking beneath the soil and preparing to do the work of growth above ground.

I suppose it isn’t surprising that March – a month of transition – is hard for someone who has always had a tough time with transitions. Not just large life changes but simple things, like saying goodbye to someone after spending time with them. The past ten years have been filled with a lot of transitions in terms of work and relationships beginning and ending and moving houses and kids leaving home. So sometimes I think that when seasons change, I’m bracing for transition, regardless of how I feel about the coming season.

I try to accept this about myself, because everything is easier when you’re not judging your own responses to things, but sometimes my slowness in moving toward the next part annoys me and I get impatient. Impatience gets me into trouble a lot. The need to see progress sooner than I’m seeing it, whether it is with a health goal, a writing goal, a pottery goal, or some other objective creates unnecessary tension in my brain. The pressure we put on ourselves can sometimes be motivating but can also leave us feeling abraded and aggravated. Sometimes my heart feels like a skinned knee. It is difficult to determine what is the right amount to push ourselves toward what we want to accomplish, but to not push ourselves so hard we fall down.

I used to make myself do difficult things, like training for half marathons. I loved running and I loved feeling fit, but I also clung to the idea that being able to do something challenging made me feel strong at a time where I felt like I needed to prove to myself that I was strong. Now, I want to take long hikes because I enjoy them. I combine running and walking for a cardio workout and because I do think running at that level is fun and just enough. It doesn’t need to be extra challenging just for the sake of it. Maybe I’ve run out of things to prove. Or, at least, I finally know my own strength.

Still, I have struggled in the transition from my 40s to my 50s in certain ways. As with most things, we never quite know the ways in which something is going to be difficult until we are in the thick of it. I never imagined aging was going to be effortless, painless, easy. But the challenges hit differently than I thought, and there is so much emotion wrapped up in everything that happens to people’s bodies, lives, perspectives.

I turned 50 in 2020, a few months into the pandemic. I was selling the house where I’d raised my kids, where so much of my adult life had happened. The move itself was physically demanding, with lots of work done on the new house, and on the old house in preparation to sell, along with purging, packing, and physically moving. And the move came after a tumultuous number of years, full of change and heartbreak. So by the time the move was finally complete, I crashed. I feel as though all the exhaustion from the prior years, combined with the move, all caught up with me. Catching my breath took a long time. My energy was sapped. In some ways, I’m only now recuperating. It probably doesn’t matter whether some of my struggles over the past few years were related to all of that, or to the physical act of aging into my 50s, or all of it happening all at once. What matters is how we evaluate things when we pause to take stock of where we are and where we’re going.

I think that’s where acceptance comes in. I fell out of some healthy habits in the years after the move with regard to regular, dedicated exercise, but in the past year and a half, I’ve been trying to rebuild routines that previously served me well, but also to reimagine them, since I’m not the same person I used to be. Still, I find myself resisting the term “acceptance.” It feels loaded, and two-faced. It invites me to step into this next chapter of my life and enjoy without judgement or resistance the altering of old practices and development of new ones that serve me well now, at this exact time and place where I exist as a fifty-three-year-old human. At the same time, it also mocks me and questions me. Acceptance? Do not go gentle into that goodnight! That’s a bit melodramatic to be sure, but it does make me bristle and feel combative to accept things that I don’t feel great about. I’m sure there is a balance to be found but I have not yet gotten there, and maybe the muddy, churning month of March isn’t the right time to look for it.

I wonder if there’s a perspective, somewhere adjacent to acceptance, where we allow ourselves to simply be where we are, where we acknowledge that things are not perfect, and that we struggle with this or that, and that we’ll continue to do so. We know we’ll fight some things and embrace others. We know we’ll make mistakes as well as plans—to improve or change course or reimagine. And we know we’ll enjoy some small victories; it is reasonable to expect some, to keep our eyes open for them. Maybe all of this is a part of a continual process of alignment, where who we are connects with who we thought we’d be, where we find our common ground. Acknowledge and align seems like a game plan I can live with. At least, they are buzz words I can call to mind when I’m feeling as messy as March mud, and when I forget about those sleepy roots beneath the soil stretching out and preparing for growth.

Love, Cath

Coyotes and Sketches and Dreamy Trees

By Catherine DiMercurio

I have today off, and during my dog walk, I had a strange experience that led to a series of strange thoughts, which I sketched out with the pencil of words as quickly as I could when I returned home. It felt the same as waking up in the middle of the night to write down a dream because it seems so full of meaning and you do not want to forget. Maybe it will make sense later and maybe it won’t, but it feels important to try.

This morning, I walked the dog a little later than usual, because I had that luxury today, the luxury of time, and no set schedule. It was sunny, but cold, about 22 degrees. My dog is reactive, a label that I really didn’t know too much about before I adopted him. There is a lot I could write, and have written, about my pup and how he responds to the world, but for now, it’s easier to just say that we try to avoid seeing other dogs while we’re out. A barking dog behind a fence or another dog on a walk can make him jumpy. He pulls, sometimes barks, and it can be difficult to move him past the situation. If another dog is walking on a leash away from us, and we do not follow him, he is actually calm enough to be still and observe, and this is progress, so I reward him with treats. This morning had been rather peaceful, despite the fact that a fenced boxer barked—loudly, and long after we’d past. But my dog calmed himself with some eager sniffing of the path ahead, and I meandered a bit before turning us toward home.

And then we saw a coyote.

The coyote was running in that distinctive loping way down the street that we were headed toward. We were about to turn in the direction the coyote was coming from. We stopped, my dog and I, and both instinctively froze. The coyote turned away from us, probably didn’t even see us, and headed toward the golf course, and the woods near it.

More than anything, I was relieved that my dog had the good sense not to bark or draw attention to us in any way. I didn’t know what to expect, had the coyote turned toward us. Maybe the animal was young and had belated realized he or she was out past dark. It was 9:20 a.m. Maybe they were just heading home, same as us.

It was an unprecedented treat for me to watch this beautiful animal running in front of us. Small, grayish brown, casually quick, hurrying but not sprinting through the morning sunshine.

As much as my brain then turned toward getting home as quickly as possible—I was a little spooked, and so was my dog—part of me turned immediately toward meaning-making, as it usually does when something unexpected like this happens.

I began following two trains of thought simultaneously—one focused on the way happiness is not so much fleeting (as in, quickly disappearing) but fleet of foot (as in, quick and decisive), and one focused on the way so many of us are always on the lookout for signs from the universe.

It is hard to not see an unexpected visitor from the wild natural world, loping through the domesticity of the suburban street, as a nudge. Pay attention, the universe seems to be saying. I feel as though I am always wondering if I’m on the right track, so when something larger than normal unfolds in front of me involving an ambassador from the natural world, I feel as though the universe is reassuring me. This is your sign that you’re on the right track. But what I’ve been wondering lately is that when we are looking for signs from the universe, is it more accurate to say that what we’re looking for is a sign from ourselves? And wouldn’t it be true to say that’s the same thing anyway? Are we not brimming with the universe and does it not expand within us when we make room? Maybe it is guiding us from an internal rather than external vantage point and maybe those are designations that are meaningless to the universe.

With regard to happiness: how like this coyote is happiness and the way it moves through our lives and hearts, deliberately, softly. I want to say swiftly but then I think that the coyote seemed swift to me, but from the coyote’s perspective, how swiftly was it really moving? Isn’t that the same with happiness? The speed is relative. We have an experience and we feel happy and then it is over and the happiness might linger but soon we don’t feel happy anymore and our instinct is to chase it and get it back. But in the now-timeline of the happiness, it is expanding in all its fullness and etching itself in our memory and while we have a sense of it being over quickly, in so many ways it is still expanding within us, but when we feel the now-ness of it dissipated, we imagine that it has darted off, that it is gone. And I’m here to speculate that maybe this is the wrong way to look at it. Maybe it doesn’t leave us as quickly as we think, and maybe we don’t need to chase it. Maybe it isn’t ours to get, it’s just ours to have for a little while, without acquiring. We are just stewards of it for a time, and we must make an environment hospitable for it.

My instinct is to dissect it all, pin it down, put it under a microscope, but instead what I’m trying to do here and in my own thoughts is to let these ideas move through me, and settle where they will, if they will, and enjoy the moments where I’ve been able to marvel at happiness loping through me and the universe stretching out and getting comfortable in the den of my mind. I worry that if I think about it too much and use language less ephemeral than metaphor it will slip through my fingers, through the bright but hazy instinctual way of understanding.

At the DIA this weekend with my honey I stared at the trees in Van Gogh’s The Diggers. What I love about those trees is that they both look like trees and they also look the way trees might look in a dream. Likewise this coyote was at once a now-coyote and something from a dream, constructed out of lines that hummed with color and life and meaning that you grasp only by not trying too hard to see it or hold it. It was something to wonder at.

What if our grandest purpose is simply to find ways to see and feel differently, dreamily, to lean into metaphor and let it shape us. In that way, do we become a part of something larger than ourselves? If we experience the universe in this way, can we understand our world, and our place in it better? And make it a better place? Imagine what it would be like if more people cultivated a sense of wonder instead of war, built a habitat for happiness in their hearts, so it had a home when it visited.

I hope something magical happens to you today, or soon, and you can feel, at least for a moment, the universe expanding within you.

Love, Cath

On Coloring Inside the Lines and Owls at Midnight

By Catherine DiMercurio

It’s a strange world to be in, where it feels like it is falling down all around us but we’re expected to still be our best selves, working, keeping a roof over our heads, pursuing our own dreams and our own happiness. It’s hard to make sense of.

I certainly don’t have any answers. I’m just over here coloring inside the lines, keeping my head down and staying focused on my work, whether it’s the job that pays the bills or my creative work. I try to be a good mom when I’m needed, a good friend, a good girlfriend, a good sister and daughter. I try to stay true to myself, pay attention to the world around me. But I also have to resist taking in too much when it makes me feel like I’m drowning.

Still, all of that can feel like you’re keeping busy watering the plants while the house burns down around you. I have dreams about various apocalypses, global and personal.

I try and focus on the whispers of good things, to amplify them, the little moments that breeze through our lives and feel like happiness, joy, silliness, small victories. A laugh shared with my kids, moments of connection with my friends or family, a hug with my guy. Recently, before I went to bed, as I was turning the heat down, I noticed the battery monitor on my thermostat was at one bar. I flashed back to years ago in my old house, not long after my divorce. It seemed that the furnace had stopped working. I had several long moments of panic, and then somehow realized it might be the battery in the thermostat. I couldn’t remove it from the wall though, to get to the batteries. I ended up breaking something on the flimsy plastic housing and then having to tape it back together. Every time I touched that thermostat afterwards, I was angry with myself for having broken it, frustrated that I didn’t have it in me at the time to replace it and figure out how to rewire it. I just lived with it broken but functional. This time, in this new house with the new thermostat that the repair man installed after doing some expensive work on the furnace, I proceeded differently. I was being proactive in replacing the battery, instead of waiting to have the thermostat stop working. I googled how to get this particular model off of the wall, and I changed the batteries (I actually had the right batteries to replace the old ones!). I went to bed, warm and safe, with nothing being broken. Small victory. Such a small victory. But I clung to it nonetheless.

It was hard not to think about how such a simple domestic chore could represent change and growth. We live long stretches of our lives, feeling broken but functional. And eventually, we become new. Well, new-ish. There’s no magic in it. It’s a series of choices, consequences, broken heartedness, healing, and continued striving. It’s work. And often, the amount of work that we’ve done is not apparent until we look back over the years.

When I started writing this post, it was different; it was about belonging. I had attended a pottery show/market with my boyfriend and one of my closest friends and her husband. I saw many people from the studio where I take my class, and I felt like part of the “club” each time I greeted someone, or they greeted me. Later in the week I learned that one of my stories had been nominated for a literary award. It was affirmation, that I am on the right path with my writing. It was a nod to the fact that I belonged here too, in this club of writers. But it was only because I spent years cultivating a different sense of belonging, that I could enjoy these other types. It took me a long time to feel as though I belonged to myself, and without that foundation, I don’t know that these other instances would have resonated as they did. I think my self-criticism would have found a way to outweigh the good things.

Of course, there is still self-doubt, about relationships, creative work, life in general. Sometimes we don’t know if we’re growing or regressing. Sometimes we’re just as nervous about good things actually happening as we are about bad things potentially happening. That certainly doesn’t feel like growth, but in its own way, it is. That is, having an awareness of what we’re feeling and being able to name it is so much better than feeling awash in a vague discontent or despair that we can’t pinpoint. We have cultivated an awareness about uncomfortable feelings in our bodies—an upset stomach, a tight chest, tensed muscles—and we understand that it is because we’re anticipating something. Even when it is a good thing, our bodies sometimes feel this way. And though we’d love to get to a point in our evolution where good things aren’t something we brace for, the growth is in the fact that we get it. We understand that this happens sometimes, that we experience a nervousness and tension, which is part excitement but part anxiousness about the unfamiliar, or which is a sense of caution about potential danger. Sometimes that caution hangs around us like a fog even when we’re standing in the sun. Knowing ourselves in this way, when we haven’t understood such feelings before, and knowing that we can work through them, is growth. But that doesn’t mean it feels comfortable. And it doesn’t mean that working through them is linear.

When I couldn’t sleep recently, I listened to the neighborhood Great Horned owl sometime after midnight. It’s hard to think of a more peaceful sound than such a magnificent bird calling out at night. I read online that the particular call I was hearing was a “territorial” one. I recalled the way I move through my house sometimes, looking at objects that represent my personality or my journey, and I think “mine, mine.” So, I understand the territorial call, the need to mark out space as your own. There is a part of me that remembers every detail of every battle that led me back to myself. That part of me recognizes that being the person I am today represents a hard-won victory, and not a small one. There is another part of me that appreciates the need for a softer approach, especially at the beginning of a new relationship. Not a relinquishing of self, but some kind of flexibility as two people try to understand how to share their lives. That part feels unfamiliar and ill-defined after a long time on my own, and an even longer time getting the balance wrong, relinquishing too much in past relationships.

It’s no wonder that the territorial part of me is hooting in the night, as if to remind me not to forget who we are and how we got here. And that’s okay. That’s the part I’m on. At the beginning of something new, of course this is going to be what comes up as I begin to draw close to someone. But, it’s navigable. The owl knows and navigates the night, and so do we. What’s more, we know and navigate ourselves.

On my desk is a kitschy owl pendant I’ve had for over a decade. I rediscovered it recently, wear it sometimes. It landed on my writing desk at some point in the last week or two. It is almost unfathomable to recall who I was when I first wore it and who I am now. And I’m startled too to think of continuity, and what we retain of ourselves through all the years and all the changes, what has always been a part of us. What a victory, to be able to recognize and embrace all these parts and versions of ourselves, and where we are right now at this precise point in time.

Love, Cath

On Socket Wrenches and Sight Reading

By Catherine DiMercurio

I keep thinking about Carl Sandburg’s poem, “Fog,” which opens with the lines “The fog comes / on little cat feet.” In the very brief poem, the fog arrives, hovers briefly over the city, and moves on. I’m thinking about those little cat feet because it seems like some of the best things come into our lives this way, quietly and softly.

Sometimes when you’re starting something with someone new, life feels disrupted in a loud, jangling way. This is not always a bad thing and sometimes that’s what we’re hoping for: someone to shake things up, knock us off center, sweep us away. But once we’ve learned who we are and how to center ourselves, once we have come to understand our own person and the value of being centered, the storminess of off-center relationships feels a lot less pleasurable and a lot more threatening to our sense of peace.

Though, maybe the images of little cat feet and fog are not quite the right ones either. Dogs have always been such a big part of my life that I’m imagining what sort of weather might come in on dog feet. Maybe a day of boundless sunshine, maybe a cloudy day that’s made for nothing but snuggling. Maybe that’s how this new person has entered my life, softly and gladly. The sunlight padded in on friendly dog feet. . . .

I wrote a poem once about an ex, about the way he seemed like a stray cat, showing up sometimes for a scratch or a bowl of milk, the way he knew that he’d not be sticking around and the way I believed I could keep him. And the way I showed up like a stray dog, content to misinterpret affection for love. Now, in this new relationship, the energy is different. It’s mutual and earnest, playful and affectionate. And I don’t feel like a stray; I feel like I belong. I may still get a bit wary sometimes out of habit. But I also have the sense that everything is entirely genuine.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that it is okay to let people in, to accept care and hugs and kindness. I went from not knowing how to provide such attention for myself, to relishing in my ability to do so, to wondering if I had to do so all the time now, and no longer knowing if there was something wrong with wanting and needing it from other people. It’s hard to find the right balance.

There was a moment a couple of weeks ago where I very much felt as though I was standing at a crossroads. I was having a bad day, wanting a hug, feeling like I wanted to crawl under my desk and hide from the world. All the defense mechanisms kicked in—the walls, the isolation, the I-will-just-handle-it-myself. The man I’m dating had offered to stop by and give me a hug. I was worried that it was too out of his way and he didn’t really have much time. I didn’t want to be an inconvenience. But he said “I’d be happy to stop by and I’d love to give you a hug.” On my lips were the words “no” and “I’m fine” and “thanks, anyway,” but there was a voice inside saying it was okay. To say yes. To be hugged and comforted and cared for.

Do you ever have that feeling that you are poised between two worlds, and a small decision feels much bigger than it is? There’s the world in which you know are fine on your own and another one, the one in which someone is trying to be there for you, the one in which you let yourself have the comfort they are offering. It is a long moment, and you swing as if dangling from a pendulum between the two worlds.

Many thoughts flash through your head. You think of all the times people who promised to be there for you weren’t, or, the times the person who was coming through for you kept score, metering out how many times they had to show up. Or the times showing up for you was a tool they would later use against you. But this is a new time, this is a new person, you are a new person. We are.

The pendulum swings and you take a deep breath and say, “That would be nice. If you stopped by.” And they do and it IS nice, it is better than nice, and you feel the victory in letting yourself have this, a hug from someone who wanted be there for you.

It is one of the hardest things to do, letting someone be there for you. We are praised for our independence and chastised for our “neediness,” and experience teaches us that we simply have to be able to handle so much on our own because sometimes that’s all we have. We all want to be capable and confident in our own abilities, and those are good things, but so is being able to accept help when it is offered. Or being able to ask for it. That, too, takes incredible strength.

I am thinking too of how wonderful it feels to show up for someone else. Recently my sister needed a favor, which is a rare thing. She’s the oldest of the five of us siblings, and she’s independent in such a thorough and awe-inspiring way that I was completely delighted when I offered my assistance and she accepted. All I did was drive her to pick up her new car and help get the license plate off of her old car, but it gave me a lift all day to have been able to do that for her (and to be in possession of the universal socket wrench that got the stubborn bolt removed). It feels good to be able to return a favor when you have been lucky enough to receive so many.

Since that moment a couple of weeks ago when I accepted the out-of-the-way hug, things have progressed with my new person in promising ways. I’m looking for old anxieties and not finding them. I seem to have found someone who, like me, is not truly capable of being someone he is not. In my last relationship, I wanted things to work out so much that I tried to be very accommodating. I attempted to pretend that uncertainty and unclear communication didn’t bother me. In that way, I was being disingenuous, and it felt terrible, so as things progressed, I tried to be more of who I was instead of who I thought I was supposed to be. I tried to be clearer about what I wanted, though that didn’t really work either, because we wanted such different things. In this new relationship, after two years of focusing on myself, I find the only thing that feels right to me is to be exactly who I am, and I am discovering how delightful it can be to be with someone who appreciates that, who respects not only the action of being me being who I am, but the actual person that I am.

I have had such trouble writing this and I’ve been trying to understand the nuances of why that is. Certainly, part of it is that this new person will likely be reading this. How strange to read about yourself and the way your new relationship is unfolding in someone else’s blog. It is challenging to write about something that is ongoing instead of something in the past, but writing always helps me process, and writing for an audience is an exercise for me, in elevating that processing in a way that reveals something of the way hearts work (not just mine). I think there are universal properties to the way people love and I am always attracted to writing that I connect with, where I can see a little bit of myself.

What do you see of yourself in this? Have you found joy in being able to show up for someone—a partner, a family member, a friend—who usually seems like they don’t need it? Can you recall a time where being your true, full self did not feel safe or appreciated? Are you learning who you are and being who you are, and at the same time continuing to learn to love yourself while learning to love someone else? I think that is what’s happening to me. In this new relationship, it feels very different than the ways I “fell” in love with people in the past. I feel like I’m growing into it, learning it as I go, as I learn more about him. It is as if we are sight reading the relationship, ourselves, each other.

[Until my children were in orchestra, I had no idea what sight reading was. In a competition, the whole orchestra gathers to play a piece they’ve never seen before. As a group, they briefly study a new piece of music, are guided by their orchestra teacher, and somehow manage to play something they’ve never seen or heard before. This is an oversimplification, and I don’t play an instrument, so my understanding is limited, but the magic in that music, in that collaborative, focused effort, is breathtaking.]

So, though I am often made uncomfortable by new things, any discomfort in the “new” of this relationship is being diffused as we go, as we learn this new music together. And I’m grateful for that.

Love, Cath

On Curiosity and Conversation

By Catherine DiMercurio

How strange that September is beginning is a thought that chirps through my brain these days. This time of year is so laden with transitions it is easy to feel unprepared. The loss of light has been startling, and though temperatures have spiked this weekend, there has been a coolness to the nights and mornings that smells of autumn. The softer light and cooler air touch your skin differently. I don’t mind grabbing a sweater.

There’s much to love about what comes next, but for me, each season always feels too short (except for winter). In this space, I’ve written often about transitions and transformations.

Sometimes transitions sneak up on us the way fall does. Softly but inevitably. Not urgently, but with a quiet sureness. And internally, we feel ourselves needing to recalibrate, wondering how we hold on to the best parts of one season as we enter another.

I think of what I’ve been loving about summer and how to carry that into fall, despite shorter days and cooler temperatures. I no longer have the busyness of shifting from children’s summer vacations to back-to-school, so the seasonal shift is gentler than it used to be. But it can feel jarring, nonetheless.

At a farm stand in Ann Arbor, I bought a small watermelon, some peaches, and a couple of apples, and I thought how wonderful September is, that it encompasses all this, that it is summer and fall, in conversation with one another.

It’s easy to think in terms of conflict, where we focus on the ending of one thing and the beginning of another, and the summer people and the fall people on social media are either lamenting or rejoicing. It’s easy to look at our own apparently competing desires as an equation to be solved, where the variable, “x,” will equal something when we’re done figuring it out. We will do the math and the result will be an answer to the problems that plague us, to the what-iffing we do about both the past and the future. I’m curious about the conversation between the “this or that” scenarios we paint for ourselves. And how, amid all this contemplation, do we sustain an attachment to the present moment? How do we position ourselves fully in who and what we are right now, when we are so busy trying to solve the past and anticipate the future? We fixate on healing and learning from the past, on preparing for a future we can’t possibly know, but we try to know it anyway. Meanwhile in the present we are trying not to disappear.

Maybe the problem starts when we are little, when we are constantly being asked what we want to be when we grow up, and do we have a girlfriend or boyfriend. Why do people do this to children? This felt like a fairly common practice when I was a child. The goals were laid out definitively for us, even if we were unable to articulate them as such as elementary schoolers. We were not even allowed to live in the present as eight-year-olds. It’s no wonder it is difficult to do so now. The messaging we got from so many angles was that the whole point of life was work and a partner. So when one or both of those things don’t work out how we planned, of course everything feels scrambled. And even if everything goes according to plan, many people still find themselves with a persistent “now what” sort of feeling, since everything they’ve pursued has been external.

These days, I try to train myself to savor the current moment and it has meant a certain type of negotiating. For me, being able to fully experience the present means that I must stop trying so hard to eliminate anxiety about the future or analysis of the past. I don’t want to fight myself anymore. It’s exhausting, and it has begun to feel uncomfortable and disingenuous to wish I was different than I am. For me, the thing to do is to focus on what else is also existing right now, amidst the familiar habits of worry and rumination. Can I shine a light on it? Is it excitement? Hope? Curiosity?

I feel as though the path, for me, is peace-making with the parts of me that admittedly feel in the way sometimes. Maybe instead, I should listen to what they need to tell me, listen with a compassionate ear for hearing, not solving. Maybe if I simply say, I understand your concerns. It’s normal for you to feel that way, they will feel heard. They won’t have to shout anymore because I’ve stopped trying to ignore them. And they’ll stop feeling like I’m trying to figure them out of existence. In a way, given that anxious tendencies develop from vulnerable parts of ourselves, we have to be as patient as we would with a child, and sometimes repeat ourselves, with kindness and empathy.

Then, perhaps, once they quiet down, I can listen to the other parts of myself that don’t always get the attention, the quiet ones, who say softly that things are good, that there is much to delight in, even amidst the anxiety. They remind me to trust myself. To be curious and have fun and to not forget about open-heartedness.

Though I sometimes must remind myself to be playful and silly, I never regret it, and it always connects me with that curious, light-hearted, open part of myself. My son tips me off to the best boxed vegan mac and cheese, and I splurge and buy 12 boxes so I always have something yummy and easy on hand, childhood comfort food. I giggle as I feed my dog bites of ice-cold watermelon and he nudges me for more, his whiskers tickling the bare skin of my summer-brown knee. I sing along to the radio on the way home from pottery, windows open, bright light from the full moon shining down. I make wishes on dandelion puffs. I play with the waves at the beach.

I remember how to do this, to be delighted, to give this part of myself a seat at the table. But usually, she doesn’t want to sit still. She is laughing and playing freeze tag in the back yard with her siblings, running through her father’s perfect lawn in her bare feet, not minding that she’s “it” again. She is me, I have to remind myself sometimes, and our lungs are full of waiting wishes.

Love, Cath

On Growth and Stillness and Glow

By Catherine DiMercurio

When I was at the pottery studio recently, we were waiting for the raku kiln to reach its final temperature of 1850 degrees Fahrenheit. We worked while we waited. I attached handles to mugs I’d thrown the previous day. I will mention here the details that occur to me as mattering. I worked with reclaimed clay. Scraps once discarded and brought back to new life with water and time and reshaping. I practiced different techniques for crafting the handles, all of which I find difficult, none of which resulted in the graceful form that I’d hoped for, all of which will be fired and glazed and useful and beautiful anyway.

The woman sitting at the table behind me was talking about how she did not like how the nights were getting cooler and that she could hear crickets now. As soon as you hear the crickets, she said, you know summer is coming to an end.

Had I been facing her or had I known her better, I might have started a cricket discussion with her. Is this true? I might have asked. I have cherished cricket song for as long as I can remember, and often lament the summers when it seems to start so late. I had just been thinking earlier that week of how nice it was to finally hear crickets at night. In my memory, crickets are associated with summer, all of it, not the end of it, but mind and memory tends to blur time and boundaries. Cricket song will always be one of my favorite sounds regardless of when in the summer it begins. But I’ve been thinking about what she said.

I thought about how, if this is true, about crickets being a harbinger of the end of summer, then in a way, they are like my favorite moon phase, the waning gibbous, which I’ve written about here before. It is something that to me symbolizes a period of calm in the aftermath of the large, chaotic wildness of the full moon. It also reminds me of the lines from one of my favorite poems, Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

There is so much I love about “just after” moments. Maybe for me, it is a way to prolong a moment, because in the moments after, if you are of a mind (and a heart) that is able to fully savor, it’s almost as though you are still living the actual moment.

Sometimes I wonder, though, if I have difficulty in fully living in the moment. Is the pleasure I take in the “just after” moments merely the counterpoint to the anxiety or anticipation that I often experience before the moment? And do both overshadow my experience within the moment itself? Maybe sometimes. Not always.

Take the raku firing for example. It was explained to all us students the timeliness of what would happen the instant the kiln was opened, how we must briskly but safely retrieve our pieces. Sometimes, based on the choreography of the kiln, we’d need to wait a moment until someone else removes their piece before we can safely access our own. Such was the case with my piece. And in that moment of waiting, I stared at the vase glowing in front of me. At that temperature, all the ceramics glowed like bright stars. My piece had some carving in it, vines and leaves. And because in those places the clay is thinner, they shone even brighter. And it felt like the image was burning itself into my memory. I wished I had been able to take a picture, but there is no time for such things. You have to move quickly and get your piece into a metal bucket filled with newspaper. The paper catches on fire. After it burns for several seconds, you put the lid on it. This is a reduction environment, with a limited amount of oxygen, and it is where the magic happens. The oxygen is consumed by the burning of the combustibles. This creates beautiful effects in the glaze.

Still, regardless of how much you make of a moment, or just after, or just before, they are all only moments. We might be able focus our consciousness during them to experience them more fully, but they last as long as they last.

When I think about how I want to live, I think about moments a lot, and how to make the most of them, whether they are blazingly beautiful and exhilarating or whether they are strikingly ordinary. I think too, of the moments we’d like to forget. Certainly there is a lot of talk about learning from difficult things, and how this is the method to discover value in mistakes and tragedy. Too often, too many of us get stuck there, in this search for meaning. I get overwhelmed by the need to understand the whys and hows of bad things. I replay them in my head from all the angles and look at what could have been done differently. And I do that because the world has suggested that this is a way of making them “okay” somehow, if I at least learned from them. But, what if I didn’t learn the right lessons? What if I didn’t learn enough? We are told we are doomed to repeat past mistakes unless we really and truly learn all the right lessons. But we are also told not to dwell on the past.

Because my brain has formed this habit of overanalyzing past pain, errors, and difficulties, I began to believe that if I failed to learn from the past—enough things, the right things—then I invited nothing but pain and tragedy in the future. But this is a miscomprehension, and one that can leave you frozen. It’s not that the past has nothing to teach us, but it is one class in a full schedule. It’s not the only way, or the only thing, we learn.

And one of the things I’ve learned is that it takes focus and endurance to shift our gaze from past lessons and look at other areas of experience. Sometimes we have to keep opening our hearts and looking at the world with a fresh eye. We focus, with all our strength, on the unfurling of fern fronds, and the way lake water baptizes our hearts into their new whole selves, and the way peace stretches roots within our lives when we invite it there every day, and on the star-glow of freshly fired clay. Maybe we must be clear about what we’ve won, not only what has slipped away as loss, and be just as clear-eyed about what we willingly trade every day, as in, I will accept the occasional storm of loneliness so that I can steep myself in calm for as long as I need to, for as long as it shows me how to grow, even though unfurling happens in increments so whisperingly minute it looks like standing still. But it isn’t.

I’d like to say that I find myself at an inflection point: tired of trying to learn everything I am supposed to from the past and ready to refocus my gaze. Yet, I’ve been inflecting. I’ve been at this, refocusing, shifting, turning, for many moments, but because it is so gradual, I sometimes forget that what looks like standing still from the outside can feel like standing still from the inside too. But it’s not. [And also, is there anything wrong with stillness? No.] Physical growth can be demarcated on a wall, a pencil line scratched into poplar molding glossed with white latex paint. I remember the smell of my children’s hair as I marked their height, the earthy sweetness of their sweat, the scent of the summer air clinging to each beautiful strand on their scalp. But how do we mark out our own growth as adults, out of the lattice work of our own pasts and into who we are now? There is no pencil for this, no wall, we simply keep going and wondering. We are unfurling, whether or not anyone can see it. When we think but I am trying so hard we must believe in the efforts we are making, whether or not our growth can be demarcated with pencils or moments or star-glow or nothing at all.

Love, Cath

On Roles and Poses

By Catherine DiMercurio

A scene from Wes Anderson’s new film, Asteroid City, keeps playing in my head. In it, actor Jason Schwartzman plays actor Jones Hall, who is playing the role of Augie Steenbeck in a play called “Asteroid City.” Jones breaks out of his role as Augie to tell the play’s director, Schubert Green, played by Adrien Brody, “I still don’t understand the play!” Jones expresses his angst, asking “Am I doing it right?” Schubert tells Jones that it doesn’t matter. “Just keep telling the story,” the director insists.

The film makes use of a multilayered frame narrative. It opens with a scene from a 1950s television special about a playwright (Conrad Earp, played by Ed Norton) and his play, “Asteroid City.” Throughout the film, the actors are not just playing their role in Wes Anderson’s film; they are playing their role as the actors in the play. As actors in they play, they periodically step out of their roles and interact act with one another (as characters in Wes Anderson’s film). Get it? All of that can be a little hard to follow, but it speaks to something essential about the ways we enact multiple roles in our lives, how interconnected those roles are, and how often we find ourselves sitting with that question: am I doing it right? Anderson’s film and his characters are as self-reflexive as we are.

The director’s answer—It doesn’t matter, just keep telling the story—sticks with me, both as an angsty human with a hazy understanding of her own role in this world and as a writer with a similarly foggy grasp of how to approach that role.

When I was in my twenties and just getting started on my how-to-be-a-writer journey, I had joined a local writers’ group in the town in Illinois we’d just moved to. My then-husband had accepted an engineering position at an automotive plant. The Michigan-based company he worked for often had its contract engineers do a stint out of state for a couple of years before being hired in directly. This was the path we were on. We knew the post was temporary, which made everything feel temporary. There was no sense in putting down roots since we knew we’d be headed home before too long. I knew no one, and had begun freelancing, so I didn’t have a workplace to meet people. So, I joined a writing group. They were an eclectic mix of people. They had an annual gala where everyone read from their work. I was working on a novel at the time. I had never read my work in front of people before, and I was terrified. Yet, I really wanted to belong, to behave as a writer would, so I promised myself I would do it.

At around the same time, my husband and I had also decided to take a yoga class together, a first for both of us, at the local YMCA. Our instructor used to tell us to “relax into the pose.” I clutched this notion like a life preserver as I approached the podium the evening of the writers’ gala. I told myself to relax into the pose of writer. It helped, somehow.

I think of that now because the phrase, which has often returned to me at various points in my life, recalls the themes of Anderson’s film, and reminds me of all the ways we struggle in our various “poses” or “roles.” We ask ourselves, am I doing this right? Because often, it doesn’t feel as though we are. Am I being a good parent, a good friend. Is this the kind of person I want to be. What kind of partner am I. What kind of artist. What kind of me. Sometimes it feels wrong, or strained, or unfamiliar, to be who we are or where we are, or we find ourselves in roles we never expected to be in.

And sometimes we have the opportunity to isolate ourselves from our roles. I recently returned from a solo camping trip. In the woods, setting up my tent, or out on a hike or kayaking, it was impossible to avoid memories of past trips, to see myself through the lens of my various roles. Camping was something the kids and I always used to do together, so I thought of what it was like to be a parent on such a trip. I also thought of a former role, that of “wife,” because I didn’t start camping until I married. After the split, the kids and I continued to take a camping trip every summer.

But now, out there on my own, flooded with memories as I was, I also experienced a whittling away. The memories came and went, leaving me focused on the tasks of camping: gathering firewood and kindling, pumping water from the hand pump, guarding against rain, cooking, and cleaning up. And there was quiet and solitude. I had time to decide based on my own whim what I wanted to do next. Read for hours? Go to the beach? Haul the kayak down to the water for a paddle? Take a hike along the ridge that looked out over the lake? There were a number of instances where I was keenly aware that it was just me, as me, out there. The absence of responsibility to anything but my own needs was essentially an absence of roles. And in that space, I found that my brain was able to disconnect from the perpetual figuring it out that it is always compelled to do, the spider web of concerns and ideas and emotions I feel daily as a home owner, an employee, a potter, a writer, a mom of on-their-own kids, a mom-guardian-friend to my dog, a friend, a freelancer, a sister, a daughter.

I love my roles. They, and the absence of them, make me who I am. I exist both in relation to the people (and dog!) and activities in my life as much as I exist in relation to no one. I think these two modes of being are in dialog with one another, under the surface, in ways we don’t comprehend or have an awareness of. And maybe what I have been trying to do my whole life is to connect with that awareness, that unity that hums beneath it all. Sometimes there is a sense of fracture, the feeling that we are broken apart into pieces, fragments of ourselves. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety or urgency at times, one that is hard to put a finger on, where things feel off, misaligned. Sometimes it seems that our various roles are disparate, independent identities but they are all yoked to the core of who we are, and in that way, are connected to each other. Though, we live in a world where it is not always encouraged or advantageous to bring our whole selves into everything we do, so the prickly sense of fragmentation persists.

After all the afters—after the kids moved out, after I moved out of my old house, after my last breakup, etc.—there were moments I experienced a specific kind of hollowness. The roles I’d been playing to that moment all needed to be redefined, reshaped. But, I wasn’t entirely clear how to do it. I tried to figure out if the roles themselves—understanding them, inhabiting them—were supposed to be my purpose, or, what was the game plan, what did unity and alignment feel like now?

Consequently, I often ask myself am I doing this right? Is this how it is supposed to be? Is this how you do it? Is this how I do it? To see Jason Schwartzman’s character in Asteroid City asking the same questions was piercing, enlightening, and a relief. I always feel as though I’m trying figure IT out. My role. Life in general. The nature of purpose and being and doing. Trying to understand it all feels at once vital and futile, as if, at birth I was assigned a quest that it was not humanly possible to complete. I do not remember a time when I did not have a sense of wonder and confusion about the nature of self, in all its fracture and unity. Trying to wrap my head around what I was and what I was doing here is in fact one of my earliest memories. I don’t think I’m supposed to stop doing that. I’ve realized lately that I don’t want to stop doing that, that I don’t need to. For some time, I wondered if, in the ceasing of that effort, some sort of peace or perpetual happiness waited. Maybe it does, but to get there I have to stop being who I am, and if that is the path, it is not one I am ready to be on.

At the same time, doing all that gets exhausting. It often doesn’t feel like I’m relaxing into anything. Which is why I knew I needed the break that camping provided. Where whim was the guiding force, where all of the talking and wondering and chatter in my brain quieted down. I am getting more in tune with how that balance works for me, between the busyness of figuring out how all the roles exist and talk to one another, and the quiet, blank-slate absence of roles I know I can find when I need to.

I don’t want to be any other way than how I am, when I think about it. Maybe I have more figured out than I think I do, maybe we all do, and the issue we deal with is that this world is loud and full of messages that compete and contradict and confuse. It is full Stuff to Deal With. Jobs that pay the bills but also sap our energy, things that go wrong, that fail in our houses and cars and bodies and hearts. It is so easy to get shaken up, shaken off course, shaken to the bone. Of course we’re going to wonder if this is how it is supposed to be and if we’re doing it right. How could we not wonder that?

Maybe the secret is not to eliminate the questions and the angst, but to stop resisting it. We need to make room for it, get comfortable with it. Relax into it. I think in the end, that’s what was so freeing and elating about the director’s response to Jones’s question in Anderson’s film. It doesn’t matter. Just keep telling the story. It was permission. As if someone gave me, gave us all, permission to not have the answer. We can keep trying to figure it all out, if we feel compelled to, if we like it, if that’s the way our brains work, but we are allowed to not find the answer; there is no failure in not coming up with a tidy explanation or an essay on synthesis. We’re allowed to just keep telling the story. It’s our story after all. We can tell it any way we like.

Love, Cath

On Donkey Tails and Butterflies, or, an Alternate Theory of Happiness

By Catherine DiMercurio

When I was much younger, I used to think of happiness as something fixed, the donkey’s tail reunited with its waiting body at a child’s party. Life was the twirled and blindfolded eight-year-old, and when they pinned the tail, whether it found its way to the donkey’s nose or flank, it stuck. I used to think that it would stay stuck. I counted on it, as one does when one is young.

Still, even when it didn’t stay stuck, I assumed that there was always another chance, another spun partygoer who would make an attempt to once again affix happiness to my waiting existence, and it often worked this way. I felt lucky. And patient. I could wait it out. Wait for the next chance, and then prance ecstatically once again, when that magic reunion happened.

What I didn’t count on were the people in my life who were less optimistic about the return of happiness to our waiting bodies. They seemed to assume that once it had fallen away, that was it, game over. What they never understood was that the odds were in our favor. It would return, it always did if you believed it would. What I had to learn was that while there was chance involved, and luck, and optimism, you also had to make yourself an easy target. You have to watch the way everything is spinning and try and get out in front of it. Be hopeful and easy and trusting that it is on its way back around.

I lived that way for a long time, trusting and certain that happiness would make its way back to me. Sometimes it was just so easy, how could I not believe that? But when the person you’re with has a different philosophy, as a pair, the two of you become a less likely target. And then, when you’re no longer a pair, you find that you’ve begun to doubt your own beliefs. Life becomes less like a dizzy, capricious child at a party. Happiness is bestowed less easily and frequently. It becomes something you pursue instead, a quarry that seems to prefer remaining hidden, and life provides countless obstacles that make the hunt even more challenging.

Everyone is always trying to figure out how to find happiness, how to keep it, how to be it. But I remember that I once simply cultivated peace and contentment, and I enjoyed happiness when it found me. But I didn’t expect to permanently live in a state of it. I made myself an easy target for it. I practiced the good habits that made me feel healthy and whole, and when happiness found me, I was there for it. Ready to soak it up. There is a way to bask without grasping for it, without trying to bottle it up like so many fireflies.

I feel as though I have forgotten some of my former way of being, my pin-the-happiness-on-the-human philosophy. With the ebb and flow of life, with the stress, and the changes and the losses life throws our way, it seems sometimes that we are made of steel, that there is no soft surface any longer for happiness to be affixed to. It doesn’t help that a lot of the messaging we’re bombarded with tells us that happiness is something that we should be striving to fully embody at all times. That unless we’re able to say, I AM happy, simply feeling happy sometimes is somehow not enough. It’s easy to conflate being and feeling, especially when we’re young. It’s that notion of happiness being affixed, the idea that we have it now, as if there is permanence to it, which makes the losing of it harder to bear.

But if we acknowledge that it is a transitory thing—something that lands on us when the conditions are right the way a butterfly lands on you when you’re standing very still in the sunshine and wearing the right color—the loss of it is softened. If we stop demanding happiness, searching for it, clutching it, then maybe when it finds us, we can enjoy it more fully, and when it flutters away, we’re not left with a shattering loss, but rather, the peaceful and contented state we have been cultivating, and which we were in, before the butterfly, or the tail, alighted upon us.

We attract happiness in the way we construct our lives, but that doesn’t mean we can live in a permanent state of happiness. To expect to do so invites disappointment and even despair. But we open ourselves to it, and we control what we can. We monitor and tend to our health—physical, emotional, mental, spiritual—and we are careful with those we surround ourselves with, drawing near to us those who encourage us to be our full selves, who don’t diminish us through word or action. Life has taught me that there is a high price to pay for being with someone who prefers a certain, constrained version of yourself to your actual self. And even after you realize it, the rebuilding of self takes a long time.

I have a theory that when the quest changes from how do I find and keep happiness to how do I cultivated peace and contentment, happiness finds its way to us with more regularity anyway. I also believe that peace is not arrived at through conflict avoidance but instead through a reverent attention to self-growth, self-acceptance, and self-respect. It’s different for everyone, I’m sure. But after a confusing decade filled with so much change and so many beginnings and endings, taking time to look inward has made the most sense to me. And doing so reminds me of all the earlier iterations of myself and what worked and what didn’t.

This morning I woke earlier than I have been lately, and it was still dark outside when I let the dog out. I recently strung fairy lights beneath the newly painted patio area. They are solar lights and I am often in bed reading before I really have a chance to spend any time beneath them in the evening, so it was unexpectedly joyful to have them still glowing this morning, when I was out with my coffee and the pup. I felt happiness rustling nearby and I let it find me, let it erase my grumpiness at having woken too early after a restless night. I created that outdoor space for just such an experience. It’s filled with flowers and comfy furniture, and though it’s rustic and imperfect and really needs to be rebuilt, it is doing exactly what I hoped it would do: setting the stage for the peaceful and contented mindset I’m trying to cultivate. And in this environment, happiness alighted, and affixed, at least for now, which is all that we can ask of it.

Love, Cath