On Winter Gifts and Safe Harbors

By Catherine DiMercurio

As I walked along the snowy beach, the lake splashed against the frozen droplets of former waves at the shoreline. It was wondrous with the sun sparkling across the waves and the icy beach. I slid across frozen puddles, crunched across the ice that rippled like a memory over the windswept sand. I never expected to enjoy a wintry beach walk quite so much. I talked to the lake like an old friend, thanked it for being deep enough to receive my troubles and old griefs without finding me “too much,” without resentment or judgement.

It has been a year packed with some big transitions, which is why, when winter hit so suddenly and forcefully a couple of weekends ago, I didn’t feel prepared. It was a big snowfall, followed by another heavy round a couple of days later. And since, we seem to get another few inches every couple of days to add to the two feet of snow already on the ground.

I remember my father taking my sisters and I sledding when we were little, ice skating once or twice too. I wanted to like it. I did enjoy playing in the snow, building snow men and snow forts and making snow angels. But I remember being at the top of the sledding hill and feeling a sense of apprehension, a worry that we’d collide into the other children sledding down the hill. I wonder if I would have enjoyed it more if it had been just us. Skating never made sense to me. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was going to get the hang of on the first time out and since we only went a couple of times, there was not really a chance to improve, but I also didn’t enjoy the slipperiness, the falling. I felt clumsier than usual, and I was already a kid that got called klutzy. Despite growing up in a state known for its winter wonderland, I have always had complicated feelings about the season.

One Christmas Eve when I was still quite young, we were returning home after visiting my grandparents’ house. Our car spun and skidded off the snowy road and when it stopped, we were facing the Saginaw River. I don’t know how close we were to the river, but in my memory, I have this sense that we had narrowly escaped careening into the water. Maybe that’s why, years later, after I learned to drive, I would become extremely fearful of driving in snowy conditions. Of course I adapted, as you do when you have places to go. You do what you have to do. But possibly this early memory is at play when my driving-in-bad-conditions apprehension surfaces. Perhaps I also just have a strong survival instinct. That, and I don’t really trust other drivers who seem to have no sense of caution.

Combine all this with the anniversaries of some Bad Things happening in early December many years ago, along with the short days and lack of sunlight, and you get a very tricky time. Yet, there is a kind of unexpected vibrancy in this community I’ve landed in, a recognition of and appreciation for the natural beauty we’re surrounded by. People get out there and enjoy the lake and the woods and the fresh air in all kinds of conditions. It’s a bit contagious, even if, especially in winter, I have to work a little harder to get motivated to spend lots of time outside.

I’ve been doing okay though—snowy hikes, walks or drives to the lake, icy beach strolls, sunsets. Some days though I get hit with melancholy, or fatigue, or some other cocktail of emotions that seem to rise to the surface more readily in darker, cold months. Like many people, I walk a fine line between knowing when to let those feelings in, acknowledge them, feel them, deal with them, and knowing when to get out of the house and out of my head. I’m still learning what it means to feel the heavy feelings without falling into ruminating, stewing, spiraling.

At the worst time in my life, I felt as though I was constantly at risk of falling into a deep darkness that I would not be able to climb out of. In retrospect, I think I did fall in sometimes, though, at the time, I believed I was pulling myself up and out just in the nick of time. So when things seem heavy, I occasionally get a feeling of dread, as in, please don’t let this be that. But it has never been that again, thankfully. I have a lot more tools now, and I’ve had a lot fewer reasons to ever feel quite like that again. I don’t often give myself enough credit for the navigating I’ve done, away from dark places.

But here, where I’ve landed, I often look around at the beauty of my surroundings and thank myself for captaining myself to this shoreline city. Sometimes there are two selfs, the one who doubts and is often fearful, and the one who sees the path and makes the necessary choices and journeys. Do you believe me now? I’ve asked myself. Do I believe now that I can make the decisions that land me in the right places at the right time? Do you trust me now? We made it here, after all.

At the end of my street is a marina. The joy those docked sailboats bring me, when I see their masts jutting into the sky as I stride down the hill, is both reliable and exhilarating. Reliable joy? What a gift! A sign reads “A SAFE HARBOR MARINA.” Safe harbor. How wonderful to discover that this is what we can be for ourselves, and what an actual place can feel like. Finding that feeling after a period of drifting and searching, of looking for belonging and not quite getting there, is as magical as the icy beach, or the gathered boats snug in their harbor. I hope this winter finds you in a safe and wondrous place.

Love, Cath

On Crescent Moons, Kaleidoscope Progress, and Feeling Move-able

By Catherine DiMercurio

The moon was so pretty the other night I cried a little. It was a tiny little sliver of a moon and just glimpsed between the oak leaves and the pine boughs. I don’t know what moved me so much but to feel move-able is wonderous. I thought, well, that was strange. I mean, I always love glimpsing the moon, but it doesn’t usually bring me to tears. I figured maybe that’s what happens after a long period of stress when things are kind of calming down, relatively speaking. Moving felt like a year-long obstacle course and while there are still post-move things happening at the house, the bulk of that particular effort is over. Talk about a heavy lift.

But now my attention is shifting, away from the chaotic multidimensional problem solving and navigation of moving, to where I am, what I’m doing now, what is next on the horizon, so I guess I have a little space for feeling actual emotions again. I guess that looks like crying at the moon. I thought it was maybe a one-time thing but I also teared up at the stars the next morning. I can see so many of them here. While I can’t see the lake from my property, the sky looks bigger and more open in that direction. Undoubtedly there is less light pollution so maybe that’s why the star gazing is kind of spectacular here.

It’s a beautiful fall here and I’m exploring the trails at the closest state park. The landscape is gorgeous and hilly, featuring marshy wetlands as well as steep, sandy dunes. I started out on a trail I’d been on the week before with my sister, except this time, I ventured out onto the spurs and loops that could be accessed from the main trail. One of the loops was labeled “challenging.” Given that the trails designated as “moderate” were fairly easy, I thought I’d give this challenging loop a go. It was definitely more challenging for me – more hills, and steeper ones. Rooty, narrow paths. But manageable. At one point, I peered out over a section of trail that went sharply downhill, all sand. The trail I was on went past that section and I marveled that anyone could get up or down it. And I went on my merry way, deciding at one point that instead of just skirting out and back to check out the trail, I would do the full loop. I was feeling pretty good about things until, after a bit of a downhill section, I found myself at the base of the big dune I’d spied earlier, and now I was going to have to go up it, or turn around and go all the way back. I stared at it for a while, dumbfounded, and then decided to give it a go. There were a few trees at the edges, so I figured if it got tough, I’d have some branches or roots to grab on to (which I only needed to do a little bit). I made it up, and while it was difficult, I was about halfway up when I realized I could do it, and that I wasn’t going to keep back sliding in the loose sand.

While this was a challenge for me, I’m sure for people who grew up around this terrain it was more moderate. I’ve never been athletic, though I had a chunk of time in my 30s and 40s where I was running regularly and completed a few half marathons. Once I stopped freelancing and went back to work in the office full-time, my running tapered off. Between working and commuting and single mom-ing, I struggled to find the time to go consistently, but I managed to feel like I was still in it. In the midst of the pandemic, I moved, and that process was extremely taxing, especially since both the old place and new place needed a lot of work. After I was settled in, I was so exhausted that I stopped even trying to run, and before I knew it, it was winter. By spring, I was starting from square one with running, and I feel like I have been doing the same for the past 5 years. Throw menopause into the mix of major life changes along with moving and empty nesting and breaking up, and there I was, starting from square one, and barely making it to square two, and then getting derailed, taking a break, and starting from square one again. Which is where I am now. Post-move again, and now trying to get back into running, but also trying to mix in weights, yoga, hiking.

It’s harder than ever to push myself. For the longest while, I kept telling myself that I needed to work on consistency first, and then I could work on building from there, longer runs, heavier weights. The lines are blurry. When have I been consistent enough to start building? How much is too much too soon? Can’t I just work on consistency a little longer? But even when I’ve been working on that, a lot of workouts feel harder than they ought to, which is frustrating. It used to be easier to stop and start up again, to make progress and build on it. That’s something that I’m still getting used to as I get older. Trying harder used to work, or, it used to work faster. Now, I feel as though the best I can do is to keep nibbling away at things, and so far, I can’t really measure progress in terms of a longer run, or one that felt easier, I can only say I keep trying. Maybe farther down the line something will feel like strength or speed again, but for now I am pleased that I challenged my brain to navigating new trails, and my body to steeper climbs up sandy slopes, and that I’m still trying with running and lifting.

At the end of that particular hike, I returned to my car and drove a little further on to the beach. It was deserted, except for the gulls, and I strolled barefoot in the cold sand, played a little tag with the waves. I wanted the feeling of running on the beach so I started out at a jog, and the Rocky theme came into my head, the training montage where Rocky and Apollo are racing on the beach and I pushed myself into a short sprint, which felt amazing. It felt like playing. It felt silly and joyful, full-body laughter. In a way, it was the same feeling as crying at the moon, my body releasing the stress of the last year in little doses, trying, starting over. A different kind of progress, like a kaleidoscope instead of a straight, solid line.

I don’t know what any of this means except that I’m definitely in a new chapter and my body knows it and my heart knows it, and I’m sure my soul or spirit or whatever you want to call it has known it for a while, that this is where we have been heading. It’s all good even though it doesn’t make sense in the strictest sense of the word. I’m just here and floating in it.

I feel quite positive about it all in general but there are things that weigh on me, things that need to be addressed now that I’m feeling settled in. And the missing of my people is something that’s always nearby, an awareness I have of the physical distance between us. I love the ways we stay connected in spite of that distance, but I do miss hugs. I have some trepidation as “the dark season” approaches; I know the things I struggle with in the winter. We all have heavy things to carry. But I’m also curious, about what the lake will be like in the winter, how life is lived in this particular place each season. It’s a gift to be able to keep figuring it out, to move across the state and across the sand and through the woods and feel moved by the sight of the moon.

Love, Cath

On Moving through This Particular Time and Space

By Catherine DiMercurio

These past several months I have felt as if keeping my head above water takes most of my energy. Each moving-related milestone felt less like a hurdle overcome and more like a wave crashing down on me, until it is over, and I can float a little, catch my breath a little, until the next wave hits. In the midst of all the painting I was doing this past week at the new house, I was fighting to do just that, catch my breath. The task felt overwhelming, the number of walls, the trim to either paint or tape off, the cutting in, the multiple coats, the clean-up, the way the plaster was so thirsty and gulped up all the paint, the cove ceilings and their delicate curves, the yucky and ancient vinyl floorboard molding in the kitchen, the ruined window frame in the living room.

It’s been over a year since I got it in my head that I was going to move. I took my time with the process, knowing how much I loathe how urgency makes me feel. Winter and early spring were focused on clearing out the basement and making plans, and then in April and May I began to ramp things up with house repairs. Then things really sped up in June when I listed my house for sale and began searching for a new home in earnest. Now, I’ve closed on both houses. I spent a long weekend at the new house organizing some initial improvements—tearing out carpet and having a fence built—and cleaning. This past week, I went back to paint. It’s a task I always enjoy in the beginning, but by the end, I’m ready to be done. And this time the end didn’t come until the fourth room was painted on the fourth day. It was a big job, and like any home improvement task, it came with unexpected obstacles.

But, this isn’t going to be a boring home improvement post. I thought I wanted it to be about how good it felt to let this new-to-me but old house breathe and feel cared for again after a couple of years of vacancy. I thought I wanted to write about how I was trying to make this random place feel like my home. And I thought it was going to be about what a long, sometimes scary journey it has been.

Yet what is hitting me most right now, as a sit in my cozy current home now that I’ve returned from the painting week, is how confusing and chaotic prolonged transitions feel. Many people are in the midst of them now, with grown children off on new adventures or otherwise finding their footing in adult life. People are ending relationships, or starting them, or moving, or grieving, or changing jobs. Sometimes we go through big changes with others and sometimes we go through them alone. And we might have folks helping out where they can, but when we’re flying solo, the upheaval of big changes can hit especially hard.

Somewhere between wrapping up the painting of the bedroom and the office and the hallway and beginning the painting of the kitchen, I felt particularly wrung out and empty, and then I sort of remembered why I was where I was. Two miles west of me was one of the best stress-busters I’ve ever known: Lake Michigan. So that morning I made my coffee and loaded Zero in the car, and we drove the short five minutes to the lake to see the morning light play on the waves. We just stayed in the car, because we see off leash dogs all the time and that is not a great thing with a reactive dog whose training got derailed. I wanted this to be a moment of calm, so we stayed cozy, and watched the other early morning people go by, or do the same thing we were doing, viewing the lake from our cars as if we were at a drive-in theater. I’m looking forward to when I’m actually living at the new place, and I can go grab moments of lake-calm for myself whenever I need to. In this particular moment, I marveled at the way the light of the morning could be both bright and soft at the same time, and the way a gull sounds different when it’s swooping around the shoreline than a gull sounds in the old Kmart parking lot in the puddle of my childhood memories.

That moment was also a reminder to seek out calm wherever I am, lake or not. Because life can feel so big and so chaotic, whether or not we’re in periods of momentous transition. It’s not as if I forgot that I need to do that, or like I wasn’t trying all along to manage my stress with yoga and walks and early morning coffee in the yard with Zero and chats with family or friends. But sometimes we tell ourselves there’s no time, or that it won’t help anyway because there’s too much to do or our feelings of overwhelm are too great.

We tell ourselves a lot of things when we’re tired or drowning in all there is to do every day. We tell ourselves there’s not enough time to sit quietly in a safe place and catch our breath. Maybe we even tell ourselves there are no safe places, and it is tragic when that is true. But sometimes we’re still learning to be our own safe place and that takes time and practice. Sometimes we tell ourselves that we miss things that weren’t particularly good for us. Sometimes there were good parts to miss, but that doesn’t change things. We might ask ourselves why we ever thought we could handle the enormity of moving farther away than we’ve moved before and then we remind ourselves that we are, in fact, handling it. We’re almost there. We’re almost home.

And still, that doesn’t erase the hard parts. Holding two opposing truths within us at the same time can cause a bit of inevitable heartache. For reasons of financial and mental health, I need to go. To follow the dream of living near the lake, I need to go. Because I want to love where I live, I need to go, and at the same time, the fact that I’ll be almost three hours from my kids instead of half an hour hurts like hell. I haven’t made peace with that. I don’t know how to. And I guess, I don’t really want to make peace with it. I want that angst to keep motivating me to find ways to make it easier for us to see each other. I don’t want to slip in to “but it’s so far and everyone is so busy.” I want to remain highly motivated to find someone who can watch my sweet but challenging pup so I can take off for a long drive and a short visit, or to take a weekend here and there to see friends and family. People figure this stuff out all the time and I will too. It’s just, in moments of high contrast, the difficult parts feel sharper. Having just had time to hang out with my kids, the prospect of missing them is looming large.

It’s as if we have to keep finding ways to be bigger on the inside than we are on the outside, so we can hold all that life seems to ask us to hold. And sometimes there is no more room, and we have to become willing and able to put something else down so we can hold on to what we want to hold on to. Maybe there are old griefs I can leave behind so that there’s space to manage this new challenge of geography and proximity to the people I love. Maybe the perplexing problems I have for so long felt gnawing at me are less about algebra (as in, how do I solve for all these variables) and more about physics (as in, this is about the realities of force, mass, and acceleration, as in, how can I move myself forward through this particular time and space). Maybe the math analogy is bad but what I’m saying is that maybe it’s time to get practical instead of theoretical.

We’re all moving—together and separately—through this particular time and space and I hope we all find ways to allow ourselves to lean on one another and to be strong when we can’t and to be strong when someone else needs to lean on us.

Love, Cath

On Pebbles, Fish, and Feathers

By Catherine DiMercurio

Hope and perseverance take various shapes these days. My house is up for sale, and there’s a hopeful contender on the west side of the state just waiting for me. I’m starting to picture where I’m going to land, how I’ll arrange the furniture. I’m trying to do two things at once: fan the flames of my hopefulness to keep it alive, and also, maintain it at only a steady low burn so I’m not overly disappointed if things don’t go my way. That’s not an easy balancing act.

Still, when I recently visited the town I’m moving to and spent some time by the lake, I had that feeling, the one where my heart wakes up, fluttering and thundering in my chest. There is a simultaneous tug of calm peace and wild joy that tells me this is it, I belong here. I once thought love was supposed to feel that way, and maybe sometimes it has, here and there, and maybe that’s asking a lot of love.

A lot has to happen before I can move, and I’m often wondering if I’m doing it right. I don’t know the rules. I think that’s because there aren’t any. I must have made that part up, that rules exist for How to Do Things. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that if I could a) learn the rules and b) follow them, then the result would be everything making sense and falling into place. I imagine the gentle way it will happen, the falling into place, like a gull feather softly floating from the sky, and sighing into the sand at the water’s edge. I think I’ll sit on the floor in my new house and I’ll say, I did it, I got us here. I know it won’t make the world make sense again, but it will feel better, it will feel right and good and like home. That’s what I hope. And then I’ll get to go to the lake whenever I want, and my heart will hop and dance and trip over itself on the way, clumsy and glad.

When I say that I made that part up, about those rules existing, that isn’t entirely true. I willingly bought into beliefs and norms and societal conventions and turned them into rules inside my head because on some level, rules make me feel safe. Knowing the boundaries makes me feel confident. As in, here is a closed system and once you know how it operates you can function in a predictable way and get predictable results.

Even though I learned quite some time ago that the world doesn’t work that way at all, there is a small part of me, a thin little shadow, that stomps her feet in disbelief and frustration when things happen in ways they’re not “supposed to.” And when life gets overwhelming and more variables enter the equation, that thin little shadow grows into something larger and more solid. It’s okay. It’s something you have to learn to live with. Something I learn to live with, the shadow to bargain with, that is really just a version of me that wants to feel safe and understood. I can give her that at least, even if the world can’t. I can try.

If none of this is making sense to you then maybe you were lucky enough to play by the rules whether you believed in them or not and things fell into place for you, so much so that you’re surprised when things don’t work out for other folks. Maybe you figure that they just didn’t work hard enough, like you did. Or they weren’t positive enough or whatever enough, whatever it is that you believe got you where you are.

But if this is making sense to you, then hey, nice to see you here, hope things are going okay.

It’s hard, isn’t it, to live in this liminal space with all this uncertainty unfolding in multiple directions? It almost forces you to be the calm center of it, as if there are so many forces pushing at you from the outside that all your chaotic, uncertain, wayward and worried energy is forced back toward you, and you have to learn to metabolize it all. Because if you don’t metabolize it, you start to feel like it is crushing you. I’ve felt that way recently, like I was getting smaller and smaller. Just a pebble, really. Though, pebble-sized, everything happens around you, not to you, so maybe that’s the right way. How else does one metabolize all that chaos? Maybe it passes through you, like water through fish gills, and we take in what we need to breathe and nothing else. There probably isn’t a right way. Maybe sometimes it is a pebble day and sometimes it is a fish day.

But we all have stuff coming at us all the time. Theoretically, we could reduce the amount of chaos coming at us if we could diffuse our own response, our worry and fear and what not, and only deal with the outside forces, the unpredictable things in our lives that make us feel like things are overwhelming or out of control. But that is easier said than done. Sometimes the only thing that shows us the way is our own exhaustion. When we have no more energy left to worry because we’ve been too busy coping with what life is throwing at us. There is some relief in that somehow, in being too spent to work up enough energy to thrash against uncertainty like a caught fish in a net. That’s when we get to the point of saying, I’ll just have to roll with whatever happens next. And maybe when we’ve done that enough times we won’t have to wait until we’re completely exhausted to adopt that mindset. It’ll be a choice instead of a consequence. Sometimes that’s where the growth is; some of us only learn lessons the hard way.

When I think about leaving this house, I think about all the work I put into it, and how I turned it into a safe place to land after all. It’s a cozy refuge that has served me well. I hope it will let me go, will work its charm on the right person who is ready to make an offer any moment now, so the next set of things can fall into place for everyone.

But for now, it’s wait-and-see mode. I have moments where I’m okay with that, with the not knowing, with the in-between-ness, and there’s a part of me that actually does feel confident that I’ll be able to adapt to however the situation evolves. It’s hard to hold on to that mindset, when part of me wants to lean in so badly the particular details of how I want things to happen. Hope is a funny creature to tend to, being wild and capricious and hungry and fragile all at once. That’s another thing there aren’t any rules for, the care and feeding of this creature called hope. Maybe we’ll all get it a little bit right today.

Love, Cath

On Crayon Stars and Resisting

By Catherine DiMercurio

This winter, as always, I try to keep my head above water. It’s harder when the world keeps fracturing before our eyes, but when has it not been fracturing? It’s just a matter of how open our eyes are at any given time.

I’ve taken a break from pottery to focus on some other things, and while it was a hard decision to make, I find that I am both missing the studio but feeling like the break was indeed needed, if only for what I hope is a little while. It’s not hard to find other mediums for my creative energy, but there is no replacement for the collective creative energy of an art studio of any kind, and I’m definitely feeling the lack of that in my life. Still, I’m trying to look ahead to the move I want to make, and I need to create time and space in my life to focus on the necessary steps.

Sometimes it feels like life is lived while simultaneously looking over our shoulders for that which we are trying to outrun and looking ahead of us for that which we might run into, but there is always the running. Even when the pace of life is slow, this mental race is happening.

In some ways, I try to opt out of it, try to stop looking back and forward at the same time. Nothing depletes us quite so quickly as running in two directions at the same time. At least, I’d like to try and imagine that I’m heading toward a goal, instead of fearfully scanning the horizon for obstacles I might collide with.

There’s a not-new idea out there that the energy we put into something, individually and collectively, shapes reality, and that thoughts are energy, so thinking about what we want our lives to be like, and believing in those possibilities, goes a long way toward creating that future for ourselves. On the flip side of this is that our negative thoughts and beliefs play a similar role; we might be inviting into our lives the very things we fear by focusing on those fears. I have long realized that my mental health relies on my ability to redirect my own thoughts when I’m looping on something that is causing me anxiety. Still, I find it overwhelming to think that if I don’t stop being afraid of certain things happening in the future, I might somehow be calling those very fears into being. It can make me feel as though I must police my own thoughts. To me, this is too reminiscent of the old prayer that haunted me as a child, where we confessed to sinning in our thoughts and words, in what we had done, and what we had failed to do. Even as a child, I thought that covers everything! Is nothing about me good? The idea that even my thoughts were bad felt paralyzing, just as the idea does now that bad thoughts create bad reality.

If you have a busy, anxious mind, it isn’t as if redirecting your thoughts is a calm, once-in-a-while sort of activity. It can be a full-time job some days. Maybe that’s what has always been so intimidating about this process. One of the things that I try to do, when a fear or worry arises, instead of trying to push it away as quickly as possible, is to stop, recognize it, and say I see you, I hear you, I GET you. I am resistant to the idea that something organic to my own self—a thought springing from a fear in my brain—is wrong or bad in and of itself. But like an opinion not supported by facts, the fears in our brains can be misinformed. And I do believe there is value in trying to understand where our fears come from. Sometimes that provides us with an approach for a counterthought we can redirect our brain’s focus to. If I am worried about something that I have to do, and am concerned that I won’t be able to do it, I can remind myself of some of the things I’ve handled, and reassure myself that if this hypothetical situation should arise, I can handle that too.

Sometimes though the fear or worry is something large and unspecific, and even knowing where it comes from within us doesn’t really help. One phrase I’m seeing pop up in various places that can serve as a good counterthought to such thoughts and fears is something like I have the power to create the life, the future, I want. Some people believe the use of such phrases is a way to “manifest” for themselves materialistic things, or a partner, or any number of things, and some people believe that this is nonsense. Others hold that we can even use this type of thinking and believing to create the world that we want, that by channeling our individual energy toward a collective goal, we are feeding positive energy into a world hungry for it, and that this can have powerful results.

This idea holds some appeal. Is this maybe the way to counter some of the horrible developments we’re seeing in the world, in our country, these days? At the very least, can it help us to hang on to the things that are important in our lives and in our hearts while powerful people try to wash those away?

This makes me think of a third-grade art project, where we drew a picture, colored it in with waxy, bright crayons, and then washed over it with a dark paint. Some kids colored dazzling stars that stood out an inky night sky, some drew shining fish in a deep blue ocean. I found the result of using a resist in this fashion mesmerizing. Maybe we can be the resist, be the bright colors we all are, be shiny and solid, and we can stand out against the darkness that wants to wash over everything, wash everything away. Maybe we have to be that type of resist—bright, unyielding—in our own lives too, in our own thoughts, and in the world at large.

It can be so hard, especially in the thick of winter, to hold on to the good things, and find joy and solace in them when there’s so much cold and dark. Battling our fears every day is exhausting and honestly, my fears are part of who I am, which is maybe a strange way to look at it. But I want to understand them and comfort them, help them grow into something else, not battle them. I want to thank them for trying to protect me and show them that their energy could be put to a less defensive use. Our fears are trying so hard to protect us because of how much we love ourselves, even though we often perceive them to be a force that is working against us. I wonder what could be transformed if we looked at them that way, as a force of self-love. Maybe what we need to resist is the shutting down that we sometimes believe our fears are telling us to do. But perhaps they’re just there to remind us about the lengths love will go to.

Love, Cath

On Stress, Right Answers, and Noticing

By Catherine DiMercurio

I cherish calm, routine days. I think I’ve always been that way, but at this point in my life, I am more thankful than ever for peaceful stretches of time where I’m able write, exercise, work, hang out with my dog, and spend time with people I care about, without anything disrupting that flow. I had the thought recently that I need to figure out how to hang on to that sense of peace when I’m stressed. But a new thought dovetailed into that one. Once I’m stressed, that feeling of peace or well-being or calm is lost or distorted. What I actually need to do is to keep that stress outside of me.

Can we deal with stressful situations without becoming stressed? Is it possible not to internalize it? I have started to wonder not only if it is possible, but if it is the way many people already know how to handle it. Can I simply decide to not let it in? Sometimes I think of stress as a cold shadow, and though I try and stay warm and in the sunlight, I get cold and dark anyway.

Maybe it has less to do with what we let in and what we don’t. Like many people, I use the terms “emotions” and “feelings” rather interchangeably, but there’s a lot of information emphasizing that they are two different things. A Psychology Today article I read provides an example of the emotion of discomfort one might experience at a party. Your stomach might constrict and your breathing becomes shallow and rapid. Maybe you start to perspire. One person might interpret these physical cues as feeling anxious our awkward. Another person might experience the same physical cues and describe feeling excited. I certainly have tried to tell myself at times that the physical experiences that I associate with anxiety, often about a social situation, are actually excitement, hoping that if I labeled it differently it would calm me. It usually doesn’t.

Whether stress in particular is a feeling or an emotion seems a little blurrier. It certainly involves physical changes in the body that we label as “feeling stressed” but it is bigger than that. The Mayo Clinic notes that stress affects our body, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. I feel as though my big “revelation”—the idea that maybe I can choose whether to internalize or externalize it—will not be so simple to enact, given that an external situation that is stressful causes immediate physical reactions in my body; this happens before thought, or regardless of thought.

Is it possible then to experience the physical signs of stress—to be having an internal, bodily response—but still try to externalize the stress? As in: there is a stressful situation happening over there. I can feel my heart beating harder in my chest and my breathing is shallow. And while I recognize that I am experiencing physical discomfort and am feeling fearful, the situation itself is still happening over there. I can choose to react to it differently. I can take deep breaths and stretch and I can trust that I will find a way to handle the details of that situation.

Yet a stressful situation is stressful because some part of us feels threatened. Whether it is related to our own experience or that of someone we care about, we might feel that physical or emotional safety is threatened, or financial stability jeopardized, or there might be some other fear we feel deep down in our bones. It might also be very difficult to see it as something external if it is something related to our own bodies, like an injury or illness.

I suppose some of the best advice is just about noticing. When we’re in a heightened, uncomfortable state, we can notice what we’re experiencing in our bodies and how we’re labeling it. Then we can try to bring our bodies back to a state of calm—by breathing deeply, stretching, jumping, dancing, shaking it out, crying. I wonder if the most important part is avoiding what many of us do: we try to talk ourselves out of feeling what we feel. But what if instead, we attempt to love ourselves through it, and to be curious about why we’re responding the way we are.

Sometimes, the most comforting and grounding way for me to respond when I observe that my body is tense, and my mind is swirling with worry, and my feelings are overwhelming me, is to say to myself: hey, it is normal for you to be feeling this way in this situation. This is a natural response to stress, especially given the circumstances (whatever those may be). Sometimes it is that permission to respond in the way I am responding that makes the path through it a little clearer. This is a generous, loving response that I had to teach myself slowly and painstakingly over a long period of time, that I am still teaching myself.

What’s key here is that when faced with a stressful situation our bodies often have an immediate intrinsic response. It is incredibly challenging to move ourselves toward a calmer state of being if we tell ourselves we should not feel the way we are feeling. But maybe it is possible to take it in steps. Our bodies and minds are going to have that immediate response to something stressful, and that’s normal and healthy. They want to protect us. But once we manage those physical symptoms, and after we’ve been gentle with ourselves and acknowledged the existence of those normal feelings, can we then try to separate the stress from ourselves, can we other it, externalize it, place it “over there” as a set of problems to be solved or details to be managed? It’s worth a try.

Perhaps there is some danger too, in the idea of externalizing stress. That is, we don’t want all big and uncomfortable feelings to be something we see as separate from ourselves, right? I think when we separate ourselves from our grief or rage for example, we lose an opportunity to work through them in a healthy way. But stress is a special beast and maybe it needs special rules to tame it, and to treat its effects on us. It is a strange thing in many ways to try and extricate ourselves from stress and its effects. What I mean is that the world and its energy is woven throughout us and always has been. We can’t float along through this life untouched by things we’d prefer not to experience. It is hard to be soft, to let ourselves have a permeable barrier that allows us to take in as much love as we can, without taking in pain too. It’s hard to live fully and to also protect ourselves. The act of living and pursuing our dreams invites stress and risk.

One of the things that always comes back to me—wise words from a long time ago—is that there is no right way to do this. No right way to heal, or grow, or explore new things, to say yes to some things and no to others. There is no standard, no road map. As a kid, I always wanted to have the right answer, and in school, there always is one. I wanted to get the “A” and to be ready in class if I was called on. I think of my hand, shooting up into the air, ready to be the one to get it right. Throughout my adult years, I have searched out the “right” answer. The right way for me to live, to love, to be, to be me. It’s been hard to trust that I have ways of doing things that are the right way for me, especially since I look at the way my path has been different from that of a lot of people I know. My way doesn’t have to be someone else’s.

Sometimes when I’m not sure about what to do, I feel as though if I listen hard enough and in a particular way, I will be able to figure out what I truly want. I have worried that I’m on the wrong path because I’m not listening well enough.

What I forget is that there is a chance that the part of me I turn to for the “right” answers for myself might not know yet. It’s one thing to trust your gut, but sometimes your gut is still working on things. It’s hard to be patient, to trust in the timing as well as the answer, to trust that I’ll know what I need to know when I need to know it. I wonder, what if I miss it? What if the answer is too subtle, or I’ve been waiting so long I’ve forgotten to listen?

Perhaps, this is when it all comes back to noticing. We must be ready to notice what our instincts, our gut, is trying to tell us, in its own time. Maybe we must strive to dwell in a state of awareness. Perhaps this is part of what I had in mind, without fully knowing it, when I started this blog. Being an open-hearted person means being open to what is happening around us and inside us; it is about cultivating a rich, fulsome awareness. I think of that same hand shooting up in the air, not to proclaim the right answer, but simply to feel the air, simply to notice.

Love, Cath

On Burros and Butterflies, or How to Hold on to Your Dreams

By Catherine DiMercurio

When you are snuggled up with yourself on a towel with a thermos of coffee next to you after you’ve dipped yourself in a chilly lake on a cool, grey morning, you forget. You forget about all the things in your life that you needed to forget about for a little while. The things that seem un-figure-out-able. Those are the things that cause me the most daily stress, and having some relief from them was a gift. Lake Michigan is always a gift.

That was one of my favorite moments from my solo camping trip—the overcast day, the cold lake water, the hot coffee. Perhaps I could even call this trip a retreat, in that I retreated from the overwhelming stress of what my job has been like the past couple of months. I hiked and journaled and did some watercolor painting and read a lot and sat on the beach and looked at the water, and swam whenever I wanted. I made campfires. I listened t0 bumblebees in the silver linden tree. I watched butterflies flit through spirea blossoms, through a field full of staghorn sumac, milkweed, ox-eye daisies, black-eyed Susans. I sought calm and coziness.

Returning to the shores of the lake is for me like returning to the first sound you ever knew, your mother’s heartbeat. And it never fails to unlock something in me, this return. Still, this, itself, is part of one of my un-figure-out-able things. I haven’t figured out how I can rearrange my life, or afford, to have a lakeside life. I tried not to think about that on this trip, tried to simply immerse myself as much as possible.

When I’m in proximity to the lake, I don’t think about the not-belonging I feel almost everywhere else. I feel less out of sync with my environment than I have in most of the places I’ve lived. What does it mean to belong to a place, anyway? It is hard to find language that captures it. In some places, you simply feel connected. A place can speak to you—a house can, a lake can, a town can, a tree can—and you understand somehow. It feels like you. It’s a familiarity, in the sense that you recognize something of yourself in the landscape. It feels like home, a returning of you to you.

I’ve written a lot about belonging over the years in this blog. I thought about it a lot when I left the home I’d raised my children in and moved to this nearby township. It’s my fourth summer here and I don’t feel as though a strong sense of belonging is developing. I’ve made it my home, certainly, and my neighbors and I are friendly with one another. It isn’t a bad place to live by any means. But it is a long drive to a body of water. And in light of the dog attack I’ve written about and the number of loose dogs I have seen in the neighborhood, a new sense of hostility has developed. After the last incident a few weeks ago—another large dog was loose, but I spied him before the dogs noticed one another and I turned and we made it home—something in me closed a door, said it was the last time. The last time I risk another attack. It is another un-figure-out-able thing, my love of morning walks with Zero, and my inability to feel as if we can do that safely. I consulted a trainer, and I’m doing everything I can to make sure Zero is still getting exercise and mental stimulation. But it has been tricky. I have been very unsettled by the loss of our routine. And this sense of the neighborhood at large being hostile to us has been hard to shake.

I once had the thought, or the hope, that once I felt at home in my own skin, felt at last as though I belonged to myself, then I could and would feel at home anywhere. And I do feel that I have arrived at a place where I am more comfortable and content and at home with myself than I ever have been. But rather than this creating a situation where I feel at home wherever I am, it instead has intensified feelings of misalignment in terms of me feeling at home here.

And yet, for now, there’s nothing to be done, or if there is, I can’t see it yet. But, in most lives, there are un-figure-out-able things we live with all the time. We circle back to them, or, they circle us, like hawks or wolves. I’m trying not to think of these circling thoughts like predators, but I do feel an urgency about figuring things out. I wonder if I can make myself more patient by imagining them like butterflies or puppies instead. Though I suppose butterflies and puppies and all living things have some sense of urgency about them. Maybe, like everything else, it all comes down to self-trust. We have to trust ourselves to figure out the right thing at the right time.

There is some version of me that will know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, and maybe I’m still evolving into her.

I think that a recent dream I had reflects how I’m really feeling about these stubborn, un-figure-out-able things. The dream centered on a stampede of wild burros. It was a chaotic scene, but the burros were beautiful—their hindquarters a golden honey color and their forequarters white with dark spots. Maybe, in the midst of trying to figure out what we want and how to get there, part of the process is cultivating an openness toward all the ways we receive clarity about our path. That is, there is some beauty in wanting, no? My quest for the lake takes many forms, but maybe until I land there, I need to (from the safety of some shelter) observe the beauty of the stampede of my dreams. That is, our wanting helps us flesh out the specifics of our dreams, helps us to pinpoint exactly what is important and why. My desire for a safe place to walk with my dog and enjoy experiences with him is leading me toward other ways of interacting with him and building our bond.

So much of mental health, or at least my mental health, is centered in reframing how I look at things: my fears and anxieties, my past experiences, and my own view of myself. My sister recently observed that we don’t hear rain; what we enjoy about the sound of rain is the sound of the impact of each drop—on a window, the pavement, our skin maybe. She made a point of noting that it is only through this striking of water against object that we note the beauty of that sound. It is up to us to interpret how we view the nature of that impact within this metaphor. To me, “impact” is a word with some inherent violence but it is unsurprising that I hear it that way. Sometimes even minor experiences can leave me feeling a bit shaken; I often experience the world as a little overwhelming (sound in particular). But we don’t have to see everything that way, hear it all that way. Lots of gentle things can be described as impact—clapping, any touch, the brush of a butterfly wing against a flower petal.

We do have to trust ourselves to know what action to take and when to take it, to assess the status of our dreams and our progress toward them, but we also can take smaller, gentler actions every day in the way we look at our lives and our hopes. Recharacterizing our perspectives, reframing our metaphors, can help us tame the chaos of our anxieties. And observing the subtle qualities of our desires can help keep us in tune with what we’re seeking. Sometimes I find it exhausting to hold my own hand and walk myself through something that has been troubling me or causing me persistent worry. But I’m glad I’ve learned how over the years. Kind of. And we have to help each other to do the same. It’s not always about listening to a friend or a loved one and offering advice on what to do. Sometimes we just need to hear one another and swap metaphors, share our dreams, create safe places from which to observe stampedes.

Love, Cath

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 Mapping, Risk Management, and Clues

By Catherine DiMercurio

Not everyone prioritizes a sense of safety. Some folks are natural risk takers and enjoy adrenaline rushes, and for other people, that rush causes not a pleasurable feeling, but a host of uncomfortable after effects. Everyone is wired differently. Still, most people want to feel emotionally safe and physically safe within their homes and neighborhoods. I suspect that even the natural risk takers prefer to seek out their adventures rather than be surprised by them on a morning walk.

I’m not a natural risk taker, and I’m okay with that. I can be cajoled, either by myself or others, to try new things, because I do value the growth that new experiences invite. But there are certain environments where I think it is reasonable to expect safety, and one of them is when walking one’s dog in one’s neighborhood.

It’s hard, then, to not look at the dog attack my dog and I experienced recently as a violation and a setback, for both my dog and for me. We’re both okay. It could have been worse in so many ways. But the problem with that “it could have been worse” thinking is that while it does invite you to be grateful for all that didn’t happen, it does dismiss what did. And in the frightening moments when something terrifying is happening, you don’t yet know how bad it is or will be. It feels life threatening. Lots of thoughts flash through your head, and in my case, I had no idea, in the midst of the attack, if my dog would escape without serious, or even fatal, injuries. We’d walked past a house I usually avoid. The dogs are tied up, but there’s no fence. You can’t see them at first, because there are always a lot of cars in the driveway blocking the view. We didn’t see the one that must have slipped his collar until he was running across the street, headed right for my dog, ignoring my firm shouts of no, and my stance, squared off in front of my dog, all of which have gotten us out of other situations with loose dogs.

When we finally escaped and returned home, I both panicked and collected myself enough to check my dog over for wounds. I thought of the minutes that we both fought, and how loudly I screamed pointlessly for help that didn’t come. I thought of how long we were followed by the other dog, and how I repeatedly had to shout and stomp him away and keep myself in front of my dog, to avoid a continuation of the attack. I thought about how it felt like my legs were shaking so badly I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it home anyway. I thought of the woman who, a block over from where the attack occurred, came out of her house with a broom to help fend of the dog so my dog and I could make our escape without being followed. It could have been worse. We ended up not needing to go to the vet, though in the days that have followed, I’ve continued to examine my dog, peering through his thick double coat, studying the wound I missed initially. There’s a minor, scabbed-over line? gash? that could have either been from the harness or a tooth or a claw, but it looks to be healing and I haven’t noticed any signs of infection. I never saw any blood on that first day, and yet, it is scabbed, reminding me of the way I’d skin my knee after a fall as a child, and how the abraded skin would sort of bead up but never really bleed, and then a thick scab would form.

I worry I’ve let him down by not finding it sooner. I worry I let him down. I worry.

He continues to be active, playful, and is eating and drinking normally. He was like this almost immediately. For a week, we didn’t go for walks. We’ve started again, the first time back out being with my boyfriend, which provided us with an added sense of security, in addition to the airhorn I brought along.

Still, I find myself recalling other significant moments in life where my sense of safety has felt similarly erased, as if this event calls up a map, revealing neural shortcuts. I’ve realized in recent days that there are a lot of these shortcuts, and the older you get, the more of them there are. The map is intricate. A song can take us back to a key moment in our past, a smell can, an event can. Every day we have more past than we used to have. Some of the memories we travel back to are beautiful, and some are the worst we’ve experienced. So often, it is the painful memories that surface with ease, seemingly un-dulled by time.

Photo by Aksonsat Uanthoeng on Pexels.com

I remind myself in the aftermath of all this, that it isn’t my job to do everything possible to avoid more pain. It’s to populate that map with so many new, good things that the pathways back to the frightening or wounding memories are crossed over many times with side trails, alternate routes, shortcuts to joyful recollections, to peaceful moments, to delight, to wonder.

Now, though, I’m more fully aware of how wrong a simple dog walk can go. In the past, even though we’ve been approached by loose dogs before, I have felt a false sense of security because the owners have been nearby, or showed up, and things were diffused before they turned ugly. I thought the risk I was managing was more minimal than it is.

At the same time, the usual joy and pleasure of the morning walk is not something I can give up easily. And based on his demeanor the two times we’ve walked since the attack, it isn’t something my dog wants to give up either. We have some work to do. I do think he’s more skittish than usual, and we still need to do things like walk as early as possible so that we can avoid other dog walkers. He was reactive before this, and the attack is definitely not going to help. But, I’m starting a new training plan. I have an air horn. I have pepper spray.

It’s difficult though, to find that sweet spot, where appropriate caution and enjoyment can cohabitate. Where I’m not leaning too hard into risk management, or too hard into peaceful obliviousness. But this is the way with everything. It’s the same in this new relationship I’m in. For the first several months, I felt so self-protective, unwilling to jump all the way into the vulnerability that builds the closeness that I long for. Once you’ve tried to build that over and over with other people and it doesn’t work out, it’s so easy to hesitate, to hold back. Still, things are beginning to change for me, and while I’m not jumping in with wild abandon, I’m wading in, and enjoying the process of slow and deliberate acclimation, and it’s been so wonderful to do that with such a compassionate and loving person by my side. I think he sees my true value because I was finally able to see it (and I see his). All of this encourages the blossoming of trust, which I think of as my body’s and my mind’s own intrinsic from of risk management.

We all have different strategies for getting us through tough times, and sometimes it seems like none of them are particularly effective. I remind myself that the route toward healing is not trying to make myself “feel better.” It’s allowing myself to experience the feelings various events create and trigger. I used to think “working through” things meant thinking my way out of feeling sad or angry or scared. But to a certain extent, I’m starting to understand that being brave enough to not avoid all those heavy feelings is the most direct route toward getting to the other side of them. I often worry that I’m dwelling too much on something, but I believe that sense comes from my habit of trying analyze my feelings instead of simply experiencing them. Maybe it would be better to look at my hyper-focused thought patterns as clues to feelings I need to spend more time with, rather than thoughts that I need to keep rethinking.

I don’t want to feel like I’m prioritizing safety so much so that I’m missing opportunities to experience fun, joy, delight. I want to give my dog a good life, and I want that for myself. As with most things in life, the balance here—between risk management and pleasure-seeking—is hard to achieve. For me, it is important to remember to be patient with myself, and not label my process of bouncing back from a frightening experience as an overcorrection. We were truly in a dangerous situation and the world isn’t telling me to “get back out there,” but a part of me is hearing that anyway.

For now, I’m going to take it slow, and lean into my support system, and populate my map with as many shortcuts to good memories as I can. There’s no right way to do any of this. Safe travels, friends.

Love, Cath