On Creation, Waiting, and Time

By Catherine DiMercurio

I don’t have a record player but periodically I think of getting one and it seems every time I do, it’s after I heard a Tom Petty song. I recently listened to a snippet of an interview with him in which he was talking about the process by which he wrote “The Waiting.” You know that one. The waiting is the hardest part. Every day you get one more yard. You take it on faith, you take it to the heart.

He was talking about how a bit of the melody came to him and he played it over and over again for weeks, and then the chorus, same thing. He just played the same thing over and over. The snippet cut off after he talked about somebody knocking on the other side of the wall telling him not to play it anymore but presumably the rest of the song came to him this way, in pieces, over time.

I wish I could speed up processes sometimes, creative processes, learning processes, healing processes. It’s like I’m always waiting for my ability to catch up with my creative energy. My results don’t often match the vision I had in my head and I’m chasing the kind of book I want to write or piece of pottery I want to create. Or, the life I’m trying to build.

I look around at the things that seem to come easily for people and long for something like that for myself. I feel wildly impatient with my slow pace in nearly all things. Sometimes I feel as though I have the mentality of a perfectionist but not the talent, or results, to show for it. I am not meticulous. I am a messy learner with almost no eye for detail. I am full of earnest trying but am frequently wanting something more to show for the effort than what I was actually able to produce. I wake up too early and agonize over glazes I applied too thickly despite my best efforts in pottery class or fret over stories I’ve been submitting for years that keep getting rejected. I wonder, when is it going to all come together, and, what have I missed?

And then, things come together a little bit, all at once. Last year, I did get two pieces of writing accepted at literary journals and they finally were published this past week, within twenty-four hours of one another. And the glazes I’d been so worried about turned out fine, and I threw well that night at pottery class. I enjoyed it thoroughly, that moment where things coalesced in a brief way, knowing that such moments never promises anything. Any future success in either art form will be just as hard-earned and the waiting in getting there will continue to be the hardest part.

I look at all my impatience and I wonder where it’s all coming from and why it percolates everywhere for me. For all my striving toward self-acceptance, this feels out of place. When I step back, I can see that it isn’t there all the time, but it comes back to me, maybe when I’m feeling low about other things. I am trying to pause and consider why it matters so much that I learn faster, glaze better sooner, write and publish more now, etc. I think a lot comes down to validation.

If I’m producing “good” work in a visible way it’s proof, right? I mean, that’s how external validation works. We believe that if others can see something of our “goodness” or “value” then maybe it’s easier for us to believe in ourselves. Alternatively, it simply is enjoyable to feel seen, to have someone else confirm what we’ve been cultivating in ourselves, i.e., a sense of our own worth. For so long, I thought the goal was to not need external validation, that there was something wrong with wanting it. So, I worked diligently on trying to find where this need arose from in my past, how it came to be that I felt unable to sense my own worth. I work at rebuilding my sense of self in the same way that I create, revise, and re-create art in the mediums I’m working in now: clay and words. I’m continually learning how to be me in the same way, with the same habits of working and trying and reshaping and revising. I hum the same bars over and over for weeks. Still, I’m coming to understand that it doesn’t all have to be internal. We must feel safe and good and loved within our own skin, but it also feels good to have someone tell us good things. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying that.

Many people struggle with feelings of not being “enough” or “good enough,” and all for different reasons. I’ve dug into my own reasons, determined to understand them better, because I have found that the only way for me to cultivate healthy self-perspectives and habits is to use precise and loving language in my internal thought processes, language that responds specifically to the lessons and events of my life that wired my brain for self-criticism and an extreme response to anything that feels like rejection.

I am impatient with all this, but I think one of the reasons it takes so long to recover yourself from various types of wounds is that you often can’t face it all at once. It’s too much. It was too much for me to heal in a smooth and linear way and all at once from a twenty-year marriage ending in the storm brought on by my then-husband’s alcoholism and infidelity. Some wounds feel as though they change us at our core, forever, and after bearing the initial brunt of that pain, we begin to understand that the only way to survive it is to take breaks from it. We turn away, we look to others for help. Then we go back to it when we’re strong enough and rested enough.

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

What I need is to believe that I have time. That I can keep conquering what I need to, that I can keep writing and learning, that there’s no need to rush. But we live in an urgent world that is always proving that nothing is promised, certainly not how much time any of us have left. But I need to believe that I have time, anyway. That my own pace for healing and nurturing my sense of self, for building my writing self into who she is becoming, for learning all I can in an artform as elusive and slippery as wet clay, is all sufficient. I need to believe that because whenever I try to rush things, something is sacrificed. Whenever I grow too impatient, I wind up falling into a dark place and my energy is then focused on pulling myself out of that instead of all the other things I’d rather be doing.

In a way, that’s my own version of blind faith: that I have time, that we all do. To keep creating the person I want to be, the life I want to have. My pace is neither fast nor slow, just mine, is what I tell myself. The waiting for it all to come together will always be the hardest part, because that’s where all the living is, in the waiting. The moments when things coalesce are fleeting, and the rest is creative energy at work. There is so much beauty and art in the waiting, even if it is the hardest part sometimes.

Love, Cath

On the Familiar, Change, and Growth

By Catherine DiMercurio

One of the strangest facets of my existence in the past ten years has been the recurring sensation of unfamiliarity, and how dizzying it can be at times.

When I was married, I enjoyed the feeling that I knew my partner better than anyone else in the world, and I felt was as known to him. Toward the end, that changed, and it began to feel as though he was becoming a different person; the reasons are varied and complex and I have never truly understood how much of that I should allow myself to write about candidly. Suffice it to say that after it was over, I felt as though maybe I’d never known him at all.

In the relationships since, each ended before I’d arrived at the familiarity I craved. I also moved at the beginning of the pandemic, and my youngest went off to college, all of which contributed to the sensation that nothing in my life felt familiar to me any longer. Not my home, not my community, not my solitude, not my self. So much of who we are, at any given moment, feels rooted in place and people. When we look at ourselves extracted from those relationships, it can be disorienting, and it takes a while before we can take advantage of the opportunity it offers.

During my relationships, I was so afraid of loss that I had become someone other to myself, someone who allowed herself to be sloughed off, little by little. I found myself in a dangerous pattern of letting go of little pieces of me, the ones that might get in the way of the relationship succeeding. In the hazy aftermath of it all, after the last one ended, I realized that I did not know how to be in a relationship without this happening. The reason, I began to learn, was that I’d drifted too far from the shores of my own sense of identity. I had forgotten—or never knew—that I was the safe harbor I’d been looking for. The pattern of self-abandonment for the sake of the relationship, for the sake of loss mitigation, had become so familiar it provided its own comfort. It felt easy and good to mold myself into the type of person it seemed my partner wanted me to be. But when things got comfortable, when I was comfortable enough to relax and be myself a little more, it was understandably jarring, and I would back pedal. How much of myself do I get to be, and for how long, became the guiding principles of my behavior. Though there are a lot of reasons things didn’t work out with my past relationships, this is the part that I have to own.

I’ve spent the last two years trying to undo that damage. Some of the rage and grief I still feel over the decade’s losses are rooted in this loss of self—and my own role in it. At the same time, I exist alongside a frustration with time. When I imagine potentially building that sense of familiarity with a new partner, I remember that you can’t create twenty years of history with someone you just met. It’s hard to make peace with what feels, at times, like running out of time. One of the balms for this particular type of bruising the heart experiences is trying to nurture those relationships with friends and with family with whom a history does exist.

But here we encounter another wrinkle. People change, all of us do. And we might find that people who once seemed very familiar to us no longer do, and maybe we don’t seem familiar to them either. And change is such a slippery term, right? It rarely looks how you think it will, in ourselves or in others. To put it more baldly: it hurts. Sometimes it simply hurts to watch people you love become someone else. And our own evolution can hurt, too, when we choose to know and honor who we are. Growth is prickly, painful, and nonlinear.

Sometimes growth is prickly and we long for familiar things we can't have. — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

For a long, long time, the idea that guided my writing was informed by a similar exploration of familiarity and change: do we become more or less of who we are as we get older? Are there essential facets of our true nature that get stripped away or clouded over, or are we growing, feeding that true nature so that it blossoms in a thousand beautiful ways? There is much to think about here, but it seems to me that despite whatever we are doing internally to nurture and protect that truest self, there are external forces acting upon it too. There are people who feed our soul, those who seek to crush it, and those whose aims are more difficult to see, who, for whatever reason, see what is beautiful in us and cannibalize it, because it soothes their own wounded soul. And sometimes we can’t even see it happening, because we are busy being our loving and generous selves. But we are mistaken to believe this is anything other than trauma, and there is wisdom and growth in waking to that knowledge and repairing the damage.

So how do we reconcile this need for familiarity with the fact that everything is always changing? For me, it has become a practice of asking myself new questions. Why am I drawn to the familiar in the first place? What am I truly looking for? The answer is usually comfort. Something needs soothing. All the things that had me craving something familiar—the ending of a relationship, having moved to a new house, my kids moving out—left me disorientated and lonely and I wanted to sink into something that felt like being held. But there was nothing to hold me, so instead, I sifted through old familiar things, held them: photos, books, trinkets in jars, stones from beaches gathered on trips I’d taken with my children.

But one of the most amazing things that has happened in these past couple of years is that I’m learning to accurately identify what I’m longing for and how I can soothe that longing. Not everything that feels like loneliness is loneliness. Sometimes, when the hum of routine has me feeling under-stimulated, I’ll seek out art, nature, company. Sometimes there’s too much happening, and all I want is for everything to slow down, so I’ll do something slow, like bake, sit in the sun, read a book. When I’m longing for connection, I’ll reach out to the people who understand. And sometimes I do genuinely feel lonely and I let myself feel it, knowing that it is a price I willingly pay for peace.

I long to layer all this thinking with some kind of metaphor that captures the feelings I want to convey, but it’s hard because change isn’t always for the better, doesn’t always seem to lead to growth, not when we get stuck in certain patterns. It’s like going through all the trouble of dissolving ourselves in a chrysalis but never becoming a butterfly, when sometimes all we really want to do is be a caterpillar anyway, happily munching on leaves all day. Maybe we do the whole thing over and over again in a lifetime, or maybe we’re always part caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly, all at the same time, with different parts of us transforming in different ways. I think though, at the heart of it all, is a truest self, always longing to be seen, to show us the familiar and changing way back to ourselves, lighting the way like a little firefly in the night.

Love, Cath

On Rage and Other Big Things We Don’t Like to Talk About

By Catherine DiMercurio

I took my rage for a walk the other day because the only thing that made sense was tiring it out. I wondered if it was more like a toddler in tantrum or like a puppy full of energy to spend. But the rage—my rage—was unlike either of those things. It wasn’t innocent frustration opposing the structure of its world and it wasn’t joyful and bored and antsy. It was more sophisticated and self-aware, and I couldn’t think of it in a way that made it seem cute and small and not very dangerous. It was not cute, and it felt volatile and intimidating.

On my drive out to the woods, the rage quieted. Simmered. Waited. I was tired of trying to talk myself out of it, just because I didn’t know where it came from. I was tired of trying to figure out all the reasons I felt so full of this surging and unpredictable reactive energy. But I did it anyway. Was it because of the world at large and all the ways it is hateful and crumbling? Was it frustration with life and how there’s no way off this treadmill of working to pay for a roof over your head and having little time or resources to ever do much else? Was it this new and uncontrollable bristling I feel when I encounter inauthenticity? Or was it the powerlessness I feel when I witness people abandoning themselves the way I once did, in service of people or situations that were hurting them? Or was it simply grief’s companion, still flailing over all the things that still hurt?

I don’t know that I learned how to properly self-soothe as a child. People tell you to calm down but they don’t tell you how. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out what to do with myself when emotions feel too big for my body. When my kids were young, I would tell them to not do anything with their hands when they were angry because we’re so much stronger when were mad. Mostly this was to keep them for hurting each other when they were upset. We talked about different things they could do when they felt that way. Scream into or punch a pillow. Jump up and down. Take deep breaths. But we probably didn’t talk often enough about all this. I was still learning myself, but I suppose a lot of parenting is like that.

Now, as I began walking a trail covered in snow, several inches deep but packed down by other feet and frozen into other shoe shapes, my own boots slipped and slid. I had decided by then to just let myself be angry instead of trying to figure out why it had appeared out of the blue without an obvious trigger. I tried to not be resentful this time. Fine, be mad, I sometimes told myself, all the while feeling a meta-anger, that sense that I was mad about being mad.

This time, I tried to be agreeable about it all. Okay. Today we’re going to be mad, I guess. It’s okay to be mad. I tell myself this now. Because it is, even though I don’t like how it feels inside my body. And I did try to impart this to my kids, too, that it’s okay to be mad but it’s not okay to take it out on other people. But whenever I tried to apply this lesson to myself, I kept trying to talk myself out of my feelings. Maybe I was told too many times that I didn’t have anything to be mad about.

I have this idea that as an adult I’m supposed to be calm and in control of my emotions all the time. I have a habit of judging myself for the “negative” emotions that take me over. In a way, trying to figure out all the reasons I might be mad felt like an attempt to justify, to counter the “you don’t have anything to be mad about” charge, like part of me was yelling, yes I do! It’s as if I’ve been seeking permission from myself to be angry. I have embraced sorrow. When it visits, I let it stay as long as it needs to. I feel it, I talk to it, I cry. I let it have its say, and that seems to matter. But I’ve been afraid of doing this with rage. It feels too big, unstable, uncontrollable.

As I hiked through the snow, I turned on the path that leads to a loop through a big, open, hilly field. It’s a less popular trail and the snow was fresher here, less hard-packed by the few hikers who had passed this way before me. It was deeper to trudge through, and it felt good, pushing through the snow. I checked in on my rage and it felt like it was diffusing a bit. By the time I’d finished five miles, I felt tired and refreshed. The rage had loosened its hold on me, glad perhaps that I didn’t try to tell it to go away, that it didn’t have a right to be here.

On the other side of rage, it is sometimes easier to see that it’s often about fear and things we have no control over. I always want to understand it because I’m afraid I’ll miss something. People say that you should listen to your anger because it’s trying to tell you something, point you in the direction of something that needs healing.

But the tricky part about healing is that it doesn’t mean something stops hurting. At least, not so far. Sometimes we’re pointed in the direction of our pain and all we can do is recognize and honor it, just like we do with the emotions that brought us there. We self-soothe as best we can. We cry, take a hot shower, go for a snowy hike, scream into a pillow, ask for help or a hug, snuggle the dog. Sometimes we simply must take a deep breath and get on with our day.

Maybe healing is simply showing up for yourself, again and again, without judgement. Without criticizing yourself for having grief, or rage. I think all of us are all the time trying to heal, from big psychic wounds that we never saw coming and stay with us for decades, and from all the little things that gouge at us more recently.

For a week I was not able to pinpoint what it was that had made my insides churn with a rage that seemingly had nothing to do with my life at the moment. Everything had been relatively calm in the days preceding and then I woke up and the rage just hit me. I’ve spent the week thinking about it, and telling myself to stop thinking about it, that the why doesn’t matter. That I did the right thing in finding a way to let myself feel it safely. Anger is a big emotion and it made sense to enlist the woods and the solitude and snow to help absorb it, and that worked.

But it still bothered me that I couldn’t pin it down. This morning, a week to the day, I woke up, and as my amorphous thoughts gathered into language like raindrops on a windowpane melting into one another, I thought, I’m mad at myself for still feeling grief. I don’t want to feel this way. I don’t think I should. But I do. As I walked myself back through the previous week I realize it all started with a dream. I’d woken up, been frustrated that my subconscious was still nursing old wounds, but I didn’t give it another thought. Then as the morning wore on I realized this rage had seeped in from someplace, seemingly all of the sudden. My dream had been forgotten. And I didn’t put it all together until now.

Our minds and hearts operate in strange ways. In the calm and safe world I’ve built for myself, my brain works on things while I sleep, in ways I do not understand, but in waking life, I’m left to process it all along with the residual emotions. I suppose it is all happening the way it should. The part of me that has waited for me to be ready to do this part of the work is nudging me. But sometimes it feels like a war between two voices inside me, one saying you don’t get to be mad at yourself because things still hurt, and one saying, just watch me.

Maybe it’s my job to be the peacemaker. To tell myself that my anger is a valid response, especially since, if I pick it apart, I can see that it isn’t solely anger at myself for still hurting, it’s anger at the people who hurt me, and anger at myself for “letting” them. In peacemaking, I can allow safe spaces for the anger to exist and expend itself, to rise up when it needs to, just like I’ve learned to allow with the grief. Maybe my anger just needs some time alone with me, away from grief.

I don’t know if it will ever all dissipate, or if all these disparate parts of myself will peacefully coalesce, like those raindrops on a windowpane. For now, though, there’s not much I can really do except keep listening, and making space when the big emotions show up and demand attention. Maybe healing is simply showing up for yourself, again and again, without judgement. Maybe life is.

Love, Cath

On Owls, Cranes, Practice, and Purpose

By Catherine DiMercurio

In the late afternoon, before the light began to fade, I stretched on my purple yoga mat in my bedroom. The puppy, (now two years old), is always at my side and it is no different when I’m standing on my head or sinking into shavansana, corpse pose. He’s right there, at least one paw on the mat, connected to me. When I finished, I found myself thinking that as I go into the new year, one of the things I’d like to move toward is a daily yoga practice. Right now, I do a couple of half hour sessions a week, but I remain stiff in some poses, can’t do some of the things I used to be able to do. So, I’m deciding that I will try to do at least 15 minutes a day. I have other goals for daily exercise, ranging from dog walks to long hikes, and I’ll still do longer, deeper yoga sessions a couple of days each week, but 15 minutes on the other days seems like a reasonable goal, and something I know will benefit me both mentally and physically, particularly as I try to get through these long, cold, dark months. I realized, as I sat on my mat, petting my dog, that my goal did not need to be about getting back to where I was with my yoga when I was younger, or reaching a certain point of mastery over a pose. It is simply this: I feel good when I do yoga. I feel like me and I want more of that.

As I continued to think about how setting this type of goal differed from the ways I set goals in the past, I realized that what I’m after is a practice that is more about habit and effort, rather than outcome. And I began to reflect on how this type of goal setting might be helpful in other areas of my life. Too often I set goals that are achievement-based. I want to be able to do this type of pose perfectly, or get this number of pieces of short fiction published. Then, I further encumber such goals with a timeline. Life teaches us to do this. Self-help books, social media posts, and professional development materials, all often insist that goals need to be measurable and time bound. I even remember reading someplace that goals without a timeline are just wishes.

But I am curious about this: what naturally evolves from a habit-based practice versus achievement-based effort? If I practice yoga for 15 minutes every day and observe my body and my mind, what benefits might I notice? This is different than saying, I am going to do yoga for 15 minutes every day so that I can do a back bend by the end of February.

Likewise, if one of my writing goals is to submit two short stories to literary journals every month, what could grow from that practice of writing and submitting? And how might that practice differ than if I aim for getting, say, three acceptances in the coming year?

My point is that there is so much we are not in control over. And what discourages us, depresses us, keeps us in a sluggish instead of vibrant mental state is that feeling of failure, of letting ourselves or others down, of comparing ourselves to others and not measuring up, because we haven’t gotten to where they are, and shouldn’t we, by now?

Yet, I have little control over whether or not something gets published. I can keep writing, and choose what to submit and to whom, and after that it is out of my hands. We can, to some extent, choose how to spend our time, though we all have responsibilities that can make even this challenging. Still, we can control our own efforts, shape our own habits. What we can’t do is force the world to react to any of that in a certain way.

My writing practice, my yoga practice, my pottery practice—these are more important to me, the doing of them, than the achievement markers that indicate to the world that I’m successful at them. But I get hung up on the proof sometimes. I try to avoid the trap of external validation, though, like most people, I enjoy it. So I want to point to publication as proof of my writing effort; I want to show up in a yoga class and prove I belong because I can keep up; I want to throw a large piece or create something exquisitely artful as evidence that my hard work and practice has paid off. But, what am I really trying to prove, and to whom? Is my desire to demonstrate effort a performance for an audience? Does someone else saying that’s good or I can see you tried really hard matter more than me saying those things to myself? I don’t think that it is wrong to envision what we might accomplish, to want those things, to work toward them. But I’m starting to wonder if practicing with achievement-based goals at the forefront of our effort is the healthy way to go. Maybe, we could let achievement be the by-product of effort, of habit. And if our effort does not produce those tangible markers, then so be it. If we are working with our own satisfaction, enjoyment, thrill of discovery, etc., foremost in our hearts, rather than what we hope to prove to ourselves or others, wouldn’t the habit itself be more delightful to cultivate?

This is not news to everyone, this idea of practicing the things you love, that are important to you, for the sake of the practice itself rather than what you can show for it or get out of it. It’s not even news to me, but sometimes we lose our way a little. The world teaches us to be goal-oriented, our professional lives hammer home messages of efficiency, productivity, success. But I’m finding there is little living happening in that way of doing things. There is striving and measuring, but not breath, pleasure, joy, satisfaction.

While I am often resentful of the notion that I should make New Year’s resolutions, I have always found that it is a good time to reflect. But in reality, I’ve been doing so since the solstice. The time frame between solstice and the new year has been, continues to be, a rich one for contemplating what I’m learning, what makes sense, what doesn’t. In the coming year, I want to stretch as if I’m waking up from all that has kept me asleep, and still, and sad. I want to “relax into the pose,” as my very first yoga teacher taught me.

As the new year approaches, I’m going to continue to reflect on what other habits I’d like to cultivate with a heart focused on the habit itself, rather than what it produces, or how efficiently. This coming year, I want to relax: into poses, practice, purpose. To unfold, to deconstruct the beliefs that have led me to approach goals as rigid, structured things measured by success and failure, beliefs that have led me to view myself in the same way, like an origami crane made of glass, something that can be easily broken, instead of something sturdy yet flexible, something that can be unfolded, smoothed out, and remade.

Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz on Pexels.com

After my yoga practice, just after dusk, I heard a great horned owl. Across the street, behind a row of brick ranch houses, is a creek and little woodland strip that separates this subdivision from the next. It is the home for a lot of wildlife—deer, opossums, groundhogs, skunks, hawks, and owls, among others. I don’t know that I can ever hear an owl without thinking of some kind of sparkling magic happening just outside my door. I want more of my life to feel that way, infused with the everyday magic of living things being themselves. I want to be part of that, be completely and unselfconsciously myself, making and unmaking myself as needed, as easily as my owl friend hoots in the settling of night over the woods, as soft as moonlight on feathers. I think our habits and practices can lead us there. Don’t you?

Love, Cath

On Plans, and Doubts, and Dandelions

By Catherine DiMercurio

I awoke on a recent summery May morning to a cool breeze sighing through the open window and the smell of someone’s backyard woodfire still clinging to the air. It felt peaceful, but despite this fine context my first thoughts of the day were despairing ones. They were emotion-thoughts more than word-thoughts. I anticipated the coming day and recalled the previous one, wondering vaguely what I added to the world that had value. Thoughts like these result in anxiety and restlessness for me, and managing those emotions means I have to pep talk myself about what I contribute, what matters, what I’m grateful for, etc. It seemed a bit early in the morning for an existential crisis, but truth be told, I’ve been thinking about such things as long as I can remember. What is the point of all this, I wonder, often. Not just why am I here, but why are any of us? But given that we are, what should we be doing?

We live in a capitalist society in which many of us have internalized the notion that value and worth are tied to what we produce, and what we accumulate. To counter that, a whole culture has grown up around the idea that our personal value is tied not to those material things, but what we’ve done to make the world a better place.

Another way of looking at our personal worth centers on the love we’ve created in the world. Who we love, who loves us. For a while, this perspective really worked for me, but children grow up and move away, relationships dissolve, and there are plenty of people who haven’t felt loved, or haven’t had the opportunities to find and create love, and it doesn’t seem fair to tie personal worth to things that are often beyond our control.

Some people don’t question these things much because they have found answers in their faith. I was raised Catholic and my thoughts on why I’m not anymore could fill a book, which I likely will never write. A lot of people these days say they are spiritual but not religious and that means different things, depending on who you ask. It’s hard to say if it applies to me. I consider myself agnostic, meaning that for me, if there is anything divine in this universe, which I’m not sure of, the nature of it is unknowable. I do believe that energy cannot be created or destroyed, and this scientific principle seems more divine than anything else I’ve encountered. But the point of all this is to say, that I don’t believe there is a consciousness at the helm of all this, and certainly not one that has a plan for me, or anyone else. People also say things like “the universe is trying to teach you this or that.” It’s pleasant and nontheistic to think that, in a way, but that statement is not different from the “it’s all part of God’s plan” line of thinking and I’m not convinced the universe works that way. If the universe thinks I’m supposed to learn things, then it must be because there is a path it thinks I should be on. The whole notion of a plan—God’s or the universe’s—boils down to the centuries-old debate about free will versus determinism, and if theologians and philosophers have been playing this game for hundreds of years, I’m certainly not going to figure it out.

It makes me think of the University of Michigan football stadium at full capacity, with half the stadium yelling “Go” and the other half yelling “Blue.” It’s a battle of who can be louder, but it is also about the harmony of the message. Similarly, we seem to need to believe in both free will and fate. We want to believe we have choices, that it isn’t all preordained, but at the same time, we want to believe there’s a plan. When things happen that we don’t understand, people say it’s all part of God’s plan. Or when we are not where we expect to be in life, or have a setback, we are told it is because there are things we haven’t learned yet, and the universe will find different ways of sending the same lesson until we get it, and then somehow things will get better, or make sense. On any given day people believe what gives them the most comfort. On any given day, I see both chaos and order in the universe and I don’t know where I fit.

Everyone has advice. Find your purpose. Chase your dreams. Do what you love. Don’t overthink it. Others tell me that we are here to simply enjoy ourselves as best we can.

I think of all the philosophies I’ve embraced and either discarded or incorporated some parts of. I have sought clarity, but sometimes it accumulates as clutter. I often forget that moments can feel longer than they are, and time is like pulled taffy. Getting lost in ruminations about purpose, value, and identity is something my mind does every so often. But in other moments, I’m living less inside my brain, and I’m doing things I love, or just muddling through, and it all somehow makes enough sense. I don’t know if I’m on the verge of figuring things out for myself, and all the other things are a distraction from the work my brain wants to do, or if all the ruminations are the distraction, and real life and real meaning is in all the rest of it.

Both, I realize in flashes of insight. It’s both. It’s the harmony between thinking and feeling, between doing and being, between contemplation and action. I do know that in all the advice I’ve internalized over the years, the phrase “be yourself” continues to ring true. This is the way my brain works, always has. But I think truly embracing the notion of being who I am might be the north star that I’m looking for. Maybe it is the way to recalibrate when I feel lost. Maybe it is the only way to understand our place in this mysterious universe. I just read something online about the dandelion, and how useful all its components are, and how resilient it is. A dandelion succeeds as an individual plant and has succeeded as a species for centuries because all of its parts work together to insure it thrives. It supports the lives of pollinators—it does good in the world—but it doesn’t exist in order to do so. It just is. It doesn’t need a plan, it just maximizes its resources: the sun, the rain, the wind that disperses its seeds (or the human making a wish).

I am this collection of cells and memories and have lived and evolved right up until this moment. I have a hard time believing there is a Plan beyond that, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make squishy, flexible plans for what I might want in the future. And letting go of things I had once planned for my future—things that I imagined were solid and fixed, things that will never come to be—that is some of the hardest and most necessary work I’ve done. But for now, it makes sense to be. Be myself. Maybe be a little like a dandelion.

Love, Cath

On Voice, Moment, and Movement

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes moments are motion, and our voice guides us through, if we listen.

Spring weather here can be a strange mix, with warm sun shining down while a frigid wind blows. Moment by moment you are alternately completely comfortable, basking in the sun that soaks into your skin, and then suddenly freezing and wishing you had a hat and gloves. This weekend my emotions played out similarly.

With my son home for a visit, relieving the solitude of my day-to-day life, I alternately felt happy, comfortable, and relaxed, and then suddenly sad and anxious, as if I existed in the moment and the ones just before and just after all at the same time.

In the course of running some errands, we stopped at the pottery studio where I take my class. I picked up a couple of glazed pieces that hadn’t turned out as I’d hoped, then we headed to the nearby gardening center. As we wandered the greenhouses, my emotions were all ebb and flow. There were layers washing over one another: the disappointment over my pottery was softened by plans for how I could improve next time; the excitement over what plants I might buy to spruce up the yard wilted as I worried about costs; but mostly, the joy at having my son home and spending time together was being washed over at the edges with the sadness of knowing we only had a short time together, and with the ache of wishing my daughter could have been with us too.

People say, live in the moment. In that moment, I was giving myself the same instruction. Do not focus on disappointment or sadness; be here with your son and the beautiful plants the smell of hyacinth and this adorable cat who wandered up to greet you. It isn’t as if I ignored joy and dwelled only in the darker thoughts. But sometimes, you have to hold it all at the same time. Sometimes the moment pushes and pulls you as though you are standing chest deep in a big lake and the waves make stillness impossible.

In navigating the movement of the moment, I often feel as though I’m straining to hear a voice over the distraction of ambient sound. I am trying to coax this voice to greater volume. The voice of instinct, of guidance, can be so quiet in me sometimes, but I have begun to understand why.

In my writer’s workshop, we’ve been talking about voice, and the way any novel opening can work if the voice is effective. When I’m writing a novel it takes a while to find that voice. Until recently, I hadn’t realized that the issue of voice in my writing and the strong clear voice of instinct that I have been listening for within me were one and the same.

There are many reasons why it is hard to hear and trust that voice within us, nudging us toward good things, warning us away from trouble. I think it can be difficult to hear your own voice if ever you were told that you were too sensitive or too needy. In response, you might have found yourself voicing feelings and needs less frequently and more quietly. You began to observe, trying to determine what emotions are allowed to be expressed, and when, and by whom. Over time, the weight of what you haven’t expressed makes you empathic. You are in-tune to the deep feeling of others because it is so heavy in you. You might have become a servant to other people’s emotions, knowing how it feels to have things unattended to. Sadly, in this way, we teach ourselves to listen more closely to others than we do to ourselves.

Well-meaning people tried to protect you from a mean world but didn’t understand that your openness and sensitivity were strengths, not liabilities. You didn’t need a thicker skin, you needed understanding, maybe some tools to help you cope. Later, less well-meaning people were able to spot your vulnerability, told you to trust them and not yourself, and that was easy to do, because your own voice had grown so quiet.

This voice is how we navigate everything, so when it is quiet, we are filled with self-doubt. And even when we train ourselves to listen for it again, it is easy to discount it.

I’ve recently tried to start running again, and I’m still incorporating a lot of walking into my running because in the past I’ve made the mistake of trying to ramp up too quickly, and I get injured, and then I can’t run at all for a while. I used to think that I “failed” at a run if I needed to stop at walk. The mindset I’m trying to cultivate now is that a successful run is the one I’ve begun. It is the one in which I listen to my body and walk when I need to.

I used to think that I failed if a story got rejected, if I never heard back from an agent, if the guy from the dating app who was messaging me disappeared. But I’m realizing now that every time I begin again, I succeed. Every time I listen to my instincts and chose hope, resilience, and perseverance, it matters. Of course, we need to rest, to pause and listen to that voice within us, to keep recalibrating our efforts to our purpose.

Do we ever get it right, the balance between when to push ourselves and when to pull back? Or does getting it “right” mean that we cultivate the awareness that balance is achieved through this movement? Sometimes it seems that balance is more about living in midst of that ebb and flow, the push and pull, than it is about a finding that briefest moment of stillness somewhere in the middle of it all. My comfort zone is in that middle space, and I’d love to learn how to expand it, but so much of life happens in the waves pushing and pulling me away from it.

Whether it is learning how to exist in a moment that is filled with the fluidity of past, present, and future all at once, or existing in the process of working through “failure” toward what we value and what we want, being able to accept the movement of the moment, of all that is pushing us and pulling us as we try to keep our footing, relies on us hearing our own voice and letting it guide us. This is our work.

I have learned that I only experience peace in the midst of all these processes when I am able to hold it all at once, when I can embrace a moment and the movement around it. It is the cat in the warm greenhouse, and the cold wind, and the peppering of disappointment and worry, and the scent of hyacinth, and my son with me now, and his imminent leaving, and missing my daughter, and the sunny joy of love, and all of it all at once.

I hope you find peace in the process and can always hear your voice.

Love, Cath

On Loss and “Lost”

By Catherine DiMercurio

On a recent damp and drizzly hike with my sister, I got us lost. Inconveniently lost, not dangerously lost. We were deep in conversation, and I missed one of the markers that would have helped me know where I was along this path that I’d hiked once before. We backtracked and figured it out. I tried not to let it bother me, this feeling that I should not have let that happen, but it did. It bothered me in a big way at first, as though I’d let us both down, and by the end of the hike, it only bothered me a little, like a small stone in my shoe. Yet for a while, this thinking also spiraled forward to a solo camping trip I’ll be taking in the summer. What if I get lost in unfamiliar woods when I’m hiking alone?

As we walked back to the car, I tried to return my awareness to the current moment. We’d hiked longer than we intended, but we were enjoying one another’s company and were never in any danger. She didn’t care, didn’t judge me. So, I managed to shake it off.

But, it did make me realize how easy it is for a moment of anxiety to amplify itself, reverberating into the past and into the future. How did I let that happen, and what if it happens again? Sometimes we exist in all the moments at once, as if time ceased its habit of being linear. In this instance, the sensation didn’t last long, but depending on the circumstances, we can get lost in these spirals. The experience reminded me of how connected lost and loss are.

Sometimes, the losses we’ve experienced in life unroot themselves from their context. We can’t pinpoint precisely why we are feeling a certain way, but this loss is wandering around inside us, untethered from memory. We feel confused about our sadness, our fuzziness, about the despondency that leaves us inexplicably tired. It as if the loss itself is lost within us.

Have you ever gone looking for your sense of worry when you actually feel fine? You have that sense that something is missing, and you aren’t sure what, so you search for it. Now what was it that I was so worried about? The worry needs a home, so you attach it to a dentist appointment, a financial concern, a work meeting, or larger and less-specific things, like the rest of your life. I think this is what we do when we have a big loss lost within us. There are some things we might never be done grieving, and the loss sometimes shows up as worry and needs to be taken by the hand escorted back to its context, its memories.

The trouble is, then we must confront those memories again. And we don’t want to. Who does? It hurts. Good memories can hurt more than bad memories, too. But when they are calling to us, it is better to give them some time and hug rather than ignore them. Otherwise, they will keep wandering away again and turning up in strange ways. Does all this mean, that despite our efforts to heal, to take time for grief, and go to therapy and journal and talk, and all the things we’ve tried to do to move forward, does it mean that none of it has worked?

Of course not. It means it IS working. Being able to recognize what is happening when feelings take us by surprise, when big anxiety comes at us for little reasons, is a sign that we are evolving. When we can pause and say: Oh, yes, I see. This old pain still hurts sometimes and wants to be felt as now-pain and is showing up in this weird way so it doesn’t get ignored, even though it doesn’t have much to do with the dentist appointment or my future goals or the fact that I accidentally got a little lost in the woods. Sometimes it takes a few days or longer to unpack a response, to look at a recent event and decode why our feelings felt outsized for what was happening.

I am not good at compartmentalizing anymore. I did it a lot when I had to, when I would not have been able to function otherwise. It is difficult now for me to say I shouldn’t feel this way about this situation, so I won’t. I need to know why. I want to understand the connections my brain is automatically making (you are nervous, here is danger, avoid this), so I can intervene and try to rewire (you are nervous, and it is normal to feel that way in this situation, but it reminds you of real danger and that was scary, but you don’t have to avoid this, and it is okay to feel uncomfortable).

Being able to decode and rewire allows growth. It allows the unexpected. It allows me to open doors I have been too tired or too anxious to open, and in doing so, I discover new loves. I have fallen in love with pottery, this mysterious thing I’m learning, this vast muddy sea of things to discover. I have fallen in love with the new novel I am writing, with the process of getting to know new people on the page, their desires, their flaws, their histories.

Sometimes you are ready for a new story, and you didn’t know how much until you start writing it.

I fall hard for moments sometimes too. I fall for the quiet writing hours I cobble together in the dark mornings, listening to the birds wake, to wind and rain, to the dogs snoring away nearby. I am often overcome by how happy this makes me, this simple gift of my favorite part of the day.

I know none of this is the same as falling in love with person, which I hope is still a possibility. But being able to embrace my life and my self and everything that I’m discovering is not a consolation prize, and that has surprised me. It startles me what wholeness can feel like, and sometimes it even scares me in ways that I’m still articulating for myself.

Sometimes I’m intimidated by all there is to learn about myself, where I’ve been and where I’m going and how to get there, and other times I think it is all in the palm of my hand already, or at my fingertips. Many of the realizations I’ve written about here grew out of a scene I was writing in my novel. I guess I must keep learning to trust myself, and when I write those words, I can see that this is the through-line, my wobbly dance with self-trust. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” I remember reading those words in college, sitting at a desk in a classroom with pale green walls, and having an overwhelming sense that this mattered in ways I didn’t fully understand. It seemed unfathomable, as impossible as someone telling me to run a four-minute mile or jump out of a plane, things that other people could do, but I’d never be able to. It is no wonder that the ability to follow that advice has taken me my entire lifetime. But, here we are, trying. It’s all we can do.

Love, Cath

On Messiness, Moodiness, and Harmony

By Catherine DiMercurio

I usually am craving spring by March. This year, I am stunned to discover that I am not, at least, I’m not consistently yearning for it the way I usually am this time of year. I am no fan of prolonged winters and I’m not as cold tolerant as a lifelong Michigander should be, yet with the promise of long days ahead I have the sense that I’m still in some sort of cozy, dark cocoon I’m not ready to come out of. I think much of this is due to the largely self-imposed idea that the longer the day, the more productive I should be. Yet, no one is policing me. And I do love finally feeling the sun and digging in the dirt. I’m sure, when the time comes, I will be ready.

But, the time change often makes the transition to spring feel forced, unnatural. In general, I have found that most transitions are difficult for me. It takes me longer than I expect, always longer, to recalibrate my brain and heart. Changes take time to get used to, even if we are ready for them.

This has been a time of noticing for me. I have spoken here often of the abrupt shift to solitude I experienced when my son moved out at the end of the summer, and this experience coming on the heels of other endings. In the months that have elapsed, I have taken care to notice things about myself that previously only fluttered to the surface of my perception, when my attention was more keenly attuned to the other people inhabiting my daily life. Despite periods of loneliness, it has been a gift to become reacquainted with my own natural rhythms, my own seasons.

Sometimes I wake to the feeling that I am in my own little bubble floating on the periphery. I don’t mean this in a covid way, though surely the isolation of the past two years has contributed to this feeling for many people, myself included. I think this shift must be common to many empty nesters, particularly single parents. One day you are the safe and solid center of a little family’s busy hum of activity. And then . . . you sense you are still that, but in a way that is fractured and more theoretical. It is normal, natural, abrupt, and jarring all at once. Though you always knew your children were universes unto themselves, not simply a part of yours, when you cohabitate all the universes merge and overlap and interact. And then, they do not, not in the same way.

Everyone’s life has changed dramatically in the past two years. We are still in the process of molding what things are supposed to look like now as a society, while individually we are integrating covid adaptations into our lives along with all the other changes that naturally happen to a person and a family over the course of two years. We simultaneously feel an urgency to play catch-up and to re-evaluate.

It is so messy. I find that the chaos of Michigan weather in early March mirrors my headspace at this time of year. When I began writing this earlier this week, it was about to snow and 19 degrees out. In a few days, the temperature is supposed to be almost 70 degrees. When I woke too early recently, I turned on the light, tried to write, got sleepy, tried to fall back asleep. Maybe I did for a few moments. I rose and warmed up yesterday’s coffee, let one dog out and in, greeted the other still half-asleep dog, and as I walked down the hall back to my bedroom, coffee in hand, I felt as though my mood changed with each step. I was angsty over beginning the workday on not enough sleep, worried and despondent about the collection of things that currently trouble me, overwhelmed by all the house and yard stuff that is going to need to be tackled soon. And as I reached the end of the hallway rug and my right foot hit the hardwood floor, I smiled. I smiled because of the dogs. I smiled at the glimpse of my bedroom, with its pretty blue walls and embroidered curtains. I snuggled back in bed to write, pleased to be in my own space, and that I still had time to write before I had to turn to the rest of the morning and all its business and busyness.

One of the things about where I am now is that I have time and space to have mood shifts that don’t need to be explained or mediated. It is much easier for me now to experience difficult feelings and move through them in an organic way rather than to have to compartmentalize as I’ve done in the past. I have been the type of partner who has moved my own mood out of the way when it seemed like the simplest path toward what I perceived to be harmony. I made things disharmonious within myself to try and cultivate and preserve harmony in the relationship. I’m not certain I will ever know to what extent I did this because of internal or external expectations. Most likely, it was both. I like to imagine a future relationship in which this type of behavior will not be expected of me by my partner or myself, and in which I will keep the lessons I am learning about myself now at the forefront. In which my compulsion to make things easier for someone else will not supersede my ability to voice and address my own needs. It isn’t that we shouldn’t have empathy toward our partner, but we must have equal empathy for ourselves. No one should have to feel like they are somehow in someone else’s way.

March is a messy, muddled month. But it churns with energy, and we mirror its moods. We are sunny, it is raining, it is snowing, we are tired, hope sprouts beneath the dead leaves that protected it in the long cold months. It is windy, we are moody, look, here’s the sun again. It can be difficult to find harmony in this season of change. But if we cultivate a practice of noticing, of observing the fluctuations in our mood and states of minds, and states of hearts, if we let it all move through us, jangling and cacophonous like a windchime in a March storm, maybe it will be harmony that finds us in the aftermath.

Love, Cath

On December Moments & a Moon, on Resolve & Routines

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes you look at yourself in a new light.

I try not to make New Year’s resolutions. It feels so contrived. At the same time, contrived or not, I have always felt a kind of magic at the stroke of midnight. With a tick of a hand on the clock, we suddenly turn a page. These are just numbers, arbitrary ways of marking time conceived of long ago by men who needed to do so to efficiently wage war.

This is not an accurate account of the history of time. I have a vague memory of learning about Julius Caesar creating the calendar roughly as we know it, and I imagine him doing so in order to plan empire-building attacks. And “civilized” society grew on such foundations and now we are able to not only war more precisely, but we learned to mark out work weeks. I think I would have preferred just partnering my movements with those of the sun and the seasons.

But, here we are. Everything we do is pushed through the sieve of the clock.

So as this year is ending, I keep thinking of things I want to prioritize in the coming year. Things that have fallen away that I want to get back to, new things to explore.

I always have writing goals, but as I wait for the publishing world to make decisions on my submissions, I feel like I need a new way of looking at success. Is success, or the lack thereof, related to the fact that a tiny fraction of a percent of what I have written has been published? Or is success deliberately cultivating a writing life? Writing every day, learning about writing, finding ways to be parts of different writing communities, reading. There is no new story here. I want to see success as the journey, not the goal, since the goal is elusive and I’m working very hard and want the work to mean something. I imagine there are two types of people who do this: people who have not achieved the goals they hoped to, and people who have, and understand that achieving a goal is not as brilliant as you think it is going to be. You hold it for a moment and then it slips away, and in its place, we fix another goal/hurdle. The fact is, the world is going to define success however it wants to. And the only path to sanity (and one’s ability to remain motivated), is for each of us to decide for ourselves what success means. What if it is that simple?

On the morning of the solstice, I walked with my dog beneath a waning gibbous moon. I paused to notice its particular shape and glow, and decided in that moment that this was my favorite moon phase. Waning gibbous. [Later I will think of the Wallace Stevens poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” when I consider why the waning gibbous is my favorite: “I do not know which to prefer / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendos, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.” I love the settling calm after the full moon, like a bird’s ruffled feathers hushing back into place.]

A flutter of movement caught my eye, pulled my awareness fully from the moon and toward a young stag, on its way back to the little strip of wood between the golf course and the houses that abut the creek. We looked at each other. My dog was quiet, alert. The three of us paused this way, for several lovely moments. I always hope when something like this happens, on the rare occasions that it does, that it means something. That I’m on the right path.

A few days later, on Christmas morning, I awoke to the knowledge that my children once again slept in rooms a few feet from mine, snuggling with the dogs. We haven’t woken up together on Christmas Day in this house before. The knowledge left me with the feeling of peace and anticipation, like opening a letter from someone you missed and hadn’t seen for some time.

Some mornings, my first thoughts upon waking are about what is missing instead of what is present. I imagine someone kissing my shoulder, making us coffee, beginning our day together. Other mornings it is easier to unfold into my own day, rather than my imaginary one, to make the coffee and write and walk the dogs.

I have come to cherish this routine, my routine: waking in the darkness, finding words and purpose, then getting outside. I shake my sleepy head the way the dogs do and see what lands on the page—strange new ideas, one gorgeous metaphor to wrap a sentence around, or sometimes, thoughts I can’t quite string together or make sense of. And then, as the sky begins to lighten, I walk the puppy, who is jumpy still around anything unexpected—a car backing out of a driveway, a dog barking across the street. We move into the world before the world is moving, a short brisk walk where we sometimes dart from smell to smell as he investigates. And then, we return home, and I switch dogs. My senior pup’s walks are long and purposeful. Ahead, ahead, let’s go. Sometimes he stops to sniff but he is about movement, and I watch the way his stiff joints seem to loosen and ease. The joy he takes in his morning walks is spectacular. And even if I’m frustrated from the writing, or how much the puppy pulled or lunged, by the end of this second walk something in me usually loosens and eases as well.

I recall how difficult maintaining this routine was in my last relationship and I’m disappointed that I sacrificed so much of myself to a situation where little was offered in return. But this is how we learn. This past year I have learned so much about what I truly value. About what I like. Not only what I enjoy doing, or what pleases me about my life. I am learning what I like about myself. This is good territory. I’ve been here before but have not inhabited this space. I’ve dropped in for visits but only as a tourist. I’m becoming a local now. I didn’t know you could do that. That I could. If such things are taught some place, I missed the lessons. I feel as if it never occurred to me before to develop a more conscious understanding of myself in this manner. I think deeply and often about my feelings and my past and my flaws, but I have spent so little time in this other region of selfness. I keep returning to this thought: I didn’t know it was okay to want to.

Even as we are dealing with so many stressors and responsibilities, we somehow must learn to be our own guidance counselors, and to put ideas in front of ourselves to consider. For me, it was: have you given any thought to what you like about yourself? One of the benefits of pursuing this line of thinking is that there is so much less time and energy to pursue the endless ruminating on what relationships failed and why. I have ruthlessly covered every inch of that ground, dragging myself through the dark woods over and over again. What did I miss, could another path have been taken, what went wrong, what went right, you better learn from this so it doesn’t happen again. To spend time instead exploring the other worlds inside my heart is a gift. I could chastise myself for not getting here sooner, but I think we’ve covered the ground of self-recrimination in several ways at this point.

So instead, let’s explore lightness and joy. Instead, let’s allow that we have learned and re-learned old lessons, we have dissected mistakes, grief, loss, and failures. Let us now resolve to learn and re-learn what success means to us, what joy does, what self does.

Love, Cath

On the End of the Line, and Catching Your Breath

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes it is hard to trust your instincts.

Sometimes, it takes us years to process something terrible that happened to us, that changed our lives, changed who we were. Are. Those years are spent trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, trying to metabolize pain before it metabolizes us.

And when it involves someone you trusted, trying to understand why and how feels like the most urgent and important thing in the world. It feels possible, but elusive.

If I stopped trying to understand, what would happen? It doesn’t mean I haven’t learned anything. It doesn’t mean that the journey has been a waste of time. To the contrary, the endeavoring was part of my healing process.

But it is also the part that has no where left to go.

I imagine it this way: I have been moving forward carrying a large ball of twine that has been unwinding with each step. For years, it was always there, no matter how many steps I took in any direction. But now I find myself holding the end of it, and behind me, it winds all the way back to what happened, and it charts all the ways I tried to see it from all the angles. It’s not a straight line and it is wrapped around memories and snagged here and there so that as I hold it now, it’s taut. There’s no where left to go. To take the next step forward, I have to let go. Maybe I’ve been standing still longer than I realize, holding that last bit of twine, waiting for it all to make sense. It won’t. It can’t. Maybe I know, too, all the ways it connects me to more than just pain. It connects me to things that that were possible that aren’t anymore. Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out all along. How possibility, at least one thread of it, is cut short.

Photo by Jess Bailey Designs on Pexels.com

For years I held on tight to what hurt. I thought that if I could understand it, it would hurt less, or, it would offer some protection against future suffering. But I don’t think it works that way.

It wasn’t as if I wasn’t living and loving during this time. Hearts do complicated work while performing their function. It isn’t as if my endeavor to understand what happened insisted on being the only story, the whole story. But it was a through line. Life is a complicated interweaving of past and present and pain and love and you just keep going even as you keep working. Even if clumsy, we walk and chew gum. We love, we pursue dreams, we fall into old grief masquerading as new grief, we dig, we think, we learn, we move, we stand still and catch our breath.

Sometimes too, it seems silly almost, that I would have spent so many hours and thoughts and heartbeats and breaths and tears trying to get to a place where I could say, oh, yes, I see. That makes sense, especially when I see others going through different, bigger, harder traumas. But, I can’t change that this is how things felt to me, and this is how long it has taken me to get here. Sometimes things just are how they are. They take the time they need to and that has everything to do with us but nothing to do with choice.

So, what does it mean to open my hand and heart and take the next step without what has become a comfort, my tie to past hurt, my journey to understand it, that umbilical cord feeding me stories of how it used to be and never will be? What is like to move from but, it wasn’t supposed to be this way, to whatever is next? I don’t know yet. I don’t know what is beyond the reach of my tether. I’m still catching my breath. I’m still loosening my grip on that last bit of twine. But I think I’m close. Something in me, some instinct I can finally hear, is saying it’s time.

Peace to you all, wherever you are on whatever part of the journey you find yourself.

Love, Cath